Green Apple & Raspberry Shake

And now for something simple.

Prep Time: 5 Minutes

In desperate need for a nice cool treat the other weekend (which, if you live in Nova Scotia, you would think I was quite mad, since we haven't had that thing that is known as "Spring" yet, but I digress) I decided that I would whip us up a milk shake. But what flavour to have?

Vanilla? Nope. Too boring

Chocolate? Naw. Too sweet

Strawberry? No. Too 1950's

So I decided to see what kind of fruit we had around the house. I found some fresh raspberries and granny smith apples. And why not. The tartness of the raspberries and the sourness of the granny smith partly counter the sweetness of the ice cream. Here is what I used:

- 4 generous scoops of the good quality (read: lots of calories and fat) french vanilla ice cream

- 1/2 tbsp vanilla extract

- 1 shredded granny smith apple

-1/2 quart fresh raspberries

- milk

Combine all ingredients in a blender and blend away. You will notice that I only said "milk", as you can add as much or as little as you like, depending on how thick you want the shake. I put enough in so all the stuff is blending smoothly.

Alternatives:

-I have used frozen raspberries as well, because really, who will notice when it is all blended together.

That's all I have for now.

-d

o_O

Linking up with Skip to My Lou

The Children's Place Victoria Day Sale - 40% off + 4X Air Miles

The Children's Place is having a Victoria Day Sale, which is up to 40% off all swim and swim accessories, polos, shorts, shoes & flip flops. They also have a $8 flat rate shipping, which is valid now through June 19th 2011 in CANADA stores only. Until today (May 23rd 2011) you also get 4x the Air Miles Reward Miles on your entire transaction of $20 or more! The Air Miles offer is not valid online.

Furthermore, I was sent an e-mail, where you can save another 15% off until June 19th 2011, if you show the e-mail at check-out. If you'd like me to share the e-mail with you, just leave a comment and your e-mail address and I will gladly forward it to you, so you can benefit from this offer also! Happy Shopping!

Gymboree Sale - Everything $12.99 and under + Gymbucks

Gymboree currently has its Memorial Day Sale on where everything in the Store is $12.99 and under! This goes for online and in store. All prices on the Gymboree website are in U.S. dollars. On top of this you can also earn 25 Gymbucks today through July 10th, for every $50 you spend. I checked out the website and there are some really sweet items! I always like to take such opportunities to buy presents for upcoming birthdays or births.

Yummy Dough Cookies & Review

Package Contents (missing the little modeling tool) & what the dough should look like.

The adding of water & mixing of dough mixure.

Some time before Christmas, I bought this 3-pack of Yummy Dough at Costco because it looked really fun. I think it only ended up being about $3 a box or so. Yummy Dough caught my eye because of what it says on the box: "Shape it, Bake it, Eat it - Edible Modelling Dough!". I mean really, what sounds more fun than that to a little one? The dough is edible not only when it's baked but also when it's raw. It's also nice to know that Yummy Dough is constantly quality tested and that its colouring agents are all vegetable, per Wikipedia. Anyway, I finally got around to trying it today and it was pretty awesome!

Some pictures of how our lion came to be.

You can find step-by-step instructions on the

Yummy Dough Website for many creations.

I wasn't sure if Yummy Dough is available anywhere else other than seasonally at Costco, but I googled around a bit and found it online here at Chapters.ca. I'm not sure if they also carry it in store.

The tasty Yummy Dough Lion

I was totally excited to find out that this dough (originally called Essknete, which is German and literally translates to Eatable Dough) was actually invented in Germany in 2005 by a man, who credits his two daughters to have given him the idea, as they wanted to not only be able to play with dough, but be able to eat it at the same time. I think it's neat that Yummy Dough's website is in German, English and Polish.

The cupcake was a favourite of my daugther's - she's got a sweet tooth - what can I say?!

All the items you need in order to make your fun pieces with the modelling dough, are included in the Yummy Dough Box. There are four packages of dough mixture: green, blue, yellow & green, a syringe (which is used to ad 20ml of water to each mixture) and a modeling tool. It took me about 30 minutes to knead all the doughs to the right consistency and then the fun began. I logged onto the Yummy Doug website and followed some of the step-by-step instructions in order to make little masterpieces. This is especially great for people like me, who are not very artsy. The Yummy Dough website also has instructions that you can print off, put under the parchment paper and by tracing, create your shapes that way.

Strawberry - Flower - Mushrooms (ran out of red, so these are Super Mario ones) - Butterfly

I made these cookies with my 3 year old daughter and she helped by pouring the dough mixtures into the bowl, syringing the water and then stirring it. She had fun. Other than that, she mostly played with one of the balls of dough that I was not using, creating her own creations with lots of imagination. However, she very much enjoyed herself.

What I really love about Yummy Dough is that it's:

entertaining

educational

easy to use

affordable

yummie

unique

fun

All our cookies before they went into the oven.

The final product - my daughters favourites were the ice cream cone, cupcake & lion.

Linking up with: Skip to my Lou

Melissa & Doug Food Groups - Review

This picture is from Melissa & Doug

I think out of all the play food that my daughter (age 3) has, this is her favourite. She plays with it every single day. Her favourite thing, is to put all of the items in seperate bags or cans or whatever she can find to put the items in and carry them around. Then she re-bags the items and can play like this for 30-40 minutes or so. She also uses the Melissa & Doug Food Groups with her KidKraft Kitchen. She doesn't really sort the food group items yet or anything like that, but here are the reasons why I really like Food Groups by Melissa & Doug.

*It's wooden

*It's affordable (~$20)

*Includes 22 food items

*Includes all food groups

*Nice colours

*Comes in 4 baskets, so food items can be sorted into different food groups & stored easily

*Encourages healthy food choices

*Encourages imaginative play

We got it for our little girl around 34 months and she's loved it ever since. The Manufacturer's recommended Age is 3+. Do you have this toy also? What do you think of it?

Gymboree - 30% off Everything & You Could Win Great Gymboree Outfits

Starting Today Wed 5/11 ONLINE 12:01 ET & IN STORES Store Opening Wed 5/11, you can get 30% off everything in Gymboree stores or online with this discount barcode. You should be able to just print it off above, in order to use it in stores. :-)

Please Mum - New Ways to Double Green Backs

Picture from Please Mum

Please Mum has a promotion going on for a limited time right now, where you can double your GREEN BACKS on all big kid jeans & big boy fall/winter clothing. Use your GREEN BACKS towards any in-store purchase, including sales and promotions.

Cottonelle Fresh Flushable Moist Wipes

If you click here, you can fill out a tiny survey (mostly about yourself) and receive a coupon to get a FREE tub of Cottonelle Fresh Flushable Moist Wipes. It's called the "Give a tub. Get a tub" promotion, which lets you put in one friend's name and e-mail address at the end, in order for that friend to do the same. Limit one tub per household, while supplies last. Valid in Canada and the US.

Butternut Squash, Carrot & Broccoli Puree

This recipe (with the little change of sweet potato being replaced with butternut squash) is from Annabel Karmel's First Meals Canadian Edition cookbook. It's all about "fast, healthy, and fun foods for infants and toddlers".

Picture from Amazon

Prep Time: 5min

Cook Time: 18min

Makes 6 portions

Suitable for freezing

Ingredients:

*2 1/3 cups sweet potato, peeled and chopped

*1 large carrot, peeled and sliced

*1 1/3 cups broccoli, cut into florets

Preparation:

*Put butternut squash and carrots in a steamer and
cook for 10 minutes

*Add broccoli and continue to cook for about 7 minutes, or until all the vegetables are tender

*Blend the vegetables with 6-7 tbsp of the water from the bottom of the steamer to make a puree

Picture from Well.ca

I freeze the baby food in either empty baby food jars or Baby Cubes that I purchased from Well.ca, as they offered them cheaper than the specialty stores in our area. I really like Baby Cubes, as they come with an attached lid, are microwavable, come in different sizes and the trays can be stacked in the freezer. Well.ca is a great site to order Baby Cubes (and lots of other items) from, as it's Canadian and has free shipping in Canada, which is always appreciated.

Linking up with: Skip to My Lou

Free Comic Book Day 2011

The first Saturday in May marks the annual Free Comic Book Day. This is something that the comic industry started about 10 years ago to promote new and independent titles, as well as to try to attract new readers. I first stumbled across this glorious day in 03, when I first moved to Halifax. Me being me, I get excited when I see a comic store, and I want to go in and check it out. When I walk in to Strange Adventures (a local comic shop) staff tells me to my delight, that it is free comic book day and I could choose 10 comics for free. It was fairly busy, but not entirely overwhelming.

The next year we went, the line up was quite a bit longer, and they had a door man to let people in at about 20 at a time. (Strange Adventures, though a fantastic shop with friendly people and the best deal around, is a small, little cave under a sex-toy shop). After that year, they decided to rent out a church hall, the next block over, and allow us faithful nerds to pick up 20 comics. By the time it came to this year, there were well over 1000 people of all ages who attended to pick up some free books.

What makes the Strange Adventures Free Comic Book Day so great is that they don't just offer the comics that are given from the comics companies as free books, but they also offer some older comics, which have been sitting on the shelf for a few years. Furthermore, they have games for the kids and a photo booth which had Thor's hammer and Captain America's Shield. Prizes were given out to people that dressed up in awesome costumes as well.

A nice haul

Again, big thanks to the folks at Strange Adventures.

-d

Springtime - how exciting!

It's already been two weeks since hubby, myself, the girls and the doggies were able to sit outside in the beautiful sun (it's been rainy and dreary ever since!).

So here's to hoping that we'll have another beautiful day soon, so Olivia can cook her sand food and feed it to Daddy. Lexie enjoyed playing on the blankie on the grass for the first time. It would be great to have another beautiful weekend day, so Daddy is home to get in on the fun. :-)

Um...I admit, there is a lot of purple in these pictures!

Delicious Potato Salad

Prep Time: 35min Cook Time: 25min

My family loves potato salad, so I am going to share it. This salad is really a mix of my family's and my husband's family's potato salad. There are items that my mom puts in hers, items that his mom puts in hers and then there are the yummie items that my husband and I threw in, to top off the deliciousness of our potato salad.

The great thing about this potato salad, is that you can put in as many of the inredients below as you want. Furthermore you can put as much or little of them as you want. When I'm pregnant, we usually leave out the onions alltogether or when we're out of one or the other vegetable, we just leave that out.

Ingredients:

*10 large potatoes

*10 strips of bacon, finely chopped

*1/2 onion, finely chopped

*1 large tomato, diced

*3 pickles, finely

*2 eggs (boiled), coarsly chopped

*10-15 broccoli florets, chopped

*some grated skimmed Mozzarella cheese (or any other cheese you may like)

*1 can of white, flaked tuna

Preparation:

Start out by laying the bacon out on a cookie sheet, covered with parchment paper. Bake for 15min at 350 or until you can tell the bacon is crispy on one side, then turn it to the other side and bake for another 5min or so. While the bacon is in the oven, peel and chop the potatoes and boil them for 20min. Also boil the eggs for 10 min.

Pour this salad dressing in the salad bowl. Add quite a bit (4-5tablespoons) of low fat Hellman's mayonnaise (or miracle whip if you prefer) and whisk well. Chop the onion, tomotoes, pickles, broccoli florets, slice the eggs and grate some cheese.

To make things a bit easier, when stirring, pour some potatoes in the bowl first, then add some of each vegetable etc. and stir. Repeat this process until everything is in the bowl, by this point, hopefully nicely mixed. Sprinkle a bit of cheese on top and top with some parsley for nice presentation. Enjoy!

Linking up with: Skip to my Lou

Spring Blog Carnival Giveaway (International) - BOOKS

Picture from Pure Imagination

There is a Spring Blog Carnival Giveway (books - how exciting!) and it's International as well, so anyone can enter. You just have to fill out the form, where it gives you options to gather even more entries by doing certain things. Feel free to check it out. This Giveaway ends on May 8th, so hurry!

Barbequed Chicken Quesedilla

Prep Time: About 15 minutes Cook time: About 15 minutes.

I was at work the other day, and one of my co-workers brought in a frozen, store bought, quesedilla. He opened it up and it looked half decent, with all it melted cheese goodness. So I thought to myself, if a $1.50 quesedilla looks fairly good, a home made one must be better.

Never making them before, I just sort of came up with the stuff that I would assume goes into one. They turned out pretty good. Very colourful and all the mouths in the house were happy. Here is what is requred to make them:

4 10" tortillas

2 chicken breasts

1/2 cup of corn

1 small onion, finely chopped

1 finely chopped green pepper

1 plum tomato, finely chopped

1 can of refried beans

lots of shredded pepper-jack cheese

Sour cream

Salsa

1/2 tsp Chili powder

1/2 tsp smoked paprika

salt and pepper to taste.

First start with heating up the barbeque. While that is heating up, trim off any excess fat from the chicken and season with the salt and pepper. Put the chicken onto the

grill when it is nice and hot. While the chicken is cooking, chop up all of the veggies. When the chicken is done, chop it up into small chunks. Mix the chicken up with the chili powder and paprika.

Cut up Veggies

Just before Cheese was Added

Heat up a non-stick skillet to medium heat (or two to speed things up). Spread two of the tortillas with the refried beans. Top with the remainder of the veggies on both of the torillas and top with a generous amount of cheese. Place the other tortillas on top and put them into the skillet. Cook for about 4-5 minute a side or until the tortillas a browned and toasted and the cheese is melty and gooey. When they are done, cut into wedges. Top with sour cream and salsa.

Alternatives:

- For some extra fire, add some jalapeno peppers and/or chipotle pepper and/or red pepper sauce (I like Frank's Red Hot)

-We tried it with whole wheat wraps as well, and they turned out really well.

-This of course, is also good with ground beef.

That's it for now:

-d

Linking up with Skip to My Lou & Mommies Point of View & Paisley Passions & Feeding Four - What's Cooking Thursday