Food Storage February

This is a follow-up post from my Provident Living post in 2014. As Matt and I have built our food storage, we realized that the handy-dandy sheet we used wasn't as awesome as we thought, mainly because we don't ever use half the stuff we bought (flour, yeast, powdered milk, etc). So now we have pounds and pounds of stuff that's going to expire shortly.

So, I've decided that February will be food storage month. I'm going to make bread from scratch! I'm going to try new recipes that actually use tomato soup or cream of mushroom soup! We won't be eating through everything, but hopefully we can make a dent in our storage before it's too late. Then we'll be building up a whole different food storage based on things we actually eat on a regular basis.

I started out on Sunday by making cinnamon rolls from scratch for the very first time, and they actually turned out okay! Not perfect yet, though, so I'm going to have to give it another go. Then maybe I'll post the revised recipe.

If you have any good bread recipes or ideas on how to use up 5 pounds of peanut butter, let me know.

Rhetorically,
Rebekah

Dear Dash: Twelve Months

Dear Dash,

We had a great celebration for your birthday! You loved all of the attention.

In honor of the Winston-Salem Dash, I did baseball themed cupcakes and a batter bowl smash cake. 

You ended up pushing the entire cake off of your tray, so we gave you a smaller piece to munch on instead. 

It's crazy to think how much you've grown over the past year!

I'm kind of glad this is the last time I'm doing monthly pictures because it's so hard to get you to stay still.

It's been a busy month for you! You celebrated your first Christmas, caught another cold, and took your first steps. You can climb our stairs in 30 seconds flat, and have started to figure out how to climb down them safely. You are a social laugher and social cougher. You play most with your musical toys, although you will push anything around on the floor (paper, boxes, cans, etc). You still think the vacuum is the coolest invention. You love to turn pages of books. You sneakily gnaw on the corners of our games or the corner of the bottom stair.  You will let us spoon feed you almost anything if you are distracted.

Rhetorically,
Rebekah

Baby Cereal Banana Muffin Recipe

As we're working on introducing solids, I wanted something that was soft and healthy for my baby to practice feeding himself. So I made a few modifications to a banana muffin recipe and thought I'd share it! This is a non-dairy, non-fat recipe.

Ingredients:
1 c flour
3/4 c baby cereal (I used whole wheat)
1/2 c sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 eggs
1 c banana, mashed (you can even use jars of banana baby food for this)
1/2 c applesauce (again, you can use baby food jars)

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 F. Combine dry ingredients in a bowl. Combine wet ingredients in a separate bowl. Mix wet and dry ingredients and pour into muffin tin. For full size muffins, cook 15-20 minutes. For mini muffins, cook 8-10 minutes. Makes 12 regular or 48 mini muffins.

We ended up freezing a bunch and then defrosting a few at a time.

Rhetorically,
Rebekah

Use Easy Recipes

We do our share of frozen and boxed dinners, but here are some easy-to-assemble recipes for meals we cook on a regular basis:

Baked Potatoes (Wash potatoes, dry, and spray with canola oil. Bake at 400 for 45-60 minutes. Cover with your choice of toppings- cheese, chives, sour cream, chili, bacon bits, etc).

Grilled Cheese and Soup (We do use canned soup...but we grill the sandwiches ourselves. Some fun twists are using cream cheese spread instead of butter on the bread, adding basil or garlic salt on top of the cheese, or using several kinds of cheeses).



Skillet Shepherds Pie (1 lb ground beef, 1 can tomato soup, 1 can green beans, 2 c mashed potatoes. Cook the ground beef and add tomato soup along with a dash of oregano, garlic salt, onion flakes, and black pepper. Top with warmed green beans and mashed potatoes. Note: don't add the mashed potatoes until everything is cooked and you are ready to eat.)

BLTs (Cook the bacon, shred the lettuce, slice the tomato. Assemble. Or make it a BALT by adding avocado.)





German Pancakes (Preheat oven to 425. Melt 1/2 stick of butter in 9x9 pan. Mix 1 c milk, 1 c flour, 4 eggs, and 1 tsp salt. Pour into pan and bake for 20 minutes. Top with syrup, powdered sugar, and fruit.)

Tacos (Add packet of seasoning to 1 lb ground beef. Top with lettuce, tomato, cheese, ketchup, etc).





Stew (Combine 1 lb stew meat with 4 cups of cubed potatoes, celery, carrots, and onion. We buy a packet of stew seasonings and combine that with 2 cups of water. Crockpot for 8 hours on low or 4 hours on high.)




Stir-fry (Granted, we usually use a frozen stir fry mix for this, which we combine with stir fry meat and frozen pot stickers. Seasonings we've used in the past are: soy sauce, a-1 sauce, Korean bbq sauce, and ponzu lime sauce. Serve with rice on the side.)

What are some of your easy-to-assemble recipes?

Rhetorically,

Rebekah

"Healthy" Chocolate Options

Blend with milk and frozen banana chunks to frosty-like consistency. 

Drizzle over your choice of fruit (I prefer strawberries).

Make your own fiber brownies using black beans.

Rhetorically,
Rebekah

Happy St Patrick's Day!

We had a great day! Besides wearing green, we celebrated by making "Layers of Luck" dessert, using girl scout thin mints as the garnish. It was delicious!

What did you do to celebrate?

Rhetorically,

Rebekah

Hot chocolate

Hot Chocolate is one of my favorite things in the winter. Over the past several weeks, I've experimented with different add-ins to the classic milk chocolate mix. My favorites so far are: vanilla ice cream, cookies and cream ice cream, eggnog ice cream, the these truffles. And no, I do not recommend adding everything I listed at the same time. 

In addition to making our own hot chocolate, we recently went to Juice n' Java and tried out their gourmet white hot chocolate and snickerdoodle hot chocolate. (I preferred the snickerdoodle). 

What's your favorite hot chocolate flavor/ add-in?

Rhetorically,

Rebekah

2014 Top Thanksgiving Memories

1. Watching Big Hero 6
2. Winning at Pinocle
3. Uncle John trying to tell a Thanksgiving memory and his family interrupting every other sentence
4. Cranberry Jello Salad
5. Kristi's pregnancy joke: "When's the basketball due?"

Rhetorically,
Rebekah

Restaurant Review: El Tropical

There's a Dominican Restaurant that just opened up in Provo! "El Tropical" is at 40 W 400 N, Provo, UT. Matt and I decided to try it out yesterday. We ordered mostly fried food, since that was the most common for missionaries to have (and the food I most enjoyed on my mission).

I give them an A+ on empanadas. They were so good we ate them before I remembered to take a picture. The drinks were also great, although I'll have to go back when they have chinola juice (they were out at the time). The quipe was a lot bigger than I expected, so if you're planning on sampling it, one will probably suffice.  We ordered one platter of pica pollo con tostones, which was more than enough for the two of us. So for main dishes, expect big portion sizes. Overall, it was a good dining experience. They offer San Cocho on Wednesdays and Fridays, so we'll be going back sometime to try that out as well.

The best part was using my Spanish to order food! Our waitress was Dominican, and she was very attentive. I'm so glad I still understood the accent and slang words after being back for over 2 years.

For all you RMs from the Dominican, I'd recommend you try this place out. Then you can tell me what dishes you really enjoyed.

Rhetorically,
Rebekah

Halloween Festivities

*The title of this post is not to be confused with the post I did last year.

Even though Matt will be gone for Halloween, we still wanted to participate in the festivities. We tried something new this year by making our own caramel apples! I won a huge jar last week for guessing how many caramels were inside and I used about a third of them for these apples. They weren't as attractive as the ones we get from Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, but they still tasted delicious.

This year we decided to do "The Incredibles" as our pumpkin theme. 

The goal: 

The reality:

Yeah...you can't really tell that it's "Jack-Jack"-O-Lantern. 

 Same pumpkin, other side:

Doing the "I" was a little bit easier in the design, although Matt had to spend some time carving out the circle around it so you could see the faint glow of the candle.

Matt also cooked pumpkin seeds again this year, which he will be eating all by himself (No offense to Matt's cooking, I just don't like pumpkin seeds).

What have you been doing to celebrate Halloween?

Rhetorically,

Rebekah

The Party That Almost Wasn't

Several weeks ago, I saw so many cute ideas for Halloween snacks that I decided we should have a Halloween party so I could do all of them. We promptly postponed buying supplies and inviting people until this week. After sending out over a dozen texts over the course of several days, we discovered that no one had (to our knowledge) RSVP'd in the affirmative. So we figured the party was off. It was kind of a bummer, but we figured with it being late notice and so close to the holidays that it was understandable. 

Around two hours before the party was scheduled to start, we were at the grocery store and got a couple of calls from people saying they were coming. The party was back on! Since we were already at the store, we got all of the supplies we needed and rushed home to make the following foods: 

After "dinner" we played games. The first was the Snickers game. It involves unwrapping and eating a frozen Snickers Bar with a chopstick. Everyone has a turn to roll the dice to roll the number of the round (we started off with the number one) before passing the dice on. Once you rolled right number, you grab the chopstick and go at it. The winners are those who eat a piece of the candy bar. Matt got creative in this shot and used the chopstick to scoot a chunk off the table and into his mouth.

The second game is "What if...then" where each person writes a "what if" statement on a piece of paper, switching papers with someone else so they answer the question with a "then" statement. You mix up the papers again and have everyone switches off reading a "what if" question while the person next to them answers it with their "then" statement. Not all of them turned out, but the funniest one was, Q: "What if Violet (one of the baby attendees) stopped crying?" A: "Then earplugs would be a useless invention."

We were thrilled that the party actually happened and everyone enjoyed themselves.

Rhetorically,

Rebekah

Pumpkin Time

This post is partially inspired by the "Disneyland Pumpkin Food Crawl" post I read a few days ago. However, since I haven't been to Disneyland recently (and since they already did the work for me), I'll be reviewing pumpkin foods found locally in Provo/Orem:

Pumpkin Bagel: Meh. I don't know if it should have been sweeter or had more spices in general, but it was blander than expected. However, I didn't have it with pumpkin shmear, which may have been my downfall.
Also, this bagel should not be confused with the "Pumpkin Walnut Crunch Gourmet Bagel" which I have not tried.

Pumpkin cheesecake and Pumpkin spice cake doughnuts: Yes, please!! I think I liked the spice cake slightly better than the cheesecake, but it's a toss up. They were both sooo good. 

BYU Creamery Pumpkin Pie Ice Cream: No thanks. They nailed the pumpkin pie flavor, and there were chunks of pie crust throughout, but I guess I just don't like pumpkin pie if it's not heated up.
(However, my sister tried it and liked it, so there's a second opinion.) 

Menchie's Harvest Pumpkin Frozen Yogurt: with help, a winner. When I first tried it, the flavor was pretty overwhelming. However, after mixing it with their toasty marshmallow flavor, some carmel topping, and oreo bits, this was definitely an excellent fall treat.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies: Delicious. We actually made these.
If you don't know the super easy recipe already, here it is: 1 box spice cake mix, 1 can pumpkin puree, and your preference of the amount of chocolate chips. Mix them all up and bake for 14-15 minutes at 350 degrees. 

What are your pumpkin food favorites?

Rhetorically,
Rebekah

Peach Season

Our landlady has a peach tree in the backyard, so we've been getting a lot of free peaches recently (which we love). Since Matt and I can only eat a couple ripe peaches a day, we've come up with a few ways to use them:

Peach Cobbler (compliments of my cousin, Cami)

The Peach Cobbler recipe is something that we adjust based on the size of the pan, but generally speaking, for a normal 13x8 cake pan:

• 2 cans of peaches (or enough fresh peaches to fill the pan) 
• 1 box of yellow cake mix 
• 1 cube of butter (I like to use less fat so we tried to reduce the amount of butter to 1/2 cube) 

If canned, drain peaches. Fill cake pan with about two layers of peaches, cover with cake mix and top with butter (we grated the butter so it would cover the pan more evenly). Cook for 45 minutes at 375 degrees. As a side note, I've also done these in a steam oven instead of a regular oven. The crust comes out moister and you can use even less butter.

Peach Ice Cream (click here for the original recipe)

We doubled the ingredients, yielding about 1 1/2 quarts of ice cream:

• 6 cups sliced peeled peaches (To easily peel ripe peaches, place in boiling water for 30 seconds. Then move to ice water, where they can cool off. Once you can handle them, pinch the skin with your fingers and you should be able to pull it right off.)
• 2 cups half-and-half (equivalent to a small carton of half and half)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup whole vitamin D milk
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Blend the peaches until they are a fine pulp. Mix in with remaining ingredients (we used the pulse button of the blender to mix the rest of the ingredients). Pour mixture into the freezer can of an ice cream machine and follow the instructions. We have the Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker, which requires you to freeze the freezer can for a day beforehand. Then you just pull it out of the freezer right before you make the ice cream and it takes about 20 minutes. 


What's your favorite peach recipe?

Rhetorically,
Rebekah 

Quarter of a Century Old

My birthday was a blessing. I've had a pretty stressful summer, and it was so nice to take a day off. Matt was awesome and took pictures for me for this post (and, of course, spent the day with me).

I felt the love with all these cards from family members and friends.

Splash pad times at Pioneer Park

Birthday lunch and treat at Brick Oven

I got a mer-rebekah and a mer-matt from my niece for my birthday- we took them to the Bean Museum so they could be in their element.

Rhetorically,
Rebekah

Dominican Drinks and Desserts

I loved how much fruit there was in the Dominican. Just take a look:

While there, I tasted and enjoyed a lot of fruits I had never even heard of: guava, starfruit, noni, tamarindo, zapote, and red bananas (to name a few).

Also, I learned about the many varieties of mango. For the record, the best are the reddish green ones. They are not too stringy and not too small. 

Besides eating them plain, I loved fruit shakes and drinks. My favorite shakes were made from either papaya or zapote:

Many people would have literal "lemonade stands" where they would sell freshly squeezed fruit juice (with lots of sugar) in the street. While they usually sold juices such as lemon, lime, or orange, I also liked the more exotic juices, such as passionfruit and tamarindo:

Another common drink is Morir Sonando. Think Orange Julius, Dominican style.

Dominicans often blended dry oatmeal in their drinks, to give it a milky flavor and a thicker texture. They even sold dry mixes with oatmeal:

It sounds weird, but it actually tastes pretty good. 

The other great thing is that people would sell ice cream (either store bought or home made) from their homes. A unique but surprisingly delicious flavor was helado de batata (sweet potato ice cream):

They would divide them into little plastic bags and then sell them for 10 to 15 pesos (less than 50 cents). You always felt like you hit the jackpot when you found out someone made these in the area you were working in. 

When we had time on P-days, sometimes we would go out to eat. One of my favorite dessert shops was Yogen Fruz, which sold frozen yogurt mixed with whatever toppings you wanted: from the  waffle cones to tropical fruit.

Also, since it is technically a fruit- the avocados in the Dominican are HUGE, cheap, and delicious.

Rhetorically,
Rebekah