This morning I broke in my new fruit juicer attachment for my Kitchenaid. Let me tell you, “Fresh Squeezed” is NOT the same as homemade, fresh squeezed! Nothing compares to the quality, flavor and sweetness of unprocessed, fresh squeezed, orange juice. Nothing.

So, what caused me to finally break in my new spinning fruit juicer? Well, I have great neighbors, many of whom own orange trees. Suffice it to say my basket was flowing over. As I’m not great at eating fresh fruit, I needed to find a way to use them. Don’t get me wrong, I love fruit but I’m super picky about sweetness. A tart strawberry can take me off the market for even trying another one for long spell. Oranges are a gamble. A really ripe one can be sweet and totally awesome, but get a tart or bitter one and I’m right back with the signing off for a spell page.

The greatest thing about my attachment was zero learning curve. It was obvious that I just had to plug it in to the front of my Kitchenaid and tighten the holding screw to keep it in place. I did find out quickly some lubricant was necessary. So I sprayed some cooking oil on the connector:

You can see the black lines at the top of the spinner, that’s where the spray went and instantly all the squeaks went away.

Then it was on to the juicing. I cut up 20 oranges of various sizes and held the halves up to the spinning device. I found the best speed was about 2. The seed/pulp catching tray caught the big stuff and the spinner did all the hard work.

I filtered the first few cups into the pitcher through a mesh cloth.

Then I got smart and put the cloth over the bowl:

I ended up with 1 quart of juice from 20 oranges (for reference, I’d average my sizes as medium), not bad for roughly 20 minutes worth of work this morning, minus a few interruptions to get the puppy out of the flower bed. *wink*

Looks like grapefruits and lemons are next.

Oh, and another fun tip I’ve learned and tried with success is freezing excess juice into ice cubes. You can add these to recipes and drinks to enhance flavor or cool a drink without diluting it. It’s so easy and works great.

So this morning I learned what a trillion dollars looks like, and how a new and unknown element may be the biggest reason for weight gain as well as the inability to lose it.

All in all, a good Monday morning!

It’s that time again! This year the kids decided to do a Santa’s Village for our annual gingerbread creation. My daughter requested that we do it when her grandma and grandpa were in town so they could do it with us. Here’s how it turned out:

The recipe and other years of gingerbread creations can be found here.

Here’s how it went down this year:

Wednesday afternoon I sat down to work out a pattern for the village. I’d decided to try a Santa’s Workshop, candy shoppe, sled and big Christmas tree for the village. I started with a blank piece of paper and some basic image ideas I scratched out.

Then I moved into creating a pattern and taping it together for testing.

I made the dough on Wednesday night but couldn’t get to it to roll and bake until Thursday. The good news is that it required very little flour for the rolling process. The bad news is that it was really stiff and I had to work it a bit before I cold successfully roll it. Therefore, my *note to self* is to not leave it refrigerated in the future for more than the suggested hour.

Thursday was rolling, cutting and baking:

If working with straight edges is important, you’ll want to take a moment to trim the baked pattern pieces when they’re fresh out of the oven while they’re warm and pliable. I personally like the rounded edges and know they’re all going to be covered with frosting anyway so do all my cutting before baking.

Friday morning I glued the houses together with royal frosting and later that afternoon we went to decorating:

Here’s a few more pictures of the finished results:

It’s always a fun thing to do, but I’m glad it only comes around once a year. I’m ‘gingerbreaded’ out!

Yummy Pork Salad

I love when things come together, especially after a day of the opposite happening. So I was tickled pink when last night I could pull of a truly successful dinner that was literally last minute. I’m not kidding about last and minute. It was 6:40, I’d just finished a project on the computer and no dinner started. I pulled out paper plates and threw the following together:

Baby spring salad mix
Baby spinach salad
Grated chedder cheese
Sliced mushrooms
Cooked, shredded pork
Cranberries
Fat free sun dried tomato dressing

It was splendid! It’s also very easy to customize with your favorite toppings or dressings. The key was already having the ingredients, especially the meat. Which brings me to the real purpose for this post.

Busy moms don’t have time to dilly dally in the kitchen or slave over Martha Stewart style dinners. This busy mom is always multitasking and thus needs all the help and tricks she can find to keep things moving smoothly. As a result, I’m a vigil simplifier. If there’s a way something can be simplified, I’ll find it. One of my favorite cooking and “mom chef” simplifications is using my slow cooker. Now before you go thinking I’ve put an entire recipe of multiple ingredients together for a scrumptious dinner, remember I’m a vigil simplifier and multitasker. We’re talking throw in a frozen roast before checking morning e-mail here. One of my favorites is pork loin roast with a small can of green chilies. After several hours it will start to break apart. This is the point when you can easily start shredding and pulling it apart with two forks. The meat can easily stretch through multiple meals all week long for my family of four. It seems that there’s always leftovers for quick lunches too. Here’s a few of my family’s favorite ways to make meals with the cooked meat:

Pork Tacos with corn salsa
BBQ pulled pork sandwiches
Cheesy tomato sauce with egg noodles and pork
Pork salad
Pork enchiladas
Pork and avocado sandwiches

All this comes from one pork roast thrown in a slow cooker with a small can of green chilies. There’s no prep time, no babysitting or slaving over a stove. Yet the results yield several “instant” meals later just by mixing and matching ingredients. A little BBQ sauce and you have a whole new venue, same with spaghetti sauce, and of course you can always leave it totally plain like in the tacos or on a salad.

Other things I’ve tried with success is throwing in a seasoning packet with a roast, like Lipton’s onion soup mix, etc. For a Sunday roast I’ll take the time to cut some veggies to cook with the roast, but during the week it’s a simple soup mix or more often a can of chilies, etc. The point is that once the meat is cooked you can stretch it so many ways with success and less stress.

I’m constantly amazed at the satisfaction and boost it is to get simple things done. I tend to think about the things that need done so often that I’ve done them at least a hundred times in my head before I actually get the job that only takes once to be done. What a waste of energy.

I’ve been learning how much easier it is to tell my kids yes instead of no and the benefits far outweigh the inconvenience. For example, a few weeks ago I was doing something when my son came to me and asked if I’d please make him his favorite cookies. My first thought was no, I’m doing something right now. But I’ve been working on retraining myself to that initial reaction by asking why not and how long will it really take, so instead I said yes. I dropped what I was working on and spent the next 15-20 minutes making him his favorite no bake, chocolate oatmeal cookies. Not only did I have a very happy boy, it saved me hours of nagging and interruptions. I went back to my previous task and completed it with a smile on my face knowing I’d taken time to do something that really mattered. If there were any doubt, my son confirmed this simple act with multiple verbal thanks that night and at bed time told me how he loved me with a hundred hearts and I was the best mom he ever had. Those moments are beyond price and they cost me only 15 minutes of readjusting my expectations. It takes so little to move mountains in the home.

Inspired with such simple successes in the kitchen I tried on a few things I’ve been putting off like baking bread from scratch and juicing fruit. I threw a new twist on my banana bread by cooking a large batch in a bunt cake pan. I’ve made several batches of homemade bread now and look forward to exploring new and different recipes. A little success goes a long way!

I grew up with a mother who did a lot of home canning and preservation of foods. I burned her homemade bread when left on watch. I learned how to do things with her tools and I’ve put off doing similar things in my own home for the excuse that I don’t have all the same tools like her steamer juicer. But last week I picked up all those guava that fell of the tree and juiced them. It’s not hard to cook the fruit until tender and create a makeshift drainer. I used my strainer over a bowl and one of my old flour sack dish towels to strain and squeeze the cooked fruit.

I have fruit in bottles in my fridge for immediate use and ice cubes for future use. I can’t tell you how this simple thing lifted my spirits compared to last year’s efforts of picking them up, keeping them on the counter for a few days and eventually throwing the spoiled fruit away.

Other tasks are easier to see and therefore procrastinate, like my floors. With a little unplanned motivation last week I steam cleaned my family room carpet which led to finishing the job on the tile. Have I mentioned how much I love my steamers? Or how much I love seeing the ‘after’ clean from the ‘before’ dirt?

This Saturday, I’ll drop off what feels like a garage full of bags and boxes from the deep clean of forbidden closets and corners of my home. It’s so nice to feel the space and organization when all the clutter is gone.

Little by little things are getting done and that’s my whole point. It doesn’t have to be a marathon event or everything done at one time. Just taking the few minutes here and there to do one thing that’s needing done or bugging you can do so much for your self esteem and motivation. I’ve only recently been let in on the great secret that it’s never done. So I’m not worrying anymore about getting everything ‘done’, I’m focusing instead on completing a few tasks when they come up. There’s much to be said for obtaining balance with this mentality from making cookies to playing a game or reading a story with your kids to clearing out that one junk drawer that’s taking over to preserving instead of throwing out the fruit you didn’t get to before it over ripened. I no longer look at my calendar to see everything I have to get done this week or this month. The lists are taking a much needed sabbatical and I’m retraining myself to keep the little things little, but important enough to get done. I wish I could put into words how amazed I constantly am at how much more I get done and how little time it takes to do most things. At the end of the day I’m learning the value of the lesson to just do it!

So I’m sitting here wondering where the summer went. I feel like we’ve crammed two months worth of activities into July alone. Several times last week I went to the calendar thinking it was already August as a result.

We left town right as school got out this year for the kids. We brought home some cousins to stay with us after that trip and then we drove back a second time to Idaho. We had one more trip to Las Vegas for a family event the 3rd weekend in July. Now I’m sitting here with the vacation and traveling done, looking at the calendar and realizing my kids start school in 14 days and feeling rather dazed.

So naturally, I redirect my thoughts to all the future things I want to get done, etc.! Before I know it the weather will be great again and I’ll be balancing my time with outside yard and garden time. There’s so much I want to do.

I’m also finding myself longing to get back into some projects that I can wrap up. My photo project is moving back up to the front of the list. I want to get all my backups organized, tagged, etc. and I want copies of all my new digital photos to have paper copies in the photo books too.

I’ve recently thrown baking into my hobby list of things I want to improve on. I baked my first loaf of homemade bread last week. I’ve made a lot of things from scratch, but bread was always more intimidating to me and it’d always been so much easier to pick up a loaf when shopping at the store. It was much easier than I was expecting and it’s been received extremely well. I’m getting ready to branch out into specialty and dessert breads.

Before I know it I’ll be celebrating kid’s birthdays, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Time flies.

Tonight brought a happy surprise. My daughter has been begging me for quite a while to make her favorite dessert. It’s a miniature chocolate raspberry torte from one of her favorite dinner places, P.F. Changs. We bought some shot glasses and mini spoons shortly after the restaurant started offering their individual sized desserts. We’ve had fun doing various types at home, but to date I haven’t done her beloved chocolate with raspberry sauce. So tonight I decided to tackle it for her. I was going to make devil’s food chocolate cake but when I did a search online I found a copycat recipe for the Chang’s version so I used that. The flourless chocolate cake was dreamy and super easy too. My happy addition was finding that my apple corer worked perfectly for gathering up small circle sizes of the cake to fit the shot glasses.

I decided as long as I was going to do the dessert I’d see if I could make my favorite dinner dish from there too, Mongolian Beef. I was so tickled at how well it turned out! It was worth sharing, especially for bookmarking the recipe for later! I even snapped a photo of the leftover dish and it turned out pretty good too! Yay for sweet success.

It’s always nice when you can start a week with some momentum of positive energy from the weekend. Saturday was a really productive day for me this weekend. By 11:00 a.m. I had mowed the front lawn, trimmed the bushes, harvested the garden and pulled the weeds.

We took a break for lunch at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants. The kids weren’t sure they wanted to go anywhere until we told them we’d be hitting the movie theater after to watch the movie my daughter’s been begging to see for what feels like forever - Confessions of a Shopaholic. The lunch was great and the show was much better than I was expecting. In fact, I’d go see it again and even apologized to Cid for dragging my feet so much on taking her to it.

Then it was back home to process and store the garden goods. I pulled out the old canning stuff that’s been collecting dust since I left Idaho and got to work.

My extra effort in planting paid off with nice, big carrots to work with this season. It took much less time than last year and they were easier to work with. These were vacuumed packed like last spring’s crop as we found that worked really well for keeping “crunchy” carrots (according to my son). My vacuum packer is now over 11 years old and I’m afraid that we’ll have to purchase a new one soon, but it has sure paid its dues! I wish we’d had one of these when I grew up as it’s a great way to preserve your crops in addition to bottling.

We decided to pickle the beets this time as my hubby said it’s his favorite way to eat them. Admittedly, it took me a minute to remember how to do this even looking at my recipe card. Thankfully, I found it a lot like riding a bike and the knowledge came back soon enough.

During this process my daughter asked why we were doing this. We explained that you can’t eat everything from your garden when it’s ready because it will go bad, but we don’t want to waste it. These methods allowed us to enjoy the vegetables all year long. Her mouth fell to the floor and she said, “A whole year?!” we giggled as we informed her that all the carrots we’ve eaten since last year at this time were from that same batch we’d stored. It’s fun to see your kids start to get it.

Sunday was a nice day and I even refilled the cookie jar before bed!

There is so much to be said for seeing the rewards of your labors. It’s such a boost!

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This year the kids decided to do a gingerbread train instead of houses. So we started a couple of days ago making the dough. While it chilled, we created our own pattern and tested it taping the paper templates together. Then we rolled out the dough, cut out the pieces and baked them. As you can see Taylor was very excited to help with this part.

I’m not sure what he had more fun doing, rolling, cutting or building flour mountain ranges. *grin*

Tonight it was on to decorating:

And the final result was one we were all happy with!

For past years of fun check these links out:
Successful Gingerbread Creations
2007 Gingerbread Houses
A Week Before Christmas
The Gingerbread Boy
2006 Gingerbread Houses

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One of our most relaxed days on our trip ended with a trip to the Alamo and Riverwalk. It was fantastic!

Taylor thought museum part was boring. Imagine that coming from our six year old boy. *giggle* I, however really enjoyed it! Then we walked down to the Riverwalk and enjoyed the streets as we went.

The Riverwalk is a fun strip of restaurants, shopping and other business that run along the river. We ate dinner at Boudro’s based on Blake’s co-worker’s suggestions and we weren’t disappointed. We sat right out on the river where the kids enjoyed learning about the different tour cruises going up and down the river, and why you wouldn’t want to feed the ducks from your table.

Naturally we had to take the tour cruise after talking with one of the boat drivers parked next to our table for a while. We ended up waiting for a little longer than we thought for the next boat, hence the kids actually sitting…but it was great.

Then we hooked up with the cousins again for ice cream! Taylor said he was “girl locked” at the ice cream bar and I almost dropped the camera from laughing so hard. He smiled and said it was okay though. Those girl cousins are so much fun!

It was such a fun and relaxed day and evening. The Riverwalk is the highlight of San Antonio and anyone who doesn’t take it in while they are there will be truly sorry!

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