Latest love and hash brown casserole

Okay, so I’ve been mia again… but for a really good reason… I have found my latest love…  PINTEREST!  It’s SUCH an easy way to keep tabs on all the things I find that peak my interest…  it’s like bookmarking with pictures!  Of course I spend way too much time browsing than actually making/doing any of the things I pin, but hey, a gals gotta start somewhere!

My son absolutely loves hash browns (he’s a total carb addict like his mama…), so I thought this would be something good to try one morning…

From A Southern Fairy Tale, this sounds totally delish… SO not on my diet, but oh well… 

Monkey Munch

Okay… had to add one more thing… (although going through her site, I may as well just put it all here… I’m in heaven I tell you… HEAVEN…)

Yeah, so maybe it’s not so new, but hey, it’s new to me!

 

 

St. Patrick’s Day inspirations

Will I ever do/make any of these?  Maybe not… but I can still crush on them…

 

St. Patrick’s Day Cake Pops

Just one of the things from Love From the Oven that I’m drooling over…

St. Patrick’s Day Brownies

St. Patrick’s Day Ice Cream Jello

Just found this blog and I am in LOVE!!!!!  If I didn’t read it for myself, I’d swear she was actually a Hawaii-transplant…  she makes everything that I love and grew up with!

 

St. Patrick’s Day Whoopie Pies

Not a big Lucky Charms fan, but I’d totally make this minus the singing leprechaun…

Swimming anyone??

Munchkin #2 is actually having a birthday party this year!  She’s always wanted an outdoor birthday party…  her birthday is December 20th… yeah, you do the math…

The past two years we’ve said that we’d put it off and have a half-birthday in the summer, but when summer rolled around, she wasn’t really all that enthusiastic about having it.  Before you get all up in my grill, we DID actually have a family celebration for her… I’m just talking about a party with her school friends.

So this year we’re having a swim party in Dec… yup, you heard me right.  A swim party.  Thankfully it’s an indoor swim center, complete with slides, a lazy river, and a water-filled jungle gym. 

So her theme?  Owls.  Yeah, don’t ask me how owls and swimming fit in together, but we’re going with it anyway.   I’ll let you know how it all turns out.

A couple of things I worked out so far (I know, I know… the party’s on Monday!)…

~The favors are going to be dollar store travel mugs filled with a packet of hot cocoa and marshmallows.   I also found a site where you can print your own 2011 Owl Calendar, so I’ll be adding those into the mix as well.

~The invitations and some of the decorations is coming from Amy over at Living Locurto… I fell in love with this set from her shop… I am SO doing these Owl Smores!!!!

~I’m hoping to have some other things up my sleeve, but we’ll see if I ever get around to any of them…

Procrastinate?  Who, me???

Thankful for my teacher…

So I’m making a little “I’m thankful” jar for our teacher to present to her during our Stone Soup/Thanksgiving luncheon next Friday and I started looking around for more ideas for later on when we have teacher appreciation week.  I stumbled upon this really cute idea from Skip To My Lou…

And I just so happen to have an extra pill box too!!!  I am SO doing this one!

All wrapped up!

Popcorn Turkey!!!

OMG, how cute is this??????

 

Thanksgiving Turkey from One Charming Party

I am SO doing this one for our classroom feast… not only is it totally sweet, but it’s easy too (right up my alley!!).

 

Check out the instructions over at One Charming Party!!

Damn you, Costco!

WHY is it that I just can’t get out of Costco with anything less than $200 worth of “stuff”???

I had an hour! That’s it! Not enough time to peruse the isles… just enough time to get in, kill my list, pay and get out… NOT! What I calculated to be a $175-$200 hit and run ended up turning into a $430 shopping spree… YIPES!!

The sad part? I didn’t even buy anything for me!

Yeah, yeah…  my pantry and freezer are both fully  stocked, and now I have no excuse to hit the drive thru’s (although, knowing me, I’ll find the excuse anyway), but still…

And now I have to actually sit down and menu plan so I don’t end up throwing stuff away due to freezer burn…

Where’s my buck-fifty hot dog???

Epic Fail!

I was trying to get my inner-martha to surface and prove herself yesterday… don’t ask me why…

My attempt to re-create Bakerella’s Cake Pops yesterday ended up with nothing but a bunch of wasted time and a lot of orange pops in the trash… sigh.

I started off with the boxed red velvet cake – WRONG! My daughter made a r-v cake a month ago from scratch and it was fabulous… and it wasn’t all that hard, but silly me decides to go the even easier route and do the box brand… sorry, but after you’ve tasted it from scratch, the box stuff just doesn’t cut it. But so what, right? I’m adding frosting and candy coating to it, so it can’t be all that bad, right??

Next, the frosting… if I wasn’t going to make the cake from scratch, why would I make the frosting from scratch?? Yup, used the canned version… blech. But hey, it’s small little bites, and the candy coating can still save it…

Nope.

Like a big doofus, I ended up putting WAY too much shortening in the candy coating to make it to the desired consistency… Mind you, I NEVER use shortening, so had no clue as to how badly it would turn out… I was just going for consistency, never bothering to really taste it first…

So I do all the pops, and it’s okay… nowhere near the perfect round little marvels that Bakerella does (how does ANYONE make it perfectly round and the perfect size everytime???)… nope, mine were more realistic pumpkins… odd shaped, bumps all over, you know the deal…

But I go along my merry way and dip all the cake balls and towards the end, I was getting the coating to look pretty smooth and thought I was really getting the hang of it…

Then I tried to draw on the faces, but of course I didn’t get the right type of edible marker… I could barely get one little eyeball on there when it just stopped working… SHEESH! I just gave up and figured they’d be round little orange balls instead… that’ll still work right??

Then they dried, and I decided to try one… so in my excitement, I give one to each of the kiddos and hubby, and we all take a bite together… and we all made the same face together… BLECH! They tasted like burnt oil, slathered with some sugar to cover the taste. The kids, bless their hearts, tried to eat more and tell me that it was good, but there was NO WAY I was going to let keep eating them….

I didn’t even have the heart to take pictures, it was that bad…

Next time that inner-martha voice returns, I’m beating her down, leaving the job to the actual martha’s of the world, and going back to bed!

It’s been how long??

2 years… yup… that’s how long this frozen entree bag has been in my freezer, hiding, way in back (don’t even want to look at what else is hiding in there… yeesh!).

The only reason I actually pulled it out was because a friend called me up asking if I remembered the ingredients for a meal that we made at Now We’re Cooking, an assembly kitchen in Danville (so sad that it closed… fabulous concept, great recipes, friendly and helpful staff…) and I vaguely remembered seeing that ominous ziplock bag with the bright white instruction label peeking out at me behind the bags of frozen veggies and waffles.  But of course, now that she brought it up, it made me start craving that wonderfully delicious skirt steak and the quest was on… (Google is my best friend!!)

I heard that Lisa, the owner of NWC, was going to publish a cookbook of the recipes from the kitchen… crossing my fingers worked…kinda…  turns out that Lisa took the NWC website and turned it into her personal blog, and included recipes, personal and those from the kitchen… YIPEE!!!

This was my absolute favorite recipe from Lisa… for now… I’m still going over her blog and looking at all the other delish-sounding recipes…I copied this directly off her site (I chose to keep out the Blue Cheese, but that’s just me)…

Marinated Skirt Steaks with Bleu Cheese or Caramelized Shallot Butter

½ cup hoisin sauce

¼ cup brown sugar

1 Tablespoon garlic

2 teaspoons ginger

2 Tablespoons rice vinegar

1 Tablespoon Mae Ploy sweet chile sauce

6 6-ounce skirt steaks

½ cup bleu cheese crumbles

3 Tablespoons shallot butter (recipe below)

1. Mix the first 6 ingredients together well.  Pour over steaks.  Turn the steaks a few times so they’re fully coated.  Cover and let marinate in the refrigerator for 4-24 hours.  (You can also put them all in a plastic bag and freeze them. The steaks will marinate while they’re defrosting in the refrigerator.)
2. Fire up the grill to high temperature.  Remove steaks from marinade; discard marinade.  Grill steaks for 3-5 minutes per side to desired doneness.  Top with bleu cheese and melt for 1 minute.  Or, if using shallot butter, top steaks immediately before serving.  Alternatively, you can broil the steaks, about 6 inches away from the broiler element.

Someone posted a question about how to cut the skirt steaks.  Skirt steak is a long piece of beef that’s covered in loose fat.  Lay out the steaks and trim the loose fat by running a chef’s knife or boning knife away under the fat, and then angling the knife away from the beef while you run it down the length of the steaks.  Then cut across the narrow part of the steak (with the grain) to portion it into portions of equal weight.

When it’s cooked, you want to cut against the grain.  Here’s a short video from youtube showing how to do that.

Caramelized Shallot Butter

1 tablespoon shallots, finely chopped

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 Tablespoon soy sauce

1/2 teaspoon tarragon, dried

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

1 stick unsalted butter, softened

Finely chop shallots.  In a small pan, saute in olive oil, stirring frequently, until shallots have begun to caramelize, about 20-30 minutes.  Stir in soy sauce and cook until all liquid is evaporated.  Stir in tarragon and pepper.  Remove from heat, let cool.  Process in food processor until butter is smooth and creamy with bits of shallots.

Journal Jars

So I started a couple of projects to do while I’m at the computer…

While I LOVE scrapbooking, my reality is that I actually only sit down to scrap when the girls and I are out on a scrap-night (which is next to never nowadays).  With all the pictures I take, they’re just sitting there, waiting for me to do something to them… so I’ve taken it upon myself to do something quick and easy – every once in a while, when the inclination hits me, I’ll open up my photo folder in my computer and randomly pick a photo or two and just simply paste it onto my word program, then either write the story behind the picture, a brief caption, or what I’m feeling when I look at it… no embellishments, no cute background paper, no perfectionism… just the picture and the words… at least this way, if I never get around to scrapping the photo, at least the kids will have some of my thoughts to go along with it…

The other thing is that I’m trying to keep my journal… I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started one, only to get a couple of days (maybe weeks, if I’m good) into it, and then abandon it for months, years, even.  So now I just sit at my computer while watching TV at night, and randomly put down my thoughts… not necessarily what happened that day, just my thoughts on whatever comes up.  With the life that I’ve led, many people have told me that I need to write it down… yup, I could star in my own soap opera, let me tell you…  hopefully this is my way of actually getting things done – leaving the perfectionism out and just doing…

So along those lines, I stumbled on a journal jar tutorial from Dana-Made-It

(I actually found it after finding her Beach Towel Dress post – another TOO CUTE project that I have on my list of things I’d love to do but will probably never get around to)… I love it… simplicity at it’s best… I think I’m going to make one for both of the kids too – it’ll help them with their writing over the summer, and hopefully they’ll have something wonderful to look at when they’re older (I only wish I kept my journals from when I was younger… sigh)…