ourhappyhouses

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Nothing like a giant pot of veggies and turkey chilli to drown your sorrows! #yum #healthyrecipe

[ourhappyhouses]

Saw Alt-J tonight! #kickass #concert #show (at Meadow Brook Music Festival)

[ourhappyhouses]

Making some tomato soup from scratch! #cooking #recipe

[ourhappyhouses]

Rawr! #corgi #corgisofinstagram #love #cute #furbaby

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Couple of cuties! - 💜 Jessi #corgi #cutie

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Steak Betch, check the link in bio! #recipe #cooking #meat #easyrecipe #newpost

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My eyes, shirt and pillows match! #awesome

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#lol #omg #corgi #derp

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Must Haves for Stocking Your First Kitchen!

Jessi again, bringing you a list of things you need for your first kitchen! I remember the day I moved to Montreal. I was moving directly from my parent's house to my new apartment in the city. I didn't own any furniture, towels, cleaning supplies, pots, or anything else for that matter. I arrived in the city with two suit cases full of clothes and my excitement!

The first dinner Mike and I had there was noodles and marinara. We ate off paper plates, with plastic forks, as we sat on the floor of our empty home. I spend the first few weeks after moving scouring dollar stores and second hand shops to get all of the stuff we needed, and (to be honest) I never stopped. Now, four years and two apartments later, I finally feel like I have just about got everything I could ever want for my kitchen.

For the first few months I did all my cooking with a few bowls, cutting boards, a small pot, a non stick pan, and steak knives. It served me well for a while, but as I became a better cook, I needed better equipment! For anyone who is just moving out, or putting together a wedding registry, check out my list below! 

****If you purchase any of these items through our links, we will recieve a portionj of the sale!****

Cookware

Cast Iron Dutch Ovens and Cast Iron Skillets are essential! They can be used on the stove and in the oven. You can fry, saute, sear, bake, braise, and boil in them, and they last a life time. I also find a set of non stick pots and pans are great. The nonstick surface is perfect for eggs, pancakes, and stir fry. Pyrex glass dishes are perfect for marinating, roasting, and baking. Cookie sheets are great for baking as well as caramelizing veggies in a hot oven.

Prep Essentials

Buy a decent set of knives! It will be more expensive, but well worth it! One good, sharp knife is safer and speeds up cooking time when used correctly. If you are like me and have a hard time sharpening your knife, buy a hand held sharpener. You pass the blade through and it shaves down the blade to keep it nice and sharp. Wooden spoons are great for any kind of cooking, and its good to have a variety of slotted spoons and spatulas. Get lots of cutting boards, you'll thank me later when your'e prepping ten dishes for thanksgiving. Graters and peelers are great for zesting, julienning and prepping lots of yummy veggies. Get the Joseph Joseph bowls, seriously, get them. They include measuring cups, measuring spoons, a siv, a collander, and two bowls, everything you need! Plus they look cute and stow away neatly!

Dinnerware

Buy some nice white plates and practical steel flatware. You will be using this stuff everyday, so it is worth investing in! Also get lots of strong, break resistant plastic glasses, you can never have too many glasses! I have to recommended the Glasslock food storage because they can be used in the oven! That means you can make a mini lasagna on Sunday, and throw it in the oven on Thursday! Perfect for left overs!

 That's my list! What are your kitchen essentials? If you like this post, check out our Cooking Basics Pinterest board, it's great for beginners and experienced cooks alike! Thanks for stopping by today, see ya next time!

Follow Our Happy Houses's board Cooking Basics on Pinterest.

[ourhappyhouses]

Must Haves for Stocking Your First Kitchen!

Jessi again, bringing you a list of things you need for your first kitchen! I remember the day I moved to Montreal. I was moving directly from my parent's house to my new apartment in the city. I didn't own any furniture, towels, cleaning supplies, pots, or anything else for that matter. I arrived in the city with two suit cases full of clothes and my excitement!

The first dinner Mike and I had there was noodles and marinara. We ate off paper plates, with plastic forks, as we sat on the floor of our empty home. I spend the first few weeks after moving scouring dollar stores and second hand shops to get all of the stuff we needed, and (to be honest) I never stopped. Now, four years and two apartments later, I finally feel like I have just about got everything I could ever want for my kitchen.

For the first few months I did all my cooking with a few bowls, cutting boards, a small pot, a non stick pan, and steak knives. It served me well for a while, but as I became a better cook, I needed better equipment! For anyone who is just moving out, or putting together a wedding registry, check out my list below! 

****If you purchase any of these items through our links, we will recieve a portionj of the sale!****

Cookware

Cast Iron Dutch Ovens and Cast Iron Skillets are essential! They can be used on the stove and in the oven. You can fry, saute, sear, bake, braise, and boil in them, and they last a life time. I also find a set of non stick pots and pans are great. The nonstick surface is perfect for eggs, pancakes, and stir fry. Pyrex glass dishes are perfect for marinating, roasting, and baking. Cookie sheets are great for baking as well as caramelizing veggies in a hot oven.

Prep Essentials

Buy a decent set of knives! It will be more expensive, but well worth it! One good, sharp knife is safer and speeds up cooking time when used correctly. If you are like me and have a hard time sharpening your knife, buy a hand held sharpener. You pass the blade through and it shaves down the blade to keep it nice and sharp. Wooden spoons are great for any kind of cooking, and its good to have a variety of slotted spoons and spatulas. Get lots of cutting boards, you'll thank me later when your'e prepping ten dishes for thanksgiving. Graters and peelers are great for zesting, julienning and prepping lots of yummy veggies. Get the Joseph Joseph bowls, seriously, get them. They include measuring cups, measuring spoons, a siv, a collander, and two bowls, everything you need! Plus they look cute and stow away neatly!

Dinnerware

Buy some nice white plates and practical steel flatware. You will be using this stuff everyday, so it is worth investing in! Also get lots of strong, break resistant plastic glasses, you can never have too many glasses! I have to recommended the Glasslock food storage because they can be used in the oven! That means you can make a mini lasagna on Sunday, and throw it in the oven on Thursday! Perfect for left overs!

 That's my list! What are your kitchen essentials? If you like this post, check out our Cooking Basics Pinterest board, it's great for beginners and experienced cooks alike! Thanks for stopping by today, see ya next time!

Follow Our Happy Houses's board Cooking Basics on Pinterest.

[ourhappyhouses]

We are having Popcorn in bed! #nationallazyday #corgi

[ourhappyhouses]

Analytics : An Update

Hey there guys! Jessi here! Kelly is off on her family vacation, so I will be manning the wheel for the whole week. I'm starting this week off by doing a little marketing. Lots of blogs these days are sharing their analytics, not just marketing sites either, food blogs, fashion blogs and lifestyle blogs too. There is a rising trend in blogs being as transparent as possible about how they get traffic and make money. I think it has been extremely helpful in creating my own blog and marketiing strategies. I'm going to the return the favor and talk a little bit about our analytics for the last few weeks.

How do analytics relate to your audience?

Analytics reflect all of the activity on your website. They includes how many people come to your site, where they are going, how often they come, what pages they read, where they share your content, what they like, what sites they frequent,  how often they engage with your brand and many other pieces of information about your audience. Understanding analytics is all about making connections. It's about taking all of these pieces of information and working backwards to understand your audience and their behaviors. When you learn more about your audience you can tailor strategies to get them to engage with your brand. You can focus on the content that they consume and engage with the most, post and share content at the times it best suits them, even offer deals and promotions that will keep them engaged and invested. 

Our Strategies as of August

We use a lot of social media mediums to market our content. So far the place that brings the most traffic for us is Facebook. We share with our family, friends, recipe groups, diy groups, and blogging groups. We get a lot of engagement from our Facebook page. 

Twitter has also seen a crazy amount of growth this month, we went from 300 to 1600 followers and the amount of people that see our tweets has risen to 4000! 

I use my Facebook and Twitter analytics to see what time most people are online and reading my posts, it also tells me what kind of posts do well. Some of our best posts are about being a Mother, so that tells me that lots of Moms read our blog! People have also responded well to Sewing and Recipe posts. This information helps me decide what to write about as well as what kinds of content I want to share from other places on the web.

I attribute my growth for Twitter and Facebook to Edgar, an application that we use to automate our Facebook and Twitter feeds. The reason we use Edgar is because it gives you so much control over those feeds and that when you share a post it is then saved to a library. It will put it in a category where it will then be sent out at another time. Re-posting content might sound odd until you realize how few of the things you post get seen by your audience. I work hard at curating my social network feeds and it is a shame when a post only gets seen by one person. By reusing old content you can expose more people to your brand.

We have been steadily adding pins and followers to our Pinterest account, we have grown by 600 followers in the last month, and this is due mostly to following other accounts, Pinterest is very much a follow for follow community. Doing this has certainly increased the amount of people laying eyes on and repininng our pins!

Instagram is still something we are struggling with in terms of building an audience. Only about 5% of our traffic comes from Instagram. We are trying to build more of an audience there. We have been posting more regularly, using Crowd Fire to manage our followers, and we even hosted a Loop Giveaway with other bloggers. The giveaway brought us over 100 new followers, so I think it was worth it. We are trying to post quality pictures in order to retain them, but only time will tell if they will stay.

We are dabbling in Google+ and Tumblr, but haven't been focusing too much on them  in favor of spending more time on Facebook and Twitter. This barely skims the surface of our marketing strategies, but it is what we have been focusing on the most for the last few weeks.

Click through the gallery below to check out the information for your self! I only shared a few screen shots, this doesn't include all of the different types of information I collect on my audience. If I shared everything there would be a hundred images :D !

 Click On the Images for a Larger View!

So that is how we have been doing. My over all goal is to be flexible. When I sit down each day and look at my analytics I try not to just seem them as numbers and graphs. I try to draw conclusions about why people do what they do, and how I can fit into that. I try to provide my audience with what they want. I don't compromise my vision, but I do write for the people who read my blog. 

I know this isn't our usual kind of post, but I wanted to share all of this for other bloggers and entrepaneurs. Understanding your audience is paramount in getting them to engage with you. I have seen for myself what using analytics to tailor to you audiences wants and needs can do. Although we haven't blown up, we are seeing a steady climb in engagement, followers and subscribers!

I would love to hear from other bloggers and anyone else interested in marketing. I always want to learn about new strategies, programs, and experiences. Thanks for stopping by today! If you liked this post, follow out Blogging Rescources board, I have a great list of helpful posts to get your blog off the ground!

Follow Our Happy Houses's board Blogging Rescources on Pinterest.

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Took Mike to the Ceasars Palace in Windsor, Canada last night to celebrate his 33rd birthday! It was very cool, there was even a #corgi slot machine!

[ourhappyhouses]

Little man is so tired from the company party last night! 😴😍 #love #corgi #baby

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Oooooooooo

Lighter than yesterday

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#selfie

[ourhappyhouses]