A package, salsa, and a fabulous new book to read!

Happy Monday evening to you!

I had a good day, except for battling back to school traffic on my way into work this morning. I pass by a high school on my way and I noticed so many cars on the road in that area.

I started off my morning with some of the Seattle’s Best level 5 coffee, which reminded me of Starbucks. Some people don’t like that taste, but I prefer a dark, bold blend of beans.

I also had plain non-fat Chobani with fresh strawberries, hemp seeds, and the last of the Trader Joe’s Vanilla Almond granola.

Lunch was a ham sandwich topped with spinach and a roma tomato from our garden. I also had a string cheese, a red pepper from our garden, and some cucumber slices. I enjoyed the pomegranate Chobani as a 4 p.m. snack right before I left work.

My drink was a Cascal soda. I have to be honest–I didn’t love the crisp white flavor. I am hoping I enjoy the other ones more.

When I got home from work, I received our Kodak Gallery medium hardcover photo book in the mail!

Craig and I were both really impressed with the quality of it. I am so happy I was able to receive it as part of the Foodbuzz Tastemaker program with Kodak. We’ll have these memories of our honeymoon to share with others and remind us of the unbelievable trip we experienced in Europe.

The back is a picture of us pouting on our last day of our trip, in Frankfurt.

We made salsa for dinner. We have so many different types of tomatoes and hot peppers to use up.

Our favorite tortilla chips are these from Sam’s Club.

It was beautiful out, so we dined outside next to our container garden.

I went to the gym and started reading Farm City while biking. I love the book so far! It is definitely well written.

The Urban Ecology Center in Milwaukee is hosting a book club discussion on the book, so I want to read it and attend the event.

The author lives in Oakland, CA and talks about her experience farming in the backyard of her apartment. I lived right on the border of Oakland and Berkeley and the neighborhood she lives in sounds pretty close to the one I lived in in Berkeley.

Some of the quotes I can relate to so far are:

“This place, this ghetto of Oakland, California, brings out the best and the worst in us.”

(Well for me, it brought out the worst in me to be completely honest. I did feel challenged and like I was always learning something while living in the area. But, most of the time, I felt pretty depressed living in that area).

She talks about living in the Oakland hills with a pack of straight-edge vegan anarchists and says the following: “At first I thought it was cute that anarchists had rules. No alcohol. No dairy products. No meat. Then the paradox started to chafe.”

(Kind of reminded me of the apartment I lived in in Berkeley with 5 or 6 housemates at a time. This Midwestern girl did not like it when my one housemate and classmate told me that drinking cow’s milk was evil and I should start drinking soy. I did try soy out, but it seemed to upset my stomach and now I much prefer almond milk to soy.)

I can’t wait to read more of this book and go to the discussion in September.

Time to sign off of this addictive new computer and go read!

Kodak gallery photo book experience

Through the Foodbuzz Tastemaker program, I was able to start creating a medium hardcover photo book on the Kodak site. This opportunity really excited me because while I love taking pictures and with our digital cameras, I find that I don’t take advantage of printing them enough.

I could choose to put any pictures I wanted in the book, so I decided to create one about our honeymoon in Europe. We hadn’t created a photo book with some stories about our trip, so this gave us a nice opportunity to finally make one.

Us in Berlin

Me in Amsterdam

On the rooftop of our hotel in Prague

I looked at a few example photo books and then got creative.

My husband and I are celebrating our second wedding anniversary on August 22nd, so it seemed appropriate that I would finally make a photo book of our fantastic honeymoon trip!

Thanks to the Foodbuzz Tastemaker program with Kodak Gallery for allowing me to do so at last! This photo book will allow us to look back on our trip memories and reminisce. I picture us being 80 years old and going through this book, discussing our honeymoon memories.

I dedicated the first page of the book to our wedding day and transitioned to the honeymoon trip.

I am creating the book in chronological order of our trip and started with pictures of us in Bacharach, Germany.

-Check out some of the layout options on the left.

-To get the photos “into” the book layout, you just drag the thumbnail of a photo you uploaded into the “drag photo here” spot on the page.

-After you have used a photograph in your book, the upload section above the layout of the book shows a green check mark, which is a really nice feature.

Here is the start of the Bacharach layout:

And what it looks like now after I experimented a bit more:

I loved that I could include 9 images on the page on the right and then some larger ones that we love on the left. The text boxes and layout options are so nice! There are many layouts to choose from. Once you are on a page you want to layout, you just click on the page layout and it shows blank photo spots and text options. You don’t have to have text at all, but I chose to incorporate it into almost every page in the book.

The picture of the Riesling wine and glass below has a funny memory associated with it. The German woman who owned the restaurant was our waitress during our lunch and she brought out my Riesling, set it down on the table, and talked about how beautiful the light was hitting the wine and table. I had to take a picture! Craig made fun of what she said, but I think she would have been a food blogger if she had been younger because she noticed the beauty of the wine.

I found it easy to upload the pictures, but it’s just so hard to choose which ones communicate all of the things we loved most about certain cities!

Here is the layout of Koln, which we went to after a stop in St. Goar and an afternoon at Burg Eltz.

At times, I did wish I was able to add more text below the photos. There were options for adding paragraphs on the left side of larger photos. This would be nice to do if I wanted to add more pages to the book and not squeeze in so many images into the 20 pages I was allowed to work with.

There were many nice fonts to choose from, but I stuck with using Nobel Bold throughout the book.

The back cover will show a small photo of us in Frankfurt, the final city on our trip, making sad faces because we (well I) didn’t want to leave Europe.

I have about half of the book complete and can go back and keep adding pictures and text to it until it is complete and ready to be sent to me.

If you were inspired to create your own photo book through Kodak, they are offering an exclusive 40% off offer for readers. You can redeem the offer at www.kodakgallery.com/creativity anytime before 8/31.

Thank you Foodbuzz Tastemaker program and Kodak!

*In exchange for this post, I will receive a free photobook with Kodak gallery through the Foodbuzz Tastemaker Program.