US meets UK

You’ll be happy to know our florist still wants to work with us, even after I dropped the ball.  When she sent me an email confirming the flowers we had discussed, I realized our flowers were still with the old color scheme instead of the new one!

Oopsies, so the hive shall receive more flower searching inspiration from me. Our florist asked what boutonniere Mr.D should wear to compliment the bridal bouquet and I realized, with no cala lillies in the new bouquet it would be kinda silly for him to be wearing one.  The new bouquet will be made of lavender hydrangea, lavender roses, lavender stock, lavender lisianthus and variegated purple dendrobium orchids (but I’m seeing if I can switch in other purple flowers instead of the orchids) with gray berries.

So I thought maybe a little thistle with gray berries? It seems pretty manly, I mean, as manly as flowers can get…

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Or maybe a bit of lavender hydrangea with gray berries instead of green.

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I dig this adorable cotton boutonniere as well!

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I’m also out of ideas for corsages, I’ve been leaning towards using freesia but I’m not sure how sturdy it will be or if it’s in season.  For our original color scheme we used Cymbidium orchids and calla lilies for a fair amount of the boutonnieres and corsages.  I’d like them all to be a little bit different from each other so that everyone isn’t wearing the same corsage or boutonniere. Now that we’re looking at less structured flowers and I’m getting lost.  Any suggestions hive?!

Because they are amazingly yummy.  and Vegan.  Go Figure

Nick and I wont be able to make it to the grocery store for a long while so we had to figure out how to make do with the supplies that are left. We were both in the kitchen wandering around in a daze trying to figure out what to do.  We could have pasta…and plain tomato sauce. Or…beans? Or an omelet? Uhg, we were out of food and running out of appetizing ideas when I remembered I recipe I had recently bookmarked. Do we have kidney beans? oats? veggies? Success!

I stole the recipe from this blog and I’m so very glad I did.   We substituted a few things and these burgers still turned out quite delicious.

While they’re a bit high in calories they’re still pretty good for you (Nick even had two!).  Here is a link to the nutritional content.  Oh, and these are remarkably budget friendly - woohoo!

Edit: Nick begged me to remake them today (Wednesday).  The first time we made them using mixed beans and kidney beans and this time we used all kidney beans.  We prefer the ones with mixed beans and kidney beans.

Happy Easter!  Although these are on my “do not eat” list, that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a splurgetastic time with them.  I made these a looong while ago, as in when I first made pretzels.

I would say “we” miss Cinnabons, but once Nick found out there was cream cheese in the frosting he stopped missing them. He pretty much has a cheese phobia, so although he enjoyed Cinnabons once he can never go near them again.

I was feeling emboldened after my pretzel success and decided while I still had a dough hook and stand mixer at my disposal I should get busy with them. I hunted around for a cinnabon copy recipe and there are TONS! I found one with UK measurements and just decided to go for it. I didn’t take as many pictures this times because I forgot. If you use the same recipe I did I’d double the frosting, I can’t imagine using that tiny amount for all the rolls.

I was getting pretty worried because unlike the pretzel dough which actually did double in size this dough ball pretty much stayed the same. But I forged onward, Nick rolled out the dough and then we slathered it in butter.

Sprinkled copious amounts of brown sugar and cinnamon on the buttered side and attempted to roll it up. In retrospect I would have heavily floured the board instead of lightly floured it because it got a bit sticky.

Put them in the oven until they browned and out they came!

Because Nick has the cheese phobia I made penuche icing for his and cream cheese frosting for mine. In retrospect I should have picked a different frosting because penuche is butter, brown sugar, confectioners sugar and a tiny bit of milk. Between the rolls and the penuche icing I used the entire container of brown sugar. Lucky for me, Nick has the largest sweet tooth I’ve ever met.

In the end they aren’t exactly cinnabons, but from what my tongue remembers they’re pretty close! The main difference is that my buns didn’t rise a second time (FAIL) so they didn’t get as huge and doughy. They were still delicious though and I’d make them again in a heart beat.

A master of the Master Cleanse that is.  Okay, maybe a novice, because it was my first cleanse/fast/detox whatever, but I succeeded.

This blog post is by no means telling you to do a cleanse/fast/detox what-have-you.  I’m just letting you know my experience with it, because hey, it’s part of my journey.  So let us journey…

As most of you know, I can’t work while I’m in the UK, this gives me a fair amount of free time (aka all my time).  Ample time to try things like the Master Cleanse; I have a confession for you guys…are you ready for it?

I actually enjoyed the Master Cleanse.

The cleanse gave me time to consider my relationship with food, what food I enjoy, how food affects my mental state, how/when/why I consume food.  I realized that much of the time I eat I’m not actually eating because I’m hungry, I’m actually eating because I’m bored, emotional, or worse, out of habit.  Yes, that’s right, I’ve actually been eating food because it’s a habit.  At this point I realized “wtf have I been doing?!”, Mr.D and I always get popcorn at the movies (habit), he also enjoys garlic bread with pasta so I eat it too (more carbs habit).  Not to mention I also realized the portions I’ve been consuming are out of this world.  If I’ve been surviving/thriving on 1-2 liters of the MC juice then why have I been overstuffing myself?

When my grandmother passed away it was the first day of the cleanse and all I wanted to do after I spoke to my mother was to drown myself in Macaroni and Cheese (emotional habit).  I stayed with the cleanse though and didn’t succumb to the emotional cravings.  One great tip I read while I was researching the master cleanse is that if you’re hungry for pizza, visualize a green salad.  If you still want to eat the salad then you’re actually hungry, if not the pizza was just a craving.  I repeated this over and over when we went to the movies in an attempt to avoid the popcorn.

Prior to the MC I ate a vegetarian diet with a slight addiction to cheese (just check out my WeddingBee bio!).  While this is okay (but potentially high in fat and refined sugar) and I get a wide variety of nutrients, I always think there is room for improvement.  The places I’m improving are:

• Avoiding refined sugar (big time, like it’s the plague)
• Avoiding Dairy (gasp!)
• Avoiding refined flour
• Eating more pulses, complete grains and kicking my veggie intake into high gear
• Proper portions

I’ve been exploring raw food and macrobiotic cooking as well to find recipes that fulfill what I’m looking for in my diet. I’m avoiding alcohol and caffeine, and as much as I’ll miss the coffee I think it will ultimately be better for me.

My theory is that if I survived without these things (refined sugar, dairy, and refined bleached flour) for 10 days I can certainly make a long term commitment to it.  Oddly enough my only honest to god craving has been for pickles and red peppers (go figure).

For those of you wondering about weight loss I only lost 8 pounds.  For all those celebs saying they lost a gagillion pounds in two weeks…I have no idea how they did it.  Maybe if I did 5 hours of cardio a day or something that would have been possible.  But with moderate workouts and drinking the juice I didn’t really have that much weight loss.  In any case, I’m much more excited for the weight loss that is to come from my revised diet.

Have you cut any foods out of your diet or done a cleanse in the run up to the wedding?

So, I know that a fair amount of wedding attire is focused on the Bride, but lets give the grooms some credit here.  Mr.D is tall and lean, which makes it surprisingly hard to find a well fitting suit.  We were entertaining the possibility of a bespoke suit when we stumbled upon this website.

I can’t personally vouch for the fabrics and quality, since we haven’t been for Mr.D to be measured or for us to feel the fabrics.  What I can say however, is that this site is a lot of fun to play around with!

The choices are endless!  Lucky for us that Mr.D and I seem to have similar suit tastes.  You can customize practically anything. A Suit That Fits gives you tons of options to play with with such as the 2 or 3 piece suit, colored linings, vests, buttons, pockets - the list goes on!

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I enjoy playing around with the options and sending them to Mr.D.  Even if you’re not considering a custom suit, it’s a good way to get a feel for the styles you and your mister enjoy.  I dig their blog too - check it out!

Is your fiance considering a custom suit or tuxedo?

I have a confession, for almost a year I’ve been heavily addicted to the site One Pretty Thing.  I check it daily and have been saving DIY projects from it for a long time.  I just wanted to share some of my recently featured favorites with the hive.

If you like Mrs. Pineapple’s clay flowers (and you’d like to take it on yourself) check out this Martha tutorial:

I love, love, LOVE terrariums and succulents; these would make fantastic centerpieces.  Not to mention they’re the kind of centerpiece that you can take home and will last for a long while. Can’t you just imagine these surrounded by tiny votives?

These waxed flowers (from Martha) seem out of my league but the comments make it sound like a great project!

Can you tell how much I love succulents yet? As a former Arizonian I really can’t get enough of them, I even drove a poor baby Organ Pipe cactus all over the United States in my trunk because I couldn’t part with it!  Mr.D and I have debated about using succulents or not and we still haven’t decided (I can’t believe we’ve honestly be discussing these for 8 months). These are intended as favors, but I could easily see them places on a table with votives.  If you mixed up the potting height they’d also be great as stand alone centerpieces/favors (favorpieces?).

The Cherry Blossom Festival is about to kick off in DC.  If you’d like to bring the outdoors in to your wedding you can try these cherry blossom centerpieces from (who else?) Martha.

Who knows what Ikebana means? I didn’t until I checked out these flower arrangements.  We’ll be doing a take off of the curly willow/orchid arrangement but with delphiniums and curly willow (card tables etc).

Okay, I know this might feel like a DIY/Martha Overdose, but I had to share one more.  This one doesn’t contain flowers - they’re  luminaries from Martha. I honestly squealed when I saw these!

Ahhh, too much inspiration!  Anyone else on the DIY path for centerpieces? Where do you find your inspiration?

it’s good enough for Mr.D.  You see, Mr.D isn’t wild about the idea of “man jewelry” but I’m slowly convincing him to wear a wedding ring.  After checking out men’s wedding rings Mr.D and I were relaxing with a glass of wine when he realized that David Beckham wears a wedding ring (so clearly it must be manly?).

Mr.D assumed Becks would have a simple, classic style wedding band so we set about googling “David Beckham wedding band” until we found a picture. This is what we found:

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So…not exactly Mr.D’s idea of a simple or classic wedding band.  The search continues, I can’t buy jewelry online ( I need to touch it!) so I guess we’ll have to wait till we get back to the US.

How are you and your mister finding his ring? Does he want to wear a ring or…not so much?

Miss Bruschetta’s post about her and Mr.B’s Apartmenticipation got me thinking about my cohabitational history with Mr.D.  I’d always thought that before I was married I would have lived in several different cities (check), lived alone (could never afford it), finished my masters or had an established career (half check?), I thought I’d be almost 30 (about 5 years early on that one) and my future husband and I would move in together after the wedding/honeymoon (nope).

Why did I imagine all that? I don’t really know, I always try to create benchmarks, plans and such.  I think it’s just the planner in me.  But, the funny thing about plans is that you’re constantly revising them since life seldom consults your excel sheets and goal charts before going about it’s business.

Does anyone remember the Friends’ episode where Rachel turns 30 and all the friends reminisce about their 30th birthdays? Phoebe found out she was an entire year older than she thought she was?  Life doesn’t wait for you to tell it what to do (or to tell it how old you are).

After our Road Trip, Mr.D and I were apart for another month and he agreed to come back and visit for a month in late May.  While he could have rented a place in Miami it would have been VERY expensive and honestly, it just didn’t seem worth it.  Once Mr.D was here though, we just weren’t ready to be split up.  So he changed his flight to give him almost the maximum time allowed by the Visa Waiver Program and stayed with me until late August.

So, now you have almost the whole story of the d’Orsays.  We met in March, went on a 10 day second date in April, moved in together in May and engaged in August.  We move fast

Anyone else on the fast track?

I spoke to my mom yesterday and the news was not so good.  My Nana (Dad’s mother) has been pretty ill for a while, but she’s always pulled through.  Unfortunately it was getting to the point where she wasn’t going to pull through, she’d been moved to a Hospice and the outlook wasn’t so good.

So not good that my mother said even if I did fly home I might not even make back in time to see her. Nick and I always say ” _____ is just a plane ride away”, and that if things were really bad we’d be able to be where we need to be.  I couldn’t believe that I was so out of control, that there was nothing I could really do.

There are so many things I wanted to tell her.  How much she meant to me, how she inspired me, how much I loved her.  Sometimes my Nana could be tough to get along with, but honestly, it made me love her all the more.  She set standards (no matter how absurd the seemed) and she stuck to them, she said what was on her mind and she didn’t apologize for it.  I think those qualities are really rare these days and I’ll miss her dearly.

I called the hospice so they could hold the phone up and she could hear me, but the people at the hospice didn’t understand what I was asking.  The woman just kept telling me that my Nana couldn’t speak and that I should come in if I wanted to speak to her.  I gave up trying to explain that I was in England, that I couldn’t make it there and just called my mother instead.  My father called me from her bedside and I was able to tell her how much I loved her, missed her and wished I could see her to give her a hug.  I honestly didn’t think it would be the last time I spoke to her, I planned on speaking to her the next day.

She passed away only a few hours after I spoke to her. I think I was still hoping she would pull through and I was still shocked by it. Even as I write this I’m constantly changing things to past tense for her. I didn’t know she had gone into hospice and in the span of only a few hours I found out she was in hospice, dying, and that she had passed away.

One of the reasons I was so excited to chose our venue is that it was literally down the street from her nursing home.  She had serious mobility issues, tired very easily and was in near constant pain so I was happy to pick the place that would mean the least amount of travel for her because I knew she’d want to be there for our wedding. I know Nick and I will find a way to honor her and her presence will be intensely missed.