I love summer! I love the heat, being able to sleep in with my boys and the overall carefree vibe that summer brings. Along with all that love, there are several beauty essentials that I find help me stay on my beauty game while beating the heat. Without further ado – here are my picks (and why) because we all need sunscreen, but I wanted to explain my reasons for why I made specific picks. 🙂
Summer is coming which means it is the season for tanks and shorts. The showing of a little extra skin for me means sloughing off the dry, winter skin to reveal refreshed, smooth skin. Enter my favorite way to exfoliate – the Baiden Mitten. This is one magical piece of skincare heaven and I am obsessed.
I have always had a love/hate relationship with granola. You see, I love to eat granola, but I am often put off by the extremely high-fat, high calorie granola that comes with the itty bitty service size. Some different brands of granola I have tried have as much as 10-12 grams of fat per serving. I love chocolate far too much to be wasting those fat calories on granola so I passed on granola for ages, until now.
I feel like the skies cleared once I started making this recipe. It is so flipping good. One of the main things I love about this recipe is how versatile it is. The base includes oats, crisp rice cereal, coconut oil and either maple syrup or maple flavored agave syrup (I am sure that honey would taste delicious here as well.) All the other ingredients can be included, excluded and/or swapped out based on what you have on hand. I included chia seeds and hemp harts in this granola recipe due to their nutritional benefits. However, if you don’t have those ingredients, by all means leave one or both of them out. Same goes for the almonds. You may also notice that I have excluded dry fruit from this recipe. I did this because I actually prefer to enjoy this granola with fresh fruit and I find dried fruit to be extremely calorie dense and overly sweet.
Whew! That is one long title for a recipe! However, I will tell you that all elements are so amazingly delicious and really make the dish go from really good to crazy good so bear with me on this. I have previously blogged about how I love a one pot meal and one of the main reasons I love meals like this is because I can re-heat them and often times these one-pot wonders actually taste better when they are served reheated. This chili recipe definitely falls into that category.
I hate going on vacation only to find that I didn’t pack enough of something or hate what I packed. On a recent trip to Hawaii I found that not only did I not pack enough bathing suit coverups, but the ones that I did pack – I hated. While on vacation I am very zen so I didn’t stress and made what I had work, however now that I am home, I am on a cover-up mission.
I have a couple of tips regarding purchasing cover-ups that I wanted to share with you. First, I do not like spending a lot of money on these pieces. Generally I am swimming, wet and drenched in sunscreen. These items are used, abused, thrown on the ground, the beach – you get the idea. Also, when purchasing cover-ups I look under casual dresses. The second thing I wanted to touch on is to keep an eye open for the fabric. I love terry coverups as they mimic wearing a towel and are very absorbent. I have been hard pressed to find any cute terry coverups recently though so if you find any cute ones, by all means, please share.
