Food magic

November 19, 2012

My daughter woke up not feeling well. Normally, I would ask my hubby to run to the store to get some sicky food (jello, applesauce, juice, etc.). Today I figured we must have something here that she would like. I found two jars of homemade goodies from my parents: ginger pears and orange applesauce. She picked the pears. It was nice that even though my parents live over 1,000 miles away, they were able to help my daughter to feel better today. After a quick lunch of leftover chili, I got to work figuring out what recipes to use for dinner.

Have you heard of Amish friendship bread? You have a bag on your counter for 10 days and each day you add ingredients to it and mix it up. The thought of it sitting out for that long kind of grosses me out (although the bread is delicious!). I found a recipe called "Amish Cinnamon Bread" on Pinterest and this recipe requires no sitting out! I pulled the loaf out of the oven at 3pm and it is already half gone. I had to tell the kids they couldn't have anymore because it would ruin their dinner. Definetely a keeper recipe.

Nothing is as it seems today. My parents "took care" of my daughter today. I made "friendship" bread. Why not keep with the theme and make beef stew minus the stew?! I love how tender stew meat gets after simmering for two hours, but I didn't feel like having stew tonight. So I made the meat as if I were making stew and then just pulled together some other side dishes to go with it. I made garlic and olive oil vermicelli. Ok, ok. It was a box of pasta roni! I still need to use up most of my stash. What about veggies? I just had some leftover home canned green beans. I used my apple slicer and cut up an apple for the kids. I had some strawberry yogurt that needed to be eaten up. I gave the kids their "fruit dip" and told them that if they ate dinner well then they could eat the graham cracker topper that came with the "dip". Seeing as their dinner was a tad more fun than mine, I took a picture of one of their plates for tonight's photo.