Father and son Super Soaker lesson
Share:
Category Archives jl
Amazing eggplant meal and more
I will admit it, I am a very lucky woman. Why you ask? The real list would be quite long if I tried to elaborate. Today, I am thinking about dinner at our house. If you are married, does your husband cook dinner often? I can honestly say heck yes on this!
Not many wives can say that their husband does approximately 99% of the meal making for dinner. I can and am forever amazed with my husband for doing this most evenings. JL comes home from work and makes a meal, or has prepped it the night before. Seriously, he does this week in and out. I am not a huge fan of experimenting with new recipes, but JL likes to. Thanks to this, he has pretty much cooked dinner since we got married eight years ago.
We have a kosher kitchen at home. Most of our meals are meatless because of the extreme cost of kosher meat. We typically have chicken 2-3 times a month and fish 1-2 times a week. The rest of our meals are pretty much vegetarian by nature. We had been eating a lot of soy products – veggie burgers, Morning Star galore and other items like that. JL and I liked these meals, until they started to make me violently ill. I now believe that I have a soy allergy/intolerance. This puts another major kink in our menu planning. Now we are looking for recipes with lots of beans and vegetables in them.
Each week, JL and I sit down and plan out a menu and grocery list. On Saturday, we decided to try something new with the slow cooker. The dish was called Eggplant Italian and cooked for only four hours. The smell in our house was amazing and I could not wait to try this. I was not disappointed. Here is a tease of the dish.
You can read more this latest healthy meal success and see the recipe on TechyDad’s website.
If you have any good Slow cooker dishes/soup or other items to share we would be greatly appreciative.
Share:
- Categories:
- food glorious food jl photos yummy
Tie-Dyed Cheesecake Results and B-day summary
All day Monday, JL and I kept talking about how we could not wait to try the Tie-Dyed Cheesecake experiment that we made on Sunday. We were anxious to see if it would live up to our memories of the amazing cake that we had while at Disney’s Pop Century Resort in May. Monday evening finally arrived. JL and I dropped the boys off to have dinner with Nana and Papa. From here we drove to a new Chinese/Japanese/Thai restaurant to try. On our way we saw the fire engine that was mentioned on my Worldess Wednesday.
It was so nice having dinner together and not worrying about what the kids would eat. We quickly decided on some sushi rolls to share and ordered our meal. After a little while, our sushi appetizer arrived. Not only did it look amazing, it was absolutely delicious.
Just as we were finishing these up, our meals arrived. I decided to go with something safe, but not something that I typically get (beef and broccoli) and JL tried something quite different (spicy orange tofu).
Thanks to my digital camera being with us most of the time, we were able to capture the photos of our wonderful meal. Of course, taking photos during your meal gets you looks. Our waitress came over. Of course, I had to explain that we blog and take pictures to show JL’s birthday meal. A little while later, while waiting for our packaged leftovers, the waitress and another come over. The two of them were singing happy birthday to JL while carrying ice cream with a lit candle on top.
Once we were done with dinner, we went back to my parent’s house to have the much anticipated Tie-Dyed Cheesecake. I quickly opened up the spring form pan so we were able to see more of the colors.
Then it was time to sing Happy Birthday to JL and dig into the cake.
Finally, it was time to cut inside and see if it looked anything like the much loved cake from Disney’s Pop Century Resort. Here is a reminder of what the cake there looked like.
This is what we saw when we sliced inside the cake . . .
As you can imagine, we were all disappointed. It looked nothing like the cake of our dreams from the memories in May. This cake was 2/3 red velvet and only 1/3 cheesecake. NHL actually thought the cheesecake was frosting on top of the regular cake. Basically the proportions of the cake were flipped.
Don’t get me wrong, the recipe is not a bust. It was not horrible. However, as cheesecake fans we loved the cheesecake part, which was a mere blip in the cake. In the end, we figure we would try this recipe again. Next time we would likely use 1/3 of the cake mix, or possibly only 1/4 of it. Then we would at least double the cheesecake portion. We figure this would fix the proportions. In addition to this, we would not cook the red velvet all the way during the first time in the oven. We figure mostly baked would allow it not to dry out quite as much. Of course, we may also try this recipe that my friend who made this on Monday found after we had both made these cheesecakes. Certainly not going to be any complaints from the family about eating another cheesecake!
_______________________________________________________________
Submitted as part of Grace’s Kitchen Friends on Feels Like Home.
Share:
- Categories:
- baking birthday Disney food glorious food jl looking back photos yummy
Birthday wishes for TechyDad
Today is a special day in our family. It is the reason three of us spent time baking an extra special cheesecake for tonight. On this day, many years ago in a city that often appears to be in a galaxy far far away, my husband was born. Today JL will be spending the day at work, coding lots of important items. Thanks to going in early this week, he will leave to pick NHL up from Dinosaur Camp. From there we will be dropping the boys off to have dinner with Nana and Papa. Not sure where JL will pick to have his B-day dinner, but my guess is something that involves sushi. After that we will head back to get the boys and finally test out the tie-dyed cheesecake together.
Here are some new photos from the weekend of my amazing husband with our boys. These are when we went to build at Home Depot Saturday morning to make a message center. I can already see the future when JL teaches the boys to build their own computers from individual components.
Later in the afternoon, it was sunny out and we went to the park. All three of the boys had fun running all over the place. The two little guys even had some special one-on-one time with JL.
Last year I wrote a piece, with lots of photos, about our years together and it still sums everything up. JL is the geek of my dreams and I love him more and more each day. Most women would only dream about an amazing husband who cooks dinner almost every night, cleans the bathroom, and loves to play with the kids. This is my reality and I am truly blessed to have found my TechyDad and married him.
Share:
- Categories:
- birthday jl looking back my boys photos
The Pop Century Tie-Dyed Cheesecake experiment
Back in December, we did a lot of research to try to figure out which Disney World resort to stay at. Several of the Disney message boards had amazing posts with information about anything and everything you could ever want to know. Seriously, they had information about the rooms, pools, buses, and even the food. Best of all, they had photos of items that helped to lure us into staying at the Pop Century Resort.
One night, JL and I were sitting at the laptop reading about the Pop Century. At the time our reservations were at a different value resort on Disney property. We read about all of the activities that took place at Pop Century each day, especially for kids that were NHL’s age. Then we looked at photos of things from the food court. We were immediately intrigued by something called tie-dye cheesecake. The photos were amazing and we sat there almost drooling. Several days after this we changed our reservations to Pop Century Resort.
When we went to Disney in May we knew that we HAD to try the tie-dye cheesecake. Of course, we did just that one morning as part of our breakfast splurge.
We had this colorful, delicious treat twice while on our week long vacation. . . so did my parents. A short while ago JL did a search for the tie-dye cheesecake on Google. He found a recipe mentioned on Slashfood.com that compared itself to the cheesecake at the Pop Century Resort. Today we went grocery shopping and JL mentioned that he wanted to try making this. It seemed like the perfect time since his birthday is tomorrow. So we bought the red velvet cake mix, got bricks of cream cheese, and bought food coloring just in case we needed it.
When we got hom JL and NHL baked the 9" round red velvet cake in our never used springform pan from my bridal shower. It also made a dozen cupcakes with the extra batter. Then I switched out and made the cheesecake part. We opted to only do four colors this time around. So I mixed green, blue, purple and yellow for our experiment. Here is the cake just as it was heading into the oven to bake the cheesecake part on top of the red velvet cake.
Now this colorful creation is baked, cooled and chilling.
Tomorrow we will slice in to test and see how our colorful creation tastes when we have it to celebrate TechyDad’s birthday.
_______________________________________________________________
Submitted as part of Grace’s Kitchen Friends on Feels Like Home.
Share:
- Categories:
- baking birthday Disney food glorious food jl looking back vacation yummy
Associated With
