Beet What Ails You Juice

I found this recipe on a number of sites and so I was excited to try it.  It sounds like it's something that will help boost up your immune system.  With all the flu going around, I am more than happy to make sure I have all necessary vitamins on board.  I also liked this recipe because you can use red apples and it seems like every recipe wants you to use green apples.

Beet What Ails You Juice

2 beets

4 carrots

2 apples

6 celery stalks

2 limes

2 in. ginger

Enjoy!

Beets are the prettiest veggie to juice!  I love how beautiful the color is when it comes out of the juicer.  This time I added to stems.  Not all recipes say to add the stems, but I did some research and they do hold a lot of nutrients, but you can't drink the juice of the stem on it's own.  Not a problem for me, beets make look super pretty but they kind of taste like dirt to me.

This recipe tastes pretty good.  Not very sweet but it's "filling" and makes a ton of juice.  I have found that since I'm a chugger, having extra juice is better than just one glass.

Carrot Pineapple Pick Me Up

I have just started juicing and have been working my way through a number of juicing books, blogs and online reviews.

This is one of my favorites so far.  It's a great little pick me up during the day.  With the perfect amount of sweetness and it comes out to be such a pretty color of orange.

Carrot Pineapple Pick Me Up

3 large carrots

1/4 of a pineapple

1/2 lemon

1 small piece of ginger

This picture shows more ginger than you need.  This time it had much more of a bite to it from the ginger.  I don't mind it, but usually it's better with just a hint of ginger to go with the rest of the flavors.

Enjoy!

My Favorite Paleo Junk Food ~ Peanut Butter Cups

I am not true Paleo, but I love the idea and try hard to follow some of the ideas of the movement.  Since I gave up processed sugar a year and a half ago I have really not craved sweets much.  But sometimes I do...and sometimes I need a little fix.  This is the first recipe I ever found that counts as Paleo Junk Food to me, but I love it!  I found this recipe from Practical Paleo.   She calls it fudge but I call it my peanut butter cups.  It's such a great flavor.

Almond Butter Cups

1/2 cup Coconut Oil

1/2 cup Penzeys High Fat Cocoa Powder 

1/2 cup Almond Butter

1/4 cup Maple Syrup (or you can use honey)

1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract

Melt the coconut oil and then blend all the ingredients in a blender.  

Fill a silicon tray or paper lined mini muffin cups.  

Put in the freezer for at least 30 minutes.

Remove from tray.  

Store in the freezer. 

I found that using a high quality blender works better than a food processor.  The chocolate comes out much smoother.

I also love using my different silicon trays, I have a number of Demarle trays and I find that the shallow, and small ones give you the option to eat 2 or 3 pieces of chocolate without overdoing it.

Keeping them in the freezer until right before you are going to eat them is so important.  You don't want it to melt and lose any of the paleo goodness.

What Made Me Want to Juice

We watched the movie Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead and we both decided that maybe juicing is worth taking a look at.  Not really for weight loss, but for the obvious health benefits you can get from just ingesting all your vitamins in one shot.

Looking at different juices at the store, it was obvious that you could spend a small fortune buying bottles of pre-made juice or just spend the money to buy your own juicer.  So we went with a juicer.  We also bought a new heavy duty blender, but more on that at another time.

I searched and searched for the recipe of what the guys were drinking on the movie and I finally found it here at myjuicecleanse.com.  This was the first juice I made and I have to say, it doesn't taste too bad.  I have always substituted kale leaves with cups of kale mix, mainly because I have a hard time finding kale leaves.

Mean Green Juice

3 cups mixed kale greens

1 cucumber

4 stalks of celery

2 green apples

1/2 lemon

1 piece of ginger

Enjoy!

Making a Dirt Cake Mountian

My thoughts for Reed's birthday cake was to make one that represented one of his favorite past times, motocross riding.  I got on Pinterest and found this site with the most perfect dirt hill cake Spoonful Site.  I mean, how much more perfect can you get?  I was super excited to surprise Reed with it.

I made a few adjustments to the decorations, feeling like I might be able to make it look better with more candy.

Dirt Bike Cake Recipe

• 4 (9-inch round) cakes
• 3 (16-ounce) cans chocolate frosting
• 7 straws
• Oreo cookies, remove the filling and crush
• Large Pretzel rods
• Chocolate cereal (we used Cocoa Puffs®)
• Whoppers 
• Reeses Pieces
• Butterfinger Bite Sized Pieces
• Fruit by the Foot®
• Thin pretzels
• Toy dirt bike and rider

1. 
   
2. Trim the cake tops flat. Cut 1 cake in half, and cut one third from another cake.
3. 
   
4. Assemble the cake as shown, frosting between each layer: 
5. 
   
6. Stack the 2 rounds, add the two-thirds section, and insert 3 straws, spacing them about 1-1/2 inches apart. Add 1 cake half (you can save the other for snacking) and insert 2 more straws. Add the cake third and the last 2 straws. Frost the entire cake.
7. 
   
8. 
   
9. Sprinkle on a cookie dirt trail, then add pretzel rods, cereal, candy, and licorice for log trail borders, rocks, boulders, and plants.  Add the rider on top.
10. 
    

I started following the recipe.  I decided that  and was so excited to start stacking my cake...and then this happened.

The whole thing just collapsed.  It was awful!  I was depressed.  The middle layer fell into itself.  How do you fix that?  I walked away.  I took Reed to the park where Scott and the guys were training.  Reed and I watched them for awhile and then we went back home.

I decided to not give up.  I went ahead and melted half a can of frosting in the microwave.  Doing that allowed me to pour the frosting over the demolished, crumbly cake. Then I added a messy layer of frosting.  Thank goodness this was a dirt hill, because the little pieces of cake that came through didn't ruin the overall cake concept.  

Once I had all the frosting down, I just went for it and started adding the rocks, the path and the plants.   I just kept adding more and more and the more I added the better it looked, at least to me.  It was a mess and it was "dirty" but it seemed to work.  I cut up the green pieces of the fruit leather and it made the best contrast of little grass coming through.  So, after running out of "rocks", I stepped back.

He loved it so much.  It definitely looks much messier but I have to say that it looks way more realistic than the original.  He loved it.

Valentine's Day Cards

Making Valentine's Day Cards

One year I decided we'd make homemade Valentine's day cards.  

So much more special and then it makes it less about a commercial holiday, and more about time I spend with my children, the thought put into a gift given to their friends and my ability to get to cut and paste something fun!

Sawyer made all the girls bracelets, and I told her I would make the boys.  She only has 17 children in her class, 6 girls and 11 boys, and I wanted her to enjoy the process so I agreed to take on the boys (plus I could finish 2 in the time it took her to do one).  

On Pinterest I found a cute cards I could print off and use, here for the Friendship Braceletes and here for the Stick 'em Up cards.

Reed's ended up being a lot of cutting and pasting, and the little pasting I let him help with, he was a pro.  Reed took guns to school with a piece of gum that said, "This is a stick up!"  Afterwards I am not sure if guns were the right thing to make, but it was cute and Reed's teacher liked them!

Decorating for Christmas

Needing to try something new for Christmas Decorations, I went with rustic.  I have always been a little partial to rustic anyway, and this just seemed to fit.  The best part, it didn't cost me a dime.

Reed and I went out searching for pine cones.  In Oregon, in the middle of winter, there is no way we were going to find dry pine cones.  But we looked anyway.  We found a bunch of closed pine cones, and they were soaking wet, but we picked them up anyway.

We came home and turned the oven on to 200 degrees and left them in there for an hour.  The house smelled woodsy and the pine cones dried out and opened it.  It was fabulous.

I found gold ribbon in my gift tag box .  With a hot glue gun in hand I started making the jars.

Christmas Jars

Large canning jars

sugar

tea lights

gold ribbon

twine

branch off the Christmas tree

pine cones

Really, they couldn't be cuter and they look like and smell like Christmas.  I used twine, more pieces off the tree and a cinnamon stick to wrap the napkins.  (Next time I will buy cloth napkins for this, but I was so happy to not spend anything on this project, I couldn't bring myself to drive to the store to do that.)