Kiersten’s Blog

I was upstairs and heard some clanking around downstairs.  I came down to see Ashton with the Magic Bullet telling me he wants a smoothie.  Fine.  I told him I would make a smoothie.  The only problem: no juice.  I don’t know how to make smoothies without juice.  The only juice I had was lemon juice and I probably have 3/4 of a gallon of the stuff.  I got a bunch of lemons that I squeezed yesterday.  Anyway, thinking lemon juice probably wouldn’t be the way to go, I decided to pull out the juicer.  I made some apple and some carrot juice.  And here’s the thing.  I keep thinking I will like carrot juice.  I keep juicing them thinking that maybe I’m missing something and that I’ll like it next time.  But it’s not any better.  Everybody tells me how much they love carrot juice but I just don’t get it.  Usually I juice apples and carrots together and I feel like the carrots kind of ruin the amazing apple juice.  So today I made them separately and let me tell you, that apple juice was DELICIOUS!  I didn’t drink any of the carrot.  BUT, I did make a smoothie.  I used frozen strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries.  I added a handful or two of fresh spinach (because for some reason, London, who won’t touch vegetables to save her life, only likes smoothies if they have spinach in them) and threw in a splash of lemon juice and a bunch of carrot juice and a bit of apple juice.  I can taste the carrot juice a bit, but I’m not opposed to it this way.  The smoothie turned out really quite good and the verdict from London: SPINALICIOUS!

If you weren’t up running Swallow with me at 6 this morning (and let’s face it, you weren’t), you missed out on the most beautiful sunrise. The fog had settled down in The Box and there were some clouds in the sky, which made for some lovely colors just over the mountains. We could see layers and layers of mountains. What a view! I thought about running inside to grab my camera, but who wants to run while toting that along (even though it is really small)? Not me. It was sure worth getting up for. And FYI, I did NOT eat this yummy pumpkin dessert for breakfast. How could you even suggest such a thing?!

It’s been a while since I posted a recipe.  So here’s a good one I cam up with just today.  It seems as though Sundays are meant for cookies.  I don’t know what the deal is.  Let me mention, however, that it has been a number of weeks since I made my Sunday cookies and the only reason I actually made them today is because I have a PTA board meeting (yes, I’m on the PTA board.  GASP!) tomorrow night and I promised to bring cookies.  But here’s the problem.  I might have to make more before tomorrow night because these turned out so good I might not have enough left.  What is so great about these cookies, you may ask?  Do you love oatmeal cream pies?  That’s what’s so good about them.  And they’re easy.  I tweaked a recipe found on allrecipes.com and here’s what I came up with:

1 spice cake mix

1/2 cup butter

2 eggs

1/3 cup oatmeal

2 tablespoons milk

Mix it all together.  Use your cookie scoop to make the perfect little cookies.  (Yes, Taylor makes fun of me for the unitasker of a cookie scoop that I have but I think it’s a great invention.)  Bake them at 375 for 8 minutes.  Let them cool on the pan for a couple minutes then move them to the wire rack where they will be devoured before you even get a chance to frost them.  I used the whipped buttercream frosting recipe from ourbestbites.com.  I could eat that stuff with a spoon.  Yum-o.  Plus, I didn’t have powdered sugar.  (I also didn’t have enough chocolate chips for chocolate chip cookies, and I couldn’t find my amazing PB cookie recipe, so it was oatmeal cream pies.  I don’t regret it.)  Frost the bottom of one cookie, sandwich another one with it, and you have one delicious cookie.

I wonder how it would taste with a lemon cake mix instead.  I might have to try that.  Then I’ll have to take the cookie jar back out of hiding.

As mentioned in my Zion post, we celebrated Taylor’s birthday while we were on our trip.  I think it was pretty anti-climactic for him, since we didn’t have a birthday cake or anything on his actual birthday.  In fact, he didn’t even have any presents to open.  My gift to him was an iPhone, which he was really excited about, but got a month previous.  Anyway, I knew his birthday would turn out that way, so I decided to make cupcakes and have at least a little bit of a celebration the day before we left when we were staying with Taylor’s parents.  The week previous, I had seen a photo of Minion cupcakes that my cousin, Brandy, had posted on her facebook page.  My kids thought they were the funniest things they had ever seen, so I promised them that we would make them for Taylor’s birthday.  They were quite simple and turned out really cute.  We’ll have to do them again some day.

And in case you’re wondering, Twinkies really aren’t as good as I remembered.  But the cupcakes were really yummy.  I used a devil’s food cake mix, mixed in a can of soda (it probably would have been better if I had something more neutral like lemon lime, but I used caffeine free diet Pepsi) and spooned the mixture into blue cupcake liners (no other ingredients needed).  They were still moist and delicious.

I love the one-eyed ones

Then I frosted them with the best frosting recipe ever and added some obvious embellishments using Twinkies, Smarties, and frosting.  As soon as London saw them, she started cracking up, and Ashton couldn’t stop saying, “ME! ME! ME!”  (And then we watched the movie no less than 10 times in the week we were gone.)

P.S.  Just because we’re talking about birthdays, Ashton thinks everybody is two.  He knows he is, but because he is, whenever anybody asks how old London is, he gets mad when she tells them she’s 5.  It also goes for Taylor’s birthday.  According to Ashton, Taylor turned two.

Remember this?  I made tortillas a couple of weeks ago.  They turned out horrible.  I couldn’t believe I could do such a bad job at making something.  Something must have gone terribly wrong.  Somehow I mustered up the courage yesterday to try again.  This time I used the secret ingredient: HOT water.  Last time I just used room temperature water.  Taylor informed me that the recipe probably meant room temperature water in August in a non-air conditioned house in La Quinta.  Because that would have made all the difference.  The recipe I used was very, very similar to the one I completely botched, except this time, they turned out SO good!  They were easy to roll out.  They stayed thin and soft and yummy.  I think they rival the uncooked ones I usually buy from Costco.  And they didn’t take that much longer to make.  But London didn’t agree.  She took one bite and said, “Gross!”  But she says that about almost anything I make.

I made homemade tortillas for dinner tonight.  I thought that it wouldn’t be too hard and it would save a bunch of money, considering my kids could eat them for every meal of every day.  The problem was, they didn’t turn out good at all.  I’ve been looking at different recipes, wondering where I went wrong.  It’s hard for me to accept failure and just move on.  Maybe I’ll give it one more shot, but if I fail twice, it’s back to the Costco uncooked tortillas.  I can’t go wrong with those!

I’m not normally one of those crazy people who takes pictures of their food, but this was just too pretty not too.  And it tasted as good as it looks (okay, the picture doesn’t really do it justice and it also looks like I ate a ton, but that really was a small plate, although I did go back for seconds).  Last week when I was at the grocery store, I noticed that tilapia was on sale.  Now, I’m not one to every buy fish so when I brought home a very large bag of frozen tilapia filets, Taylor was stunned and I set out to find an exceptional tilapia recipe.  I definitely found a winner.  I figured with this combination of flavors (orange juice marinated fish and mango/lime salsa) and a bit of spice, I couldn’t go very wrong.  It was so good that I even used the leftover salsa on a pizza today.  I was a little inventive with the pizza.  I used some avocado/cilantro hummus (I kind of splurged at Costco yesterday and bought 3 big things of hummus), a bit of mozzarella, leftover salsa from last night, a bit of jack cheese, some feta, and some tomato slices to top it all off.  I didn’t take a picture of the pizza because I couldn’t bring myself to do that 2 nights in a row.  But it was good.  Really good.  Taylor named it “avocado yummus pizza.”  It lives up to its name.  So there you go.  A blog all about my last two nights dinners.  And just because I’m pretty sure you’ll want it, here’s the recipe for the tilapia (I found it on allrecipes.com):

Ingredients

• 4 tilapia fillets
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 1/2 tablespoons grated orange zest
• 1/4 cup fresh orange juice
• salt and pepper to taste
• crushed red pepper flakes to taste
• Salsa:
• 1 mango – peeled, seeded and diced
• 1 small red onion, finely chopped
• 1 avocado – peeled, pitted and diced
• 3 roma tomatoes – peeled, seeded and chopped
• 1 lime, zested and juiced
• 1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger root
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C.)
2. In a shallow baking dish, combine the olive oil, orange zest, orange juice, salt, pepper and chili flakes. Rinse the fish fillets and pat them dry. Place them into the baking dish and turn to coat with the seasonings.
3. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes in the preheated oven, until fish can be flaked with a fork.
4. While the fish cooks, combine the mango, onion, avocado, tomatoes, lime zest and juice, jalapeno, ginger, cilantro and 1 teaspoon kosher salt in a glass bowl. Stir to blend and set aside at room temperature until fish has finished cooking. Place fillets on a platter and spoon the salsa over them to serve.

I saw this recipe for coconut lime cheesecake and had to try it.  I love cheesecake and the coconut lime combination sounded heavenly.  I have never made cheesecake before, but it can’t be that hard, right?  So I went out and bought a spring form pan (which is probably the reason I have never made it before) and got to work.  I stayed up last night baking it.  It looked great when I got it out of the oven.  I checked on it again this morning and it still looked good.  I was patient and waited for Taylor to buy whipped cream on his way home from work before I tried it.  The result: heavenly!  I couldn’t be more happy with it!  It’s moist and delicious and the crust is flaky and yummy.  I didn’t even crack the top!  Now my only problem is how to get rid of it!  I can’t eat the whole thing by myself (with a little help from Taylor).  Anybody want some cheesecake?

I recently bought two new cookbooks.  One is Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld.  The other is The Sneaky Chef Returns by Missy Chase Lapine.  I thought these would bring some great ideas into my normal cooking.  You see, the problem is, London doesn’t like vegetables.  At least she says she doesn’t like vegetables.  I try everything I can to trick her and make her eat them, but the fact of the matter is, if she thinks it might be a vegetable, she won’t eat it.  When I found these books, I thought it was the perfect solution.  And it would have been, except that it doesn’t work.  Somehow, that girl can identify vegetables in ANYTHING!  She doesn’t even know it’s vegetables.  She just knows that she doesn’t like it.  I thought it would be a no-fail with stuffed shells.  London loves cheese.  The vegetable (cauliflower) was hidden in the cheese, so even if she didn’t eat the rest, at least she would eat the cheese.  Wouldn’t you know, she announced after one bite, that she didn’t like that kind of cheese.  Okay, maybe I was a little too overzealous with that one.  I tried mozzarella sticks How could one go wrong with mozzarella sticks?  That cheese was no good either.  I have tried a number of concoctions with ideas from those two books.  Not one has worked.  Today was sweet potatoes in grilled cheese sandwiches.  I didn’t even like them.  For the record, Ashton loved it.  I just told London to cover it with ketchup and she wouldn’t taste it.  That’s what I did.  At least she ate it that way (and she got nutrition from tomatoes in the ketchup, which was probably more than she got from the sweet potatoes in the sandwich).

There is another reason these books don’t work for us.  I think the recipes are good ideas, but really, how much vegetable puree can one hide in any one thing?  Not much.  London would be better off to just eat two bites of sweet potatoes.  It would probably go down a little easier (at least faster) and it wouldn’t have to ruin her otherwise moderately healthy meal.

Verdict: it’s probably time to post the books back on Amazon and give up trying to get my 4-year-old to eat her veggies.

Last week I made a cake.  It was a carrot cake from a mix with canned cream cheese frosting.  I planned on juicing a bunch of carrots and adding some pulp, but the carrots were hairy by the time I got around to juicing them and making a cake.  I thought I would make the cake a little more eye-pleasing by baking it in a bundt.  The only problem was, when I turned the cake out of the pan, half of it stuck, and I ended up piecing it together with the yucky canned frosting.  I was hoping that since it was cream cheese frosting it might taste better than the normal stuff, but it’s exactly the same.  So the cake didn’t taste horrible, but it didn’t taste great.  It did, however, look horrible.  We ate some of it and even fed the decent looking part to the missionaries we had over for dinner that night, but as I though about it, I knew I wouldn’t eat the rest of the cake.  It just wasn’t that good.  So I decided to make cake pops.  Bakerella makes them look so easy, so cute, and so yummy.  Well, hers are cute and possibly easy.  They’re not hard to do, but they are time consuming and don’t turn out nearly as cute as Bakerella’s.  I know.  I’ve tried twice.  Even with the cuteness factor gone, they sure taste yummy and I won’t have a problem downing the rest of that cake all by myself.  Curse you, Bakerella.  Instead of throwing away a mediocre cake, I’m stuck eating these delicious cake pops and getting fatter by the second.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go eat a cake pop.