Normally, I would do a weekend recap for the same weekend, but the majority of my weekends in May I was working, which is probably not as much fun to read about! So instead, I decided to combine together a Thursday through Sunday from May up until now to create a weekend at a glance!
Thursday, April 27
I was so grateful to be offered a second swimwear collaboration - this time with an up & coming brand out of Florida called Saltymess! I was sent several beautiful pieces to create some awesome content for, and what better backdrop for swimwear than at the beach!
Since Memorial Day Weekend was coming up, we decided the best day to go to the beach was probably early Thursday morning to beat the crowd. We headed out to one of my favorite beaches in Malibu, got there around 9am and were so lucky that the beach wasn't crowded! The sun wasn't quite out yet, and there were plenty of empty stretches of beach, so we got to work! I did some quick changes in the car and my boyfriend helped me get some great shots of the swimwear! Within an hour, we had gotten all of the shots we needed and still had some time free time left over for a mini picnic I packed for my boyfriend as a thank you.
Before we left the house that morning, I packed a cooler full of cheese (Trader Joe's New Zealand grass-fed cheddar), salami (peppered and red wine with garlic), cage-free hard-boiled eggs, salted pistachios, organic strawberries and an apple! I rolled the salami into flowers and used toothpicks to hold them in place, and snipped a couple flowers from my bouquet to use as decoration. For the container? An old Valentine's Day chocolate box! They're always so pretty, that once I'm done with the chocolates I have a hard time throwing them away. I never really have a use for them...until now! I unpacked our cooler and placed everything in the box, and used the flowers to fill up the empty spaces, and we had a lovely little homemade charcuterie box at the beach!
I definitely bought a box of TJ's red pepper scalloped crackers just for this picnic (I usually try to cut gluten out of my everyday diet) and then forgot the box...whoops! Regardless, we still had an amazing time at the beach. A little before noon, we were ready to leave the beach, and just in time! The sun started to come out, the weather shot up to over 80 degrees and more people started to show up. All in all, it was a great quick work trip to the beach. (If you'd like to shop my looks, I've linked the swimwear from my beach day above!)
Friday, June 4
One of my close girlfriends in Los Angeles hit a big milestone with her husband: they bought their first house!! After weeks of getting her new home ready for guests, she was finally ready to have people over and I was so honored to visit and have a home-cooked meal with her husband! The meal? Homemade pizza!!!
We had one white sauce pie (roasted garlic white sauce with artichokes, arugula and prosciutto) and two red sauce pies (red pizza sauce with mushrooms, olives, and salami), and both were so. good. I honestly couldn't decide which one I liked better, both tasted amazing and hit the spot!!
If you haven't tried making your own pizza yet, I highly recommend it!! It's one of those dinners that is so much fun to make, and regardless of how it looks, it's pretty difficult to mess up on the flavor! It was one of the first dinners my boyfriend and I made together when we started dating. We had a lot of difficult time with the dough (it may have been the fact that I didn't use a rolling pin to flatten it out, or by that point we may have had too much wine...who can know for sure?), but the pizza still came out tasting delicious!! We've since just bought pre-made dough at either Whole Foods or Trader Joe's, and it's made making pizza a whole lot easier.
Anyway, back to Friday! My friend opened a new bottle of wine gifted to them by their realtor to share, and we caught up and chatted for hours! Especially after the year we had in 2020, it felt so good to be out of the house and sharing dinner with good friends. For dessert, we had some salted caramel gelato (honestly love everything salted caramel!!) and a slice of key lime pie! Delicious food shared with amazing company made for a pretty awesome Friday night.
Saturday, June 5
Saturday was my day to experiment with some new cocktails! I bought a bunch of plump organic blueberries and got the idea to make some bourbon concoction with blueberries and white peaches. Sounds good in theory, right?
After several hours of playing around with different recipes, I can now say with complete confidence that I will not be using peaches for cocktails in the future. Peach nectar? Probably amazing! Peach syrup? Sure, why not. Fresh peaches? YOU GUYS. Have you tried peeling a peach? I was quickly losing momentum and excitement for my cocktail day about halfway through peeling the first one. And I had several more to go! It's also possible that they weren't quite ripe or in season yet...maybe that helps? But they didn't add enough flavor to my drinks to make peeling them worth it. I also had the bright idea to double-strain the peaches & blueberries...YOU GUYS. I'm already a pretty impatient person by nature, so you can only imagine the struggle it was waiting for the cocktail to strain through all of that fruit! Thank goodness my boyfriend wasn't there to witness any of that because I probably would've provided a lot of unintended enjoyment for him.
Moral of the story: if you're going to use fresh peaches, muddle them & keep the fruit in the cocktail, don't try to double strain it. Also, look up potential hacks online on how to peel a peach.
I've thought about making a peach & blueberry cobbler with brown sugar, but if I have to peel them I may reconsider.
Anyway, some of the cocktails did turn out fantastic, so be on the look out for some new drinks soon! Here is a little sneak peek at one of my favorites!
Sunday, June 30
Sunday was another fun drink day, but the main spirit? Water!
I am absolutely terrible when it comes to drinking water. For a long period of my life, I was drinking iced coffee several times a day and went a while without drinking any water. I know, terrible! So I wanted to create a way to make drinking water more fun, for it to become something I actually looked forward to, like say, an iced coffee! Or a cocktail! And so, I made myself some fruit-infused water!
Some call it spa water, some call it detox water...honestly though, it doesn't matter what you call it, as long as it helps you get the proper amount of daily water intake! My personal favorite is strawberry, cucumber and mint! Orange is probably a close second. If you're somewhat of a sweet tooth and need your water jazzed up a bit in order for you to drink it, I highly recommend plopping some sliced strawberries in your water; it's crazy how much they sweeten it up! With all of these water combinations, you better believe I was ultra-hydrated for Memorial Day Weekend!
So it wasn't a weekend recap with consecutive days...
But it was several days I wanted to share with you! I hope everyone has a fantastic week, and remember to spread some kindness today!
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