Cubano pork chops and bowling

Last night's dinner was oh crazy yummy...took 3 bone in bone in pork chops and marinaded them for 5 min in olive oil, bbq 300, allspice, coriander seed and some agave syrup, then my hubby grilled them for me.  I also took some corn which I wrapped with butter and salsa verde that also went on the grill, topping the whole meal off with chopped tomato salad with fresh herbs.  The whole dinner was a based on this idea from RachaelRay, as I had a really hard time finding the peppers and thinking that they might have been a bit much for my two ladies I opted for the tomato salad from last week that the girls loved, specially easy as I had all the ingredients on hand including the last of my ripe tomatoes from the garden.  All in all a very very lovely diner and one to be remembered.

Then after the super meal we had the girls had their baths and Isabel had her first night without her cup of milk in bed before sleeptime, she did superbly and both slept the night so I'm not complaining.  Abigail has happily been going down for over a week now without that milk as she had a tendency to just throw the cup out of the crib along with her binky now she seems a lot more settled and we have less tantrums and throwing at night so that is a huge improvement.  Isabel I was starting to notice was smelling a lot of stale milk where it was spilling in the crib as she was drinking, not the most pleasant of smells so I decided last night we needed to put a stop to it.  Isabel is one of those children that does adapt to new things easily so I had a feeling it was going to be ok but you never know.  She did look around for her sippy cup but after she saw it wasn't there she just laid back in the crib let me read the story with minimal fuss and they both did a great job of going to sleep pretty easily.

Once the kids were down Mum got to go and enjoy herself at the bowling alley, totally redeemed myself over last weeks showing and had fun as always with the ladies, shame I had another headache but it did manage to fade by the end of the evening only giving me a bit of a problem once or twice.  Oh and my final set of games I achieved a whopping 147!  Not as good as Diane's when she broke her finger but decent for me.  First game was ok with a decent 112 and I managed to walk away the overall winner for a change, and only one game where I zeroed out completely.  Thanks for the fun and games ladies love ya all.

A taste of Denmark

It's been awhile since we have been to a different country on our Monday nights, but I finally went there last night:)  So we started off with some smørrebrød (open sandwich) with cream cheese and smoked salmon, and yes the twins loved it :)  along with everyone else, I then followed that up with frikadeller, with creamed cabbage and boiled potatoes.  Now I could have used ground pork to cut down on the prep time a little but other than that it was fairly basic and pretty successful.  Then the star of the show was a sour cream banana cake.  Now yeah I know that's not traditional Danish no really it's not, who ever heard of bananas growing in Denmark?  But I like the recipe and it does have Danish origins, so I took a little liberty.  All in all a not that far out of there meal that everyone enjoyed for the most part so I deem it an official success.  My secret confession tho I wish I could have had some herring in sour cream but I just knew that would not have gone down well:)  And our next port of call...drumroll please


CYPRUS

Hmm could be interesting, first impressions are it will be similar to Greece but hey I could be wrong.  Either way not a bad place to go visiting :)

Moderation and the lazy days of summer

Moderation on all comments...sorry after some trolling posts in my comments I will now moderate all comments posted to this blog.  I really object to having remove irrelevant posts that have nothing to do with what this is about and I had a spate of them the other day to the point where I wanted to lock this down more.

This week has been jam packed or so it feels.  James has been working hard (not abnormal), but I've been hanging out a bit more with friends and even went on a day trip with them to the jellybean factory.  All in all it's been a fantastic week and one for which I've been proud of my girls as they have been extraordinarily well behaved.  I also managed to have a girls night out with the ladies in the picture and one other which was a blast despite Diane (2nd from right back row) lacerating and getting a compound fracture of her left hand index finger...she had a great game I might add!

Sweet end of summer recipe

This one was a real hit with everyone including the girls, chicken pillards with herb-tomato salad.  I have to say I'm really proud of both my little ones this week, Abigail did well eating pan cooked chicken with Brussell Sprouts, I can't find the recipe I used but it entailed cooking bacon in my iron skillet, removing it then cooking the chicken and sprouts in the rendered fat and then adding back the bacon at the end.  My only problem with the meal is what goes in must come out, the diapers the next day were a little pungent :)

I have some interesting meals coming up this week now the weather has cooled off some.  We are finally taking our trip to Denmark on Monday which should be interesting, and I'm making my cheese less lasagna which is a hit for 2 days and I get to use my lasagna pan for the first time for it's real purpose :)

Saw a great dish set in Costco for pasta and was drooling over that big time.  It's one of the few things I really would like a large round pasta serving bowl with smaller pasta bowls, just because it's one of the staple winter items.  Oh did I mention we are also going to visit Asia with some phunky pho?

Cool dinner new additions and fun

This week has been a blast compared to last week in fact we really only have had one down day so far this week and this morning I was able to order our new TV /drool a 58" flat screen and a new receiver.  We will be getting the hardware we need and doing the pre installation work over the next week, then a week on Monday they will come and take the old piece of junk away and put up the new one.  I cannot wait!  This is a huge tv compared to our current 34" crt.  Now don't get me wrong that CRT has done us proud and got us through the last 6 years but it's time to retire, to heavy to big and not easy to child proof!  We have shelves up on the wall in preparation for the new baby, just seemed the easiest cheapest solution for getting everything out of the way that allows for ventilation.  Maybe I'm just paranoid but I find the majority of tv and electronic cabinets just don't give enough ventilation, they look great don't get me wrong but do the furniture designers know how hot an xbox or cable receiver actually gets?! 

For the love of parsnips...

I am so happy the weather is cooling down early this year and I can start using the oven and breaking out the fall / winter recipes, although as I proved to myself last night you don't have cook everything inside even then.  Now I love parsnips, I really do and my little ladies quite enjoy them as well, I love their flavor which is quite unique in my opinion.  So I was excited by my October issue of the Rachael Ray magazine where they had a recipe idea for parsnip frittatas, oh yeah baby and done in a skillet, easy just use the cast iron skillet out on the grill!  Bingo instant hit with me before I even started cooking.  Unfortunately I used too many parsnips and not enough eggs so they didn't really hold together well so it turned more into a parsnip pancake, I also forgot to buy scallions / green onions for the recipe as well so I dug into the fridge and found the last of my shallots and grated that into the mixture instead, with despite these substitutions and over use of ingredients we still had a fabulous dinner.  So nice to be doing something other than roasting parsnips and learning to use the veggie in other ways.

Another mile stone was also achieved last night, Abi went into her crib and to sleep without her night cap.  I have been getting fed up to be honest of making it for her and it just going on the floor and she has been barely drinking, so when faced with one clean sippy cup and the prospect of messing about with the dishwasher I decided to tempt fate and make one up for Isabel only...it actually was a far calmer bed time routine than it has been in like forever so I shall try again tonight and see what happens. 

New foods, and a promise for more frequent updates

Last night's dinner was amazing!  Oh boy oh boy was it good, I used my new Arizona Dreaming spice mix from Penzy's Spices and made the cover recipe from the last catalog, I have to say this was an absolute hit with the whole family, and fairly healthy to boot.  This new spice lacks sodium which is great for me because I need to avoid as much salt as possible.  The spice mix has a bit of heat but a great mix of flavors and the sauce just complimented the rice, the only thing I didn't do was the corn, I had it but ended up rushing a bit and forgot to put it on the grill early enough so I will leave that to go with tonight's dinner instead.  It's not a hard recipe and can easily be adapted for the grill, this one is a keeper guys.  In addition I also baked the poppy seed berry cake at the back of the catalog, oh yummy!  It's worth trying but you can easily use fresh lemon peel instead of the dried reconstituted peel the recipe calls for., the cake is moist and not too hard to make.  This is also not the first cake I've made this week as I challenged myself to make a coconut cake, I wasn't entirely happy with the final result of that one as the cake em sank in the middle making it a challenge to cover with icing.  However the cake was loved by everyone so not going to complain too much.

We also made a much needed trip to Ikea this weekend, James was an Ikea virgin mwhaha, although next trip will probably involve my Mum and Dad and we will make a day of it and eat there most likely as well.  We were bummed that a lot of the items even tho they were on display were not in stock when we got there, very frustrating which meant backtracking to another part of the store once we got to the warehouse to find alternative solutions, in actual fact I think the alternate probably ended up looking better than the original ideas.  I was also able to get the spice rack and kitchen tools I've been drooling over for a long time enabling us to free up more kitchen counter space and making it easier to find the items I use most commonly in cooking, and I've finally been able to toss out my oh so useless paper towel holder.  All in all not sure I need much more for the kitchen now, I picked up another magazine holder to keep the most frequently used books and magazines in for cooking.  All in all I'm pretty happy with the look and design of the kitchen and there isn't much I would change although a built in soap dispenser to clean up round the sink.

So the plan is get the shelves up as we have to have those done and prepared for when we get our flat screen.  Why?  Well we need shelves for the electronics to link up to the tv once it's up, and we need to find an alternative place to keep all the dvds that are currently in the entertainment center as once the old tv is removed that whole unit has to go or it will become a climbing frame and we both can see someone getting hurt very easily.