Cinnamon Roll Easter Bunny - Pinterest Busters

Pinterest - the little corner of the world where everything is beautiful and perfect. One of the things our homeschool co-op likes to do is see if all that perfection is real or a ruse.  This week we tackled a few Easter pins. 

Since our co-op is three boys, we tend to navigate towards food pins and tried the cinnamon roll Easter bunnies.  The boys bravely opened the cans of premade cinnamon rolls.  Those things scare the crap out of me, but they didn't even flinch.

They spread out the rolls for the head and cut one roll apart to have dough for the ears.  The directions stated to leave a space in the middle of the ear to allow for the dough to grow.  Pop them in the oven following the baking directions on the can if you haven't already thrown the can away.

After frosting we added a couple chocolate chips for eyes and a nose.  They turned out pretty cute and delicious.

We would call this pin a success because, even if you make the ears to short, you have cinnamon roll bears.

Irish Colcannon with Kale

This is an Irish dish, but don't feel like you have to save it for St. Patrick's Day, enjoy it all year.

Make mashed potatoes as you normally would.  In a separate pan put 5 - 6 tablespoons butter, 3 cups chopped kale and 3 chopped green onions with the tops.  Cook about 5 minutes, you want the onions and kale soft but not mushy.  Mix potatoes and kale/onion mixture together.  Serve in bowl with a plop of butter in the middle of the potatoes (the best scoop comes from the middle of the bowl).

This can also be made with cabbage, Swiss chard or any other hardy green.

Celebrating National Days

There is a national day for just about everything under sun. They range from the common, such as, Grandparents Day, that even gets a mention on most calendars, to the uncommon celebration of the rather morbid National Life Insurance Day. Over the last couple of years we have added celebrating these days into our homeschool.  We mostly focus on the days that are food related or one that can be celebrated with food. The first reason for the food focus is our co-op is teenage boys, who are always looking for something to eat, and secondly, teenage boys are not interested in making a craft that goes along with a theme.  There might be one, or maybe even two out there, but I don't know them.

In the last few days we have celebrated National Milkshake Day, I recommend peanut butter

and National Cheeseburger Day.

There are lots of websites out there to tell you what day it is, here is one to get you started National Day Calendar. I can tell you, I have my eye on the up coming National Ice Cream Cone Day (19th) and National Corn Beef Hash Day (27th).  

How To Prepare Spaghetti Squash

We were given a spaghetti squash a few years ago from someone who had a garden overflowing with them and loved it.  The next couple of years we thought that we would just grow our own and not have to rely on kindness from others.  Well, we were unsuccessful in getting them to grow for some reason and gave up on them.  This summer we decided to try our hand at them again and we grew a plant that took over the garden.  I don't know why some years certain plants grow and other years they don't.   Anyway, if  you're fortunate enough to get your hands on a spaghetti squash, here is what you do with it.

Split it in two and scoop out the stuff in the middle.  You can roast the seeds like pumpkin seeds for an extra treat.

Lay it cut side down on a tray with a little bit of water and bake it at 350 degrees for about half an hour.

Take it out and rake over the flesh with a fork.  The strands, or spaghetti, will easily pull away from the rind.  Use this just as you would spaghetti.  

4-H Favorite Food Show Potato Salad

Favorite food show is a project where you highlight one of your favorite foods by constucting a theme (Spark's was obviously 4th of July) and complete a menu around it and then present it to a judge. This year Spark chose Potato Salad.  You can never go wrong with homemade potato salad and this year it won him a blue ribbon.  I can actually brag about our potato salad recipe because when there is a potluck, often times we will get requests for our dish to be potato salad. It's not a family secret so here is the potato salad recipe.

Spark's potato salad was a little harder to make this year than usual because our stove died and we haven't gotten around to getting a new one. To boil the eggs and potatoes he had to haul out the camping stove so he had a little extra twist to tell about his dish. The rest of his meal was a burger, baked beans, chips, sweet iced tea and, if you can see the little flag on the top of napkin, mini Resees Peanut Butter Cups arranged as a flag.

To complete his theme he wore a USA t-shirt.

Besides making the food the kids also need to know what nutrients are in the the meal, how much it costs and anything else the judge can think up.

Dutch Oven Pizza

Step 1: Before starting the fire to make the coals to go around the Dutch Oven, remove your cat from the top of your fire pit.

Step 2: After starting the fire, bring your dog out to enjoy the evening with you. Don't forget a pillow for her to lay on because the chair is cold.

Step 3: Spray the inside of the oven with cooking spray or rub with butter.  Spread out the pizza dough and smear with pizza sauce.

Step 4: Layer on the toppings.

Step 5: Bake.  Have plenty of coals or this takes a long time to get done. 

We were baking rolls in our other oven and could have used way more coals.  It took a good 50 minutes for this to get done and it was torture waiting that long.

Step 6: Slice and enjoy!

Dutch Oven Maiden Meal

We have been scouring the thrift stores for a Dutch oven the last few months with no luck in finding one.  People must not part with them, or else it is going to go the other way and now that we finally bought one I will start seeing them for sale everywhere. We choose a traditional cast iron one with legs and the curved handle.  They make really fancy ones, but those come with quite the price tag so we went with one priced in the middle of the road.

First step in using the oven is seasoning it.  Just spray that baby all over with some Pam.  Bam, done!

For our first delicious delight, we threw in sausage, apples, a bag of cabbage and onion.  Dump it in, stir it up.

The coals to bake it need to be made before you put them on the oven.  To make them, burn logs in the fire and when they are black and charcoalish, lay them on the ground and then load some on the lid.

For the oven to bake the meal there needs to be heat from the bottom and the top.  Turn the oven every 15 minutes to avoid hot spots where your meal is burned on one side of the oven and raw on the other.  This goes for the lid as well, give that a little spin when you turn the pot.

When you are going to check how it's going in there, the suspense will be killing you, the cover needs to be completely cleaned off.  Remove all the embers and dust off the top or the meal will be adulterated with coals and ash. 

The end result was so worth the hour it took to cook this.

Cabbage and Hamburger Hotdish

I know the pictures not much to look at, but the dish is really tasty.  This is so fast to put together, almost as fast as those nights when you don't know what to make so scrambled eggs get served for supper. Also my family likes cabbage so we almost always have a head in the fridge. If this isn't the case for you it would take a little planning for the ingredients.

Cabbage and Hamburger Hotdish

1 1/2 pounds hamburger
1 large onion
2 cans cream of mushroom soup
3/4 cup milk
1 head cabbage
salt/pepper or other favorite spices

Brown the hamburger and onion.  Slice the cabbage and break apart in 9X13 pan.  Season cabbage with salt and pepper or other spices. Spread hamburger/onion over cabbage.  Mix together soup and milk.  Pour over top of hamburger.  Bake at 350 for about an hour until cabbage is soft.  If you needed to get dinner on the table quicker, just boil the cabbage and then put the dish together.

The Four Pound Hamburger and Three Pounds of Fries

Yep, that right, a 1-2-3-4 pound burger.  The boys in our co-op like to eat...a lot...and often. We thought, "Why not combine one of our favorite shows on the Travel Channel, Man vs. Food, and their seemingly hollow legs?" Our hypothesis was - is it possible to make a burger big enough along with fries to completely fill them up?  I'll tell you at the end.

First, the burger had to be made.  This took about 1 1/2 hours.  Thinking that they wouldn't be able to get down straight burger because it would be too dry, Dad mixed in a couple of eggs and crackers making it sort of like meatloaf.  He patted in a cast iron skillet because it would be too big to flip and it had to be cooked in a pan that could also go in the oven.  Before it hit the oven, he fried it on the stove to get the bottom done and then baked it in the oven.  After baking it was "flippable" so out of the oven came the burger.  Back on the stovetop it was flipped so that both sides were fried.

While that was cooking he sliced the bun.  In this case the only bun we could find big enough without having to make our own was a Kings Hawaiian round bread.

Toasted his bun in another frying pan.

Took it out of the oven when the liquids ran clear and it was cooked completely through.

Next came the layers of cheese. By now this behemoth smelled so good it could have been used as a torture device for getting people to talk.

Slapped on some mayo and a lettuce leaf.

Gingerly laid that bad boy on the bun and deposited a few rings of onion on the top.

Pickles on the side, three pounds of fries and lunch was ready to be served.

Ready to dig in.

We sliced it into wedges and 

they started eating.  

So can our boys eat a gigantic burger and a pound of fries apiece? 

The answer is......

no.  

They put a really good dent in it, but they just couldn't finish it.

As an aside, looking at the picture now it looks like they were throwing back a  beer with it, but that was innocent apple juice. It was a fun lunch and they were quiet the rest of the afternoon. Perhaps they were napping.

Homemade vs. Store Bought OREOs

Our homeschool co-op is all boys and they like to eat so we do a lot of cooking when we get together.  The mom's don't complain either ;)

  

We were talking and realized that you never hear about people making homemade OREOs.  So the boys tried their hand at it.  The recipe they made was from the web site momables.

They cut them out with a shot glass (or a two table spoon sampler as Spark calls it) which was the perfect size.

The verdict?  If you have a hankering for OREOs, then buy the real thing.  The homemade are delicious, but they aren't OREOs, they taste more like the chocolate waffle cookies I made as a kid.

Make a box cake taste like it came from a bakery.

I saw this on Facebook as I was zooming through posts of friends so I am not sure where the proper credit goes for this idea.  What I do know is that we will not be making box cake according to the directions given on the box anymore.  

The kids and I decided to to do a taste test.  We chose a plain, white cake mix for the simple reason that we had two of those on hand and we wanted to compare cake to cake not one flavor to another.  One was made business as usual and the other we used the steps from above.

The cake on the left is the bakery taste cake and on the right is the regular box cake.  As you can see, they aren't even the same color.  And the taste, well, there was more difference in the taste and texture than in the color.  In fact, the bakery taste cake was so good that after our taste test, we scraped the non-bakery cake out of the pan and took it out to the chickens.  They didn't get to taste the other one so they didn't know how bland it was. Sorry chickens!

Happy New Year from Pinterest

Our New Years Eve was going to be low key, we watched New Year's Eve programing and did a jigsaw puzzle.  Even so, we needed to have a few fun things so I turned to Pinterest.

2015 in pizza.  This was Dad's homemade pizza therefore it was scrumptious.

Chocolate dipped ice cream bowls.  We had never had these before and they are quite good.  Real simple to jazz them up, dip them in melted chocolate (we used almond bark) and sprinkles.

Dancer went to a party, but was home by midnight (maybe we aren't as boring as we think).  The pin showed to have balloons with time on them counting down the entire evening, but since Dancer was only here at midnight we opted to only have one.

And Nikki.  She spent the night begging for pizza and lounging on us while we watched t.v.  A dog's life is the life to have.

Grilled Cheese in the Oven - Pinterest Busters

Our Helmets Required co-op got together for another round of Pinterest Busters, this time trying out if you can make a good grilled cheese in the oven.

After readying the sandwiches as you would to make them in a pan, we put them on cookie sheets.  We tried regular metal sheets and the Pampered Chef stones.  Put the sandwiches on one sheet and cover them with another.  The oven was preheated to 350 degrees and we popped them in.

About 20 minutes later, about the time I could have made at least 20 sandwiches on the stove, we had six flat, pale, dry sandwiches.  We put them back in for about another 5-10 minutes and they did brown up a bit, but again they were dry.  They did work better on the metal sheets than the stones.

Dancer cranked the oven up to 400 degrees and that sandwich did turn out looking more like a proper grilled cheese sandwich.  We could probably play around with the temperature and the type of cookie sheet we used to make them better.  However, our recommendation is, if you have a frying pan and a burner, make them on the stove not in it.  We would call this pin semi-busted, yes we made grilled cheese, but it was substandard.

The boys also made TF2 (Team Fortress 2) steam game sandviches.  Sandvich, it's suppose to sound Russian.  What they wanted to know is if the sandvich tasted good.  Surprise!  It did!  I think that was a creative way on their part to ensure lunch during co-op ;)