Best Ever Date Squares

These are seriously the most scrumptious date squares ever. The orange zest makes them absolutely incredible! I did not come up with the recipe, a friend brought a batch to "Birthday Club" one evening and it's gone viral in our small little group since then ;)

Best Ever Date Squares 
from Anne Lindsey via Kaitlan via Marina

2 cups packed chopped pitted dates
1 cup cold coffee
2 Tbsp brown sugar
grated rind and juice of half an orange
1 Tbsp fresh lemon juice

In small saucepan, combine dates, coffee, sugar, orange rind; bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer uncovered until soft enough to mash (consistency of jam). Roughly 10 minutes. Remove from heat, stir in orange and lemon juice. Cool.

Crumb:
1 1/2 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2/3 cup butter

In bowl, stir dry ingredients. Using two knives but in butter until the size of small peas.

Stir into crumb:
1 1/4 cup rolled oats
3/4 cup lightly packed brown sugar

Put 1/2 crumb mixture into greased 9 inch pan. Spread date mixture on top. Spread rest of crumb mixture, lightly press.

Bake at 325 for roughly 30 minutes or until lightly browned. Let cool in pan. Cut into squares.

Moo Shu Pork

This Moo Shu Pork recipe from Kitchen-M is to die for delicious and easy enough for me to make. I highly suggest it :)

Child Labour (a.k.a. making a preschooler chore chart)

Now that he's 3, I've been pondering solidifying Booper's chore responsibilities and finally got around to it today. After looking at all of the "chore chart" ideas on Pinterest, I realized that most wouldn't work for us because I am dealing with pre-literate clientele and so pictures are a must. Sadly there weren't any easy tutorials that came with a free page of icons so I made some that, hopefully, at least one other person can make use of themselves. I apologize for the terrible picture as well, I still don't "get" this camera.

Here's how I made my chart:

1) Print out the chart and icons (sorry, for some reason the icons didn't show up in the presentation so I posted them separately). The chart has my son's name on it and I can't seem to edit it on the online document (which doesn't mean you won't be able to figure it out) but, honestly, it's easy enough to make your own on PowerPoint or any other program.
2) Laminate your pages or paste them to something more sturdy. I just so happen to have a rarely used laminator that I actually found this morning so I obviously HAD to use it.
3) Cut out the icon circles
4) Put little pieces of sticky velcro on both the job charts and icon circles
5) Tada, you're done

This could just as easily be done using stick on magnets or actually printing the icon circles onto magnet printer sheets. Really, using any other sticky things in your house would work too- heck sticky tack would do if you don't have a child who might try to eat it ;)


Booper's response to his new chore chart? "This is going to be good!" - gotta love little kids :)

Here's a closer look at the job icons too- not the best drawing, admittedly, but they'll do :)

Almost World Famous Soft Pretzel Recipe

I tried pinning my favorite pretzel bun recipe on Pintrest but because there was no picture on the page it wouldn't let me. Anyway, I've copied the recipe from Strothotte.com so that I can find it more easily when I want to make it :) These things are delicious and the story that goes with them makes me smile every time! We make salami sandwiches with them (the spicy Genoa salami is a personal favorite) using just butter and salami. They are great for travelling and beat any of the terrible snacks that you can buy in airports or on planes these days. The dough is easy to shape as well so you can make all sorts of different shaped breads; one Halloween I even made soft pretzel slugs. Mmmm!

Almost World Famous!

For ~8 Pretzel buns/ 3 dozen 6-inch sticks/1 dozen 6-inch Pretzels

1 tbsp Yeast
1 tbsp Sugar
1 tsp Salt
2 tbsp softened butter or softened margarine 
1 cup warm (115-+ deg F) water

2 3/4 cups flour

Coarse Salt to sprinkle on Pretzels before baking
5 tsp baking soda mixed in 4 cups water in a non-aluminum saucepan.
1 large slotted spoon to "go fishing"
Greased cookie sheet
Preheat oven to 475 F

Put yeast, sugar, salt, butter/marg, water and ONE CUP of the flour into a medium mixing bowl and pour in the water.

Stir till all smooth, and yeast starts to bubble.

At this point add the rest of the flour, stir till it is mixed in.
When mixture is too stiff to stir with a spoon, begin kneading.
Knead dough till smooth and till it no longer sticks to the bowl and your hands

Allow dough to rise to about double its height.

While dough is rising, grease the cookie sheet. and prepare the baking soda-water mixture and bring to a boil on stove.

When dough is risen enough, punch down, knead for a minute or so, then divide and roll the 6-inch sticks with your hands, to about 1/2 inch in diameter, or 12-15-inch long rolls to make into the pretzel shape.

Allow sticks or pretzels to sit for about 1-2 mins. Place them into boiling water-baking soda mixture one or two at a time.

Let the pretzels boil for 1 minute 10 seconds, then flip them over with the slotted spoon and boil on the other side for 1 minute and 10 seconds.

This boiling step gives them a firm skin and adds some flavour. Not boiling long enough leaves them too soft and allows them to rise too much. Boiling too long makes them tough.

Fish them out of the water, let them drip off and place them on the greased cookie sheet.

When all the pretzels or sticks are done, sprinkle the coarse salt on them.

Bake for 12-15 minutes or till sticks or pretzels are golden brown.

You can double the recipe in proportion.

ENJOY!!

Here's why I call this recipe "Almost World Famous". One fine day a few years ago, President George Bush choked on a pretzel and fainted. Shortly thereafter, I had a really big spike in hits on this page. Turns out that the Guardian Unlimited online had published an article on pretzels. The reporter included a link to this little recipe as an example of soft and non-life-threatening form of the art or pretzel-making. Thanks, Dubya!

Winter-time Entertainment

Chicago is certainly much warmer at this time of year than I'm used to on the Canadian prairies, it's not exactly play outside weather most of the time soooooo, we've been trying to find fun ways to stay happy and entertained in our apartment without cluttering it with too many toys, spending too much money, or forgoing our damage deposit ;). Here are a few of the things we've tried out:

Making things with boxes: 
I found this link on Pintrest to ikat bag's collection of DIY box creations for kids. We decided to make a box kitchen out of some of the many boxes that are floating about here from all of my online holiday shopping.

Art . . . in the shower:
We've added food colouring to both baby shampoo a shaving cream for painting. Benjamin's also a big fan of his bath crayons.

 
Sensory Play:
The number one sensory activity in our house is playing in water. I always get help with dishes, cleaning, and Booper would happily take 10 showers or baths a day :) I've got a tub of rice that we play in when I'm feeling especially patient, but cloud dough is a huge hit in our house, as is playing with dried beans (and they're really very easy to clean up). Booper loves pretending to cook too so I'll sometimes pull out oatmeal, flour, spice jars with spices or Ovaltine in them, along with measuring cups, spoons, and bowls and let him make a gigantic mess.

Fine Motor Fun:

I'm super cheap so I scoured the recycle bin for containers that could be used to push or sort items into. Here's what we came up with :)

What a Halloween!!!!

Booper loves the lions at the zoo and has perfected the cutest "roar" ever so I decided to make him this adorable lion costume from McCall's. Unfortunately, after sewing all of those ribbons on, he decided that the head piece was pure evil and refused to wear it (thank goodness for more mature cousins who will happily wear them instead, making one toddler's mother feel much better about the blood, sweat, and tears invested). This, however, left us costume-less only a week or so before Halloween. Oh dear!

I was working on adult costumes in the meantime:

Owls for my sister-in-law and myself. I found this on the Livvy Loo Who blog; a knock off of a Pottery Barn owl costume that I then made a knock-off of for us.

And an octopus for my brother-in-law inspired by this picture I found on Flickr

I have to say, hoodie costumes are the way to go!!! All you have to do is trace a hood from your wardrobe (and I followed the instructions from Indietutes on how to make a Basic Hooded Cloak for the owl) and off you go!

Anyway, while reading 10 Trick-or-Treaters a few nights before Halloween, Booper declared that he was going to be the orange spider in the book, so . . . that night I made him an orange spider costume inspired by the octopus.

Turns out, of course, that we didn't end up celebrating Halloween at all since we flew home to Chicago that night (and he didn't particularly like wearing this costume either) but it was certainly fun making all the costumes AND we should all be set for next year :)

Toddler hooded towel

Booper recieved something like seven baby towels as gifts when he was born, each wonderful and cozy in their own ways. He has grown out of all but two, and our favorite, by far, is one by Dwell Studios. Not only is it a substantially sized towel but the hood juts off from the center of a rectangle as opposed to being in the corner of a square, which makes the wrappability of the towel great! Unfortunately, said towel costs $52.00 and I, being a true Winnipeger by now, am FAR too cheap to shell that out ;) Soooo, I decided to figure out how to make them myself. I ordered the terry cloth and sock monkey material from fabric.com (why can't we have an online fabric store like this in Canada?!?!?) and took two evenings to make 3 fabulous towels for the little monkey cousins (Owie, Ya-ya-ya, and Boopie himself). Here's how it went:

1. Cut the cloth. I got a yard of each colour of cloth and cut it at 29 inches.

 2. Cut the long, thin piece into 4 equal sections (I promise this will make sense in a minute)

3. Right sides together, pin (and then sew) 2 of each of the pieces together along one of the long sides. Iron seams flat.

4. Make a pattern piece for the hood. This is what mine looked like- I just traced the hood from his other hooded towel, or you could use a hooded jacket etc. 

4a. With right sides of the already-sewn pieces together, pin and cut out two hood piece. (Cut out two hood pieces from the terry cloth as well)

5. Pin and sew hood pieces along curved edge (with right sides together, of course).

6. Cut a piece of terry cloth the same size as your big piece of outer cloth and then pin with right sides together. Sew along 3 of the 4 sides, leaving one long side open.

7. Iron sewn hood piece, right side out. Place it, facing the right side of the terry-cloth hood piece, and pin around the outer hood (as shown). Sew together.

8. Flip hood right-side out and iron flat.

8a. Sew two layers together, as close to the edge as possible, to keep the hood's shape well.

9. Place the hood, terry-cloth towards terry cloth, and outer-fabric towards outer-fabric, inside the open side of the main part of the towel. Pin closed, leaving a foot or so on one of the sides open.

9a. Sew the side closed, leaving the gap open to turn the towel right-way out through.

10. Turn the towel right-side out and iron flat. Fold the material from the gap together and pin in place.

11. Sew all the way around the outside of the towel to help it keep its shape.

Ta, da! You're done!!!!

Geepers, I hope that made sense. It ended up being much more difficult to explain than I had anticipate :)