Happy Birthday Baby!

So my Daniel is now one year old! I find this amazing and yet unbelievable. I wanted to celebrate with a car theme cake. (Not the movie Cars. Just plain old cars.) He really likes to play with hotwheels cars (we called them dinky cars as kids, I wonder what they are called now?) .
Really good friends of ours had a baby boy (Jonah) the day after Daniel was born, so we decided to celebrate their birthdays together. So a week before their actual birthdays we got together for supper and cake. Now how to make a cars cake for two? I surfed the internet for awhile and found some neat ideas. I don't claim to be a great cake decorator. I mostly have no skills - just the instructions that came with the four pack of piping tips I bought.
Anyways... I put a few ideas together and here is the cake.

Get it?
They are tied for first!

Before digging in.
The cupcakes were for the other kids at the party.
This way all this kids got cars (but the birthday ones were way cooler).

I think they spent as much time chewing on their race cars as smushing cake around.

Jonah thinks birthdays are awesome and delicious.
Happy first birthday Sweetie!

Daniel thinks he should always get cake for supper.
Happy first birthday Little Boy!

Stay tuned... we had our families over for a birthday BBQ and although I did not make a cake, I made something that was way more delicious...

Curry, Curry, Everywhere

So I found a recipe called "Slooooow Cooker Curry." That's right, sloooow. Anyways, we don't eat a lot of curry (ok, really none at all), but for some reason this recipe caught my eye and I really wanted to try it. Potatoes, red onion, crushed tomatoes, curry, cinnamon, garlic, and chicken... What was not to like? So the recipe concluded with "serve with rice and naan." Rice seemed a little redundant since the chicken is cooked on a bed of potatoes. But naan bread... Yummy! So as the curry was cooking I found a recipe for naan bread. It is neat to cook because I had to preheat the oven as hot as it could go, with the baking pans in there, and then toss the bread in and cook for five minutes. I did get mildly distracted and when I pulled the bread out one was burnt. A minute later my fire alarm went off. I was worried because they were all really puffy, and I think naan bread is more of a flatbread, but when I cut into them they flattened right up and looked like the picture next to the recipe. I even ate the leftover burnt one with pizza sauce to dip the next day. The leftover curry chicken, however, is still sitting in the fridge.

2011 Kitchen Challenge - FAIL / Hello 2011 - SUCCESS

Sorry for flaking out on you.... I don't have much of an excuse at the moment... but I have posted a last minute May Challenge... I promise to have something up for June!!!

I was re-reading my January 1st blog post about some goals for this year, and I thought I would update you on some of that. Here is what I wrote:


Hello 2011... the year I will hopefully get all of you to try a few new recipes with me through my 12 month cooking challenge. The year I hope to become more of a Locavore. The year I plan to succeed at making hamburger buns. The year we are going to try growing some of our own food!


I think I have made some good progress on this!
-I HAVE figured out how to make hamburger buns, finally.
-We are buying all of our beef, chicken, and eggs from local farmers, and we are even buying locally milled whole wheat flour. Once local veggies and fruit are in season we plan to do most of our groceries at the farmer's market.
-We have planted a garden! After two years of planting flowers and then not caring enough to weed, we have filled our front flower beds with veggies. One tomato plant is flowering and I have two lettuces sprouting. This has been a wonderfully great experiment so far, I can't wait to see what happens. Google "square foot gardening" if you want some great ideas for starting your own veggies on a small scale.

Meatless Monday Blahs

So today we made a family decision to scrap the meatless Monday. We have been trying this since January and we are both sick of not being able to come up with good stuff. I made some pretty good minestrone once, some okay potato soup that would have been better with bacon, and some awesome potatoes and risotto that would both have been way better with a steak... Or even a pork chop. I just can't eat a side dish for my main dish. I don't like tofu and I don't want to learn to cook it. The boys don't eat rice or potatoes and the last two pasta dishes I have made they would't touch. In fact tonight I tried a red pepper sauce with peas on tortellini. Jacob ended up eating processed cheese slices and pepperoni instead... He said his macaroni was yucky. Daniel wouldn't even try the tortellini but he would put the peas in his mouth, then take them out of his mouth and throw them on the floor. He had plain soda crackers and strawberries for supper. Jeff ate two plates, but I think it was only because he was really hungry and it was edible. So, I give up. I justify it by saying we only have meat with breakfast maybe once a month, and if there are no leftovers in the fridge I never make meat for lunch. So really, we have at least one meatless meal a day.
Blessings to all my vegetarian friends and family... I couldn't do it.