Spinach Strawberry Salad

Lunches around my house are almost always leftovers. Sometimes there is a little less left over than I would like, so I will include a salad. I easily get bored with food if I eat the same thing all the time. There will probably be at least 2, possibly 3 salads in lunches for a week. Instead of sending the same tossed salad with the same dressing, I try and make them all a little different. Doing that also helps me use all of the food that I have bought so that I have no waste. I had bought the spinach to use for a recipe and had about a third of a bag left and a few strawberries.

Spinach Strawberry Salad

fresh spinach, torn into bite sized pieces

sliced strawberries

sliced almonds

Balsamic vinegar

olive oil

Salad ingredients go into a bowl and I just made a quick dressing with the vinegar and oil. I love strawberries and balsamic vinegar together so I make the dressing kind of tart!

Belated Birthday Post

I have been out of town a lot over the past couple of months and haven't really been posting with any regularity. Hopefully life is getting back to normal for me! I wanted to take the next couple of days to play catch-up with some of my photos that were taken, but never made it out of my camera!

I will start here with Kip's birthday cake. I always make his cake and will try to tie it in with a theme to go with his gifts or something that delights his geeky soul. He loves the game Portal so I made a cake to go along with that game. I had a little help with this one too, Samantha wanted to help and since she has more experience working with fondant than I do, I gladly accepted her offer. And at 12, she also has a lot more cake decorating tools than I do.

The cake was a marbled vanilla and chocolate cake with chocolate butter cream icing.

Here is the happy birthday boy with his gift. Like I said, I normally try to tie in the cake with his gift but I wasn't sure I would be able to find the Batmobile or not when I was planning the cake. He was happy with both though, so that was all that mattered to me.