Super easy, fast, and delicious: Guacamole!

James and I eat a LOT of mexican food... and I'm positive that I could eat it for three meals a day and not get sick of it for a long time ;) On that note, as much as I love guacamole from our local Whole Foods/New Seasons Market I love homemade guacamole SO much more. I usually go the lazy route and have James throw some together but lately it just hasn't tasted the way I want it to so instead of telling him things to add/take out i decided to just make it how I used to do it :)

Ingredients:

3 avocados
2 roma tomatoes (the picture has three but I only ended up putting 2 in)
1 large clove garlic plus 1 small one minced (I only say those sizes because that's what I had on hand instead of 2 medium ones haha)
lemon and lime juice (i use stuff from the bottle out of ease but you could easily use 1/2 lemon and 1/2 lime for this)
a pinch or two of cumin
a pinch or two of ground California chili pepper
a pinch or two of salt
a pinch of two (see a common theme here? haha) of ground black pepper
1/4-1/2 chopped onion (I used about 1/3)

To prepare the avocados I cut them lengthwise in half, pop the seed out with a sharp knife, then cut the "pulp" into cubes while it's still in its shell (careful not to stab yourself through the skin!). Then I take a spoon and scoop it all out in to a bowl.

Next I just eyeballed the amount of lemon and lime juice that I used (I like using both for a different flavor but you could certainly use just one of them), but it was probably about 1/2 lemon and 1/2 limes' worth of juice. I tossed the avocado chunks around in it, finely minced my garlic cloves, put them as well as the salt, pepper, cumin, and red chili pepper into the bowl.

 Next I just mashed it all up and made sure to mix it well. I then chopped up my tomatoes (I usually de-seed one of them so there's not a lot of tomato juice in the finished guac but I've found that if i do that on both then it's not as good) and thew them in, as well as about 1/3 of an onion (more or less to taste). I'm a huge fan of tomato chunks in my guacamole and although I love the flavor of onion in it, I wasn't in the mood for big onion chunks today so i did smaller ones. Mis well and let sit for at least an hour if possible (I was up super early this morning so I just made it, covered it in plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge until dinner time tonight)

Look how delicious that looks!!! YUMMMM!!

Enjoy! 
-B

Easy homemade fire-starters

James and I LOVE to camp... so we do it often. Last summer we went camping through the beautiful states of California and Oregon and had the time of our lives. HOWEVER, we also learned a lot of very valuable lessons:

1. Carry a gun. You never know when you might need to protect yourself from other people or animals.
2. Carry bear spray. Better safe than sorry and we had a handgun which wouldn't help much from a pissed off bear so this was our plan if we had issues with one
3. Don't camp in such a remote camp spot that there is no one else around you, you're next to a RUSHING creek (so noisy you almost have to yell over it), and are in such a heavily populated bear area that you had to sign a waiver to not sue if there was a bear attack when you're not armed (common sense kicked in at about 9pm and we packed back up and left. Forget that. lol!)

Note: we did two separate almost week-long trips... the first taught us to carry the gun and spray. for the second.

4. Buy a griddle for a bbq and use it over campfire pits for ease of cooking food like french toast, meats, and veggies.
5. Carry several lighters, lots of paper products to burn, and fire-starters to use if all else fails (wind was our biggest enemy that trip)
 6. Pack all of your camping supplies in large Rubbermaid type totes. It is a lifesaver when it rains since you don't have to worry about cardboard boxes getting soaked.

I'm sure we learned several other things but those were the biggest. We both have extensive camping backgrounds but there are "little" things that you learn through experience.

SO on to how we made fire-starters:

Supplies needed:
Cardboard egg container (we used one from an 18ct pack of eggs)
Shredded/ fine cut paper
Dryer lint
Wax

Directions:
We had extra wax left over from when we made candles for our wedding so we used that wax here. We melted the wax in a double burner while getting the rest of the supplies ready.

We didn't have any shredded paper for some reason so I cut up scrap paper from the recycling bin

I put a little bit of paper in the bottom of each egg carton cup followed by dryer lint (no joke, I work at a hotel and went and collected the dryer lint from the laundry facility we have on site for guests for a week since we didn't have enough at home hahaha..... also, I shed hair a lot so you can see my lovely blonde strands sticking out from the lint. Since hair burns anyways, I wasn't concerned lol). 

I packed the dryer lint in the best I could and when the wax was finally all melted i used a cheap throw-away ladle that we had on hand to scoop and pour wax into each container.

NOTE: put containers on paper towels as the wax WILL go through the cardboard. 

I let them cool in the garage overnight by the camping totes so that we wouldn't forget to put them in there. When we needed them the next time we went camping, we just broke off one at a time and light it with a lighter (one of the days was really windy so i threw three in to make sure we maintained a steady flame and at first I felt bad for "wasting it" but then I remembered how cheap they were to make so I didn't feel bad anymore ;) haha.

Enjoy!
-B