Monthly Archives: July 2012

Jul27

Beat the Heat: Spicy Margaritas!

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Beat the Heat: Spicy Margaritas!

I have a new favorite cocktail!  I discovered it in New York City a few months ago and was determined to re-create it at home.  After several batches and fine-tuning, I am proud to present you with the recipe to my masterpiece: Spicy Margarita!  YUM!!!

I am sure many readers have now fled this site in horror, but in case anyone is still reading, I will issue a disclaimer that this is not a drink for the weak of heart!  This yields a hot and sweet drink that I find very refreshing on a hot day, but few others in my world have been able to tolerate the heat factor.  If you like spicy foods and margaritas, then you absolutely must try this and let me know it makes you as happy as it makes me!

This is a two-part recipe.  First you must make the jalapeño infused tequila with this simple process:

  • Buy a bottle of tequila and 2 spicy looking jalapeños.
  • Open the bottle, pour a shot (to make room for the peppers), and have a shot in my honor!
  • Slice the jalapeños in quarters and stuff them into the bottle, seeds and all!
  • Wait.  Sample. Repeat.
  • When the tequila sample meets your criteria for spiciness and flavor (probably around 48 hours from the start), strain the tequila into another container, shake out the peppers, and pour the tequila back into your bottle. Consider labeling the bottle with a scull and crossbones to fairly warn off any sissies!

Here is a picture of my infusion in progress:

Jalapeño Infused Tequila

Easy enough, right?  I’ve tried with Jose Cuervo Gold and Silver.  I liked the Gold much better.  It had a very distinct smell that I loved and I thought the flavor was better too. In both cases, I thought the jalapeño brought out the tequila flavor and vice versa. Next time, I want to try a more expensive bottle and compare tastes.

Trader Joe’s makes an excellent margarita mix that I used with my jalapeño infused tequila to make a delicously hot and sweet margarita on the rocks.  It was icy and sweet, but with a lingering burn.  I followed the directions on the bottle with great success every time.  I am always craving that drink now!

I also made a version with the Crystal Light drink mix and that was a good low-cal substitute.

Finally, I received a gorgeous organic grapefruit from our CSA and decided to try to make my own grapefruit margarita.  I juiced it by hand and got a half a cup.  I added 1 Tablespoon of sugar to the juice to make sure it was nice and sweet.  Then, I added 2 oz of the jalapeño infused tequila and 1 oz of Triple Sec.  I mixed it all up and poured over ice cubes.  It was really delicious and tasted very fresh too!  I am definitely going to try the same recipe with blood oranges when they’re in season.

I am generally a red wine drinker, but hot weather just signals mixed drinks to me, so this has been a fun experiment.  I also tried making poptails, based on this recipe I spotted some time ago.  They turned out great! I have a whole booze pin board full of ideas that I want to try.  I’ll keep you posted on my progress!

What is your favorite summertime cocktail? I’d love to hear any new ideas!  In the meantime, the air conditioner has malfunctioned at our house and it is 5pm on Friday, so it is officially spicy maragarita o’clock for me! Have a great weekend!

Jul26

Bento To Go!

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Bento To Go!

I had a special guest in my bento zone this week: my sister-in-law and mom-to-be, Ashley!  She was here with my brother for one last visit before their baby arrives.  She decided to join us at the NAC for Girlie’s musical theater class and I was excited to show her how quick and easy it can be to pack a healthy bento on the run!  Ashley puts an emphasis on healthy diet and exercise in her daily life and I know she will her little girl to eat lots of fruits and veggies too!  It was fun to show her how my special touches don’t take too much time, yet have a big impact in the way my kids eat.

Here is the EasyLunchBox I created for dance class on Tuesday:

Bento To Go!

Bento To Go!

This very simple bento took only a few minutes to put together, but made my kids very happy! They ate every bite!  I have heart-shaped silicon cups of crackers and sliced cheese.  I included a piece of vegetarian bologna that I cut in half, rolled up, and speared with a cute animal food pick.  There is also some pirate booty and pears.  Girlie has cucumber and yellow bell peppers.  I put trail mix in Little Dude’s small compartment since he is not a fan of those vegetables.  The kids really respond to this kind of meal because it lets them mix and match their own cracker sandwiches and the food is all very colorful and bite sized.

Here is a picture of my bento crew on the way to the NAC:

We have only one week of musical theater left and then we’ll be free of activities for a while!  I am excited to get Tuesday nights back, but I am glad Girlie had so much fun dancing all summer.

Parenting Dilemma: Do you let your kids choose their activities?  Girlie has real talent in gymnastics and has the build for it too! She has two-left feet and cannot follow along with the teacher in dance class (just like me!!!).  However, she seems to enjoy dance more than gymnastics and also her friends do dance and not gymnastics.  I’d prefer her to stay and develop her gymnastics talent, as this will maybe motivate her to continue being very fit and dance may get discouraging for her.  She seems adamant about switching to dance.  What do you think? As a nearly 6-year-old, is she entitled to make that decision?

Jul23

My First BOC Revealed!

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My First BOC Revealed!

If you have never heard of woot.com, you will not get this at all.  I’m sorry.  I am even more sorry if I somehow cause you to be addicted to woot.com and begin an arduous quest to obtain a Bag of Crap.  Please don’t hate me.  Disclaimers aside, this is the happy story of my very first BOC!

Woot.com is an awesome one-deal-a-day type of site and I frequently snag some excellent finds there.  On a really fun day, they’ll have a woot-off, where they put great deals up and things sell out quickly, but they replace them with another great deal immediately after.  Sometimes, on a woot-off day, they’ll throw in a Bag of Crap to stir a frenzy among their fans.  A Bag of Crap (BOC) contains THREE random items that they probably could not otherwise get rid of.  You can’t complain with what you receive, because it only costs $3 and it has the name ‘crap’ right in the title… you’re not receiving any real gems.  Still, I had high hopes for my future BOC acquisition and have tried for YEARS to secure one for myself.  Yes, you read that right: YEARS.  You see, when the BOC’s go up on woot’s site, servers crash, all hell breaks loose, and the site just can’t take my order.  If you don’t buy a BOC in the first few seconds, you aren’t getting a BOC at all!  Everyone cries and moans about it, but I think for many of us, it just fuels our burning need to get a BOC even more! Sigh.

On July 12, on a day like any other, and not even a woot-off day, I took a facebook break at the exact moment that Woot posted on their facebook page that they were serving up a BOC for us facebook fans.  Since it caught everyone unawares and I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, my dream of buying a Bag of Crap was finally realized.  Like I said, if you have never heard of this before, move along… you won’t be impressed by what I am about to reveal.  However, if you’ve been pining for a BOC of your own, behold my wondrous BOC:

I think I got a super-sized BOC because it was Woot’s birthday celebration!  Or maybe because 2 of the items were spectacularly damaged???  Who knows!?!  Crap is crap, right?  The picture shows all of it, but here are the glorious details (clockwise from the top left):

  • The bag that holds the crap: A recycled tote by Gwen’s Nest.  I’ll use this! Score!
  • T-Shirt – A size small woot! shirt that I can force my kids to wear.
  • DVDs – A 36 disc collection of America Stories of War. The tin is badly damaged, which I think makes it a more authentic looking relic of battle.  This baby is just begging for some sucker to re-gift to!
  • Diva Darling – A microfiber headband.  This requires explanation.  Luckily the back had a nice description so I can understand how to use it! It is a “super gentle and absorbent material that swoops up stray water droplets.  Now you can wash your face in luxury without getting any of your gorgeous hair wet!” I am not exactly sure how I have survived my whole life without this!
  • Water Bottle – It is a STANLEY brand steely wide mouth bottle that is horrendously mangled.  I am not sure what exactly I can find to do with this… perhaps ‘coal’ in someone’s stocking? Let me know if you have any suggestions that don’t involve the dump!
  • Kindle Cover – This is a Cyber Acoustics brand Leather Protective Cover.  I don’t have a Kindle or know anyone who is in the market for one, but this looks pretty nice!  It is a table style padfolio case.  It does offer some protection and feels like it is well-padded.  If you’re in the market for a kindle case, leave a comment.  If I get a few comments, I’ll raffle it off to one of my many fans!  ***Update: Since there is some interest here, it is a Kindle 3 Cover, Model KC-3000BK. Add a comment, and I’ll scribble your name on a paper and put it in my hat. That is my fancy and high-tech methodology!

I was extremely pleased with this BOC.  I would have loved woot-off lights, or a screaming monkey, or anything useful, but this is some good crap, or at least very random crap!  One of these days, I need to do a post on my shirt.woot collection. I have bought more shirts than any sane person should admit and I love all of them.  I am a sick person.

Have you shopped on woot.com?  What’s your favorite purchase to date? Have you ever received a BOC? I’d love to hear about it!

Jul18

Dragon Tales Fails!

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Dragon Tales Fails!

You may have seen that Girlie and I have started reading the Magic Tree House series.  We’ve already finished books 1 through 4 and finally discovered last night who the mysterious M is!  Very exciting, right?  I wanted to celebrate with another Magic Tree House bento, this time about the mummies book we loved so much (book #3).  Girlie had other plans and pleaded with me to make her a Dragon Tales bento.

She has become obsessed with this show after discovering it on Netflix.  She loves the characters and the Spanish vocabulary mixed with magical words too.  She also told me that she thinks that she and Little Dude are a little bit like Emmy and Max.  I really wanted to make her an awesome Dragon Tales bento to take to Musical Theater last night, but I don’t have as much skill with character bento yet.  I tried to improvise by turning my dino sandwich cutter into a dragon, with the addition of scales and wings.  You can judge for yourself, but I could see on Girlie’s face that she was NOT impressed!  Here is her EasyLunchBox:

She has a vegetarian bologna and cheese sandwich.  I used cheddar cheese for the scales and Swiss cheese for the wings.  I colored the wings using food markers.  She has apples, blueberries, and strawberries in the fruit compartment.  A hard boiled egg is paired with baby carrots in the small compartment. So, maybe not the best rendition of a dragon, but I tried! After her critique of how this was much more dino than dragon-looking, she issued her thanks and praise and ate the entire bento on her way to dance class.  I am sure it helped that she was starving after a very long and hot day at camp!

Did you watch Dragon Tales as a kid?  Do your kids watch it now?  It aired in 1999, so I was too old for it, but today’s teens are likely to remember it fondly!  Here is a clip of the opening song, if it helps you take a trip down memory lane!

As for Magic Tree House, Girlie has requested that I get back to the library for book #5 ASAP because it is the one about ninjas that she has been desperately waiting for!  She is just like me with the chapter books… hanging on to every word and practically in tears when it is time to close the book.  She is very eager to know what happens next.  She has lots of great ideas and seems to understand the full story arc across many chapters and books.  She’s been great with tracking the M clues too.  I hope this is a sign that she will be as avid a reader as I am!  What are your kids reading this summer?  I’d love any other great suggestions!

Jul15

Raising A Rabble!

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Raising A Rabble!

Did you know that a group of butterflies is called a rabble?  You do now!  I had to look this up myself, so I’d know what to call this most recent batch of butterflies we raised and released, using our Insect Lore Live Butterfly Pavilion.

We have done this several times now, but it never seems to lose its excitement for me or the kids.  We love to watch as the tiny larvae rapidly grow into huge fuzzy caterpillars and then move into their cocoon stage and eventually emerge as butterflies.  This time we took extra care in documenting the process, which gave the whole project a scientific feel.  I like activities like this because they are fun and exciting, but also provide an educational experience that crosses many areas of science and language.

Whether this is your first time using your butterfly pavilion, or if you’re a repeat customer like us, your first step will be to order your caterpillars from Insect Lore.  We’ve done this many times with the same tent by simply washing it and storing it for another use.  Your caterpillars will arrive in the mail in a plastic cup with a bunch of gunk on the bottom and five tiny larvae (Day 1 below). The goo is actually their food and you will be able to observe that the caterpillars ball it up and eat it and grow very quickly.  See how they’ve grown to many times their initial size in just one week in my picture below!  It is easy to see how much they grow on a daily basis.  You’ll also be able to see them spinning silk.

After the caterpillars become very large and fuzzy they will climb to the top of the container and hang upside down.  Sometimes it will still take a few days until they become a chrysalis, but when the time comes, it happens quickly.  In fact, I have never seen this in progress.  It seems that one minute, they are a curled up caterpillar, and the next, they are in chrysalis form.  I work from home and check on them frequently, trying to catch this in motion, and I always seem to blink my eyes and discover that the change has occurred.  In the picture above, you can see the caterpillars in progress on day 18.  4 are in their cocoons and 1 is about to change.  The next day they were all in the chrysalis stage and ready to be hung in the tent.  This part is always a bit scary for me, but I’ve gotten better at keeping a steady hand and having some confidence.  You just have to pry off the plastic lid to expose the paper disc the cocoons are attached to, then carefully lift the paper off the cup, and pin the disc to the netting of the pavilion.  If a cocoon falls you can rest it on a paper towel at the bottom of the tent and it might still hatch.  It has been about 50/50 in my experience.  This time, we were successful in making the transfer without any cocoons falling down.  After a big sigh of relief, we tried our best to be patient for their emergence as painted lady butterflies!

Two weeks later, we had 2 butterflies hatch in the same day! We had two the following day as well, and the last straggler took another day to make his appearance as a stunning butterfly.  We give the butterflies fresh flowers, orange slices, and paper towels soaked in sugar water.  I am sure this is overdoing it, but I am always careful to make sure they have plenty to eat and drink.  They do seem to thrive and flutter about happily. I usually like to keep ours for about 10 days and then release them on a beautiful morning, so they’ll have plenty of time to explore before nightfall.  Our current rabble had 2 butterflies that flew off and were never seen again, and three that really hung around our house for a few days. One of them even climbed onto girlie’s finger!  Here is a video of our release:

You can see the little scientist come out in her narrative as she sets them free.  Little Dude really got into it this year too and I know he will continue to appreciate this more and more as he grows to understand the amazing transformation he gets to witness.  Girlie informed me that ladybugs have a similar life cycle as butterflies.  They start as egg, and then are pupa, cocoons, and finish as ladybugs.  I think we may order an Insect Lore Ladybug Land next year, in addition to the butterflies.

We made a butterfly life cycle bento in the spring when she learned about that topic in school and we had our own butterflies. If you click on the picture below, you can read that original post.

Butterfly Life Cycle Bento

Have you raised any other insects? I’d love to hear your experience and know what else is fun!

Jul11

Bear’s Loose Tooth!

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Bear’s Loose Tooth!

My Girlie has finally reached a milestone she’s been pining for: her first loose tooth! She complained last week that her tooth hurt while she was eating and said she wanted to stick to softer foods. A few days later she said it was sore when I was brushing her teeth and when I checked it, it wiggled!  Oh, there was some serious shrieking and giggling and giddy excitement.  To her, this is THE milestone that turns her into a real big kid.

My bento blogging friend, Keitha from Keitha’s Chaos, suggested we pick up Bear’s Loose Tooth from the library.  This adorable book by Karma Wilson does a great job of showing all the fanfare of Bear noticing his first loose tooth, his friends’ excitement for him, the tooth coming out, the fairy’s visit, and the cycle starting up all over again with a new tooth becoming loose.

Girlie and Little Dude enjoyed this story and the illustrations. After reading it, we were even more  excited about her loose tooth, so I decided to make a Bear’s Loose Tooth bento for Girlie to take to her Musical Theater class last night.  Here is her EasyLunchBox:

Bear's Loose Tooth

Bear’s Loose Tooth

Bear is a cheese sandwich with veggie bologna facial features.  Girlie is still a serious vegetarian, but she seems to like a lot of the vegetarian meat substitutes.  I used cheddar cheese for Bear’s ears and eyes, and Swiss cheese for his teeth.  She has pears, carrots, and sugar snap peas.

Here she is showing off her loose tooth and her bento dinner on the way to dance class:

Girlie's Loose Tooth

Girlie’s Loose Tooth

We’ll keep you posted on when the tooth finally comes out.  How long should I expect this to take?  Bear’s came out in the course of one day, it seemed, but I don’t think Girlie’s will be that quick.  It is just a little bit wiggly but not very loose.

In other news, both kids are loving summer camp and Girlie has learned to swim underwater in just the first 2 weeks. She told me that she can even pick up something from the bottom of the pool in the ‘Level 1′ area.  She’s eager to reach ‘Level 2′ status, but worries that there might be a height requirement that can’t be attained this summer even if she becomes much better at swimming. Little Dude is very comfortable in the pool and seems to love camp so much more than school. They’re both having a great summer! I hope you are too!

This post is linked to Read.Explore.Learn.

Shibley Smiles

Jul8

Cookbook Update

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Cookbook Update

It is so hard to believe that this time last year, I was nervous about moving across the country, finding a new home, and my kids’ adjustment to changing preschools.  One of my biggest worries was how to pack a healthy lunch that my preschoolers would actually eat.  The school my children started in provided hot lunch and nutritious snacks daily.  They had an on-site chef and meals were served family-style to encourage good eating habits and table manners.  There was no way I could compete with that and my spoiled kids would certainly know the difference!  Plus, I’m no cook!  I truly felt intimidated by the daunting task of packing lunches every single day.

Fast forward 11 months later and we’re settled in our new home, the kids are adjusted, I have a new job (upgrade!), and on top of it all, I’ve become a bento blogger with a recipes in a cookbook!  I can’t exactly explain how it happened, but I became obsessed with the works of the amazing bento bloggers and their creativity and passion for getting their kids to eat healthy foods. I started copying them and taking pictures. I sent some of the pictures to a few friends.  Eventually, I wanted to share with a larger audience and pay back some of the inspiration I’ve received by looking at what other moms are doing.  And somewhere along the lines, I was invited to participate in a Cooking with Trader Joe’s cookbook! Trader Joe’s has been my grocery store of choice for more than a decade and I already owned several Cooking with Trader Joe’s books.  I rarely use cookbooks, but I’ve used many recipes from their Pack a Lunch book and was thrilled to participate in the next volume.

The cookbook was a lot of work for me, even as a contributor.  I had to create 10 recipes and write them out with precise measurements and cooking times.  I submitted drawings to demonstrate the layout of how my food fit in the EasyLunchBoxes.  My recipes were narrowed down to three confirmed entries and I had to submit some revisions on those too!  I had photos done by our amazing photographer, Rachel Beck.  I wrote a bio.  I edited draft versions and gave sign-off on our final copy.  If this is what I went through as a contributor, I cannot even imagine how much effort the core team expended in getting this book together!

It will all be worth it though, when the cookbook is released in September! It will be a great book for anyone looking for inspiration for to-go meals and it will be an awesome piece of memorabilia for my family to hold on to.  When the kids are older and my lunches are a distant memory, we’ll always have the book to remind us of this fun and special way I sent a piece of home to school with them every day. I can’t wait to get the final copy in my mailbox in just 2 months.

If you’d like to read the official announcement about the book, please click on the image below to visit the EasyLunchBlog!

Trader Joe’s and EasyLunchboxes – the BOOK!

Trader Joe’s and EasyLunchboxes – the BOOK!

Jul4

First Chapter Book: Magic Tree House #1

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First Chapter Book: Magic Tree House #1

We’ve reached an exciting new milestone in our house: the start of chapter books!  Girlie loves reading and can retain a story’s details for a long time and make predictions about what might happen next, so I decided she was ready to move on to chapter books.  I was not sure at first how she’d feel about waiting a few days to complete a storyline, but she loved it!  We had a great time talking about the characters and what was going to happen to them over the period of a few days while we read the book.

We started with The Magic Tree House because we heard it was popular with the kindergarten set.  We borrowed book # 1, “Dinosaurs Before Dark,” from our local library and it did not disappoint. The story was full of action that was easy to follow and each chapter included at least one illustration, which made reading fun and helped complement the descriptions of the dinosaurs. We read two chapters a night and finished the entire book in under one week.  We started each nightly reading session by reviewing what had already happened in the story line and what we thought might happen next. After reading our two chapters, we discussed the kids’ decisions and what we might have done differently or done the same and then made predictions about what we’d discover when we resumed reading the next night.

To celebrate the completion of our very first chapter book, I made Girlie a Magic Tree House bento to eat in the car on her way to Musical Theater last night. Here is her EasyLunchBox:

Magic Tree House Bento

Magic Tree House Bento

I made her a PB&J tree house, using bread crust for trim, a pretzel rod for the tree trunk, and lettuce leaves.  I attempted to make a cheese stegosaurus and a cheese T-Rex, but you can see for yourself how those turned out! I set some blueberry dinosaur eggs at the base of the tree.  Her fruit compartment has kiwi, raspberries, blueberries, and grapes.  I packed the small compartment with carrots, sugar snap peas, and a hello kitty hard boiled egg.

Girlie was very excited to see this bento dinner and it definitely helped her re-energize herself after a full day of summer camp to make it through her Musical Theater evening dance class.  She loved all the fruits with their pretty colors and she discovered that she could hold the tree house by the pretzel trunk and eat it like a “sandwich lollipop,” which made her giddy.

Have you read the Magic Tree House books? The library does not have book #2 in stock, but they do have #3.  Does it make any difference if we skip around?  I can see there is something about collecting medallions that leads me to believe the order may be important, but I may be wrong.  If you have advice on this, please post a comment.  No spoilers!!! :)

If you have not read the books, click here to visit my amazon store and learn more about this fun children’s series, which chronicles the adventures of a brother and sister who visit a magic tree house stocked with books and travel to historical times and places, kind of like a kiddie version of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.  Party On, Dudes!!!! :)   Have a fun and safe 4th of July, everyone!

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Shibley Smiles