Bacon wrapped avocado

I will be the first to tell you that I do not love avocado. But I will eat it. Once we ate at a diner that had avocado fries as an appetizer. It was a breaded and fried piece of avocado with dipping sauces. It was surprisingly delicious. Then on Pinterest I came across bacon wrapped avocado. Hmm... that could be tasty! I tried out the recipe the other day and it was an enjoyable culinary experience. You can view the original recipe on Oh, Sweet Basil.

Bacon Wrapped Avocado

Ingredients
Bacon
1 Avocado
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 to 1 t chili powder

Directions
Heat the oven to 425 degrees.

In a small bowl, mix together the brown sugar and chili powder. Set aside.

Line a baking sheet with foil (or be prepared to do a bit of scrubbing afterward).

Cut open the avocado and remove the pit. Slice about 3/4 inch slices lengthwise through the avocado and then cut in half width-wise. I made 4 cuts lengthwise giving me 8 chunks of avocado per side...16 chunks total. Cut each slice of bacon to wrap around each chunk of avocado. I just cut each slice in half, but you could cut in thirds to make your bacon go farther. Wrap the bacon piece around the avocado chunk. Roll in the brown sugar mixture and place on baking sheet. I had a bunch of the brown sugar mixture leftover after rolling all my pieces so I spooned the rest on top of each chunk before baking.

Bake for 10-15 minutes. Remove from the oven. I put mine on some paper towels to soak up some of the bacon grease before transferring to a pretty plate.

Adult Coloring Party

The other night I attended an Adult Coloring Party. As we all know, adult coloring books have been trending as a great way de-stress. This party featured coloring books from Usborne Books. I do not pay much attention to direct sales businesses, especially those that are kid-oriented. But this was a fun party! You could host one yourself through a Usborne rep or purchase coloring books anywhere they are sold and invite your friends over.

There were a variety of books to choose from and I ended up going with the Clothes and Fashion to Color book. It shows fashion from many time periods.

We each paid $10 which included a book and a set of colored pencils. Now that I've tried out this coloring thing, I want to get a bigger set of colored pencils so I have more colors to choose from. 

After a while of coloring, my hand was starting to cramp up. With all the typing we do nowadays, using actual writing utensils for an extended period of time is tiring.

I can't wait to get to the end of the book for the 50's and 60's fashion!

Easy Scrapbooking: Trail Race

I totally did not mean to only share scrapbook pages from races. Oops! My scrapbook is actually filled with more travel related subjects than running, but I guess these pages just turned out to be more interesting. I will definitely share others in the near future.

This page is from a trail race called Love on the Rocks. It is slightly more complicated since I made my own snow-capped mountain range by hand. I am proud of this page because it's a little more creative than a lot of mine. You could use this type of design for other things as well...skiing, mountain climbing, etc.

Easy Scrapbooking: Color Run Page

The next scrapbook page I would like to share with you is from a Color Run. (I don't run that much, I swear!) Color Runs are, well, colorful. So this page had to be that, as well.

I love the color splotches I found (on Google) and imported into my Silhouette software. I wasn't sure exactly how I wanted them on the page, so I cut out several in a few sizes. I really like how it turned out.

Easy Scrapbooking: Race Day Page

I love scrapbooking! I enjoy looking back through all my scrapbooks and remembering all the fun times and people I have chosen to include. But I think scrapbooking is intimidating to a lot of people. First you have to sort through all your photos, figure out which ones to have printed and then have all the right supplies. Once you get all those things sorted out, scrapbooking can be very easy and relaxing. I have a simple approach when it comes to immortalizing my memories. I do not include a lot of embellishments; I like my pages to focus on the photos.

The first page I would like to share with you is a race day page. It's probably one of my more modest layouts. I love the patterned paper on this page. It's a colorful chevron print. I used the same paper for the running man and title. I do not even remember where I bought it. I love Hobby Lobby and Michael's, but I like local scrapbook stores even better. There was an amazing one in Dayton, but I only discovered it right before we moved. I haven't found one near me in California.

To make both the running man and title, I used my Silhouette. I love, love, love it! Even though I've had it for many years now, I am still figuring it out. I finally learned how to take any image found on Google and make it into a Silhouette shape. This is saving me a lot of money because I am not limited to the shapes in the Silhouette Design Store that cost about $1 each. Thank goodness for Pinterest!

Memorial Day Weekend Travel: Part 2

Part of our Memorial Day Weekend trip was to check out Santa Barbara. All my knowledge of Santa Barbara comes from watching Psych. Suffice it to say, that gave me very little real information to work with.

Santa Barbara was a neat town. We started off by visiting Mac's Fish & Chip Shop. It was featured on Triple D and sounded delicious. I had the steak and potato savory pie. Charles had shepherd's pie. I enjoyed mine immensely. The place was charming and the food was so tasty! If I lived in Santa Barbara I would want to eat there often.

The restaurant was on State Street. Santa Barbara's State Street was a fun area to walk around. There were so many restaurants and shops to explore. You could have almost any type of cuisine you could imagine on State Street. People watching would also be good here.

After walking up and down State Street, we headed over to the Old Mission Santa Barbara. It was a happenin' place! We decided to visit during their annual sidewalk chalk festival and there were tons of people there.

The mission was beautiful, but it was missing the gorgeous garden that the mission in Ventura had. This one was larger, though.

Memorial Day Weekend Travel

For our (I should say Charles') long weekend, we drove down to Ventura, CA. The main reason for the visit was for Charles to have a second shot at qualifying for the Boston Marathon at the Mountains to Beach Marathon. We used the opportunity to see what Ventura and Santa Barbara had to offer.

On our first day in Ventura we visited Pete's Breakfast House for brunch. It was delicious! I had the waffle sundae and it was the perfect combination of slightly crunchy but still soft waffle, ice cream, chocolate sauce, fruit and crunchy granola.

One thing we had not done while living in California is visit any of the many missions. Missions, according to Wikipedia, comprise a series of 21 religious outposts; established by Catholic priests of the Franciscan order between 1769 and 1833, to expand Christianity among the Native Americans northwards into what is today the U.S. state of California.

The Old Mission San Buenaventura is a small one, but has a beautiful courtyard garden and a lovely church.