Easy pasta salad

For lunch today I decided to be healthy and make a pasta salad. This was super easy and I just used whatever we had in the fridge. I tried to make the dressing a little bit healthy by mixing a couple of tablespoons of mayo with some Greek yoghurt and it actually tasted really delicious. 

First I boiled the water and made pasta as normal.

We had some frozen green beans so i thawed them and then fried them with some button mushrooms.

To the pasta I added about half a can of corn, leftover takeaway duck, and some tuna.

For dressing I used 2 tablespoon of mayo mixed with half a cup of yoghurt and some garlic pepper.

And voila! Easy and healthy pasta salad.

Dessert at Frasers

Last night the family and I went out for dessert at Frasers cafe and Espresso bar on Mt Eden road to celebrate getting an A in my first semester at uni. The place was so crowded for a Tuesday night, every table was full and people were turned away. And there was a good reason it was packed. The food was amazing and reasonably priced as well which is a bonus. 

I ordered the warmed chocolate came with vanilla ice cream and warmed chocolate sauce. It was so delicious on a cold winter night. It was $13. 

My mum ordered the lemon tart for only $7 and they gave us a huge slice! It had the perfect sweetness balanced with he sourness of the lemon. Totally worth it.

Top 5 Apps

I love apps. I used to dislike them because I found them annoying and I didn't get the hype but now I love apps! Here are my top 5 apps and since I'm cheap they are all free. I'm also excluding social media cos otherwise my top 5 would be twitter, Facebook and YouTube. 

Comment below if you would like me to do a what's on my phone tag and your favourite apps. I would love to find more great apps.

1. Battery doctor

This app has been a life saver for me since we all know how short the battery life of an iPhone is. I found this app randomly one day in the App Store and i never looked back. This app has helped extend my battery life by hours and got me in much better charging habits. You basically open this app when you are charging and the app makes sure it charges fully. Since using this app I can nearly go a day and a half without charging!  It also clears junk in your phone, boosts memory and tells you which apps uses the most battery and how to optmise your battery life when you are running out.I highly recommend this if you are having battery problems.

2. Charades!

This app is basically the free version of Heads Up app by Ellen. I'm always on the lookout for fun games which are free and this one is great. It is basically charades and you can play it in groups where one person holds it on their forehead while the other describes it to them. 

The cool thing about this app is that you can actually create your own categories and personalise it. It also has so many built in categories like animal kingdom, songs of the 80s,90s,00s and brands and more. I played this app with my friends on a bus trip to Rotorua and it was so much fun. 

3. PicsArt

This is my favourite photo editing app to use. It has everything I would ever need to edit a photo in one app. It has all the tools such as brightness, crop, rotate etc but it can also place overlays on your photos, shape masks which is what I use to create my banner, stickers, borders, frames and more. The effects aren't that good but certainly useable and it even comes with a fade setting so you can adjust how much the effect appears on the photo. 

4. GuitarTuna

This is the perfect app for anyone who plays guitar. It has a built in guitar tuner so all you have to do is place your phone besides the guitar and pluck each string. The app will tell you if it is too high or low and then you tune accordingly. The screen goes green when the string is in tune. This app is perfect for beginners especially because when I first started learning guitar I could not tune at all. I have no musical ear even though I played piano for ten years so this app really helped me out. It also has games that help you learn chords and notes so it is just a great guitar app.

5. Sleep time

I have a love hate relationship with this app. It is basically an app that measures your sleep. You place it beside your pillow at night and it records how well you slept- how many hours of deep sleep you got and how many hours of light sleep and then in the morning it presents a nice graph of your sleeping patterns. 

Another cool aspect of this app is that it is also an alarm. At night you set what time you want to wake up by and the app will wake you up in your lightest sleep so you wake up happy instead of grouchy! 

The only downside to this app is that you have to set our alarm every night in order to get a graph and some mornings i don't have to be up at a certain time so I don't want to set an alarm but other than that it is a really great app!

DIY lyric art- Airplanes

 Airplanes by Bob and Hayley Williams is such an oldie but a goodie. The lyrics of this song is beautiful and meaningful so I decided to recreate my favourite lyrics from the song. "Can we pretend airplanes in the night sky are like shooting star?" These lyrics give me so much hope and brings me back to my childhood. I'm really proud of this piece that I did, it is super bright and colour and I am really happy with it.

Comment below other lyric art you would like me to do and I'll do my best.

St Lukes Shopping Haul

Spent the day shopping at St Lukes Westfield in Auckland today and picked up a couple of items.

Got this Jordana blush in 42 rich sorbet and it is the most gorgeous pink colour I have ever seen!

Jordana undercover cream concealer in 02 light medium.

Elf healthy glow bronzer in the shade sun kissed. I am so happy that elf is in Kmart now. Makes my life so much easier to get my elf!

I love this cute daisy patterned circle skirt from cotton on and it was in the sale section for only 10 bucks! What a bargain!

I also picked up this top from Valley Girl and it was 20 dollars. The cute cat with the moustache twisted my arm and the fact the print is in black and white, it looks so cool. I love!

DIY berry smoothie

Today we finally got some sun here in Auckland after lots and lots of rain so I decided to treat myself with a bright berry smoothie for breakfast. This is super delicious and really quick.

Ingridents:

A large Handful of berries ( I used a mix of strawberry and raspberry)

Half a cup of orange juice

One pot of yoghurt

One banana

One small apple

One teaspoon of cinnamon 

Half a cup of coconut water

Mix and blend thoroughly.

I really love this recipe because it is sweet but healthy. The banana helps me to stay full for a long time. Plus I love the bright pink colour!

Chinese Steam Boat Feast

"Laughter is the brightest where food is the best"

Had a great feast with our neighbors before they move out. I am going to miss them so much even though we've only been neighbours for a couple of years. To say goodbye we invited them over and had traditional Chinese Steam Boat. Steam Boat is basically a mini stove in the middle of the table (in this case we had two- one for the adults and one for the kids). On top of the stove is a big pot full of boiling water and it's basically an all you can eat buffet. Whatever you wanna eat you can put into the pot and it only takes a minute to cook, and then you can dip it into difference sauces. It is actually quite a healthy way to eat because there is no oils or fats, just cooking with boiling water. We had prawns, mussels, fish balls, tofu balls, spinach, squid (as you can tell, lots of seafood), vermicelli noodles, cooked duck and chicken, bean sprouts, crab sticks and lots of other goodies. It was a great night to say goodbye to our neighbors!