Dippin' Dinners

We LOVE dip! We also love making full meals that are just for dipping, and we do it quite often. We call them dippin' dinners, although more often than not they are for lunch.

Today we made hummus (chick peas, olive oil, lemon juice, s &p, oregano, and basil) and dipped pita, broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, and cucumbers.

We've had Muffin Tin dippin' dinners. This one included guacamole, black bean dip, salsa, sour cream, chocolate, and yogurt and we dipped in nachos with cheese, cucumbers, carrots, bananas, cherries, and plums.

Here we had tzatziki sauce (cucumber, greek yogurt, garlic, s & p, lemon juice, and dill) and dipped in red pepper, pita, chicken, carrots, cucumber, zucchini, and tomatoes.

We have also done dippin' dinners with homemade chicken nuggets and fries with sauce, warm spinach artichoke dip with dippers, and much much more! My kids LOVE to dip, and I love that it's a fun way to get them to eat their fruit and veggies.

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Kids in the Kitchen~ Dinner Time Fun

Last night the kiddos and I cooked dinner together. We made chicken tenders, yam yums, and strawberry kiwi smoothies.

Lyssy crushed the corn flakes.

Aidman mixed 1 part mayo to 1 part Dijon mustard to dip the chicken in.

I have the creeps about the kiddos touching meat so I did that part.

We baked them at 450 for 20 minutes.


We used metal cookie cutters to cut the sweet potatoes.

Aidman brushed a maple syrup mixture on top of the sweet potatoes. We really need to get a non-grilling basting brush. We baked them at 450 for 10 minutes.

What a yummy dinner!

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Kids in the Kitchen ~ Strawberry Cake

We LOVE picking our own strawberries!

It is great fun and a really good experience for the kiddos to be able to pick their own foods.

And look at all these pretty berries!

When Lyssy and I got home we decided to make a strawberry cake. It is so yummy and basically melts in you mouth.

I used this adapted recipe.

• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1 1/4 cups sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 4 tablespoons sour cream
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup chopped strawberries
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons butter, softened
• 10 strawberries
• 2-3 TBS sugar
  

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease a 9x13 inch baking pan.
2. In a large bowl, cream together 1/2 cup butter and the sugar. Add the eggs, and beat for 1 minute. Stir in the vanilla and salt.
3. In a small bowl, stir together the sour cream and the baking soda until the baking soda has dissolved. Add the sour cream mixture and the flour to the egg mixture. Beat well, then stir in the mashed strawberries.
4. Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake in preheated oven for 30 minutes, or until top springs back when lightly touched.
5. While cake is cooling, make the berry puree: Blend berries and sugar. Spoon puree unto each serving.
   

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Kids in the Kitchen ~ Cake

We have been (and will still be more this week) baking up cakes like crazy! The reason is that I have not always been the best cake baker, a few of my problems are that 1. my round cakes ALWAYS fall apart 2. probably because I usually try to cut into or take them out of the pan too fast. So I have decided to do away with the round pans and just use different ones because those normally turn out pretty good even though I can't really get fancy with decorating and put it in my cake stand. Oh and the reason I've needed to perfect my cakes and test new ones out is because some good friends of mine are walking the the 3 Day Breast Cancer Walk for Susan G Komen and are having a bake sale/auction this weekend that I baking for.

So anyway, I pretty much let Aidman make this cake completely on his own. I gave him the measuring cups and ingredients and told him how much to add and when, he did all of the actual work.

I LOVE how he has flour on his face, he looks just like me when I cook (and NO we do not put it on our faces for show, it just happens every single time!).

This cake was DELICIOUS! I had my hubby taste it before I told him what it was (because he's funny about certain things) and he LOVED it.

And now to tell you what it is... DON'T judge it by it's different main ingredient because it's AWESOME and you can't even tell that that's what it is.


Grapefruit Chiffon Loaf Cake

* 1 c. flour
1/3 c. grapefruit juice
* 3/4 c. sugar
4 egg whites
* 1 1/2 tsp. B.P.
1/4 tsp. cream of tartar
* 1/4 tsp. salt
2 tsp. grated gf peel
* 1/4 c. oil
1/2 tsp. vanilla
* 3 egg yolks
1 to 2 tbsp. gf juice
* 1 1/2 tsp.. grated gf peel
1 c. sifted 10X sugar

In a large mixer bowl stir together flour, the granulated sugar, the baking powder, and salt. Make a well in center of dry ingredients. Add in order: oil, egg yolks, the 1 1/2 tsp. grapefruit peel, and the 1/3 cup juice. Beat smooth with electric mixer. Wash beaters thoroughly. In a medium mixer bowl beat egg whites with cream of tartar till very stiff peaks form (tips stand straight). Scrape the whites over the flour mixture and fold in gently. Pour into an greased 9x5 loaf pan. Bake in 350 degree oven for 30-45 minutes or till cake tests done. Invert; cool in pan completely. Loosen edges of cake and remove from pan. Combine remaining grapefruit peel, vanilla, and enough juice with the powdered sugar to make an icing of drizzling consistency. Spread over top of cake, allowing some icing to drizzle down sides.

Because it's so yummy, I'm going to use this as the cake part of my strawberry shortcakes this strawberry season.

Kids in the Kitchen ~ Grapefruit Juice

We LOVE fresh juice! And we LOVE citrus! We are lucky that we live in Florida because we can get it fairly easily. This weekend my friend K let me know that her hubby just got done picking 40 grocery store bags of grapefruits and that I needed to come and get some of it. WOOHOO, Score!

I did not plan on juicing the grapefruit because I would prefer to just eat the grapefruit, but the kiddos begged to juice it.

To take away some of the tartness we also juiced some oranges to add in and it made a very lovely juice that the kids have been drinking like crazy! I think I need to go pick up a few more bags from K!

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Kids in the Kitchen ~ Strawberry Muffins

It's March, which means strawberry season in Florida! And oh how we LOVE strawberries!! We even love to go and pick our own strawberries. The only problem is that we always pick more than we can eat right away.

This week Lyssy and I discovered Strawberry Muffins! It's a pretty good recipe and is perfect for those strawberries that you want to use before they go bad.

Lyssy and I enjoyed some one on one time while Aidman and Daddy rode bikes. She LOVED getting to do all the stirring by herself.

Yummy Muffins!

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Kids in the Kitchen

The other day I was feeling very very bored, which doesn't happen very often. I needed something to do with myself. So I decided to try out a new recipe, which is one of my very favorite things to do! Of course the kiddos HAD to help!

What did we make? Carrot Cake! You MUST try this recipe! It was so very very good and very very easy!



Sorry, I didn't get very good pictures this time.

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Dogs

The kids came to me today and said they wanted to learn about dogs. So we got to work learning about them. Luckly, we have a log and Aidman has always been obsessed with dogs.

This feed the Dog game was the first game Aidman ever got. Since he has had it so long, I decided to make it alittle harder. I did that by adding number cards to the game and having the kids count out that number of bones.

Then we made dog treats. We used this recipe.

This was a really fun dough to work with for the kids.

Since our dog is a boy, they used "boy" shaped cookie cutters.

They turned out pretty good.

And the dog really liked them.

After talking all about different types of dogs and dog safety, we went outside to play with our Boxer Tango.
Tango's 2 favorite things to do are to go on a walk and to eat and chase bubbles. So we did both things.
Tango LOVES bubbles!


Then we went inside and drew dogs. This is Aidman's dog, it is Tango.

Kids in the Kitchen ~ Pumpkins

For this weeks Kids in the Kitchen we decided to use one of the pumpkins that we got from the farm yesterday. I LOVE cooking with pumpkins, during fall (while they are available) I like to cook at least one pumpkin a week. I freeze the pumpkin and then am able to use it in lots of different recipes.

Today the kiddos cleaned out the pumpkin for me (they ALWAYS love doing this).

Aidman loves to be silly and said he had a goop beard.

They Lyssy and I had some alone one on one time and she made the pumpkin seeds. She put 1/8 teaspoon paprika, and 1/2 teaspoon each of salt, pepper, garlic, and onion powder into an empty spice container.
Then she shook it.

And sprinkled it on the seeds.

After baking, I put the seeds in a pretty leaf dish...

And the kiddos attacked it! They LOVE pumpkin seeds and the 3 of them ate the entire batch in just a few minutes.

For lunch I made pumpkin pancakes.

And for dessert tonight, I made a pumpkin pie. The wonderful thing is that I still had 2 cups of pumpkin left to put in the freezer!

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Apple Pumpkin Muffins

It was the first cooler day of the season (the high was only 80 and there was little humidity) and we were so excited!! We had all the doors and windows open and decided we needed some yummy comfort fall food. Aidman and I had some alone time in the kitchen (Lyssy was napping) so we decided to make apple pumpkin muffins!

Aidman did most of this by himself with instruction from me.

Since it is very rare for me to get any alone time with either child, it was very nice to just have one kiddo to instruct while cooking. Aidman really enjoyed it being just him.


The muffins were so yummy!

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