Eat

It’s been a while, since I did any baking with my kids. I’ve said it before, I’m not the biggest fan. “Frazzled,” just barely describes how I feel after a baking session with them. But, they love it, and I love that they do, so I suck it up.  I promised them we would bake together once a week, instead of just once in a while. Obviously, I have a death wish. 

For our first baking sesh, it was just me and the girls. That made it a little easier. Not really. We decided on soft pretzels because they are a favorite. Also, it’s a fool proof recipe. They honestly did all the work. I just read the recipe and gave them some pointers, such as dusting your hands with flour to stop the dough from sticking. 

Instead of just regular pretzel shapes, they wanted to do letters. So we decided on the first letter for everyone in our family, plus 2 bunnies. We ended up with a C, K, J, A, W, S, M, and L.

In the end, there was a mess. Um, flour gets everywhere when left for tiny hands to measure. My circuits were on overload and I was starting to twitch. However, I had two little girls who were so impressed with their baking skills, they are in talks to open shop and become professional soft pretzel bakers. It was worth it. 

This is the soft pretzel recipe we use. It really is easy and they turn out perfect every time we make them! My kids love them as is with the buttery, salty topping. I prefer to dip mine in mustard. They are delicious and they will keep for a few days, but they never make it beyond an hour here!

At least once a week, I bring my kids into the kitchen to cook with me. They alternate turns, because 3 of them at once is just too crazy. Also, I find that I enjoy it more when I can I have one on one time with each of them. They love to cook and I do love teaching them. Not only do they get to sample through out the recipe, but they are practicing they’re reading and math skills. That’s a bonus for this homeschooling mom! 

I’ve always wanted to make cream puffs and if I’d known just how easy it was, I would have done so a long time ago. There are two main characters in a cream puff recipe. The first is a French pastry dough called, pate a choux. Sounds like, “pot uh shoe” and fun to say a million times over. Annie must have said it, just that many times! The second, is creme chantilly. Sounds like, “whipped cream.” Okay, so I did feel a little ridiculous every time I said, “creme chantilly.” But, French is a part of our daily studies, so I kept it legit and went with, “creme chantilly.”

I chose this recipe, because the instructions were clear and the photo of the creme puff showing all that glorious creme chantilly! If I’d thought about it, I would have gotten a picture of ours showing off the cream, but I forgot in the midst of instructing and photographing. You’ll just have to trust me, that our cream puffs were all kinds of jacked up with the creme chantilly. Have I said, “creme chantilly” enough yet?

I’ll admit, when we first put the cream puffs in the oven to bake, I wasn’t sure if they were going to work. For the first few minutes, I was actually sure of it. Then out of no where, they began to puff. As a friend recently said, “they are magical!” The key to a good cream puff is the puff. It’s actually a pocket of air inside the pastry. That’s the housing for all that wonderful creme chantilly! Here I go again, dropping my creme chantilly. I think I’ve creme chantilly-ed this post to death. All hail to the creme chantilly! I wonder, if I go in the bathroom, turn off all the lights, look in the mirror while chanting, “creme chantilly”, if Julia Childs would appear? Ha! I won’t be trying that, but you should definitely try this cream puff recipe!

When I wrote my last blog post in March, I didn’t anticipate taking such an extended break from blogging. But I did and it felt good to step away for a while. I was able to enjoy, ahem, survive the last few months of my pregnancy and didn’t worry too much if my blog would be okay. On June 5th, 4 weeks ahead of schedule, we welcomed the fourth baby and second boy in our family, Wyatt Sam. He is a complete joy and quite the little chunker! I’ll tell you more about my newest love in another post. For now, I want to share this slammin’ broccoli and cheese quiche recipe!

I have never made quiche until this recipe. I’m not exactly sure why, but baking a quiche has always sounded intimidating. Perhaps it was the thought of making a crust that kept me from making this deliciousness. Well, no more. I’ve made this quiche about a dozen times in the last few months. C’est magnifique! It’s perfect for breakfast, snack, lunch, or dinner. It’s one of the few ways, I can get Savannah to ingest more than a sliver of broccoli. It is so easy. The crust is the perfect quiche crust and it takes no time at all to make. Grab the crust recipe here and the quiche recipe here. The only ingredient I have substituted, was the cream in the quiche. Once, I didn’t have any on hand, so I used canned coconut milk. It was just as a good and a little healthier. Also, there were a few comments on the quiche recipe, that it used too much onion. Too onion-y? Is that even possible? Onion breath be damned…I say, load up! But if it’s not your thing, just sub it out.

Now that I’ve gotten my first postpartum blog post underway, all while, a sleeping Wyatt lay on my chest and Savannah shoved every Tsum Tsum in my face, I think I can declare I’ve officially returned from my blogging break!

A while back, I stumbled onto a recipe for making chocolate ice cream out of frozen bananas. It’s awesome and I make it quite often here. It’s still a giant mystery to me how frozen bananas can turn into ice cream, but it does. After making it for a while, I thought if I could make ice cream out of frozen bananas, then maybe I could make sorbet out of frozen strawberries. Turns out, you can. You can actually make sorbet out of several different fruits. We’ve made them all, but today I’m talking about strawberry sorbet bars. I’m talking about chocolate covered, strawberry sorbet bars. Oh yeah!

It’s back to school time and I think this would make a great after school snack to chase away those back to school blues. Make them the night before and they’ll be ready the next day. A perfect refresher after hitting the books all day!

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Let’s get the obvious out of the way. I suck at taking pictures of food. I so totally do. It’s probably why I post such few recipes. I need to get over that. See how I took a bite out of one and placed it on top of all the others? That’s my go to dramatic effect to entice you into make this recipe. Now that I’m looking at the picture, I can see that I actually missed biting the almond. I was so sure I got it. Well, that probably takes away from some of the dramatic flair I was after. Oh well.
I came across a recipe the other day for a sugar free, chocolate covered coconut bar. It lost me at sugar free, but it pulled me back in with the promise of chocolate and coconut. Listen, I give mad props to anyone that can do a Paleo or sugar free diet. I cannot. I come from a long line of sweet toothed people. We have to end our day with something sweet, that is not fruit, that is not Stevia laced. It is law with my people. I am law abiding.
Even though I love my sweets, I have adopted a healthier eating lifestyle over the last two years. This is not to say, I don’t occasionally partake from the refined sugar food group. I do. But, I have learned what I bring into my house, my kids want to eat. And as they have gotten older, it’s become increasingly hard to eat a candy bar on the sly. The cough/unwrap trick works no more. Clever little souls! So yes, we do consume refined sugar, but I try to keep it to a minimum.
Almond Joy happens to be one of my favorite candy bars of all time. What’s not to love? The almond? The joy? I knew I had to attempt this with a little revamp using maple syrup and chocolate chips. Y’all, they are so delish! I’m not exactly fooling myself that I’m eating an Almond Joy. No, but it’s dern close enough for me and I have zero guilt consuming one or three, because they are made with healthier ingredients. If you can get beyond my ugly food pictures, make these.

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I’ve been wanting to post favorite family meals for a while. There just never seems to be enough time to squeeze in a photo. We are off to a hockey game tonight, so dinner came early. Finally, I had time to snap a picture. I couldn’t pass up posting this one, because we thought it was fabulous!As with most of my meal planning, I scour Pinterest until something catches my eye. I knew I wanted to make turkey burgers, it was just a matter of finding the right recipe. Certainly, there is no shortage of turkey burger recipes out there, especially on Pinterest. I finally settled on a Chipotle Turkey Burger, topped with a fruit salsa. It did not disappoint!

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