Typical scenes at our house these days:

There are several diaper changes:

There's lots of play time in the exersaucer--a favorite!

There's generally some rocking--sometimes Grandpa gets to enjoy this.

He loves to play on the floor and is just on the verge of crawling.

Sometimes he plays on the bed although this is a limited activity now that he's nearly crawling.

Eating is a favorite activity, especially when it involves carrots or squash.

Can you tell we are having lots of fun together?

Becka

Oatmeal Cookies

3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 cup butter or margarine, softened
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla
2 eggs
3 cups old-fashioned oats
1 1/2 cups white whole wheat flour
3/4 cup dried blueberries
3/4 cup white chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In mixing bowl cream butter with sugars and vanilla. Add eggs then baking soda and salt. Stir in oats, flour, blueberries, and chocolate chips. Drop dough by heaping tablespoonfuls onto parchment-lined cookie sheets and bake for 10-12 mins. or until lightly browned. Cool briefly on cookie sheets before removing. Makes about 5 dozen small cookies.

You can substitute raisins or craisins for the blueberries. The white chips would be good with cranberries but you might want to use chocolate chips with the raisins or you could substitute chocolate covered raisins for a taste thrill.

On a totally unrelated note another wild creature was in our house this evening:

Becka

About 3:30 the morning of the wedding we got a call from DS, Mark telling us that Katie was in labor and they were at the hospital. About three hours before the wedding he texted to tell us that they had broken her water and that she was dilated to 9. We were definitely torn emotionally with extreme joy for Nora and Topher at their wedding and with concern for Mark and Katie and the delivery of the baby. Later in the afternoon we heard from Mark that Ryan David had arrived at 2:56 (the wedding was at 2). He was turned face up and they had to use suction to help with the delivery. It caused some swelling and a wound on his head, but we still think he's pretty adorable. Both parents and baby are doing well and hope to go home from the hospital tomorrow.

We weren't able to take too many pictures at the wedding or the reception, but I will try to post some as people send them to us. I'm sure I'll also be posting lots of baby pictures too!

Becka

This past year Megan and I collected children's Christmas books for my grandson Drew. She wrapped them in Christmas paper and he is opening one each day this December in anticipation of Christmas day. Here is a picture of him opening the first book:

On a recent thrifting excursion I found a couple of Sunset cookbooks that looked interesting. One of them had this recipe for Fresh Corn Madeleines which I thought would be great for making savory madeleines in the new pans I got for my birthday. If you don't have madeleine pans you could make the recipe in regular muffin tins.

Fresh Corn Madeleines

1/3 cup butter or margarine
1/2 cup minced onion
1 cup flour
1 cup yellow cornmeal
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 large egg
1 cup milk
1 cup fresh or frozen, thawed corn kernals

Melt the butter in a skillet and cook the onion until soft, about 5 minutes. Set aside to cool.

In a bowl blend together the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, and salt. In another bowl whisk together the egg and milk. Combine the butter and onion, the milk mixture, and the flour mixture, stirring gently until just mixed. Butter and flour the madeleine pans (I used a spray) and then fill the pans. The amount you use will vary according to the size pans you have. Fill them about 2/3rds full. Bake at 350 degrees until firm to the touch. They will look pale on top but should be nice and brown on the bottom. Mine took about 15 mins. If baking as muffins bake for about 25 minutes.

I served these with Easy Beans and Rice and we thought they were very tasty. You can also freeze them and then thaw and reheat them for about 10 minutes at 300 degrees before serving.

Becka

While we were in Michigan we spent a day in Toledo, Ohio, and went to the zoo, ate supper at Tony Packo's and went to a Toledo Mud Hen game. Here are some pictures from our adventures that day:

The zoo has several polar bears, including this adorable 5 month old:

When we walked up to the gorilla enclosure this fellow ran up to the glass and banged on it giving us all quite a scare.

Drew really enjoyed petting and brushing the goats.

We ate supper at Tony Packos. We had heard about this restaurant for many years, but this was our first visit. We enjoyed it very much.

The restaurant was right across the street from the Toledo Mud Hen ball field:

Here are Meg, Jim, and Drew at the game:

Here we are at the game:

And, finally, here is Drew meeting the Mud Hen Mascot, Mudonna:

Becka

This is my egg tree that DH thinks looks like Charlie Brown's Christmas tree:

Our friend and my former college roommate, Cathy, came down from NC for a couple of days to see us and to attend the Living Gallery program on campus. This was the 13th year that the school has presented this program. This year's play had a very powerful evangelistic message.

While Cathy was here she wanted to reconnect with Jane, another friend from college. We were able to meet for lunch at a restaurant and hear about Jane's recent trip out west. As you can imagine, none of us has changed a bit in the last thirty or so years.

Everything is in full bloom here in Greenville. Rob brought in some daffodils and helleborus from our yard and I was given a lovely bouquet of tulips and a beautiful lily plant for Easter. I don't think I have ever had a lily before and I didn't realize that the white ones were so fragrant.

My Easter wheat grass experiment was a great success! I even had to "mow" my grass a couple of days before Easter because it was getting so tall. I need to make a note for future plantings that one week before Easter is sufficient for a healthy crop.

Here is the grass ten days after planting:

Here it is on our table for Easter:

I also tried a few more of the silk tie-dyed eggs. They are fun to do and I plan to try to do more of these in the future.

We had wonderful services at church on Sunday. The Sunday school hour was a time of focusing on the Lord's crucifixion and the morning service was a time of rejoicing in the resurrection. The evening service was a praise service where six different individuals were able to share how the Lord has worked in their lives in recent days.

We were also able to share lunch with family and friends gathered around our table. I hope all of you had an equally blessed day.

Before I close I need to post a couple of Easter pictures of GS, Drew.

Here he is meeting the Easter bunny at the mall:

Here he is tasting his first colored Easter egg. He was very excited about the whole process of coloring the eggs, but was very disappointed in the taste after eating marshmallow eggs earlier in the week!

Becka

We attended church at Faith Baptist Church of Warren and enjoyed the teaching and preaching there and talking with people we have come to know on our previous visits to the area.

We also took a couple of day trips while we were there. One that we all really enjoyed was a visit to Cook's Dairy Farm in Ortonville, Michigan. We started off our visit by having a dish of their delicious ice cream. Rob and I tried the Cowpucchino and Megan and Drew had the Cow Pie flavor. Both were really quite tasty. After our treat we toured the farm and enjoyed seeing the cows, calves, and pigs. Drew is at a stage where he really likes animals, so this was a very exciting activity for him. (The rest of us enjoyed it too!) Here is Drew meeting one of the cows:

Megan did a whole post about our trip to the dairy farm.

One afternoon we went to a local water park where we had fun watching Drew play in the fountains:

Another day we drove down to Bowling Green, Ohio to see Rob's mom again. Rob's sister, Deb, met us at the nursing home where we visited and had lunch and took some family pictures. Unfortunately it was very difficult to get all four generations looking the right direction at the same time! Here is one of our awkward family photos:

On the way back from Bowling Green we had to pass right by an IKEA store so we stopped by and did a little shopping and ate a nice supper of Swedish Meatballs and Mashed Potatoes. We always enjoy looking around in IKEA and even Drew had a nice time. He was fascinated with a little wooden stacking toy they had so he ended up with two of them -- one for at home and one for Poppi and Grandma's house.

Megan enjoys cooking and trying new recipes, so we generally try some new things when we are up visiting. One thing we tried while we were up there were Gorditas. Here I'm rolling them out:

Here Megan is baking them on a griddle:

Megan reads a number of cooking blogs and a woman had posted about making them from a recipe on the King Arthur Flour web-site. Just last week they featured this recipe on The Baker's Banter Blog in a step-by-step tutorial. These are really tasty and we ended making them twice during the week we were in MI and then once again while she and Drew were here visiting with us.

As I mentioned in an earlier post Megan and Drew accompanied us on the next leg of our trek and then came back to Greenville with us. In my next post I will chronicle our trip to Missouri.

Becka

I made pancakes Saturday morning for our breakfast since I know this is something Drew really enjoys. It also gave me a chance to try out the griddle on my new stove. It worked like a charm. Drew had plain pancakes, but the rest of us ate pancakes containing blueberries from the garden. Here are some pancakes on the griddle:

Here's the recipe for the pancakes. It's a really good recipe from an old Farm Journal cookbook.

Favorite Buttermilk Pancakes
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
2 Tbsps. sugar
2 eggs, slightly beaten
2 cups buttermilk
2 Tbsps. melted butter or oil

Stir together the flour, baking soda, salt, and sugar in a mixing bowl.

In another bowl combine the eggs, buttermilk, and melted butter or oil.

Combine the two mixtures by stirring just enough to moisten the flour. Do not over mix.

The batter may still be a bit lumpy. This is a thick batter. If you prefer a thinner batter you can add a bit more buttermilk, but in my humble opinion it makes perfect pancakes!

Bake on a lightly greased griddle (I grease it by holding a partially unwrapped stick of butter or margarine and running it over the hot griddle.) Dip batter by 1/4 cup measure. Turn when the bubbles on the top of the pancakes start to break and the top loses some of its shine. This amount will make enough for about four people with average appetites.

For the blueberry variation just drop a few berries on the pancakes while you are cooking the first side. You can also add chopped banana, nuts, well drained cherries, chocolate chips, etc.

Here's a picture of our little pancake eater:

]]> http://beckasblog.ivman.com/pancakes/feed/ 2 http://beckasblog.ivman.com/a-tale-of-two-lentils-and-a-two-year-old/ http://beckasblog.ivman.com/a-tale-of-two-lentils-and-a-two-year-old/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:49:09 +0000 Becka http://beckasblog.ivman.com/?p=292 Do you like lentils? I don't think I ever ate them until I was an adult. I grew up in the midwest where we ate a lot of great northern beans, navy beans, and kidney beans, but not lentils, blackeyed peas, or pinto beans.

The nice thing about lentils is that they cook quickly and don't need presoaking. At the moment I have two kinds of lentils in my cupboard.

My favorite lentils are these tiny green ones that are French lentils or lentils du puy (pictured here on the left). I first had them in France a number of years ago and at that time they became my favorites. I had difficulty finding them around here until a couple of years ago when I discovered them at one of our favorite restaurants here in Greenville, The Pita House. They have a large array of middle eastern groceries including a rainbow of lentils. Unfortunately I still had some of the less favored brown lentils (pictured on the right) in my pantry, so this week I decided to try a new soup recipe to use up some of them. It was actually pretty good, so give it a try if you like lentils. In a future post I will give you my favorite lentil recipe, so stay tuned, lentil lovers.

The recipe follows a picture of our grandson, Drew (who probably doesn't care for lentils) who just turned two!

Lentil Soup
1 pound lean ground beef
1 cup dried lentils, sorted and rinsed
1 cup peeled and diced carrot
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup chopped cabbage
1/2 cup chopped celery
generous grinding of black pepper
1 bay leaf
1 Tbsp. beef soup base or bouillon
4 cups water
2 cups tomato sauce (I used spaghetti sauce)
1 Tbsp. red wine vinegar

Brown ground beef in large soup kettle. Drain off fat and add onions and celery and cook a couple of minutes. Add all remaining ingredients except the vinegar. Heat to boiling and then reduce heat to a simmer. Simmer covered until vegetables and lentils are tender, about 30-40 mins. Just before serving add the vinegar.

Becka

He got George this past Christmas (actually he found his gift early, so his mother didn't have the heart to take it away from him!). The two have been inseparable since first meeting.

George has had some interesting experiences including a couple of showers and a swirly. George is very helpful to have around. Sometimes in the evenings or at naptime when "George is tired" Drew will very happily crawl into bed so that he and George can get some much needed rest!

I recently found this little George and purchased him for Drew's birthday which is coming up soon. This George is in his pajamas and is holding a little teddy bear. I'm not sure he will be as well loved as his predecessor, but perhaps he can stand in when George I is drying out from his next water adventure.

Another gift that is going into Drew's birthday package is this little gift set of the book Corduroy and a little Corduroy bear wearing green corduroy overalls. This set is in honor of Corduroy's 40th birthday.

So, if you see Drew, please keep these new friends a secret. Fortunately he doesn't read my blog, so I'm safe sharing these pictures with you.

Becka