Homemade PB Cups

Once a month
my 10th/11th grade girls' small group
does a craft.

This month we made PB Cups!

They were so yummy!
I even learned a few tricks!

The fabulous recipe:
(makes 16-20)

12 oz bittersweet chocolate
1/3 cup creamy peanut butter
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1/4 cup crushed honey graham crackers

I lined mini-cupcake pan with paper liners. This is a good idea but paper was not a good choice. I'm thinking maybe the foil liners might be better? Okay, so my big new trick.....rather than melting my chocolate in a double boiler....I just put a few chocolate chips in the bottom of each cup and baked them at 200 degrees for about 5 minutes!!!! They melted perfectly, I just swirled through them with a table knife to smooth it out.

Worked like a charm!

Mix the rest of the ingredients together. I formed them into balls ahead of time to make sure I had enough and that they were all about even and then smooshed them a bit into disks. Put one disk in each mini-cupcake, top w/ more chocolate chips, put back in the oven for 5 more minutes to melt the top chocolate...remove from oven, swirl through top chocolate to smooth, and let cool!

Delicious!

Baked Potato Salad

Our town has free concerts in the park every Thursday night during the summer. Gran meets us there and we take turns bringing dinner for everyone. A new favorite has become the Baked Potato Salad. Although why it's called a "salad" I certainly don't know...

But today's your lucky day because today I'm going to share the recipe!

You'll need:
*5 lb bag of red potatoes
*10 slices of bacon
*1/2 C sour cream
*1/2 mayo
*1 C shredded cheese
*olive oil
*Montreal Steak Seasoning

First up, cube your red potatoes and drizzle them with olive oil. I like to collect mine in my big pyrex mixing bowl, drizzle, then stir. Looks like this:



When the potatoes are coated with olive oil, pour them out onto a baking sheet (I usually need two baking sheets) and "sprinkle" (ie-cover!) with Montreal Steak Seasoning. You could also add salt and pepper. It will look like this.



Put them in the oven at 400 for 30 mins, stirring about halfway through.


Meanwhile, start frying up your bacon! (I got a 2lb package and have enough bacon for this recipe and some delicious BLT's for lunch tomorrow.) In my opinion, crispy is BEST!
(Please note that the best time to dig through your recycling for an empty can to drain the bacon grease into would be before you start cooking the bacon and not during the whole process.)


Should I tell you that my grandmother always used that old bacon grease to make her green beans with??? No? Well, they were the best green beans EVER!


After the bacon has cooled, chop them up into 1/4 inch-ish pieces. Or break them up. It's no-stress, so don't stress!



Now, when your potatoes come out of the oven, they will look like this:
)


Fabulously delicious! Be warned, you will be tempted to eat a few (or a lot!). That's okay! These are a perfectly good side dish on their own (They are called "Life Potatoes" at our house after being randomly named by One.)

So here is the hardest part....WAITING! The potatoes need to cool off, we don't want our cheese to melt when we mix everything together. Here's my best tip: walk away from the kitchen! Otherwise, you just might eat them all gone -yes, all 5 lbs of potatoes, they are that good- so just walk away and let them cool down.

You could also put them in your fridge like I did, but I didn't really want to mention it because there's no way I'm showing you a picture of the inside of my fridge!

Okay, so with the potatoes cooled off, dump them into your biggest bowl. Add the sour cream, mayo, shredded cheese, and bacon.



Stir together. That's it!




Now if that doesn't look disgusting to you, I don't know what would, but I promise it's Delicious! Serve it hot or cold (I usually do cold so I can make it ahead of time). Feel free to change up the ingredients and make it your own. I hope you love it! We tend to treat it like a real baked potato and serve it with a big salad.

But with all that sour cream and mayo, you just might want to walk around the block a time or two (or ten) when you're done!

The avocado

If you want to make your own baby food,
this is the best book ever.

I started making baby food when One was a baby. Turns out he was allergic to some of the acid used as a preservative in the jarred baby food. It also meant he couldn't drink orange juice or eat other acidic things until after he was potty trained.

I know that's a weird leap, but trust me on that one, you don't want the details.

Making your baby food is so easy! And cheap! This book lays it out month by month, tells you how to cook everything, when it's in season, and how to know which ones are ripe.... It's a wonderful book and I even found my copy at a local used-book shop.

Now, everyone has a Martha story. And somehow, mine involves making baby food. Before I ever had children, I saw a show on making baby food. They were going over the basics, with one of the last steps being to strain the food to get out any and every lump. Martha joked that you could drop that step for your third child. For some reason I found that so funny at the time and it stuck with me but sure enough, when I started making food for Three, I thought about that show and went,

Oh, he's fine.

Tonight Three tried avocado for the first time. One and Two hated it when they were infants. I wasn't expecting much success but Three seemed to enjoy them. He is certainly his own little guy!

Avocado: B+

Secret Family Recipe

I'm on the women's committee at church and we are putting together the menu for our annual tea. This year we decided to do a trio of salads and they asked for my tuna recipe. I've never met anyone who makes tuna the way I do ...... or many that want to try it when I tell them what goes in it ...... but once they (politely) try it, they start making it themselves too! It's yummy!

Now, there is no real recipe for this. I've made it my entire life and just know but that wouldn't cut it for the tea, where several people would be making batches of it so that we would have enough. So today I did my best to come up with an approximate recipe.

Here are the ingredients:

(mayo, apple, tuna, and garlic salt)

Drain the tuna, finely chop half of the apple, and mix together with 2 Tbs of mayo and 1/8 tsp of garlic salt. That's it! It's especially good if made the night before but it doesn't really matter! You can make a sandwich, serve on crackers....I like eating mine as dip with tortilla chips!

The finished product isn't especially beautiful, but it's delicious!

Enjoy!

Yum-O

Well, I didn't even think to take pictures while I was doing this so you only get the final product. Here is the first food I made for Three....

bananas!

He doesn't like them.
I'm wondering if he's really mine.

Minty, Chocolate-y Goodness

I usually leave the cub scout activities to DaddyMan, but a recent "derby race" seemed like a special event I should attend. Turns out the race was doing double-duty as a monthly troop (? like I know) meeting which meant it turned into a looooong afternoon. However, they auctioned off a few desserts as a fundraiser and so here, my friends, is the $35 recipe which can be yours ("if you call in the next five minutes!") for the very low price of approximately $3:

The ingredients are brownie mix and crumbled andes mints - yum!

Cook the brownies according to the box directions. About 5 minutes before they are "done", put the crumbled andes mints on top of the brownies and put the brownies back in the oven. That's it! You can leave the andes mints melted chunky or you can spread them around a bit but either way they are delicious!


Now onto some closet crafting I have been doing:

The scarf on the right is something I knit for my aunt. She doesn't know it, but she picked out the yarn! I saw her eyeing it at a trip to Joann's and went back that day to get it. I'm so sneaky! I mailed it off today and I'm so excited because she has no idea that it's coming! She doesn't even know I was working on it. Fun stuff!

The scarf on the left is a different version of this, more of a rag-style. It's headed (another surprise!) for a dear friend and mentor of mine that just moved cross country. I made sure to mention that it was a scarf (he he he) after this fiasco... But I do think I (sort of) figured out what was wrong with the yellow fabric. It was still obnoxious but after changing the thread tension whenever I was over that fabric (something I learned in my sewing class, you can find my teacher's blog here) it worked much better. Needless to say, the leftover yellow fabric is now in the trash.

ps. Could I have used any more parenthesis in this post? (Sorry about that.)