Sticky Bun's for breakfast

My neighbor Kevin has a fantastic job, and I love him for it. Mostly for this recipe I'm about to share with you. For ChristmaChanukah last year his company gift was a cookbook compiled of employee's recipes.
Let me preface it with, we don't eat like this at all. However with July 4th company and California company, a good gooey breakfast is in order.
This seems to easy to be as good as it is, but folks, I don't mess around with food.

1. Pkg of frozen dough balls ( I bought Kroger brand)
1. Box of butterscotch pudding, not instant
1/2 c. of pecan pieces
1. stick of butter
3/4c. sugar
1 t. cinnamon
THE NIGHT BEFORE
In a greased bunt pan, place 16 dough balls evenly around the pan.
Sprinkle evenly with dry pudding mix, and then pecans.
Melt stick of butter, and mix well with sugar and cinnamon.
EVENLY spread the schmooey mixture over the dough balls.

Place bunt pan on a cookie sheet. Cover pan with a clean dishtowel, and let rise overnight.
The next morning preheat oven to 350 degree's, uncover dishtowel, but leave bunt on cookie sheet, bake for 30 min.

When done, turn out onto a pretty platter, and stand back so as not to get in the way of the hungry savages. They will last all of 5 minutes, and no one will utter a word. Just moans of deliciousness, as a dribble of goo dribbles down ones chin. That's when you know you've found a good recipe.

she can't, she won't, and she dont stop.

Remember this post?
Well, its only taken three months since that post, to get to this one.




go, Rubes, go!

Drew assures me that I sound NOTHING like this, but something tells me there might be a little white lie buried underneath his words. If you don't hear from me in a while, just assume that I'm meeting with my vocal coach, a la Singing in the Rain style.

floors vacuumed.
floors moped.
floors polished.
stainless polished.
laundry done.
beds made.
bathrooms tomorrow.
dusting tomorrow.
windows tomorrow.

just whistle while you work.
(if only I could whistle.)

got anything to add to my list?

ummmm.....
I don't want to offend anyone, but my strawberry-laura-ingalls-wilder-preserves are ballicious!

So if you see the whisper of a grown woman with an infant feeding spoon in hand, sneaking by the fridge just to have a small taste of strawberry goodness, and tip toe away so as to not ruin the fiesta her taste buds are having, its OK for you to to think she's odd, but she is not wrong.

Pesto and Preserves

Since the garden has been picking up its production we've been working on some foods to freeze/save. There are only so many times in a week one can eat sugar snap peas.
Ruby has started eating them raw, which isn't a bad thing, its just funny to me to see my 16month old, chewing and chewing and chewing, like its greed cud.

We've had an abundance of basil, and what do you do with 428 lbs of basil you might ask? Why, pesto of course. I've been making the master chef, Christopher Kimball's 'The New Best Recipe" cookbook Classic Pesto recipe super easy and great for SP to help with, she's is great with a food processor. And with pesto, the options are endless...sandwiches, soups, pasta, pizza and one of our regular staples Chicken Pasta Pesto, a.k.a. Green noodles.


This is one of the few original recipe's I have. While its not going to impress the socks off of the cyber world readers, it will score points with the mom's of young children crowd. Easy and quick, and kid's think they are eating something crazy, noodles that are green.

1. box of whole wheat smallish pasta. cooked and drained.
2. rotissery chicken, picked into bite size pieces.
3. roasted red peppers or sun dried tomatoes, chopped.
4. feta cheese crumbles.
5. one jar of pesto.

mix all together and serve, hot or cold.

There are several ways this can all be done, you can cook your own chicken, and make your own pesto, but if you need quick and dirty, just buy all the ingredince and just act like you made it all from scratch. No one has to know.
This make a ton, so be prepared to eat on it for a while, or be kind and send some over to your neighbors house.

Another venture I have attempted is strawberry jam preserves.
I made this with the inspiration from my friend Katy, she's the kind of girl who gives meaning to the word 'Foodie.' She showed me the less sugar preserving method, and I tried it.
I was a little unsure as to how this would all turn out. I wanted fresh strawberries, but there was n-o-t-h-i-n-g in this world that could have made me go out in the middle of June. and pick fresh strawberries. with my kids. That insane thought lasted for all of 3 seconds. Then when I came to my senses, I convinced myself that fresh frozen strawberries would work just as well.
So I thawed them out, measured and proceeded to "can." All in all, it was an easy process, but understanding it all, and deciphering the directions was not easy, but they sure turned out pretty. I've not tried it yet, its "setting-up" at the moment, but I'll report back once I know if they are worth it.

So shiny, so fresh, so sparkly, so ..... prairie girl?
Drew came home and used the adjective "Laura Ingalls Wilderish"
Then asked me where my prairie dress was.
Funny, real funny.
Its going to be even funnier when I don't share my shining strawberry jam preserves.

summer time fun.

We've started out out summer with a flurry of activity, which was not in my original plan. Funny how things never go according to an original plan, not since the beginning of time.

All this to say, it went like this.... Sarah's wedding, Costa Rica, Birthday camping for Drew, Girls trip,teaching vacation bible school, and now a wedding. After all is said and done, that only leaves about 6 weeks until family vacation, then school to start again. I am determined to not let the rest of it slip away, not that the events of summer thus far haven't been great, and made for great memories. For some reason or another I'm nostalgic for the summer days of my youth, and I'm wanting that for my children. Days of swimming, ice cream, hot summer movie nights, family game night, riding bikes, going to the cabin's on Elkmont, ohhhhh how I loved going there in the summers.
I'm h-bent to slow down and take in the time together with the girls, and drink in the rest of this summer. Here are just a few highlights of the "nothing-ness" I am craving.

Sprinkler time, and silly face time with great friends.

Pajama snuggling time. Yes, I realize there is an iphone involved, its the closeness that is desireable.

Coloring for the first time, then tasting crayon for the first time.

4th of July mini sprinkle doughnuts for no reason other than "just because"

A garden flower in your hair, and an overflowing heart consumed with the joy of family.

Mas Costa Rica.....

Oh yes, there is more......
Part of the fun of this trip was using all of our combined broken Spanish to communicate with the general public. Rosie loving all things Hispanic, was great with putting together enough for us to not get lost, which happened, and to prevent us from eating anything that would kill us.
With that being said, onto the food portion of our trip.

On the first day we went straight to the grocery stores to load up, and little did we know it would be one stop shopping. There were more consecutive rows of alcohol than any other product in the markets, and all of it was so pretty.

Some items we just had to make our best guess as to what it was, and by the end of our trip we were able to use our deductive reasoning skills to make some pretty good choices. While we didnt purchase any Froot Loops, we at least knew what they were.

We dubbed this "brain fruit" but for all we knew it was a vegetable.
Of course Drew and Tim were the ones to cut it open and take a big ole bite without any reservation. Seeing as Tim once ate baby octopus soup, I knew that his adventure for food would be fully explored here. As for the brain fruit-could-be-vegetable, it was not good, so much so that Drew spit it out and made a bunch of grotesque noises to express his disdain.

It was interesting to me that in every market most of the meat was what you see above. It is a beef/cattle country, but there were feet upon feet of these sausages, all coiled up. Some refrigerated, some not. Needless to say I would not let any of our group eat unknown, unrefrigerated meat.

This was the first moment that I realized I needed to stick with totally recognizable food. I was searching for polenta to make for dinner, and came upon the Corona product.
I grabbed one and threw it into the basket then started to "read" the label. It didn't take long for me to notice that the density of this tube was not normal for polenta, but since I usually make mine from a dry mix, it didn't set off any alarms. Upon further inspection I came to realize that this was lard, straight up cooking lard. Yep, lard.
I cant even imagine my surprise to slice off a piece of it and proceed to cook it. I know I wouldnt have gotten that far, but still. yuck.

Drew was enamored of all the Defenders that were on the road. There was even a Defender pick up truck, that was never sold in the US. We kept talking about how long it would take to drive one back home, and the estimated length of travel was 8 days. That kind of put the kibosh on his desire for one, but the idea is still in his head rattling around. I can see it back there.

Back to the food. Fish taco's on fresh corn tortilla's. One of Drew's favorites.

Sweet Rosie.

This was on the beach in Tamarindo, and it was completely different than Liberia, where we were based. Whiter sand and clearer water.
(as a side note, I bought those ear rings in Memphis, and LOVE them, and so did all the locals)

This is one of my favorite memories of our vacation.
This little girl was walking from the deck of her parents restaurant to the beach carrying all these balloons. I thought she was so cute and I had to take her picture, and casually started talking to her in my "kitchen-sink" Spanish. It was so sweet, she was showing me her balloons, and told me the colors of each one. I asked her how old she was and told me. She also was telling me ( I think) about the swing her Papa had hung in the tree for her. She was a little shy but very willing to try to communicate with me. She probably was thinking I was some kind of moronic adult who didn't know how to speak well. But it was all joy for me.

The end of the day beach picture. A beer. A towel. A nap. What more does one need?