Ah girls night! A time for us ladies to get together with our closest girlfriends, crowd around good food, good music, and catch up! I really love any reason to get together with my friends, but I especially can’t wait to see them when I’ve had one of those ‘longest days weeks ever’ kind of moments. It’s definitely the busy season…it’s the summer season, wedding season, and baby shower season (am I right?!), so I’ve been traveling a ton. An awesome girls night with amazing girls was definitely in order…from left to right, this is Karissa, myself, Sarah, and Whitney. Alexandra is here too, but behind the camera.
I called up my good friend Sarah…I can always count on her. I can also count on her to be organized when I’m feeling flustered so we put together a quick menu, a list of fun things to do for our girls night, and reached out to some friends! We invited Whitney who is a colleague of Sarah’s and whom I’d met many times before and adored. She is sweet and savvy, the girl just knows how to make you smile. We also invited Karissa, who is the girlfriend of one of our mutual friends (who’s just as awesome) and she is the kind of girl you always want to be around because she’s just an amazing energy. And we also reached out to Alexandra, Sarah’s neighbor who is a SUPER talented photographer (all of the photos you’ll see today are works of her). She is the neighbor you wish you had because she bakes home made cookies for everyone in the building AND shares her basil plant with anyone who wishes to take some from her porch! I mean I’ve never even met my neighbors after three years yet alone share a love fern with them. Just an incredible group of girls and our night was set!
www.alexandrabrandlphotography.com
Arrived late having come from a meeting down town, having fought traffic….having moved my life square a bagillion times that day, it was SUCH a moment to arrive to smiling faces and a yummy spread of food! On the menu (and already set up on the table may I add): two kinds of red wines, hummus and chips, peppermint bark, home made pico de gallo, home made chocolate chip brownies, home made crusted zucchini rounds, and my STORE bought cheese platter…womp womp . Note to self: Blue cheese does NOT taste like GOAT cheese, nor does it even sound the same I don’t know how that even happened to me.
We sat around the best food, had the best conversations, and then moved the party into the living room where we popped on some tunes and got lost in girly things. They say that when women get together that all they do is polish their nails, braid one another’s hair, and talk about boys. Well they’d be right ……except for the braid part. Next time. Besides the smelly feet cheese and rosemary crackers… I also brought along with me the new… no light needed Sally Hansen® Miracle Gel™ polishes, and I brought along three colors; Pink Cadillaquer, Hydro Electric, and Purplexed. We sat around the table, dove into the colors and here is what we did!
The photo above is our model pose…how we would pose if we were hand models…which I mean, we totally could be! Posing, pampering, and giggelfests…I had so much fun with these ladies and I can’t thank Alexandra enough for capturing these moments. You won’t see her in any of the photos because she was the magic behind them!
So I’ve been a long time lover of salon gel manicures. Being so busy, I don’t have time to fuss over my nails, to have them chip or peel on me, or to even deal with the fuss of purchasing a UV light for home so that I could potentially do them myself. However this is a great way to get that salon look, at home, and the polishes were awesome not at all fussy. I’d suggest applying 2-3 nice thick, even coats of your chosen color onto your nail, wait a few minutes and then apply the top coat. The polishes dry pretty quickly, as we learned by doing the ‘test’, where you touch your nails together and if they don’t stick they’re ready. And they were ‘ready’ quicker than I’d expected them to be.
The brush has got to be my favorite thing about the polishes aside from the vibrant colors. It’s not too thick or thin, or too square (you know what I mean here, totally important), it takes the shape of your nail bed quickly, and applies the color evenly. If you choose a more transparent color like Pink Cadillaquer, I’d suggest making a ‘double lined’ kind of pattern on your nail with the color, to be sure that you cover your entire nail and that the polish is distributed evenly. On Sarah is Purplexed, a deep purple, and Karissa is wearing Pink Cadillaquer, an all around favorite- a pastel pink rich in color.
Whitney and Alexandra have Hydro Electric on, a gorgeous hue of blue, and I used both Pink Cadillaquer and Purplexed to recreate my favorite cupcake pattern on my nails but of course! My reason….”sometimes you want to say hi with one color, and goodbye with another color!”. I crack myself up! It’s been a few days now since our pampering party/girls night and my nails have held up really nicely AND I get to say hello with one color and goodbye with another.
I highly recommend spending an evening with your friends, catching up, slowing down, having fun, and just remembering that the world may be moving quickly but we have people around us to keep us grounded. Amen for that! If you want to enter for a chance to win your very own set of these awesome polishes (I suggest you do, I mean..girls night!) simply enter the #PerfectPairSweeps <—- this is the hash tag you’re going to want to use when you submit a photo of YOUR own #MiracleMani to enter to win, and you can submit that here.
Please TAG me also when you enter so that I can see all of your pampering parties, what your nails look like, and can live vicariously through your girls night! I’m @Jess_Lizama on both Twitter and Instagram. I’ve also included all of our yummy recipes below so you can try them out at your next girls night or get together and let me know how it turns out!
Thus my goal for the rest of the year is to each month set aside time for myself, time with my friends, and time to reflect. We all need that sometimes and shouldn’t feel guilty or unproductive when you do. I promise you’ll tackle life so much more refreshed and relaxed the next day when you take a day to yourself. Big hugs to my Sarah, Whitney, Karissa, and Alexandra for spending the evening with me, talking all things life and love… like girls do, and let’s do more of this ladies!
Please check out more of Alexandra’s work here,she is a fantastic photographer and amazing at capturing moments.
Have a great weekend and I hope you get a lil you time in really soon!
xoxo-
Jess
The noms:
Chipotle Brownies (thanks to Sarah!): 1/4 cup all-purpose flour 2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder 1 teaspoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 3/4 teaspoon chipotle powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup unsalted butter, cut into pieces 2 ounces peanut butter chocolate chips 3 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped 3 eggs 3/4 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 1/3 cup sour cream 2/3 cup chocolate chunks Heat oven to 325 degrees, butter and flour an 8×8 inch baking pan. Combine flour, cocoa, baking powder, cinnamon, chipotle powder, and salt in a medium bowl; set aside. In a medium saucepan bring 1 inch of water to a simmer. Add butter, peanut butter and semisweet chocolates to a metal bowl large enough to sit on top of the saucepan. Melt ingredients, about 4 minutes. Remove from heat and stir until smooth. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, combine eggs, sugar, and vanilla. Whisk on high until slightly thickened, 1 to 2 minutes. Pour in the melted chocolate mixture and whisk on medium for 30 seconds. Add the flour mixture and whisk on low for 30 seconds. Add sour cream and whisk on medium for 30 seconds. Stir in chocolate chunks by hand. Bake at 325 degrees for 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool on wire rack for 10 minutes. *best ever- Zucchini Parmesan Crisps (thanks to Karissa): 2-3 medium zucchini olive oil or coconut oil 1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan 1/4 cup Italian bread crumbs 1/8 teaspoon kosher salt 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper Preheat your oven to 450 degrees and coat a baking sheet with cooking spray or line with wax paper. Slice the zucchini into 1/4 inch thick rounds. In a medium bowl, toss the zucchini into the oil and in a smaller bowl combine the cheese, bread crumbs, salt, and pepper. Dip each zucchini round into the cheese mixture, coating it evenly on both sides of it, and then press the coating onto the rounds for the mixture to stick. Place the rounds in a single layer on the baking sheet and bake for 30 minutes or until browned and crisp. Enjoy!
Sally Hansen® Miracle Gel™ At Last! Gel without the light!
Disclosure: Compensation was provided by Sally Hansen® via Mode Media. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are not indicative of the opinions or positions of Sally Hansen®.
Perhaps it’s that I needed to remind myself to slow down, or that I love receiving actual letters in the mail that I can touch and read, or perhaps it’s that I love surprises and meeting new people. Well in fact, it’s all of that. I love meeting new people, especially when they are in another country, I love corresponding via snail mail, I love purchasing stamps, and I love the idea of these lovely letters.
I joined the Lovely Letters snail mail exchange after suggestion by my amazing friend Esther, who one- is an amazing photographer and foodie, and two- inspired my daughter and I to start our mother/daughter blog. But more importantly, she and I have been exchanging snail mail since she moved from LA to Vegas a few months ago. It’s such a refreshing gesture that shows you’re being thought of when friends reach out and say howdy, even when they have a gazillion other things happening in their own lives. Esther definitely does that, she’s great at making you feel special and remembered. I thought I’d pay it forward and chime in on this pen pal thing and I’m loving it so far! I’ve only has the chance to correspond via email with my pal, who lives in the UK and her name is Adrienne. However, it’s so awesome to get to know someone new, someone with a completely different life, in a completely different environment, in a completely different country! She’s a few years older than my daughter, in college, and I think it’s funny that we all live in this great big world with our very own lives to worry about, but that we’re all under the same blue sky. Think about it. Crazy right! So interesting to me that I now get to know someone I would under any other circumstances, not have gotten the chance to know. So if you love meeting new people, reading new blogs, writing, and snail mail, join us in the Lovely Letters snail mail exchange and get your pen pal! It’s like a ‘Paris Hilton’s new bff’, except less drama, more bff’s, and no air time ;)….well except for the snail mail part.
You can read more about Lovely Letters here from Esther and Lauren here, and sign up for May’s exchange here. So grateful for friends like Esther and for new friends like Lauren and Adrienne! Happy reading and writing to you all, hope to read about all of your exchanges and pen pal lovin’ next time! Hugs, Jess
For those of you out there on a cleanse, or if you’re gluten free, or vegan, this one’s for YOU! So the night Fr. Leo came over to cook up a storm, one of our friends was on a cleanse (I know right, I felt so bad that all this carb dense food was staring at him!) and my daughter is a gluten free vegetarian, soooo we had to make something that wasn’t all carbs and meat haha! This dish was refreshing to our palettes and diet friendly to our friends. Win win baby! So lets get cookin shall we!
So this egg plant dish is creamy in texture, but not creamy in an ‘I hate textures and can’t eat that’ kind of way. It’s mineral-ly and smokey, and light enough that I could literally eat this every day.
We had this in between courses while our food settled, and it was light enough to refresh us, yet satiating enough to keep us from going back for seconds on the other dishes.
What you’ll need for this Coponata:
– 1 eggplant
– 1 clove crushed garlic
– 2 tablespoons chopped parsley
– 1 teaspoon sea salt
– 1 teaspoon fresh cracked pepper
– 1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
– half of one finely diced red onion
So cut the tips off of the ends of the egg plant and slice the eggplant in half, horizontally. Then cube and cook them on very HIGH heat in 2 tablespoons of heated olive oil. Cooking this on high heat will allow the eggplant to blister which we want. You may drizzle the eggplant with extra olive oil if it’s not frying enough, perhaps you didn’t add enough at the beginning (this is what we experienced). You don’t want the eggplant to dry out so if using more olive oil is necessary, go for it.
Then add in the fresh garlic and onion, crack some fresh pepper over top and add in the salt, and give it a toss. Drizzle the red wine vinegar over top once the onions are softened, this will de glaze the pan, and then add in some freshly cut parsley to top it all off before serving. ENJOY! Nom nom nommyyy!
This is really really yummy for an appetizer too, light enough for it, and gets you ready for the other 5 courses! Please visit Grace Before Meals for more yummy recipes, and thanks again to Fr. Leo!
Hope you enjoy this dish, I know we did! Be sure to tag me on Instagram and Twitter when you make it, I love seeing your spin on recipes!
