Thankful Sunday

I am thankful for my garden gloves.

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time with my hands in the dirt. However with time, I have decided that I like to wear these gloves during most of my "dirty" gardening--weeding and digging. One pair has leather fingers and palm which help protect me from things like thistle, and the other has rubberized fingers and palm which gives me a surprising amount of flexibility. My hands still get dirty, but I get a lot fewer thorns in my fingers and surprises with poison ivy when I wear these trusty gloves.

Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. Also, I am using this public forum to encourage us to eat out less which includes better meal planning. You can follow how we are doing in this endeavor by reading True Food Confessions.

This Week's Food Waste

NONE

This Week's True Food Confessions

When I was in the kitchen this week, instead of taking pictures of food, I took pictures of what I saw out my kitchen window.

For the first few days of the week, I was totally unmotivated to do any cooking. Luckily we went to a cookout one of these nights, and we had Subway another one. We also got a  rotisserie chicken from Costco that served us well. One night we had sandwiches, another night we had chicken with with baked potatoes and roasted broccoli, and yet another night we had chicken soup and homemade bread.  I consider it a pretty good week especially since I was not interested in going into the kitchen during most of it.

However, I was highly motivated to try a new recipe--Cake Balls. A coworker brought them to work a couple of times and they were really good although very rich. One person said they were so good that they rolled your eyes back in your head.

The concept for cake balls is very simple. Bake a cake, crumble it, mix it with icing, roll into balls and dip into chocolate. However, once I started to read about them, there were many, many variations on the best way to make them and many variations of success and failure stories. And there seemed to be little consistencies in the stories. I consulted with my coworker to get her tips for making them. Then I gave them a try.

Cake Balls

I'm a little short on pictures here, but you can get the idea.

The combinations are almost endless of flavor combinations you can make these with, but here's what I did.

Makes 4 dozen or so depending on size of balls.

--One yellow cake mix. (Dense cakes don't work as well as light ones.)
 
--6-8 ounces (1/2-2/3 cup) of plain cream cheese icing.

--One six ounce container of whipped cream cheese.  (I added this instead of all icing so they wouldn't be quite as sweet.)  

 --Andes Mints broken into small pieces. I actually had baking ones that were already broken. Use as many or as few as you like. I used about 3 ounces for half the batch.

--Dipping dark chocolate

Mix and bake cake. Shape of pan does not matter. When cool, crumble into large mixing bowl. 

Mix icing and cream cheese into crumb mixture. When the individual crumbs start to disappear, it is probably good a consistency to roll into balls. If adding liquid for flavoring such as liqueur or orange juice, add it before you add the icing. 

Mix in mint candies.

Roll into balls. (I made ~1 1/4" balls and they were a little too big because these are so rich. I think 3/4" would be better.)

Freeze or cool for a couple of hours in the fridge.

Melt dipping chocolate.

Take balls out of fridge or freezer. If frozen, wait just a couple minutes until they thaw a little.

Make a hole in the middle of a ball with a toothpick. Take another toothpick, dip it chocolate and insert into hole. (This helps cement the toothpick into the ball so it doesn't slide off while dipping.)

Put balls back into freezer to cool for 1/2 hour. Take balls out of freezer in batches and get ready to dip.

Remelt chocolate and then dip balls into melted chocolate and put on sheet lined with was paper to harden.

Enjoy!

This seems like a lot of steps (hope I didn't leave any out) especially for me. I think the key to success in making these, is to keep the balls cold while working with them. I did half of these plain and half of these with Andes Mints and both were good although I preferred the mint ones. I already have several other flavor combinations that I want to try. Too bad these wouldn't make a good supper food. :)

Today...

Today I am going to appreciate those who came before me. The ones who took the risks of coming to an unknown land and had the determination to establish a great country.

Happy Independence Day!

A Second Look--July 3, 2013

This is a great time of year because new kinds and colors of flowers are blooming everyday. Soon we will hit the really hot and dry part of the summer when nothing is happy except the weeds. But for now, the flowers are outshining the weeds.

On the bird front, the baby bluebirds have blue feathers on their wings and will probably fledge soon. The sparrows continue to build a nest in the other box the sparrow kind of way--messy.

The deer haven't been as prevalent this summer in the yard, but I did see a mother with two fawns passing through. It was fun to watch as the mother had to nudge one of them along. I guess kids of all kinds can be distractable.

Here are a few things I saw this week during a Second Look.

This marigold is a volunteer from last year.

Coreopsis and blanket flowers.

The enemy has arrived-- Japanese beetles. We are seeing a lot more holes in things as they eat away.

Balloon flowers

On the left is the box containing the sparrows nest. It is made mostly of twigs like the one they left hanging outside. On the right are the baby bluebirds in their typical pile. When they know it's not one of their parents coming to the box, they play possum.

Day Lilies

Yellow trumpet lilies have joined the white ones that were blooming last week.

This squirrel is enjoying some of the old seed that Wally threw on the ground when he cleaned the bird feeder.

Boys vs. Girls--Sunshines

Before I had kids, I thought that each child was an individual, and didn't believe much in gender stereotypes in children. Little boys ran and jumped a lot because that's the kind of games they were taught. Little girls played with dolls because that was the kind of toys they were given. I thought that if all kids, regardless of gender, were exposed to the same things, they would have the same tendencies. Then I spent some time in the real world of kids and figured out that I was wrong. Possibly there were some differences between boys and girls. From time to time, I'm going to share some of my experiences that led me to this conclusion. However, so as to not bias you, I'm going to let you guess, who are the boys in the stories and who are the girls.
Today's Story

Wally was in kindergarten and we were visiting on parent's night. On the wall were pictures that the kids had drawn, and we noticed that several of them had a sun in them that was wearing sunglasses. Upon further investigation, we discovered that they were all drawn by one group of kids in the class. We thought this was interesting, but didn't think much about it until Theo was in kindergarten three years later. Then we saw the same thing--sunglasses on all of the suns in the drawings of one group.

You decide. Did the boys or the girls draw the sunglasses on the suns?

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I'm not sure what it means, but the girls were the ones drawing sunglasses on the suns.