Thanksgiving break

(Click to enlarge. Image from magazineart.org.)

I'll see you in a week or so.

Pineapple right-side-up coffee cake

As children, my sister and I often stayed overnight with my aunt when we visited my grandparents. We loved staying with her: she spoiled us rotten and let us play with her pig collection. One morning she offered us coffee cake for breakfast. Coffee cake? Red flags went up in our minds. We don't drink coffee. She couldn't convince us that there was no coffee in the cake and that it was okay for us to eat it. She finally had to get our mom on the phone to tell us as much.

These days, although I still don't drink coffee, I still enjoy a good coffee cake. Probably I should serve it as a dessert, but it usually ends up as a side dish. (original recipe credit)


Pineapple right-side-up coffee cake

2 cups flour
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup instant dry milk powder
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup oil
1 egg
1 can pineapple chunks, juice reserved
5–10 maraschino cherries, chopped

1/4 cup flour
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3 tablespoons oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Mix flour, brown sugar, milk powder, baking powder, salt, oil, egg, and 1 cup pineapple juice (add water to make one cup if there isn't enough) until well combined.

Turn into greased 9"x13" pan and arrange pineapple and cherries over the top.

Toss together flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, and oil with a fork. Sprinkle over top of cake. Bake for about 40 minutes.

The Book of Mormon

A little bit sick

Some of us have been feeling a bit sick this week, but we're on the mend. Poor Tiger Lily has never been sick before. She prefers to stay swaddled and drift in and out of sleep, as long as she's somewhere that she can still see the action.

Toys and kids' rooms

(Picture from here. Click to enlarge.)

We don't keep toys in Red Chief's bedroom. It seems to me that a young boy who doesn't want to go to bed isn't going to be helped by a room full of toys. We keep a dresser full of clothes, a box of books, and a reading chair in his room. That's all besides the bed.

I'm thinking of converting our front room into a playroom one day, but for now, we have three shelves of toys in the living area. I rotate them as Red Chief loses interest. When I keep the quantity of toys in rotation to a minimum, the living area is usually manageable (although messy most of the time). 

Where do you keep toys?  Do you like having your kids play where you can keep an eye on them, or do you like to keep the mess and noise contained somewhere else, like bedrooms or a playroom? What are your rules about picking up and how do you teach your children to clean up after themselves?

Recently tried recipes

• Sugar donut muffins. Too sweet with not much other flavor. 
• Kung pao chicken. We enjoyed this and it stood up pretty well to my rampant substituting. We'll have it again.
• Chocolate cake in a mug. I love that this recipe doesn't call for dividing up a cake mix. It is very, very good. It's kind of shocking to see how much oil goes into one serving, though. I'm working on a makeover, but I just can't get it to taste quite as good as the original.
• Slow cooker oatmeal. I've just about given up on making oatmeal in the slow cooker. The first batch I tried turned rock-hard and inedible overnight. This recipe with the water bath worked much better, but it was gluey. I like my oats al dente. Other recipes I've seen call for four hours of cooking, but I'm not getting up in the middle of the night to start breakfast. Sigh.
• Sweet pork salad. We really liked the pork. I doubled the recipe and froze a bunch. It didn't really fit with the salad, though. The rice (option 1) was yummy, the dressing not so much. We ate the salad once, but we're eating the rest of the pork on buns. The pork recipe is definitely a keeper, and so is the rice.
• Chicken enchiladas. We really liked these! I might tweak the recipe a bit in future to suit our family's tastes. This recipe makes two big pans—one to eat and one to freeze.
• Tofu and broccoli in peanut sauce. I made this because Red Chief loves tofu. The taste was really good, but it was a little pasty. I think it needs more, runnier sauce, so I will change things accordingly next time. 

Letter H

Here's our preschool plan for letter H:

• Craft paper uppercase (Harold) and lowercase (hand) Hs
• Sing the "H" song (the H sound to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star")
• Watch some Sesame Street movies featuring H
  
• Letter H on Starfall
• Read Harold and the Purple Crayon
  

We had to do Harold because Red Chief is such a big fan. Give him a purple crayon and he's happy. On a related note, did you know that you can watch a TV version of Harold and the Purple Crayon on Hulu? It's fairly well done, and Red Chief loves it.

Redesigned

I was getting tired of the old look, so I redesigned my blog using illustrations by Kate Greenaway. Come see.

Pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting

Pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. I like All Recipes because of the helpful reviews. Everyone was using applesauce for part of the oil in the cupcakes, so I took it a step further and used extra pumpkin instead. I also halved the cake recipe and quartered the frosting recipe, because if I make a full batch of cupcakes, we'll eat them all. This was just right.

Letter G

Here's our preschool plan for letter G:

• Craft paper uppercase (glitter) and lowercase (grass) Gs
• Sing the "G" song (the G sound to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star")
• Watch some Sesame Street movies featuring G
  
• Letter G on Starfall
• Read Hansel and Gretel

The glitter on the uppercase G ran because we put it on the wall before the glue was dry. Oh, well.