Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Saved by the Kale!
Meet Jim
Hi to all you Saved by the Kale regulars. I’m Jim Lastinger, Jen’s husband. She had a great idea over the weekend that I should start contributing more of my recipes and thoughts to Saved by the Kale. Here’s a bit about me.
I started cooking at around 10 years old. My mother is the best cook that I know and she taught me well. Some of my favorite memories from childhood are cooking the family dinners myself or cooking alongside her. Over the past 25 years I’ve learned to cook just about anything and everything, and I love trying new things.
I also have a passion for making things completely from scratch…. things that probably shouldn’t or don’t need to be made from scratch. Some things that I’ve been know to make by hand are brown sugar, bbq sauce, spice blends, syrups (chocolate milk yum), and much more. I’m going to be sharing things like that occasionally as well as some of my favorite foods and recipes.
Jen and I have pretty different ideas about food. I love barbecue, steak, burgers, wings, and pizza. She loves healthy food and finding ways to make everyday foods better for you. It’s an interesting dynamic that I hope comes through here in the future.
I’m looking forward to spending a bit more time in the kitchen. Over the past few years I’ve been focusing largely on my work in the tech industry, but more and more I’ve been wanting to branch out and try some new things. Getting into the world of food blogging is an exciting avenue for me and I can’t wait to get started. There’s a lot of delicious recipes coming your way 🙂
Leave any questions you have for me in the comments. You can also reach me on Twitter @jimlast. I look forward to getting to know all of you!
One of my Resolutions for this Year!
Happy 2014 Everyone! I hope everyone had a fun time bringing in the New Year last night. Â J and I had a quiet celebration at home. Â Every New Years Eve we make our lists of resolution and read over our’s from the years past. Â We have been doing this for last 10 years so it’s alot fun reading what our goals were from a decade ago. Here is one of my resolutions for this year.
This year I want to make it a priority to TRAVEL MORE! J and I have never made this a priority, we are awesome at planning trips and then deciding we don’t have time to go or we will postpone it and then one day never comes. Â I would like for this to start changing this year. I came across some inspiring quotes from Pinterest!
I could go on and on, but you get the point 🙂
Let’s Chat:
Do you make a list of resolutions for the New Year?
Do you have a favorite place you like to visit over and over?
Any awesome recommendations??Â
Starting Fresh
I cannot believe we are only a fews day away from the new year. I’m sure it will take me forever to get used to writing 2014, but I am ready for a New Year and new exciting adventures. Â Speaking of adventures we had actually planned to leave the day after Christmas and head to SC for 10 days, but we made a last minute change of plans. Â I was starting to feel so overwhelmed with everything I felt I needed to do here at home. Â I talking like serious deep cleaning and purging things and then reorganizing. Things that in a normal week I just do not have time to tackle. Â It seems like we are either always busy with plans or travelling and those things just get pushed back and back and never happen. Â So with the influx of the things we received and the kids received for Christmas I knew it was time! Thankfully J was on board with this and so we have been tackling one room at time and giving it a makeover. We are about half way over at this point.
I am also looking at paint colors. When we moved into this house we said we were going to paint the hallway and also the girls bathroom and we haven’t done it yet. Â I have really been wanting to put gray up on the walls. Â So of course I have been looking at Pinterest getting some ideas, I know we will be going with some shade of gray now I just need to decide how light or dark I want to go. Â Here are a couple of shades I’m thinking about.
The first is Repose Gray. I know it is incredibly hard from the pic to really know what the color will look like but at least it gives me some idea.
and the second is Lazy Gray
Both seem to be very similar. I really just need to go pick up some paint cards and see what looks good.
It feels great to be doing this, you may think I’m crazy to choose this over being on vacation, but it feels good to get rid of things you no longer need or use. I cannot even tell you how extremely happy it makes me to walk into the rooms that I know are free of clutter and crap stuff. Freeing up space for what really matters! 🙂
Let’s Chat:
How often do you go through your house and purge items? I feel like I do this several times a year. It is amazing how quickly “things” accumulate!
Do you like organizing? OMG I love it, such a high…I know I’m a little crazy 🙂