I know it is hard but we all need to keep calm and carry on our daily routine. I was texting a friend tonight and said, if this continues, I am going to need some strong meds!!!!!!! I am in shock with what is going on all around us. I think I can help a little. A while ago, I installed the Calm App. It is full of tricks to help you reduce anxiety. But recently, I discovered The Calm book. And, I thought I would give it a try. To get your own copy or for more information….click HERE.
Based on the popular iPhone app, a visually exciting, practical, and playful interactive guide to twenty-first-century meditation that provides simple tools, tricks, and habits to find tranquility and focus, improve creativity and productivity, achieve better mental and physical health, and ultimately transform your life.
Achieving mindfulness doesn’t require a huge lifestyle shift or special training. It’s about mastering simple habits that work with the demands of your busy life. It uses the abilities you’re born with: creativity, spontaneity, and awareness of the world around you. There are no rules to follow or break. Everyone can achieve calm—including you.
In Calm, Michael Acton Smith combines fascinating neurological research, ancient wisdom, and real-life experiences to demystify meditation and show you the many simple ways to be mindful everyday. Crafted to resemble a journal, filled with beautiful and inspiring artwork, and divided into eight life-balancing sections—Nature, Work, Creativity, Children, Travel, Relationships, Food, and Sleep—Calm can help you change your perspective and rediscover the pleasures of the world. Each section blends fascinating research, creative prompts, activities, instructions, and insights that will stimulate your senses and inspire you.
Calm can be used multiple times a day or whenever you need it to find a little peace. Take a walk without a fixed destination, savor a piece of chocolate on the tip of your tongue, plant a seed, doodle aimlessly, turn off your mobile phone for five short minutes. Smile, breathe, and go slowly. Calm your mind—and change your world. – Amazon.com
I think one of the best things we can do to stay healthy, not just during this outbreak, but all year round is to increase the immune-building foods that we eat.
Vitamin Booster Smoothie
Up your vitamin quota with help from this bright and fresh smoothie. Orange, carrot, celery and mango pack a nutritious punch
adapted from goodfood.com
Ingredients
- 1 orange, peeled and roughly chopped
- 1 large carrot, peeled and roughly chopped
- 2 sticks celery, roughly chopped
- 1 mango, roughly chopped
- 1 cup water
Put the orange, carrot, celery and mango in the blender, top up with water, then mix until smooth.
White Bean Dip
A dip filled with beans that are filled with beta-glucan and zinc – all immune-boosting properties.
adapted from Food Network.com
1 (14 ounces) can cannellini beans, rinsed and drained
1 clove garlic
1 1/2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
4 sprigs fresh mint leaves
6 sprigs fresh thyme leaves, stripped from stem
Coarse salt and black pepper
3 tablespoons chives, chopped
Pulse all ingredients except chives in a food processor or until a smooth paste forms and transfer to a bowl. Serve on bruschetta or as a dip for fresh veggies and garnish with chopped chives.
Chicken and White Bean Soup
Rotisserie chickens can really relieve the dinner-rush pressure-especially in this Italian-inspired soup.
adapted from Eatingwell.com
- 2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil
- 2 leeks, white and light green parts only, cut into 1/4-inch rounds
- 1 tablespoon chopped fresh sage, or 1/4 teaspoon dried
- 2 14-ounce cans reduced-sodium chicken broth
- 2 cups water
- 1 15-ounce can cannellini beans, rinsed
- 1 2-pound roasted chicken, skin discarded, meat removed from bones and shredded (4 cups)
Heat oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add leeks and cook, stirring often, until soft, about 3 minutes. Stir in sage and continue cooking until aromatic, about 30 seconds. Stir in broth and water, increase heat to high, cover and bring to a boil. Add beans and chicken and cook, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until heated through, about 3 minutes. Serve hot.
Egyptian Tossed Salad
adapted from EatingWell.com
This superfood salad will boost your immune system. You can eat it in a pita or on top of a chicken cutlet or on its own.
Ingredients
Ingredient Checklist
- 2 tablespoons lime juice
- 2 teaspoons distilled white vinegar
- 2 teaspoons ground cumin
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- 1 ⅓ cups diced cucumber
- 1 ¼ cups diced tomatoes
- 1 cup chopped fresh parsley
- ⅔ cup diced green bell pepper
- ½ cup diced radishes
- ⅓ cup diced yellow onion
Whisk lime juice, vinegar, cumin and salt in a large bowl. Add cucumber, tomatoes, parsley, bell pepper, radishes and onion; toss to combine.
Let’s take a break from the Coronavirus for a minute to talk about the Shop Bop sale..You have 2 days left to grab some of the best clothes of the season at discounted prices. I know it’s so hard to get our minds off of this very unfortunate situation but just take a minute to check out this sale!!! Don’t worry, I’ll be back tomorrow with more Corona coverage!!!!
This top is a little more pricy but it is a great wardrobe staple..
Everyone is always asking me for a great black blazer, here it is!
There is something about the look of this dress that I LOVE!
This is a perfect piece for the spring/summer long dress trend…
I brought this on my girl’s bday weekend and everyone was asking where they could get one!!!
This might be my favorite dress in the sale!!!
I have been looking forever for a leopard blazer!
This top is so pretty..I can see it paired with white or light denim jeans!!
I really like this top too..the color is so great!
I made this recipe for my youngest daughter and a bunch of her friends over the past weekend. Everyone loves Mexican food and I thought this looked so good and was so easy to make. I served it with chips, salsa and guacamole (the whole foods one is really good though I like to add a little more lime juice!!!). They all loved it and went back for more and more..
Ingredients
1 rotisserie chicken
2 packets Frontera Enchilada sauce.
2 bags Mexican Shredded Cheese
Corn Tortillas
Directions:
Shred the chicken and place in a bowl
Line baking dish with tortillas
Add chicken and cheese to the inside of the tortilla and roll.
Repeat. Place all the rolled tortillas side by side in the baking dish.
Pour the Enchilada sauce on top and sprinkle with remaining cheese (be generous!!)
Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes
Serve with a dollop of sour cream or plain Greek Yogurt (optional)
Spring is right around to corner. It seems that we all are losing touch with nature, and too many people fail to make the most of their outside space. Having a garden could potentially be your own slice of paradise if you’re willing to put in a little effort, as it doesn’t take much to clean up your outside space and start attracting some wildlife too. With more and more house complexes popping up every day, there’s not much room left for other animals to create their homes – your garden could offer them the haven they so dearly need! So, if you’re ready to turn your garden into a wildlife hotspot that you can utilize as the summer months start to creep ever closer, then read on to uncover some of the best tips and tricks that you can make the most of today!
Lay The Best Foundations
The very first step that you must take when creating the perfect outdoor space is to lay the best foundations possible. In short, this means clearing out any debris, cutting over grown grass a hedges, and doing some general maintenance work that can help to make an open space for you to build on later. If a garden is left untouched for more than a few months, it’s likely that most plants will become unruly and weeds will start to appear – it’s important that you can get rid of any species that may cause harm to other plant life, such as knotweed or ivy.
Water Features Galore
Once you have cleared a substantial space, you can now begin to start adding special features that can add not only aesthetic value and some kind of attraction for local wildlife too. For example, one of the best things you can install to benefit your gardens ecosystem is a water feature of some kind. A pond can be an amazing choice, as all it takes is a little digging and a few Shinmaywa submersible pumps to create the perfect place for marine life to thrive. Whether you purchase your own fish to be housed inside your new pond or wait for frogs and other critters to come and take a look around, having such a water feature can really help to bring more wildlife to your outdoor space.
Attracting Birds
Many people would agree that there’s no better way to be woken up in the morning than listening to a sweet bird song from outside of your window, but this is a seemingly uncommon occurrence thanks to the simple lack of trees and other larger plant life in which they can make their nests. Attracting feathered friends to your garden is so simple, as you can invest in bird baths, bird houses and feeding stations that will work wonders in bringing them to your garden. You can create many of these things yourself by following DIY tutorials online, and they can make great garden features in terms of aesthetics too.
Turning your garden into a haven for wildlife has never been so simple.
We are one day late because of the Coronavirus and getting the Purell DIY out to you readers…but I did not want to miss telling you about today’s book, The Holdout: A Novel by Graham Moore. It’s an instant New York Times bestseller….
One juror changed the verdict. What if she was wrong? From the Academy Award–winning screenwriter of The Imitation Game and bestselling author of The Last Days of Night. . . .
“Exhilarating . . . a fiendishly slippery game of cat-and-mouse suspense and a provocative, urgent inquiry into American justice (and injustice) in the twenty-first century.”—A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window – Amazon.com
It’s the most sensational case of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Jessica Silver, heiress to a billion-dollar real estate fortune, vanishes on her way home from school, and her teacher, Bobby Nock, a twenty-five-year-old African American man, is the prime suspect. The subsequent trial taps straight into America’s most pressing preoccupations: race, class, sex, law enforcement, and the lurid sins of the rich and famous. It’s an open-and-shut case for the prosecution, and a quick conviction seems all but guaranteed—until Maya Seale, a young woman on the jury, convinced of Nock’s innocence, persuades the rest of the jurors to return the verdict of not guilty, a controversial decision that will change all their lives forever.
Flash forward ten years. A true-crime docuseries reassembles the jury, with particular focus on Maya, now a defense attorney herself. When one of the jurors is found dead in Maya’s hotel room, all evidence points to her as the killer. Now, she must prove her own innocence—by getting to the bottom of a case that is far from closed.
As the present-day murder investigation weaves together with the story of what really happened during their deliberation, told by each of the jurors in turn, the secrets they have all been keeping threaten to come out—with drastic consequences for all involved.
For more information or to purchase this book, click HERE