ispindle

Heaven help us, this was SO good!

Wanna make some yourself? Of course you do! Here is the EASY PEASY recipe:

Stuffed French Toast Casserole

Ingredients

:: one fat loaf of french bread

:: 8 oz room temp cream cheese (we used pineapple flavored)

:: 4 eggs (or your favorite substitute)

:: 1 cup milk (or your favorite substitute)

:: 1/4 cup of sugar (or your favorite substitute)

:: a pinch of salt

:: cinnamon to taste

:: butter or some sort of spray oil to help release the goodness from the cooking pan

Mechanics of cooking

Prepare a casserole pan (9″ x 13″) by giving it a light coat of butter or cooking spray.

Basically, you will make little cream cheese sandwiches and cram them into your casserole dish, covering them w/ an egg mixture before baking.

You’ll need to cut the bread into roughly 1/2″ slices. My loaf cut into 14 pieces and these (stacked double) completely filled my casserole pan. Adjust your slicing to fit your pan/bread needs. I sliced two slices then fit them (stacked) into the pan. I left them in the pan as I continued to slice, stack and cram. It made filling the pan as completely as possible quite easy.

Once done w/ the slicing, take off the top layer of slices and smear each piece with cream cheese. Replace the top layer, cream cheese side down.

Now mix up the eggs, milk, sugar, salt and cinnamon. Get this mixture good and combined, using a blender or submersible blender if you need to. Now pour this over the “sandwiches”, making sure to saturate the tops and pouring in the nooks and crannies to let the bottom layer of bread get some eggy goodness too.

Cover and set aside for a bit to allow the bread to soak up all the egg mixture. You can make this the night before and have it waiting to pop in the oven for a quick brunch dish. Or make up during the day to serve for dinner.When ready to cook, bake the casserole uncovered in a 400ºF oven for 25-30 minutes or until the top is golden.

I may adjust this recipe just a wee bit. Our top slices came out a little dry and the bottom slices a little soggy. It really didn’t make a noticeable difference once it was on the plate with the berry topping. But I noticed as I was serving.

Topping

Really, you could use any topping of your choice. Today, we lucked into gorgeous fresh, local strawberries and blueberries at the market. SCORE! We bought a couple flats and mixed some up as our topping. I didn’t measure anything, just eyeballed. I did add about 1/8 of a cup of sugar to the berries just to get them macerating. I thought about adding a wee bit of vanilla or mint or coconut syrup or balsamic vinegar or maybe even some amerreto or rum, but didn’t. The berries were perfect enough on their own.

Maybe next time a plain cream cheese filling with a ginger peach topping? LOTS of possibilities!

… the day the school supply display is discovered.

That would have happened today. In Target. About 11am local time.

Every time the kids start wearing my nerves thin, the school supplies magically show up in the store and remind me that summer break is temporary. This joyous revelation is usually accompanied by the parting of the clouds, rays of heavenly light shining down upon the fresh supply of pencils and paper, and a choir of angels singing Hallejuia

Today, it was also accompanied by a teenager’s whine and gnashing of teeth.

Ahhhhh … the best day of summer!

How sweet are these?

The girls and I had fun making these simple summer bracelets. Crafting really doesn’t get much simpler than these.

Materials:

a fat quarter or two or three or four or more! You could also use any scraps or yardage you have on hand. We happened to have  fat quarters on hand and their short sides were the perfect length to make a bracelet.

scissors.

Step 1: You need to rip a strip off the fat quarter. (yes, you could cut nicely, but riping is so much more fun!)

On the long edge, make a snip about 1″ long and roughly 1/2″ from the short edge. Grab this tab you just created and tear the strip off. Strips roughly 1/2″ by 18″ worked well for our bracelets. Of course, you can vary the thickness of the strips to fit your fancy!  Cut/tear as many strips as you need to complete your braid. We did simple three strand braids, so used three different colored strips.

Step 2: Braid the strips together. You may find it easiest to safety pin the non-working end to your jeans. Or find a handy-dandy clipboard to hold it. Or enlist a friend’s help. Or just let the end hang free while you braid.

Step 3: Once you are finished braiding, tie around the nearest girly wrist!

Above are just two of the ones we made this afternoon. The left one was finished w/ a “granny knot” and the edges trimmed to make a little bow. The one on the right was finished by tying an overhand knot into each end and then using one end to knot a loose overhand knot around the other end. This sliding knot finish lets the wearer take the bracelet on and off with ease.

Dinners at our house are always a challenge. There are five people under the roof with five different ways of looking at the table: (1) one confirmed meat eater who won’t admit you can eat a well rounded meal w/o consuming animal products, (2) one who is a lacto-ovo vegetarian (all meals here have some sort of vegetarian option even if its not listed specifically), (3) one who just cannot stomach beans or rice in any combination, (4) one who is either a vegetarian or meat-eater when its convenient for her to be one or the other (aka doesn’t like the meal served), and (5) one who prefers to eat sustainably as much as possible.

And because I’ve been insanely bored with cooking the same meals over and over, I trolled the internets for a few ideas. Links provided where there was one!

Orange chicken and vegetable spring rolls. Both of these came from Costco and were requested by the youngest. We actually had this meal twice already — once Friday and once Saturday. Made for quick and easy meals while the older two girls were in Forks.

Mediterranean salad with chickpea patties.

Husband requested Grilled burgers, tater tots, and melon or salad. The vegetarian will have a grilled boca-burger-esque patty.

Zucchini with quinoa stuffing. Quinoa is an excellent source of complete protein, but some eaters in this house would prefer something “more” on their plate than just the stuffed zucchini. I may or may not serve this with chicken or salmon or possibly a tossed salad.

Pan-fried pork chops or veggie patty with applesauce for dipping, mashed potatoes and glazed carrots. This meal was added by request. (Love you, Baby Doll who reads the blog!)

And at the risk of too much zucchini on the menu too early in the season: Zucchini Crescent Pie and caesar salad.

And I still haven’t gone to the market to gather all the foods needed for the menu this week. I’ve gone “spot shopping” here and there, but no big trip. I plan to go tomorrow when I am on base for Sarah’s swim lesson. (Yes, that means going to the stinky commissary!)

I dusted off the Girl Scout skills and lashed together a trellis for my cucumbers using some bamboo and dishcloth cotton.

I’m pretty proud of it! Hopefully the cukes grow UP big and strong! Right now they are trout-sized puny …

Grow little cucumbers! Grow!

Meet Athena …

She’s come to hopefully help us wage war on those blasted fruit flies. For some reason, our home- custom-made fruit fly death trap just isn’t working well lately. I’m not sure Athena will help too much (they seem too tiny to trigger her reflexes!) but I’m willing to give it a go. Plus we happened to see a display and Emily wanted one and so did I she twisted my arm really hard .

My planned Food on Friday post will have to wait until later this weekend. I didn’t get a chance to get to the market today. I ran needed last minute errands to get the two older girls ready for their “Twilighter Overnighter” in Forks. Tonight I’ll be uncovering the septic tank for the guy to inspect it tomorrow (Jack called to say he’ll conveniently be home from work tonight after dark … ). Then tomorrow, Sarah and I are heading to the zoo. Busy! busy!

10.5″ of tube knitting and still working …

Hardly worth bogging about, but there ya go.

Making a sock with an afterthought heel (hence the odd green line in the sock). Thought it would be a good thing so I can replace the heel as needed. However, knitting the tube, which will be almost a foot long before the toe is tackled … UGH.

At least the yarn is gorgeous! Hard Twist Petite from Lisa Souza. Skein label says it’s the “Spumoni” colorway. I’m dubious since this colorway looks way different on her website. Heck, it even looks way different from the photo. In person, the color is a light banana yellow w/ stripes of the palest pink and green and random flecks of color. Pretty!

Have been hoping to reign in our food spending and get it under control this summer. It was bad this winter when Jack worked late and I was in school all day. Too much convenience foods went into our bellies! I hope to turn that around this summer and work on a plan for this fall. It seems that I will not be home until after 7:30pm Monday – Thursday for the first 6 weeks of school. After that, only Tuesdays and Thursdays will be late days. Even still, I’d like to have dinner plans and stock up on good things now.

Taking a small cue from fiftybucksaweek.com, I decided to use that as a general guideline for our food budget. I say general guideline because we are a family of 5 — includes two teens and an 8yo — so the $50 per adult might not be so “us”.

Fridays here are grocery days. I picked up 90% of what we will consume this week for $113.81. WOOT! I think I did pretty good. I went up to the market (my favorite where I can get a fair amount of organics and/or local, not the commissary where things would be cheaper but decidedly not organic or local) and pretty much stuck to my list. I did however spend $11.96 on two flats ($5.98 ea) of fresh, local strawberries and $9.79 for a block of my most favorite cheese ever, mango-ginger stilton. I did not have to buy any cereal (a budget buster!) and relied on some items from our freezer (chicken, pork). All in all, I think I did pretty good.

So what is on the menu this week?

Grilled chicken, mac n cheese and broccoli

Caribbean Rice with tofu and peas

Smoothies (tofu, mango, blueberry w/ pineapple coconut juice) and a strawberry dumpling dish and greek yogurt (I should probably serve this for desert, not dinner but I’ve convinced myself it’s not much different than serving breakfast-for-dinner- pancakes and strawberry sauce for dinner. Right?)

Grilled pork loin and israeli couscous salad

Chicken or tofu (eater’s option) melon salad over a bed of lettuce

Burgers, cucumber salad and tater tots

Tacos (tortilla, boca-type crumbles, cheese, olives, tomato, lettuce, sour cream, etc … )

So that is the plan this week. I plan to post my progress each Friday through the summer. Check on back to see how we’re doing!

I know how I like to knit socks. I know how I like my socks to fit. I am pretty good at recalculating existing directions to give me the sock fit I demand when I knit my own socks. But I’m tired of doing the same  calculations and modifications. You’d think I’d actually save it somewhere, huh? Yeah. I had that thought today too!

So today, as I knit the heel on Summer Sock #2, I made a little chart I could save and print whenever I wanted to knit a new Sherman Heel for my sock. This particular sock needed a heel done over 40 stitches so the tweeking was done and a chart was created. And now it’s shared with y’all. Download below or use the soon-to-be link on my sidebar.

Sherman Heel over 40 stitches.

Knitting a nudibranch and its killing my hands.

Large quantities of oddball white buttons are hard to find. Curtains may not get knit.

No pictures.

Over and out to Trader Joes this fine sunny morning.