the kids and i went grocery shopping today and found a few things to try out. the first things we picked out where those fuze drinks. i’ve never had them before and since they were a dollar, i thought we’d give them a try. the boy has had them before so he picked out the strawberry kiwi one that he likes. the girl loves coconut flavored stuff so she picked the banana coconut one and i decided to try the fruit punch one. they have things on them like slenderize, and low carb and that sort of think, but these are not diet get you thin drinks. the kids liked theirs. the fruit punch one had a bit of an aftertaste to it, but that could be because it wasn’t totally cold yet. i still have half the bottle to finish later. they only have 5 calories, so they are better than drinking soda. but they aren’t going to be an everyday drink.
then we found milkshake shakers in the freezer section. it’s a plastic shaker cup with beads of icecream in them. think dip n dots in a cup. you add milk to it and shake the bejeezbus out of it. what you end up with is a single serve milk shake. we tried the chocolate one. it tasted pretty good. i think it was 1.50, maybe a little less than that. i wouldn’t use them to make milkshakes for a crowd, but it was good and i’ll buy some again for a treat for the kids. one made enough for each of us to get a good size sample. the containers would be good to reuse as packaging for hot cocoa mix and the like for christmas.
then the girl and i went to fresh market to get produce and meat, and while we were there, we got a vanilla cupcake with chocolate icing, and one of the key lime tarts. the cake part of my cupcake is pretty much just there as an excuse to have a big heap of icing. it had the taste and texture of a box cake. nothing against box mixes as i use them myself sometimes, but i expect more from a bakery cake. the icing was thick and heavy. the cupcake really couldn’t stand up to the heavy icing and toppled over when i cut it in half. half for me and half for the boy. the icing tasted like it came out of a can of dunkin hines icing instead of bakery icing. again nothing against canned icing, i just expect more from bakery items. and it’s better to find out on a 99 cent cupcake, than to order several dozen of them. they do have a yummy dessert tray that we got to sample a few weeks ago. when the daughter of the lady i do girl scouts with graduated fro high school, she ordered a dessert try from fresh market. the lemon bars and the brownies that i tried were very good. they just seem to have missed the mark with the cupcakes.
we also bought starbucks frappichinos since i had a coupon for them but they are in the fridge getting cold. we’ll try them later today or tomorrow.
we had a visitor in the backyard this evening. i was washing the dishes and looking out the window that is over the sink and spotted a turtle! he wandered over through the wire fence at the back of the yard that separates us from the little bit of wooded area behind us. we took some pictures and he wandered around a bit. when he couldn’t make it back through the fence, i had to pick him up and put him through it. then he wandered on his little turtle way. i’m assuming it is a male, since men won’t ask for directions. i did put on gloves before picking him up, and i gently touched his hind legs to get him to retreat into his shell so i wouldn’t accidently hit his head when i put him through to the leaf pile on the other side of the fence. the girl sat and watched to make sure he wandered back into the woods and not our yard.
I tried tinting the plain batch of play dough. Since I only used small balls of dough, I only needed a couple of drops of food coloring. They were about the size of a golf ball. The colors came out pretty vivid, but again, they were small bits of dough, and it would have taken a good bit of coloring to color the whole batch this way. I also tried using paste food coloring that is usually used for coloring icing. that worked really well and since it is a concentrated coloring, it didn’t take a lot of coloring to get darker colors. Once the color is worked into the dough, it doesn’t come off on your hands. I ended up with some black coloring on my hands, but that was where I touched the gel before it was worked in all the way.
I made a few batches of homemade play dough today for the kids to play with this summer. The girl is having a friend spend the night tomorrow night, so i though it would be good to have it ready for them. The recipe i used is a pretty common one floating around the internet and i have seen it in a few books for kids’ activities.
you will need:
1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
1 cup warm water
2 tsp cream of tartar
1 TBSP oil (i used veggie oil)
mix everything in a saucepan and heat over low heat stirring constantly. It will slowly thicken and turn into dough. You can either tint the whole batch one color using liquid food coloring while you heat it, or you can make a plain batch and knead it in after it’s cooled a bit. It needs to cook long enough that it will form a ball in the pan as you stir it around. If it is too sticky to knead when you take it out of the pan, you need to pop it back in the pan and heat it longer. once it has cooked long enough, plop it out on the counter to cool a bit. You want it to be cool enough to knead it to make sure it’s smooth and not sticky. I kneaded it a few times to make sure it was smooth, then I covered it with plastic wrap and left it on the counter to finish cooling. It’s ready to play with once it is cooled. Store it in a plastic container to keep it from drying out. My plastic containers are a little big for each batch of dough, so I am covering the dough with plastic wrap and then putting the lid on the container.
It’s nontoxic dough since it’s basically flour, water and salt. But it is NOT an edible dough. If your little one eats a hunk of it, they may end up with a tummy ache from the salt.
If you want to add the coloring to the dough after cooking it, roll the cooled dough into a ball. Make a well in the middle of the ball and add a few drops of coloring to it. pinch the dough over the coloring and carefully begin to knead the dough. carefully because you don’t want to squirt food coloring every where. I’m not sure how much coloring you can add this way, so I don’t know if it is possible to add too much. so just start with a few drops and add a few at a time. I have a batch of plain dough to try this with, but it is still cooling.
so it’s been a busy week. yeah it’s only wednesday night, but a lot has been going on. friday night carl, cherryl and i went to the george strait concert. blake shelton and julianne hough were the opening acts. i had only heard one of julianne’s songs before other than the cover song she did. i had forgotten some of the songs that blake shelton sings were his songs. he’s got an odd sense of humor. he sang the free credit report dot com song from the pirate commercial. and as always, george strait put on a really good show.
at some point in the last few weeks, the door bell broke. the pizza lady informed up of that. thank you pizza lady. who knows how long it’s been busted. we bought a replacement. it’s a wireless one, but we forgot to get something to cap the wires with and you can’t just let wires hang out without something on them. so the new doorbell is on the kitchen table along with the new weed whacker line thing that needed a longer bolt to attach it to the weed whacker.
tuesday the boy got 3 awards at school. and today was the 5th grade promotion for the girl. in the fall i will have 2 kids in middle school. they will both be at the same school next year so i only have one bus stop to go to in the morning. the nephew will be going to the school here in the neighbor hood. we are too close for a bus to come through so we will have to walk or drive, but since he will be on the same schedule as the boy and girl, i only have one set of school hours to remember instead of the 3 i had to remember this year.
the girl got to go to lunch with carl and some of the guys he works with. thankfully she’s her daddy’s girl and is already a smart alack so she wasn’t corrupted by them. for example, we had dinner at 5guys with pirate and his girlfriend over the weekend. when pirate asked the girl “what’s up?” in true smart alack style she replied “the ceiling.” yep she’s definitely one of ours.
tomorrow, i finally get to go for the mri on my jaw. i had to postpone it once because they hadn’t gotten the preauthorization from the insurance company, and then i got a call earlier this week telling me i needed to go to a different office because they can take better images or something. oh yippie! so now i have to drive farther to get the mri. the other place i at least knew where i was going. oh well, that’s that the gps is for.
we have a plastic pool we are going to use for a sandbox. we have to get some more sand, but we have a few bags to start with should it ever stop raining long enough for the lawn to get mowed. i bought shrinky dinks to play with, and i think we’ll make some playdough next week.
i think that’s all that is going on right now. happy summer!
i found this recipe over at bethanyactually.com and finally got around to trying it. i’ve been looking for some new snacks that are easy to make and this is really easy. the only hard part is watching the chickpeas to make sure they don’t burn. the link to bethany’s post is http://bethanyactually.com/yummy-and-healthy-roasted-chickpea-snacks/
you need:
one 15oz can of chick peas
1Tbsp olive oil (i ended up using regular veggie oil since i was out of olive oil)
1-2 Tbsp worcestershire sauce (i used 2TBSP)
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp salt
drain the can of chick peas, then rinse and drain again. lay them out on paper towels to dry. i didn’t let mine dry much, and i should have at least patted them dry, but i didn’t.
turn the oven to 400 degrees.
mix the rest of the ingredients in a pan and heat them up. toss in the chick peas and stir to coat them well. this is where having dry chick peas would have been helpful since the sauce doesn’t coat wet chick peas. once they are coated, spread out on a foil lined cookie sheet/jelly roll pan. make sure it has a lip all the way around or you will have little chick peas rolling all over the place. now if you are like me and don’t wait for the chick peas to dry, you can pour the sauce that didn’t stick to them over the top of them once they are on the baking sheet. even if they were dry, pour any remaining sauce over top anyway. 
put them in the oven to roast for 45 minutes making sure you stir them every 10 minutes.
mine were done at 40 minutes.
Last monday, i took the nephew to the park so he could play a while before the rain started. he was having fun climbing up the ladders and coming down the slides. while watching him play, i yawned. i didn’t think it was any different from any other yawn until my mouth wouldn’t shut. well crap! now my jaw is locked open. kiddo thought i was playing around since i was talking funny. and so the adventure begins. after taking kiddo back to teh house, i went to the urgent care place to see if they could help. it was a fairly slow day for them so i got back pretty quickly, but by the time i saw the doc, it had already been an hour that my jaw had been locked. two docs, a nurse, a shot of lidocaine, time waiting for Red to get there to drive me, a shot of valium and several attempts at resetting my jaw later, i’m still stuck with my mouth open. valium was not my friend that day. i’ve had enough of my head being shaken around, so now it’s time to go to the ER. the ER took some x rays, used me for a human pincushion, and finally gave me something better than lidocaine for the pain. the first doc (yes it took more than one here too) was smart enough to wrap gauze around her thumbs for padding before she tried to reset my jaw so she wouldn’t have to worry about me biting down on her thumbs. urgent care guy, you should think about doing that. anyway, she had no luck either. time to call in a bigger doctor. before he came in they gave me more meds. thank you ER doc for that. i zonked out from the second dose of meds, but carl tells me it took the second doc 2 tries to get it reset.
now i’m having to track down an oral surgeon that will take our insurance to make sure it is healing well. there are 4 within a 50 mile radius all of which are on the other side of the river. yippie!
now should you ever find yourself with a locked jaw in search of medical attention, make sure you take a pen and paper with you. trying to talk is pointless as it just makes things hurt worse, and no one knows sign language. not even numbers or the alphabet.
carl took a day off last week and we went to the mall so i could get a battery for the watch that died almost a year ago. we got there a little early and the only store opened was the sporting goods store, so we headed over there. waved hello to the security guard on our way into the store and wandered through camping gear. the watch place was open so we dropped off my watch and then went to old navy to kill the 10 minutes it was going to take to replace the battery. carl needed to go to the bathroom, so after i was done looking at what i wanted to check out at old navy, i went to sit in the food court to wait for him. the security guard walks by and sort of does a double take at me before asking ” no class today?” she thought i was a high school kid!! mind you this is the same security guard we saw when we walked into the sporting goods store and she is the same one i have seen several mornings while mall walking. the only thing i could think to say was um, i’m 33. i haven’t been in high school for 16 years!
the fun doesn’t end there. we go to borders and i leave carl in the magazine section and decide to look at the kid’s books to see if there is anything the girl might like. the sales guy there asks if i am looking for anything so i tell him no, i’m just waiting on my husband. he then proceeds to tell me the wonders of some book about the 40 year friendship of 11 girls blah blah blah, and oh its 30% off, would you like it??? um sorry dude, i read sci fi stuff.
so one person thinks i’m a teenager, and another thinks that just because i’m a woman, i want to read sappy books. silly peoples.
carl goes to lunch with a regular group of guys from work. there is the pirate, the big kid and morse code. yes there are reasons why i gave them these nick names, but those are stories for another time.
one of the places they go for lunch is a pizza and sub place that brings out shakers of red pepper flakes. at one of their recent lunches, the red pepper shaker was full. they happen to use the big shakers that most places use for sugar. the big kid puts some pepper flakes on his food, then decides to be a smart alack and unscrews the top. the next person who decides to add red pepper flakes happens to be morse code. and with an unscrewed lid, he ends up with more red pepper flakes than he bargained for. a whole shake full. he shares these red pepper flakes with the big kid by dumping some of them on top of his food, but he is still left with quite a lot. carl says there was a bit of sweating while eating lunch that day. unfortunately it wasn’t one of the days i ate lunch with them so carl may have more details he can share later. he has some pictures of the pepper flake covered food that are quite pretty.
so that is a bit of back story for the part that i had a hand in. today was the big kid’s birthday, and at a lunch before the pepper flake incident, it was decided that i would make a cake for the occasion. i have a computer shaped cake pan so it seemed fitting that is what i would make for the cake. well after carl told me about the pepper flakes, i thought well we could get him back by putting pepper flakes in his cake. brilliant idea! but we wouldn’t want everyone to eat a red pepper flake laced cake. hmmmm what about cupcakes? even better idea. so for a couple of days i thought about the best way to spike the cupcakes. i knew i was going to have left over cake mix and would end up with a decent amount of cupcakes., but i needed to make sure i didn’t confuse the regular cupcakes with the hot cupcakes. different cupcake liners solved that. so how to put the heat in the cupcakes. i had two ideas and decided to try both of them. one was to mix cayenne pepper into the batter of one before it was baked. the other was to cut the top of the other off, pour in some hot sauce, then replace the top and ice it. carl and the girl helped come up with that idea. the hot sauce i used wasn’t your regular tabasco sauce. the girl likes spicy food so i let her pick out a hot sauce at the store last month that is made with habenaro peppers. that is the hot sauce that soaked into the cupcake. i iced them with plain white icing then dipped them in black sprinkles to make the tops look like part of a parking lot. i keep telling the big kid that he can be run over in the parking lot, so on one cupcake i put a little lego man running away and on the second one i put a match box car like looks a little like my car so it looks like i’m chasing him down in the car.
i delivered the cake and special cupcakes to carl’s workplace this afternoon but unfortunately i did not get to stay to witness the eating of the cupcake. however i am told that the big kid ate one of them in one bite. ouch. i burnt my taste buds just taking a little sample of the cayenne pepper batter. one of the other guys took pictures that i will hopefully see soon.
don’t unscrew the lid of red pepper flakes, you might end up eating something worse.
yesterday was a short day for the girl. the elementary schools here get out early on wednesdays to give the teachers planning time or something. they get out of school 2 hours and 40 minutes early. on top of that, there was a 2 hour delay because of fog. so school started at 11 and got out at 1:10. they were pretty much there for lunch. well you don’t get much homework when you only have 2 hours of school, so the girl finished up pretty quickly. after i got dinner started (yum meatloaf) she wanted to play a game. we started with scrabble. neither of us are the best scrabble players, but we played better than we usually do. then we moved on to go fish. i won a couple of games, she won a couple of games. and by then it was time for dinner. after dinner we played war. the girl kicked my butt. then carl got in on the games and we played spoons. do not play spoons with carl. he cheats. though he finally lost a game of spoons. yes on march 19th 2009, carl lost a game of spoons to me and the girl. we had a good time hanging out together.