Tasty Tuesday - Tomato Basil Cups

I love the holidays and entertaining and baking. This past week, I hosted a cookie exchange (the cookie recipe comes next week, I promise) with friends, and we had a blast. I also made a Pillsbury recipe (see my post on why over on my review blog) - or at least my take on a Pillsbury recipe. It was absolutely delicious and so easy to prepare. In fact, when I hosted bunco on Friday, I made it again because it was so quick and easy and yummy.

Pillsbury has the original Tomato Basil Cup recipe on their site, but you know me. I had to adjust it and tweak it. And I think I like my changes.

Tomato Basil Cups
1 8 oz package cream cheese
1/2 c fresh Parmesan (or, ahem, more)
12 cherry tomatoes (or more)
1 1/2 T dried basil
2 T milk
1 package Pillsbury Grands, original flavor
salt and pepper to taste

Directions:
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and grease your muffin tins. This makes 16 servings, so grease the right number of tins. If you have only 6 count tins, add a bit of water to the cups that will be empty to keep the tins from warping in the oven without something baking in it.

Make sure your cream cheese is as room temperature, and mix it with the basil, milk, and Parmesan. Add a little salt and pepper to taste. It doesn't take much, as the Parmesan is already salty.

Gently split each Grand in half, peeling it apart with your fingers. Stretch each round of dough slightly and place it in an empty muffin tin so that the edges are atop the tin. Place a dollop of the filling inside the Grand. Remember that the cream cheese and Parmesan will be very rich, so don't put too much in there.

Quarter the cherry tomatoes, and carefully place three tomato quarters atop each cup. Or cut up more tomatoes and put more there, but three seemed to be a good fit, though these were large cherry tomatoes.

Bake at 350 for 10 or so minutes, until the dough is a beautiful golden brown. Serve immediately or at room temperature and watch them disappear!

Enjoy this and more with Blessed With Grace and Tempt My Tummy Tuesday. Also posting now with A Southern Fairytale and her Mouthwatering Monday.

She's Got A Lively Imagination

I'm lucky that my parents live very close to us and have a great relationship with the wee ones. They do the vast majority of our babysitting, and when they don't see the wee ones "often enough" in their minds, they beg to come over and hang with them. It isn't all sunshine and roses - we have some boundary issues - but it's a huge relief when I have two children who need to go two different places and only one adult is available. Thus, my mom picks Little Miss up every week at school to take her to gymnastics.

My mom being my mom has a hard time following the rules. She doesn't just go inside the school to the hallway and wait there patiently with the other mothers. Unfortunately, Little Miss's classroom is just around the corner from where the parents wait, and if you peek around the corner, you can see into her classroom - and watch them pack up their backpacks from their lockers in the hallway at the end of the day. Needless to say, this is frowned upon, as it's distracting to the students. My mom doesn't care; she just wants to see her granddaughter, regardless of the rules.

I discovered how much an issue this was when my mom accused me one day of planting stories with Little Miss. I looked at her blankly, truly having no idea what she was talking about, but she didn't believes me and insisted that I must have told Little Miss what to say. I hadn't. My dear child simply has an interesting and vivid imagination.

Little Miss told my mom that she had to stop peeking around the corner at her. Why? Because it isn't allowed. And not only that, but the school has cameras to watch for people doing this, and if you get caught, the police will come to take you to jail. Little Miss didn't want her grandma to go to jail. And no, I have never once used the threat of police or jail or anything like that to scare her into behaving. I have absolutely no idea where she came up with the story, but she knows now that Grandma doesn't believe her and figured out that it was a made up story.

Little Miss still had a solution, however.

I know you miss me at school. I miss you, too. Here is a picture of me so that you can keep me close to you. I love you, too!

(Forgive her spelling, as she's in first grade and being taught only in Spanish, so her English spelling isn't where we would expect it otherwise.)

Seriously? How precious is that. Hilarious. Highly entertaining. Gonna give me grey hair as she moves into the preteen and teen years, but precious nonetheless.

Why I Never Took An Elective Art Class

I love homework. Or maybe I shouldn't say that I love homework, but I certainly understand it and appreciate its value - to an extent. I get that repeating on his own what he learned earlier in the day helps to cement it in Mister Man's brain. The independence and responsibility that completing his homework fosters is a good thing for him, as it is for Little Miss. I'm not in favor of multiple hours of homework a night - especially not at this age - but that's not what we get. We get a completely manageable half hour or less a night, and I'm good with it.

There is also a monthly book report, which I've so far convinced Mister Man should be done early so that we don't have to stress about it at the last minute. He loves to read, so getting him to read the book isn't a challenge. And the skills he gains by being able to explain the book and character traits shown in the book and finding ways to support his statements with examples from the book is awesome. I love how this builds on what he does in class.

What I don't love so much is the extra project associated with the book report. I'm one of the people who never had a problem with word counts or writing term papers or the like (can you tell?). When given the option, I would write to my heart's content. I still remember in high school having to do a project for To Kill a Mockingbird that had to be "something creative." I chose to write a journal from the perspective of Scout. The extra projects Mister Man gets are all artsy crafty things.

That's not so bad when you're given directions, and we are. The problem comes with the expectations that the teacher has. She wants projects that show "effort" from a child. Our last one was to create a mask that showed the character traits of a main character in the book. Mister Man carefully colored many different pictures on a paper before cutting it out and attaching twine to make a mask that would sit on his face. He then created a legend for each symbol to describe its meaning.

When we received his book report back, he got good grades on his content and knowledge demonstrated. On the creative part, he got the lowest grade possible, including the comment, "Was this really your best effort?" (her emphasis, not mine) Actually, we thought he did a pretty decent job. We'd stepped it up from the first book report because he'd gotten only a so-so grade. At conferences, we asked her about it. She explained that she didn't want kids to just draw on the masks. She wanted to see "effort" which is defined in her mind as "something glued to the paper." Why gluing a feather shows more effort than carefully drawing and coloring one, I'm not sure... but we learned our lesson. (It also turns out that she had somehow missed seeing the legend that was stapled to the book report, which was part of her issue with his in particular.)

This time around, we discussed the mobile he was to make for his favorite scene. We talked about creating three different scenes to show the progression of action within the scene. We discussed what the scene would include. And then my mom watched the wee ones over a weekend and did their homework with them. When we headed to her house the next day, we saw a completed book report.

Yeah. By the way, that's supposed to be a king cobra attacking two people with an elephant stomping on it to rescue them. You can tell, right?

I can tell you right now what the teacher is going to say about this. My mom protested that he'd spent a lot of time working on it and put a lot of effort into it. Unfortunately, it doesn't show. I absolutely don't believe in parents doing their kids' homework and projects (though I can see that not everyone at my school has the same belief), but there are times where I can say that something needs to be done to a certain standard - if only to protect him from disappointment down the road when he's otherwise crushed by his teacher's commentary on his project. I tried to convince him to recreate it, but it was a no go.

Or it was a no go. The other day, he left the mobile on the ground. Our cats discovered the ribbons attached to it and chewed them off, ripping the paper as they did so. He now had to recreate his project. Bummer. I did none of the work, but I showed him how to trace the snake to make it look more lifelike. We discussed what to include in each scene and how to create it. And I think it looks a whole lot better, and he's really proud of it.

It's December. I only have five more of these this year to do for him. And how many more years of school for these projects? Spending hours and hours cutting out figures and creating scenes that "show effort" is not helping him to learn more about the book. It's not helping him get excited about reading. It is helping him hate art projects almost as much as I do, however.

Wordless Wednesday: Weirdest Kids Ever

It's official. I do truly have the weirdest kids ever. This was what I saw when I peeked outside on Friday morning while waiting for the bus and carpool to arrive.

Why yes, yes they are shoveling the garbage cans. With their shovels. For some unknown reason. Of course, this was also after I looked outside originally and saw Little Miss scraping snow off the top with her glove and then licking it. Ewww. Yuck. So. Grossed. Out.

Tasty Tuesday - Pumpkin Chocolate Muffins

There was a bake sale at Mister Man's school last week. Remember those and how fun they were to pick and choose what you wanted from all the great bakers in the community, ooooing and ahhhing over the delectable delights? Most schools no longer allow this or just have store bought items (boo!), but we're lucky that ours still allows a bake sale from homemade goodies. Of course, I had to bake, too.

I couldn't choose something easy or simple that I knew a lot of people would be making. No brownies or chocolate chip cookies or sugar cookies for me. I had to find something that I thought would be unique for the bake sale but still appealing and somewhat seasonal. I finally decided to make pumpkin chocolate muffins, and they were awesome. Even better, they were dairy and nut free, so some students who normally can't purchase treats were able to enjoy them, too.

Pumpkin Chocolate Muffins

Ingredients:
4 eggs
1 1/2 c granulated sugar
1 15oz can pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie filling)
3 c flour
2 t baking soda
1 1/2 t baking powder
2 t cinnamon
1/2 t nutmeg
1/2 t salt
2 c chocolate chunks (mini chips work, I chopped a bar of dark chocolate)

Directions:
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees (I always bake with my convection oven, which means I preheat to 300 for baking - mine has a great feature that recalculates the temp and time for baked goods using a convection). You can make these regular size muffins (about 2 dozen) or mini muffins (up to 8 dozen). Either grease your tins or line them with muffins papers.

Beat the eggs and sugar in a large bowl until it's lighter in color and has grown in volume. Add the pumpkin puree and oil, and beat again.

Add the baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt to the bowl and mix well. Add the flour and stir slowly until mostly blended. While there are still some white streaks add the chocolate chunks/chips. I would not use full size chips if you're making mini muffins. And the unique shapes that chopping a bar of chocolate adds was pretty cool in the muffins, something I would definitely do again.

Add the batter to the muffin tins, filling about 2/3 of the way full. Bake in your 350 degree oven for 20 minutes, until a tester comes clean (or they spring back when you touch them - with mini muffins, especially, I go for the touch test when baking). Let the muffins cool a couple minutes, then remove them from their pans. If your muffins are stuck to the pans, check out my cool solution. Because, yes, some of my muffins stuck. I successfully rescused them all, however.

Enjoy this and more with Blessed With Grace and Tempt My Tummy Tuesday. Also posting now with A Southern Fairytale and her Mouthwatering Monday.

How To Get Stuck Muffins Out From The Tin Without Ruining Them

If you haven't noticed, I love cooking. And baking. That doesn't mean that I don't have my issues while baking. I really hate it when I make something and it sticks in the pan. It's so frustrating to go through the effort of making something delicious and then having it ruined by not coming out when it's supposed to. I found a great solution.

Of course, nothing beats actually properly greasing your pans, but there are times when I think I greased every part of it but missed something. For muffins, I generally try squeezing the top of the muffin and twisting gently so that it releases. There is a portion of the time when the muffin top simply breaks off, of course. Those muffins simply need to be eaten.

When I had a few muffins start sticking last week, having a multitude of broken muffins wasn't an option. They were for a bake sale, and I had a minimum quantity I had to bake and didn't have the time or energy to make more. I had to find a better solution. After frantically taking a mental inventory of my kitchen, I found my new favorite tool.

My fondue fork was perfect. It was slim enough to fit down the sides of the pan without damaging the muffins, and it was long enough to give me leverage to be able to get the muffins out. It worked beautifully. I simply gently slid it along the edge of the muffin, trying to lever it out. If it moved, great. It not, I simply slid it sideways a bit and tried again. Not a single muffin stayed stuck. It was awesome.

I'm wondering if it would work with my molten chocolate cakes, too.... And yes, I'll share the recipe for the awesome pumpkin chocolate chip muffins I made tomorrow. Yum. And dairy free and nut free.

An Empty Toilet Paper Roll Is A Dangerous Thing

I have a post I've been wanting to write for awhile now. I've been mentally composing it and editing it, but I'm afraid to actually write it down for fear that I'll jinx myself. Silly me, I had planned to post it this week. But no, I have something much better to post about, lucky me. Because right now I'm doing midnight laundry. Again. Yes, it's the second time this week.

Why am I doing laundry this late (ok so it isn't really midnight, but it sure feels like it)? Trust me, it isn't from some misplaced compulsion to maintain a completely empty laundry basket. I haven't seen a fully empty laundry basket in a long time. And I already did laundry once today, so it's silly to do it again, right? Not so much, unfortunately. Laundry at this hour means I have to do laundry.

I was upstairs with Mister Man helping him find something after bedtime and we walked out of my bedroom where I saw the wee ones' bathroom door was closed and the light was on. I didn't think I'd left it like that a minute earlier, so I turned the knob and jokingly asked, "Who's in there now?"

That's when I saw Little Miss sitting on the floor with her pajamas in a pile in front of her. She wasn't fully awake, but she was working on it. As I stepped forward to see what the problem was, I felt something wet under my foot. My brain finally caught up to the rest of me, and I groaned. At least she'd made it into the bathroom and the tile floor, but the rug and her pjs (and socks she was wearing under her footie pjs for some reason) were soaked. I helped her into the shower and sighed.

Once she was back in bed, I picked up her dirty clothes and the now dirty bath towel and stuck them in the laundry. I shrugged and added the rest of the dirty laundry to fill the load before going back into her room to question her a little more. Slowly, slowly the story came out, as her personality is loathe to admit to anything she thinks might be doing something wrong, even when it isn't anything that's wrong or anything that's her fault.

There was a reason she had her accident in front of the door rather than anywhere else. She'd walked into the bathroom and seen that the toilet paper roll was empty. Her six year old assumption was that you can't go to the bathroom if there's no toilet paper. She knew where we keep the extra toilet paper, so she walked to that cabinet in front of the door and opened it. When she couldn't find any in there (the new giant pack was in the garage), she gave up.

Oh my poor peanut.

So let that be a warning to you. Always, always change the toilet paper. And yes, I'm talking to you. Trust me, you don't want to walk into what I did tonight. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some laundry to go change.