Ginger sesame chicken

Ok, so food photographer, I am not!  The problem is, it's hard to take pictures while I'm cooking!  My energy is more focused on making sure that I'm reading the recipe (when I read recipes), or that I'm not burning the food.  Generally I have my phone in the kitchen next to me and can grab a quick crappy cell phone pic, that does the food no justice at all, but a picture of something is better than a picture of nothing! 

Anyway...Ginger Sesame Chicken...another favorite in our house!  One that is pretty easy to make, but at the same time, one that I don't make nearly often enough.  When I do make it, it's gobbled up pretty quickly.  I found the recipe in a cooking magazine a few years ago.  I can't remember which one it was, but the recipe is as follows:

1 tbsp. cornstarch
3/4 c. chicken broth
2 tbsp. sesame seeds
2 tbsp. maple syrup
4 tsp. soy sauce
1/2 tsp. ground ginger
1/4 tsp. pepper
1 1/2 lbs boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into 1" cubes
2 tbsp. olive oil, divided
1 c. chopped green pepper (Doesn't have to be green pepper.  I often will use orange or yellow peppers)
1/2 c. chopped onion
Hot cooked rice

In a small bowl, combine the first seven ingredients until blended; set aside
In a large sillet or wok, stir-fry chicken in 1 tbsp. oil for 4-6 minutes or until no longer pink. Remove and keep warm
Stir-fry green pepper and onion in remaining oil for 2 minutes.  Stir cornstarch mixture and add to the pan.  Bring to a boil; cook and stir for 1 minute or until thickened.  Add chicken; heat through
Serve with rice
Makes 4 servings

I'm back!

So, since this here blog doesn't get read tons, my absence most likely wasn't noticed!  In any case, we've been so insanely busy the last couple of weeks, that blogging has been the lowest on the list of priorities.  Simply surviving has been what life has been about lately.  The reason why?  Hubby was coaching boy's high school swimming this year and championship season was the last couple of weeks with districts, and then state this past weekend.  I'm totally going to brag on my hubby here for a bit...he had a great group of boys swimming for him this year, and took the largest team to state that the school has ever had!  I'm an insanely proud wife, but we're all insanely tired too!

I decided that I wanted to make something for the team, since the banner somehow went missing partway through the season.  The final product turned out pretty close to what I had envisioned too!  I love it when projects turn out like that!  I used my silhouette cameo, and spent a couple hours getting everything cut out.  After that, it was just a matter of getting everything layered and stuck down.  The font I used was "varsity", which I was able to find free online.  By the time the state meet came around this past weekend, a couple of the parents had donated some money to get a new banner made up.  The new banner looks really sharp, and they'll have it for next year now too!  I think the boys appreciated the fact that at least for the district meet that they had something up in the stands.  I don't know though...they're teenage boys!
State went pretty well.  There were 2 relays and 4 individual swims...the most that this school has ever had go!  I may be biased, but I think that my hubby is a pretty great coach!  All but 1 swim made it back for finals on the second day, and the team placed higher than they ever have.  Although the season ended on a high note, I think everyone was ready for it to be done!  I can deal with a 3-month swim season!  After years of age group swimming, and having meets once, if not twice a month...EVERY month, having 2 weekend meets in 3 months is a pretty good deal!

Since we both had the day off work today, we made the most of it and had a much needed family day in Seattle.  We took a trip over to Seattle and took a ride on the great wheel.  It was a bit spendy, and the views would have been better had it been a completely clear day out, but it was fun nonetheless!  Since the wheel is pretty new, we decided to go for a ride just to say we'd done it.  After that, we had dinner and then came home.  I love family days, and we make the most of them when we get them!

Here we are in our gondola on the great wheel!

Tomorrow means back to work, and getting back into a "normal" routine...whatever that is!  I'm looking forward to things somewhat settling down for a little bit!

New Creative Memories tools coming in March!

I love all my Creative Memories tools!  Of all the stuff that's out there, you just can't beat the quality of their tools or albums.  You truly do get what you pay for in the industry.  I love when new stuff comes out and get especially excited when they release new tools.  The new shape maker tool is one to get excited over!  While I still love all the original shape maker tools that they came out with, but I don't pull them out very often.  This might be just the thing to get me to pull my old shape makers out, especially if these new shape makers are a different size than their old ones were!
Along with the new shape maker tool, there's several more products coming in March to get excited about, including a new cricut cartridge!  I can't wait until I can get my hands on them!  If there's anything you're interested in, be sure to visit my Creative Memories site.  You can find a link to my site over on the sidebar on the right.

Melty Beads

Does anyone remember these things?

Melty beads!

I remember making lots of projects with these darn melty beads when I was a kid.  In a state of nostalgia last week, I picked up a few, ok a lot of these when I was at JoAnn's looking for my next project to do.  I had the boy with me, and I got him all excited about making fun stuff with them.  I've discovered a few things...those darn beads are a lot harder to work with when your hands are bigger than they were 20 years (yikes!) ago!  Also, the things that you can make are a lot more intricate than they were back when I would make things with them!  Seriously!  3-d projects and everything!  The only things that I ever made were things on the square and circle pegboards.  I think I figured out how to make a heart.  I do remember having a lot of magnets made out of these beads all over the refrigerator.  Feeling ambitious, I picked up one of the 3-d project kits.  Oh.My.Word., did my back hurt after being hunched over the table trying to follow the pattern and make sure I had the right colors in the right place!

Seriously!  Look at these patterns!

This was one of the easier ones.

I do have to say though, they look pretty cool when they're done.  I've still got a few more to go until I've got this whole set finished.  The poor boy wants to help so bad with this one, but the patterns are so complicated with the different subtle shades of color on a few of them.  It's somewhat hard for him to manage the small beads too.  I think if I would have picked up a kit with the larger beads, that would have made a difference.  Heck, maybe the larger beads would have been easier for me to pick up too!

3-d projects...who knew?!

I decided to pick up some off-brand $1 kits at Michael's thinking that maybe those ones would be a little easier for the boy to make.  While they're certainly easier, the quality isn't that great.  They didn't melt as nicely as I would have liked, and a lot of the beads split while they were being melted too.

All that being said though, it's still a fun project.  The boy is waiting for me to finish with the kit so that we can "make our own designs" with the rest of the beads.  So far we've done pretty well keeping them contained.  There haven't been too many that have spilled on the carpet (yet).  I'm fearing the day when one of us gets a little too excited and doesn't pay attention and knocks the whole container over onto the floor.  I'm not sure whether I'm going to cry or laugh if/when that happens!  I did read though on the manufacturer's website that there's this cool little "vacuum" that you can get to clean all the beads up!  I might have to look into that if I can find it!  Meanwhile, I think I may have to stock up on some smaller containers to keep all the different colors separated out.  It takes more time digging through to find the right color than it does to put the beads on the peg board.

Hubby asked me what exactly I planned to do with all of these once I was done making them all.  I stared at him blankly and retorted that the grandparents were all going to get magnets made with love by the boy for Christmas this year (Mom, you've been warned)!  At least these will be cooler than the (lack of) designs that I came up with as a kid!

Stir Fry

I'm not going to take any credit for this recipe.  This was taught to me by a good friend of ours who had come out to visit from Chicago a couple of years ago.  We picked him up from the airport, and then hubby had to go to work, so I drove him around and did some sightseeing around the area.  He decided that he wanted to treat us to dinner the first night that he was out.  Hubby is still kicking himself that he had to work late that night and missed it!  I've made it many, many times since then, and I've been able to get the flavor pretty darn close to what was made for us.  Never again will I go back to using frozen veggies for stir fry...ever!
I know that using fresh ingredients makes a huge difference when cooking.  I had just been using a frozen mix for so long, that I didn't know any better.  We love a good stir fry, and I make this often for dinner.  Lately, I've been mixing it up a bit and adding different ingredients just to see if I can improve on it even more.

Mmmm...heaven in a skillet!

Anyway, this is real easy to make.  I don't measure anything in this one.  I know I've got the seasonings right by what it looks like and by what it smells like (yes, I am known to cook by smell!).  I wish that I could upload what it smells like!  You will need the following ingredients:

1-2 chicken breasts (can also use shrimp, which I would if hubby were a shrimp fan!)

1-2 broccoli crowns

1 bulb (yes, bulb) of garlic

1 sweet onion (I use half, depending on the size)

1 red onion (I use half, depending on the size)

Peppers (I use a combination of red, orange and yellow to give the dish color)

Sunflower seeds

Cumin

Red Pepper Flakes

Olive Oil

Soy Sauce

Chop up chicken and all veggies into bite size pieces and put in a skillet.  Add olive oil and soy sauce; enough to give everything some liquid to cook in and have some sauce for the rice.  Toss in some sunflower seeds to your liking.  Add cumin and red pepper flakes to taste (the more you add, the hotter it gets).  Stir fry until the chicken is cooked through.  Serve over rice.  Enjoy!

The last couple of times I've made this, I added a can of water chestnuts to give it a little bit more crunch, and it was amazing!  If I knew what a fresh water chestnut looked like and how to prepare it I'd use fresh, but canned worked for me here.  Next time I'm thinking of adding some green beans and/or some baby corn.  Stir fry is an easy dish to experiment with.  There's not much, other than over-cooking, that can be done to ruin stir fry!

DIY Kid's Pajama Pants

I will be the first to admit that I am not a great seamstress.  I know enough to get through a project.  Patterns sometimes tend to confuse me.  My mom used to make clothes for my sisters and I when we were younger, and I always wanted to learn how to do that too.  Other than starting to sew a pair of uniform pants together in girl scouts when I was in middle school, I've mostly taught myself everything I know about sewing.  One of my strengths has always been in spatial reasoning, and I can usually fudge how to put something together.  My mother-in-law, knowing that I was the crafty type, gave me her sewing machine back when hubby and I were still dating.  She was a crafty person, but had no clue how to sew.  I think she told me that she had either never used the machine, or had maybe used it once or twice.  I had somewhat of an idea how to sew.  I figured I was at least doing something right when I figured out how to get the bobbin filled and the machine threaded!  My first projects were blankets, and all that those consisted of was either putting a finished edge on some fleece, or sewing some binding to the edges.  There was one time, back when hubby and I were dating, that he was working in construction and needed a work apron.  I thought up a pattern in my head and went to work.  Not having a clue what I was doing, it turned out pretty well, and he wore it all the time when he was at work.
Anyway, I like to peruse pinterest for random projects to do.  I've got a board filled with sewing projects.  One of them caught my eye because it looked pretty easy.  That particular pin I found was this one:

Source: mycottoncreations.blogspot.com via Erika on Pinterest

After reading through the easy step-by-step directions, they looked easy enough to make, so I made a quick trip over to JoAnn's to pick up some material.  My first stop was the remnants bin, to see if I could find something cheap to do a first run on (just in case I screwed something up).  Since I had the boy with me, I asked him what kind of pants he wanted.  It was no surprise to hear him say that he wanted Thomas!  I found some fleece, and bought a couple yards.  I figured I could get a pair of pants out of it for him to wear now, and then have enough left over to make him another pair of bigger ones later.  I would make up a tutorial here, but seriously, the pin that I linked to is great!

The first pair I did were the green ones.  Using a pair of pants that fit him as a pattern, it didn't take too long to get them cut out and sewn together.  The longest part of getting the pants made was making sure that I had everything lined up correctly so I could cut them out.  I have a bad habit of not pressing my fabric, and also not using a measuring tape.  I tend to eyeball everything.  Sometimes, eyeballing things comes back to bite me!  The green pants ended up with one leg being a smidge shorter than the other.  Even so, it doesn't stop the boy from wearing them all the time!  He's growing so quickly right now that most of his pants end up looking like highwaters.  Having a pair of pants that had one leg a little shorter than the other didn't really matter much!  They were a trial-run, and just being used for pj pants anyway!  My second run was with the Thomas material.  I purposely made them longer so that he could wear them longer, and also so if I did happen to short one leg, it wouldn't be as noticeable!
Overall, I don't think I'll ever use another pattern for making pajama pants.  This one was so easy, and I had both pairs of pants finished within an hour total.  Can't beat sewing 2 seams, and then rolling over the top and the bottoms to finish them off!  As is typical with fleece, they get softer with each washing.  I did notice the other night that one of the seams had come apart, but it didn't take anything to pull out the sewing machine and fix them up real quick.  I think the next time I make a pair of these I may double-stitch each seam, just to give it a little more strength.

Birthday Cake

I don't claim to be a good cake decorator by any stretch of the imagination, but I do enjoy dabbling in it.  Something about being creative is such a release for me.  When the boy requested to have another Thomas the train themed birthday party this past year (he's a bit obsessed), I jumped at the chance to try my hand at making another cake for him.  Imagine my annoyance surprise afterword when I discovered that there is actually a legitimate Thomas the train cake pan!  Regardless, I still enjoyed making the cake and I was pretty happy with how it turned out.  Being a novice cake baker, I had no clue how many cups of batter one box of cake mix made, so I mixed up two.  There was extra batter left, so I used what was left to make cupcakes.  We were eating cake for a while after the birthday party!  One of these days I'll do cake batter from scratch, but when time is a premium, I don't feel bad using a mix.  The cake was baked 2 days before the party because that was when I had a chance to do so!  Decorating was done the morning of the party, which included mixing up the frosting.  After finding a good recipe for buttercream frosting, I won't buy the stuff in a can anymore...it just doesn't taste as good!  Not only that, but I can control the consistency of it better from scratch as well.

After the birthday party, I found and bought the actual Thomas cake pan.  I'm (not so) secretly hoping that the boy's obsession lasts another year so I can get some use out of it!