Week in Review - Peru and Brazil

Last week we "traveled" to Peru and Brazil and we had a wonderful time!

We ate FABULOUS food! You will definitely want to try these: Lomo Saltado, Fruit Espuma, Feijoada. Especially the lomo saltado! It is so delish that The Hubs asked me to start making it once a week.

To celebrate the traditional weaving done in Peru, we made woven bookmarks. I used instructions that I found on Craft Stylish. We were about a nickel short of a total project FAIL when it suddenly clicked for everyone and we ended up being successful. My sweet Little CC had a complete meltdown. Fortunately for both of us, I have a little bit plenty of experience with craft-induced breakdowns so I was able to calm her down fairly quickly :)

In honor of the Brazilian celebration of Carnival the kids decorated masks with glitter glue and feathers.

Finally, we spent a little bit of time looking at the globe (I seriously did not realize how huge Brazil is!) and updated the kids' passports. See those little flags at the bottom of the pages? Those are our "stamps" for each country. I found the images on the CIA website (yes, that CIA). They have tons of info on every country and flag. Not TOP SECRET info, silly, just demographics and stuff. And along with the images of the flags they include info on the symbolism and importance of each element of the flags. Very cool.

So now we are heading to Europe. This week we will visit France and Spain. The food alone is very promising :) I hope you all got to spend time with family for Father's Day and that you had a great weekend!

Adios,
Brooke

Week in Review - Mexico

We had a great week in Mexico last week! The kids were {mostly} awesome! The activities were fun and the food was sooo delish! Seriously, pickled cactus is one of my new faves. It tastes a little like capers, all salty and vinegar-y. Even the kids loved it - and I wasn't even sure I would be able to get them to try it! I made a "cheater" version of the Nopalitos con Papas because tamales are a lot of fun to make, but they are a lot of work, too! So I just cooked up a package of hash browns with peppers and onions according to the package directions and threw in about a cup of nopalitos toward the end. The kids went nuts for it! For reals! I couldn't believe it. I would still like to try the more traditional version sometime, but some form of this dish will become part of our regular repertoire for sure.

I hope you are all having fun! We are off to Peru and Brazil this week. And you know I'll be sharing about that! Have some fun and do something nice for yourself ~ you deserve it!
~B

Travel Plans

Hi all! I hope you had a great weekend! I am so excited to kick off our week of imaginary Mexican travel. Today, we are going to start working on a papier mache pinata. It takes a little bit of work every day for several days, so if we start today it should be ready to fill with candy in time for our Mexican fiesta at the end of the week. If you want to make a pinata with your kids, you can find great instructions on DLTK's website. There is a wealth of information over there. Lots of craft ideas for every occasion under the sun. So fun!

We're going to keep our pinata pretty simple. I'm going to blow up a 12" balloon to use as our form, then we'll add a layer of papier mache everyday for a few days, letting it dry overnight between layers. Then the kids can have a day or two to decorate it before our fiesta.

On DLTK's website you can also find instructions  for a craft to simulate Aztec pottery. You use paper plates for the base and the kids draw or paint decorations onto them. Awesome! For both the pinata and the pottery craft I had most of the supplies around the house and only needed to purchase paper plates and balloons from the dollar store. Two dollars for a few hours of crafting fun! Not bad!

I picked up a book at the library about Mexican holidays. It's written for kids and has lots of great photos. Plus it gives a lot of cultural information as a background to the different holidays. It has a pretty delicious-looking recipe for Mexican hot chocolate, too. I'm sure we'll be drinking some of that despite the 95 degree temps :)

We'll spend a little bit of time looking at the globe and talking about geography and other basic facts - money, language, and of course food. Then we'll wrap up our week with a Mexican fiesta. I'm going to attempt to make tamales using a recipe from allrecipes. For our side dishes we'll have tropical fruits and Nopalitos con Papas. Nopalitos (cactus) in a jar are in the Mexican food section at the grocery store. I've had them once before and they taste a lot like green beans...yum! For dessert we'll have Tres Leches cake (made from a Duncan Hines mix) and then we'll bust into the pinata.

Can you tell I'm a little excited about all of this? Summer is my favorite time of the year. Having all the kids home can be challenging, I'm not going to lie about that, but we get to have so much fun too! I like for most of the time to be pretty loose and unstructured - the school year feels so scheduled all the time and I often feel that there just aren't enough hours in a day to do all of the things that need to be done. Summer is so different! If something doesn't get done, there's always tomorrow! Didn't make it to the library today? No bigs - we'll just do it tomorrow. Didn't make it to the store today? No prob - we'll have pancakes for dinner. See? Love it!

And I think unstructured time is good for the kids, too. So I don't want to give the impression that this is a curriculum designed to fill every hour of every day. It's more like a framework. I find it helpful to have a few structured activities in my back pocket to fill in the holes when things get a little too loose. So our imaginary trip around the world just gives me sort of a theme to work with to plan a couple of activities a week. It also serves as a fun way to sneak in (Ha! The kids don't even know about this part!) a little bit of learning so the kids don't go back to school in August with mashed potatoes for brains. Plus, let's face it, I'm a geek. If something involves crafting, cooking, and doing some research on the web - count me in.

We would love for you to come along! Feel free to add suggestions!
Adios!
Brooke

My Perfect Date Night!

My mom had the kids over to spend the night yesterday which means that The Hubs and I got to enjoy some much-needed alone time. A couple of weeks ago the kids went to my in-laws' house for the night and I was so tired that I fell asleep on the couch at 6:00 while watching a movie and slept until 9:00 the next morning. Yeah, I am one hot date :) But last night we had a perfect date night.

Before kids, The Hubs and I had evenings like this all the time. This wouldn't have been anything special, it would have been, like, a Tuesday night or something. Now that we have kids, a lot has changed. Of course I love my kids, but I sometimes often long for that feeling of The Years Before Kids. So last night, we had dinner at the best place in town.

We had drinks and appetizers. We spoke in full sentences with NO rhyming words whatsoever.

We got to hand-pick our steaks (rib-eye for me and KC strip for The Hubs).

They were cooked to perfection by the resident Grill Master.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, someone slaved to prepare the perfect side dishes.

You know what? Before kids, the Caesar salad would have been dressed with homemade dressing and the fries hand-cut from actual whole potatoes. The appetizer would have been homemade hummus and pita chips or bruschetta with toasted baguette slices (and the baguette would possibly have been homemade as well) instead of store-bought 7-layer dip and a bag of tortilla chips. But I didn't want to spend time in the kitchen, I wanted to spend time with The Hubs!

But when you sit down with your favoritest person in the whole world to a dinner that looks like this, it's hard to find much to complain about! There was a time when I thought that having EVERY single part of the meal be made from scratch was paramount to having a great dinner. I now know that the company is a much more important factor! I am so blessed to be married to someone who, after all these years (8 adventure-filled ones), is still the person I most want to hang out with! 

Of course, a perfectly cooked steak doesn't hurt either :)

And finally, because one of the benefits of dining in is that man's best friend can join you:

This is Max. He's been feeling a little neglected since the cat has had so much more blog exposure than him. But Max just doesn't provide me with as many bloggable moments as Lucky does. Max always looks pretty much like this. He's a real good dog. He's sweet and loyal, a lap-dog in a 110 pound body, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he is definitely a very good dog.

Ooh - ooh - ooh! In these pics is a sneak peek at a fun project I hope to complete and share with you in just a few days. I hope you are all having a great weekend. Try to work in a date night if you can :) You deserve it!

~B







Make it Monday - cupcakes!

Happy Monday friends! For this week's Make it Monday, I'm sharing a recipe for peanut butter cup cupcakes. I've got to give a shout out to my friend Emily, who shared this recipe with me years ago, but I never actually made it until this past weekend. Boy, was I missing out! These things are awesome and they taste just like a Reese's peanut butter cup!

For the cupcakes you will need:
1 box chocolate cake mix (I used Devil's Food)
2 eggs
1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
Water - the amount called for on the cake mix

Preheat oven to 350 F. Line muffin tin with cupcake liners. Prepare cake mix according to package directions, using only 2 eggs, the amount of water on the package, and the peanut butter instead of the oil called for on the box. Fill cupcake liners about 2/3 full. I used a 1/2 cup scoop and got 21 cupcakes. Bake for 19-23 minutes, until they appear done and the top springs back when touched. Allow cupcakes to cool completely before frosting.

For the frosting you will need:
6 oz. chocolate chips, melted (I used the microwave, but you can use a double boiler as well)
1/2 cup softened butter
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 1/3 cup creamy peanut butter

Beat all of these ingredients together until smooth and frost away. If the frosting is too soft, a few minutes in the fridge will stiffen it right up. I made a double batch of the frosting so I could really pile it on. I definitely used up more than a single batch, but I had a ton left over. The Hubs enjoyed it magic-shell-style on ice cream. The kids will probably polish it off by dipping animal crackers in it. It's some seriously delish stuff!

I garnished the tops with chopped-up peanut butter cups!

And since it's Monday, I have a new spring cleaning assignment: to clean out the worst closet in the house. This is a week-long project. I plan to spend 15 minutes per day working on my worst closet...which happens to be my very own personal closet. I took some "before" pics this morning, but alas I am simply too mortified to share them with you yet. I did spend 15 minutes working on it, but it has not improved enough for me to feel any better about it. I can actually see a bit of the closet floor, which is a definite improvement, but it's still so bad. And you know I've shown you some pretty embarrassing "before" photos, so this is really, really bad. If you used the full extent of your imaginative powers you probably still could not picture just how horrible it is! And it overwhelms me. But I figure I can do anything for 15 minutes. Just to keep it real - a lot of my closet issues involve being waaaay behind on laundry for myself. So, I'm not counting laundry catch-up in my 15 minutes per day. I will be spending additional time on laundry. I'm optimistic, though. I think 15 minutes a day plus some laundry will leave me with a spiffy closet by week's end. Oh happy day!