I LOVE a good sandwich. I’ve learned that humans cannot live by sandwiches alone, but I have this reoccurring food dream that one day I will open a sandwich truck. Yum!
This sandwich. Praise the Lord emoji hands. It is truly a refined take on the kid-favorite counterpart (though I have to admit that my husband and I have been dressing up grilled cheese for years with rosemary pressed into the butter on each side and a healthy dose of garlic powder in the middle).
This incarnation of the grilled cheese from The Scramble* takes everything to a whole new (half) healthy, full-flavored level. I mean, why not toast to health over the kale and artichoke extras and the peppy addition of asiago cheese? To sandwiches!
Oh, my, YES!
XX, Megan
Ingredients for the Main Dish
The Scramble suggests that you preheat the oven to 250 degrees, making 3 sandwiches at one time, and then warming the others in oven while you finish making the final three. I chose to use to skillets to make our sandwiches and whipped them up all at once!
Saute
In a heavy skillet heat the oil and sauté the garlic for 30 seconds until it is just fragrant. Add the kale and salt. Toss until the kale is covered in garlic. Sauté for 1 more minute, then cover and steam for 5 minutes.
Chop
Meanwhile chop your artichokes and slice your bread. (You can also grate the cheese now if you didn’t buy pre-grated.)
Add
Add the artichokes and balsamic vinegar to the kale and heat for 2 minutes. Then add 1 cup of the cheese. Stir cheese in until melted and remove from the heat.
Butter
Butter the outside of each bread slice. Heat two large heavy skillets (or warm the oven 250 and do two shifts of 3 sandwiches as described above).
Grill
Place 3 slices of bread on each skillet. Top the bread with 1 tsp of the remaining cheese. Then spoon about 3 Tbsp. of the artichoke/kale/cheese mixture onto the bread. Top with anther tsp. of cheese. Cover with last bread slice. Press firmly down on each sandwich, or do as The Scramble suggests and place a foil wrapped brick on top of your sandwiches!
EAT!
*The Scramble is a meal planning service to which you can subscribe here. For a fantastic price you will receive 5 weekly meals which means 5 recipes (main course plus a side dish), complete grocery list, the ability to tweak the number of people you are making for, and full nutrition facts. PLUS tips as to how best to PREP your meal beforehand, add a punch of FLAVOR, and how to SLOW COOK almost every recipe if you’re especially slammed that night. This wonderful service really does live up to it’s name. You can come home at 6 p.m. and be sitting down to a DELICIOUS, HEALTHY, HOME COOKED meal by 6:30 p.m. most nights.
Getting a little bit real today about what goes on over here at Refined + Rugged behind the scenes.
A friend asked me last week if I had a nanny or a housekeeper. She wanted to know how I was keeping up with the every day stuff of life. These were her words, “Do you have a nanny? Or housekeeper? How do you do all these fun things and keep up with the everyday and the littles?”
How was I keeping up with cleaning my house, watching my kiddos, and still doing this thing called a blog? Well with my VAST experience (I hope you’re laughing here because I have been blogging for all of… [checks watch, cough, cough] three months. And I didn’t have a method for maintaining complete life balance before I began blogging.
And I certainly haven’t found it now midst the six-days-a-week posting schedule I’ve assigned myself). The short answer is no and no. I do not have a nanny nor do I have a housekeeper. Both would be nice at times, and I respect folks who are nannys and housekeepers and folks who employ both.
But no, we don’t have help for those tasks at our house. I think what she was also asking is, “Where are your kids when all of this business is going down? What are they doing when you are taking outfit photos? What is the state of your kitchen sink? Where on earth do you find the time to do laundry and still post a meal you made?”
Or maybe I am asking those questions of myself these days. The short answer to those questions is that my kids are basically there, off camera, in the wings in whatever blog business is happening. I mean my six-year-old has taken Outfit Of The Day photos for me, for heaven sakes!
The other part of this answer is that while this blog is managed by me– I do the writing, I make the editorial choices, I choose the outfits, I run the science experiments, I cook the meals– the reality is that the entire endeavor is a family affair. I couldn’t or wouldn’t be able to do it any other way.
My husband takes the outfit photos while my kids skateboard, or shoot hoops, or pick their noses. He takes extra alone time with the boys while I’m writing posts or editing photos or doing research or even reading a book. So how do I do it? How does anyone DO IT?
I’ve followed enough blogs over enough years to have read many, many posts about this kind of BALANCE. I do think it is a balance we all seek no matter whether you blog or not. This is LIFE balance we’re talking about, and here are a couple answers about the out takes I’ve discovered not just since beginning this blog, but as a mother of two small people seeking to fulfill family, friends, faith, and self on many different levels.
1- There is no such thing as balance. It does not exist. Now don’t cry when you read that, like I’ve been prone to do on occasion. Don’t sink into woe or spiral into sadness. I realize it is hard to hear this. But there are some positives to coming to grips with this reality. Like living in reality! Not only have I read this from several different authors (blog and non-blog writers), here, here, here.
I’ve also lived it. I have had plenty of days where dishes were piled like their own sky-scrapper cities, when laundry looked as though a bull dozer may have been needed to move it to the bedroom, or the state of my toilets was, ahem, questionable. This is life.
I have been in grooves where I was religiously hitting the gym, but I simply couldn’t seem to keep the clutter at bay on ANY surface in my house. Or periods where I was rocking it at keeping every load of laundry rolling out like an assembly line, but I couldn’t seem to make a play-date for my kids to save my life. I’ve had moments where I felt like I was winning in the educational department by rocking the Science Fridays (this was long before blogging), but I just couldn’t find an outlet for all of the thoughts jumbling around in my head.
So if it looks or appears like I have it all together here– on this blog or anywhere else across social media, Instagram, Facebook, even text message– please remember that these are snap shots of my life. They are chosen because I want to project goodness, and joy, and beauty and yes, even fun. But they are curated.
Not that they didn’t happen to me or my family. We lived them for sure! But for the thousand words that each picture tells there are 10,000 more pictures that I can’t or choose not to share. I don’t chose to project happiness, joy, and beauty because I am trying to fake you out. I am doing so to lend uplift to my life and yours.
2- I’ve set up my blog to include my family. I talked about this earlier, and I’ve had conversations with a lot of friends and family and some real thoughtful self-reflection when I started my blog about how I would include/exclude my family. After all, my people are still very little people.
They aren’t making a fully conscious choice to participate in blogging. I wanted to make sure that I was choosing my posts for the RIGHT reasons, not incorporating them to gain readership or posting about their activities for selfish reasons. I don’t feel as though I am doing either of those things.
At this point, my blog includes my family because I am still at home with them every moment of every day. It won’t always be that way. I expect that as my life changes, morphing to different phases, my blog will change, as well. But for now it doesn’t make sense not to include the people most precious to me. If I went away from posting about them, I’d probably have to set posting aside for now.
Plus, this has already been such a fabulous way to document some of our doings, our comings and goings, and isn’t everyone with kids looking for ways to mark and remember, document and journal. At least I always am, and this blog has been the perfect mode for me to do so.
3- Tweak and re-tweak, try and re-try. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Here’s where that old adage applies. The deuce of it is that you have to keep this keeping-on midst a constant state of change. There was a time maybe six months ago when everything clicked. I don’t remember my surroundings or circumstances, I don’t remember the day of the week, but I remember this moment distinctly when I thought, “I’ve got it!”
For me, the I’ve got it meant this: I am finally able to both do what I think is a decent job being a mother and enjoy the doing of it at the same time. It only took me seven years to come to this cross-roads friends, seven years. I wouldn’t call myself a quick-study! And in that moment, that very breath, that very feeling of… I don’t know what to call it. That feeling of exultant peak reaching, that feeling of deep satisfaction, that feeling of getting it right after a long, long time trying.
This thought followed: soon everything will/would change again. In a year my second son will go to school full-time, in the fall things will change and shift again, tack on 5 or 10 more years to that and everything will definitely, certainly, undoubtably be different.
So I will have to keep trying. Keep balancing. Keep going. Keep learning. Keep doing and breathing and being and rising and loving. BALANCE. If balance doesn’t exist, I must be looking for something else. JOY. I believe that what I’m looking for is JOY. Joy in living, joy in learning, joy loving. JOY in life.
XX, Megan
Enjoy the outtakes below. 
In the short life of this blog I’ve already received a lot of questions about how to decide what to keep in your wardrobe and what to ditch. (*For a note about pregnancy and what to hang on to midst multiple body shapes and sizes, see the end of this post.)
To be honest I set about to produce this post using other blog references as fodder rather than my own photos or direct experience. There are some really good articles out there about closet organization. Like Mackenzie Horan’s, Design Darling post, “The Easiest Way To Clean Out Your Closet“, or The Every Girl’s article, “7 Questions to Ask When Cleaning Out Your Closet“. These set me on a good track toward the happy ending. But we’re not quite there yet!
I simply intended to highlight those conversations, or even just link those articles, steal their pictures (with attribution, of course), and call it a day. In other words, I was trying to take the lazy man’s way out. That’s not exactly what happened. In fact, it is the OPPOSITE of what happened.
My googling led to a COMPLETE closet clean out. Please don’t believe I think I am reinventing the wheel here (or continue reading because you believe I have some revelatory way to clean out your closet that doesn’t involve at least a little bit of TIME, EFFORT, WORK, and yes, maybe even a little PAIN, eek!). If you’re here for some reality, read on!
As previously stated, I set about to curate all of these other voices on the subject of closet clean outs. What should I keep, sell, donate, toss, or move. I went to my closet to take pictures… and realized that I should really just DO what I was talking about myself.
So I did.
Here is the state in which I found my closet last night around 9:00 p.m.
Hello shoe problem! Hello awkward pajama problem! Hello shoved in corners problem!
At this point, just looking at my closet, my resolve to clean and post weakened quite a bit! I was feeling sort of sensitive about the state (read: the messiness) of my closet. I was felling a little shy about sharing my dirt (read: I was edging away from putting messy closet pictures on the internet.) Bah! But if I didn’t get in there and clean it out myself, guess what, no one would else would be!
In the name of de-clutter, in the name of Spring Cleaning, in the name of whatever Saint watches over wardrobes and home organization, I stepped back into my closet and went to WORK.
METHOD(s)
1. Empty. Empty out your entire closet.
2. Zone. Take different sections of your wardrobe and clean each one out as time allows.
Here you have really got to pick your poison, your method based on 2 factors– time allowed, and desired depth of this clean. Are you going to take the ENTIRE contents of your closet OUT of the closet as many organizational experts recommend? Would it be best for you to work in sections and split this job up over a few days.
In the past, I have definitely stayed with the ZONE approach. Taking one evening to clean out and straighten my shoes, another afternoon to go through my t-shirts and sweaters, another to tackle shorts and pants. One of the problems this poses is that I often don’t clean the shelves themselves properly, and the floor doesn’t often get a thorough once-over as I am usually using the floor space to stow the contents of the particular section I’m cleaning.
At this point, however, I believe it was time to rip the band-aid off and give it the FULL GO in one shot. To prove that I really did empty out the entire sucker in one punch (and as a cautionary tail that your entire wardrobe cannot be held up by your shower curtain rod), see the picture below. Sad.
The story gets better from here on out!
I began by making areas for each of my categories: 1. KEEP, 2. SELL, 3. DONATE, 4. TOSS, 5. MOVE. After collapsing my shower curtain, I moved the “keep” pile to my bed!
MADNESS
1. KEEP
If you’re going to experience the fully cleansing effects of this clean out, you might as well stick with the full monty (after extracting it from your wardrobe) and put each and every article of clothing to the 5 pronged question. Are you going to KEEP, SELL, DONATE, TOSS, or MOVE this item? You can do this on the way out of your closet (recommended), or on the way back in. You can ask that 5 pointed query both ways if you want to further cull your KEEP pile as you return it to it’s home.
Now hear this: this has got to be QUICK. No dilly dallying! The more quickly you can do this, the more quickly your clean will go. You should not hem and haw for more than thirty seconds, that’s right 30 seconds. The longer you spend deliberating the more likely you are to end up right where you started. With a closet full of keep, sell, donate, and toss items right where they were when you began!
You wear it? You like it? You fit into it? You can HONESTLY see wearing it in the next six months? (This can then account for seasonal change.) It makes you feel SPARKLY and HAPPY– keep it. No questions to ask.
You are hanging on to that sweater your first boyfriend in high school gave you for Christmas that you shrunk in college? You are saving that cocktail dress you wore three years ago before you were married, had a baby*, moved to Northern Michigan and don’t see wearing it in the next three? 30 seconds. Sell or donate!
2. SELL
That AMAZING GUCCI shirt you bought in college as a splurge, or with birthday money from your boyfriend? Do you wear it? Or do you hang onto it because the tag reads GUCCI. Cause here’s the thing. If it says Gucci, but it sits in your closet then it might as well say nothing. Brand doesn’t matter at this point, folks. The great thing about BRAND is that it can sometimes hold some value long after it’s season has expired. I like this article about white glove consignment from Ann and Liz. The difference between donating and consigning might only be a few dollars, but that’s more than what was in your pocket before that item exited your closet. And once you’re hooked up with a great consignment store I feel as though it is almost as easy a process as a donation (almost, but not quite).
3. DONATE
Most of the goods culled from my closet are put into a great big black plastic trash bag for donation. Now don’t mis-read, I donate only clothing that is in good condition that I can see will have a happy life beyond me. There is no point in donating worn-out, ripped (we’re not talking tasteful slices here), stained, or otherwise trashed clothing. But there are plenty of clothes in my closet that simply don’t suit me anymore. Donate away!*
4. TOSS
For me, this pile is probably the smallest. I don’t hammer very many of my clothes, but I’ve had a couple pairs of running shoes that turned into dirt shoes that turned into cut-the-grass-shoes that turned into… well, you get the idea. Throw them away.
5. MOVE
I pulled this section from a really great cleaning article “How to Clean Your Closets“, and honestly, I had sort of scoffed when I read it originally. The move section is to REMOVE any item in your closet that should be in another area of your home. I actually had a lot of junk in my closet that needed to be MOVED. For some reason, I had been ferreting away some random keepsakes in my closet. I found my oldest son’s baby book under a pile of sweaters. I had stowed my college diplomas behind my scarves. RANDOM! 🙂 Where else do you keep those babies? Move ’em.
CLEAN
Then came the scrub down. This actually went rather quickly. I used a solution of 1 tsp. dish washing soap, 1/2 C white vinegar, and 2 quarts hot water for all of the shelves. Then I dried them all with paper towels. (I needed to get my crap back in and usable quickly!) I vacuumed and edged the room. I even wiped down the base boards. This is serious business, people! Clean.
RESULTS
This is where everything started to feel really, really good. It got even better the following day when my three-year-old walked into my closet and said in aw, “Mom! Your closet is SO clean!” Seriously. Those were his words. Then he put the cherry on top with this, “Mom, you’re a really good cleaner!” Thank you son! You made your moma’s day!
Good luck, wonderful readers!
XX, Megan
*Oh sweet full of life (literally) people! Oh pregnant friends and loved ones. This have a 3 or 5 size wardrobe is SO HARD! Especially those of you trying to cram even a small slice of curated clothing goodness into a micro IKEA wardrobe. Here’s the thing. You’ve got to be even more picky, and even more creative with your pregnant wardrobe (and pregnant closet clean out). Honestly, don’t let the fact that you are 3, 7, even 9 months pregnant discourage you! In fact if you are nesting like crazy, maybe you will end up hell-bent on cleaning your closet. SO, be easy.
Here was the question that sparked this tangent: I have a linen white jacket that I LOVE and have been saving for “when it fits again” which leads me to a question (and perhaps a future post for you???!!!): How do you rotate your wardrobe? When do you get rid of clothes? How many clothes is too many? At what point do you say goodbye to favorites?
KEEP your pre-pregnancy favorites! Keep them even if you have no clue if you will EVER return to them. (I said favorites, not fall-backs.) I say, keep that white linen jacket until you are out of your “child bearing” years. Until your body has a chance to settle back into a more stationary size. This takes time! You don’t have to be hasty! (Unless you have HUGE space issues. Then you have to ask yourself if it sparkles enough, does it make you sing!)
KEEP those first maternity clothes you got when you realized that pants with a stretchy tops are seriously a little piece of heaven and easily hidden by a tunic. You will use those babies (even after baby), I promise. (Here is my dirty little secret. I continued to wear multiple items in my pregnancy wardrobe as every day clothes. GASP! HORROR! For years after I’d had my babies. A black lace skirt, that looked just like it’s non-maternity counterpart minus the more expandable waistband; a brilliant striped top that just looked long when I was thin again; and the most adorable white shorts that seemed to fit no matter what size I was. No one ever knew. Or if they did, it didn’t matter to me. Incorporate, gals. Enough said.)
DONATE. Skip goodwill. Instead, donate to your best friend who is having a babe right after you. Donating your pregnancy clothing to family or friends can often mean that you create a maternity wardrobe LOOP. All you moms know exactly what I’m talking about!
If in doubt, one more courageous clean out article to keep you convinced!
While camping, we love to make Kodiak Cakes for breakfast. Have you ever tried them? Kodiak makes a whole wheat pancake mix that requires only water. Dry goods, water, mix, pour, pancakes!
Refined + Rugged 