Mother’s Day

Order by May 5th for delivery by Mother’s Day. Free shipping + $20 gift certificate included with your gift of $25.00 or more! Use coupon code “mom” for free shipping to be applied and then I’ll email you your gift certificate as soon as your purchase is cleared.

Roasted Eggplant and Garlic Hummus

1 Cans Garbanzo Beans drained and rinsed (reserve about a cup of the liquid)
Juice of 1/2 lemon
2 T. Tahini
1 Roasted Eggplant
1 Head of Roasted Garlic
1-2 T. EVOO
1/3 t. of  salt

Preheat oven to 400.  Slice eggplant in half.  Remove excess paper from garlic (leave the tight paper), slice the top of the head off, just enough to expose the cloves.  Place garlic on aluminum foil, enough to wrap the whole head for cooking.  Drizzle with olive oil and salt.  Close foil around garlic and put tray in oven.

Let cook for about 45 minutes to an hour.  Until the eggplant looks like this:

Take the tray out of the oven and allow to cool a little bit.  When the foil is cool enough to touch, unwrap the garlic.

At this point, you can squeeze the cloves of garlic out of their wrapper and basically eat them.  They’re so delicious you could use them in place of butter on a good loaf of bread, or whip them into mashed potatoes or really anything.  If you’ve never roasted garlic, you really have to try it.  Amazing return for very little work.

Squeeze all of the garlic out of the head and scrape the eggplant out of it’s peel.  Drain and rinse the chickpeas. Add all the ingredients to your food processor except the olive oil and pulse until it’s well blended.  At this point, check for taste - it’s all about how you like it - maybe add more lemon - I added a little more salt, but I really like salt.  Adjust your seasonings if necessary and close the processor.  Add 1 t. of olive oil and process.  1 might be enough.  I added the second one as it looked a little dry to me.

Transfer to an airtight container and chill.  To serve, I sliced fresh cucumber, drizzled a little olive oil and sprinkled some paprika for color.

Learning to Ride

Today my daughter learned how to ride a bike.  We’re a little bit late in the ride a bike department, I know.  So sue me. We never really lived anyplace that was conducive to bike riding and we didn’t have a bike.  So Jim figured that while we still have this much property, it’s time for the kids to learn.  Yes, that means that the 14 year old doesn’t know how either.

Haley decided that today was the day she was going to learn to ride and learn she did.  In one hour. This child is the bravest person I have ever met.  No, she’s not fearless, she’s brave.  She will not allow fear to keep her from doing something, whether it’s swimming, or riding, getting up on a horse or singing in public, she musters up her courage and just moves forward.

You can see the determination on her face.  And true to form, within an hour she was riding and riding and riding.

You go girl.

Home Made Ketchup/Catsup (Tomato, tomahto)

It seems they don’t make the lowcarb ketchup anymore, and the regular ketchup is full of evil crap high fructose corn syrup, so what’s a girl to do?  Make her own, of course.

1 6 oz. can of tomato paste
1 8 oz. can of tomato sauce (check the ingredients, we don’t want any funky stuff here)
1 T. Worcestershire Sauce
4 T. Splenda
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder (I’ve also used minced onion here about a teaspoon, but I was out of them)
put all ingredients in a bowl, whisk until blended.  When you taste this, be careful - you really want to chill it before you start adding more ingredients as it tastes more mellow when it’s chilled.

I’m also starting to experiment with other sweeteners as I’m not as in love with fake sugar as I used to be, although anything’s better than evil crap HFCS.

Kajeet Phone Giveaway

******Update!  We have a winner!**********

Remember when I wrote about kids and cellphones? Well, I won a contest that was going on at Twitter Moms for having the best tips regarding kids and cellphone usage!  I won a beautiful LG Rumor from Kajeet with $150 in the wallet to be used towards services.

This phone features a QWERTY keyboard with MP3 player, easy parental controls that allow you to set up when and how it is used - allowances, timeblocks and it’s GPS enabled!

Kajeet is a very different kind of cell phone company;  plans starting from $4.99, always free parental controls, very flexible add-ons and no contracts! Unfortunately, I don’t have a plan this flexible and have at least a year and a half left on our family plan.  I contacted the folks at Kajeet and asked them if it would be ok to transfer the prize to someone else and they very graciously agreed to give the prize to one of my readers.  So cool, right?

So if you need a great cell phone with all the bells and whistles as well as a $150 credit for your little one, please leave a comment to enter.  If you tweet it or blog about it, come back and leave another comment (three entries per person) with the exact link for another entry.  On May 1st, I’ll choose a random number and you could be the winner of this way cool phone!

Next Page »