Friday Food and a Digital Art Update

In my quest for better eating and saving money, I have been back at the meal planning. I know in my head and heart how much better it is to do so on many levels. And I go along pretty well, and then life happens and I fall into the fast food drive through.

Anyway...

Tuesday while I was off, I had three things I was going to fix. The first was Chicken Tortilla Soup, the second, Baked Chicken Chalupas and the third was the Chocolate Lavender Brownies.

This is one of the two mixes I purchased at the Dallas Lavender Lane Farm Lavender Festival this past weekend. I made the brownies. And Savvy and I ate the brownies before I could take a pictures. I will say, in my defense, there was a third party involved in the consumption of the brownies.

Then I made a pot of Chicken Tortilla Soup. While I cooked the chicken for the soup, I cooked extra to make...

Baked Chicken Chalupas.  I will say the recipe called for diced tomatoes with green chilies. The store was out. And then I thought - Rotel! I had two cans in the pantry which I substituted for the one larger can it called for. And while I was digging through the pantry, I found a small can of sliced black olives that I added.

Savvy and I both agreed the soup was a little bland, but the chalupas! Spot on!

I did had the 'liquid' from the chalupa mixture to the soup and it really improved the taste of the soup.  

Then on Wednesday night, I used up the last of the blueberries I had on hand and made a blueberry coffee cake. 

All this cooking came in handy on Wednesday when I spent all day at the computer 'playing' with a new tutorial I found for Photoshop.

I spent wwwaaaayyyyy to many hours going through pictures and creating some new artwork with them. I LOVE the way they turned out. So much so I am thinking about creating postcards and notecards with them. 

It also made me happy to find something new because I was getting a wee bit tired of the mandalas. I have done them for several years now and felt it was getting a bit old. I need to go in and count up the number of mandalas I have made over the years.

So now Mandala Monday will be changing up a bit and become a Digital Art Monday instead. Stay tuned for all the new lovelies.