Partyin’ ALDI style! #ALDISummer

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Y’all know I loves me some ALDI! Great prices without having to cut coupons, wheeeee!! So when my pals at ALDI asked me to sample some of their great groceries to throw a party, I was all for it! ALDI sent me $100 in gift certificates and some party ideas and I went with it. Since I eat gluten-free, I decided that a “South of the Border” taco party would be a great fit. Although, because I’m such a considerate person, I did buy some flour tortillas for those who like their tacos soft. I’m a giver!

I set out on a kid-less afternoon with my shopping list and got shopping! It didn’t take long to fill my cart. Some of the things I was on the lookout for: my favorite Little Salad Bar salsa for $1.99, and Little Salad bar guacamole for $2.99. I L-O-V-E both of these items! Sadly, my ALDI only had the *spicy* guac, and I can’t do spicy, so I ran down the road to another ALDI and got my guac! 🙂 It was worth it. Here’s my cart at the end of my main shopping trip:

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An ALDI cart full of awesome! Everything in this cart was $80.76, add $2.99 for the extra guacamole I picked up from another ALDI store.

I got everything I needed for my party including meat, taco shells and tortillas, tortilla chips, vegetables, salsa, guacamole, cheese, sour cream, fresh fruit, drinks, paper plates, cutlery, plastic cups, etc. for less than $85! I was honestly shocked. Even though I am used to ALDI’s great prices, I still expected to use the entire $100 ALDI had provided.

Now that I had my food, I needed a reason to party! I decided to provide food for our house church group to celebrate my BFF Luanne & her hubby’s new house! They moved in on Monday, and we partied the following Sunday with delicious ALDI food!

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The tacos were delicious, especially with the Little Salad Bar salsa and guacamole and the Happy Farms sour cream and Mexican shredded cheese. MMMMM. I was also feeling adventurous and bought the ingredients to create a recipe from the ALDI Test Kitchen: Blue Corn, Great Northern Bean & Salsa Pie! It was awesome!

The pie crust is made out of Clancy’s blue corn tortilla chips and parmesan cheese with a little butter to hold it together.

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Then you add in some heated Dakota’s Pride black beans (which are like, 59 cents and are sooo good!)Untitled

Dakota’s Pride Great Northern Beans, sour cream, salsa, and mozarella cheese make up the next couple layers of the pie. Chill it for a while and then dig in. It’s delicious! And so very gluten-free! 🙂
UntitledYou can find the recipe here at the ALDI website. Note, the recipe is for mini-pies, but it does have instructions for making one big pie, which is what I did.

In addition to all of the fabulous food, I also made a delicious raspberry lemonade with frozen lemonade and Season’s Choice frozen raspberries. It was deeelectable. Seriously all I did was mix the lemonade and dump in the frozen berries (which were only $1.99!) YUM. Another one of my favorite ALDI items I picked up were the cute yet very sturdy paper plates. I thought they went so well with the southwest theme, too!

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We had the best time at our #ALDISummer South of the Border party! It was great to christen my BFF’s new home with good friends and great food. If you have any get-togethers coming up, head to ALDI for a great deal on everything you need for your event.

Thanks ALDI, for making our party great!

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Humility

So, I’ve been having a *few* problems with my hormones lately.

In the interest of not horrifying my male reader I won’t go into the unpleasant details.

But here’s a clue about one of my symptoms: This morning, as I was enjoying my morning cup of coffee, and the sun streaming through the blinds, and Jonah’s cute singing in his high chair, my sweet, darling, observant eldest son says to me:

Mom, why do you have red spots all over your face?

I wish it were because of some terrible infectious disease.

No such luck.

 

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How to Apply and Use Lip Liner #doyourmakeup

How to use lip liner

A couple of weeks ago I did a guest post for my pal Jamie over at Blonde Mom Blog (she’s Nashville’s finest, y’all!) Check her out!) on how to use lip liner. And the whole time I was writing it I was like, I really need to share this with MY readers too!

Now, the Google gods don’t like it when you duplicate a post, so I am going to give you the same information in a different way. And without all the background info I gave Jamie’s readers about how awesome I am, since you already know that.

I think lip liner is the one cosmetics essential that is most overlooked by the ladies! I always, always, always wear it under my lipstick, but there is a right and a wrong way to do so. The right way to wear lip liner is to fill your lips in completely with the liner and then put the lipstick on top of it. If you do this, it will make your lipstick last all day (if it’s a half-decent lipstick, and I’ve tested quite a few so next post is going to be a brand comparison, I think!) Behold this explanatory visual:

Lip Liner Yes No

Trust me ladies, lip liner is your friend! Not only does it help your lipstick stay on all day, but it can also change the color of your lipstick. You can get different looks out of one lipstick tube by using a different liner underneath. See?

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Here I’ve chosen one of my very favorite go-to lipsticks, Copper Star  by Mary Kay (who, sadly, does not seem interested in paying me to say so) and two liners – netural on the left and cappucino on the right.

Before I go on, let me just say that it is not necessary to be shamefully well liner-endowed like myself. One or two colors is really plenty. If you’re going to do just one, get a neutral! You’ll be sooo happy you did. I have yet to buy any drugstore lip liners to try, but Revlon’s “nude” and “natural” are on my list of good potential neutrals.

Below you can see how using the same lipstick color atop a different liner color really changes the look.

liner lipstick collage textSpecial thanks to my clone for helping me with this photoshoot

So now you know how to use it and some fun benefits of using lip liner,  but I have one last rule of lip liner to share with you. That rule is this: Don’t buy the pencil kind! Get a retractable lip liner that you don’t have to sharpen. The wood shavings, finding a sharpener, and accidentally stabbing yourself in the mouth with a splintery liner make pencil liners more trouble than they’re worth. Please trust me.

Well, that’s my sermonette on lip liner. Are you a lip liner girl? If so, what’s your favorite kind! If not, go out and treat yourself to a neutral today!

To see what makeup I’m wearing every day (and how I’m wearing it), don’t forget to follow my #doyourmakeup hashtag on Twitter and Instagram!

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