recommended pintrest recipies for thanksgiving

this year I am in charge of making the desserts so I plan on in a couple weeks shaping the recipes I used to make some homemade no back cheese cake and some mini fruit tart pies. until then here are some recipes  and tips I found on Pinterest that I hope help you with your Thanksgiving cooking.
creamy fruit salad
how long to cook a turkey in one easy chart
not yo mamas banana pudding
how to roast a turkey
sweet apple cream cheese spread
guidelines for brining turkey

tips so your thanksgiving doesnt fail (hopfully)

Thanksgiving can be extremely stressful, especially when you are the one hosting the dinner for your big family and relatives. I'm not even the head of the kitchen who cooks the majority of the meal and organizes it all and I feel stressed when trying to help and running to the store at the last minute because we forgot about the cranberry sauce. so here are some tips so that hopefully your thanksgiving isn't as stressful and isn't a complete flop.

Tip one: If you are reading this its and haven't bought your turkey, its probably too late, kidding, but really you should have one by now. I suggest ordering a turkey 3 weeks before thanksgiving because everyone is going to be wanting a fresh turkey so the order list will be long. also you want to make sure to have time to pick up the turkey and if you are given the turkey and its frozen rock hard you will need time for it to thaw out.

Tip two: all the simple stuff do the day before, such as the vegetables, and cookies and baking. its better to do cookies the day before because otherwise they may become a bit stale and if you are like my family half of them will be gone by the end of the week. basically make anything that you can the day before to save you time thanksgiving day.

Tip three: make a game plan. make a check list of EVERYTHING you will need, food, drinks, napkins, table setting decorations. also make a scheduled plan of when you need to start cooking everything thanksgiving day because you want everything to get done at the same time are shortly before its time to eat so you have time to set everything out on the table.

Tip four: when it comes time to cook check on your food constantly. I've heard so many stories and personal experience of accidentally setting the timer to a longer time, setting the heat too high or low, or forgetting to turn on the oven. you don't want to get to dinner time and find you hadn't even starting cooking the turkey yet or that its on fire!

Tip five: I don't here of this one happening as often but sometimes your fridge may stop working at the worst time, its smart to just have a thermometer in the fridge so you can check and see if it is still running.
Tip Six: get as much help as you can. don't be that stubborn person who wont let anyone help because they wont do it right or because they are in your way. and if this is you send then to do something outside the kitchen like go to the store or clean the house because we all know the you don't want guests over for dinner if your house doesn't look presentable.
well I hope this helps and have a happy Thanksgiving!

turkey decoration craft

when you think of decorating for the holidays you mainly think of Halloween, Christmas, and Easter. what many people don't think of is decorations for thanksgiving. why? because what is there to put out? Halloween has the pumpkins and spooky decorations, Christmas, has the tree and the lights, and Easter has the colorful eggs, but what does thanksgiving have? all I can think are paper hand turkey, but here's another easy craft for kids especially, pipe cleaner and puffball turkeys. my mom made a pipe cleaner when I was younger and so I tried to re-make it except using puffballs instead off all pipe cleaners. my mom's of course looks a lot better but this is a lot easier if like me you aren't good with a lot of pipe cleaners.

Step one: find a small light brown, and a medium dark brown puff ball. (I don't know if they are actually called puff balls, but I'm going to call them that) also find 2 eyes








Step two: use double stick tape to attach small puff ball to larger one to make the head and the body. them use double stick tape to attach the two eyes to the head

Step three: now to make the feathers for the turkey find a variety of colors of your choosing. I have picked out brown, red, and yellow. make each pipe cleaner into a loop proportional to the body and hold them all together at the end. Then wrap a brown pipe cleaner around them all and cut of any extra pipe cleaner.

Step four: use large piece of double stick tape and attach it to brown pipe cleaners on feathers and attach the feathers to the back of the dark brown puff ball.
Step five: use regular tape and wrap it around the back of the feathers to the sides of the dark brown puff ball to secure the feathers.

Step six: next cut a pipe cleaner in fourths to make the wings. take a fourth of the pipe cleaner and bend it into a wing shape

Step seven: wrap a long piece of double stick tape on either ends on the pipe cleaner. then attach to the side of the bigger puff ball so that the tip of the wing is pointing towards the feathers.


Step eight: pick a color for the feet and beak. I chose yellow. make the feet by bending the pipe cleaner to create 3 toes. and tape onto bottom of bigger puff ball

Step nine: use small section of pipe cleaner and bend in half to make a beak. then use a small section of a red pipe cleaner and twist it in to make a gizzard. then tape below and in-between the two eyes.

    well I hope you enjoy making this craft with your family.  

Pintrest Pillow DIY suggestions

Pillows are a fun way to bring vibrant colors and patterns to a room and I would love to be able to try different ways to decorate a pillow. I haven't been able to try these yet but here are some DIY pillow projects I am interested to try and I recommend you try as well.
Quote Pillow
T-shirt Pillow
watercolor pillow

pie crust (cherry)

Thanksgiving is coming up and we all know what that means, it's time to eat till our tummy's are twice their normal size and then eat some more. Everyone is planning who will be hosting the dinner and who will be bringing what dish. For my family it changes between my uncle's house and mine each year. My mom and older sister are the ones who are mainly in charge of making dinner, but as I get older I am given more responsibility for making dinner. This year I am in change of baking dessert for dinner to bring to my uncles house. You can't have thanksgiving without pie, and store bought pie is never as good as homemade.

Pie Crust (cherry):
 Cherry pie is an all time favorite and it's so easy to make. The cherry filling sadly is hard to make homemade, the homemade part of cherry pie is the crust. Store bought never tastes as good.

Step one: in a mixing bowl combine 2 cups of flour and 1/2 teaspoons of salt
Step two: mix in 2/3 cups of shortening till the mixture is pea size clumps of the shortening covered with the dry mixture.
tip: use a pastry cutter to mix in the shortening (shown below)

Step three: start to add in 1 tablespoon of water evenly into mixture. then toss up with a fork and then mix around with a fork and then push to side of both. repeat this process until the mixture Is completely moist. should be around 6 to 7 tablespoons of water total.

Step four: divide the dough in half and make each portion into two separate balls. (1st section of the dough will be the bottom half of the crust and the 2nd half will be the top.)

Step five: start to roll the dough out to create a circle on a lightly floured surface

tip: to roll into a circle flatten the ball of dough with a hand and then roll out with dough starting at the center. should become a circle 12 inches in diameter.

Step six: lay the circle of dough onto a 9 inch pie plate

tip: to transfer the circle of dough from table to pie plate wrap the dough around the rolling pin by holding one end of dough onto the rolling pin and rolling the rest of it on. then lay end of dough so that some is still hanging of the end of the pie plate and unroll the dough off the rolling pin.

Step seven: slowly and carefully guide the dough all the way to the bottom of the plate.

tip: make sure not to stretch the dough or else those parts will be thinner and bake much faster then the rest

Step eight: cut off the extra dough on the edge all the way up to the rim of pie plate.

Step nine: now back to the other ball of dough, there are many ways to do a top pie crust. one way is to do what you did for the bottom crust, but this time cut slits of even shapes into the dough so that the steam can come through the top. this is very important to have these holes, otherwise steam will build up and create a big air bubble. what my mom likes to do is to take the dough and make a weaving top. this is achieved by after repeating the first five steps cut the dough into even strips. this can be a bit difficult and takes more time than the others but it looks pretty cool in the end.

Step ten: before placing the dough on top of the pie first you must put the cherry filling inside. I'm sure you can make homemade filling but I honestly have no idea how so my family just uses good old store bought in can cherry filling. I've never had it any other way and it's still good to me.

Step eleven: there are many ways to weave the dough but this is very hard to explain just in words. here are some pictures of different ways to weave the strips, once you have it down it becomes a lot easier than it looks.

Step twelve: cut off the extra dough the hang off the side

Step thirteen: pinch the dough all around the edge to create a wavy edge and to pinch together the top dough with the bottom.

This is the end process on how to make the crust, the next part is easy. you just stick I in the oven and follow the directions for whatever kind of pie you are making asks for, because this is not just cherry pie crust, it is your basic crust for any pie.

Property Brother

Property Brothers is another good HGTV show that is enjoyable to watch. This show I would compare to being a lot like Fixer Upper. I talked about Fixer Upper in an earlier post. Property Brothers is about two brothers Drew and Johnathan Scott, you can obviously tell that they are brothers because they look so much alike being that aren't only just brothers, but twins. however they each have their own style of the way they dress and style their hair that you can tell which one is which. In the show the brother help their customers buy a home in their price range and then after they have made their purchases they help renovate these outdates and no to the customer’s standards houses. A lot like in the show Fixer Upper the two stars in the show each has a different specialty that contributed to what they do in the show. In this show Drew is known as the brother who negotiates with the people who are selling their houses to get them down to a price that the brother's costumers can afford. Sometimes they are unable to get the seller to bring down the price so they either have to skip a renovation or settle for a different home that they can afford. The other brother, Johnathan, is the designer and construction worker for the inside of the house. Most of the renovations only consist of interior design and breaking down some walls.

      While Property Brothers and Fixer Upper have a lot of similarities I would say that Fixer Upper I prefer more but that is just my preference. The best part of both of these shows is that they have a lot of very comical moments in the show because of the main stars of the show. The two brothers are very competitive, as most brothers are, and it makes it fun to watch them play pranks on each other and try to one-up one another when it comes to getting the job done. This competition between the two is probably why they created the new show Brother VS Brother that of course stars Drew and Johnathan. I haven't watched this show yet but I will back sure to do so and post about why I think later on.

     Why I like Fixer Upper more is because it shows more of the couples family, and I love seeing their kids on the show at their adorable farm. I also love the fact that this show have the married couple who own this business together and work so well together. However there is nothing bad about Property Brothers that would make them worse, for me it is just my preference. However I would think many people who prefer watching brotherly competition over the loving family business would like Property Brothers better. So I do recommend this show, it is very fun to watch and gives some really good tips on how they renovate things in the homes.

                                               Johnathan on the right and Drew on the left

DIY suggestions through pintrest

I rarely have time to post any DIY projects which are one of my favorite things to do so here are some link to some good DIY projects that I happened to find on the wonderful world of Pinterest to make up for it. I do highly recommend checking out Pinterest is you haven't already. it is a great place to get inspiration and ideas for pretty much anything. you can practically plan anything with this website.

homemade air freshener:
http://naturalfitfoodie.com/diy-air-freshener/
letter decoration:
http://www.thebudgetdecorator.com/diy-projects-with-letters/