Pins Awkwardly in Real Life: DIY "I Love You Because" Board

As many of my regular readers know, my sister got married about a week ago.
When it came to giving a gift I found myself at a cross roads. I wanted to get her and her husband something special, that wold stand out in a long list of plates and silverware.
Something that was a little different. And something that had to do with love.

So, to Pinterest I turned.

Now, I'm not much of a crafter, but I found two relatively simple ideas that I really liked, and handmade which feels a little more thoughtful.
They also were pretty romantic, which I thought was appropriate for newlyweds right?

This calls for  a Pins Awkwardly in Real Life Post! Find my first post here.

It is true that I made two gifts. I'm going to do two separate posts so it doesn't get too long.
Today I'm going to share with you the "I Love You Because..." Board.

Now I am going to put this out there right now.
This project was in no way my idea. And I am in no way trying to take credit for it AT ALL.
The tutorial that I followed most closely is from the blog  "A Content Housewife".
(Which is a blog that I now follow because it is adorable.)
Here is the link to the Pin, and here is a link to her tutorial specifically. 
Newsflash: Hers is way cuter. She also decorated the frame. I was not that motivated.
There are also other pins that show examples and link to tutorials. Here, Here, Here, Here.
I could go on. Either way, just wanted to make sure you all knew this was not my idea and I am in NO WAY claiming it is. I just shamelessly copied it, used my own style, and made it awkward.

"I Love You Because..." Message Board: Awkwardly In Real Life

My journey started off at my local big box store in the craft aisle.
I found a set of scrapbooking paper that had a few different options. The colors were cool and there were plenty of pieces with patterns that weren't super busy.

And then because the printer we have isn't so great I decided to do the lettering with stickers. I chose two sets of stickers so the word love could be in bold.

After finding a two black 8X10 frames it was time to go home and get my craft on.

Yes I got two. Why? Well I wasn't going to just make one for my newlywed sister!
I knew I'd want one too so instead of putting it of to "sometime later" I decided to do both at the same time!

First I picked out the papers that I wanted for my sister, and one for myself.
Then, because I can't cut in a straight line, I took out stock photo from the frame, used a paperclip, and used that to guide my cutting.

Because I'm the type of person that will write diagonally if I don't have lined paper, I decided to paperclip scraps to make sure my letters went on straight.

For both of the boards I decided to go with lowercase letters for everything except the word love. That was in the bolder font and in all caps. I noticed that with most of the boards that I looked at as examples they did something different with the word love to make it pop.

Now one problem that I found at the end was that they did not provide me with any periods.
Not providing enough punctuation? Who did these stickers think they were?
I couldn't go without the ellipses!
For my sister's I used the dots of the leftover lowercase i's and j's/
When I got to mine I had run out.
 So I took matters into my own hands and very carefully, cut parts of the numbers off until they slightly resembled periods.

After staring at them for a little while in awe that I had created something so adorable I slipped them into the black frames and voila! They were done!
Here was my sister's

And the one that I made for myself.

Per advice from the tutorial that I followed, I also gave my sister a vis-a-vis marker as that supposedly erases easier than a white board marker.

Here are both of them side by side.

I made sure to get frames that could also be hung up on the wall, in case we ever run out of shelf space or have a bare wall that needs something in a future home.

But for now I've put mine right next to the TV in plain view for everyone to see why we love each other. As you can see it's already being put into good use!

The project was pretty easy and not a lot of clean up. It's a sweet touch to the house, and we've already exchanged a few notes to each other that have induced "awwwwww"s all around.

What do you think?

Pins Awkwardly In Real Life: #1. Butternut Squash Lasagna

I think my original motivation to join pinterest  was because it seemed like a secret club. This super secret internet club that only girls who could cook and craft had been invited to.
It was all super creative people everywhere could rave about.
"OMG DO YOU HAVE PINTEREST I SAW THIS AWESOME IDEA ON PINTEREST YOU JUST NEED TO GET AN INVITE TO PINTEREST IT'S JUST SO WONDERFUL SO MANY IDEAS I DON'T KNOW HOW I DID ANYTHING BEFORE PINTEREST."

Okay, maybe this is an exaggeration.

Either way, I  somehow finagled an invitation from my bloggie friend Jess at You Are My Color. 
I logged on the first time, and from there on I was addicted. I kept logging on at an exponential rate, finding people to follow. Finding fancy foods to make. Finding clothes I could never afford. Finding complicated crafts to make my life a better place. Finding funny ecards that must have been made specifically for me.
I pinned, pinned,  and pinned some more. And after I'd had it for a while I sat and looked at it and went, Hmmm. So what do I do now?

And then it hit me, I kept pinning this stuff because I was sick of eating the same things every night. I was tired of looking at the same stuff around my apartment.

Thus begins my series of posts that I am going to call "Pins In Real Life".
I have tried some of my pins in real life, and here I am going to show you how they worked out.

There are plenty of bloggers out there that put their pins into practice all the time.
There is one woman whose blog is called "Pintester". Her entire blog is dedicated to trying out pins. Most of the time to some pretty humorous results. Definitely check her out.

So I mean this series  I am starting is obviously nothing new. But I figured there are so many pins out there,  I might as well pitch in for the greater good and try some pins out.

I have probably 7-8 pins that I've actually tried. Some are more complicated than others. Most of them are food. Most of them I have documented.

Today I will start off with one of the first pins that I tried, and probably one of the more complicated.
I present to you:

 Butternut Squash Lasagna: Awkwardly In Real Life

So I decided to make this at a time that I wanted to make something for dinner that I could just heat up for lunch at school the next day. I felt as though just regular lasagna was tiresome. I was too good for that now that I had found Pinterest. So I picked out the sophisticated butternut squash lasagna recipe and went out for supplies.

What it is supposed to look like when done.

Here is the original pin.

The pin linked back to the website Design Sponge. A  refined blog that focuses on design, meals, drinks, and parties among other things. The specific post was written by Kristina Gill and the featured lasagna recipe was developed by a man named Brian Malarky. He is apparently a big deal.

Check out the original post with all of the professional photos that make the lasagna look like a piece of art here.

I should've known when I saw the blogger's write-up about her passion for butternut squash, and then the biography of the executive chef to whom we credit the recipe that this was not your ordinary lasagna for ordinary people. It is an extraordinary lasagna made by extraordinary people who have a clue as to what they're doing with food.
Which is not me.

The instructions are also quite detailed. Red flag? Oh no not for me. I am the pinterest queen. If I can pin then I must be able to do.

Ingredients

1 or 2  Large Butternut squash – Peeled, cored and sliced thin 1/4  inch
10 to 14  Pasta Sheets – Cooked
1 handful  Spinach
6 cloves  Garlic
1 bunch  Italian Parsley
1 stick Butter (114g)
¼ Cup  Flour
3 ½ Cups Whole Milk
3 Cups  Shredded Mozzarella
½ Cup  Parmesan
10 each  Sage Leaves – Sliced Thin
1 each Lemon – Zest
Salt and Pepper and Olive Oil

Make the Lasagna

Pre-heat oven to 375F

You will need a 13x9x2 baking dish (a regular glass one or any type of casserole will do)

Drizzle the sheet tray with olive oil and place the slices of butternut squash on it, season with salt and pepper, repeat another layer until all the butternut is layered.  Cover with foil and bake for about 8 to 10 minutes until the squash is cooked yet still firm enough to break apart.

While that is working start on your roux:  ½ stick of butter in the pot and melt until almost browned, whisk in the flour and continue to cook for about 30 seconds, slowly whisk in the milk and bring to a boil, Add the garlic and continue to cook at a medium heat until mixture thickens.   Transfer the mixture to the blender and blend in the Spinach/parsley.  Season with salt and Pepper.

Rub the Baking dish with a little butter and begin the layers:  Cream Sauce, pasta, Mozza, Parma, butternut – Repeat.  Make sure the top layer has cheese on top.  Cover with Foil and Bake for 40 minutes, remove foil and bake for another 15 or until the top is crispy golden brown.  Let rest for 10 minutes before serving

Like most of my cooking adventures, Dave was helping out in the kitchen. Just making sure I didn't burn the house down. 

-We started off by preheating the oven and chopping up the butternut squash. It was difficult. It was much harder than we had expected it to be. 
- We layered and drizzled the butternut squash and put it in the oven for 10 minutes.

 We took it out and it didn't seem like it was all the way cooked.  But hey, what did we know about buttersquash? It had already been in the oven for the maximum of 10 minutes and we didn't want to over cook it. I think if it had been sliced a little thinner then our buttersquash might have been a little more like the recipe. But this ended up being the least of our worries.

While the buttersquash was in the oven we melted the butter in the pot.

 This is the place where I pause and tell you that everything was about to go wrong. In this section of the recipe the cook makes a roux. For those of you who aren't french or an iron chef, a roux is a white sauce. Sauce is sauce, which should be easy right?

WRONG.

If you read above you'll notice that there is no directions as to what heat your pan should be on to make the roux. I guessed, and just set it at mid-heat between 5-6. Mid-heat feels safe when I'm making grilled cheeses, soups, and cooking chicken.

But if you learn anything from this tutorial, mid-heat is not good for making a roux. You should only use low-heat. But like I said, we did not use low-heat.

So we whipped in the flour vigorously. We whipped it even more vigorously when we realized it was sticking to the bottom of the pan. Then we added in the milk. We whipped and stirred and whipped.

We added in the garlic. Not cloves of garlic like the recipe asked for, just some chopped up garlic in a jar. It was already in the fridge so why not? Saaaaame thing.

Meanwhile the spinach and parsley waited patiently in the blender for the roux. We used dried parsley.

But the roux started to smell. Burnt. Very burnt. We continued to stir and stir hoping it would make it better, but we couldn't take it off the heat until the "mixture had thickened".

We took it off the heat and it didn't smell promising. We contemplated what to do next since we'd used all of our milk. The only choice at this point since our lasagna noodles were already boiling was to go on. Linus sat on a stool watching, and I'm sure secretly judging like cats tend to do.

After poring the mixture into the blender we discovered the status on the bottom on the pot.

It was bad. Really bad. ( PS The residue actually didn't come off no matter how much we scrubbed and soaked. But we saved the pot. How? Boiling vinegar! This idea, was of course found on pinterest. And it's totally fine now!)

I sampled the roux, and it tasted like carbon.Ick. But I was optimistic and let the process go on. Somewhere through the rest of the baking process the other flavors would overcome right?

So we blended.
It was finally time to start making the lasagna.
Now please take a look at the photo below featuring what the final product should look like from the original recipe. Take extra notice of the roux in between the layers.

The roux is mostly white, with specs of green spinach and parsley throughout.

Now here is our roux after blending.

Yup, that's green. Toooootally green. I think that after the roux was burnt, the consistency was changed and it reacted with the spinach and parsley different than it was supposed to.

And again, hungry and desperate for dinner we continued to make the lasagna. No turning back now!
The squash was layered with the mozzarella, noodles and roux. We didn't have enough mozzarella or Parmesan so we added in the sandwich provolone that we had in the fridge.

 I don't know if there's an appropriate caption for what is happening in this photo.

But once we had everything on it we almost forgot that it was probably going to taste like eating old ashes from a fire. Almost. There was that lingering burnt smell that made it hard to forget.

We put it in the oven for the appropriate amount of time (or until the cheese on top was melted. I forget) and then had this semi-appetizing looking gem.

We let it cool, cut it up and bravely took our first bites.

Oh man.

Verdict? Well I coughed for a few seconds after swallowing and Dave just spit it out.
We both took a few more bites because we were that hungry. And then we gave up and made sandwiches instead. There was no amount of lemon juice that was going to cover that mess up.

Whoooommppp whooooommmmppp.

We actually want to try this recipe again.  Underneath the taste of ashes and charcoal I could tell it could've been good. Here are my tips for you if you want to eat classy lasagna and not have it taste like death in your mouth.

1. DON'T RUIN THE ROUX. Be patient and cook it on low heat. It doesn't say that on the recipe but after further research, that's one of those basic things that I was supposed to know already since I'm adult. 

2. Slice up the buttersquash pretty thin, or else it's not going to cook the way you want it, and it will be took thick to eat. And buy two buttersquash. One wasn't quite enough to cover all of the layers.

3. Always have extra ingredients. If we had just two cups of milk we could've made the recipe over again and not put my gag reflex into practice.

So there it is, Butternut Squash Awkwardly In Real Life.

To all of my fellow pinners out there, be brave and get going on those pins in real life.
I'm excited to some more pinning and doing adventures with you in the future. I promise not all of them were as awkward of a fail as this one.
Until then, make sure you follow me on pinterest.

Also, if you've tried a pin in real life or have a pin that you'd like to try then leave a link to the pin in my comments.
Have you even written a post about it? Even better, leave a link to that post in the comments. I'd love to see what other bloggers and pinners are doing out there in real life instead of just on the computer.
Until then, stay fab!