Healthy Eats - My Favorite Green Bean Side Dish

Hello lovelies! I've got a quick healthy recipe for you guys today that can be made as a side dish or enjoyed as a meal. I was half asleep last night and decided that I wanted to cook (random I know, but when I get sleepy I like to cook lol) but it was really too late to be making myself anything. So I pulled out the slow cooker. And if you don't know, I LOVE my slow cooker!! With the kiddo running around it can be a pain to make a nice healthy meal during the day, so getting to throw everything in the slow cooker before I go to sleep is a serious help to my diet.
I was going to try and put together something really fancy, but after I cut up my onion I was pretty well out of steam. So I threw this recipe together, it took me maybe 5 minutes total, and I put it in the slow cooker over night. This recipe is super easy and SO good for you! So here it is, my slow cooker green beans aka string beans.

Slow Cooker Green Beans
Prep Time: 5 minutes
Cook Time: 8-ish hours
Serves 3 as a side dish

Ingredients
1 medium onion, any variety will work though I used a sweet onion
1/2 a bag of frozen green beans
1 jar of mushrooms (fresh are better, but this was what I had on hand)
Salt and pepper to taste
1 cup of water

1. Cut your onion into fourths and then slice. You can cut up your onion however you like, I just like big pieces of onion because I really love onions. If you're not an onion person, dice the onion so you don't get big bites of it. Then toss the chopped onion in your slow cooker.
2. Toss your frozen green beans into the slow cooker.
3. Drain your mushrooms and then toss them into the slow cooker.
4. Add the water, salt and pepper to the slow cooker and mix it all together.
5. Put the slow cooker on low heat and let it cook for about 8 hours. Make sure to check it every now and again as you may need to add more water to prevent burning. 

This is a really versatile recipe, you can add a lot of things to make it more hearty or complex. My mom makes a similar recipe and she adds bacon (which is totally delish, btw) but bacon is really fatty and I'm avoiding it at the moment. Smoked turkey would probably be a really good substitution for the bacon... I'll have to try that next time..
This recipe is so good for you! The onion is great for your heart, it can help lower cholesterol and it protects your heart and blood vessels. It's also been shown to help prevent the loss of bone density when eaten regularly AND it can help prevent cancer. And green beans are loaded with vitamins and minerals, as well as antioxidants which is great for your overall health. And then there's the mushrooms which are also loaded with antioxidants and vitamins and such, most notably potassium and vitamin D.

 I hope you guys enjoyed another healthy recipe from my kitchen. This is great comfort food without having to worry about a lot of fat or calories. It's really dreary and rainy here and this made for a great lunch. Til next time!

BH Cosmetics San Francisco Palette

Hello lovelies!!

I'm going to be totally real with you right now. I am so friggin tired. Like, holy hell am I tired. But I swore up and down that today I would put up my look at the San Francisco palette from BH Cosmetics, and I'm gonna do it. And I'm going to do it quickly. So here we go!

This palette, as with all the palettes in the California Collection, comes with a gorgeous illustration of part of the city for which it is named. The palettes come with matching sleeves, I forgot to the sleeve back on the one in this picture, but it looks nice. The palette has a magnet in it to hold it closed, and it works quite well. Haven't had one fall open on me yet.

When it's all folded open you can see it has 4 blushers, 16 eyeshadows, and a handy little mirror for touch ups. I like how they have the eyeshadows separated, it seems that the shadows on the left are more evening wear while the shadows on the right are more suited for day wear.

I really like the selection here for blushers. Before I swatched them I didn't think they looked overly impressive, but these colors are rather interesting to wear. The top left is a really pretty highlight with a gold-ish shimmer to it. Next to it is a bronze color that is really quite light. I actually found that it looks really nice on my cheeks as opposed to a contour. The bottom left is a really pretty rose blush with a rather heavy shimmer to it and the bottom right is a matte pink. A very bright, highly pigmented matte pink.

The blushers swaatched really well. They went on really smooth, and they're pigmented very well. I think I'm really going to rock the rose blusher this fall, I'm totally in love with it.

This palette comes with 16 eyeshadows, and they did a great job with color selection. There's a very even distribution of matte and shimmer shadows, and the colors are all very smoky and down to earth.

I love these eyeshadows! The colors are so pretty and they apply really well. Of all the California Collection palettes, the shadows in this palette applied the best. I really like the darker colors, and this is looking like my go to palette for the fall. I love the wine colored shadow, it might be my favorite of these shadows. And the white shadow on the bottom right is really neat, it has like a pink-ish shimmer to it that I think is just totally gorgeous.

I think that about wraps up my look through this palette, I'll be posting some looks using this palette throughout the week. This palette sells for $17.95 and in my opinion, it's worth every penny.

But again, I'm really friggin tired, I'm going to ditch you guys and go get some shut eye now. Til next time!

DIY Nail Polish

Hello again lovelies! I was floating around the internet today and I happened across a couple of DIY nail polish posts, so I thought I would give it a whirl. I was super surprised at just how simple the process was, and it seriously took me less than 10 minutes to make my own color of nail polish. And because it was super fun and super easy, I thought I should share it with you guys.

What You'll Need:

• A half empty bottle of clear nail polish
• Loose eyeshadow of your choosing (you can mix pigments to make your own unique color or if you have regular pressed shadow, you can crumble it up really fine to make it loose. Bottom line, when you mix, it needs to be loose lol)
• A toothpick to stir, or those awesome little ball bearing mixing bead thingies for polish
• A funnel or a small scoop

Alright, let's get started!! I didn't take step by step pics because I'm a bad blogger, but it's really easy and I'm sure you lovelies can figure it out.

1. Get all your stuff laid out and prepped. If you want to mix pigments for a unique color, do it now. If you need to crush up a solid shadow, do it now. If you don't know how to go about crushing up a pressed shadow all you really need to do is scrape out the shadow into a plastic bag and kind of crumple it with your fingers, then go over the bag with a rolling pin until the shadow is nice and smooth. 
2. Open up your clear nail polish and insert funnel into the spout. If you don't have a funnel and are using a small scoop, skip this step!
3. Pour your loose shadows (already mixed if you're going for a custom color!!!) into the funnel and work it into the polish. If you aren't using a funnel and are using a scoop, scoop the eyeshadow in.
4. Stir the eyeshadow into the polish to help blend with a toothpick. I don't have any toothpicks, so I just cut up an emery board to fit. If you have those little mixing ball things, add those in now.
5. Shake the shit out of that polish!!! No joke people, you really gotta get your shake on to avoid clumping and help distribute the pigment into the eyeshadow. It's important, kay?

When going about trying this yourself, there are a few things to keep in mind. Firstly, the quality of the pigments you decide to use as well as the quality of clear polish you use will effect the end result. More finely milled shadows will clump less and distribute the color better. Also, you might want to add the shadow bit by bit to the polish. If you add too much, it will totally clump on you.

So here's my finished polish, and I'm pretty pleased with it. The color is really pretty and it was opaque after 2 coats.

My polish, no flash in natural light

My polish with flash

Sorry about the big ole watermarks over my work, but I recently had a fellow beauty blogger go through some bs because somebody decided to steal her work and enter it into a scholarship contest. So I figure better safe than sorry.
And if you're curious, I used a random clear coat I've had laying around for a couple of years from ONS and I loaded it up with an e.l.f. Studio Pigment Eyeshadow in Tropical Teal. I applied two coats of this over my natural nail and I think it's really pretty. My daughter recently destroyed my go-to teal polish (she dumped it all over the bathroom floor) so it's a welcome addition to my rather small nail polish collection.

But I had a total blast doing this, and I'm thinking that maybe I should throw my hat into the indie polish scene. But it's quite an investment to get up and started there, so we'll see...
If you decide to give this quick and easy DIY polish a try make sure to let me know!! Send me your pictures on Facebook so we can all see what everyone created. Hope you all had a lovely weekend! Til next time!

Sponsored Giveaway for a Spicy Subscription Deluxe Product + Sample Products

Hello lovelies! Today I have for you my very first sponsored giveaway!! Yay!!! This giveaway might be a little racey for some of you guys, and it's only available to my readers that are 18 years old and up. But as I said, this is a sponsored giveaway and I would just like to give a quick shout out to Nicole who contacted me from Spicy Subscriptions. She was super nice and very helpful and extremely patient with me, I had like a million questions for her and she always answered very promptly and was so kind.
This giveaway is only available to those of you who are in the United States and Canada, and there will be one lucky winner. The winner will receive a deluxe toy and sample products, and Spicy Subscriptions prides themselves on discreet packaging so you don't have to worry about anyone knowing what's getting delivered to your door.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

If you'd like to learn more about SpicySubscriptions *Click Here* to view their website. They offer a Premium Spice Box for $24.95 as well as a Deluxe Spice Box for $34.95. And if you use my coupon code "kjkosmetics" you'll get a 5% discount on the price of the subscription. Yay discounts!!

 
I hope you're all excited for this giveaway and good luck to all of you who choose to enter! I think that this is a super fun subscription box and if you sub for it I'm sure you'll love it. Til next time!!