I said LV was going to make the brownies for Scrappy's class, but I ended up making them. With two boxes, I thought we'd have so many more leftover. There were only a few. I guess I cut them too generously. ("Neurotically" might be a better word to describe my attempt at perfect symmetry.)
First we have a picture from LV to demonstrate that I really have been a good influence on Scrappy. When she went out to lunch at Outback, she ordered grilled chicken and green beans. Yeah, that's a kid's meal...
Then we have a picture from LV to demonstrate that he really could eat pizza every day. Even after saying he was not interested in eating and I covered the pizza in mushrooms (one of his least favorite vegetables), he still ate pizza.
We thought it would be a good idea to plant something with Scrappy. Now we have a Chia Herb Garden. They make it hard to go wrong. Water the sponges (yeah, sponges), sprinkle the seeds, cover with a sandwich bag, wait.
Originally, I had joked that we could get Scrappy to eat vegetables on St. Patrick's Day by telling her she had to eat green food for good luck. Like the Irish love broccoli or something. By the time we got back from shopping, though, I was ready to just throw a frozen pizza in the oven and call it a day. Then I decided to run over to the grocery store.
Frozen country fried chicken, frozen peas and carrots, and mashed potatoes out of the box. About as easy as waiting 15 minutes for the pizza.
"I didn't want one anyway."
"So, you're not going to eat your dinner?" I ask. "Because I'm not going to bother giving it to you if you're not going to eat it."
Scrappy wanted the chicken. She didn't say she only wanted the chicken. She said she wanted dinner. She swore she was going to eat it.
Sunday afternoon found Scrappy staring down the vegetables and mashed potatoes she ended up refusing to eat the night before and LV asking if we could make more green margaritas.
I was swamped this weekend, so I didn't leave the computer. LV took over making dinner for the night. I thought the fact that Scrappy was sitting down to a plate of carrots merited a photo alone. She had fresh pasta with leftover oven-fried pork while LV had fresh pasta with leftover meatloaf. And lots of carrots all around.
Sunday was a busy day.
BREAKFAST
The new grater was put to good use with all the oranges that needed to be shredded for this recipe. Any dried fruit would have worked, so I picked cherry-flavored dried cranberries. Scrappy decided these were just raisins. "They feel like raisins, but they taste like cherries," I told her.
"No," she said. "They taste like raisins."
But she continued to help make them and ate two biscuits when they were ready.
LUNCH
The Bears play-off game started at 1 p.m. EST. This called for wings. We thought they might be too hot for Scrappy, so she was eating orange slices. "This one has a seed," she said before continuing to eat. Then she stopped. Looked at the seed she had put on her napkin and yelled, "It's my tooth!"
The stuff all over her hands in the photo is sauce from the wings. She decided to give them a try after checking out the hole her first baby tooth had left behind.
DINNER
I'd never had Chicken-Fried Steak before in my life, so I had no idea what it was supposed to taste like and very little idea what it should look like. I've decided creamy sauces are fun to make, but I just can't eat them.
This is a photo of Scrappy's plate. The only part she had a problem with was the mashed potatoes. Crazy. She likes corn, which I don't think counts as a real vegetable, but she got distracted trying to put kernels in the hole where a tooth should be.
DESSERT
While waiting for the Tooth Fairy to show up, LV decided he needed a snack. I offered up vanilla ice cream topped with Oatmeal Scothies and Butterscotch sauce. There wasn't much ice cream left. It would have been a very sad looking sundae in print. But it was tasty.
The gingerbread men in the Woman's Day Christmas cookie tear-out looked really good, so I decided to go ahead and spend 8 hours mixing, rolling, refrigerating, rolling, freezing, cutting, baking, and decorating some. (some = about 5 dozen)
This must be somewhere near the end of the process because my face is red and I have a toothpick ready for testing.
The important thing here is to note the dining room table in the background. No more folding-chairs-turned-into-tables for Scrappy.
"What kind of cookies should we make?"
"Strawberry."
I'd never heard of strawberry cookies. Were they pink cookies? Did they just have pink frosting? Were they just in the shape of a strawberry? Rather than go to the Internet and hear what everyone else thought a strawberry cookie was, I started asking myself what the Little One might have found lacking in previous batches of cookies. Were they dry? Did she not get to use the rolling pin enough? The answer, I decided, was to buy premade sugar cookie dough and a jar of strawberry jam. Voila. Strawberry cookies.
No stores in our neighborhood had the cans of Pilsbury dough, so we bought the Duncan Hines sugar cookie mix. This worked out better for incorporating the rolling pin. One cookie in the shape of a Superman glass, add some jam, top with another cookie in the shape of a Superman glass minus a heart or star cut-out. Bake. Strawberry cookies (that are not so easy to layer in a narrow Tupperware container).
I don't know what we're making here... LV's grimace implies it's either too hot to deal with Scrappy's questions or there are too many ingredients in that bowl.
There was no blog when this was shot, so there are no pictures of the final product. There's a video where I think LV is telling Meg to add the coconut (and he seems happier), so most likely they were the Oatmeal Scotchie alternates that have toffee and coconut...
(Note: She's not really that tall. Her step stool made it a lot easier to reach the countertop.)
