Manicotti and Cherry Blossoms

Double whammy today, folks! Food AND nail art! Woohoo! I'm going to share with you my FAVORITE manicotti recipe ever. I found a recipe for making your own, homemade manicotti noodles from scratch. Because the ingredients for the rest of the recipe looked a little bland, I decided to turn to The Pioneer Woman for her version of Three-Cheese-Stuffed Shells. It. Was. A perfect. Match.

Making the noodles from scratch is very basic. 4 simple ingredients everyone has in their pantry. They're really like crepes, except thicker. And more filling... Mmmm.... Sorry, I was thinking about the cheese-filling that goes inside of these later on...

To make them round, once you have the batter in the pan, just turn the pan in a clockwise motion while it's vertical. You want to be quick, though, because these babies cook really quickly.

Let's skip to what they look like after they're out of the oven... I felt that I didn't need to take pictures of the rest of the steps. Pioneer Woman does a great job of that already.

It was so... Good... Heavenly. Just heavenly. You pair Pioneer Woman's cooking with homemade noodles, and you've hit the jackpot.

Because tomorrow is a big day for me, I needed to paint my nails to reflect what we're going to be doing:

Any guesses?

The color of my nails remind me of seaweed...

We're going to be learning how to make sushi tomorrow!! So I had to do a little cherry blossom theme on my nails. Granted, I only have white acrylic paint, so I improvised and used some beet powder from my mom to get the pink color. Worked out fairly decently, but I would have rather used a dark pink acrylic paint. The beet powder didn't create the dark color I was looking for. (I submitted my nail art to this link-up if anyone is interested in seeing more nail art ideas. :) )

It was hard to create those flowers. It was my first attempt at one-stroke gradient. It didn't turn out quite like I wanted it to, but it was a good first attempt. :) I'm trying to branch out... Pun unintended...

So I'd rate the nails a 3/5 for difficulty and the manicotti a 2/5. It was super easy; just time consuming.