Home {decor} Tour

 We finally made some time (I must say, Nick made it happen) to get our place looking more like home. I'm excited to show some of our home improvements, but have to show more happy days flowers first.

Nick surprised me with these amazing flowers along with dinner and sweet words when I came home from work one night the week before last. He's always so encouraging and thoughtful and these flowers hit the spot with what I needed to hear.

I had a fun photo shoot with the flowers too. They are just happy flowers!

 Thank you to the world's greatest husband:)

Back to the decor touches! We've been needing to get things on our walls since December. It's been bugging me constantly to feel like I have unfinished projects seeing bare walls the past few months. Part of it was also deciding what should go where.

We landed on this fun colorful painting which I love! It pulls together the colors well and is fun and inspiring as well. You'll also notice that Owlie continues to hold a prominent place in our living room.

This vase with fun potpourri is in our bathroom and I love the style (and smell!) of it. I may remove that top piece of potpourri, :) it's slightly out of place! 

This is our reading corner. We got the chair for free (!) and added the cute lantern to a hook that was already hanging in our bedroom. We also added a battery operated candle with a remote! Without the remote, we'd have to take the lantern apart and flip the switch every time to turn it on and off, so I'm loving the remote feature. The lantern creates a nice ambiance in the room when we're winding down our evenings.

Here's what landed on our "dining room" wall.  

Close up 

 Here's the new pillow for our couch! This pillow makes my heart melt.

 Close up

 I finally got some flowers to fill this pretty vase and really like what it brings to the room now.

  One of my most exciting projects was getting all of my jewelry hung! It was a complete mess (seen below) and was a disaster to find what I was looking for, let alone untangle it.

My old necklace hanger broke as we were leaving Texas and my jewelry has been in disarray since then.

Disarray no more!

It's like a breath of fresh air to have these organized and so pretty looking! 

 This frame was made by two of my great friends, Maggie and Hannah - check out their blog for similar unique pieces they remake and sell. 

I feel like I'm walking into a jewelry store now when I go into my closet. It's wonderful! I have even more fun picking out accessories now that I can see them all :)

In other news, I made gazpacho on Monday and it did not disappoint. It's so tasty and so so fresh on warm summer days.

Here are my blended veggies plus the tomato juice, hot sauce, etc. being ready to mix with the diced veggies. Yum! If you've never tried it, this summer is the perfect time to try it. Here's my post from last summer with the recipe.

Before I forget, I just have to note that last weekend was SUCH a great weekend for us. I finished my part time job and enjoyed two whole days off work (it had been over a month since I had a day off). We went to Lake Calhoun, checked out thrift shops, went out for breakfast (twice! Once with Nick and once with friends), went jewelry shopping, and explored our neighborhood some more. Talk about a "me" kind of weekend - it was great!

Lastly, here is today's Pinspiration:

source

Gazpacho

 

Last weekend I made my first ever batch of Gazpacho. I had never heard of it until a luncheon I attended for work in February. It was called "empty bowls", supported the local food bank and many vendors and restaurants in the area served soup according to their specialty. It was pretty amazing and one of my favorites was this soup called gazpacho that is served cold! It seemed pretty weird, but was surprisingly good. It may be a southern thing? It originated through Spain and Latin America. 

Anyway, it's an amazingly fresh summer meal I highly recommend giving it a try with some fresh ingredients this summer :) One of my favorite things about this recipe is that you don't need to use your oven or stove at all - so no heating up the home on a hot day! You just dice everything up and blend half of it - so easy! It's been in the 80's - 90's here so I've definitely been in the mood for fresh summer meals and this one hit the spot. I got this particular recipe from The Pioneer Woman's Blog - have you checked out her blog or recipes? Oh my gosh it will make your mouth water. She makes amazing food.

Photos are up first, the ingredients list and full directions are below...

1/2 red onion, diced, and two minced garlic cloves added to the blender

Diced cucumber (ok... I may have minced it. Maybe this is why it took me so long to dice all of these veggies!)

Diced tomatoes. Does this make you ready for summer or what?!

Diced zucchini

2 stalks celery - pre-dicing

1/2 of all veggies (it makes for a FULL blender I may add)

Here are my reserved non-blended veggies (and yes, my thumb)

  Add the liquids and seasonings to the blender

Blend

Pour into large bowl and stir in the non-blended veggies. This gives it a great texture. Taste check to see if the amount of salt, hot sauce and pepper are to your likings.

Chill in the fridge for at least a few hours before serving.

Add remaining veggies as garnish (apparently the garnish is enough to serve 8 and I divided all of the garnish between our two bowls, creating an EXCESS of garnish. I believe that's why I didn't like it as much the first night. The other meals we ate it without garnish, I loved it so I think next time I'll just use a little sprinkling of the pretty garnish so most of the veggies are marinated). After sitting overnight, I LOVED it though and will be making many more batches for our long summer! :)

Ingredients:

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 red onion, diced

1 large cucumber, diced

5 roma tomatoes, diced

1 zucchini, diced

2 stalks celery, diced

1 dash salt to taste

1/4 gallon (1 quart) tomato juice

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

1/8 cup red wine vinegar

2 tablespoons white sugar

6 dashes hot sauce

1 dash black pepper to taste

Directions:

In a food processor or blender, combine the garlic with half of the red onion, half the cucumber, half the tomatoes, half the zucchini, half the celery, half the tomato juice, olive oil, red wine vinegar, sugar, hot sauce, salt, and pepper. Pulse until all ingredients are blended well; mixture will be nicely speckled.

Pour into a large bowl and add the rest of the tomato juice, half of the remaining onion, cucumber, tomato, zucchini, and celery (reserve the rest of the vegetables for garnish - or if you don't care about garnish, throw them all in :))

Stir mixture together and check seasonings, adding salt if needed. Chill soup for at least a couple of hours; soup should be served very cold.

Remove from fridge, stir and check seasonings. Serve with garnished vegetables if desired. Eat the chilled soup out on your patio on a warm day and enjoy!