Stuffed Peppers

I am always trying to find easy, healthy recipes that everyone likes. This was a keeper according to my family. I am slowly trying to reduce the amount of meat that we eat. Although, my husband did notice the lack of meat, he didn't complain. He actually ate leftovers for lunch the next day and was happy about it. I hope your family enjoys it as much as mine did.

Stuffed Peppers

4 Bell Peppers

1 cup cooked Brown Rice

1 can (drained and rinsed) Black Beans

1 can Rotel or your favorite Salsa

1/4 cup fresh chopped Cilantro

1 cup shredded Cheese

Salt to taste

Heat oven to 400 

Spray a cookie sheet with cooking spray and tear a piece of foil the length of the cookie sheet.

Cut the peppers in half and remove the seeds.

In a bowl, mix all the ingredients together except the cheese.

Fill each pepper half full with the rice and bean mixture.

Put the peppers on the cookie sheet and cover with foil, but leave two sides open for ventilation.
Cook for 40 min, remove foil and top each pepper with cheese, and then cook another 10 min or until the cheese melts.

-Ashley

The Simplistic Baker: Garden Cake

I tell everyone that I love weddings.  I actually say it like this: "I loooooooooove weddings!".  This is half true..., okay, one forth true.  What I really love is cake, and weddings are known to have some freaking awesome cake.  My first thoughts when I receive a wedding invite? "I'm invited to an event that someone labored over a cake for HOURS?!?" (Now picture me doing a mixture of these moves).  Weddings only happen so often, so I try to labor over my girl's birthday cakes to make them almost as awesome as a wedding cake.

I am not a talented baker, so I needed help in making cakes and cupcakes amazing.  I have many different cupcake books that focused on recipes, but I have one cupcake book to rule them all:

This book is amazing.  The blog is equally awesome! The techniques used in this book can make the beginner baker look like professional.  ...Or close to.  I use this book not just for cupcakes, but for my cakes as well.  I'm not a huge fan of fondant, and this book gives many alternatives to it!

For my oldest girl's second birthday, I made her a garden cake.  I got this idea straight from "Hello Cupcake".  I tweaked the idea just a little to fit my cake idea.  Here is my finished product:

I made the photo a bit bigger so you can see the cake better.  I appologize in advance for my crappy photo cropping! Crazy that I didn't take more pictures of the cake! To make a cake like this, here's what you need:

Fruit chews (star burst, laffy taffy)

Corn flakes

Chocolate covered sunflower seeds

Green string candy (Sour straws, rainbow twizzlers)

Chocolate crunchy cookies (Oreos, thin mints, chocolate graham crackers)

M & M's (green and red)

Stick Pretzels

Unsalted square crackers 

White wafer chocolate

Two 8x8 stacked square cakes

2 cans of chocolate frosting

1 can of white frosting

Food coloring

Parchment paper

Bake two 8x8 cakes.  Stack them on top of one another and frost completely with chocolate frosting. 

Crunch up your chocolate cookies really fine.  I used Oreos and just took out the cream, and then smashed the crap out of them!  Doing this is especially helpful if you've had a stressful day.  Sprinkle the mutilated cookies evenly on the top of the cake.   

Unwrap your fruit chews.  You will need a red and an orange fruit chew.  The red will be for the tomatoes, and the orange will be for the carrots.  Fruit chews can be easily manipulated in shape if they are a little warm.  Pop one of the fruit chews in the microwave for 5-10 seconds and then shape away!  Everything basically needs to be in balls except the carrots.

Color a large spoonful of white frosting green, and then heat the frosting up in the microwave for 10-12 seconds. You want the frosting to be soupy. Dip different sizes of corn flakes in the frosting and lay on the parchment paper to dry.  You will use these for the lettuce heads and the tops of the radishes. 

Carrots:

With kitchen shears or very clean scissors, cut the sour straws into thin strips at different lengths, the tallest being the length of your pinkie.  Poke holes in the orange shaped carrots using a toothpick.  Squirt a small dab of white frosting in the hole and stick the thin sour straw strips in the hole.  Repeat until you have enough carrots for your desired row.  Stick the carrots in a row into the tops of your cake.

Tomatoes:

Color the rest of your white frosting green.  Place all of the red fruit chews on the top of the cake in a row.  Put some of it in a small ziploc bag using the technique in Hello Cupcake (or use a piping bag) and pipe a little greenery on the tops of your tomatoes.  

Lettuce Heads:

At this point, your frosting covered corn flakes should be dry.  Get a green M & M and surround it with the frosting covered corn flakes.  Secure them to the M & M with dabs of green frosting.  Put the lettuce heads in a row on the cake.

Radishes: 

Following the directions on the bag, melt a 1/2 cup of the white chocolate wafers.  Get the desired amount of red M & Ms that you want for your radishes and dip the tip of the M & M in the wafer chocolate.  Let dry on parchment paper.  Once the chocolate is dry on the radish, secure one or two frosting covered corn flakes on the top of each radish.  Lay the radishes in a row on top of the cake.

Fence:

For each fence piece you will need four stick pretzels.  Two vertical pretzels will be connected by two horizontal pretzels. Secure each pretzel to one another with wafer chocolate.  Let dry on parchment paper.  Before sticking the fence to the cake, pipe some of the green frosting you already colored around the perimeter base of the cake.  This will be the grass.  Place the fence in front of the grass.

Sign:

Thinly spread the melted wafer chocolate over the two saltine crackers (Or more, depending on how much you want to write on you sign).  Let them dry on the parchment paper.  Once dry, get a pretzel stick and secure it to the opposite side of the cracker.  Let dry on parchment paper.  Write your message on the cracker with your choice of colored frosting then stick the crackers at the end of the vegetable rows. 

Shovel:

Break a pretzel stick in half.  Secure the half stick horizontally on the end of a whole pretzel stick.  After warming a purple fruit chew in the microwave for 10 seconds, shape it into a flat round shape.  This will be the head of the shovel.  Secure the head of the shovel to opposite end of the pretzel stick.  Let dry on parchment paper.  Once dry, you can stick the shovel into the cake and surround it with a few chocolate covered sunflower seeds.

Bowls:

I made these because I had extra vegetables.  I heated some fruit chews in the microwave and then shaped the bowls to my liking. 

Done-skis! Now enjoy a super awesome cake.

-Amber

Sorter Toy Out of a Shoebox

A little something you should know about me: I am a cheapo. Like, crazy cheapo. I’m the person who walks into a Goodwill and says, “Eight dollars for a pair of jeans?!? Forget it”. That being said, I rarely buy my girls toys.  They usually get one for the birthday and one or two for Christmas. If I can make the toy..., well now that’s a different story.

I will say that once a kid gets past toddler age the kids are a little harder to please with homemade toys.  Lucky me, I still have a little one year old!  Score. This one year old loves to sort, stack, and hide things, so I figured a sort toy would be perfect, and guess how easy a sort toy is to make? Mmhmm gurl, you guessed it. Real easy.

Here’s the things you will need:

A Shoe box
A few block shapes

A xacto knife (Or a poor man's xacto knife: a box cutter)

 If you want your box to be pretty, then you will also need:

A large gift bag

Glue gun

Clear tape (forgot that one until later)

The blocks are wooden blocks that I bought at Hobby Lobby a few years. Amazon sells them here.

I started by simply tracing the blocks on the top of the shoe box and then cutting out a slightly larger shape so that the block could easily be put in the hole by a sweet little baby.Got all your holes cut? Boom. Done.

If I had thought further ahead on this project, I wouldn't have used the arch block. My baby can push any block through that hole, which is fine because she’s still happy with the toy, but if you want to make the toy a little bit of a challenge, skip the arch block.

Now, if you want to take this a step further and make the sorter toy pretty, continue on.

The gift sack paper I used is thicker and smoother than most wrapping papers. I also decided to use a glue gun to secure the paper to my box.

Once the entire box is wrapped, cut the paper where the shape holes are. I used clear tape to secure the paper under the lid, but you could use the glue gun again.

Tada! You're done! Well done on a free, super easy to make toy for the baby in your life! 

-Amber

Pallet Gardening the Delaney Way

It’s all the rage. I’m not pretending to be an excellent gardener or even a good gardener. I wing it. I’m just going to share how I’m doing things. This will be my fourth garden in my fourth backyard. I've done this gardening method in two cities in Texas and one city in Colorado, so now I’m trying my hand in Oklahoma. This will be my largest garden if everything produces. I’m really excited to share this with my 16 month old daughter, Elliott, who loves to help. She gets so excited when we go outside to work in the garden. Mostly she likes to play in the dirt and move it around with the occasional dirt snack (See below). Soon enough we will be able to pull carrots out of the ground. Yay!

To start, you need pallets. We drove down alleys and just kept our eyes peeled. We stopped and asked a couple businesses that had some laying around. You can also check craigslist, but usually there is no need to pay. I would make sure the pallets that you choose are marked with a “HT”, which stands for heat treated. I would also check to see what was on the pallets because you don’t want anything with chemicals.

While Elliott and I started moving dirt my husband Dylan got to building. There are multiple ways to utilize a pallet when gardening. For my standing herb and flower pallets Dylan used pieces of wood from other pallets and completely filled in the back portion. We then made 3 shelves where the herbs and flowers would grow. There will be gaps or holes where dirt can fall through, so we laid landscape fabric down and it held the dirt in well. Another option is to use landscaping fabric to create a back and shelves. Maybe double layer it. Use a staple gun to hold it in place. My other standing pallet is for cucumbers. I just made a single shelf on the bottom and plan to let the cucumber vines crawl up the pallet.

We were going to do raised beds for all the veggies that need deeper roots but didn’t have the budget for all the dirt. Raised beds would be simple enough you just need to deconstruct the pallets and reconstruct into boxes, sizes are your choice. After we decided not to do raised beds I still wanted to go with the pallet theme so I had Dylan make frames that would sit on the ground and give a nice look and organization. We slightly recessed the frames into the ground and filled with a mixture of dirt and topsoil.

These are some examples of raised beds that you can make out of pallets:

What’s going to be growing in my garden and devoured by my family? Herbs (parsley, rosemary, lavender, chocolate mint, citrus mint, oregano, cilantro, basil) spinach, arugula, mesclun, carrots, black beans, onions, zucchini, squash, bell pepper, jalapeno, and tomato.

I'll post again when everything has been completed and we start to see a crop!

-Ashley

Rewedding Photos

Five years ago, my guy and I already had a three month old and we had single digits in our bank account. We knew we wanted to be married, but money just wasn't permitting it. One morning as my guy was getting ready for work, I asked, "Hey, did you want to get married today?".  An hour later we were at the courthouse sitting in front of a woman who clearly hated life.  Each of us took a turn signing our names at the bottom of the heavy paper.  "Congratulations," the despondent woman had said, "you are now husband and wife."  Such a lame beginning to the awesome life that I have now.

Recently my second sister told me she and her husband had a rewedding photo shoot.  Mmhmm.  I had no idea what it was either.  Rewedding photos are photos where you and your significant other act like it is your wedding day all over again simply for the pictures.  Photographers will do this so that they can build their portfolio with wedding photos without having to deal with Bridezilla, or they will do a schedule rewedding shoot for people who never had the chance to have wedding pictures (me! ME!).  I absolutely love this idea!

My sister was able to fit into her wedding dress from years ago (amazing!), but since I don't have one I could just buy one on Craigslist or rent one.  Her husband simply wore khakis and a white shirt with suspenders.  They had a Bohemian themed rewedding.

 The photographer actually made this head piece for the photo shoot.  It's fake flowers purchased from a craft store.  I found a cool DIY for floral headpieces here.

I'm not positive what the decor is, but it looks easy to replicate.  I think they used maybe jute string strung from two different places, and then tied ribbon or scrap cloths to the string.

The bouquet was done from fake flowers as well, and it looks so pretty! I found a tutorial for a wedding bouquet (it is with real flowers) here.

I think my husband and I could definitely pull this one off.  Little to no planning and doesn't have to be a huge hoopla, yet I can still share our pictures with everyone!  This idea seems much more attainable than planning an entire wedding even though we are already married (though I wouldn't mind planning a fancy party for all of our friends to hang out!).

Photo credit: Julie Wilmes Photography

-Amber