Iron Chef: Corn

 Today was a corny day. Corn was my secret ingredient in Iron chef today and it was a successful iron chef.

I made:

1. Chicken corn tamales and corn cake.  I put chicken, cheese, corn, and tomatoes in corn tortillas and fried them in oil. The tamales were pretty good but a little dry. The corn cakes were yummy and sweet.
2. Spicy corn dip. This dip was delicious. The corn flavor really shined and I mixed taco sauce and cream cheese and put it in the food processor until it was smooth.  I dipped peppers and chips in this yummy dip! Even the girls loved it.
3. Corn, shrimp, and black bean quesadillas. These were delicious!  I put a spicy sauce in the quesadillas as well.  Yum!
4. Carmelized onion, chicken, and corn pizzas. The carmelized onions made this pizza awesome. This pizza was the best thing I made - so many flavors that all worked well together.
5. Corn and raspberry cheesecake. I almost didn't serve this.  I made it but wasn't sure if it would be good.  Wow - this was really good. The corn and raspberry worked well together.  I was suprised but it was really good and even Erik liked it.

Erik rated me as 15.2 and I rated myself 14.9.  The girls even helped. Jenna poured the corn muffins in the tin and Sarah chopped nuts for the dip. They were my little sous chefs.

Last night we went to a Halloween party at the house of one of the kids in Jenna's class. I put on my Princess Leia costume but couldn't get my hair to do the cool bun thing. So I was Princess Leia on a bad hair day.

82 points on Quiddler today

Halloween Parties

This week has been filled with Halloween/Harvest parties at school.  Sarah's party was on Thursday where she trick or treated all around the preschool.

She is my little duck.

Jenna's party was on Friday and I was the party coordinator for her room. In half an hour the kids ate donuts, did a craft, and played a game. We jammed a lot into their party but they had fun. 

Jenna is the Spanish girl and Mrs. Rucker is a blue crayon.  I don't know who those older people in the back right of the picture are.  If I was super talented I would photoshop them out.

But I'm not.

And I'm lazy.

My Mom knows about Sarah's love of mushrooms so she sent Sarah this mushroom growing kit. Every day Sarah looks at it and asks if we can eat mushrooms.

Not yet Sarah!

Sarah's favorite song is Your Hands by J.J.Heller.  Here is Sarah's rendition of it. Not quite a perfect rendition but still pretty good I think.

When I do projection at church I often come extra early and practice along with the band.  Matthew LOVES music and here is a video of him dancing during the worship songs.  The band loves him too.

Of course Matthew is not limited to dancing with worship songs. Here he and Jenna are dancing to Bon Jovi :)

I loved my first week off.  It was glorious!

Basically I'm spending all my previous time grading watching Battlestar Galactica.

Here is a top ten list of my favorite characters in Battlestar Galactica

1. Starbuck

2. Everyone else

I love Starbuck's character.  She is awesome!

This break from work should be wonderful (reading, eating, baking, and watching TV). Of course I'm taking 2 classes towards another masters degree but I'll still have a lot more free time than usual.  Still haven't figured out what my focus area of this masters degree will be yet.  I just can't stop doing school :).

62 points on Quiddler

My Rant on peanuts

Sarah and I had fun making candy corn fudge for her school snack. Sarah carried the fudge into her classroom all excited to share and her teacher looked at it and said "we can't serve this" and gave it back to me. 

Huh?

Apparently some candy corn is made in a facility that has nuts (bag didn't say anything). Her preschool is a nut free facility.  Seriously people - this is going a little too far. I'm not serving nutty peanut butter nut-bars, I'm serving candy corn on vanilla fudge.  Candy corn is pure SUGAR (and some food coloring). 

I understand that peanut allergies can be dangerous. Sarah started crying because we couldn't serve the candy corn fudge.  I felt so bad.  Jenna's first grade class can not have any food for birthday celebrations either. 

In addition, they discourage homemade treats at Sarah's preschool.  Yes - makes perfect sense to me.  Preservative-laden storebought food is much better than homemade!

Nuts! Nuts!  Beware!

Evil Mr. Peanut touching Candy Corn! Muhahahahaha

Switching off my rant now to something much more exciting. I have discovered a chocolate chip cookie recipe yummier than my previous recipe - I'm always up for new recipes. Brown butter and sea salt chocolate chip cookies.  Oh wow! These are soooooooooooo good.  Even the dough was spectacular.  I'll be making these more often.  Not for preschool but just to eat.

Yum-O

Only 30 points on Quiddler today because I got stuck with no vowels at the end. However I made the word "equaling" probably my best word ever!

The Halloween Spirit

As promised I'm posting some pictures from our Halloween camping trip. We went camping at Cross Creek Camping Resort which is nice and close. It was our last camping trip of the year and we had an awesome time!

Matthew eating (what else does he do?) at the picnic table. You can see the 4 trash cans full of kindling behind Matthew.  Our neighbor cut down their tree and gave us these trash cans full of sticks.  I thought it would last all weekend.

Nope.

It lasted 3 hours!  4 trash cans of wood! So we had to get some bigger pieces of wood.  We needed fire.

We stuffed ourselves with smores, pizza pies, brats cooked on the fire, not to mention candy!  The kids trick or treated all around the campground. We brought a huge bag of 120 pieces of candy from Sams and ran out halfway through trick or treat!  The kids got good candy too (aka chocolate, not sweet tarts, tootsie rolls, or dumdums).

Several of the campers decorated their campsites for Halloween - some went all out!

Like these people.

And these people.

We put orange lights around this tree.  Go us! 

The campground had a picture frame Halloween craft for the kids.  The girls loved it.

There was also a costume contest.  Matthew was a little unhappy.

Matthew and Daddy enjoying the fire.

This was a great camping year for us. We had so many good trips - hopefully next year will be even better!

67 points on Quiddler today!

October: a pretty cool month

I like October.  It's not too hot, not too cold, the leaves are beautiful and there are an abundance of fall activities.  I like fall activities.  It is also the beginning of holiday eating (something I truly enjoy!).  Note:  October is not my favorite month hmmmm.... sounds like another list!

In the past two weeks we went to a Devry fall party, Leeds Farm, Miller's Country Gardens, and a Halloween Camping trip (more on this later).   I'd also really like to do Hocking Hills Zip Line in the fall but maybe next year when Matthew is older and not so crazy (I hope next year he's not so crazy).  Check out his bear crawl - at some point he will actually walk - then I'll be in trouble!

The girls at the Devry Fall party with their faces painted.  Jenna got a flower and Sarah got a star. Her current favorite shirt has a star on it (pictured)

I caught Matthew at the table eating an apple after one of the girls left without finishing it.

The girls on the banana ride at Leeds Farm.

Our family picture at Leeds.

MUD!  Matthew, Sarah, and I went to Miller's Country Gardens for Sarah's preschool field trip.  It was raining and muddy.  We still went on the hayride (in the mud!) and got out and picked two pumpkins (in the mud!).  I had to take her shoes off and my shoes off and drive home barefoot!

In other news:

1. This week is finals week for me. After this week I'm off for November and December - yipee! 
2. We are covering the Jewish Feasts for small group. Each week I've tried to make a traditional Jewish dish.  Last week I made cholent which is basically beef, barley, and potato stew. It was so delicious!  However I threw most of it away since I'm the only one in the family who liked it.  Bummer. So this week for our Jewish study I'm making chicken tortilla bake.  Hopefully I won't have to ditch the leftovers! 
3. I've been selected to coordinate the Devry faculty symposium. This is for all faculty across the system and only 12 people are on the committee. I'm so excited I was chosen!
4. I have also been giving workshops on Saturdays for students and faculty.  I'm giving one workshop on Friday titled Microsoft Office tips and tricks and one on Saturday about Microsoft Access.  There has been great turnout and I think they have gone well.  Hopefully these next two go well too.
5. 90 points on Quiddler today

I need more than spellcheck

Embarrassment. I think that's my middle name.

Tonight I was teaching Java Graphics and Event Handlers.  To illustrate Java graphics I used a timer that would create the illusion of moving a ball across a frame by incrementing the x and y coordinates of the ball by 3 pixels every 25 milliseconds.  The event handler would just repaint the screen.

Here is a snippet of my code:
.....
public class MovingBall extends JPanel
{
   //Code here to create variables
    MovingBall()
    {
      //Constructor
     }
     //Create inner class for event handler
    private class BallHandler implements ActionListener
    {
    .....

Oh my. 



 

Beautiful Flowers

Fall is such a beautiful time of year. The leaves are changing color and everywhere you look is so picturesque.

I was going to post my top ten list of favorite trees but realized I never posted my favorite flowers.

Are you kidding?

I know - how could I not post my favorite flowers?  This is such an obvious list that I was shocked I didn't have it on my blog!  Now you can rest assured knowing my list of favorite flowers.

I have put the pictures in this collage left to right :

1. Rose (fire and ice rose pictured - beautiful!)
2. Tulip
3. Lilac (LOVE the smell, my favorite route to run at OSU went by some beautiful lilac bushes, the smell was so intoxicating - like McDonalds french fries only better and less greasy)
4. Lily
5. Pansy
6. Lily of the valley
7. Columbine
8. Geranium
9. Floxglove
10. Gladiolus
11. Orchid
12. Daisy
13. Iris
14. Dahlia
15. Chrysanthemum

I like more flowers than are on this list (obviously), these are just my top 15 favorite flowers.

On a different note:
I prayed with a student a few weeks ago after class because she was in the hospital.  The following week she told me that she was going to have a baby. Wow! She is very young and seemed scared. I gave her some websites and resources, told her I was praying for her and that God had a plan for her and her baby.  She sent me an email that said "Hi Gina, thank you so much for your email the other night it really meant the world to me. I had my doubts about continuing my pregnancy but I really feel like with your prayers and support it helped me to come to the right decision to keep my baby. "

Praise God!  It's times like these that I know God has me at my job for a reason.

In other news:

• I'm reading A Fortress of Grey Ice by J.V.Jones. This is the second book in this series and I love it!  When my semester is over I will finish the series.
• I recently finished reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  If you have not read this book put it on your reading list. The book challenged me; it's one I could read over and over.
• Our Coo* book club is now reading Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson. This book is a young adult book, light reading, and funny. I'm glad we are reading this one - it's a break from The Anubis Gates (which I didn't actually read).
• Here is a video of Sarah describing her opinion of OSU and Michigan. She's so adorable.
• There are only 2 more weeks left in this difficult semester. Finals week will be crazy for me. I may not sleep the entire week, however next session I'm off completely. What will I do?
• 68 points on Quiddler today

Blue Princesses

I'm pretty sure I have a husband.  I haven't seen him for awhile but I'm sure he still exists.  Someone has to be eating all the chocolate chip cookies (oh that could be me too).  Erik has been so busy lately.  Last week he didn't get home from a client site until after 7pm and I leave for work at 4pm so the kids were juggled around to a few different places.

It's just going to be crazy for him for the next month or two until the code freezes are in place. This is just how retailers roll.

For me on the other hand, I'm teaching such a wonderful class with wonderful students that I'm on cloud 9!  This semester has gone so well.  I'm so happy with my class and the students. 

To top it off I won tickets to a Blue Jackets game.  I never win things. Wow! So Erik can work, work, work but I'm happy as a clam :)

I had to post this picture of Sarah eating melted ham and cheese.  I just love the look on her face.

I've reached new heights of crazy mom-dom.  I took a picture of Matthew's first ride in the car cart at the grocery store.

I took a picture of Matthew's first ride in the car cart at the grocery store?

What is wrong with me?

Sarah and Jenna went to a princess birthday party. All the little girls were dressed up in cute princess dresses.  Blue moon ice cream was served.

Ummmm......

Hoping that oxyclean works wonders.

71 points on Quiddler today