I am SO excited to announce the winner of the Inside Out giveaway – Kelly Gill!

Thank you all so much for entering this giveaway here on the Skill It blog. Your words of what a free spirit life looks like are filled with beauty and love:

“explore and discover my soul work…”

“live from a place of joy…”

“move on from the past and run wildly into the now…”

Yes to all of this! So much of what it takes to nourish our families is to take the time to feed ourselves first – in body, mind, and spirit, giving ourselves space to feel and be creative, and letting our lights shine brightly so that others can feel free to do the same.

If you’d like to learn more about Shannon Kinney and her e-courses, you can visit her at A Free Spirit Life. Inside Out begins on April 29th so you still have time to sign-up for this artful journey with her!

Do you think of yourself as creative? Do you feel like you express yourself with a sense of joy and freedom, just like you did when you were in kindergarten, coloring with a fresh box of crayons?

As lives get busy, it is so easy to let that piece of ourselves slip away, just a little bit. Skill It is rooted in creativity that we can touch, taste and feel, with those great Home Ec talents like cooking and sewing. But it is just as important to be creative for its own sake, to get your hands messy and make something beautiful. That is why I signed up for Shannon Kinney-Duh’s course, Inside Out, last year.

Enter now through Sunday April 21st and the winner will be announced on Monday, April 22nd!

I was thrilled and excited for how many of you lovely readers entered this giveaway…thank you so much! For all of us who are loving Mary’s work, don’t forget to head over to her Etsy shop, MB Art Studios to pick out one of her personalized treasures.

Mother’s Day is just around the corner, {May 12th!} and one of these lovely clocks, dishes, or wall hangings would make a perfect gift. And what better baby or wedding gift than a lovely, personalized wall hanging? I am not-so-secretly coveting one of them for our new house…

Congratulations again to our winner, and thank you to Mary for this lovely giveaway!

MB Art Studios – Now Clock

Click here to check out Mary’s Etsy shop, MB Art Studios and her Facebook page, too!

I followed the link to her Etsy shop, MB Art Studios and fell even more in love with her work. Today I am thrilled to offer a lucky Skill It reader one of Mary’s handmade creations in a special giveaway!

The piece that Mary has selected for this giveaway is a clock that will remind you to live in the moment, staying present in your life, quietly being reminded that NOW is really all we have.

This handmade clock is stamped one at a time by Mary onto creamy, white earthenware clay. She adds a stitched border to further embellish the clock and fills these dashed lines and the letters with a black glaze. The clock measures 8.25″ in diameter and comes ready to hang on the wall. You just add AA batteries to run the quiet clock mechanism and place this treasure in a place of honor in your home.

MB Art Studios – Now Clock

Filling our homes with artisan-made, heartfelt treasures is at the heart of Skill It’s vision for a “handmade, home-cooked life.” And decorating our homes with beautiful objects is even more on our mind as we currently lead our online course, Feathering the Nest. {No, it’s not too late if you want to join in for that!}

Now, let’s get down to business…how do you enter to win?

Leave a comment on this blog post telling us your favorite item in Mary’s online Etsy shop!

Click here to check out the shop: MB Art Studios
Then come right back and jot down a quick comment with your favorite thing.

You can enter from today, April 2nd, through this Sunday, April 7th at midnight. I’ll announce a winner on Monday, April 8th. That’s super easy! Right?

Good luck to each of you and thanks to Mary for her lovely gift!

PS: Don’t forget to stop by Mary’s Facebook page, too!

Do you know that one of my favorite words is “kismet?” I just had to tell everyone that when I went to Lindsay’s website, I gasped a little because she has feathers everywhere, in the graphic design and the featured photos. Then I clicked to another page and found this quote…

Let me be as a feather. Strong with purpose, yet light at heart. Able to bend and, tho I might become frayed, pull myself together again. -Anita Sams

I thought all of you would enjoy this story and these lovely words on this soft and gentle Friday.

Lindsay will get a spot in Feathering the Nest and A Book About Me.

Both of these beautiful courses start on April 1st (soon!) If you would like to sign-up you have plenty of time to join in the fun!

XO
Leah

a spot in the e-course Feathering the Nest &

a spot in Mama Scout’s e-course A Book About Me.

Perhaps you spent a little time de-cluttering and making space in the last few months? If your answer is yes, {or that is on your to-do list for the weekend!} you might be ready for these next questions:

“You might be looking for the forgotten you, the submerged self, a younger or different you than who you confront in the mirror each morning. This course is to help you uncover her, find her and also redefine her. Because chances are, she has been deep in the muck so long, she might have evolved into something a little different.”

“By recording the details of our lives, both big and small, through word and image, we recover our lost selves and reconstruct stronger versions of the women we want to be.”

If you want to read more about Amy’s course, click here. To learn more about Feathering the Nest, click on the pretty image below.

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Because we want everyone to have access to these classes, we are both offering 15% off their tuition!

A Book About Me – enter “FEATHER” at checkout here and receive 15% off
Feathering the Nest – enter “MAMASCOUT” at checkout here and receive 15% off

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Now, how can you enter to win?

Their tender leaves are available year-round in the market and they can be cooked in endless ways to match up with all different cuisines and dishes.

I am particularly fond of adding spinach to other dishes, like eggs, soups, and stews. Since it is our commitment to eat something dark green at every dinner, I am always on the lookout for ways to add greens to something else so I can have a one-pot meal that requires less cleaning up at the end of the night.

Spinach is also one of the quickest-cooking greens out there so your dinner can come together in a snap.

If I am serving my spinach next to roasted chicken, broiled salmon, or inside a spinach & pepper quesadilla, it just needs a few minutes in a hot skillet with a dash of olive oil and perhaps a splash of water to become perfectly cooked.

Spinach is delicious raw, but its texture is not for everyone. Have you ever eaten spinach and sort of felt like you were eating fine grains of chalk? For some scientific reason {that I don’t plan on researching} this is one of spinach’s quirks. I usually mix baby spinach raw with other greens so at least I don’t notice it that much.

I think spinach tastes especially great in these dishes:

• Enchiladas with black beans & cheese
• Curried lentil soup
• Omelettes and frittatas, or eggs in general
• Stir-fries and noodle soups

If you want to serve up a simple side dish of sauteed spinach, I highly recommend pairing it with some garlic and olive oil. Other things that taste delicious to sprinkle over your spinach are:

• Goat cheese
• Toasted slivered almonds
• Shaved parmesan cheese
• Chopped black olives

This is our ode to Spinach, but we’d love to hear from you….what is your favorite way to eat these delicious greens?

One by one, I’ll share the ways we cook up all our favorite greens.

Today, I am delighted to talk all about one of my all-time favorites, kale. This dark green leafy vegetable has lots of health benefits and I love its texture and nutty, almost sweet flavor. Since the leaves are fairly thick, I also love that they don’t reduce in volume too much when cooked.

Kale is also one of the easiest things to grow in a backyard garden.

The first photo here is from our raised beds last summer. We bought some kale babies from a local community garden plant sale and popped them into the backyard without much ado. With sunshine and water, the kale went crazy and supplied us with so many dinners worth of side dishes. It was awesome!

So, how do you prepare this great food for a simple side dish? I have a few tips for you and some ideas on how you can spruce up a basic steamed or sauteed side of kale with some extra ingredients.

To prepare the kale I first have to decide if I’ll be cooking with or without the stems. This is based on how thick or tough they seem. If the stems are pretty thin, I keep them. If they’re tough, I remove them by cutting or ripping green leaf away from the stem.

Once that’s done, I use a nice sharp knife and cut across the leaf to make thin strips, about 1/2 inches wide. But if you have little hands who want to help you in the kitchen, they could rip the kale into small pieces by hand.

To cook up the kale, I do a little steam & saute combo.

This means I cook it in a little olive oil first for flavor and then splash a little water in the skillet and cover it so it can steam, too. By adding the water second, I make sure I don’t add too much because I am not a fan of too-soggy kale.

The cooking time varies based on how much kale you have, the texture of the leaves, and how much heat you use. For this shredded kale it usually takes about 4-7 minutes to cook down to a perfectly delicious but not-overdone consistency.

Oh yes, this reminds me that cooking the greens is always the very last thing I do before serving dinner to assure that the kale is nice and hot when we get to the table. I also put my dishes in a warm oven (about 250 degrees) before serving the food because that keeps it hot longer. {You might skip that if some of your dinner companions are quite little.}

Last but not least, here are some fun things you can add to your kale to give them more flavor and even a bit of texture. Mix, match, experiment, come up with your own favorite combinations, and most of all, enjoy! {I had NO idea I could talk about kale for this long!!}

Tasty Toppings for Kale

Toasted Sunflower seeds & feta
Shaved parmesan & dried cranberries
Goat cheese & pancetta or bacon
Caramelized onions & balsamic vinegar

The spirit of this day is a celebration of love and is typically associated with hearts and flowers, chocolate and candy. While I enjoy chocolate as much as the next gal, I wanted to honor this day in a different way.

Since food is always on my mind, Valentine’s Day has been making me think about all the pretty pink fruits and veggies I enjoy eating. So I rounded up my favorite photos of pretty, pink food and am sharing them here in a short & sweet way.

From beans to borscht, my favorite pink soup, these photos remind us that every color of the rainbow can be found in nature…and usually in an edible form!

Pink Beans & Radicchio

Pink Grapefruit & Borscht (Beet Soup)

Rainbow Chard Stems

I hope you have a beautiful, delicious, and Happy Valentine’s Day!

In recent years it seems the number of grains that are available (and fashionable) has grown and grown. I never ate quinoa when I was a child and I had certainly never heard of millet or farro.

Now I love experimenting with these different grains to make healthy salads, with lots of vegetables, olive oil, vinegar, and crumbled feta cheese.

In these efforts to expand our taste buds and eat a greater variety of grains, I became a tad frustrated with myself for having to look up the cooking times and grain to water ratio every night.

Wouldn’t it be easier if I wrote all that down onto one piece of paper and put it on the refrigerator?

I have been meaning to do this for well over a year, and finally just had to do it. I think I was more motivated because I knew I could share it with you! So, if you click on that image right up there, it will take you to a lovely printable-PDF of the new, official Skill It Grain Cooking Chart. It is pretty enough to pin up to your refrigerator so that all the information you need is right at hand.

I hope this makes putting dinner on the table just a little bit easier. And if you are cooking with little ones, might I suggest that you put this at their height and encourage them to be your official grain & water measuring experts. Oh, and they can set the timer for you when the grains are ready to be simmered!

Here are some photos of delicious dinners we’ve made with grains to whet your appetite. And if you like the looks of these, I hope you’ll consider joining the upcoming session of Season’s Eatings that starts this Friday. There will be lots of delicious dinner recipes and more ideas for bringing out the simple joys of cooking and eating together!

From Left to Right: Chicken with Chard & Couscous, How to store Quinoa, Cod sauteed in tomatoes and lemon over Quinoa