Tag: Hobby

Why I Enjoy Eating Simple & Healthy Meals

This week I made an easy delicious yet healthy dinner and if you’ve read any of my other Tuesday food posts, you’ll see that this is a weekly theme.
The ingredients for this meal were: Garlic naan, tomatoes, kale, and chicken with pomegranate vinaigrette.

This meal was simple to prepare because I bought a rotisserie chicken which I tore apart, cooked the kale in water and olive oil, sliced up tomatoes and cooked them, warmed the garlic naan in the oven and put all the ingredients together on the bread and poured the pomegranate vinaigrette over top. This took less than 30 minutes to make.


The next night, I reheated the meal, added a small avocado and topped it with everything seasoning. It tasted so good this way, too! The beauty of this dish is that you can add many ingredients to make it new again, which is why it’s a staple dish.

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The reason why I enjoy eating a meal like this is because I get to eat what I want while still eating my vegetables. And, anyone can make this dish. I treated it like it was a personal pizza. While I LOVE pizza and eat it from time to time, I also enjoy coming up with new dishes that satisfy me the same way a pizza would. I encourage you to try this too, all you have to do is think about ways you can alter your favorite dishes to make in a new healthier way at home. Doing this will make you more excited about cooking and eager to try something new for dinner.

Tip: I’ve learned to treat cooking as a way to relax my mind. Anytime I need a break from working on something or need to clear my mind, I find that cooking focuses my mind.

What’s one staple dish you’ve reinvented? Would you eat the dish I’ve posted? Let me know in the comments below.

The Smarter Shopper Series

Today, I want to introduce my new series: The Smarter Shopper. A new blog post will be posted every Wednesday from now until May! Here are some of the posts I’ll be sharing with you all:

The Art of Browsing
How to Have a Positive Experience in the Fitting Room
The Ultimate Way to Organize Your Closet

In 2011 (the year after I graduated college) I began writing this series. Now that I have the platform of my blog to share with you all, I’m so excited and hope you’ll find the content interesting and insightful. I created this content as a way of sharing my love of fashion, shopping and knowledge on the retail industry to help anyone who struggles with the enjoyment of clothes shopping.
If you know me personally or have read my About Me page on my blog, I have YEARS of experience in retail. My first job as a teenager was a sales associate at a local family owned department store and that’s when I realized I loved helping people find clothes/shoes/accessories they love and look great in. Now that I have my blog, I’m transferring my passion for shopping here in hopes you’ll look at clothes shopping in a positive perspective.

See you back here on Wednesday. ❤

Please let me know in the comments, what do you like or dislike about shopping? Let me know if you want me to cover anything specific in this series so that I can better help you enjoy clothes shopping.

What I’ve Learned in One Month of Blogging

MM-Happiness vs. Passion

I can’t believe it’s already been a month since I’ve launched my blog. I thought I’d share what I did before I started my blog, what I’ve learned and things I’m still working on. If you didn’t do the things I did before I started my blog, you can start now!

Before I began my blog:
I researched A LOT! I searched everything I could think of about blogging on YouTube; what equipment to use, what is SEO, and a bloggers life to name a few. I would watch videos in the mornings before work. I listened to two Podcasts: The Influencer Podcast and The Becoming Fearless Podcast after work while cooking and doing dishes. I watched Live Instagram videos after work and during lunch and I watched free webinars on the weekends and took notes. I did all of this because I wanted to know how others were so successful at blogging and how I can be too.
I tried the WordPress website for free-I used the WordPress domain before purchasing my domain. This was so I could get used to using the site before I launched it to the world. Having a lot of things in place before launching benefited me, so that I could then work on other things the day of launching-like my Facebook page. I had my picture taken, a Welcome page, a background picture and two posts written and published beforehand.

I began an Instagram account two months prior to launching my blog (I heard this tip from more than one influencer in the blogging world). This helped determine if I enjoyed posting pictures every day AND if I liked the public to see what I was posting (prior to this I’ve never had any public accounts).

Things I’ve learned:
I love going to cafés just to get posts written for my blog (and buy a smoothie). I’ve found that I can zone into my work and work quickly (the pressure of getting work done before the café closes helps to work fast, even if I’m there for three hours, I treat it like a countdown). I also love working from home so I can cast YouTube music videos on my TV while writing my blog posts.
The only person who will promote yourself the most is you, so if you publish a post on your blog, promote it to your social channels so they can view it.

Things I’m still working on:
Creating an editorial calendar and sticking to it. I’ve tried to plan with a physical calendar and with an excel spreadsheet. Neither of these have stuck with me, yet. I feel like I need something to see visually every day that is inspiring. I’ve seen the idea of a white out board, does this work for anyone else?

Along with the editorial calendar comes with making sure every post is ready for the week-this is important if you have a very busy personal life or if some weeks are busier than others-planning is key! Use the calendar to plan a month’s worth of blog posts before this I would just determine in my mind what I would write about and then write and schedule it on the weekends.

Managing social channels-For now I have Facebook and Instagram and I’ve heard influencers say to work mainly in the channels you’re interested in. But one of the main reasons I picked WordPress as my blogging platform is to engage with the community, so I also have to be following, commenting and liking posts. I also just joined Style Collective so I have to keep up with those girls too. While this sounds like a lot, I really do love engaging with others in the blogging community. It’s finding the time to properly engage with everyone that I need to balance-I do most of this on my free weekends. Anyone have any free tips on this?
Diving into new social channels can be a little intimidating but I know that I want to try Pintrest because of all the beautiful inspiration!

 

I’d love to read in the comments what you did before you started your blog, what you learned and are still working on.

Motivational Monday: Happiness Vs. Passion

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One New Year’s Eve I made “being happy” my New Year’s Resolution. I failed miserably. I thought if I told myself “I’m going to be happy this year” that I would be. The problem was I didn’t do anything to consistently make myself happy that year because I continued to go about life the way I had always known.

Looking back I realize happiness is an important part of life but you have to do things you enjoy to get yourself there. This is where I’ve realized that you can make yourself happy by doing things you are passionate about; whether it’s working out, cooking, a hobby, and the list goes on and on. I’ve found my passion through blogging because I’ve always loved to write and now that I’m actually blogging I’ve found happiness. The reason I turned to blogging is because I was tired of not doing anything other than my daily routine of get ready, go to work, make dinner, watch TV and go to sleep. I felt I needed something more and especially something creative that I wouldn’t tire of quickly.

Now that I’ve found something I’m passionate about I can turn my regular routine into scheduling what I want to do next for my blog. Sure I may not be able to blog every day as life gets busy, but it’s something I can always be thinking about to come up with new content. I can even turn a bad day into a better one by focusing on writing a post for my blog. This is all a mind-set of turning the negative into a positive and once that sets in it creates happiness. I encourage you to take something small you like doing and turn it into a passion.
What is something that makes you happy or something that you are passionate about? Let me know in the comments!

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