cooking – er something – Page 2

Bulk cooking day!!!

Everyone helps. 🙂

It’s sure is messy, but joyfully productive.

And our pweepers get the scraps 🙂

*”pweep” is our imitation of the sound they make when squealing. Hehe.

The baking day was a success. We made two different variations of a cool-whip cookies, strawberry bread and granola from scratch. We invited over a dear friend, Heather, and her toddler son to join in our day. The kids enjoyed stirring and pouring and making a royal mess with complete delight. How else are they going to learn? And who can judge them? I’m a messy cook too.

In the naptime quiet, I baked some strawberry breads and made some more cookie batters. Then Heather returned, exchanging her toddler son for her teenaged daughter, to finish up our work. We froze the cookie dough in individual family servings (which for us is 6 cookies) between parchment paper and wax paper so that come cookie baking time we could simply peal the wax paper off and throw the parchment paper and cookies onto a tray for quick baking.

We also froze away some pumpkin bread batters for another winter day treat.

In all it was a fun baking morning/afternoon where everyone could help at their initiative and talk/play with friends. Definitely a repeat kind of day!

While studying turtles for homeschooling, we had this yummy turtle snack.

A little peanut butter, chocolate chips, butterscotch chips and bread cut out into turtle pieces can sure go a long way. =)

It was fun and sure did taste good. =) Mmmmm.

So with “twins” and especially “twins who eat” we could easily be drowning in a baby food bill. So instead of starving our children 😉 I decided to be a bit financially savvy and make a boatload of baby food. I could have been more financially savvy by actually buying stuff on sale or better yet… having children who will reach baby food eating age when fruit is in season. But since I’m not that good (or whatever). I spend $35 on fresh fruit/veggies and cooked/pureed those boogers. We’ve been eating baby food for weeks (well, the babes, not me) and I don’t even think we’ve made a dent into the overloaded basket of food in the freezer. I don’t think I’ll need to make any more baby food until they hit “table scraps” age.

Various apple kinds

Thanks again Mommy for the awesome handmixer thingy!

(Yay for awesome Christmas presents!!!)

A “family size” jar.

Sweet taters!

Babyfied! (Hannah’s favorite)

Mmm, pea glop!

I also made carrots, bought and fed Hannah avocados (fork squished), some green beans (ran out of freezer space to do them all) and accidentally forgot about a bag of pears in the bottom of the fridge that’s now living in Mr. Trashcan (can’t expect perfection here people. HA!).

I froze them in breastmilk storage bags by type so I knew how many ounces were in each bag (4 oz and 6 oz quantities). I just grab a baggie out and serve it straight or mix it with other stuff for variety.

The twins? Oh they give it two “helping, I promise” spoon-grabbing thumbs up! =D

– Baby goop cheers!

One Sunday after church I decided to use the leftover pancakes to bring a new tradition into our family from my childhood: the clown pancake. Now, when I was young the clown pancake was eaten only on special occasions at “Carousel” restaurant where my uncle worked. I remember the excitement of the clown pancake in all it’s sugary goodness and presentation and hoped to bring such joy to my children. So I introduced the clown pancake one Sunday for lunch:

Look how thrilled she was!!!

I promise it was a hit (just a 3 y/o picture moment).

I told her to say “clown pancakes!!!” We all giggled about the varied translations of that phrase.

Giddy.

And this one makes faces too. hehe.

So with the success of the clown pancake, I decided to repeat the affair the next day, but offer personalized decorating. I put on the whipped creme for the facial features and the girls decorated accordingly. This time I offered more fruit and made the rule that all the decorations needed to be consumed. No one complained. 😉