Favorite Things - Spring Trees 2

The flowers on the trees are in full bloom - love a beautiful, sunny spring afternoon!

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

Nearly Wordless Wednesday 3/30/11

Love the baby buds and little leaves on the cottonwood tree in our front yard!

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

Favorite Things - Fresh Bread

 Our St. Patrick's day Irish Soda Bread, with the first slice gobbled up straight from the oven:

Freshly-baked bread is for sure a favorite thing!

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

Favorite Things - Kids' Art

I love that kids in our school get to do REAL ART with a REAL ART TEACHER. Thanks to an incredible grant program, we have both visual and performing art specialists in our school, and our kids are exposed to some amazing activities and concepts.

For the past couple of weeks in art the class has been working on a really cool cactus painting. First, they drew the cactus using a series of oval shapes. Then they painted each shape with watercolors.  The next week they glued spikes onto the cactus, and then added ink to the outlines of the cactus. Finally, ink was used to create details on the cactus.

Paining the cactus with watercolors:

Gluing on spikes:

Drawing the outline and details with ink:

Finished art:

 Kids' art, and the great experiences they have creating it, is absolutely a favorite thing!

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

Menus 3/28/11 - 4/3/11

Monday, 3/28: Hobo Hash (from the freezer), steamed green beans or broccoli, green salad.

Tuesday, 3/29: Cheap eat out (Mr. Mamie has class); YOYO/CORN for GrandmaT.

Wednesday, 3/30: Chicken Enchilada Soup (from the freezer), cornbread, green salad.

Thursday, 3/31: Asian Chicken, Yellow Rice (a HUGE favorite here!), green salad.

Friday, 4/1: Basil Cheeseburgers OR Southwest Turkey Burgers OR Healthy Turkey Burgers (the patties are frozen in the freezer; everyone can choose their own), sweet potato fries done the oven (from the awesome giant bag of frozen sweet potato fries sold at Costco), various burger toppings.

The weekend is up in the air, as my birthday is on Saturday and our plans are not firm yet.

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

Favorite Things - Great Kids' Books

I have an extensive classroom library, far more books than any one kid could read in a year. Alas, that doesn't stop me from always spotting MORE books that I think the kids would love.

This is but a small sample of my classroom library:

A couple of weeks ago I saw this cool pop-up book of inventions on a clearance table at Barnsie:

It was SO PERFECT becasue we had just had a theme about inventions/inventors in our reading series! I didn't immediately buy it though, 'cause the month's book budget had already been spent, and Mr. Mamie and I are really and truly are trying to stick to our budget allocations. Stoopid financial responsibility thing!

I showed the book to Mr. Mamie when we met up awhile later, and tried not to sound too bereft about not getting it... but I guess it didn't work, since he pulled out his wallet and said "Well, I have enough random cash in here, let's go buy it!" SO WE DID! To heck with budgeting and responsibility!

One of my favorite things as a teacher is seeing kids get ALL INTO books, and this awesome pop-up has been immensely popular with the whole class... I wish I could show you the expression this little cutie's face as he's pointing out something in the book - so excited and precious!

 

Great kids' books and great kids who love them are FAVORITE THINGS! And husbands who buy book for my classroom are my most favoritist of all!!!

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

Favorite Things - Cookie Scoop

HOW did I ever survive without a cookie scoop?! This thing is AWESOME! I picked mine up at The Walmartz about a year ago, and it's become one of my favorite kitchen implements.

Great for cookies, of course:

 

Also works for falafel:

 

And no doubt for many other things as well! 

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

Nearly Wordless Wednesday 3/23/11

Essential: Dry-erase board on the fridge with my to-do list.

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

Favortie Things - My "Sous Chef"

Niece loves to both cook AND eat! She's quite skilled in the kitchen, and can do many tasks independently and even more with a small amount assistance (Nephew, meanwhile,  needs explicit directions and supervision for heating up a can of soup).  Before she was in school full-time, she and GrandmaT made several batches of cookies every week.  We all miss those days! But during Spring Break she came over to help me make a huge batch of my favorite style of chocolate chip cookies (recipe coming soon!). We decided that instead of baking them all right away we'd freeze some "dough balls" could be pulled out of the freezer for fresh-baked cookies on a moment's notice.

Here's my favorite "sous chef" rolling up a ball of cookie dough:

And a few other memories of Niece cooking or eating, two of our favorite past-times!

October 2004, sitting at a picnic table outside of Wombat and GolfDad's RV (or "house-car," as Nephew called it back then). This was a couple of months before they bought their house here in The Village. That's GrandpaE and Golf Dad in the background. Plenty of food on the table!

 March 2006, at my old townhouse. All the family was over for a spaghetti dinner. Niece preferred her noodles plain, though! She's on the couch with GrandmaT.

May 2009, on my front patio with a big ol' burger! That's Great Uncle J in the background; he and Great Aunt C were here from California for a visit.

 October 2009, eating "breakfast for dinner." Niece is our master scrambled egg chef!

Summer 2010 - Niece made and decorated a cake for one of her parents (I can't remember the occasion). Nice job!

Having a niece who likes to hang out in the kitchen with me is for sure a favorite thing!

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

Favorite Things - SMART Board

I've had a SMART Board for the last several years, and cannot imagine teaching without it! Being able to put together complex interactive lessons and units that integrate video, virtual manipulatives, images, worksheets, music, and more is essential to good teaching - at least, for me.

 

Effective technology in the classroom is a favorite thing!

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

Menus 3/21/11 - 3/27/11

Monday, 3/21: Moroccan Chicken Salad (minus the kalmata olives), served in Flatout brand multi-grain/flax wraps.  This is the last day of our Spring Break, boo hoo!  I'm looking forward to having leftovers of the chicken salad in my lunch when I go back on Tuesday.

Tuesday, 3/22: Mr. Mamie has class, so it'll be cheap eat out. My week to pick, but I haven't decided yet.

Wednesday, 3/23: Chicken spaghetti with feta (using whole wheat pasta and organic diced, canned tomatoes), French bread (from the freezer) with garlic butter, green salad.

Thursday, 3/24:  Literacy Carnival night at school for me.  Mr. Mamie and GrandmaT will be having ham and broccoli casserole from the freezer.

Friday, 3/25: Crunchy beef tacos (using taco meat from the freezer), slow cooker Mexican beans (from the freezer).

Saturday, 3/26: Spinach and Parmesan pasta, Italian cheese bread, green salad. **Meatless**

Sunday, 3/27: Southwest Turkey Burgers (from the freezer) served on homemade whole-wheat hamburger buns (from freezer), corn and black bean salad. I LOVE having the corn and black bean salad in my school lunch the next day!


~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

Favorite Things - Baby Spinach

Love, love, love the giant container of organic baby spinach from Costco - great for salads, smoothies, pasta, pitas, and more!

Healthy, yummy greens are a favorite thing!

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

Receipe Review: Irish Potatoes

For a little background on how we ended up up NOT having corned beef and cabbage for St. Patrick's day, see this post.

I've had this recipe for Irish Potatoes from Stephanie O'Dea's "A Year of Slow Cooking" site for several months, and have even put them on the menu plan a few times. Somehow though, they kept getting bumped.  But they finally had their moment on St. Patrick's Day 2011!

These potatoes are dead simple to make, and can either be done in a CrockPot or on the stove top. I did the CrockPot method so that the potato wedges could cook all day while I did other stuff.  I used red potatoes cut in to wedges - not too small, as I didn't want them to turn into mush as they cooked. They were served with Porcupine Meatballs which seemed to work out just fine.  I added the butter, lemon juice, and seasonings after I had put the meatballs into the oven, which gave the potatoes about 30 minutes to soak up the tangy sauce.

YUM! We liked these - easy to make and tasty, two keys to becoming a "repeat recipe" around here!

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

Recipe: Big Batch Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

While I love my mom's chocolate chip cookie recipe, I also REALLY like this one.  Adding oatmeal to a cookie is almost always a good move, if you ask me! 

I got this recipe from my friend "Feather" in 1991 when a group of us lived in an awesome little apartment building on Adams Point near Lake Merritt in Oakland, CA. She called them "Mrs. Field's Chocolate Chip Cookies" - who knows what their provenance is, but they are definitely GOOD!

This makes a HUGE amount of cookies - great for a crowd! Or, freeze small balls of cookie dough in order to bake fresh cookies without the fuss later.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups butter                
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 cups brown sugar                        
• 4 eggs                    
• 2 teaspoons vanilla        
• 4 cups flour (I always substitute 2 cups of whole wheat flour for two cups of the white flour)
• 5 cups oats (powdered in a blender)
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 24 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips (a 1/2 bag of toffee brickle chips is a fun substitute for about 6 ounces of the semi-sweet ships)
• An 8-ounce Hershey bar, chopped (I often substitute 8 ounces of milk chocolate chips)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cream together the sugars and the butter in a LARGE bowl.  Add the eggs and vanilla, mix well.
3. In a separate bowl, mix together all of the dry ingredients EXCEPT the oats.
4. Blend the oats in a blender until they become powder. Add to the other dry ingredients.
5. Add the dry ingredients (including oats) to the wet ones one cup at a time.  Mix between additions.
6. Add the chocolate chips and the chopped Hershey bar to the cookie dough.
7. Drop on ungreased cookie sheets; bake 10 minutes.

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

Receipe Review: Porcupine Meatballs

I'm not really a fan of either corned beef or cabbage, so *that* wasn't happening  at our house on St. Patrick's Day! BTW, Mr. Mamie claims never to have heard of corned beef and cabbage as a "traditional St. Patrick's Day meal." What's up with that? And yes I know, probably no one in Ireland eats corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick's Day, but here in the U.S of A. it seems to be "traditional,"  at least according to the recipes that abound on morning news shows and in the blogosphere.

Yeah, so, what to fix on March 17th? When I was making the menu plan last weekend I took great delight in the fact that the coming week was Spring Break, which would allow me some extra time to cook new and/or more time-consuming recipes.  I had been wanting to make these Porcupine Meatballs from Kate at Cooking During Stolen Moments FOH-EH-VAH and this week seemed like the perfect opportunity.

This morning I cooked up a vast batch of rice using Lundberg organic brown short-grain rice (purchased in bulk from Costco). By vast I mean 6 cups DRY, which yielded almost 12 cups cooked. The rice was also being used to make some freezer burritos, which I will be posting about later.  I cooked the rice in beef broth, which gives it a richer flavor.

After letting the rice cool down, I measured six cups into a big plastic bowl and added two cups of shredded sharp cheddar cheese. The recipe alone sounded good enough that I went ahead and planned to make it double-sized so that there'd be plenty for the freezer! Next came a pound of ground beef and the seasonings. I had some doubts about the rice-to-meat ratio, but with the cheese added in it came together perfectly. Just the aroma of the mixture was making my mouth water!

With the amounts of raw ingredients I got right around 52 meatballs. I put 30 on a tray to flash-freeze, which will  be transferred to a Ziploc bag for baking later (should be two meals for three of us, or one meal if the kids are here too).  The remaining meatballs went on another tray and into the fridge until time to bake them for dinner. It was GREAT to have the main dish all prepped early in the day!

I baked the refrigerated meatballs for 35 minutes and the meat seemed to be done. They smelled delicious while cooking, and held their shape perfectly (I think refrigerating helped this aspect). They wanted to stick a little to the foil-lined cookie sheet, so I need to make sure to grease it really well next time.

Mr. Mamie, GrandmaT, and I all LOVED these meatballs, and I am sure that the kids would too.  They had a savory taste and nice texture, and I like that there's so much healthy brown rice in them. Definitely a HIT and a KEEPER!

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)