Cookies

This is my signature cookie recipe and it only comes out perfect if you follow the instructions. But don't worry, there is plenty of room for creativity. Here we go!

Flour, brown sugar, white sugar, eggs, vanilla, butter, baking soda, salt, assorted leftover chocolate chips( milk, dark, and white) and leftover English toffee.

Obviously, you don't need to do this if you don't use toffee.

Eat some of this as a treat.

Colin is particularly sensitive to lumps of baking soda. I always whisk together my dry ingredients to avoid complaints. Also, I know that I spelled whisk wrong in the Polaroid. Thank you.

Make sure and pack the brown sugar firmly. 

If you leave the dough in a ball it makes the dense, chewy, perfect cookie that we all love.

That's right. Right on top of the nutritious veggies.

Ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup unsalted butter, melted
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 egg
1 egg yolk
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips or 2 cups of any other stuff. For example, I have used dried cranberries and white chocolate chips, toffee bits and a bunch of leftover chips (as seen in this recipe), peanuts and dark chocolate chips, pistachios or almonds and dried cherries, etc, etc.

• Directions:

Whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt; set aside.

In a medium bowl, cream together the melted butter, brown sugar and white sugar until well blended. 

Beat in the vanilla, egg, and egg yolk until light and creamy. 

Mix in the sifted ingredients until just blended. Stir in the chocolate chips (or other "stuff") by hand using a wooden spoon. 

Drop cookie dough 1/4 cup at a time onto the prepared cookie sheets. Cookies should be about 1.5 inches apart.

Refrigerate dough for one hour. 40 minutes into the chilling, begin to preheat oven to 325 degrees F.

Bake for 17-20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until the edges are a light golden color. 

Cool on baking sheets for a few minutes before transferring to wire racks to cool completely.

To Gemma's High School Boyfriends: Future Punishment

I had a crappy afternoon. I really don't want to talk about it. Wait, yes I do. I have chosen to express my feelings and simultaneously exact my revenge on Gemma in the most maternally satisfying way possible. The future boyfriend letter. This WILL be printed and saved for a later date.

Dear Gemma's High School Boyfriend,

Today was a special day for your now grown-up (and potty trained...I hope) girlfriend. It didn't start out special but somewhere around Gemma's nap time things got interesting. You see, my little baby girl is in a state of sort-of-potty-training. She is fond of removing her own diapers and running around the house with her ample baby butt jiggling for all the world to see. (You see what I'm doing Gemma? This is called payback. I'm into delayed gratification.) Anyhow, dear, sweet, beautiful Gemma was found in her crib with  a neatly folded diaper in her hand and poop everywhere else.

"Mommy, I had a poopy diapoo." (Hopefully she has her "r's" down by now too)
"Oh, God help me...." I cried.

This was my afternoon. Cleaning poop off of the cabbage patch doll that used to be mine 25 years ago, and vacuuming dried poop chunks from the carpet, And doing lots of laundry (with a heavy hand while pouring the bleach,) and bathing one, very cute, feces encrusted toddler. This is my life. I really do love it despite my irritated tone at the moment.

So future boyfriend, the moral of the story is, Gemma did silly things as a baby. Gross things. And if you  don't think through the consequences of your actions you too might be cleaning poop off of a crib very soon.

Lovingly,
Erin (That's Mrs.Smith to you buck-o)

Vegan Blueberry-Whole Wheat Muffins

I had a craving for muffins this morning. Also, we are trying to use all of the stuff in our freezer and pantry so that we don't have to move a bunch of food to our new house and we can save some money in the process. This means that we only have Chex cereal (i.e. boring cereal) on hand right now and I just gave the kids the last of the pancakes that I froze so I needed some breakfast foods.

I had never made egg-free blueberry muffins before and I decided that today was the day. I was also feeling very health conscious so I made them a little too healthy tasting but Gemma said they were yummy. And I am going to ignore all comments about her being a biased critic because she has never tasted a horribly unhealthy/delicious Costco blueberry muffin.

I adapted this from the "Rich Muffin"- w/blueberry modification recipe in the Pillsbury cookbook. (Circa 1980, the one that says "New microwave ideas! Recipes & ways to use your revolutionary kitchen helper!" on the cover. Tee hee.) However, I changed so many things about it that you probably wouldn't taste any similarities between the two recipes.

Here is the recipe:

2 cups of white flour

2 cups of whole wheat flour (you can use all white flour if you desire)

1 cup sugar

7 tsp baking powder (6 tsp if you use eggs in the recipe)

1 tsp salt

1 tsp nutmeg

2 Tbsp milled flax seed + 6 Tbsp warm water (or two eggs)

2 1/3 cups soymilk (or enough to make the batter is the right consistency. Flax and whole wheat flour soak up a lot of moisture leaving the dough...well, doughy and needing more milk than your average muffin recipe)

2/3 cup vegetable oil

2 cups of blueberries either fresh or frozen (thawed and drained)

Preheat oven to 400°.

Line muffin tins with paper or silicone cups.

In large bowl, mix together the first six ingredients.

In a medium bowl combine the flax mixture (or egg), soymilk, and oil.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry being careful now to over-mix.

Gently fold in the blueberries and spoon the batter into baking cups filling them 3/4 full.

Bake for 20-25 min or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Makes 24 medium muffins.

House

You know how some people wait until the end of their 12th week of pregnancy to announce that they are expecting? I could never wait to tell people when it came to pregnancy but when it comes to home buying, I wait until the first trimester is over, so to speak. So, here it is: I am extremely happy to announce the we are buying our first home!

I have never allowed myself to dream about home-ownership because I didn't want to live in a constant state of dissatisfaction with my surroundings. But, the time had come when it made sense for us to take the giant leap from renting to owning and here we are.

We looked at a house a few weekends ago and liked it, which got us thinking about buying. It was fun to think about owning but the man doing the open house was pushy and awkward. So we called an agent named Jeff who was on a flier that we had picked up for a home that was for sale. It was kind of random but it worked out. We met him on a Saturday, he asked if we were pre-qualified, we said no. He suggested that we do that before we looked at any more houses or interview any more agents.

On Monday Colin went to a mortgage lender and got us pre-qualified. The next weekend Colin and I were celebrating our fifth anniversary by having my parents watch the kids for us while we stayed downtown. We used part of our time away from the kids to look at houses with Jeff, who we decided to use as our agent. It was exhausting in a good way. There are so many affordable houses in Spokane. In Western Washington we had always been overwhelmed by the lack of affordable housing and the general crappiness of what we could afford. It is so different here.

Anyway, after two full days of looking at lots of houses and even more online listings (hundreds), we had a top three. On Tuesday (Feb, 9 2010) we put in an offer on a house!

The house we are buying is a brand new split-level home with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, three car garage and a full unfinished basement that has a roughed in bathroom. We ended up putting in an offer above the asking price of the house because we are asking the builder to finish the basement for us and put in an a/c unit. Our basement will have a large family room, another bedroom, another bathroom and a laundry room. We can't wait until our closing date March 24th, 2010!

Here are a few pictures of the house. I'll put up more later when I can take some with our camera since these were taken during construction by the builder.

The outside

Living room (view from dining room)

Dining room (view from living room)

Kitchen (view from dining room)

Oh, and we're also having the builder put a microwave in place of that hood above the oven.

An important lesson for Ben.

Ben and I watched Mulan yesterday. After it was over he said "I want to watch the bonus features." (How he learned about bonus features, I don't know.) So, I menued around and found the bonus features which consisted of three music videos from the Mulan soundtrack sung by Stevie Wonder, Christina Aguilera, and...wait for it... Jackie Chan. Ben, not knowing who Jackie Chan is but sensing the excitement in my voice, chose the song "Make a Man Out of You" sung by Mr. Chan himself. The video opened up to Jackie picking a weapon (giant closet pole) and swinging it around artfully and then proceeding to poorly sing Ben's favorite song from Mulan in...wait for it... Chinese.

About 30 seconds in to the epicness Ben turns to me and says in a dead-sounding voice "Okay, I'm done now." He then left the room.

Lesson learned: Celebrities ruin everything. Especially your favorite Disney song.

Jackie Chan Music Video

A little bit about me.

I never really talk about myself on this blog so I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself. Here it goes.

• I don't like cats. And it's not just because I'm extremely allergic to them. It's because they are cold-hearted, aloof animals and they always leave piles of crap in my yard which I always, without fail, step into.
• My favorite color is green. But my love for green encompasses the entire green family including turquoise, teal, sea foam, lime, olive, etc,.
• I also like brown.
• I am an odd mixture of lazy and OCD. It is difficult to live with me. Colin is a patient man.
• I really, really like to watch people play video games. Just please, don't ask me to play.
• I have an ever-growing list of pet peeves that I enjoy complaining about.
• I laugh at my own jokes.
• I love Jesus.
• I am not a dreamer. I am usually pretty happy with life and I am a teeny bit afraid to dream because I don't like disappointment.
• I need to work on that whole dreaming thing.
• I grew up listening to my parent's records which included (but was not limited to)Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Sea Shanties, Miriam Makeba, The Beatles, Neil Diamond, Keith Green, etc,. This shaped the person that I am today greatly.
• I love my family a lot.
• I love to bake but I don't really like to eat what I have made. I've been accused of making people fat. I have a feeling that I'll be that old lady who forces people to eat "one more helping" because she think that they need to.

Perfect Banana Bread

Every couple of weeks I find myself with a few brownish, overly aromatic bananas on my hands. I used to put them in the freezer which was a terrible idea because I never, ever used them. Really. Never. So I had this freezer full of putrefied bananas that all eventually got thrown away after the appropriate "time period of keeping food you will never eat" elapsed.

Anyhow, I am proud to inform my readers (All two of you. Hi Mom.) that I now make a banana bread with my spotted reject bananas every week or so. It has been so great for breakfast and because I perfected my recipe, it is really easy to make. Yay! 

Before you do anything put your three bananas into a gallon sized ziplock bag and squish them until there are no lumps bigger than the size of a pea. When it's time to add the bananas you just cut the corner off of the bag to get the bananas out without any mess at all.

Note: Banana squishing is a good job to give to children who like to attach themselves to your legs whenever they sense you have any sort of task that you need to accomplish.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter or margarine, at room temperature

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking soda

1 1/2 cups flour

3 bananas

Directions:

• Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
• Grease and flour an 8x5 loaf pan.
• Mash bananas until smooth and set aside.
• In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar. Add vanilla and eggs.
• In a separate bowl combine flour, cinnamon, and baking soda.
• Gradually add the dry ingredient mixture to the wet ingredients. Do not over mix!
• Add banana by gently stirring it in. Again, don't over mix. It will make your bread tough and it won't rise as well if you do.
• Pour batter into prepared loaf pan and bake for 55-60 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted.
• Cool for 10 minutes in pan before transferring to a cooling rack.

You can use whole wheat flour if you want but it may change the texture of the bread. We like to toast slices of banana bread and put butter or cream cheese on it for added un-health.

Invasion of the Fruit Bats from Marbles & Obles

Ben loves fruit bats. I have no idea where he got the idea that fruit bats are so exciting but nevertheless he is quite taken by them. My only guess as to why he likes them is because he had a brief interest in Batman. He shortly realized that Batman is a tad scary ( almost everything scares him these days) and this led to him choosing the more-tame fruit bat as his personal mascot. He plays fruit bat almost everyday which consists of Ben spending good amount of time hiding under my bed covers which he calls his "fruit bat cave."

Ben's 4th birthday is coming up in March and I asked him what he wanted. He started out by flapping his arms. When asked what he was doing he said "I'm being the fruit bat from Marbles & Obles. That's what I want for my burf-day" What?

Then the light bulb came on. Around three months ago we were at Barnes & Noble and we showed Ben a copy of the book "Stellaluna." So, in his own Ben-way, he was asking for a book about a fruit bat. I just love how his brain works. It makes me smile.