Breakfast..

.. its whats for dinner.

My kids love having breakfast for dinner.  I love making breakfast for dinner because it is quick, easy and cheap.  My husband loves having breakfast for dinner mostly because it is cheap.

Tonight I made pancakes using my favorite recipe from Better Homes and Gardens.  I like this recipe because you don't need buttermilk or sour milk and it is really easy to double for a larger family like mine.  I always double the recipe and that makes about 18 pancakes.

I mix the dry ingredients in one bowl and the wet ingredients in the other.  It saves clean up to mix my wet ingredients in a large liquid measuring cup.

 I very gently whisk the wet and dry ingredients together.  It is really important not to over mix or your pancakes will be tough and who wants tough pancakes?

 I use a flat stove top griddle to cook my pancakes and I do 4 at one time.  It can be tricky to flip them over but when you have starving kids around you have to do what you have to do.

Son 1 took this photo of his plate of pancakes.  We are working on teaching the kids to cut up their own food, but it is hard to break the habit of cutting everything for them.

If you have extra pancakes left over, they store really well in the refrigerator and can be reheated in the microwave. 

Fresh fruit is also a delicious addition, I love berries and bananas in mine.

Enjoy!

Clear schedule..

..sick kid

Well it's finally happened, we went unscathed from the cold and flu season until today. 

Daughter is home from school with a 102 fever.  She is missing the 100 day of school celebration and fun friday.  Daughter is not a happy camper.

Me, well I'm sorry she isn't feeling well, but nothing clears my schedule faster than a sick child.

I'm going to try and enjoy my day home, have a great weekend!

Happy Valentines Day!

or Telenovela Hair day, depending on how you look at it.

Valentine's gifts

For me, once you've been married for more than a decade and have multiple children, the hearts and flowers stuff seems to lose its charm.  Don't get me wrong, I LOVED coming home after volunteering at the elementary school this morning to find a bouquet and romantic card waiting for me.  But Valentine's Day gifts aren't the end all.

What really counts with me, is the day to day stuff... cleaning up after dinner, putting away laundry, tackling jobs around the house, spending time together laughing... those things are my daily Valentine's gifts.

This weekend we have a date set at the Crow Bar and Kitchen in Corona Del Mar, this really isn't a "Valentine's Date", just one of our regular night's out together.  The Crow Bar is one of my favorites!  Since this date is slightly more upscale then dinner at Zankou Chicken and shopping at Lowes, I decided to book myself an appointment for some beautification.

I love getting my hair done, it is one of my favorite Mom treats.  Adolfo, my trusty stylist, always manages to tame my mop of hair and today I'm a Telanovela star.

Have a great day!

When your life gives you lemons..

make some lemon cake!

A couple of days ago my husband pointed out that our cute little Meyer lemon tree was loaded with 9 lemons.  Since the tree is about 2 feet tall, that is quite a harvest.  So I picked the lemons and decided to use a Barefoot Contessa lemon cake recipe that I love.

The only changes that I've made to the recipe are making the frosting thicker by reducing the amount of lemon juice and leaving off the lemon simple syrup.  In my experience cooking lemon juice never ends well, for some reason it gets stinky and nasty.

The cake is simple to make. I prepared by pans by using some parchment paper in the bottom and buttering the sides.  I usually flour the plan as well, but today I didn't.  I zested the lemons and then juiced them.

Just an eensy bit of butter here, ok, maybe quite a bit of butter.  The recipe makes 2 loaves though and each loaf serves 12 so when you calculate all of that it isn't that bad, right???

After creaming the butter and sugar together for 5 minutes you get a light and fluffy result, I'm ready to add the eggs.

At this point the batter looks curdled but it is ok.  Make sure you clean off the beater because the lemon zest really sticks to it.

Sift the dry ingredients together and mix the wet ingredients in a separate container.  Alternate adding each of these with the butter mixture.

Divide the batter between 2 pans and bake.

Voila! I frost the cakes using with lemon juice and powdered sugar.  Make the icing thick and spoon it over the cooled loaves.

 Enjoy :)

Serenaded by screaming children...

otherwise known as making dinner.  I'm sure I'm not the only Mom who has had to cook dinner while a child performs a level 5 screaming fit.  Tonight it was my turn.  On the menu was: Creamy tomato linguine, salad and toasted bread.  By the time dinner was served I'd given up on the salad when I realized I needed to make dressing in addition to preparing the lettuce, oh well.

Creamy Tomato Linguine

2-3 shallots finely diced
3-4 cloves of garlic, finely diced
2 cans of diced tomatoes (with or without Italian seasoning)
1 cup of wine
1/4-1/2 cup of heavy cream, depending on how creamy you want the sauce
1 pound of linguine noodles

1.  Saute the shallots and garlic in a bit of olive oil until soft.
2.  Add the diced tomatoes, wine and then fill up one of the cans the tomatoes came in with water and throw that in as well.
3.  Simmer uncovered until all the liquid is gone, this step takes about an hour.
4.  Meanwhile start the water boiling for the noodles
5.  Cook the noodles when the sauce is almost to step 6
6.  Sauce: once all the liquid is evaporated, add the cream and turn the heat on very low.  Add the al dente noodles into the sauce and mix noodles to coat.
7. Serve!

Saute the veggies

Sauce just beginning to simmer, lots of liquid

Sauce ready for the cream

Creamy tomato sauce waiting for noodles

This meal is very popular with the children, especially when they have exhausted themselves with crying.  Enjoy!

Crafted at Port of Los Angeles..

so I've been wanted to go try out the Crafted warehouse in POLA since I read an article about it in the Sunset Magazine a while back, today was the day.

Crafted

Although the name mentions Los Angeles, Crafted is located in the City of San Pedro.  I really enjoyed the drive out to San Pedro, it is fun to have some adult conversation in the front seat.  I remember the days when the kids couldn't eavesdrop, but those days are long gone. Spelling out words out has also passed, now we have to talk in coded double entendre.  We could be that couple in 'Americans' except for, well, almost everything in that show now that I think about it.

Anyhoo, San Pedro is an interesting place.  It isn't that easy to get to, but I love driving over the bridges (a steel truss bridge and a steel suspension bridge, no I don't know bridges, I asked Nadim :).  Once there, I'm reminded that a working port is really pretty ugly but fascinating.  The cargo ships are HUGE, the cranes bigger and the grime factor is surprising considering all the real estate is water front.  This isn't the OC.

So we cruised down Harbor Blvd past Ports Of Call and the Maritime Museum, until we hit Crafted.  The old warehouse looks pretty good with its new paint and they had an interesting garden with "art" in it.

garden filled with native plants

jeep as a garden art installation

Once inside it was a bit of a let down.  I would say that 60% of the booths are vacant.  The shops that were there were cute, but a bit expensive with lots of jewelry options and not much else.  Not much in the way of food either.

lots of empty store fronts

quilts!  finally something other than jewelry.

here are some people

There was a really cool industrial art fan, that Nadim pointed out.  It's hard to appreciate the scale in the picture, but it was really big.

ceiling fan

The kids found this art piece - a baby sculpture made out of metal mesh and filled with toys the artist found at the dump.  I found this to be both interesting and disturbing.

kids picking their favorite toys

close up of the discarded toys

I think this place has great potential, but it has a long, long way to go.  On the way home in the car I did some research and vendors there pay $500 a month rent.  I don't see how they sell enough product to make any kind of profit.

Crafted was summed up nicely by Son 1 "Mom, this place has lots of cool stuff, but it is really expensive!"  Indeed.

It's Valentines Day...

and that means cookies for the Mother/Daughter group I am in with Daughter called Adventure Maidens.  AM is the updated version of Indian Maidens for those of you who are familiar with YMCA youth groups.

yum!

Anyway this year I happen to be Princess of our Expedition and that means making little treats for all the girls whose Mothers volunteer their time to serve on the board.  This month Daughter and I decided to make cookies.

3 dozen cookies cooling off

I used this Alton Brown recipe for the dough.  I really like it and I've tried quite a few.  The dough is very tender though, so if you are going to make cut-outs I recommend rolling the dough out to 3/8 inch instead of 1/4 inch.  The thicker cookies will hold up to decorating.

the dough was really cold and hard to roll out

heart cut outs

Since we are doing a Valentine's theme pink frosting was in order.  I used the standard frosting recipe that I've noted already on the Feathery Fudge cake post.  Red sprinkles can't hurt and then I added each girl's first initial with some white icing.

Happy Valentine's Day!

What to do with one very ripe banana?

Make some muffins!  Of course I looked and looked and couldn't find a recipe that used only 1 banana, so I had to improvise.  I pulled out my trusty Betty Crocker from the 1970's and found a generic muffin recipe called Sweet Muffins.  I checked their online recipe index and they do not have this recipe listed so I've included it here.

Perfect get home from school snack

Sweet Muffins
1 egg
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

Heat oven to 400 degrees.  Prepare 12 medium muffin cups by either greasing or lining with a liner.  Beat egg; stir in milk and oil.  Mix in remaining ingredients just until flour is moistened.  Batter should be lumpy.  Fill muffin cups 2/3 full and bake for 20-25 minutes.

To this basic recipe I added 1 diced very ripe banana to the batter.

I made a quick struesel for the top by mushing up 1 Tablespoons butter, 2 Tablespoons brown sugar and 1/2 tsp cinnamon.  I sprinkled the struesel on top and popped them in the oven.  When the muffins came out I realized that the oven was pretty hot at 400 degrees.  When I make these again, I would reduce the temp to 375 degrees and bake for the same amount of time.

The muffins were a hit with all 3 kids, enjoy!

Summitting Mount Everest..

or Mountain Everest as Son 2 likes to call it.

Way, way back in the 80's I was in a Masonic youth program for girls called "Job's Daughters".  Anyway, girls were elected to be the youth leader, called Honored Queen, for a term of 6 months.  Once elected it was your job to run the meetings and plan the calender.

One of many hand embroidered quilt square

Well, I was Honored Queen of Bethel 13 Fullerton in 1986.  When my term of Honored Queen was almost up, all the girls and adults in the program embroidered me a quilt square for a "Honored Queen's Quilt".  This was quite an undertaking and my Grandma Johnson (my Mom's Mom) embroidered many of my activity squares.  The quilt was supposed to be finished and presented to me at my Honored Queen's luncheon, but that didn't happen.

Embroidered by my Grandma

The quilt squares sat around and I embroidered some of the missing ones off and on for years.  Last year I got really motivated to finish it up.  I started talking quilt squares to Daughter's ballet class and working on them at home. I finally finished all the embroidery and assembled the quilt top.  Believe it or not this was not the most difficult part.

Another square embroidered by my Grandma

The most difficult part I undertook today, creating a quilt sandwich.  I used a spray mount to stabilize by quilt back, batting and top.  I was really intimated to do this and kept putting it off.  The quilt is big, really to big to handle myself.  But I decided to go for it this morning.

Getting ready for my Mt. Everest attempt

My driveway and garage door covered with my quilt

It was sunny enough for the spray mount to work well, so I went out in my drive way and got to work.  Two hours later my quilt was mounted!  I am so excited.  All that is left is to do some machine quilting to hold everything together.

Quilt ready to come down and be stitched on

clean up time!

27 years in the making and I'm in the final stretch!

What's for dinner?

Chicken and Dumplings that's what!  Son 2 usually requests chicken and dumplings when it is his week to select a family dinner.  My recipe was my Mom's, and it was one of my favorites as a child.  It couldn't be simpler to make:

Chicken and Dumplings... it's whats for dinner!

Chicken and Dumplings

STEW
3 stalks celery, medium dice (if you want to fish the celery out at the end just cut the stalks in half instead)
bunch of carrots, peel and medium dice (if you want to fish out the carrots also cut in half instead)
4-6 chicken boneless, skinless breasts (I used 4), cut into 3 pieces each
48 ozs of chicken broth
pepper

DUMPLINGS
3 cups Bisquick
1 cup milk

Ready to simmer

Throw all the stew ingredients into a dutch oven and simmer for 1 1/2 hours or until chicken is very tender.  Adjust seasoning, be careful with salt depending on your chicken broth.

first 10 minutes of dumplings cooking

Make dumplings by mixing the Bisquick with the milk, dough will be sticky.  Drop by spoonfuls onto boiling stew (try and set the dumplings on a piece of chicken to hold it up).  Reduce heat; cook uncovered 10 minutes.  Cover and cook an additional 10 minutes.  *This makes enough for two decent size dumplings per person.  If you want more or less dumplings just add or deduct 1 cup of flour and 1/3 cup of milk.

dinner ready to be served

Enjoy!

Update to the Mission Report and Excursion to the LA Zoo

It's official - our - Son 1's grade is in and *drum roll please* he got a perfect score!  You could have knocked me over with a feather.  Son 1's teacher is a very hard grader and is one of those teachers who gives everyone a 'C'.

Here it is, the perfect score.

 Back to our regular programing...

Excursion to the LA Zoo.  I don't think I've ever been to the LA Zoo, but it is possible that my Mom will comment on here and correct me :)  Anyway, we decided to take a quick road trip on Sunday before the Super Bowl.

We had a quick drive out and found the Zoo.

Front Gate

 In all honesty the Zoo was a bit depressing.  Most enclosures were small, the layout was haphazard and the map/signage was horrible.  The kids enjoyed seeing the animals though, here are some highlights:

Black necked swans are back there somewhere.

Flamingos were stinky

Indian Rhino was cool

Giraffes were tall

Elephant!

Heading home

I don't think we will be back anytime soon.  It's pretty tough to compete with the Safari Park and San Diego Zoo.  Although our favorite is still the Living Desert our in Palm Desert.

Happy Monday and have a great week!