March 22, 2011 - Posted by CayleenRae - 2 Comments
Play Date!
Don’t worry, Ettin cheered up pretty quick:
Galoot played with a princess:
And mommy went Visiting Teaching while her awesome friend watched a bunch of kids.
After lunch, I took some time to read about Temples. I shared some thoughts with Giant, and the spirit in our home became very peaceful…
…in spite of the abundant Chaos:
In fact, Giant even commented, “Your house is nice peace. Peace and quiet.”
Then he called me Princess Keeah (a character from the Droon series Daddy is reading the boys), and I remained Princess Keeah until suppertime.
I continued to read the Temple book a bit as I helped Giant write up the ingredients list for cornbread:
“We’re making yummy cornbread, right Keeah?”
cornbrdtmuatoresupe/ Cornbread and Tomato Soup Recipe
1 FLAWr /flour
2 cormel/cornmeal
3 SHOGr/sugar
4 BaKingpawdr/baking powder
5 SoLT/salt
6 VeJeoil/vegetable oil
7 eg/egg
8 miLc/milk
We mixed it up:
And got it ready:
I love homeschooling that also gets supper ready!
Giant drew some pictures of me (Princess Keeah, in case you’ve forgotten):
And he also built a really cool contraption.
I’m not sure he knew how cool it actually was…but let me see if I can describe it:
By turning the wheels on one side of the car(?), it rotated the left and right platforms up and down, like feet stepping:
Both the upper and lower platforms were set up in this way. Very neat.
Then it was taken apart to become ice-cream cones đŸ™‚Â (Which is why I take pictures!)
To finish off the night, we went to Giant’s gymnastics presentation:
Hooray Giant!
March 21, 2011 - Posted by CayleenRae - 0 Comments
No gym today. Or for the next three weeks.
And it was snowing.
And our friends were sick.
And mommy was feeling a little…blugh.
So boys played with block in their pjs for a very long time:
I made them get dressed for snack time:
We had a gospel lesson:
Ettin hammed it up:
Then the boys spent time drawing letters (Giant wanted to make rows of letters across the page, Ettin wanted to do what his brother was doing).
I showed Ettin “Dog”, and he actually did a pretty good job copying my shapes:
Then the boys cut out their letters and Giant had fun rearranging all of his letters into funny sounds and words:
Then Giant compiled an ingredients list of what we needed to make crackers (solt/salt, bacensoda/baking soda, oel/oil, flawr/flour, milc/milk):
And the boys had endless (almost) fun rolling out cracker dough from my pasta maker:
…which makes nice, thin crackers:
In the afternoon, I got a whole lot of work in the basement done (sorting and putting away food storage, disassembling a shelf and reassembling it into a seedling table, putting up reflective blankets around my grow shelf to retain some heat in the cold basement).
Which meant the boys were entertained in other ways:
Interestingly, I’m pretty sure that even though Giant (and later Ettin) played ‘educational’ computer games for a couple of hours, I think they got way more educational value playing with letters they had drawn and cut out themselves for 10-15 minutes earlier in the day.
March 19, 2011 - Posted by CayleenRae - 0 Comments
You can take the girl out of Surrey, but you can’t take the Surrey out of the girl.
I grew up in Surrey, BC.
In Surrey there are many, many marvelous places to find yummy Indian food.
Like Samosas.
Samosas to me are a celebration after a final exam. A special treat brought to an Institute class. The epitome of yummy tastes and smells of the place I grew up in.
So, no wonder I crave them from time to time.
And I can find recipes on the internet, but I have this problem where I try to make everything “healthy,” like when I try to bake cookies or something.
So I’ve never made them (deep-fried white-flour pastry-dough does not a healthy meal make).
But today the cravings were too strong, and I had to do something….And I think it turned out rather well!
I grabbed a couple handfuls of potatoes, a handful of carrots, peas, an onion, lentils (for protein and “gravyness”), chicken soup base, salt, and Indian Spice, and started to play.
I cut the potatoes in half (because I wanted them to cook faster, but was too impatient to actually dice them first) and threw them in a pot of boiling water.
Although in reality I did it later, at this point I should have diced an onion and started sauteing it in butter over low-med heat in a medium pot. Then I would have added the lentils to the onions to save on pots and to save all the yummy flavour of caramelized onions.
In a separate pot I boiled a cup of lentils til soft in 3 cups or so of water (enough to make a thick gravy, adjust as you see fit). And I added maybe 2 tsp of chicken soup base, lots of salt, and a seasoning from ClubHouse: Indian Masala (because I don’t have the patience or the ingredients for making authentically seasoned Indian food).
While those were cooking, I peeled and diced 5-6 skinny carrots, then threw them in with the potatoes.
When everything was soft and cooked, I chopped up the potatoes roughly, mixed it all together and added enough frozen green peas to look colourful and pretty.
Here is where I started taking pictures:
For the dough, I decided to use a great tortilla recipe I’ve come across recently (which also makes great crackers, btw, but I’ll save that for another post):
[Note: this is my adjusted version, but be sure to check out the recipe (just in case mine doesn’t work for you, so you can blame me, and not the other blog)]
2 cups whole-wheat flour
1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder
1 teaspoon of salt
3 teaspoons of olive oil
1 cup of warm milk (I put my cup full of milk in a warm bowl of water to warm up)
Mix it all up, knead til smooth.
I’m too impatient to wait for dough to rest and cool, so I just carried on.
I grabbed a walnut/golf ball chunk of dough…
rolled it out…
to a thin circle about the size of my hand:
Took a moment to sooth a baby who seems to crash his noggin several times a day:
Having soothed the baby and found him some toys,
I put a heaping 1/4 c of filling…
in the middle:
flattened it slightly:
tucked it in:
covering the insides completely (while trying not to tear the dough):
[note: I tried rolling it out and filling it to look like a real samosa. Didn’t work for me. Perhaps you’ll have better luck?]
Then I turned them upside down and put them on a well buttered pan (mmmmm, butter):
I cooked them at 400 F, and when they were browned on the bottom (maybe 10-15min? into cooking), I lifted them up, buttered the pan again, and flipped them over to brown on the other side (maybe 5-10 min?):
Frying? Nope, not here. Just lots of butter!
They were great!
Oh, and the sauce?
Because really, what is a samosa without a great dipping sauce?
I brought out ketchup and mustard. But that didn’t seem right.
The sauce I remembered was sweet, and tangy. Kind of like honey mustard sauce. But fruitier.
So I grabbed my chokecherry syrup and my dijon mustard.
Seriously.
I mixed them 3 parts syrup to 1 part mustard.
It was delicious!
Daddy had thirds (and he hates potatoes)
Giant had seconds:
(Ettin was disturbed that what I had called a bun was filled with something not-a-bun. This did not work in his well-ordered mind, and throughout lunch he kept asking me to fix his bun. Sorry buddy.)
So, the approximate ingredients in summary [Made 16 samosas with 1/2c stuffing left over]:
Filling:
4-5 medium/small potatoes, cooked and eventually chopped
5-6 thin carrots, peeled and diced and cooked
1 onion, diced and caramelized in some butter
3/4 cup (maybe) of frozen peas
1 cup lentils boiled in…
2-3 (or more) cups water
2-3 tsp chicken soup base (Note: I did not use chicken bouillon. The stuff I have is not as powerful as that, so adjust as you deem fit)
1 TB (at least!)Indian Masala
salt to taste (remember, this sauce will season the potato mix, so a little on the salty side will be just fine)
Dough:
2 cups whole-wheat flour
1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder
1 teaspoon of salt
3 teaspoons of olive oil
1 cup of warm milk (I put my cup full of milk in a warm bowl of water to warm up)
Stir it up. Knead it. Use it.
Sauce:
3 parts fruity syrup (I used chokecherry)
1 part dijon mustard
Enjoy!
