Monday Meal - Jalapeno Refried Black Beans

I found this recipe while day while searching for something to serve as a side dish with our salsa chicken, but it didn't have very good reviews. So, I made quite a few changes, and the dish turned out delicious enough we've decided it can be added into our regular meal rotation.

Ingredients:

1 tsp olive oil (or so)
16 oz. black beans, rinsed and drained

2 hot chili peppers
2 cloves fresh garlic, chopped
1 onion, chopped
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

Preparation:

Heat oil in pan over medium heat. Cook the garlic, onions and jalapenos until slightly wilted. Sprinkle in the cumin. Add in beans and cheese and roughly stir, mashing some of it together. I didn't do too much mashing because I actually don't like the look of "refried" beans, so this is more just jalapeno black beans.

Prune Flaxseed Cookies

I bought a bunch of flax seed a few trips ago at the grocery store, but hadn't found a recipe to use them with, until I stumbled upon this recipe from Canadian Living. I've had a lot of success with all sorts of recipes from Canadian Living and this one did not disappoint either, I still did make a few changes, including the addition of the prunes.

Ingredients:
1/2 1/2cup cup(125 mL) softened butter
1/2 cup packed brown sugar 1/2 1/2cupcup packed brown sugar
1/3 cup granulated sugar 1/3 1/3cup white cup white sugar
1 egg 1 eggegg
1/2 tsp vanilla 1/2 1/2tsp vanilla
1 cup all purpose flour 1 1cup cupall purpose flour
3/4 cup quick cooking rolled oats 3/4 3/4cup cuprolled oats
2/3 cup flaxseeds 2/3 2/3cup flaxseeds
1 tsp baking soda 1 1tsp tspbaking soda
1/2 cup chopped prunes

Directions:

In bowl, beat together butter and brown and granulated sugars until light; beat in egg and vanilla.

In separate bowl, whisk together flour, oats, flaxseeds and baking soda; stir into butter mixture until soft dough forms.

Add chopped prunes.

Drop by level tablespoonfuls, 2 inches apart, on u baking sheets. Bake at 350°F until golden, 12 minutes. Let cool on pan on rack for 2 minutes.

Rolled Paper Frame

One day while aimlessly searching blogland, I came across this post for a rolled paper frame art. We had both paper and cardboard handy, so off we went to roll some paper. We followed the directions pretty closely, so go on over to check them out.

We spray painted the entire frame and background black, and then added a little metallic silver paint to the rolled paper.
But now we had this pretty frame with absolutely nothing to put in it. We started looking around the playroom for something we could put in it, and came across a pretty picture of a frog R had coloured with Big N one day after work. We Mod Podged the crap out of it, and came up with this stunning array.
Mod Podge and I aren't the best of friend, so I ended up using some white glue on the back to make sure the little froggie stayed put. Now we just have to find a place to put this little man. He's pretty cute. I think he might get to stay.

The $4.50 headboard

Whether this is considered a headboard or wall art, I'll never know. But, are you ready for the reveal of what this beautiful piece is made from?
It's $1.25 piece of poster board, covered in a $1 pillow case all from Dollarama. The centre is an 8x10 canvas art piece that Big N painted for me, there's actually a lot of dimension in the piece, but it doesn't really photograph very well. There you have it ladies and gentlemen, a budget basic redo.

Monday Meal - Quinoa and Spinach Stuffed Chicken Breasts

I came across this recipe the other day while searching for things to do with my quinoa.

These chicken breasts were super tasty, and although we had to vary on the recipe slightly by using mozzarella as opposed to Gouda as our cheese, and I have a feeling would have been more delicious had we used the Gouda, but it definitely wasn't worth trudging two kids to the store for.

So, I won't bother to post the recipe, since I think it's delicious as is, so pop on over and check it out. We served our meal with some baked broccoli and it was the best meal of the week. We'll be adding this into our regular rotation.

Baking

Sometimes as I'm sorting through the pictures on my phone, I come across things that I'm pretty sure I was going to blog about, but then can't remember exactly what they are.

For example, this muffin is?

All gone. They may have been carrot bran muffins, I vaguely recall peeling carrots in the past week. Obviously, the recipe I had wasn't spectacular otherwise I probably would have been more careful to save it.

And these are chocolate oatmeal cookies, which the recipe I used was WAY too sugary, which still didn't stop me from eating about two dozen of them in a day. Maybe I should get more organized on my blogging adventure? Hmm....that seems like effort, not sure that's for me.

Magazine Organizer

For my niece's birthday this year, I got her a magazine subscription, and the last I heard, she loved it! So, hopefully that's still the case. Now, the best part of this birthday gift was that if you bought two subscriptions you got a third free. What's the you say, spend an extra $10 and get magazines for myself too? Why, of course, I'll take it!

And now, I find myself anxiously awaiting my Today's Parent and Moneysense subscriptions, heck, I am an accountant by trade. P.S. Both these magazines rock!

But, onto the real point, I have absolutely no where to put my magazines beside the bookshelf in the spare bedroom, and that's a little out of the way when I'm looking for something to do to pass the time during the day.

So, Big N and I got to work making a nice magazine holder.

We took a Bran Flake box, since it was about the right size, and cut off the top and cut down the sides. We added some scrapbook paper to the back and sides to cover the box itself. And just like that, we had a cute little magazine organizer.

As I was putting away endless amounts of colouring books today, I thought one of these little boxes would work great for them too, so perhaps tomorrow we will make another. A few things I learned along the way for the next round:

1. If your box is very graphic, you may want to take it outside and add a coat of spray paint first, if you look carefully you can see the coupons available on the back of the box.

2. The glue did tend to pucker a little bit, so I would probably water it down a little more than I did this time.

3. Work at not having any excess, since as you can see above a little piece of my box is missing scrap book paper, and that is because I only had one sheet of that same pattern. If I were to make it so it didn't hardly overlap with the black binding, it probably could have covered just a little bit more.

Master Bedroom Reno

After a year and a half, I finally decided to buckle down and finish the master bedroom. It was merely a matter of putting up some finishing touches to make everything come together. So, lets reminisce about how far we've come in the past year.

This first picture is from a couple of days prior to us taking possession of the house where we checked to make sure everything seemed to be in good order and my parents got the chance to come view the beautiful property with us. I'm sure they were awestruck. I mean with a master bedroom like this, who wouldn't be?
We quickly got to work CLEANING, patching holes, burning curtains, CLEANING and the room was starting to take shape. We added some paint to the ceiling and walls, put up some new trim, added new closet doors, and ta da, it was livable.

And that's pretty much how it stayed for over a year, until one day last week, I decided I wanted a room that was a little more relaxing and a little less, I just graduated from university and all I own is this bed. There was a lot of consideration over what to use as a headboard for our bed, but the lack of funds available for frivolous redo's, Big N and I got to work making this wonderful piece for $4.50. Check back for a full post of what it is made of, I have a feeling you'll never guess.

We added a mirror that was found in the clearance section of the Superstore above the dresser, although being 5'2" on a tall day, it's a bit high for my liking, but it's just right for people of normal height.

And we couldn't kick Little N out quite yet, so during the big bed move (dragging it across the room to the other wall), he got pushed against the inside wall now. The pictures above his bed are three pictures I took after my European Adventure in 2007. I still love looking at those pictures in the morning and remembering what a great adventure that trip was.
We finalized the bedroom for under $5. We pieced together the furniture over the past year, the platform bed and dresser are from the South Shore Lux collection which we got from Direct Buy. We have the same dresser in the kids' room, so some day when we are ready to get an actual grown up bedroom set, the kids will likely inherit this whole set. The night stands and lights are all from Ikea and had been taking up residence in other parts of our house. The blinds were from the rec room downstairs, and immediately after moving in and realizing the windows were the same size, I scooped them up so R had to buy new sets for the rec room, hehe oops. All in all, I'm pretty happy with the results. Some day when we decide to pull up all the gross blue carpeting, I'll enjoy the space even more, but for now, it suits my needs just fine.

Chocolate Cupcakes

We were in charge of making the cake for the birthday party (do you see a theme to this week's posts?), so we decided to go with cupcakes, since they travel the best and work well for 6 kids under 3.5. I came across this recipe and thought it fit our description pretty well. Keeping in mind, that prior to starting this second mat leave I've never made cupcakes from scratch, and when I go back to work, the box variety will probably become our go to item again. But, these were simple and delicious, I'd definitely make them again. We had very few changes to the recipe except to remove the salt.

Ingredients:
1 cup sugar

1 cup brown sugar (not packed)
1 3/4 cup flour

3/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

2 eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup canola oil

2 tsp vanilla

1 cup boiling water

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Fill muffin pans with 24 cupcake liners. Sift dry ingredients into a mixing bowl. Add eggs, milk, oil and vanilla. Stir until your arm gets too tired to continue. Add the boiling water, and beat, just until blended. The mixture is very watery, but turns out wonderful. Pour the batter into the liners. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the center of the cupcakes springs back when lightly touched. Cool and frost.

We used the same Vanilla Butter Cream Icing as posted and it was deliciously sweet.

Ingredients:
1/3 cup butter, just slightly cooler than room temperature

3 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup milk

1 1/2 tsp vanilla
food coloring, if desired

Directions:

Beat butter in a medium-sized mixing bowl until creamy. Gradually beat in 3 cups of the powdered sugar. Beat in milk and vanilla. Blend in remaining 1/2 cup powdered sugar. If desired, tint with food coloring.

Coffee Filter Flowers

We needed some more decorations to make Granny's birthday a spectacular event, so we thought making her a beautiful brooch would be wonderful, until we discovered we don't own a safety pin. We came across this site outlining how to create coffee filter flowers, so we got to work putting coffee filters into bowls of water and food colouring. We had three different coloured bowls and Big N loved adding the coffee filters to the water. We left the filters in the bowls for various amounts of time, and then left them to dry on paper towels and newspaper on the floor.
We made flower shapes by taping the center of the flowers. Although we used all different colours, most of our flowers ended up pinkish, seems that was Big N's favourite bowl. We couldn't find anything to use for stems so we used our paper bowl from yesterday and made a beautiful centerpiece.
I'm sure Granny absolutely loved her decorations, because really, who else could love something as wonderful as this but a grandmother?!?

How Cute is this?

My parents came across this birthday cake at the market they frequent recently.

It has two layers of vanilla cake on the top and bottom for the bun, a layer of chocolate cake in the middle for the patty, and icing in various colours for the fixings. There's even a sugar coating on the top for sesame seeds. I think I need to host a burger party just so I can attempt to make this. Who wants to come?

Paper Bowl

After trolling through blog land one day, I ran across a tutorial for a paper bowl, it looked fancy and beautiful. I realized the bowl was nothing more than a little paper mache, so off we went to the backyard with a bowl, some cut up newspaper, and watered down glue.

The key to the bowl not getting covered in glue is to cover the outside in Pam, then apply saran wrap, then apply more Pam. When you start adding the paper and the glue, it won't stick to the bowl and it'll be easy to remove your shape holder.

Turn the bowl upside down, dip the paper in the glue mixture (2 parts glue to 1 part water) and start sticking it to the outside of the bowl. We continued this until we were thoroughly covered in glue. After drying for a couple days (since we needed to add some more paper and glue since our original technique of just brushing on the glue didn't hold well enough), we had a beautiful paper bowl.

We originally thought we would paint the bowl and add some fancy things to it, but we ran out of time. Check back tomorrow to see what we ended up putting in this BEAUTIFUL bowl.

Accident Prone

I think Big N tries very hard to give me a heart attack on a daily basis. In the past couple of weeks she has:

1. Fallen at the park causing her front tooth to turn black and a trip to the dentist to learn that fingers crossed the tooth doesn't fall out. And that is a good thing kids have baby teeth, they are the "practice set"

2. Fallen out of bed TWICE, once the night before the dentist appointment, which led to a huge gash in her chin. I have NO CLUE, what she hit her face on, but there was tears and blood.

3. Been stung by a bee, on EACH leg. With that adventure we learned that WD-40 does a great job of taking out the sting and reducing swelling. Thankfully Uncle Bull knew that trick and our adventurous two year old was back at her antics in no time.

From now on I think we are just going to sit at home and do NOTHING. Seriously, my nerves can't take this parenting thing.

To go with this, Little N has:

1. Banged his head off the faucet while we were trying to wash his hands;

2. Fallen into the iron railing trying to stand up using it; and

3. Taken a few good falls in the tub while trying to crawl around Big N and pull the plug out.

Sheesh, where's the bubble wrap when you need it!

Monday Meal - Vegetable Quinoa Salad

I made this salad for my mom's birthday party, and I thought it was pretty good. Having only cooked with Quinoa once before, I wasn't sure how it would turn out, but I enjoyed the salad. I'm not sure my farmer brother thought the same, although I can't say for sure if he tried it, or just the look of it turned him away? I combined a few different recipes so here's what I did:

Ingredients:
1 cup Quinoa, rinsed and drained
2 cups cold water
1 tomato
1/4 cucumber, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
3 tbsp olive oil
1/2 lime
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper

Directions:
1. In a medium saucepan, over medium heat, bring quinoa and water to a boil. Reduce heat, and boil gently for 10 to 15 minutes or until the white germ separates from the seed. Cover, remove from heat and let stand for 5 minutes. Remove lid, let cool and fluff with a fork.

2. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, combine tomatoes, cucumber and pepper. Stir in cooled quinoa.

3. In a small bowl, whisk together olive oil, lime juice, salt and pepper.

4. Pour over salad and toss to coat.

I sized down the recipe a little bit so I probably didn't need to cook quite so much quinoa, but we'll use it for another meal today so, it won't go to waste.

Lunch Time Madness

Every day around 11am, I start wondering what the heck we are going to have for lunch as I can feel the kids getting crankier by the minute. Then, I open the fridge and hope and pray there are leftovers from the night before, which is the case about 50% of the time, thank goodness. It's funny that I actually have to look because it seems in the 18 hours that passes between supper and lunch I have completely forgotten what we had the night before and whether or not I put anything in the fridge.

But, the other day, I came across a package of frozen sliders in the grocery store with cute little buns, and thought, that they would taste delicious. It wasn't until I brought them home and looked at them a little longer and realized, hey, sliders are just toddler sized hamburgers, duh! So, now once a week we have awesome hamburgers for lunch. Some day when I feel ambitious, I think I'll make our own sliders out of ground turkey or chicken, but for now, the store bought ones are DELICIOUS! With a little mayo and spinach, a side of cucumbers and apples, it's a healthy enough meal for me and the kids. P.S. They are soooo good. R gets mad when he finds out we ate them all without him. The other plus is that the ones we bought comes in a pack of 18, and since we only eat 2 or 3 at a time, they will easily last for a month or two.

Pasta Jewelry

The day I asked for suggestions on what to do another friend had said that just the other day her daughters had painted pasta and made little gardens out of the shapes. That sounded cute, until I looked in the cupboard and found out we only had penne and spaghetti. Now, spaghetti doesn't lead itself to too many crafts that I'm aware of, but maybe I should google it before I say that. But, I thought the penne could make could necklaces. So, Big N and I set off to paint some pasta. After the paint had thoroughly dried, we thread ribbon threw it and made some beautiful necklaces and bracelets. Since Big N is on a princess kick right now, she thought her jewelry was fantastic.

Toilet Paper Roll Art

After spending WAY too much time trolling blog land recently, I've come across some VERY artistic people that create awesome things without spending a cent. Now, that is my kind of art. I've decided to finally finish the decorating of the master bedroom and have been looking for some nice pieces of art to work with. The only problem with finding great art, is that it usually comes with a price tag, and mat leave doesn't pay a whole heck of a lot, so art on the cheap is definitely a plus.

Big N and I rounded up the cardboard rolls lying around the house (paper towel, toilet paper, wrapping paper, etc.) and cut them into small pieces. Then we spent a good amount of time laying out a design. We plugged in the glue gun to realize that it couldn't reach where we had laid out our design, and with Little N crawling around in our midst, we couldn't have the floor space taken up much longer, so we just started throwing pieces together and gluing fast before we lost any more pieces to Little N's little mouth.

After we had everything glued together, Little N and I took the piece outside to add some spray paint, Big N had lost interest by this point and was busy talking her dad's ear off. So. we added some black spray paint that we had randomly found in the garage, left by the previous owners no doubt. So our "iron" work has some nice Tremclad covering it, I was quite worried that it would get rusty.

Here is our final product:
I think it looks super cute, and definitely adds something to the bedroom. You can hardly tell it's toilet paper rolls in person.

I'll reveal the entire master bedroom update once I finish a couple more projects, which hopefully happens in the next few days as opposed to months, like the kitchen project that I still haven't finished.

Less than three more months of mat leave, time to speed up the projects so I feel like I did everything I could during my time at home.

Monday Meal - Lemon, Spinach and Chickpea Salad

To continue on our summer cooking journey, I stumbled across this recipe and did some adapting to fit our family. It was a super simple summer salad that took minutes to prepare but came up tasting pretty delicious.

Ingredients:
1 can chickpeas, rinsed and drained
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 lemon
2 cups spinach, chopped

Directions:
Place all ingredients in a large bowl. Mix. Serve cold or at room temperature.

Pom Pom Caterpillar

I asked a few friends one morning what the kids and I should do for a craft one day, and the first response was to glue some pom poms onto Popsicle sticks. Yes, we could do that I thought. Then, I started looking at our craft supplies and it appeared we were out of pom poms, Big N has a good habit of leaving them on the floor, where I promptly pick them up and throw them out before Little N has a chance to eat them.

But, I'm on mat leave, and we have nothing but time on our hands most days, so why not make our own pom poms, which I vaguely remember my sister doing when we were 12. I don't think I ever got into pom pom making. So, after a quick google search did not yield the results I was looking for, I made it up.

We cut a circle out of a piece of cardboard, then cut a line half way through the circle which started a smaller circle on the inside. We then went around, and around, and around with some yarn until we got what I assumed to be enough yarn to be a ball. We then carefully cut the yarn all along the cardboard being careful not to drop it. We took two pieces of yarn and tied it around the middle of each side of the cardboard and pulled out the cardboard form.
We quickly learned that what appeared to be enough yarn is actually no where near enough to make a nice ball shape, but it wasn't horrible.

Now because we had it in our heads that we were making a caterpillar we needed some more yarn pom poms. This is where things get tricky. Two year olds have enough attention span to make one ball, three balls is asking a lot. So, I showed the kids how to throw the ball to each other and quickly completed one more ball. Then I showed them how to try and juggle and sped through a third ball.

We attached all our balls onto half of a paper towel roll, added some eyes and antennae and had one super cute caterpillar. The kids thought he was nice, but had definitely lost interest by the end. Oh well, I still think he's cute.

Congratulations C&K!

We just returned home from the first wedding reception we have taken both kids too. Parties turn into whole new adventures when you have kids, ones where you spend most of your time talking to the other people who have kids and hoping and praying that your children behave themselves. We had to cut the party short since both kids were about to get VERY cranky. But, it was a beautiful reception in a great venue that we'll have to check out in the fall. C&K if you're reading this, Congratulations again! Welcome to the family K!

Book Review - One Bird's Choice

This book by Iain Reid was a pretty good read. It's a story outlining a young man's journey back home after moving away for school and to start his career. His parents live on a farm outside of Ottawa and it recounts the tales he faces living there. I laughed pretty hard at numerous aspects of this book, especially because my parents are farmers and certain things he outlined reminded me so much of home. (Love you Ma and Pa!). Anyways, if you're in the mood for some witty humour, this book will definitely keep you captivated. So, get to the library and check it out!

Sponge Balls

During the big heat wave, we thought of all sorts of activities to keep us cool. A great activity was making sponge balls, and then having a water fight with them.

It's a relatively simple activity, especially if you have a bunch of extra sponges lying around. You cut the sponges into strips, tie a string of some form around the middle super tight. And ta-da! Sponge Ball!

We had a great time throwing these around the yard. We made up all sorts of games with them, including trying to throw them through hoops, over the picnic shelter, etc. All in all, a good way to spend a hot morning.

Patio Reno

We've been homeowners for almost a year and a half, but the list of things to get done on our place is still no where near being complete. But, we received another check a few weeks ago when R and his friend R buckled down and re-did our front patio.

This space is right off of the playroom and it's now a great spot for early morning and late afternoon adventures, the pure sun it receives mid-day makes it much too hot to do anything there, except sun bathe, which I may or may not do during nap time.

Here's a couple before pictures of the space. Everything was completely rotten, and there was both a door and a large window looking on to it. Which in itself, rendered that wall quite useless inside.

When we put siding on the house, we took out the door, and added a big sliding door where the existing window was. With the help of my drywalling pro dad you can't even tell there was a door in the space before.

R&R took to work on the patio, and after much discussion, it was settled on patio boards for the walls and fake stone paint over top of OSB boards on the floor.

We still haven't purchased furniture for the space as we need to find something that the kids can't move and jump off since it is a second story patio.

Overall, I love the space. R&R did a great job!! It's so nice to finally have it completed and actually be able to go out there. I'm imagining enjoying a nice morning tea sitting out there, although my imagination is showing a peaceful relaxing tea, so that means, I'm either drinking it at 5am, or my kids have grown and moved away from home?


Thanks R&R for all the hard work! It's awesome!!

Sand Art

After our fun with glitter, we decided to do more art pieces, but using sand as our glitter. Big N had a ball with it. We started working on cardboard, but the dummy inside of me forgot to think about how brown on brown wouldn't really show up. So, we got out the construction paper.

We made some birthday cards for some very important people who are celebrating big birthday's this week.

We were done with the glue before Little N was done his morning nap, so we brought out the paints and made our pictures even prettier.

July Wall of Fame

Here's how the month of July turned out.

Monday Meal - Chicken and Balsamic Peppers

R believes he may have a gluten intolerance, so while reading up on what we would have to do I stumbled upon the gluten-free goddess and decided to try this recipe and found it quite delicious. I'm not sure R loved it, but he ate his portion without complaining and that's sometimes all we can ask of him. I did have to alter it slightly to fit our needs, but this is what we came up with.

Ingredients:
1/2 large red bell pepper, sliced
1/2 large green bell pepper, sliced
1 onion
1/6 cup organic balsamic vinegar (I'm sure 1/6 of a cup equals some form of tbsp, but, I just did approximately half of 1/3 cup since I was only feeding two people)
1 tablespoons Worcestershire Sauce
1/8 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/8 cup chicken broth
1 fresh clove of garlic, minced
1 Italian seasoning
2 chicken breasts

Directions:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Toss the pepper and onion slices in a large bowl. In a large measuring cup, fork-stir your sauce using: balsamic vinegar, Worcestershire, olive oil, broth, chopped garlic, and herbs. Pour the sauce over the sliced peppers and onions and toss well to coat.

Place the chicken breasts in the bottom of a baking pan sprayed with olive oil. Pour the balsamic pepper mixture over the chicken and arrange them evenly. Use every last drop of sauce.

Loosely cover the pan with a piece of foil and place in the center of a pre-heated oven. Bake for 45 minutes.

We served this with a spinach salad and it made for a very nice light meal.