Lunch!

Tuna salad made with green onions, carrots, celery, parsley, dijon mustard, and a bit of vegan mayo.  Layered on romaine leaves with sliced avocado and pea shoots.

Cancer Sucks

Well, I'm finally up to sitting at my computer after missing 2 weeks of my life.  For anyone who doesn't already know, I had an emergency hysterectomy on Sept. 30, and was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.  I had a rather large tumor on my left ovary.  It's stage 1C and had only spread to the other ovary, so that is good news.  I find out on Friday about chemo and whatnot.  Here's a photo of Nellie and me, celebrating the pathology report with soup and salad at Tomaydo/Tomahdo.

My sister took pictures of my CSA shares while I was down for the count, but I haven't downloaded them to my computer, yet.  I was able to take my own photo of this past Saturday's haul.

Good thing I've been eating lots of veggies.  Seems like that will give me a leg up on getting through chemo and beating this thing.

Maybe next week I'll feel like catching up on the school stuff.  We actually did a medium amount of school work today.  I think next week may be back to normal.

Hip, Hip, Hooray! We have a winner!

Sorry, no fancy receptacle, just a plastic box. Here's Andrew shaking the names and choosing the winner.  And, the winner of the $10.00 Barnes & Noble gift card is  . . .  MEGAN!!!!   Okay, Megan, email me your info so I can send it out to you:  mimlmm@yahoo.com.  Congratulations!

CSA Share 16 and Kid Food

Lots of good stuff this week- first time for carrots and sweet potatoes, a purple pepper, broccoli, more apples . . .

Here's some of the stuff that I made from last week's share:

Tomato, basil and mozzarella w/ olive oil, salt & pepper

Haven't made one of these in a while- used the lettuce and added gorgonzola cheese, dried cranberries and walnuts, with balsamic vinegar and flax oil.

Omelette with sweet orange peppers and green onions

Green beans w/garlic & bacon tossed in with some chicken, spinach & fontina sausages from TJ's.

This is Gillian McKeith's Shepherdess Pie.  I took a picture before covering the rest with mashed sweet potatoes so you could see all the yumminess inside.  This is one of my favorite fall dishes of all time! We served it for a dinner with Nellie's friends, along with greens dressed in a homemade vinaigrette.  For dessert, Nellie made baked apples with vanilla ice cream, caramel sauce and chopped pecans.  It was a truly scrumptious evening.

In a desperate attempt to get the kids to branch out and eat some different things, I let them pick recipes from Ed's Better Homes and Gardens Junior Cook Book.  The recipes in there are not exactly what I'd call healthy, but Eddie really loves that book, and at least it got them to try some new things.  

This is called Farmhouse Breakfast pizza.  It's pizza dough with scrambled eggs, hash browns, cheese, bacon and ham on top.  Andrew's side only has cheese, bacon & ham, which he picked off and ate sans crust.  Maybe he's on a low-carb diet.

Another dish Ed picked out was stuffed baked potatoes.  We used many of the same ingredients from the breakfast pizza for these.   I have to say, this was one of my favorites.  Mighty delicious and meaty and salty.  

Ed also chose Caramely  Apple Breakfast Muffins, which he proclaimed to be the best muffins in the whole wide world.  Not gluten free, so I couldn't verify his claims.

Andrew chose Monster cookies for one of his recipes.  This involves baking chunks of candy in cookie dough.   Most of Andrew's recipes involved chocolate of some kind.  Don't know where he gets that gene from. ;)

Ed experimented with some hard candies in his and found out that they don't really work too well in Monster Cookies.

 The recipe experiment was a good one, since it got the kids thinking ahead and planning meals.  They had to provide me with the shopping list for their recipes, and Andrew found out the hard way that yes, you really do need to include every item on the list, even if you don't understand what it is, or the recipe won't work.  I made them do most of the recipe prep and cleanup themselves, too.

Back to School 2012-2013

I thought I'd start the first post of the new school year with a smattering of pictures from our insanely fun and zanily action-packed summer of love!  I was surrounded by kids most of the summer.  We had the little babies we watched, my niece Ali, my god daughter Holly, and our exchange student Anja hanging out with us at various times during the summer.  We went all over town and the state to see interesting things.  We took a little trip to Niagara Falls, and Anja and I had a fabulous girls' weekend in Chicago.  I think one of our favorite events, though, was my old friend Lee bringing a chunk of dry ice and the fun we had experimenting with it. Things have settled down now.  All the extra kids are back at school and back in their own countries.  We have even stopped babysitting the babies for various reasons.  Yesterday was our last day with baby girl.  We will miss everyone!

After all this excitement, I knew it was going to be a challenge to get them back to the nitty-gritty of school work.

We had our first day on September 4.

I tried desperately to get them to pose nicely for a First Day of 4th Grade picture, but this was the best I could do.  We decided Andrew could skip 3rd grade and call himself a 4th grader since he's doing all the same work as his brother, anyway.  Michael did try to talk me into registering them both for kindergarten at the public school way back when.  He wanted me to fake the birth certificates so that they could be "twins".  Whatever, dear.

I did eventually get them to buckle down:

Here is reading time.

Here is cursive writing practice.

Who knows what in the heck this is all about.

We've sort of eased into the work.  Luckily for us, Math U See starts you off very gently, because I wasn't as maniacal about the math practice over the summer as I have been in previous summers.

See how easy, peasy this is?  Remind of this day when we start doing long division.

Here is a link to my Pinterest board which shows the materials we are using for school this year.  

I'm not going to break down each subject tonight, because my mother and I stayed up very late last night watching Harry Potter movies and now I'm almost brain dead from exhaustion.  So, here are some  examples of the work they've done over the past 2 weeks.  Most of it is pretty simple and straightforward to get them back into the groove.

They started taking theatre at the Solon Center for the Arts again.  They are a little disappointed because Mr. Dusten isn't teaching the class this year.  But, it's a big group of kids and they seem to have enjoyed the first two classes so far.

The big activity for this year is an all day Arts Class at the Willoughby Fine Arts Center.  They spend all day on Mondays at the center and take classes in theatre, visual arts, music and dance.  Music and theatre were their favorite classes after the first session.  Andrew is in a group of kids ages 4-8.  Eddie is in a group of kids ages 9-14.  I'm glad they are separated for a little while.  It makes them appreciate each other more at the end of the day.

Here's what they brought home:

This was a rendition of a dog from the story the art teacher read to them.  

This is General Grievous, which Ed apparently drew after he drew what he was supposed to draw.  I guess he left the assigned picture there.

Well, that's all I have the energy to report for today.  Maybe the next installment will be more exciting.

Oh, yeah!  I almost forgot.  Eddie has decided that he wants a letter grade on every single assignment I give him this year.  So, of course, Andrew does, too.  This should be interesting!

Post #100- CSA Share 15

Hello Folks,

I'm celebrating my 100th post by having a giveaway.  Leave a comment on this post, and I'll enter your name in a drawing for a $10.00 Barnes & Noble gift card.  Edited to add:  I just ordered the gift card through my bank's reward catalog, so I'll do the drawing on the day the card comes in the mail!

There was a nice bag of apples, another bok choy, little sweet peppers, fresh basil- lots to be excited about.  Fortunately, I bought some mozzerella so I can have a nice Caprese salad!

Tried a variation on some zucchini fries I saw on Pinterst.  Not bad.

Eddie has asked on and off for several years for me to make a recipe from his Kid's Cookbook called Ham Cannonballs.  So, today, I did.  Good thing I had the foresight to use gluten-free bread crumbs, because of course he doesn't like them.  Once again, I'll be the only one eating a dish in my house filled with uber-picky eaters.

CSA Share #14 and lots of cooking

Bok Choy and hot peppers were the new additions this week.

Finally made that ratatouille- as a stir fry!

Made some fresh pasta sauce.  Can't wait to eat some brown rice spaghetti.

Steak and bok choy stir fry.  Yummy!

Made some more salsa again- this time it's spicy with the hot peppers!