Thanksgiving

This year we had Thanksgiving at Richard's house. It wasn't a small engagement either...there were a lot of people there! I think I counted a total of 17. There was, of course, Richard and Melody. Richard's father Alfred was there as well as his brother Ronny and his sister Yvonne. There was his other brother Lyle who brought his girlfriend Erin, his son Bo and another friend. Rick's brothers Derek and Justin were there along with Jamie, Justin's girlfriend. That leaves Me, Rick, Tyler, Mom and Anni. Phew, what a mouthful!



I can always count of Tyler to act like a complete monkey whenever we're in the midst of a large crowd.

Poor Richard, he was literally in the kitchen for the whole day. I had to send Tyler with the camera to see if he could sneak a picture.

Here is some of the food that everybody enjoyed. The turkey, mashed potatoes and stuff were back in the kitchen...I forgot to get a picture of all that. For dessert, Justin's girlfriend Jamie had baked a homemade apple and pumpkin pie. She also brought some lemon bars that her mother had made using lemons from her lemon tree. Everything was delicious! Oh I almost forgot...Jamie also made homemade rolls to go with the dinner. Yum!

No Way!

It snowed last night!? Those were my exact words when I opened the blinds this morning.

As this is our fourth winter in Yakima, snow in November is not unusual, but we've never seen it before Thanksgiving. I guess that's what happens when it "rains" at night with such freezing temps outside. It's not going to last long though, our daytime temps are going to be in the mid 40's today.

This And That

This morning I took Tyler over to Lowe's for their build and grow workshop. Usually they have projects every two weeks, but this month had them back to back due to the upcoming holiday. Luckily we didn't forget about the change, because get this---we wrote it down on the calendar. Heck I don't know why we haven't been doing that all along. That's what calendars are for right? Usually we just depend of one of the three of us to remember whether or not there is a building project that weekend. Unfortunately, the system has failed us twice already this month! So from now on we'll be writing all the dates of the workshops on the calendar in the kitchen where everyone will see them and hopefully everyone will remember.

Rick normally goes with Tyler to do the building projects, but he was out of commission today so I was put on duty instead. Thankfully it was another relatively simple project. They were making snowman gift card holders. I know! Too cute!
I don't know if this is my favorite project ever, because I still really love the time we made the helicopter, but it sure was the cutest ever. You should have seen the badge too. Cute!

For dinner last night I made a soup that frequents our dinner table quite a bit during the cold weather months. It's called Broccoli Wild Rice Soup and it's from one of my light & tasty annuals.

It was warm, filling and delicious as usual. And even though Tyler has eaten the soup before on a number of occasions, this time he decided to take issue with "the little black lines". Huh, he's never had a problem with wild rice before. Well at least it wasn't the broccoli he was complaining about.

On another food note, I got the latest edition of the Food Network magazine today in the mail as well as The Best of Country Cooking Annual 2008. I'm so excited I can't stand it. My mind is boggling with all the new recipes to try.

Leftover Cookies

After using half of an 8 oz can of almond paste for the cranberry coffee cake, I had 4 oz left and no idea what to do with it. After a quick internet search I decided to make Amaretti Cookies with the remaining paste. I had to cut the recipe in half, which was easy to do since there are only 3 ingredients.

It was simple enough to whiz everything together in the food processor. Then instead of using a pastry bag to pipe out the dough, I used my spritz cookie press.

The cookies are different, I'll give you that. The outside is crisp and airy like a meringue, but the inside is a little more dense and chewy like a macaroon. I'm still on the fence as to what to think about these and almond paste in general, as neither the cookies nor the cake knocked my socks off.

From The Kitchen

I gave the boys a choice whether our next baked item should have pumpkin or cranberries. More specifically, I asked if they'd rather have pumpkin cheesecake or cranberry cake. The cranberries won out this time, but I'll be making the pumpkin cheesecake soon enough.

I ended up making Cranberry Almond Coffee Cake. I spotted the recipe last week in one of my Taste of Home Cookbooks and even though it uses almond paste, which I've never used before (and which turns out to be kind of expensive), I knew I had to make it right away.

The smell of the almond paste was pretty strong during the baking time, but I don't think it overpowered the final product. I thought it was good, not overly sweet, and had a nice tanginess from the cranberries.

I think Tyler was fooled by the word "cake" in the name, which he generally equates to something super sweet covered in frosting. Even though it's a coffee cake, I was hoping it would still pass as a dessert since we really don't each coffee cake much for breakfast anyway. When he saw the cake come out of the oven, he proclaimed that he loved cranberry cake and that he could eat the whole thing in ten seconds flat. But once he tasted the tart cranberries, he changed his mind. He looked at me with a sad face and said, "I told you that I loved cranberry cake and that I could eat the whole thing in one bite". Then he shook his head and said, "I guess I spoke too soon!".

And another new recipe we tried for dinner this week was Thai Green Curry Chicken. It's off the back of the Thai Kitchen Green Curry Paste Jar. I followed the recipe, but exchanged the bamboo shoots for red bell pepper.

Tyler was pretty skeptical about the whole thing and kept begging to have a frozen meal instead, but I persuaded him to eat the curry which he actually enjoyed quite a bit. That's a good thing because I still have a lot of curry paste leftover to use up. My opinion is that it was good, but not as good as a green curry from a restaurant. I was worried about it being too spicy, but the curry paste didn't really have any spice to it at all. I was a little disappointed in that.

The Trouble With Duck

This weekend I found a coupon in the paper for the new hasbro card games that was buy one get one free. They're great little family games that generally take around 15 minutes to play. The offer was for the Monopoly Deal card game, Rook card game, Pictureka! card game, Scrabble Slam and a few others too. We already had Monopoly Deal, which Tyler loves to play, so we were excited to add a few more quick playing games to our collection.

Even with the prospect of getting new games, I couldn't persuade Tyler to go shopping with me. So I went by myself and ended up bringing home Scrabble Slam and Picureka!. Of course Tyler wanted to play immediately and that's pretty much what we did. We started off with Scrabble Slam.

The game consists of letter cards that are double sided. To start the game, someone thinks up a random four letter word, spells it out in the middle of the table, and the remaining letter cards are distributed evenly among all the players. Then it's just a race to see who can get rid of their cards first, by placing them one at a time over the word in the middle, forming new words as you go.

This is the word we chose to start the game with.

The trouble with starting with duck is that it's kind of hard to change the ck at the end of the word when you can only play one letter card at a time. We came to realize pretty fast that there are quite a few foul sounding words that end with ck, making it tricky to use the f,i,c,o and s cards. And to make things more awkward, you're supposed to shout out the new word as you place a card down. So during the course of the game, in a haste to get rid of his cards, Tyler unwittingly spelled and then repeatedly dropped, or rather shouted the F-bomb.

Lesson learned....no more starting the game with a word that ends with ck. Geez, and they make the game look so easy to play on the television commercials!

Weekend Catchall

This weekend I made a batch of pumpkin pancakes, using up the rest of the leftover pumpkin I had in the fridge. Even though they didn't come out looking like the picture in the cookbook (which always annoys me), they were still super delicious.

The recipe came out of one of my light & tasty cookbooks and it made 13 pancakes, so I had enough to throw half of them in the freezer for another day.

Then of Saturday morning we took Tyler over to Lowes for the Build and Grow craft. He's been doing this for little over a year now, so he's at the point where he believes he's perfectly capable of building the project all by himself. He still needs help holding the nails straight and hammering at the right angle, but besides that he's doing a really good job.

This weeks project was a cute little car and garage. He also got a new badge for his apron, but he's running out of places to put them. Looks like he'll probably have to get a new apron by January. Ahhh, a fresh canvas!

Then we spent the better part of the afternoon browsing the aisles of petsmart and then setting up our new fish tank back at the house. We decided to buy a few friends for our beta fish and as a result, had to buy a new tank that included a filtering system.

So here's the new setup. It's the same exact tank we already had, the 2.5 gallon mini bow, but the newer model includes a filter, which our older one did not have. It seemed all nice and good until we plugged it in and realized that the new filter completely blocks the light, leaving the tank dimmer than we would like. It kind of stinks actually.

We got a few neons, a few glo fish and a teeny tiny algae eater. All that work switching everyone over to the new tank and I'm not sure that the beta appreciates his new friends.

The Musical Bunch

At school, Tyler has music class on Tuesdays and Thursdays so he has learned quite a few new songs in the past few months. This one must be his favorite because he sings it around the house like crazy.

Pretty catchy, huh? It's called The Alphabet Rap.

And don't forget about Max, he starts singing just about every time I turn around. He especially loves singing to Coco even if I've told him that might not be the best idea. Now that Marceau is gone, I guess he'll take any company that he can get.

Lately I've been trying to teach Max jingle bells, but we'll see how that goes. So far he's only picking up on a few notes.

All Things Pumpkin

I don't know why, but I always seem to wait until after Halloween before baking any pumpkin recipes. So without wasting any more time, I got right to work and pumped out two equally fantastic pumpkin treats.

The first, was of course, pumpkin bread. I've been using the same recipe for the last several years. It's lower in fat and calories than traditional loafs, but it still tastes great.

I was a little lazy this year and substituted pumpkin pie spice for the cinnamon and nutmeg called for in the recipe and that was a mistake. I think it tastes better just following the recipe as is. Either way, my cute little mini loafs disappear without a problem.

Secondly, I made a pie out of last years November Better Homes and Gardens magazine. It was right on the cover, I don't know how I failed to see it last year. Anyway, I had to mark the calendar this year to make sure I didn't forget about it again.

It's called Ginger Pumpkin Meringue Pie and it's definitely the best pumpkin pie I've ever made. It has a delicious gingersnap crust filled with a semi-traditional pumpkin pie and it's all topped with a brown sugar meringue. Super yum!

I took this picture pretty soon after the pie came out of the oven. That was before the meringue started to weep, shrink and all together separate from the crust ....and consequently, before I turned into a pirate and exclaimed, "Arghh!".

It would have looked so pretty too if it weren't for that pesky meringue! Oh well, at least I wasn't serving it up to guests. And despite the problem with the meringue, I still maintain that it was the best pumpkin pie I've ever made. Hands down!

As a side note, I have to admit that in the process of making this recipe, I discovered the joy of pure maple syrup. I had never tasted it before and now that I have, it'll be tough using the fake stuff ever again. Wow! I can't even get over the difference.

And now I'm headed back to the kitchen to use up the last bit of remaining pumpkin puree. How about some pumpkin pancakes?

The Latest

Albeit slow, I'm still on a roll. I'm managing to squeeze out a few scrapbook pages here and there every few weeks. Now I just need to have my Halloween photos printed and keep moving forward.

Here I used some of my older, funkier DCWV paper, but it seems to work okay with the art theme of the layout.

This layout is pretty simple. I just used a few strips of leftover Basic Grey paper and some alphabet stickers. I also used some cute 7 gypsies journaling stamps that I picked up at Bella's a while back.

On this layout I used some kitty themed paper, thanks to Tyler's strong arm. Not something I'd normally buy, but even I'll admit that it's kind of cute. I also put my Graphically Speaking cricut cartridge to work to cut the arrow.

Reuseable

It's a shame sometimes when I put so much time and work into Tyler's Halloween costumes, for just a single use. One night and it's all over. It still kills me....all the time I put into Tyler's scarecrow costume a few years ago, just to take it all apart the next day. I didn't feel so bad about this year's lego costume though. After all, it was just a cardboard box with a few yo-plus yogurt containers glued to the front.

Still, what are you going to do with it the day after?

Looks like Caramel has solved that problem for us. She's made the lego box into her own hideout. Who knew cardboard boxes had so many uses.

Massive Cookie

Tyler and I checked out another picture book from the library that included a recipe, so of course you know what that means...we had some baking to do!

The book was called Wild Boars Cook and it was about four bossy, selfish, stinky boars that had insatiable appetites. After making a massive pudding that failed to satisfy, they decided to make a massive cookie to eat next.

Tyler has been begging to make the cookie all week long, and today he finally got his wish. I left a stick of butter on the counter so that it would be soft and ready to "cream" by the time he got home from school.

The recipe is basically a standard chocolate chip cookie that is decorated with m&m's and gumdrops. We didn't have any gumdrops so we just used m&m's.

Tyler decorated the cookie to look like a face. It has a rainbow smile, eyes, a nose and some hair.

We used the last of our mini baking m&m's on the cookie, but maybe we should have used regular sized ones. Ours kind of disappeared right into the cookie. You can't really even see the face anymore. Oh well, that's not enough to keep us from digging in.

We tried not to be too boarish about it. We neatly cut ourselves a piece and saved the rest for another time. I suggested that we try to eat the whole cookie in ten seconds flat like the wild boars would, but Tyler didn't think that was a good idea. Maybe he's right.