Superest Salad Ever

It's been a while since I've posted, and although I have had inspiration and have even made a thing or two, I'm not quite ready to expose them to the universe yet. However, I made a hell of a great salad today so I thought I'd share that with you.

The other day I placed an order through Greenling.com, a sort of multi-farm coop plus health food grocery website, where you can order food, particularly local and organic produce, to be delivered to your door. While I can see why this would be a terrific service for some, I don't think it's really right for my family. I prefer selecting my own produce, and I would rather support my local area farmers more directly by buying from them at the farmer's market.

That said, I did get a pretty cool assortment of veggies, none of which were quite enough to feed me, my kids, and my parents this weekend, but many of which came together in a pretty beautiful way.

Ingredients:

1 small head of Romaine lettuce
2 cups loosely packed baby spinach
1/2 red bell pepper
1/2 orange bell pepper
5-6 medium sized carrots
2 large radishes
1/4 head cauliflower
1 cup micro greens
1 can garbanzo beans
1 can kernel corn
Parsley to taste
1/4 cup bottled raspberry vinaigrette

Chop the greens, peppers, radishes, cauliflower, and parsley roughly (I diced them so the pieces would be small and easy to eat). Shred the carrots. Mix all ingredients together, including the drained cans of garbanzo beans and corn. Toss with dressing and serve.

This was delicious, filling, and entirely vegan, and very very healthy. Even my kids liked it! Well, my daughter did. My son balked a little, but not too much.

Of course, this is just what I had on hand, so obviously it'll be different every time. It's hardly a recipe at all, but I loved it. All the different textures and fresh flavors came together really made it special, and the garbanzo beans gave it a protein boost that made it filling and a whole meal by itself. It's been a long time since I've been so satisfied by a single salad!

A cabinet for filing things!

So this isn't a wearable, which is kinda sorta against the rules, but I have been wanting to fix up an old filing cabinet for so long that when I finally got a chance this week, I realized I had to share it with the world! (I don't actually think anybody reads this blog but me.)

I found this beauty at a garage sale for the absurdly and hilariously low price of $3:

Here it is in my trunk, all happy because someone bought it (and on the last day of the sale too!) While it was the striking color that first caught my eye, after close inspection I learned that the drawers sat properly in their rails, the handles were solid, there didn't appear to be any rust (I found some on there later, but only a tiny bit), and it had the little metal dividers in both drawers. A great find for only $3!!

I took it home and started to work on getting that awful contact paper off. I used a combination of Vinegar Multisurface Windex, a plastic scraper, and patience to get every scrap of it off:

Worse than the contact paper though was the duct tape. EEEEWWWWW. (I have a weird phobic issue with sticky stuff.) I wasn't able to get all the adhesive off, but you can hardly tell now.

When I finally got all the contact paper off, I realized why they had put it there to begin with. The paint on top was in lousy shape:

And I began to notice other places on the sides and front of the cabinet that had chips and scratches in the paint as well:

I was sad because I'd hoped that I could salvage the paint job. But I couldn't, so I bucked up, put on my big girl panties, and sanded the crap out of every surface to get off the dirt, rust, and to rough up the texture a little so it would take new paint better. Then I ran to Home Depot and came home with this:

Rust-Oleum Painter's Touch in Paprika and Sage Green. They were literally the first two colors I saw that I fell in love with, so I grabbed them for less than $4 apiece (I had no idea spraypaint was so inexpensive!! I am in trouble.) and ran back home with some sort of plan in my head.

After consulting with my 9-year-old, who is the real artist in the family, I decided to paint the main body of the cabinet green and use the paprika as the "accent" on the drawer facings.

First coat:

I touched up the drawer pulls with some black paint I had laying around, reassembled the whole thing (after letting it dry of course) and here is the result:

Yes, I loved the orange, but frankly, these colors work better with my decor, with my life, with my taste, and with my happiness factor. I couldn't be more pleased with how this turned out, and even though it isn't wearable, it is yet another item that goes on my list of things I will be leaving hell with.