Whipped Strawberry Butter

Ok folks. We all know that real maple syrup is much better for us than the imitation stuff. Much better. Most of the bottled stuff basically comes down to high fructose corn syrup mixed with artificial colors and flavors. Which is just not the best thing to pour into your body first thing in the morning.  (Yes, I get the irony as I often am found downing a Dr. Pepper in the morning. I'm a work in progress and I'm hoping for my kids to be healthier than I am.) Truthfully, I don't think I'd ever tasted the real stuff until we moved here and I started prioritizing buying more real foods. Seriously, the stuff is awesomely delicious but oh so stinking expensive. Especially if your kids pour the way mine do. Yikes. So sometimes you need something else to put on those waffles. Again, ignore the fact that said children just might be eating frozen waffles this week because only one of our waffle makers still works, I am currently solo parenting, and sometimes you just decide to let something slide.

Anyway, this week we will have both homemade pumpkin butter (so easy to make if you have a crockpot) and whipped strawberry butter to top the waffles because they are yummy. And cheaper than maple syrup.

If you want a REAL recipe, here's the one I looked up. If you want to know what I really did, keep reading.

I grabbed a quart sized bag of strawberries from the freezer, defrosted them, drained them, then dumped them in a mixing bowl and sort of mashed them a bit. Added in two sticks of butter and turned the mixer on. After a while, I decided it needed more butter so I tossed a stick of butter into the microwave to soften it, dumped it in the with rest of the stuff and mixed some more. Yummy. Easy. No strange ingredients. And seriously, strawberries are sweet enough without adding sugar, I promise.  Give it a try.

Play Doh

There is something about play doh that keeps young children entertained. And in one place. And happy. For a very long time.  I whipped up a triple batch of kool-aid scented play-doh last weekend with the kids and it was played with for 3 days straight.  Seriously. For 3 days the children sat at the kitchen table, were quiet, busy, and occupied. It was amazing.  I will have to remind myself to make a fresh batch of play doh every few weeks.

The recipe I used this time was 2 1/2 cups of flour, 1/2 cup of salt, 2 packets of unsweetened kool-aid all mixed with 2 cups of boiling water and 3 tbs of oil.  And it does make a difference if you don't let the water come to a full boil.

Pictures from our World

Just a few recent pictures from our life lately. Here's  the helicopter Gabe built by himself using the directions in his LEGOClubJr magazine.  If you have LEGO fans in your house, LEGO offers both a regular and a Jr. version of their magazine for free. You have to request a new subscription every two years or so but it's free and all my kid have loved it.

Some of the peaches off our trees this year. This was an awesome year for the peach crop. Sadly the week the kids picked most of the peaches, I got super sick, Alan was out of town, and we were unable to can them.  Truly heart breaking sad to have wasted them.  Seriously. I guess next time I'll try to call a friend to help can them so they don't go to waste.

A special Reese's Pieces snack to go with movie night. You can find the recipe here.

Because we were watching this movie.  I'm liking the idea of themed snacks for movie night. Just might have to try to continue it when possible.

And our version of vanschooling. Or what happens when Mom really needs a break so Dad takes all the kids to karate.

Abby's Dessert

I've been wanting to take a break from ice cream on Sunday nights for our Sundae's on Sunday tradition for a while.  Mostly because it seems I can't eat ice cream myself anymore without feeling sick which is truly quite a bummer. We wanted to start adding small simple traditions to our daily life but sometime the same old thing gets a bit boring for Mom and Dad.

This week Abby helped me make a banana split dessert. I seem to recall my Mom making something of this sort a time or two when we were growing up but I'm not sure if this was it.  I looked at a few recipes on-line and then tweaked them a bit to match what we had in the house at the time. We ended up with something simple, almost no-bake but decidedly not a healthy dessert. Alan claims it can be considered healthy because it has bananas and pineapple in it. I'm not sure if we really want to go down that road because I can see the absolute potential for truly abusing that kind of a rule.  Anyway, here's what we did just in case you want to try it yourself.

Mix about 2 cups of crushed graham crackers with 1 stick of melted butter. Spread in the bottom of a 9 by 13 pan and bake for 5 minutes or so.  Combine 16 oz of softened cream cheese with 2 cups of powdered sugar and layer on top of the crust.  Next cut up 3 bananas and layer those on.   Top with one can of drained crushed pineapple.  The next layer is a container of cool-whip type whipped cream stuff.  Then you can add marachino cherries or chocolate or nuts or whatever you might like or have around. Like I said, not healthy but sometimes it is nice to just not worry about such things.

Katie in the Kitchen

Katie was in charge of dinner last night.  She did at least 90% of the work to make this alphabet soup for dinner.  She even helped with cutting up the meat.  It was absolutely delicious and super easy to make since you just put everything in the crock pot. 

We doubled the recipe and honestly should have tripled it or more.  As written the recipe really makes about 4 servings I think.  Or it could be that the crock pot we used does cook a bit hot so a bit of the broth was cooked off and I didn't quite add enough water back in during the day.  We used small shells instead of alphabet shaped pasta because that was what we had in the house.  I plan on picking up the alphabet pasta on the next shopping trip for the next time we make this soup.  I never buy stewed tomatoes so we just used diced instead and I'd imagine any tomatoes you have in the house would work.  I would just make sure you use something that is bigger than a puree so you actually see the tomatoes in the soup.  You can also easily keep the amount of beef in the soup small (only double the beef amount while quadrupling the soup recipe) without loosing out on taste which helps keep the cost in an economical range.  With the only processed food truly being the onion soup mix (which you can just switch out and use diced onions and a bit of beef broth instead), this is a wonderful meal to start your kids cooking.  Real food, real simple, really delicious.

Better Than Something Cake

I was looking for something different to make for a snack after the crew was in bed the other day and came upon a few recipes for Better Than S3x Cake. Just hoping to avoid the spam bots there but I'm sure you can figure out what it means.  Amazingly enough when I was crazy enough to put the title into google, I did not get unwanted crap.  But I still won't let my kids google something like that.  I combined two recipes and we loved it.  Just need a better title for the kids to use. Sigh.

 And I've discovered that I am incapable of using a recipe written by Paula Dean without hearing the recipe in my head in her southern drawl.  Just try it yourself. I bet you'll hear "boil" in a whole new light.  Here's the recipes we combined: Food Network and Allrecipes.

Seriously, this was yummy goodness.  You must try it yourself. Just make sure you have plenty of folks to help eat it.