Flashback "Fry-day" recipe!

Recently for supper we had this:

All shiny with cheese and delicious lentil stew! Yumyumyumyum!!! It was delicious of course. :) The kids, even my non-eater, gobbled it right up. I posted the recepe last year so if you'd like to check it out, click HERE and enjoy! ;)

Yummiest Ever Fruit Salad - "Fry-day" recipe!

This is the tastiest fruit salad sauce recipe I have ever tasted! This preggo lady has a serious fruit salad craving now. ;) Feeds a crowd, or a smaller family for a few days. Prepare this the night before it is to be eaten so it has time to marinate! I have no memory of where I got the original but I know I've made some alterations to it over the years to personalize it to our tastes and here's what it has become:

FAVORITE FRUIT SALAD
In a small saucepan combine the following ingredients:
2 T. sugar
2 T. Orange or Lemon juice
2 T. Vinegar or Pineapple juice
2 previously beaten Eggs
Cook and stir over medium heat until thickened.
Immediately remove from heat and stir in:
1 T. Butter
pinch of Salt
Set aside or in fridge to cool.
~
Place 16oz. Sour Cream in a bowl. Fold cooled egg mixture into Sour Cream. Cover and refrigerate sauce while you prepare fruit.
~
Cube various fruit to make 7-8 C. of cubed Fruit. Pour sauce over fruit, cover, and refrigerate overnight. Toss before serving. Keep refrigerated! Do not keep longer than 3 days total. 12-16 servings.

Fruit ideas: Kiwis, Peaches, Nectarines, Apples, Grapes, Plums, Pineapples... whatever suits your taste buds.




Linking up today to

Recipe: Banana Bread

Happy Fry-day! ;) Last week a dear friend of mine and I got together and baked some delicious bread! I shared the basic recipe that we used on here last fall, but this is a wonderful recipe that allows for changes in the main ingredient without ruining the texture or flavor of the bread. Today I'm going to share with you the variation my friend and I used last week.

I happened to be fixing the kids a snack and saw that we only had one banana left and it was a bit more ripe than my kids will eat them. We all like our nanners firm and not too sweet, so when they get to where the peel has brown spots it's borderline whether anyone's gonna eat them. When they get nice and ripe to where we won't eat them, I peel them and stick them in a ziplock baggie in the freezer. So I took a peek into the freezer to see if there was a bag of bananas in there already that had room enough for another. Nope... in fact there were 2 quart ziplocks in there that each had about 3 large bananas in them and no room for more. I had to start a new banana baggie. I thought to myself, "Hmmm self, you need to bake something banana-y and pronto!" Then I thought of my favorite bread recipe of course, and how I usually add a couple bananas to stretch it so I can get away with using less of the less-plentiful zucchini or pumpkin main ingredient without affecting the taste or texture. I started pawing around for some frozen pumpkin or zucchini and found a ziplock with about 1 C. of shredded pumpkin, and another with about 2 C. shredded zucchini. Add that to my approximately 3 C. worth of frozen overripe bananas, and I had twice the amount needed to make a batch of bread. So I talked to my friend on Facebook and we decided instead of splitting it up, we'd make a double batch and add ALL three kinds of main ingredient! After discussing the details, we realized we didn't have nuts. This bread is delicious with nuts, but it is also delicious without them! ;) So we didn't let the lack of nuts stop us. Besides, we're both a little nuts (in the funnest sense of the word of course) anyway so who needs nuts in the bread too? ;) We planned who would supply which ingredients and the next morning I drove to her house (my oven gets a kick out of burning things on the bottom so I'm so glad her oven behaved much better than mine does!) and began baking.

Here's the variation we wound up making. It's a terrific (and delicious) way to warm up a rainy spring day by using up leftover fall ingredients! :)

Leftover Pumpkin, Zucchini, and Banana Bread! ;)
5 1/3 C. Sugar
1 1/3 C. Butter (softened)
TOTAL of 6 C. in any combination of the following: grated Pumpkin, grated Zucchini, and/or mooshed overripe Bananas
1 C. Water
8 Eggs
2 tsp. Vanilla
6 2/3 C all-purpose Flour
4 tsp. Baking Soda
3 tsp. Salt
3 tsp. Cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ground Cloves
1 tsp. Baking Powder
Cinnamon Sugar (to make, blend 1/4 C. each of cinnamon and sugar) I store my Cinnamon Sugar in a glass shaker with a large-holed metal lid like you find full of parmesan on the tables of pizza places. I got mine at Dollar Tree for... you guessed it! $1. ;)
At least 2 loaf pans
Spray oil (cheap nonstick spray works fine. I personally use the organic olive oil kind we got on sale- yay for sale!)
Foil and a dish towel

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line bread loaf pans with aluminum foil, spray with oil and then sprinkle with cinnamon sugar. I find that it's easier to press the foil into the pans without tearing it if you use a wadded up dish towel or tea towel to press it in with. :)
In a large HUGE bowl, cream butter and sugar. Stir in pumpkin/zucchini/banana, water, eggs and vanilla.
In seprate bowl, combine flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, cloves, and baking powder. Mix well. Add to wet ingredients and mix well. Your arm will feel like it's gonna fall off, but I've never heard of an arm actually falling off due to batter mixing. If they did that I would be armless by now.
Measure out approximately 2 1/2 C. of batter per fullsized loaf pan. Sprinkle cionnamon-sugar generously on top of the batter in the loaf pans for a sweet and cinnamony crust. Bake 2 at a time until wooden toothpick inserted in centers comes out clean- about an hour to 1 hr. 10 minutes. When you remove the bread from the oven, the foil on the top should cool pretty quickly to where you can uncurl it from the handles of the bread pan (careful not to touch the bread pan- ouch!) and lift the whole loaf out of the pan by the foil and move it to a rack, foil and all, to cool. This enables your loaf pans to cool faster since they are empty, which is handy if you've only got 2 loaf pans since this recipe witll make about 7 loaves of bread and you'll need to refoil/grease/sugar them and get them back in ASAP so you can be done baking by midnight. Cool your bread almost completely before attempting to slice. Try not to burn yourself as you peel the foil off a loaf and chop off a chunk of deliciousness to snack on as you finish baking. If bread is still hot it will not slice pretty. Lukewarm is okay. It also, for as yummy as it is hot, actually tastes even yummier cooled. But still, if you're like we were, you'll likely be into the first loaf before it's cool. :)

Will store in refrigerator in a ziplock or saran wrap for up to 10 days. Will store in freezer for a month or two- wrap in foil and then put into a gallon ziplock bag and then in freezer. If you baked it in foil lined pans, just wrap the existing foil up and over the top and stick the whole thing in a ziplock in the freezer. Can be left on the counter for up to 2 days, provided it's kept covered between snacking so it doesn't get all stale.
Makes a wonderful gift to say thank you, great to share with friends and neighbors, give as gifts for hollidays, or just keep in the freezer and pull a loaf out when you are in a bread mood or have company.

This is great for a beginner sweet bread. If neither my picky bottom-hot oven nor I have yet found a way to mess it up, it's gotta be difficult to do! ;) You can omit or add more of the cinnamon or cloves to suit your tastes. I love cinnamon but not so fond of cloves in large amounts (LOVE the smell, but I appreciate the taste more in moderation) so you might notice if you compared this variation to the original recipe that I tripled the cinnamon but halved the cloves. Besides, cloves are really pricey. It would have been awesome with nuts, but was still awesome anyway without nuts. Out of the 7 loves, we had totally devoured the first one before the last was finished baking. This is between 3 adults and then there were a couple toddlers who each had a bite or two as well. When we finished baking, there were 3 loaves left for each of us. When I got home I left one out for my family to enjoy and froze the other 2 for later. In hindsight I wish I'd taken one over to the neighbor- guess I'll just have to bake something else tasty to share in the near future!

What To Feed The Baby?

Here are some things I feed my beginning eaters. Use your own discretion regarding your child's readiness for certain foods. Different kids are aready for different stuff at different times.
-Egg yolk; to make it easy just fry an egg without breaking the yolk. Cook all the way through. Cool and peel out the disk shaped yolk and give it to baby as a finger food. It's like a little egg yolk cookie and separating the white from the yolk AFTER it's cooked is alot easier and more thorough. These were a favorite with both of my babies from about 7 months on.
-Toast with fruit babyfood spread on it instead of jelly. Jelly is so high in sugar and a nice babyfood fruit puree tastes just as delicious to your baby. I cut the toast in strips, usually about 5 strips per slice, to make it more baby-friendly. Make sure baby can chew well enough to eat toast before trying this out.
-Popcorn; you should NOT give your baby popcorn in it's freshly-popped glory, or if you do not fully understand my explanation here. The popcorn seed explodes it's fluffy white insides out, but the outer hull of the seed is still attached to the side of the popcorn. The hull can get stuck in anyone's throat, adults included, and cause them to choke. IF you ever feed a baby popcorn, you should REMOVE the hull, and anything that looks like it's related to the hull, and ONLY feed the soft fluffy white part to your baby. So if you're watching TV and baby is mooching your popcorn, don't let her stick her hand in the bowl and have at it. Take a kernel and bite off everything but the fluffy white part. The fluffy white part will melt in baby's mouth just exactly like one of those Gerber puffs will so follow the safety instruction for the Gerber puffs when feeding your baby the "modified" popcorn: Only feed to a baby who can sit without assistance, is seated, supervised, can pick small objects up with two fingers, and can chew cheerios and Gerber puffs with no problems. Again, feed your baby popcorn AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION. Some babies might be ready for it and some might not be ready until they are 2 or 3. You know your baby so use your noggin. ;)
-Shredded meat. My babies ate finely shredded chicken as soon as they were old enough to pinch food and get it to their mouths. I shredded it hair-fine and then spread it around their plate so they couldn't pick up very much at a time.
-Peas. I buy the frozen kind and then when I want to feed baby some peas I use a little juice strainer to scoop out a good amount. I then run hot water over the strainer full of peas for a minute until the peas are thawed through. When they were first learning to eat before there were many teeth to speak of, I would pinch each pea to break the skin so it would moosh when they bit down instead of sliding down the throat whole. As they got proficient at eating I stopped pinching peas and just dumped the strainer out on their highchair tray and let them have at it.
-Bananas. It's tricky for a little tot to hand onto something as slippery as a little cut piece of banana. And if you give them a whole peeled banana they've squeezed the bottom end into slime long before they ever eat down that far. So I devised a trick for bananas. Cut the banana in half. Take one half, and cut the peel away about an inch down so that there are no floppy peel parts hanging out but the banana is peeled for exactly one inch but has the peel on the rest of it. Now, providing your baby doesn't approach bananas like corn on the cob, they will theoretically be able to hold onto the banana and eat that top 1 inch that is peeled. When they've eaten that inch down you can take it and cut off the peel for another inch down. You'll have to supervise them of course so you can peel further before they start gnawing on the banana peel. ;) Leaving the peel on all but the one inch end protects the banana from being squeezed into oblivion by a tiny tot that doesn't know their own strength yet. ;)

-Cheese. My babies loved cheese so much that if I diced it up they would put too many pieces in their mouth and not chew what they had until their mouth was so full of cheese they could not chew or swallow. So I would just cut a slice slab of cheese off the block that was about 1/3" thick, and then cut that slab into 1/3" sticks. My babies did so much better with those because I gave them one at a time and they would have it in their hand so they were not fascinated by repeatedly grabbing and stuffing tiny dices into their mouths, they were instead fascinated with passing the cheese from hand to hand and examining it from all angles - meanwhile they were chewing the bite they had and not realizing it. Sneaky. Plus it taught them how to take a bite off something in a world where all baby food items are mooshy or finely chopped. ;)

A typical menu for my under 1 year babies was,
BREAKFAST:
YoBaby Yogurt & Organic Banana
OR
Baby oatmeal with Peach Babyfood mixed in
LUNCH:
Peas & Egg Yolks
OR
Veggie Babyfood and Cheese

SNACKS:
Puffs or whatever other Gerber baby snack I had a serious coupon for, Cheerios, Peas, Toast, Rice Rusks, Fruit, Cheese, and/or YoBaby.

SUPPER:
Some variation of what we were having for dinner. I would usually take out some meat and noodles and veggies for the baby before I put whatever sauce or seasoning into the meal for the rest of us. When they were teeny I used babyfood or ground up our meal (minus sauce/spices) in the Magic Bullet, but they love to feed themselves once they can pinch things up so after that I just let them as much as possible.
One thing I learned was that babies don't really mind the repetition, it's us grown ups that do. I have fed my kids a banana or YoBaby for (and later as a side dish to) breakfast almost every day since they were born and they gobbled up their banana this morning like it was ice cream, not like it was something they are tired of. I think there are things they don't like, and they might tolerate them for a while before staging a revolt, but I also think that strategic repetition can get babies who hate a food to like it eventually. Of course that theory did NOT work for my kids with baby cereal. No kidding I tried and tried and you'd have thought I was trying to poison them the way they acted. I could get Chicklet to eat ONLY the oatmeal kind and ONLY if it was mixed with a heavy dose of peach puree, but that only lasted so long before she refused to eat even that. Bug wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole no matter what. But then he pretty much didn't like food at all until... well hey come to think of it he's still not overly fond of food. It's a good day when he finishes one whole meal over the course of the day. He'd rather play with it, which I won't tolerate (another post altogether!) so it's lucky for him I offer lots of snack opportunities if he's only gonna eat 5 bites each time before I have to remove the leftovers to save them from floordom. He's probably healthier than the rest of us with his 5 bites every 2 hours. I read somewhere that grazing is the healthier way to eat...
But I digress... what I was getting at was that we have to be careful not to accidentally make our kids picky by stressing out about giving them more variety lest they get sick of something. I know it's hard, and we get bored seeing the same thing go in their mouth all the time, but really eating alot of a few healthy things is not going to make your kids picky or not picky. But if they see you worrying that they'll reject something because it's the 7th morning in a row that you've fed them some flavor or another of YoBaby, they'll start to pick up on that and think they're supposed to reject it. And if they eat all fruit one day, all protein the next, all starch and dairy the next, and all veggies the 4th day, well then that really is fine. They covered their bases just fine over those 4 days. No big deal.
And another thing I've been thinking on is a mistake I made with Chicklet. I would encourage her to finish her jar of babyfood if she had only 2 bites left and was acting full. I should have just let her stop when she acted full and tossed the 2 bites. Really. She's doing much better at listening to her own fullness cues now than she was 6 months ago, I'm pleased to say. ;) Although tonight we had corn on the cob for dinner and I think ALL of us, Bug included (little mister 5-bites ate almost a whole cob! Yes a whole one! Himself!), got a little carried away just because it was sooooo delicious! So moral of the story, if they're acting full it's best to just throw those last 2 bites away or save them for next time. Better to learn earlier than later how to stop when you're full.




This post is linked up to my Thursday Question! Please go HERE to see the original question and add YOUR post or read others' thoughts on this subject!

Depression Cooking with Clara

"Great Depression Cooking With Clara"
A grandson wanted to capture his 91 year old Nana's recipes and stories from growing up during the Great Depression. He didn't think he could adequately write everything down to convey her charming personality and so he began making videos - Great Depression Cooking With Clara was born. Clara shows you how to cook easy and thrifty meals while sharing stories and trivia from the Great Depression! And best of all it's on YouTube so you can go there and watch all the episodes right now. ;)
If you've never seen "Great Depression Cooking With Clara" before you're going to love it:
http://www.youtube.com/user/DepressionCooking

"FryDay" recipe: Salted Pumpkin Seeds and Pumpkin Walnut Bread!

Before I get to the good stuff, I wanted to let you know why this is 2 days early. Well you see, my Nana is in the hospital and rumor has it she's not doing so well so I'll be leaving for the weekend to go see her. So here's Friday's post early and I will probably not get to post again until Monday as I will be gone. I hope you all have a terrific weekend! See you on Monday...

Pumpkin Walnut Bread & Salted Pumpkin Seeds
DAY 1 OF SEEDS, PUMPKIN PREP:
You will need 1 pie pumpkin, a couple of helpers, a sharp knife, trash can, bowls, a cheese grater, a strainer, and some salt.
Cut the pumpkin into 6ths or 8ths so it's easy to handle. Have your helpers clean the seeds and goo out. Throw the stringy goo away and put the larger of the seeds in a pile or a strainer basket. If you have a 3 year old they will probably try to eat the seeds whole and slimy. This will not hurt them, but may gross you out. Or maybe this is only MY 3 year old? Peel the dark orange shell off the outsides of the pumpkin chunks with the knife. Only go about a milimeter deep. You just want to get the outside off and not waste alot of the meat. Hand the peeled chunks to another helper to rinse off and grate with the cheese grater.
Have another helper gently rinse the seeds in the strainer so they don't go down the drain, and then put the rinsed seeds in a clean bowl. Pour in a LOT of salt on the seeds, about half as much salt as there are seeds. Run the tap until the water is hot and fill the salt/seeds bowl to where the water covers the seeds. Set this bowl in a warm safe place to soak overnight.
If you are baking your bread at a later date, put the grated pumpkin in a freezer bag and freeze. Will stay good in the freezer for a month or two. Thaw an hour before baking - also a good time to take the butter out to soften too. If you are baking it right away, proceed to bread recipe.

DAYS 2 & 3 OF SEEDS:
After soaking them in saltwater overnight, drain the seeds through a strainer and then spread on a paper towel for a bit to drain some more.
RAW- Change to a fresh dry paper towel after about an hour and leave on the paper towel to dry again overnight in a warm dry place. Leave them drying for about a week.
ROASTED- Spread drained seeds evenly on a lightly oiled baking sheet that has sides. Bake in the oven at 250 degrees for about an hour until they start to brown, stirring them with a pancake turner every 10-15 minutes. Remove and cool. Enjoy. Store in a dry place.



Pumpkin Walnut Bread Recipe
2 2/3 C. Sugar
2/3 C.  Butter (softened)
3 C. grated Pumpkin (can substitute all or part grated zucchini if you don't have enough pumpkin)
2/3 C. Water
4 Eggs
1 tsp. Vanilla
3 1/3 C all-purpose Flour
2 tsp. Baking Soda
1 1/2 tsp. Salt
1 tsp. Cinnamon
1 tsp. ground Cloves
1/2 tsp. Baking Powder
1+ C. chopped Walnuts (or Pecans)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line with aluminum foil and/or grease & sugar bottoms and sides of 2 large or 3 medium loaf pans.
In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar. Stir in pumpkin, water, eggs and vanilla.
In seprate bowl, combine flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, cloves, and baking powder. Mix well. Add to wet ingredients and mix well. Mix in nuts.
Pour into pans. Bake until wooden toothpick inserted in center comes out clean- about an hour and 10 minutes. Cool 5 minutes before removing from pans. Cool almost completely before attempting to slice. If bread is still hot it will not slice pretty. Lukewarm is okay.
Will store in refrigerator in a ziplock or saran wrap for up to 10 days. Will store in freezer for a month or two- wrap in foil and then put into a gallon ziplock bag and then in freezer. If you baked it in foil lined pans, just wrap the existing foil up and over the top and stick the whole thing in a ziplock in the freezer.
Althoug seriously you're gonna smell it baking and that will be the end of your thoughts of freezing some for later. Seriously. It will be gobbled up faster than you can say "Pumpkin Walnut Bread!" ;)

Breakfast Burritos Recipe

Breakfast Burritos
You will need large tortillas, eggs, potatoes chopped into small chunks, salt and pepper to taste, and cooked chopped meat if you eat meat- sausage or bacon or any kind you prefer or have leftover. You may add a chopped onion if you'd like. You have to go by how much you think your family will eat and like of each of the ingredients. It's not an exact science, you just add more of what you have more of and less of what you have less of and fill in the gap with eggs.
You will also need grated cheese.
To start, in an extra large skillet, put your meat and potatoes and onion and cook them until the meat is done but not overdone and the potatoes are cooked through. Add salt/pepper and eggs to make enough to feed your family and scramble it until it's done. Put a big scoop of scrambled egg mixture on a tortilla and sprinkle with cheese. Roll it up and serve hot.

If it suits you, you could add chopped bell peppers with the onions. Add or subtract whatever sounds good to you.

"FryDay" recipe: Lemonade & Granola

I'm in the mood for some lemonade! Not that too-sweet kind that comes in a frozen concentrate or the powdered kind that is full of cancer-causing NutraSweet. Oh no, I'm talking real lemonade from real lemons and real lemon juice! Not too sweet, but not too sour. Mmmm! Just perfect for a warm end-of-summer afternoon!

Lemonade:

3 lemons
1/2 C. storebought lemon juice
1 C. sugar
2 Qts. water
2 Qt. pitcher and long wooden spoon to mix with

Wash lemons. Squeeze juice from lemons into a large pitcher. Add sugar; fill pitcher with 1 qt. water. Chop rinds into large pieces and let soak in lemonade. Stir well until sugar is totally dissolved, then stir a bit longer. Strain rinds out of juice. Add storebought lemon juice and fill with water to the 2 Qt. mark. Refrigerate until cold or serve over ice. Best if used within 24 hours.


NEW!! Friend recipe of the week! Check out the yummy looking Granola Recipe over at Too Many Kids In The Bathtub! :)


To see my previously posted "Fry-Day" recipes, click HERE.

Recipe: Potato Cheese Soup

Happy Fry-day! :) With the colder weather moving in, at least at night, I thought a nice soup recipe was in order! When it's cold out there's nothing more comforting than snuggling up with a nice hot chocolate or hot soup!

Potato Cheese Soup
3 potatoes (peeled and quartered)
1 small onion (finely chopped)
1 C water
1 tsp Salt
3 C milk
2 T. flour
half a stick of butter
Dash of pepper
1 C grated cheese

In a saucepan, bring potatoes, onion, water, and salt to a boil. Cover and turn down to a simmer...
Meanwhile, put the milk in the blender with the flour and blend until there are no lumps.
Back in your pot, simmer until potatoes are tender through. Do not drain; mash them a bit with a fork. Stir in all the rest of the ingredients except cheese. Cook and stir over medium heat until thickened and bubbley. Remove from heat and stir in cheese. Garnish with parsley and a pinch of shredded cheese.

I hope everyone has a terrific weekend! Don't forget to enter my giveaway before Tuesday night! ;)

BETTER Tollhouse Cookies

Happy Fry-day! Yes pun intended... Hehe. Tuesday I baked cookies. They are deeeelicious! I always use Nestle Tollhouse Morsels and the Tollhouse recipe on the bag but I make a couple alterations to give it that personal touch.
1) First of all I add a generous sprinkling of cinnamon. I love cinnamon and it brings out the flavors nicely. If I were to measure it, it would probably be about 2 teaspoons of cinnamon. But I don't measure it. I know, bad me! I just kind turn the shaker upside down over the bowl, give it a couple good whacks, and call it good. I love cinnamon. If you are not a total cinnamon fanatic like me though you might want to only add one tsp. ;)
2) I never ever substitute anything for the butter. My number one cardinal rule of making sweets is to ALWAYS use REAL and FULL-FAT or it won't taste as good! No low-fat garbage in my sweets, oh no! So I always use real butter never ever margerine or shortening. (Another of my rules is no semi-sweet chips. I use milk chocolate chips because they taste richer.)
3) Where it says to use 3/4 C. of white sugar and 3/4 C. of brown sugar, I actually use 1 C. brown sugar and 1/2 C. white sugar. It just improves the flavor.
4) I like to use twice as much vanilla because it just tastes yummier with two teaspoonfulls of vanilla than it does with one.
5) I sometimes use extra chocolate chips, sometimes not. Depends if I have them. Sometimes I mix other flavors of chips instead or along with. They taste really good with 1 C. milk chocolate chips and 1 C. butterscotch chips together! Or instead of half and half milk choc. and butterscotch you could do half and half milk choc. and white choc. chips. Or half semisweet. Or half mint chips. Whatever sounds yummy.
And
6) just for fun sometimes I bake them in a muffin tin. They come out all cute and rounded. :) Like bar cookies only round and no cutting required. I put a rounded Tblsp. of dough in each cup and do not use paper liners. After baking, cool one minute and then remove with a plastic fork. Plastic forks are flexible and you can just scoop that cookie right out of there with a plastic fork where a metal one would mangle it.

Cheating on Dinner

Okay so last night I was tired and didn't feel like cooking anything amazing so I cheated.

Mac & Cheat Dinner... Lol! (I'm a dork, yeah I know.)

Brown up 1 to 1.5 pounds of ground beef (whatever amnt. you usually use for a meal) and set aside to drain.
Make up 1 or 2 (depending on size of your family We use 1 box for our family of 4 but if we had bigger little eaters we'd have to use 2 because I like leftovers for next-day lunch) boxes of Mac & Cheese according to the box directions.
Add the beef to the mac & Cheese.
Add 1 can of condensed tomato soup - do not dilute. Add a sprinkle of Oregano and a sprinkle of Basil. Don't add salt- tomato soup is mega salty tasting already.
Heat until it bubbles, mixing all the while. If there doesn't appear to be enough tomato soup to spread through all the noodles, add a dash of milk.
Serve. Tastes kinda like cheesy spaghetti. :)

If you have solid-eating babies, I give them some of the plain cooked noodles and beef before I add the cheese sauce and soup. This meal is good served with toast and some sort of steamed veggie. If you add parmesan with the tomato soup or sprinkle it on after serving it makes it even more delicious! It takes a whopping 10 minutes to make and everyone loves it.

Cheesy Broccoli Lentil Stew - YUM!

Last night for supper we had cheesy broccoli lentil stew. Oh I just LOVE this particular lentil stew! If you've never tried lentils you should. You really should. I've heard them compared to lima beans but EWWWW limas are so gross there's no way! If lentils were like limas I wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole. (Just don't tell my kids there's a veggie even Mama won't eat! Lol!) Miss Chicklet (almost 3) LOVES lentils. In fact, she's at the kitchen table right now eating cold leftover lentils and happily mumbling about "Yummy 'gumes!" My 1 year old had lentils for the first time last night and he scarfed them down like a starving person. My husband had never heard of lentils until he married me! He didn't want to try them at all. It took some blackmail er... convincing to get him to taste them. The verdict? He LOVES them! He ate 3 heaping bowlfulls last night! Lol!
Lentils are a legume. (Which I happened to call them last night at dinner, trying to be funny. Hence my daughter's ''gumes' comment.) Basically a bean for all practical purposes. They are about the size of a dried pea and are flat and brown, red or green. They are supposedly a good source of protein and complex carbohydrates. A real superfood. Unlike beans you don't have to soak them overnight, and unlike rice they are quick to cook. The key to tasty lentils is not OVERcooking them. If you boil them too long they get mushy like the dreaded lima bean and that for me is a big turn-off. I can't stand to eat anything that has that mushy-lima-bean texture. *shudders* Unless you're a fan of mooshy limas, you'll want your lentils cooked minimally. I mean, you should be able to chew them without breaking a tooth, of course, but once they are tender all the way through that's where I stop. Usually takes about 15 minutes once it's boiling for perfect lentil doneness.

Now, who wants my lentil stew recipe?


Cheesy Lentil Stew
1 pound ground beef
1 pound bag of dry lentils
about 1 pound of frozen broccoli florets (or cauliflower, or both)
salt
water
alot of grated cheese, sharp is best, maybe 3 or 4 cups? About half a small block grated up or more.

First wash and sort your lentils. Just put them in a strainer and run the faucet on them while you dig around a bit with your hand. I've never found a rock in my lentils but my mom has so it is possible and that's what you're checking for. No need to let your OCD get the better of you though, just dig around a bit and if you see something rocklike, remove it. When you've rinsed them and "sorted" them, put them into a big pot. Fill with water to about 1" above the lentil level. Now put it on HIGH to boil. You're gonna want to stir it often so the lentils don't stick to the bottom and burn. Unless you have a nonstick pot like I do- not healthy but it sure makes cooking easier. When it starts to boil start timing 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, brown your beef and drain it.
Back to our delicious legumes; You can add more water if it gets too low (you don't want it to boil dry) but the goal is to have the lentils be almost totally out of water by the time they're done. You see, all the nutrients boil out into the water and if you drain out the water there go the vitamins down the drain. So you want to just boil it down to where there's barely enough water to cover the lentils when you've removed the pot from the burner and things have settled. Except that you're not gonna remove it from the heat after all... You're going to taste a couple and if you think they need more cooking, boil them a bit longer and keep tasting until you are satisfied. When you're satisfied, like I said there should be hardly any liquid left. If there is too much you will have to remove some and pour those nutrients down the drain... *sniffle* bummer! But don't worry, it takes a little practice to know when to stop adding water to the lentils so that there is the perfect amount left when they're done. If you make this a couple times you'll have it down pat.
Now you add your frozen broccoli. Boil, stirring, until the broccoli is warm on the outside. Then turn down to a barely simmer and add the beef in and cover with a lid. Leave it, stirring once in a while, until the broccoli is warm clear through.
When the broccoli is warmed through, salt the stew to taste. Serve with generous amounts of grated cheese on top. Yummy!

*This recipe makes enough lentil stew for about 3 meals for my small family. It's actually kinda even better after it's been in the fridge overnight so I just leave it in the original pot and reheat it each night until it's gone. If I had more kids or company this recipe would be perfect for a nice large hearty meal!

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