Disney on Ice

Here are some pics from when I took Maegan to see Disney on Ice just after Thanksgiving. Need I say she enjoyed it? I'd recommend this show to anyone. Great costumes and skating!

Maegan as we were leaving the house to go to the show:
Jasmine and Aladdin:
Belle and the Prince (formerly known as Beast):
Mulan (one of the Disney movies that was in the show that Maegan hasn't seen yet):
Pinocchio (another one she hasn't seen yet):
From It's a Small World (loved these costumes):
The soldiers from Toy Story (Buzz Lightyear was inside the package):
I liked this move during the part of the show where all the Disney couples come out (Ariel and Eric, Cinderella and the Prince, Snow White and the other Prince, etc). The female characters are all sitting on the male character's arms, and they're spinning.


Here are the Incredibles, with Elastagirl's arm stretching through the curtain to reach the baby:

Miscellaneous Fall Pics

Whenever I take pictures of what I've cooked, Maegan always wants me to take a picture of her plate, too. So here she is with some delicious corn, ham and roasted potatoes.

Maegan has a snuggly little brother. In this picture, he is loving on her and she is snuggling back. It doesn't always work that way, but in general, she loves his snuggles.
Here's Maegan helping with the raking. I thought the tongue out was cute.
Whenever I take pictures of Ethan, Maegan says, "Take my picture, too!" So this is her being a ham when I did stop taking Ethan's picture and took hers.

Here's Fairy Princess Maegan with the pumpkin we (I) carved. We went to a fun party at Susie's house, where the kids had their faces painted by Trixie the Clown before we went trick-or-treating. Maegan LOVED her face paint.

Turnips

We had a most delicious turnip soup tonight and I couldn't wait to share. I'm also adding the turnip recipes we made this spring and haven't posted yet. (I already posted turnip greens in June.) The root part of turnips is high in Vitamin C. The greens are a good source of Vitamin A, folate, Vitamin C, Vitamin K, calcium, and lutein.

Tonight's soup recipe was from my trusty Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison. I have liked every single thing I've made from this cookbook, which is also an excellent reference for every type of veggie and grain and bean you can think of.


Turnip Soup with Gruyere Croutons

• 4-6 medium turnips, 1 1/2 to 2 lbs, with their greens if available (we did have the greens)
• 3 small boiling potatoes
• 2 Tbsp. butter
• 2 leeks, white parts only, thinly sliced
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 1/4 c. chopped parsley
• 4 thyme sprigs or 1/4 tsp. dried
• Salt and freshly milled white pepper
• 6 cups water or vegetable stock (I used chicken broth)
• 1/2 c. cream or milk
• Cheese Croutons, made with Gruyere cheese (recipe below)

Peel the turnips and potatoes, quarter, and thinly slice them. Discard stems and any yellowed leaves from the greens. Wash the remaining leaves well.

Melt the butter in a soup pot over medium heat. Add the turnips, potatoes, leeks, garlic, parsley, and thyme. Cook for about 5 minutes, then add 1 1/2 tsp salt and the water and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer, partially covered, until the vegetables are tender, about 25 minutes. Puree all or just part of the soup, depending on whether you like a smooth soup or one with some texture. Stir in the cream.

While the soup is cooking, chop the greens into small pieces. There should be about 2 cups, although more is fine. Simmer them in salted water until they're tender, then drain and add them to the finished soup. Taste for salt, season with pepper, and serve with two cheese croutons in each bowl or on the side.

Cheese Croutons (they were so good we made a second batch with the remaining part of the bread!)
Mix 1/2 cup grated blue cheese, Parmesan, or a good Cheddar (or Gruyere as above) with 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard, 1 tablespoon soft butter, and a little freshly milled pepper. Toast 12 baguette slices, 2 for each person (or 12 for each person....like we had...). Mound a little of the topping on each, then broil until the cheese begins to bubble and melt.

I liked this soup better than any other turnip dish I've made this year. Either the turnip flavor is growing on me, or the soup has enough other flavors to mask the turnip flavor a bit. Anyway, here are the other things I've made, in case you like turnips better than I do.


Early Spring Turnips Tedesco

(by Angela Tedesco, from the Turtle Farm website)

Early spring turnips, about 6-8	1-2 green garlic, chopped
1-2 T. olive oil	Salt and pepper to taste

Clean turnips; remove and save greens. Julienne the turnips. Coarsely chop the greens. Heat oil in large skillet over medium heat. Sauté chopped green garlic. Add turnips before garlic browns. Stir fry for a few minutes. Add chopped greens and stir fry a minute or two longer. Season with salt and pepper and serve.

(Maybe this would have been better if I had boiled the greens in salted water first? This takes out some of the bitterness.)

Irish Lamb Stew (Matthew's favorite)

• 3/4 lb. thickly sliced bacon, diced
• 1-3 lbs. boneless lamb shoulder, cut into 2" pieces
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. ground black pepper
• 1/2 c. flour
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 lg. onion, chopped
• 1/2 c. water
• 4 c. beef stock
• 2 tsp. white sugar
• 4 c. diced carrots
• 1 lg. onion, cut into bite-sized pieces
• 3 potatoes, cut into bite-sized pieces
  
• 3 turnips, cut into bite-sized pieces
  
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 c. white wine

Cook bacon, drain, crumble and set aside. Put lamb, salt, pepper and flour in large mixing bowl. Toss to coat evenly. Brown meat in pan with bacon fat. Place meat into stock pot (leave 1/4 c. fat in frying pan). Add garlic and yellow onion to bacon fat and saute until onion begins to become golden. Deglaze frying pan with 1/2 c water and add the garlic/onion mixture to the stock pot with the bacon pieces, beef stock and sugar. Cover and simmer 1 1/2 hours.

Add carrots, onions, potatoes, turnips, thyme, bay leaves, and wine to pot. Bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer covered for 20 minutes or until veggies are tender.

We served this with whole wheat bread from the bread machine. Here's my favorite recipe for that:
Add in order recommended by your bread machine manufacturer:

1 1/3 c. water
1/4 c. vegetable oil
1/4 c. honey, molasses or maple syrup
3 1/2 c. whole wheat flour
1/4 c. dried milk
1 1/4 tsp. salt
2 1/2 tsp instant yeast or 1 packet active dry yeast

Mae's 4th Birthday

Can it be true that Maegan is 4? She has certainly grown! She's big enough to wear girls size 6 now, so some people who have seen her out and about with me during the day ask why she's not in school!

Maegan asked for a Cinderella cake for her birthday, so this is what I made for her. Note that Maegan is wearing an Annie necklace in this picture. We watched the movie together a few weeks ago, and it made me remember the necklace I had from my childhood. Maegan was so excited when I got it out for her after the movie.

We celebrated Maegan's birthday and her Uncle Isaac's 30th birthday at our house on Sunday the 28th for lunch. We had bacon cheeseburgers with all the trimmings and homemade salsa with chips.
The one thing Maegan requested for her birthday was a doll cradle. Grandma Denise and Grandpa Monte made her wish come true. (She told us after she blew out her candles that she had wished for a cradle.)
For dinner on her birthday, Maegan requested pancakes.

A couple of weeks before her birthday, Grandpa Dave and Grandma Kathy came to visit. Maegan enjoyed her time with them and even learned a new word. (Unbelievable!)

Here's what else we've been up to:
We've been enjoying weekly bike rides with friends. Here are Maegan and her friend Sami in one of the bike trailers, all bundled up on a cold morning.
Maegan is enjoying her dance class (creative movement at the School of Classical Ballet & Dance). She got new tights and the skirt for her birthday from her mom and dad.
Maegan's Aunt Nicky gave her this dress and matching purse that Nicky wore when she was a little girl. Maegan just LOVES it and has been carrying around the purse a lot.
Maegan loves to read. This is not an unusual sight. She was especially quiet so I went to investigate and found her looking at all her books. We regularly read together before her nap and before bed. Right now we're reading Charlotte's Web for the second time.

Fried Okra

Okra was one of the items available from Turtle Farm that was optional, meaning you had to request it if you wanted it, but there was no extra charge. I requested it because I had never tried it and was curious. I learned a lot about it just trying to find a recipe for it.

The okra plant is in the mallow family (same as cotton and cocoa). The fruit has good levels of folate, calcium, vitamin C and magnesium. The name "okra" is of West African origin, but in other areas, the name sounds like "gumbo", so that's why the dish we call gumbo always has okra in it. Okra is a mucilaginous plant, which means it feels gooey/sticky when you cut it. This goo makes okra good for thickening stew and soups, like gumbo.

I wanted something "easy", so I chose fried a fried okra recipe with minimal ingredients. It was okay, but I wasn't partial to the corn meal flavor of the breading of the recipe I used. Maegan didn't like it at all, but Ethan ate more of it than anyone! If we get more okra, I'll probably try to make gumbo.

Siblings

Maegan and Ethan already have a love/hate sibling relationship. Sometimes they love playing together, and other times not so much. Maegan talks about getting married, and sometimes she wants to marry Matthew, and other times she says she'll marry Ethan. She doesn't understand why she can't marry her brother. This week, Ethan started coming up behind Maegan and hugging her. As she walks away, he holds on tight and follows. He does this a bit in the video, but mostly he's trying to put her headband back in her hair after he takes it off.

Ashby Park

The wading pool at Ashby Park isn't far from our house and it is FREE, so we've been going once a week. The first picture is the one from their website that shows what the pool looks like. The deepest part is in the center of the picture and it is about one foot deep. It gets shallower out to the edge where it is zero depth. There are about five different fountains on the near end. The city has a laundry basket full of toys there for the kids to play with. Ethan and Maegan like to take the cups to the fountains and try to catch water in them. The last picture shows the two of them taking a rest and having a snack.







Yes, Maegan has a bruise on her cheek from running in the house and falling against a doorway.

Iowa State Fair

Van & Bonnie, the morning radio hosts on 1040 WHO, were having a "Corn Dog Chomp" this morning to open the fair. If you could get there between 5am and 8:30am, you could get into the fair for free (a $10 value!) and be part of their world record for the most people eating a corn dog at the same time. We left home at 7:15, and a trip that would normally take about 15 minutes took over TWO HOURS! They had over 15,000 people actually make it through the gates before 8:30, and I'm sure there were thousands more of us on the freeway backed up for miles. Anyway, after the long trip in, we enjoyed our time at the fair. Here are a few pictures from our morning.

They had a great building all set up with baby animals and mama animals ready to give birth. There were eggs hatching and calves so new they could hardly stand up. Maegan got to hold this piglet.
This statue was just outside the food vendor we visited for lunch. We had a great tenderloin sandwich and Maegan enjoyed petting this pig and rubbing the farmer's belly.
Maegan wanted to ride the sky ride from the moment she saw it. She had no fear of being up there at all. I, on the other hand, kept my arm securely around her waist the whole time and tried not to think about falling out.
The kids and I enjoyed having Denise along. This picture was taken shortly after we finished our GLAZED funnel cake. Yes, GLAZED! I didn't know they had such a thing. When the woman asked me if I wanted powdered sugar or glaze, my heart skipped a beat. It was so delicious, I didn't even mind dripping glaze all over my pants.

Cabbage

I know you've been missing my food posts, so here's some new stuff! ;)
Here's what I did with one and a half heads of cabbage over the past couple of weeks. I found the Cabbage Roll recipe on the Turtle Farm website. Instead of sunflower kernels, I substituted a pound of ground pork, so they weren't vegetarian, but they were good! Maegan and Ethan didn't like them much, and Matthew wasn't a huge fan, but I thought they were pretty good. The original recipe is below.


Vegetarian Cabbage Rolls
(From Cooking Light 1987 [Oxmoor House, Alabama, 1987])

1 medium cabbage
vegetable cooking spray
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cups cooked brown rice
¼ cup unsalted sunflower kernels, toasted
2 ounces shredded extra-sharp cheddar cheese
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Remove dark outer leaves from cabbage. Core cabbage. Place cabbage in a large bowl of hot water until leaves are easily separated. Remove 8 large leaves, reserve remaining cabbage for other uses. Cook leaves in boiling water 6 to 8 minutes or just until tender. Drain and set aside.

Coat a medium skillet with cooking spray. Place over medium heat until hot. Add onion, and sauté until tender. Combine onion, rice, sunflower kernels, and cheese in a medium bowl; mix well.

Place a cup rice mixture in center of each cabbage leaf; fold sides in over rice mixture, and roll up each leaf. Secure each cabbage roll with a wooden pick. Place cabbage rolls in a large skillet.

Combine tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and pepper in a small bowl; mix well. Pour over cabbage rolls in skillet. Bring to a boil. Cover; reduce heat, and simmer 15 minutes. Remove cabbage rolls to a serving platter, and serve immediately. Makes 4 servings.

All of us enjoyed the Pirogi with Cabbage! Well, Maegan usually says "Yum!" after her first bite of anything, and then a few minutes later, I look over and she hasn't eaten any more of it. So I say, "Why aren't you eating your fill in the blank?"That's when she says, "I don't like it..." If I remember correctly, that's what happened with this dish.

Also from the Turtle Farms website:

Pirogi with Cabbage

1 recipe favorite pie crust (double)	1 envelope instant brown gravy mix
2 T butter or oil	2 T chopped parsley
1 cup onion, chopped	1 tsp salt
1 cup carrots, sliced	½ tsp leaf savory, crumbled
2 cups green cabbage, chopped	1/4 tsp pepper
1 lb lean hamburger (or soy sausages)	1 egg, beaten with 1 T water
1 cup hot water

Prepare pie crust and chill or set aside.

Sauté onion, carrots, and cabbage in hot butter or oil in large skillet, stirring often until tender and slightly browned, about 15 min. Remove to large bowl.

In same skillet, sauté meat until it loses its pink color. Lower heat, stir in water, cook and stir to loosen browned bits. Stir in gravy mix, parsley, salt, savory, and pepper. Cover, simmer 5 min. Add to vegetables.

Roll pastry to make double crust for 9” pie pan. Spoon meat and vegetables into pastry in pie pan and cover with top crust. Press edges together and crimp. Brush egg and 1 T. water (mixed) over the pie. Make steam slits. Bake at 400°F for about 30 min.

When I make coleslaw, I usually buy the bag of cabbage and carrots already cut up, like most folks do, I imagine, unless they're the type of folks who buy it ready-made from the deli or KFC. I had never purchased a head of cabbage and cut it up myself. Well, it really isn't a big deal to cut up the cabbage, so if the cost difference is big enough, I'll just buy the head of cabbage next time. This recipe only takes 1/4 c. of diced carrots, and that doesn't take long to prep, either.

I didn't like coleslaw as a kid, and Ethan only has 8 teeth, none of which are molars, so I didn't even offer it to him. He pointed to it on the table and grunted at it a couple of times, so I gave him some. He actually liked it!

KFC Coleslaw

8 c. finely diced cabbage (about 1 head)
1/4 c. diced carrots
2 Tbsp. minced onions
1/3 c. granulated sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. pepper
1/4 c. milk
1/2 c. mayo
1/4 c. buttermilk (or substitute 1/4 c. milk + 1 1/2 tsp. cream of tartar)
1 1/2 Tbsp. white vinegar
2 1/2 Tbsp. lemon juice

Combine last 9 ingredients and pour over first two. Mix, chill, serve.

Union Park & The Heritage Carousel

We visited Union Park tonight for a quick ride on the Heritage Carousel there. For 50 cents a ride (adult is free if you're standing next to the kid), it is a bargain! We went there earlier in the week for a picnic with friends and a dip in the wading pool, and thought it would be fun to go this evening with Daddy. Ethan wasn't enthused about the carousel, so we observed from a bench while Maegan took a couple of rides.

The other unique feature in Union Park is the rocket slide. There was a rocket slide in my hometown growing up and we loved it. This one is 100 times more awesome because it has a ramp going to the top with a second slide half way up the ramp. I've gone down it twice (I had to help Maegan up the ramp, so what was I supposed to do...walk back down the ramp??), and it is FAST. It shot me right off the end so I had to be quick on my feet.

I copied the picture above from another website, so you could see the slide better than in mine, below. Since we were there in the evening, the top of the big slide was in shadow. Maegan is down in front in the dress.