Living for Pretty

Celebrating all things pretty, happy and inspiring. From renovation stories, to recipes, decorating, parties and little life lessons, you’ll find a little bit of everything here.

Flavorful Southwest Salad

Living for Pretty's Southwest Salad

This is the first salad that I’m officially obsessed with and can’t stop making. I could eat this for breakfast, lunch and dinner (and I probably have, actually). Think of this salad as a gateway drug to healthy eating – it’s delicious, fresh, healthy, filling and full of flavor and healthy fats. It can edge on the unhealthy side if you  put a lot of dressing and load it up with tortilla toppings, but I think if you’re not a huge salad eater, this is a perfect place to start. Go easy on the dressing and tortilla chips to keep this salad in the healthy bracket.

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strawberry smoothies

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s spring. The days are getting warmer and brighter, which means my morning breakfast wants to get fruitier and lighter. Smoothies are plain awesome, but I don’t need to tell you that. Smoothies are something I will make a ton of for a month or two, burn out and then re-discover a couple months later. Here’s a quick, fresh, and filling strawberry smoothie I blended up the other day that had me thinking “where have you been all my winter?!” (I’d also like to take this moment to apologize to Billy for all the racket in the morning. But also, not. Because those smoothies in the fridge don’t come from nowhere.)

 

 

 

Recipe:

  • 1lb fresh strawberries
  • 1 banana
  • 1 cup vanilla yogurt
  • 1 tray of ice cubes

ginger martinis and our Indian dinner party

Since we’ve been having monthly mini dinner parties, I’ve been getting more adept at planning complete dinner menus, which of course, includes a drink component! Last Friday, we had some dear friends over for a dinner of Indian food. This cuisine is great because it is naturally vegetarian and meat eaters don’t even notice the absence of meat. It can be made vegan without a flick of the eye either!

As many of you might know there is no traditional alcoholic drink to pair with Indian food, which had me scratching my head for a few days. But thinking of the flavors we use in cooking, I thought a ginger martini would be a natural addition!

 

 

Ginger Martini

 

  • 1.5 oz ginger liqueur
  • 1.5 oz gin
  • juice of half a lime
  • garnish with crystallized ginger
  • rim the glass with the excess sugar from the crystallized ginger.

For those of you wanting to host your own Indian dinner, here’s what our menu consisted of…

As you can see, I like to mix a few homemade items (our masala and martini) with ready to go products. Trader Joe’s is great for this! (and no they did not sponsor this post).

BUDGETS, MESSES, AND VEGAN DIETS

I feel like this year is the first year I’ve been truly inspired and refreshed by the turning of the calendar. Our house has been a wreck for weeks. Our house is small and the work on the kitchen floors meant a constant mess we had to live in. dust, tools, appliances in the dining room. We decorated for holidays and I think that this year we probably shouldn’t have. Our home was constantly in flux, a temporary state of chaos that stretched into eternity. With the move-in and out of decor it added a lot to our stress list. But save for a few finishing touches our floor is done, holiday decor is stored for another year and we have finally stabilized. Whew! As much as I love the holidays, I have never been more happy to be back to normal life.

With the new year we’ve taken the chance to sit down, evaluate and make some changes.

  1. We decided to go vegan again, at least for a few months. When we were on a vegan diet, we ate more at home, were more inspired to cook and didn’t have to think too hard about what was ‘good’ and what was ‘bad’. I’m excited to feel the energy, loose the pounds and lethargy.
  2. Second, we have been lucky that we’ve been able to pay for Billy’s flight education out of pocket thus far. But we never budgeted for it and just made it work; we’ve restructured our budget to add in an official aviation education line, I feel so much more confidant in the future now that there’s a plan and goal in mind.

What changes are you making for the new year?

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