The Hicks | Hicks House

I apologize in advance if you’re sick of the painting posts. Since the beginning of the year it’s been our main house priority. Especially being in New England and the wicked weather we’ve had this year we are pretty much stuck indoors.

As I mentioned in this post the color we chose for our guest room was Stonington Gray. It’s one swatch down on the same color strip as the Coventry Gray we used in the dining room.

If you are looking for a little refresher on where we last were with the guest room we were here:

shot of them both

I had also created the custom pillows to put on the bed with the intention of eventually altering some curtains to match.

Here is the inspiration room we are kind of “modeling” the style of the room after.

getting closer to the inspiration room…

So far I think we’ve got the bedding nailed. 😉 I actually like my pillows better – I’m not a huge fan of pink. We followed the same painting technique we’ve done in the other rooms we’ve painted so far which is I cut in the ceiling with Ken following behind taping off the baseboards and side of the doors and windows. The taping generally takes less time than the cutting in so Ken then moves on to rolling the walls while I follow behind getting all the top of the baseboards and next to all the window and door frames.

In the end we’re left with this:

What do you think? I love that the gray in the walls makes the white nightstands, dresser and trim POP. It’s still a little too much white though so here’s what’s still left to do.

~~Get pretty bedding~~
~~Create custom pillow covers~~
~~Get and assemble nightstands~~
~~Spray paint the old hand-me down dresser white~~
~~Paint the walls~~
Make a custom painting for the wall
Hang the awesome mirror I found at Khols above the dresser (you’ll have to wait to see it – but it’s perfect for this room
Hang curtain rods
Create custom removable “bottoms” to much too short white Target curtains we already own
Make second set of pillow covers and curtain bottoms – so we can switch it up whenever we want

So that’s the current progress. What do you think?

If you like comfort food then this recipe is for you. It’s a favorite winter weekend dish in our house. A kicked up version of traditional meatloaf we use turkey instead of the more traditional ground beef to cut back on fat and because after years of substituting turkey for ground beef we now prefer the taste. To help make it somewhat ~~less bad~~ more nutritious we also add in spinach.

For such a flavorful dinner the prep is extremely easy even wannabe cooks with no kitchen skills (like myself) can do it without supervision. 😉

Ingredients:

1.5 lbs of ground Turkey
3 cups of shredded low moisture part-skim mozzarella cheese
6 oz Stuffing mix or bread crumbs (I prefer the chunkier texture of stuffing mix)
2 cups of chopped fresh baby spinach tails removed
4 cloves of garlic minced
1/4 cup of onion diced
1 egg lightly beaten
1 cup of your favorite sauce
1/4 cup of parmesan cheese
Italian seasoning
Ground Black Pepper

Assemble all of your ingredients together

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Dice up your onions and mince or dice your garlic and add it to a large bowl

Add in your egg

Then your chopped spinach

Measure out your stuffing mix and break up any extra large clumps if you find it necessary then add that to the mix too.

Then add 3/4 cup of the sauce reserving the other 1/4 cup, 2.5 cups of the mozzarella and the parmesan cheese.

Lastly add the ground Turkey and seasonings to your liking (don’t taste there is raw egg and meat in here – gross). All of the directions up until this point could have simply been “Combine all ingredients with exception of 1/4 cup of the sauce and 1/2 cup of mozzarella. However, if your like me and I wrote it like that you would dump in everything or forget something.

Then mix it all together with your hands. Go ahead get in there and make sure its all good and mixed. (I hate this part – I usually ask Ken to do it for me, if your less of a chicken you can handle it yourself)

Put the mixture into a sprayed loaf pan, pack down and form into a loaf-like shape.

Put in your pre-heated oven uncovered and bake for 50 minutes. Remove from the oven and top with the sauce and cheese you saved.

Return to the oven for an additional 10 minutes to allow the cheese to melt and ensure the loaf is cooked through.

Remove from oven and let cool a few minutes. If you cut right into it when it’s super piping hot it will most likely fall apart. (I do this all the time, I can’t wait. It still tastes the same just doesn’t look “pretty”)