Fourth of July treats

 The kids and I picked free strawberries at Spooners farm on Monday in prep for this perfect pie. Super easy to make: pre-baked pie crust (flour, butter, touch of salt and water), strawberries halved. Glaze was water, sugar, strawberry gelatin, lemon juice and strawberry extract. Brought it all to a boil, let it cool, topped my berries. It's setting in the fridge as we speak. For the amazing recipe go here


Breakfast this morning was waffles and bacon, sometime between the bacon sizzling and the coffee ready to perk I realized we were fresh out of maple syrup. What's a girl to do?  Solution...strawberry sauce! I dumped a pint of my fresh picked berries in a blender, with 1/3-1/2 cup of sugar, a tablespoon of fresh squeezed lemon juice, set to puree. Tada! Fabulous fresh syrup for our waffles!

 lunch was the usual American fare (hot dogs, chips, cola, etc) but instead of a potato salad I did an antipasto salad thanks to Giada. Chunks of hard salami, green olives, smoked turkey, asiago cheese and a homemade dressing (basil, red wine vinegar, olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper) and we have a delicious , amazingly light, salad. Jonathan says this is the only pasta salad I should ever make. It was also suppose to have chunks of provolone. But I'm pregnant and how is a girl suppose to follow a shopping list when she's in my condition? LOL Check out the yummy recipe here

now time for fun in the sun (okay, laying in my lounger with a book) until fireworks!

Granola

Quite a few of my friends have had the wonderful luxury of sampling my delicious granola. Today I'm making, yet another batch, to bring and share with granola-less friends.

Sadly, this isn't "my" recipe, as most recipes I make aren't. It's really Alton Browns on foodnetwork.com, which my mother graciously shared with a me a few years back when I was in need of a simple granola recipe.

But I have altered it slightly, thus making it my own.

The wonderful thing about granola is it's versatility, adding a little of this and a little of that. Over the years I've made it with all kinds of nuts, dried fruits and various sweeteners. A few examples are Almonds, walnuts, cashews, peanuts, pecans, flax seed, dried mango, dried pineapple, raisins, cranberries, strawberries, blueberries, sweetened and unsweetened coconut, maple syrup, honey, sugar, brown sugar and my current favorite, sucanat. As for my oil choices I've stuck with canola but olive oil has also been used and I honestly can't tell much of a difference.

My basic recipe is:
3 cups rolled oats
1 cup sliced almonds
1 cup walnuts
1 cup crasians (to be added at the end)
1 cup organic shredded, unsweetened coconut
1/4 cup sucanat
1/3 cup oil (canola or olive, depending on what I have on hand)
1/4 cup plus a bit extra Maple syrup
1 teaspoon salt

Preheat oven 250

Mix dry ingrediants together. Mix wet ingrediants. Combine the two until dry ingrediants are well coated. Pour into a large cookie sheet and spread out evenly. Cook for 1hr. Remove and turn granola, cook an additional 15min. Cool completely, add dried fruit and store in an air tight container.

My family and I usually eat our granola with a milk, but we also enjoy it over plain greek yogurt and as a crunchy topping over ice-cream. These also make delicious granola bars!! (but here is a really good step by step granola bar recipe!)

Update

I don't think I'm coming back to regular posting. But regardless of how Facebook has overtaken any time that I would normally spend blogging...I just felt sad that there were no current pictures on my blog. Even though myself, nor others I assume, read my blog any more. LOL

Oh well, so here is my big Jade-y girl. At 5yrs 6mons she's finished Kindergarten and has her very first loose tooth! This summer she's continuing with gymnastics and spends a lot of time helping me and playing with friends.

 Cutter is 2yrs 3mons and I think I'm confident enough now to say he is potty trained! I bought him some boxer briefs to celebrate and he happily parade's around the house in his little man underwear forcing me to give his little tushie plenty of pinches throughout the day. He's starting to talk, though I'd say his favorite words are still "run, jump and "help-a me mommy"

 Here are my 20mon pics of me and baby Bechtle. I'm at 21 weeks now (oooo *wink*) but I look exactly the same. haha! Jade was gracious enough to be my photographer for these.

 My baby guess is it's a girl. JB is fairly confident it's a boy.

 We won't find out until d-day though, so we all get to be caught up in the suspense!

I still enjoy cooking and I'm finding Pinterest to be my best friend in finding new recipes and inspiration. One day I hope to turn this family blog into "What Missi's cooking for dinner" blog. But I have yet to master the art of "pretty food pics". Sadly most of the food pics I taste do not do my delicious food justice and it's just not fun taking pics of food that aren't appealing. One day blog world, one day!

My Kids

At the beginning of the year, look how cute and young they looked. Jade had just turned four here.

Cutter was just at the scooting from here and there stage, but not actually walking. Not quite a year old here.

Then summer finally came (it was really late last year!) And suddenly Jade is this big four year old, doing swim classes and gymnastics and asking every day if we can play with friends or go to the park

Cutter starts walking around 15months and is into EVERYTHING and clearly loving his more mobile life!
At the end of 2012 Jade is clearly an old four, her play time with her friends is a big deal to her and she gives her girlfriends hugs good bye and hello. She enjoys AWANA, school and helping me around the house
Cutter starts talking a bit more, instead of just "Dada and Momma" he also says "baby" and "ni night" starting to sound out words like more "mooo" and please, "peas" and thank you "ank ou" He pretty much runs every where, in his little toddler toddle run

It's so much fun to see the progression of my kids in just a years time. Not just physical differences but even the way they interact with friends and family. Love my little bundles and can't wait for another fabulous year with them!

Oh, and here is my superman opening gifts at Christmas. The spoon rest is a joke gift, but I love that I captured his obvious enthusiasm over the gift. hee, hee

He's grown and been amazing this year too. With all his responsibilities as CEO of the Freedom Foundation, you'd think the man would go batty and never have time for his hot wife and wonderful kids. But he does and clearly has tried very hard to keep family first. I appreciate his dedication and the sacrifices he makes and I'm so proud of his accomplishments, and through it all that he can still strike an awesome pose at Christmas over a spoon rest! haha!

A little end of year post

Since my last post in September Jade has truly excelled in school. She loves everything about it and then some.

We only do school Mondays and then Wed-Fri for around an hour, hour and half. Because of this, many afternoons Jade is asking me "is it school time yet?"

We just started reading the week of Christmas, and Jade is very excited for school break to be over so we can hit the books again.

In cooking updates, there have been many new recipes I've tried, and loved. Ones I've actually remembered to take pictures of are as follows:

Pumpkin mousse pie

Starbucks inspired Pumpkin Spiced Cupcakes

Now, this one I can't say I really "loved" it, but it gets an honorable mention because it was the first (and perhaps last) time I ever cooked with quinoa. Granted, I was missing many of the ingredients for the recipe, so that may be why it wasn't my favorite thing ever. LOL

Quinoa Cakes

Cranberry Salsa with cream cheese

Coconut Chocolate pie

I don't have a recipe for this one, as it was a combination of ideas. A devils food chocolate cupcake with meringue frosting and just a piece of chocolate and graham cracker. I had owned a small cooking torch I would have toasted the tops to make it more like a s'more :-) On my wish list!

This is also a combination of ideas. I took a cinnamon bun recipe from my Mother-in-law and then twisted the dough up like a tree. Made a little glaze and added sprinkles for the kids:-)

And then, there is this cake. I'll attach the link for what I was attempting to copy but sadly this cake did not come close to what I had hoped.

I made this for a friend's baby shower, and it was a very last minute plan. Thus, I didn't really do any research on the actual cake recipe I used and didn't even scroll down on the inspiration link to see what the real recipe was.

So my "chocolate" cake turned out very, very, very, dry and very, very, very bland. The frosting was good, and the malt balls were fabulous. But I did run out of malt balls and had to use whoppers. Which, are nice...but the real malt balls had a LOT more chocolate coating, and thus, more delicious.

Also, not pictured, was right before I boxed it up, I brushed the top of the malt balls with edible gold dust powder. See the inspiration link for why:-)

I'm not gonna lie, there were a lot of "ball" jokes thrown around at this shower when they saw the cake. hee, hee....we are a mature bunch of women.

Malted milk ball chocolate cake

With this year now coming to a close, there are a few things I'll continue to look forward to. Spending as much as time possible with my wonderful family, continuing to workout and be fit (despite the lack of weightloss, lol), continuing to eat healthy, and finding LOTS and LOTS of wonderful, new recipes to try at home (thanks mostly to pintrest!)

My resolutions for the new year is to continue to spend time in the word and in prayer every day!

Continuing to workout four days a week

Make smart food choices

Spend time with friends and family as much as possible (this I know I can keep!)

And avoid gossip and negative conversations

I'm excited to see what this New Year holds and can't wait for it to get started!

Kindergarten

One year ago I started Jade in homeschool Preschool

Even though she is half a year to young to start Kindergarten, we decided to go ahead and start her early anyway. She's been teaching herself how to read this summer, learned to count to 100 just for fun and has been aching to return to school, daily asking me "is it Fall yet".
So here we are, one year later and just as eager as she was at 3.5yrs. LOL
baby Cutter isn't so much a baby any more, and while he took his morning nap during our school hour (yes, just one hour...though tomorrow we may need to go longer. Jade was disappointed when I told her we were done) he too was eager to start a new year!
we are doing some sing, spell, read and write for Phonics, here Jade is coloring away on what she called the "easy page" LOL

I don't post any more:-(

It's kind of a bummer I don't feel like posting any more. With facebook so many of my immediate blog needs are met, that I don't really care to post pictures and update my blog.

I guess most casual bloggers drift away after a few years, so my time has come.

Sometimes I think I'd like to turn this into a food journal, post pics of all the new recipes I try. Like recently trying Giada's Lemon Hazelnut Tiramisu ,
but sadly, though I probably try a new or super yummy recipe at least once a week, I'm awful about taking pics of said food, and defiantly bad about the step by step process. I enjoy cooking, but I'd rather have someone watching over my shoulder taking pics, then break up the blissful routine of making my meal. lol

Anyway, I don't plan on deleting my blog, cause you knows, maybe I will update it every 6mons or so, and I'd hate to lose all the wonderful pictures of the past that I've posted on here.

I guess I'll see what happens:-)

Mantou or steamed rolls

I hosted bookclub at my home last night. Every time we meet we try to provide foods that were talked about in the book or are some how related to the book.

Our book club read "Safely home" which mostly takes place in China. While googling "traditional chinese foods" I came across the blog "Almost Bourdain". I immediately fell in love with the recipes chronicled there and decided to try her Mantou, or steamed buns.

While my pictures are not as beautiful, nor my result as perfect. I'm very excited about my first attempt at steamed buns (which, like Almost Bourdain, I did deep fry half my batch and served them with condensed milk)
I think one of my favorite things about this recipe, is needing to borrow my neighbors kitchen scale to measure the ingredients.
When not given to me in "cups" and "teaspoons" I do find myself very lost. However, measuring my sugar and yeast and flour, using a kitchen scale, I did feel like a culinary master and can't wait to try another recipe that requires measuring weight, apposed to volume:-)


if you try this same recipe, I recommend not trying to fit four rolls in your steamer at a time. Instead, copy "Almost Bourdain" and do just three. When they steam cook, they rise even more and mine stuck together a bit.

I wish I had take a picture of the inside for you to see. Perhaps mine were slightly over cooked, but they were still fairly fluffy on the inside. The deep fried ones were perfectly golden and crisp on the outside and the milk added just the right amount of sweetness to each bite.

It was well worth the effort and was a surprisingly simple roll to make. I will be making these again!

I also served my guests, beef and broccoli with steamed rice and Singapore noodles with beef instead of chicken. Oh and I also managed to find, pre-made chocolate covered fortune cookies with little love fortunes inside:-)

pics

This was taken about two weeks ago. We are starting the beginning stages of potty training. hee, hee
Here is Fourth of July, around 8am, kids doing "poppers" in the front yard. Good morning neighbors!

Jade doing a cute little "Cheese" face

Cutter at the fourth of July festival:-)

This was taken today at a "Tangled" birthday party Jade was invited to. All the little girls got braids and flowers in their hair.

Some pictures from this week

With no plans yet made for my day, I've spent the morning just playing around on the computer. I thought I'd post some pictures from this week that I'd taken on my phone.

Jonathan took me on a date last Friday, we played a round of miniature golf and then bought the largest bucket of golf balls we could get and practiced our very poor golf swing till our arms were tired. LOL

Jade was invited to a gymnastics birthday party on Sunday. I'm thinking I need to sign her up for Gymnastics, the girl was going wild! Here she is getting ready to jump into the pit full of foam blocks

and the action shot

Cutter is in a silly stage of discovery. Jade has a toy egg that he found and attempted to keep on his head while running across the living room.

"see mom, it's half an egg"

he found walking kept it on his head, but running made it fall off.

Jade in all her fabulous-ness

Showing Cutter how she can balance the egg on her head on one foot! She's amazing;)
Monday I got to watch a friends two children. The two girls spent the entire day playing together and while the boys were very different in age...they too spent the day together. Here Kameron is teaching his very eager student about the tiny piano

snack time feeding. I may need to hire Kameron out from now on, he kept Cutter happily distracted most of the day!

I recently started buying free range, farm fresh, eggs from a friend of mine. She was short an egg in the dozen I bought from her on Sunday. Her husband said they'd give me an extra egg this week "but let me know if you get a double yolk...cause then we won't need too" (joking) and what do you know...I got a double yolk!! hahaha!
So there ya have it.