Icky Sickies

   Sickies around here lately. So nothing of note in the form of real life excitement. When your house is full of sickies weird things start to make your day and give one a false sense of excitement and adventure, such as finding enjoyment and satisfaction in making a wooden Thomas train track for the twelfth time of the day and organizing all the myriads of trains into neat lines and feeling a great sense of accomplishment because you managed to use all the pieces; or feeling like a great inventive cook because you invented boxed soup with peas and boxed soup with corn and boxed soup with rice - you get the picture. At least my self esteem as a mother is not affected because everyone is so grumpy it doesn't matter what I do, everyone just cries and complains which makes my job easier as now I am just simply "Evil Taskmaster" and you are either eating something you hate, doing something you hate or you are in your bed. I really tried making things they like, such as pork and potatoes but they complained as much as on soup days so I thought to myself well soup is easier and I love soup so we will eat soup, soup, soup it's healthier for the sickies anyways.
   Luckily, thankfully, gratefully I am not sick but am not feeling my best what with being cooped up with complainers and not getting more than an hour of sleep at a time if this post is a bit disjointed it's because I am taking breaks to stare at the wall.
   Honestly it's just a very bad cold that reportedly starts with a very, very, very sore throat then where baby is concerned croup and wheezing all night then a very runny nose and a nasty, nasty cough. There seem to also be stomach issues involved in the form of having to change the baby's diaper every 20 minutes and him getting multiple baths a day and Nathan lying in bed for hours and hours while turning greener and greener as the smell of dinner cooking wafted up the stairs.
I'm pretty sure I can be guaranteed a better week next week even if I get sick.

For those of you who are feeling fine and chipper and feel like making some very yummy pork chops these are my favorite.

4 pork chops

Mix together
2 eggs
1TBSP Dijon mustard
Roll the pork in the egg mixture.

1-2 cups bread crumbs
salt, pepper, oregano, thyme, etc.
Then roll the pork in the bread crumb mixture.

Cook on a rack in the oven, not the rack in the oven. I use a cookie cooling rack balanced on top of a cake pan. 400 for about 30 minutes depending on how thick your pork chops are.

Gelatinous Mass

   With all these cold rainy days and pretend snowing days that never come to fulfillment, fulfillment equaling snowing enough to go sledding I have been making a great quantity of Gelatinous Mass. Gelatinous Mass is smelly and looks like well a big pot of gelatinousness but it does make the very best food and if your baby decides he is only going to eat starch for dinner day after day you don't have to worry because it is secretly full of gelatinous mass. And as bad as it sounds it is very healthy which, of course it is, because anything that sounds absolutely delicious is most likely bad for you.
   I use Gelatinous Mass in everything except breakfast cereal including rice, gravy, mashed potatoes, spaghetti sauce, of course soup, soup, soup. How do I go about making this amazing concoction you ask? First you have to get a bag of bones (chicken, beef or my favorite, lamb) a crock pot, water and 1/4-1/2 cup vinegar.

   I am so happy I finally found a use for this crock-pot I have that has moved around with me three times and takes up half a cupboard. I knew it had a secret use other than making everything I made in it magically taste just like every other thing I made in it, and that is one thing I can not abide. I need food variety. Anyways I have a new respect for my crock-pot and it's ability to turn bones and water into something so flavorful time after time. 

   Put the bones in your crock-pot in the morning (they can be frozen or thawed.) fill the pot with water, add 1/4-1/2 cup white or apple cider vinegar let sit about 1/2 an hour then turn on your crock-pot to high.  
   Before you go to bed turn it to low.
   The following morning turn it off, let it cool, scoop out the bones, strain it.
   Put it in the fridge.
   When it is cold scrape the fat off the top and there you have it a Glorious jug, bowl or pot of Gelatinous Mass that can be added to just about anything. 

If you fill up your crock-pot with bones your Gelationousness will be very Jelly-atinous but will liquify with heat.

Edible Pennies

   We had a close call this year with the possibility of not being able to celebrate Christmas properly and traditionally as I was unable to find the recipe for Peppermint Pennies! It quite traumatic and was a very close shave.
   We could not get hold of "Christmas Cookie Master Tradition Keeper" Auntie Em. She has all the traditions safely saved up her sleeve and can whip up an excellent Peppermint Penny and 6 other Christmas Cookie varieties in the time it has taken me to type this post.
    Luckily Grandma saved the day. A quick call, a quick search in the recipe box and we were set with the recipe hastily written on a scrap of paper, no wonder I had lost it in the first place.
   This project took pretty much the whole day and we did not eat dinner till 8 o'clock that night as (for some reason) no one was hungry till then and the cookies were hogging the oven.
Before you take on this project with small children or even on your own be warned you have to mix, chill, cook, cool, ice, cool as well as follow the recipe.
   We had fun, the boys did an excellent job and were very serious about this Christmas Tradition. Which is a very serious business, the making of sweets at Christmas time is of Utmost Importance in our house.        
    The eating of sweets is also very serious and Christmasilly Joyous.

We kept our priorities in order here, Washing Hands, Wearing Aprons and using lots and lots of Butter.

We made sure to lick the beaters, bowls, spoons, icing, spatulas, fingers and counter.

100% Perfection, 100% Focus, 100% Delicious.

Peppermint Pennies

1cup Butter

2cups Brown Sugar

2 Eggs

2tsp Vanilla

2 2/3cups Flour

1/2cup Cocoa

1tsp Baking Powder

1/4tsp Salt 

Beat butter and sugar till creamy and "fluffy". Add eggs and vanilla beat again. Add all the rest of the ingredients and mix till well combined. Chill in the fridge for an hour or two or until you feel inclined to roll the dough into walnut sized balls and place on a greased cookie sheet, flatten slightly with your palm so your pennies don't start rolling around. Bake at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes. Let Cool before Icing and sandwiching together so that 2 cookies end up equaling one cookie so make lots or eat less, I suggest making lots!

Peppermint Icing

1/4-1/3 cup butter

3-4 TBSP milk

enough Icing Sugar to make frosting 

1/8-1/4 tsp peppermint extract

3-4 drops green food coloring

As you can probably tell I didn't measure any ingredients for the icing, sometimes I leave it white and I think it tastes equally good but according to the boys they taste better with green icing .

Oatmeal and Ursula

   I would be sorely misleading if I gave anyone the impression that my circumference of thought did not include food! The main problem being I have no talent and neither does my camera for taking pictures of food. Something that is warm and smells divine when clicked by my camera becomes cold, flat and tasteless, I need a camera that also detects smell and temperature, some people have this knack...I will have to keep practicing or just rely on words for some recipes.
   
Recipe #1 Oatmeal.
   Oatmeal and I have had a love/hate relationship until recently. When I was young it was the stuff you ate so you could eat more of the stuff you wanted to as in, "Mom can I have Alphabets for breakfast?" "After you eat your oatmeal you can have any cereal you want."
    Once some friends were visiting from out of town and we made a big pot of oatmeal because being good children we knew the rule and wanted to eat lots and lots of sugar cereal, so we made a huge pot of oatmeal because we all were "starving" probably about 10 cups of it and added about 10 times too much salt. It was awful. Our hopes of sugar cereal vanished with one taste but luckily for me one of the children volunteered to eat the whole pot in order for us all to have any cereal we wanted, we cheered her on and we all got the cereal(s) of our choice (except for her as she was too full to even think of eating applejack's)
  I have tired just about every oatmeal variation I could come up with, my favorite for a while was oatmeal with jam in it.
   One day oatmeal changed from what you eat because it's good for you to what you eat because it's good. I was visiting an elderly lady who was a friend of my fiance, she invited us over for breakfast and of course the first course of breakfast was...you guessed it, oatmeal which was the point I started looking around for mini-wheats but the oatmeal was delicious, nutty and creamy and actually tasted really good. Like the polite, modest lady she is when I asked her how to make it she just said, "oh it's just oatmeal, would you like some more?"
   So my quest to make oatmeal began, cooked hot, cooked slow, cooked in milk, thick oats, quick oats, thin oats, served with sugar, served with butter, served with cream, none measured up.
Recently though I think I have found it, or else it has been so long that I have forgotten what the original tasted like but either way this is excellent oatmeal especially on these cool mornings.

1 Cup Steel Cut Oats
1 TBSP Yogurt - as plain and pure as you can get
1 1/2 Cups room temperature water
Mix the yogurt onto the chunks of oats with a spoon till the oats are all coated, add room temperature water, cover with a cloth or plate, let sit on the counter about 12 hours or all night.
 Boil 1 1/2 cups of water, add soaked oatmeal mixture bring back to a boil then turn down heat and simmer for about 10-15 minutes.
Serve with butter, maple syrup or brown sugar and milk.

Serves 2-4 depending on how much of a morning appetite you have or how much sugar cereal your children are drooling over.