Making Tracks

Tempera paint, old baking pans, paper, cars, and extra large t-shirts.
Good Times.

Here the boys are working together.
I love this picture.

A couple of their finished pieces.

More or Less

So I have been totally inspired by the zero waste home blog. This family of four makes almost no trash! They collected all their garbage for a year and it all fit in a mason jar, except for their toothbrushes, for which they could find no recyclable or compostable alternative. Amazing. We have been working with being a "minimal waste family," but we think we could do more. So we got rid of our big garbage can. We now have a small can upstairs for disposable diapers (which we try not to use) and an even smaller can under our kitchen sink. This was our first full week and guess what? We didn't need that big old garbage can!
I have also been totally inspired by Dee Williams. She lives in a teeny tiny house and only owns 300 items. That is what inspires me. Her stuff! If she needs or wants something new she has to move something out of her house. I probably have more than 300 things in my kitchen alone! And how much of that is stuff I use once a year or stuff I might someday eventually maybe probably need. So Jeff and I are celebrating our 30th birthdays this year and for our gift we are getting rid of one unnecessary item every day between his birthday and mine. That gives us about five and a half months and we are starting in the kitchen. This is going to be a thoroughly interesting exercise.

Celebrate!

Happy Birthday Husband!!

(yes, that is birthday bread)

Disgusting Pudding

How can those two words go together? Especially when it is chocolate pudding! I had half a gallon of milk that expires tomorrow, so I needed to use it up... I thought - PUDDING! You know, cooked pudding, then the milk will last a little longer. Well, the recipe I found that sounded good was for that soy milk, but some people commented they used regular milk and it turned out "great"... Well, I thought I had all the other ingredients, so I started making it. Oops. No cornstarch. So I subbed brown flour. I don't know why, that might have been my first mistake. The recipe said to bring to boil on medium then turn to low and simmmer four minutes until thickened. After like fifteen minutes it still wasn't boiling and I had turned up the heat several times. I gave up. Took it off the heat and here was maybe my second mistake. The recipe said after you remove from heat whisk in two tablespoons of butter. Well, when I proposed pudding to the boys, Jacob said he wanted peanut butter pudding so I added two tablespoons of PB instead of butter.
Whatever right?
Anyways, that was this morning. This afternoon we took it out of the fridge. Dark brown skin on top of the pudding, creamy chocolate underneath. I thought it didn't look too bad. Was I ever wrong! Jacob said it was icky. Daniel cried because his "treat" didn't taste good.
Now I am not in the habit of wasting food, so I dumped the bowl of pudding into the blender, added alot of sugar, more milk, and a banana. I tasted it, not bad, and poured it into Popsicle molds. Tomorrow we will find out if those taste good.
In conclusion, keep boxed instant pudding mix in my cupboard for when we want pudding, and find something else to do with the milk.

A BIG Batch of Cookies

So I decided to make cookies with the boys... To keep them in the kitchen for a little while. It was like three in the afternoon and we had to leave for church at 5:40. There is this awesome recipe on Allrecipes called Award Winning Cookies. I last made them for Daniel's first birthday, but I made gigantic cookies, so I wasn't really thinking about the size of the batch. First off, it calls for two packages of instant vanilla pudding mix. I only had one, but I also had one chocolate, so I used them together. It didn't occur to me as I was creaming two cups of butter with two cups of sugar that this was one huge recipe. Then I added four eggs and four and a half cups of flour... My mixer was almost spilling over! The recipe calls for four cups of chocolate chips, I only used two and no nuts. The dough was delicious.
I got about TEN DOZEN cookies made before it was time to go to church... Granted they are small children sized cookies... But I also put nearly half the dough in the freezer.
In conclusion, be aware when you are making a giant recipe, and don't start it before you have to go to church. Yum. I am eating one now.

Alleluia!

Happy Easter

from my kitchen to yours!