Breeding Fish Eaters.

I am a huge fan of fish and seafood. I would eat fish, shrimp, crab, etc. every day if I could. In fact, sometimes I'll bake a pound of tilapia or salmon and just sit and eat the whole bowl of it with salt, pepper and dill!
If only my family liked it as much as I do, but as it is, Evan is the only one I can get to eat fish. So I am always on the lookout for recipes that are "not gross," which is the number one request I get when asked what I should cook. Something Not Gross, indeed.
Okay, well, I succeeded in finding a tasty recipe for garlic and herb broiled trout. I hadn't had trout in I-don't-know-how-long, and I must have forgotten what a versatile fish it is, due to it's complete lack of fishy taste. It also doesn't really stink up your house like fish. Not as flavorful as salmon, but 3 out of 5 of us really enjoyed it and we had no leftovers! I hope if you try this recipe that your family enjoys it as much as 60% of mine did.

Garlic and Herb Broiled Trout

You Will Need:

1 1/2- 2 lbs. trout fillet
2T. lemon juice (about one half lemon)
1/3 C. plain bread crumbs
1 T. Italian seasoning
1t. garlic powder
Salt, Pepper
2T. olive oil

Set oven to broil (500 degrees) and move oven rack to top. Coat your broiling tray thing with cooking spray- no one likes to scrub fish skin that's been baked on! Brush fish gently with the lemon juice and broil for 3 minutes. While fish is in oven, mix together other ingredients. Pull out fish, decrease oven temp to 350 and move rack down to its regular spot. Coat fish with bread crumb mixture. I spooned it on and patted it down. Bake another 10 minutes or so until fish flakes easily with a fork.
That's it! So easy! I served mine with rice pilaf, creamed asparagus, and biscuits.

Wordless Wednesday.

                                                   ...What can I make of this?

Apple Pie Saves The Day.

Today I decided that I'd bake an apple pie. For Christmas I got new measuring cups and an awesome kitchen knife, and I've been chopping, slicing and dicing just about anything I can get my hands on. I have a completely foolproof and delicious recipe that I've already shared with a number of people, so now I think I will share it with anyone who happens to be reading this! I highly recommend this recipe, which is *technically* from Betty Crocker, but like all of my recipes, I have tweaked it a bit.

No-Fail Apple Pie

You Will Need

6 large Granny Smith apples
2 pie crusts (They can be homemade or store-bought)
2/3 C. white sugar
1/4 C. flour
1T. cinnamon
1T. butter, cut into 4 cubes

Preheat oven to 425 and peel and core apples. Cut into different sized chunks and slices. (Doing that makes for a really "thick" pie.) Put in a bowl along with sugar, flour, and cinnamon and toss to coat. Put 1 crust in bottom of pie pan, put in the apple mixture, and place the butter around the apples. Cover with top crust, make vents in the top (or else it will explode and blow the door right off your oven), and flute the edges. Bake for about 30- 40 minutes, or until apples are tender when pie is gently stabbed with a knife. Keep an eye on the pie! If it looks like the crust is getting too brown, cover it with a piece of aluminum foil. This will prevent excess browning.

Chopping apples into multisized bits with my awesome new, and much needed, knife.

Ready for the top crust. I forgot to put the butter in mine, but you should try not to forget.

The finished product! I used a cookie cutter to make a star-shaped vent in mine. Be creative!

A Few of my Favorite Things

It's 5:55 AM on Christmas Eve. In about 25 hours my kids will be ripping into their presents and spoiling their breakfast with candy- and I am so excited. Christmas is just simply way more fun with little kids. Doing stuff for Santa, passing on old traditions and starting new ones, getting them excited about making and giving presents to others, Christmas specials on TV that are old to me but new to them... I love this season!

It's so easy to get caught up in my tangled web of a to-do list and only see the 'work' part of Christmas. Last night I was up until 11:30 (extraordinarily late for me) sewing the play food that my mom made on her embroidery machine for the kitchen set they'll be getting, and wrapping presents. If I'd been up that late doing anything else, I'd be a grumpy person right now. But while they are anticipating getting new toys, I am just as eagerly anticipating the looks on their faces when they open their presents! Their excitement and glee is my Christmas gift from them. (My gift from Ken is going to be a Belgian waffle maker- I'm pretty amped for that one, too!)

I've spent a lot of time thinking which of my Christmas traditions I want to pass down. Technically I want to pass down all of them but with 3 kids, some of it would be too much. For instance, every single year my dad and I would go shopping at the mall for my mom on Christmas Eve where we would buy Shalimar perfume and a cookbook and an article of jewelry. Then we'd have lunch in the food court and go home to wrap presents. To this day I think it's so weird to wrap presents before Christmas Eve even though it makes way more sense to get it out of the way. Wrapping presents on Christmas Eve is great when you have, like, 4 presents to wrap. It doesn't work when you have about a hundred presents to be split up and wrapped in 3 different wrapping papers! I am just beginning to clearly see this. Next year I'll wrap earlier because I still have a bunch more to do tonight!

Another tradition that I just loved (and I mean LOVED, I made my mom do this long after I was "too old" for it) was how my mom would hide my presents around the house and I'd get to find them. I know. Where did she come up with that? I have no idea but I remember the first present I ever "found", sparking off about 13 years of present hiding. When I was 5, my mom called me in to the kitchen to open the oven for her so she could put breakfast in. Five year olds don't ask questions regarding why she couldn't do it herself, so I opened it and Santa had stuck a present in the oven!! And it was the doll I wanted that peed itself and you got to change its diaper!! So probably til I was 18 (or slightly older...) some of my presents would be hidden here and there every Christmas. I wish I could do that with the boys, but I know with absolute certainty that it would be a madhouse of tearing through my stuff all over the house, looking for presents. I'm thinking some of the coolest traditions work best with an only child.

This year we have a new one though. I can't remember where I read it, but I think it may have been All You magazine. We are leaving a "Santa key" outside with a tag on it that says "Evan, Christopher, and Noah's House". That way since we don't have a chimney, Santa will be able to get into our house via the back door. I imagine he will park his sleigh on the deck and use the key we leave out there to let himself in. I am also thinking- spoiler alert!- that his reindeer are going to leave hoof prints on the deck while they eat their snack of carrots... hoof prints that will wash off when it rains. Then, (another tradition I started a few years ago) Santa will come in, leave gifts, and eat chocolate covered strawberries. That is what we leave out every year, and though I can't remember why I started doing that I'm glad I did because I think it's pretty unique.

So, I hope everyone has an incredible day tomorrow! Enjoy the magic of the season and I will be back with more posts and pictures on December 26th.

Merry Christmas!

Keeping the Tradition Alive

On Orientation day at Evan's kindergarten, I accidentally signed up to be the "homeroom mom". (Note: read the paper before you sign it! I circled the word "snacks" to indicate that I would bring snacks to a party. I did not read the other parts that said, "I will plan each party" and "I will be there to host each party in the classroom.") This means that I collect donations and plan 3 parties a year. Not hard work, exactly, but to me the pressure is on! Coming up with an activity is the worst part (pipecleaner Christmas wreaths...), but doing snacks is my forte and I knew of only one thing that could be deemed "perfect": Lollipop Cookies. The party is tomorrow and I want to share the incredible cookie recipe that I made with you...

But wait! Don't you want to know where I got this incredible recipe from? I'll tell you. My mom has been making Lollipop Cookies for the Christmas programs of our Amish friends school-age children for over 20 years. That is 2 generations! Doing that has even earned her the nickname "the Cookie Lady". I used to help her make them when I was little, but this was my first time flying solo and I'm proud to say it was a successful mission.

Lollipop Cookies

You will need to make about 10 cookies:
1 tube refrigerated sugar cookie dough
Colored sugar
Popsicle sticks
Clear plastic wrap
"Curly" ribbon (wrapping ribbon that will curl when you run a scissors along it.)

Freeze the roll of cookie dough for easier slicing. (In fact, don't even try to make them if the dough isn't frozen.)
Slice cookies into slightly over 1/4 inch slices. Take a popsicle stick and with the precision of a brain surgeon, insert the stick into the middle of the cookie dough, and place onto a baking sheet. Sprinkle with colored sugar. Bake at 350 degrees for about 8 minutes, give or take, or until golden brown on edges. After you remove them from the oven, let sit for 5 minutes to tighten them up before moving to a cooling rack.
Once the cookies are completely cool (I mean it), take your clear plastic wrap and, one cookie at a time, rip plastic wrap into a square and wrap over top of cookie. Cut a length of ribbon about 8- 10 inches long. Tie around base of cookie/ top of popsicle stick and curl the ribbon with scissors. Repeat with remaining cookies.
I "repeated" with over 40 of them, which was 4 tubes of cookie dough, so you may, on second thought, get more than 10 in a roll of dough.

                                    If the popsicle stick breaks through the top a bit, just push it back down in. If you need to you can take a small glob off the "heel" of the dough and cover it.

After having been sugared.

I've found this configuration works best. Sugar cookies get big and you don't want them to run into each other so much.

I put mine into a basket lined with a Christmas-y kind of fabric.

Enjoy!



Judge Not...

...when you see the following pictures. They are of my Trash Closet. It was not meant to be exactly what it sounds like- a closet full of trash- but that's just about what wound up happening!

The cupboards in my kitchen are too short for the trash can so we put it in the hallway closet and started calling it the Trash Closet. I clean it out probably twice a year and what you see in the before picture is pretty much what happens in between clean-outs. Not much of what you see in there is actually trash, though. In the (embarrassing) "Before" photo, most of the stuff just got jammed in there- and I do mean jammed- for lack of a better place to put it. Or because it belonged somewhere else and I wasn't going to that place right then and I wanted it out of sight. You can also get an idea of just how often I use my iron, if you can find it in there!
So why did I decide to do this right before Christmas? Are you about to read some jargon about a fresh and organized start to the New Year? Nope! I needed to fit in a 12 pack of paper towels that my mom gave me, and as you can see, it was not going to happen.

So I got to work. Well, WE got to work. When the boys saw that I was hanging around by the arts and crafts containers and was even taking stuff out they became interested. And I found that I was not using my children to their full potential! They can bring stuff from room to room for me and what's even better, they LIKE to do that! It took almost no time to empty it out and now everything that wasn't supposed to be in there is in it's proper room, waiting to be put away. So it's pretty unlikely the closet will ever get that bad again since the boys can put stuff away for me! And as a bonus I found a couple of little plastic toys and about 80 cents in change for piggybanks as a little positive reinforcement for helping!

 Before. (This would be a good picture to print out before you go on a long car trip with your children, as it looks a lot like one of those "I Spy" books.)

After (top). Keep frequently used objects, like cleaning supplies within easy reach. I added a paper towel holder by mine. I keep my seasonal door decorations on the top shelf along with other infrequently used things. Arts and crafts are within easy reach on the bottom shelf. I have them separated into two containers, Frequently Used (coloring books, crayons, glue, paper, etc.) and Infrequently Used (paints, craft kits, dropcloths, larger projects, etc.)

After (bottom). Pretty self explanatory. Trash can and- Oh! What is this? The paper towels actually fit into the closet with room to spare! It's a Christmas miracle! 

I also added a recycling container! We have streamlined recycling, I think it's called, so we don't have to separate anything. It just gets tossed into the recycling bin and someone else deals with it. Nice.

What's Cooking?

A mushroom walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Sorry, we don't serve your kind here." The mushroom says, "Why not? I'm a fungi!"
Bah-dum-CH.
So what's for dinner tonight? Portabello Stroganoff. I found a recipe I thought sounded good and tweaked it while I was cooking. Here it is:

Portabello Stroganoff

4 T. butter
8 oz. sliced mushrooms
4 Portabello mushroom caps, cleaned (Take the gills out.) and chopped into cube-y shapes
1 medium yellow onion, chopped finely
1 clove garlic, also chopped finely (You can do garlic and onion together in your Cuisanart.)
3/4 c. beef broth
1/2 c. sour cream
3 T. ketchup (or just a good squirt)
Salt and Pepper to taste
1 T. oregano
Parsley
Flour

Cook mushrooms, onion and garlic in butter until tender. Stir in everything else but flour. Let simmer on the stove for about 5 minutes. If sauce is too thin, you can sprinkle in some flour and stir it in. I didn't use more than a tablespoon in mine. It will thicken upon standing a bit anyway.
Serve over buttered noodles. I also served mine with dill butter carrots!

Chop the portabellos. It will really look like a lot of mushrooms before it starts cooking!

The onions, garlic, and mushrooms are in their butter bath.

And voila!! The finished product. How pretty.

Welcome!

Are you looking for practical help for around the home? Perhaps you want to cook or bake something new, have no idea what to make and want to see pictures of how it's supposed to look? Or maybe you know me and want to see what the family is up to these days??
You have probably come to the right place, then. Congratulations!
My goal here is to post homemaking-related tips and tricks and recipes and what-have-you, and little things I find make life as a full-time homemaker a little easier and happier.
I have 3 little boys who are 5, 3, and 2. They keep me on my toes and give me a lot of love and laughs. They also make a lot of messes... and I like my home to be neat and clean. (I also like my home to be organized but, lo, it is not. Maybe we will get through that together in the coming months.)
For instance, Noah, who is two, will "disappear" once or twice a day. He isn't hiding, he just can be really quiet and, I don't know, sometimes we lose track of him. So yesterday he disappeared and was found with kid's toothpaste covering his hands! It wasn't a horrible toothpaste mess, though; from what I can gather- a homemaker is also a private investigator- he went into his bathroom and only smeared toothpaste on his hands. So that was one incident. Add two (for the other two boys) and multiply that by 365 (days of the year) and multiply that by 2 1/2 (years since I have had three children) and simple math will show that I have an arsenal of solutions to the little "problems" or "incidents" that always seem to be popping up.  :)
I am also a firm believer that you should learn, or attempt to learn, something new every day no matter how old you are.
AND I love to cook and bake! If you snuck up to my house and looked in the front window (do not sneak up to my house and look in my windows) at pretty much any time of the day, you would most likely see me in my kitchen. My kitchen is the Mothership. It's where the magic happens and I LOVE being in there. I love sharing recipes with people. The kitchen is always good for funny stories of mishaps, too. I can't think of any right now but I know I have plenty.
So please kick back and enjoy!
I'm going to go make pancakes and smoothies. :)