This is a super yummy soup recipe that I usually double so I can freeze or just have for leftovers for days and days.
Creamy Chicken Rice Soup
original recipe here
1/2 cup chopped carrot
1/3 cup finely chopped onion
1/3 cup chopped celery
2 tablespoons butter or stick margarine
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 (14.5 ounce) cans reduced sodium chicken broth
2 cups cooked long-grain rice
1 cup cubed cooked chicken
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
1 cup 2% milk
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon white wine (optional)
- In a large saucepan, sauté the carrot, onion and celery in butter until tender.
- Stir in flour until blended, and then gradually stir in broth.
- Add the rice, chicken, salt, pepper and garlic powder; bring to a boil.
- Reduce heat; cover and simmer for 10 minutes.
- Reduce heat to low. Stir in the milk, lemon juice and wine if desired.
- Cook and stir for 5 minutes or until heated through.
This is what Joe does as I cut the chicken for the soup:
My six year old niece left a voicemail on my cell phone in 2005 that I saved on my phone for 4 YEARS because it was so adorable (she was 18 mos at the time) I couldn’t bring myself to delete it. Every 21 days, I would have to re-save it. And every time I wanted to listen to my saved messages, I would have to skip the adorable message… it got to be a bit of a pain. But I loved it so much… I just couldn’t delete it (you’ll love it to – listen to it here).
I knew I wanted to keep it forever, but I wasn’t sure how to do that. I considered getting a digital recorder and recording it, but I figured that wouldn’t give me the quality recording I wanted.
One day (after the number of adorable messages grew from one to six and I had to re-save SIX messages every 21 days – plus, I was really getting scared that Verizon would finally just delete them since it had been 4 YEARS) I decided that I would devote some time to solving my voicemail-saving problem. I was so pleased when I found GotVoice- and the answer to my dilemma.
It’s really easy to sign-up. You can even try it for free for 2 weeks – plenty of time to save all your precious voicemails. But, if you were as grateful I was to have .wav or .mp3 files of your memorable messages, please consider supporting them by subscribing for at least a month. After you sign up, all of your new voicemails will be emailed to you as .wav files. To download your saved voicemails, simply click on “get saved messages” under the header on the left of the welcome screen. It also captures the date of the message, which is pretty neat.
I think it’s important to mention that I’m not getting anything from GotVoice for this – I just think they’re super. If you need any help getting set up, I’ll try my best to answer any questions!
It’s also worth mentioning that there other uses for this… maybe you have some messages you need to preserve for legal purposes, or just need to document information.
The New Year is upon us, and with it comes tons of PowerPoint Presentations to summarize the previous years’ financials or performance. I am working on no fewer than THREE PowerPoint Presentations for various year-end meetings. I suppose PowerPoint Presentations serve a good purpose – they’re a good way to organize a lot of information and present it clearly – but gosh, they can be so boring!
This is my favorite little PowerPoint tip – how to change the little details in clipart to make them more custom. Don’t get me wrong, most clipart is incredibly tacky and should be avoided. But sometimes, a little clipart and be used to make the presentation more fun. And sometimes, you don’t really have much of a choice (some bosses LOVE their clipart!).
When looking for a nice bit of clipart, I usually use the clipart library in PowerPoint or turn to the Microsoft Office Online Clipart library. A lot of the time, I find a nearly-perfect clipart… if I could just change one small detail, it would be perfect. Very rarely do I find a perfect image – so I modify the nearly-perfect ones to get my perfect image.
Continue reading to learn how…
(more…)
Can’t sleep?
I learned this trick from my first “grown-up job” boss and she said she read it in a psychology textbook. It doesn’t work for everybody, but when it does work for people I usually get a phone call a couple days later along the lines of “OH MY GOD that is the best trick for falling asleep EVER!” because this trick is so awesome.
This trick works when your body is tired but your mind is racing and you can’t turn it off. It also works when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back asleep.
Here’s what you do:
- First, get comfortable and close your eyes
- In your mind, slowly draw a square
- In that square, slowly draw a circle
- In that circle, slowly draw the number 50
- Erase the whole drawing and start again: draw a square, draw a circle, and then draw 49
- Continue counting down (erasing the image, drawing again and counting down) until you fall asleep!
MOST people (including me) never get passed 40 – well, I did once but I just started over at 50 and I didn’t get far after that! I understand that it works because the drawing and the counting focus both halfs of the brain. But I’m not really sure why it works, I just know that it does.
I think it’s important to actually draw the shapes… very slowly draw the square, then the circle and then 5-0.
I’ll try my best to answer any questions you might have. Please let me know if it works for you!
I thought I was sooooo clever when I put “Cup Of Joe” on my Starbucks 16 oz Custom Tumbler last year (get it? Our dog’s name is Joe… all the pictures on my COFFEE tumbler are of Joe… Joe is another word for Coffee… are you chuckling quietly to yourself yet??) – so clever, in fact that I actually Googled “Cup of Joe” and that’s how I found one of my most favorite blogs A CUP OF JO. Turns out Joanna is like 2 years more clever than me.
I ended up deciding to put this post in “Make It Green” since I know using my Cup of Joe has reduced the number of plastic coffee cups I’ve put in my local landfill – but I could have just as easily put it in “Make it Special” since I happen to think these photo tumblers make excellent gifts. Especially when you make the custom insert to put in there…
…To make it a little easier, you can find blank templates here!
If you enjoy using Adobe InDesign, there’s an InDesign template for you. There is also a Microsoft Word document you can use if you’re savvy in Word and if you just want download the template and print it out to color or paint or cut-and-paste pictures, you can use the PDF template.
For Valentine’s day last year, I made one for Chris and he just loved it (I made one for me too).
