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Cooking up a Storm

Apparently fall is making us a bit crazy. In the past week we have made:

Yep, it’s a lot, but not a ton of kitchen time and that mostly for dishes! Happily, everything has come out pretty well! The refried beans were super super tasty and we got a lot out of them and froze the extras. Matt and I both thought they were somehow more filling than the kind from a can. The pumpkin bread is some of the best I’ve ever made and we are already most of the way through one loaf. The kids have eaten everything but the popcorn balls were a mega hit (one that’s not likely to be repeated anytime soon).

Looking through this list it occurs to me that none of these recipes includes meat (I think the soups require chicken stock though). How funny that my meat and potatoes husband has come over to the dark side. We’re not vegetarians and we probably never will be, but there are way too many tasty fruits and vegetables to get bogged down into the same beef, chicken, fish routine. That said, I do think there’s probably some turkey bean chili in our future.

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Apple Chips

This “recipe” is so simple I hesitate to even post it, but these are my kids new favorite snack and they are healthy, cheap and contain only one ingredient, so I thought I should share.

Ingredients

  • 4-5 medium apples apples, thinly sliced

Directions

I will give two methods for doing this. We have a dehydrator so we used that, but you can also use your oven. The prep, however, is the same. You’ll need to slice your apples very thinly … 1/8 inch or less, I’d guess. I’m sure someone can do this by hand, but I’m not that person, so I use a mandolin. They’re not too expensive and they’re super useful for many things as they slice in many thickness and grate as well. I do not bother to core them since the seeds come out as you slice thinly.

Oven: Heat oven to 225 degrees. Line two cookie sheets with silpats or parchment paper. You can also use cooling racks if you have some that are big enough to span cookie sheets. Place the apples on the cookie sheets. You can put them right next to each other, but don’t overlap. They will shrink some as they dry. Bake for an hour and flip if you aren’t using the cooling racks. Then bake another hour.

Dehydrator: Line all dehydrator racks with apples. You can really get them close together since they shrink as they dry. Turn dryer on. They will be pretty darn good after 2 hours, but we like to go closer to 4 to get them real crispy and since you’re not monopolizing the oven forever, you can.

There are all kinds of recipes on the net for these that add sugar (or splenda or maple syrup or honey), but I personally think the apples have all the sugar you need, especially after it’s concentrated when they dry and shrink a bit. I would like to try sprinkling a little nutmeg or cinnamon on these, but really, they are incredibly good as-is. We have been going through a batch a day easily. Luckily apples are 77c/lb right now!

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Worst Gardeners EVER

We are seriously terrible at gardening. We have good intentions (or we start with them anyhow). This year we even did our own starts … like from SEED! We may have started a bit late, but we did get them grown and plunked in the ground. We even made sure they had adequate, regular watering.

Then we did … err… nothing. Absolutely nothing. We didn’t weed (though our garden doesn’t seem to get very weedy?). We didn’t trim back. We just let it do it’s garden thing. We went about our summer and last Friday, Tabby went outside and proclaimed that we had a ripe tomato! And indeed we did. Quite a few of them as it happens.

Turns out we also have a squash! Forgot what type this is – I’ll have to look it up. Not sure if it’s ready for picking or not (another thing to look up), but Ben is convinced it is and that it is HIS. But for the moment, it’s still hanging out in the garden.

So Farmer Joe we are not. CLEARLY. But the kids had a splendid time combing through the vines, collecting tomatoes and exclaiming how over-crowded the garden is. And that alone makes it pretty worthwhile in my opinion. Maybe next year!

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Fall Weekend

We had a very nice, very FALL sort of weekend. Pumpkin patch and corn maze? Check. Visit to the Halloween super store? Check. Making of fall foods including pumpkin bread and apple chips? Check. A Halloween-themed birthday party? Check. Eating way too many pumpkin-spice almonds? Check.

It was busy (isn’t it always?). But very good. We got to see lots of friends and family. We got a few things done around the house. I made Tabby a dress out of an old polo shirt. Matt worked on his Halloween project, a “crank ghost.” We went for a nice long run (though it was only 5 mi – we had a b’day party to get to!). We absolutely wore out the kids.

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Random Bits of Life

My arms are kind of sore. Today my coach, Robyn, insisted I walk around the gym (approx 300 m) with a 30 lb barbell extended over my head. It kind of sucked. But I didn’t put it down the whole time. This was, of course, after I’d already walked around the building (300 m, in case you forgot) holding two 26lb kettle bells. Get this … I pay her to torture me like this.

What else is going on in the house? The kids have been crazy. Ben hasn’t wanted to eat much and he’s been really tired but when he’s up, he’s just on a tear. He just wants to destroy everything. Destroy is probably the wrong word. He wants to take everything apart and scatter it all over the house. He is currently not allowed to have: crayons (duh), his orbital toy from the Natural History Museum (he menaces his sister with this), anything with small pieces (I’m too sore to pick them up right now), any food outside of the kitchen and dining room (duh). On the bright side, he seems to have developed some respect for moving vehicles. On Tuesday he actually held my hand all the way through a parking lot and he huddled closer to me when he saw a car headed our way.

We have decided NOT to go camping. Honestly I am MORE than fine with this decision. It changes next to nothing except possibly giving me more free time, although that is quickly filling up. We can also make it to one of our favorite kiddo’s b’day parties which will include swimming. Instead this weekend I will cook the same food we would have eaten while camping (maybe we can even do a last round of s’mores on our fire pit) and instead of doing whatever camping stuff we’d have done on Saturday, we will probably work on winterizing our camper so it can go to storage (and I can have the garage back – snow is going to fly soon).

It has been a long week and I will be glad to lie around a bit this weekend.

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Gel Glue Batik

Did I mention how much I love Pinterest? Because I totally do. Of course it’s a timesuck, but I can overlook that in favor of its prettiness. Am I right? Anyhow, before we left for NYC and since we got back, we’ve been working on this craft that I had pinned to my “Crafts for the Kids” board. Tabby loves the Pinterest since she can just pick a picture of what she wants to do.

Anyhow, the concept is simple. You put designs on the shirts using the gel glue and then dye them. The gel glue resists the dye and your design shows up white/light on a background of color.

Tips:

  • All tshirts should be washed, shrunk, etc.
  • You will need to cut some cardboard to place between the back and front of your tshirt … if you don’t do this, they will stick together.
  • The resolution of gel glue is not real high, so your designs can’t be too intricate.
  • You cannot use hot dye (no matter what the package says) to dye your shirts. Hot water melts gel glue. We dyed using Tulip Brand cooled down and it worked great.
  • You will have to wash these afterward and they will give off plenty of dye …wash each color individually.

Ben’s has this design on it as Twinkle Twinkle is one of his favorite songs. I did a similar one on a onesie for a friend’s baby that has a sheep and says “baa baa black sheep.” Tabby’s was all her own design, though I executed the gluing for her. She just told me where to place the stars and hearts.

One onesie we did was mostly just squiggles and that turned out great too. The original one I saw was all cursive text which turned out cute too. I’d love to do a running one for myself at some point or an orange one that has “You are my sunshine.” on it with a sun graphic.

These were pretty cheap to make. The shirts I get at Hobby Lobby for like $3.50/ea and my shirt was just a random old shirt I had lying around. Onesies are likewise cheap. $8/3 of them. The gel glue was under $2 and each packet of dye under $3.

Everyone had a great time with this and I’d love to do it again sometime.

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Routines and Such

I have another craft that we did over the past couple of weeks to share with you all, but right now I just want to take a minute to reflect on how nice it’s been to just be home with my family. Matt snapped this picture on Saturday morning (my expression reflects my general 7 AM stupor and has nothing to do with my mood as I was super-elated to be snuggling my kiddos). The kids had just gotten up and they were thrilled to be able to hang around the house with us. We made breakfast and just hung out together.

I love all of our travels. We made amazing memories in NYC and Nashville (and definitely on the way HOME from Nashville) and on our camping trips, but they are no less wonderful than the ones we make at home over Saturday morning cartoons and pancakes. Or listening to music in the evenings while we make dinner and eat pickles (the designated pre-dinner snack at my house).

So it’s been my goal this week to have a nice normal, routine sort of week. We’ve planned nice healthy at-home dinners for each evening. We’re doing laundry and small projects. Last night I purged a ton of Tabby’s size 3T (and some lingering 2T) clothes with her help. We spent some time contemplating the evolution of Ben’s room – he can now climb INTO his crib, but uncharacteristically refuses to climb OUT (yay!). It was definitely nice.

But of course, we’ve been at home two weekends in a row now, so I’m pretty sure we’re going camping this weekend.  You know … one last hurrah. Seriously. We can’t help ourselves.

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Tshirt Dresses

That girl child of mine … she LOVES her dresses. She would probably wear dresses all the time if she could. Well dresses and jeans … she does love her jeans. Anyhow, while we were in NYC I wanted to get her a cute souvenir t’shirt, but I couldn’t find ANY that weren’t A) ugly B) cheesy C) ridiculously priced D) made from terribly coarse fabric. But somewhere rattling around upstairs was the notion that I’d seen on the internets somewhere that one can make an adult’s t’shirt into a dress. So on this leap of memory faith, I purchased a hot pink ladies I ♥ NY t’shirt for Miss Tabby. The exchange with the Indian (Syrian???) guy at the booth was hilarious. He saw me holding it up to her to see how it would fit and kept insisting he had ones that would fit her better (they had child-esque drawings of NYC on them and were the SCRATCHIEST fabric I’ve ever handled) and I could not communicate that I didn’t WANT them to fit her but finally he let the crazy lady have her way. $8/each and they’re soft, so good bargain IMHO.

So I looked up on the internets how to make the t’shirt into a dress and came across this great instructable tutorial on the matter. I followed it to the best of my rather suspect sewing abilities and produced a fairly decent dress for Tabby. Bolstered my some sewing success (this is rare for me) I decided to dig out an old t’shirt of mine from our “t’shirt quilt” (that I will never actually get around to making) box of discarded shirts and make her a second dress. This one had a much larger logo that would have been cut off by the previous method, so I made a modification. My interpretations for both follow.

Continue reading “Tshirt Dresses”

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There’s No Place Like Home There’s No Place Like Home

I am so incredibly glad to be back in Denver. I mean how can you not be when you have those two sweet faces to come back to, right? Not to mention my handsome sweet hubby and my slobbery mutt. Home also has my bed (with 10 tons of stuffed animals on it) and my treadmill and my tivo and and and. What can I say? I’m a bit of a homebody. Coming home and seeing everyone is so nice. The kids were ecstatic and Matt even more so. Loki? Rather indifferent.

Portland was great. I really enjoyed my conference all things said and done. I will bring back a lot of good ideas and new things to look at when I go back on Monday. I didn’t see a lot of Portland but most of what I did I liked. It was pretty nice to just chill in the evenings and get to sleep early. Possibly I’m deluding myself but I may have beaten my rotten cold. Or maybe not. The worst bit of the trip was that I didn’t get to meet up with my cousin who lives in Portland. Her little boy was sick and her husband out of town so it just didn’t work out. The dinner I had with my coworkers instead was really enjoyable. The second bad bit of the trip was the opening night welcoming event where they had 4 inches of HAY on the ground and HORSES. My allergies were not amused.

Now it’s back to my routine … but first … Half Marathon #6. I’m Rocking and Rolling on Sunday!