Hangover Brunch

It has come to my last day in my hometown once again.

Two weeks of family and friends and adventures I miss while I am in California. I am physically and emotionally worked out and grudgingly ready to return to my tiny apartment in the big city.

I have had two wonderful weeks, that I desperately needed before I get ready for a wedding and six months of a husband who will be underway. I skipped my Friday post, because I wanted to post pictures and share my brunch with the handful of women who are always there in my life. Despite the distance.

My mother, my younger sister, and my best friend Sam. We asked the boys to vamoose, frowned because my other sister had to work and I woke up to start working on brunch.

Menu:

• Hash-brown Potato Cakes I paired mine with a few slices of Avocado, drizzled with garlic salt and olive oil.
• Egg-Top Biscuits
• Melted Ham and Cheese Pastry 
• Raspberry or Orange Juice Mimosa's
• Various fruits to add to the mimosa's and whip cream

The setting of the food. With Orange slice and banana garnish:)

Mimosa and Fruit Bar

You can follow the link to the hash brown cakes. Egg top biscuits require an egg cracked over a Pillsbury biscuit in a large muffin pan. Ham and cheese pastry are made with your choice of ham and cheese, the convenient pastry puffs found in your local freeze section and an oven. 

It was a brilliant Brunch, one I plan to do again in the future. Everything was delicious and dainty and not too heavy. 

The champagne used for the Mimosa's is called Verdi, the wonderful choice of my cousin-in-law who bought it for my wedding last May. It is one of the BEST Champagnes I have ever had and makes a marvelous mimosa. 

Enjoy your Saturday everyone!!

m.l. carista

Continue reading →

Lazy Fridays

I am currently visiting my hometown right now, so getting blog posts up are going to be quick and painless. My husband is going to be underway on and off for the next few weeks and it's driving me insane. (It's already driving me insane) I am still crossing my fingers that he can come visit me for a week or so before he goes underway for six months and can not talk to me at all. A visit home is just what I need to get ready and refreshed for the summer.

So today, I leave you with a story I wrote a year ago for a contest I didn't win.

Everyone, I give you: Forlorn.

Enjoy

m.l. carista

Continue reading →

Let's Get Dirty!

I'm a pole dancer. Not a runner.

I soon found this out last Saturday, when my pole class decided to put a team together and do the 5K Dirty Girl Mud Run. We had been planing it for a month, we had our team, our shirts and we were READY. The only downfall was, of course:

Cardio.

We would never survive the zombie apocalypse.

However, we went anyway. Dressed in Pink shirts, pink tutus and advertising our fitness logo in plain sight on our shirts. Of course, there were girls in all sorts of outfits. From green and orange antlers to Disney themed shirts and tights! 

In case anyone is wondering, the Dirty Girl Mud Run is a breast cancer run that raises a ton of money for research. We go out, run three miles and get really, really, MUDDY. 

This was our motivation run. Apparently, throwing your hands in the air and waving helps us run.

Obstacles. There were many like it, but this one was fun.

This was one of the muddiest ones. We raced each other under the nets and came out covered in ick.

The final jump into the mud at the second to last obstacle.

It was fun, we ruined our brand new clothes and tutus, donated our muddy shoes to charity and ate hamburgers in the grass. We showered with a cold water hose, attempted to get all the mud out of our hair and giggled all the way home.

We felt dirty, sore, out of breath but most of all, bonded and accomplished. I don't have many friends out in San Diego, side from the couple my husband introduced me to a few years ago. My pole class has been a big change, I have met so many women from different walks of life. We are powerful and fun and we never turn someone away because they are different. 

Everyone welcomes you into the circle with a smile and encouragement, because no one is a pro when they first start in pole. It takes friends and practice and never giving up. 

I will miss them when my time is SD is done, but I will be thankful in the long run when I've settled down with my husband and returned home. These people kept my sane and kept my occupied during the most stressful years of my life.

We plan on doing quite a few more runs this year. Some even dirtier than this one!

Have a Happy Valentines Day everyone.

m.l. carista

Continue reading →

Topsy Turvey Tuesdays

Do you ever get so frustrated, so anxious and so jittery that you just want to cook?

Cook and cook and cook until you can't cook no more. And I'm not talking about pulling a pre-made, frozen meal out of the oven or pouring something out of a can. I'm talking, from scratch biscuits, mashed potatoes and fried pork chops.

The only thing I didn't do from scratch is yank the potatoes out of the ground or butcher the pig.

After my husbands financial scare earlier this evening, I was so jittery from helping him fix it that I walked into my kitchen, yanked everything from it's hiding place:

And cooked.

Barefoot, singing at the top of my lungs.

It's a lovely feeling, actually. So many women now a day complain about men and their jokes in the kitchen. For me and my fellow navy wives, we quite enjoy it. It's something we enjoy doing. For me, it's that time away from the world where I make something with my hands. Sadly, I can not share it with my husband, as he is on deployment. However, that won't stop me from honing my skills. I'm still a young wife.

Our husbands have very stressful jobs, and to come home to a wife who has dinner cooked and a beer ready is probably the single greatest moment of the day.(If you don't consider what comes later;) )

So even living alone, waiting for him to come home, I enjoy the serenity of cooking. I also know that one day, cooking is going to involve tiny grabbing hands, tripping over toys and complaining about dishes not get rinsed. I look forward to those days.

So as I settle into my nightly routine, I leave you with these pictures of my meal tonight.

m.l. carista

Continue reading →

Forever and a day...

We wait all our lives for that one person. We dream about them as a child, how they will look, how they will speak, even how they will dress. We draw them in our notebooks at school and send them secret valentines during lunch.

Sometimes we find them right away, in that moment during that perfect dance at the senior prom. Where they look at you and you can't imagine being with anyone else. Sometimes, we find them during our wild years, during that party or across the hall at your local college. And sometimes we don't find them until much later, after you've built your life and you touch hands at the coffee counter or run over them with your shopping cart. And they laugh and apologize, or they cuss you out and you still look at them and know that you can't imagine spending your life with anyone else.

We could wait our entire lives and never even meet them.

Then you live happily every after, with a million bills and screaming kids and you smile at each other from across the kitchen counter. Because you wouldn't have it any other way.

And then...it doesn't go as planned. This person completes you, but you know deep down that they will destroy you. Every fight gets out of hand and every word is meant with the anger it was thrown out with. You want to regret what you said, but you know you meant every word of it. And then that person slips out of your life.

We spend our entire lives trying to find that person that completes us. Some of us find it, some of never do. However, even knowing that it will either be the greatest time of your life or the worst, it will always mean the most to you. You will always look back and know that you love that person, no matter how good or bad it got.

Not loved.

Love.

Because you never really stop loving them.

Continue reading →