Wednesdays with Yoyo

This fall Keanu and his dad and grandma have spent most of their Wednesdays with Yoyo and her little brother Charlie since she only has a half day of school on Wednesdays. Since I was free this week, I joined the party. Actually, Yoyo came up to our house for a bit, too. After naps and homework, Yoyo and I took Keanu to the park. It sure is more fun to play in the playground if there's a big girl to chase and show you how to do all the scary stuff like crossing the bridge.

Later, we came back to make dinner. Yoyo always seems to enjoy playing in the kitchen, so she made us some homemade pizza! She had a bit of help, but she did pretty well, huh?

Christmas Cookies!

Last weekend we invited some dear friends over for a Christmas tradition - making Christmas cookies! While the moms and a few girls (for a short time!) played in the kitchen, the dads were supposed to watch the kids play with Keanu's toys. Well, the dads did a good job of pretending to watch the kids while Keanu's Grandma and Aunt Teresa did most of the "babysitting." The good news was that they mostly stayed out of the way until the cookie thieves came down and found some good things to eat! They did a pretty good job of cleaning up the crispier ones!

In addition to the good company and good cookies, the clean-up crew was pretty nice, too!

Menu Plan Monday

Monday: grilled cheese sandwiches and chicken noodle soup
Tuesday: Chicken Cacciatore and pasta
Wednesday: oven fried chicken and vegetables
Thursday or Friday: Chicken Pot Pie or hot chicken sandwiches (I think I'll need the recipe from Mom, though!)

Notice a theme here? Chicken! After the last trip to Costco, the gigantic packages of meat were thrown in the freezer without being divided first. That means I've got 2.5 kg of chicken thighs defrosting in my fridge right now that needs to be cooked before it goes bad. With Kevin teaching most nights, it'll be a lot of chicken for Keanu and I to eat... Do you think we can do it? What's your favorite chicken recipe?

Creepy Crawly Spiders

We're going to a Halloween party this afternoon so this morning I got a bit creative. Here's the snack we're providing:

I started with a basic recipie and then decided to shape them like spiders (hopefully they look like spiders, anyway!)

No-Bake Candy Cookies
2 cups sugar
4 Tbsp. cocoa
1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup milk
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup peanut butter
3 cups oatmeal
Mix in saucepan: sugar, cocoa, butter, milk, and salt. Boil 1 minute. Add vanila, peanut butter and oatmeal. Let cool slightly. This is what it looks like:

Instead of just plopping them onto the aluminumium foil-covered pan, I filled a round cookie cutter with the batter less than 1/2 inch thick. At first I put 6 in a cake pan, but when I tried to add the legs, there wasn't really enough room.

I added 2 chocolate chips as eyes.
To make the legs, I used the same batter to shape something that looked like spider legs, but that was kind of difficult because as the batter cooled, it was harder to make it stick together. I think in the future I'll use something easy and flexible like black licorice (yuck) or maybe just pipe some melted chocolate onto the pan beside the cookies.



Happy Halloween!