Gnarly Gnails

Foodie Fridays - Shepherds Pie with a KICK, featuring the Feast Vox Box from Influenster

Friday, November 17, 2017
By Missy
1 Comments

Disclosure - Sample Sent for Review

Yum yum yum, guys!
Today I'm bringing you another installment of Foodie Fridays.
There is NOTHING I love more than good ole comfort food when the weather starts to get chilly. Chili, Mac and Cheese, Soup, those are the kinds of things I love making in the fall and winter.
So when Influenster sent me a box full of goodies, I was super excited to see what I could come up with!

What I did was create a Spicy Shepherds Pie! Further down you can see what I used but first let's see what Influenster sent me.

The Vox Box I received was the "Feast" Vox Box

It was chock full of goodies like Tim Tams (which my boyfriend quickly snatched out of my hands!), Del Monte Whole Kernel Corn, French's Crispy Jalapenos, a couple of tea samples from Bigelow and some coupons and recipe cards.

Oh Tim Tams, never tried you and now I can't live my life without you. Are these only available in Australia? Seems they have a US Instagram but I haven't looked into where to buy these and I need to know!

I scoffed a bit when I pulled these out of the box, I cannot do spicy at all anymore these days with chronic heartburn and acid reflux. However, I did find a really cool use for them, and I'll tell you about it shortly. Anyway, these are like french fried onions, only they're jalapenos.

Tea! Yay! I'm excited for both of these, even though I don't much care for the flavor of peaches, I think even the peach tea will probably be good! I'll most likely do a mini review of these on Instagram soon.

I love corn, this is my favorite kind, so I knew this would be put to good use, and it was.

A couple of recipes I may try out.

Free butter! I'll post on IG when I try these.

Now on to our recipe!

Read on for my take on Spicy Shepherds Pie.

As always, my measurements are to my liking and not exact. When it comes to the way I cook, I just go with what I know and my terrible set of eyeballs to measure!

Ingredients Needed:

Onion

Garlic (minced)

Crispy Jalapenos

Salt/Pepper

Ground Beef

Corn

Potatoes

Milk

Butter

Paprika

Cheese

Gravy (optional, I made my own for this)

Start off by chopping up half an onion and toss into a skillet with some melted butter and a tiny bit of oil

I added the minced garlic and then I crushed up the crispy jalapenos into a fine powder and sauteed them all together.

As the onion/garlic/jalapeno mixture is sauteing, peel and cut your potatoes and get them in some boiling water.

Once the onions have gotten soft, add ground beef and cook through.

As the beef and onions are finishing up, pull out your cooked potatoes and toss them in a bowl. Mash them and combine with butter and milk until its mashed potato consistency, add some garlic, salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.

Spray a casserole dish with cooking spray and then drain your beef and coat the dish with your meat mixture.

Next, open your can of corn (drain) and layer on top of the beef.

Then add your mashed potatoes over the layer of corn and sprinkle with paprika. Then top with cheese.

Since everything is cooked, you can put this in the oven at 300 for 20 minutes.

Pull out and serve!

This is such a warm, comforting food on a cold night. I served this with biscuits and a side of broccoli and it was heavenly. The cripsy jalapenos gave the meat the smallest kick of flavor and I have since been using them crushed up with bread crumbs and used to bread my baked chicken. So good!

Tin Man - A Skincare Review

Wednesday, November 15, 2017
By Missy
1 Comments

Disclosure - Personal Purchase

Hey hey!

Today I am back with a skincare review.

Skincare is essential at my age, and while I dabbled in it all through my life because I had family in the industry and myself as well, it wasn't until recently that I realized how diligent I needed to be with it. "Dabbling" is not what you need to be doing after 30.

When the Enlite brand launched exclusively at CVS, I really wanted to try a lot of it. Unfortunately where I lived, it was just not available anywhere remotely close. When it comes to "drugstore" brands I really don't like buying online as I want to touch it in person. Plus I think at the time I thought, I have enough skincare, if I don't run across it in my travels, its not meant to be. Apparently I was right because it wasn't around very long before CVS discontinued it. When I recently moved to SC I even looked to see if it was available here only to find it was gone entirely.

Fast forward to last week when I wandered into Ross (I work next door) to see if they had any decent nail polish and I found the one item from the line I had wanted to try the most - Liquid Assets.

What this is is a peel off face mask, and while the silver/platinum novelty of it was what drew me in way back then, it actually boasts some decent claims.

Sometimes these tags are deceiving, but I know for a fact this did retail for 19.99 at CVS...so not only was I lucky to find it, but what a bargain at that.

I am all for luminosity, but I was most excited about the stripping away of dead skin cells and impurities.

It comes in a fat, short tube but has a great amount of product packed in there.

The delivery system here is a twist lid that opens up, you squeeze and the product oozes out. This is the only con I had with this product.

First, I hate tubes like this because product gets all over the outer lid and if you don't clean this really well it just gets nasty and you're using old gross dried up product every time you use it.

Aside from that, this product is almost too thick for a tube. Thickness is good for a peel off mask, it definitely has the perfect consistency for a peel off but my god it was a nightmare to actually get out of the tube, I had to keep twisting the lid to the closed position and then product would shoot out. I had to do that everytime at least 5-6 times before it started to just come out from a squeeze on its own.

But as I said, the thickness was just right to layer on and be dense enough for a good peel.

20-30 minutes is recommended but I find most masks don't dry down in that time so I left it about 35 minutes and in hindsight it was probably ready earlier because it was a bit of a pain to peel (and I apologize, I had a peel video for this review but it was too long/big and I couldn't figure out how to get it off of my phone to edit it down).

It took some decent scratching at my skin to get an edge up to peel but once I did, 80% of the mask came off in one peel, and the rest removed super easy with just water and my fingertips.

The end result was the real deal.
My favorite mask is The Ordinary peel because it really just feels like it removes an entire layer of your skin off to reveal amazing baby softness. This mask felt exactly the same afterward. I'm just sad I probably will not be able to find another tube of it.