Weekly roundup...

I thought it might be good idea to post about the little things that happened during the week on Fridays. Not maybe every Friday but I will try...

- Korman lost another tooth. I kept telling him to pull it out but he literally waited until the tooth fell off his mouth while eating pancakes.

- I  got a manicure and pedicure after months without it. I am going to a trip to the other side of the world today (New Zealand to be exact), so my nails had to be ready for it...Really...

- I tried to get ready for my trip, but I still have to pack which I will do as soon as I am done with this post.

- I ran twice this week while watching TV. I am trying to get back into running again but it is turning out to be more walking with some running in it.

- I started to watch Survivor after many many seasons not watching it.

- I baked two things this week; marble cupcakes with chocolate icing and caramel filled brownies (recipes to follow)

- We bought Sude a balance beam through Craig's List. It is pink and huge. She is very much into making her own routines on it...

- Korman wants to quit soccer and do a cross training class. Told him that we have committed to soccer until the end of the year, and cannot add another sport. Kind of proud of myself with that response.

- Korman started to read chapter books with me. He sounds incredibly cute without any big teeth in his mouth. 

Cheers...

I painted the kitchen walls...

When we got our house painted before we moved in, we picked exactly the same color that we had in our previous house. It is a shade of taupe (See the ceilings...). It is a color that both I and my husband like and it works great with our trims.

But lately, I have been craving some change. Finally on a week that my husband was out of town, I got the courage to paint my kitchen walls. First I tried few color samples with no luck. Finally, I started to look for household items that had the colors that I had in mind. At the end, I took a jar of paprika to the paint store and asked them to find me the color of the spice. And they did...

It worked out great with the existing walls and gave our kitchen warmth and energy...

It took me 2 nights to finish it up. The first night was the painting and the second one was the touch up. I also rotated the kitchen table to have a better angle with the backyard and put away the carpet that was usually placed under the kitchen table.

At the end, my husband was pleasantly surprised with the results...

Fried zucchini and peppers with yogurt sauce...

This is a very simple dish but it is soooo delicious. It gets even more tasty if it sits in your refrigerator for a day.

First thing to know about this dish; It is served room temperature or cold, right out of the refrigerator. Do not warm it up especially after putting the yogurt sauce on it.

Ingredients
3 zucchinis
1 lb sweet peppers
Sunflower oil
1 cup plain yogurt
1 clove mashed garlic
Salt to taste
Red peppers

It is a simple dish because it is simply fried vegetables. I had 3 zucchinis. I sliced them up and fried them in sunflower oil (half an inch of oil in a large pan). I think what makes this dish so tasty is the type of oil you use. You need to use sunflower oil. Any other oil will not taste same...

I fried them outside, on our grille's burner.

Then you put them on a paper towel until they are cooled off.

For the peppers, I used sweet peppers that I bought from the Korean grocery store. You can use any type of pepper really. If they are big peppers, just slice them up.

Then you mix 1 cup of plain yogurt with a clove of mashed garlic and salt to taste. Spread the yogurt sauce on top and sprinkle with some red peppers.

Enjoy...

I took two small bowls to friends; one of Sude's coaches and a neighbor. They both loved it.

The rest was mine... I love to eat this with toasted sourdough bread. Yummy...



Korman the pirate....

Korman lost two teeth in the last couple of weeks. One from the bottom and one from the top. Since he looks so adorable every time he smiles, he has been getting a lot more hugs and kisses from everyone in the family. Major cuteness alert...

 Even Sude, AKA the cool sister, keeps turning to me frequently with an "awwww" sound every time the pirate Korman talks...

Sude's Latest Gymnastics Meet...

What a weekend we had...

Sude had a gymnastics meet and it was the best meet she ever had. She got 3 medals on three individual events and finished 5th in all around in her age group. She ended up getting 4 medals in total. As a team, they won 1st place and the coaches let her keep the trophy until next practice. She was just over the moon...

This year she has been working really hard. She is also more focused than previous years. I know it also has to do a lot with her age. She is becoming a beautiful girl and a gymnast.

In our gymnastics journey there has been a lot of times where we doubted ourselves and discussed if we were expecting too much. After all, she spends so many hours in the gym. But at the same time she is becoming more and more confident and focused in everything she does. I think gymnastics training and piano has a lot to do with that.

We love you Sude.

Be very proud that your hard work has paid off...

Sude's 8th Birthday Party...

My first born has turned 8 last Sunday. I was so emotional this particular birthday, I kept thinking "She is 8 and in another 8 years, she will start driving" The last 8 years went by so fast , it is scary to think the next 8 years will go that fast also... (By the way, check out those abs...)

This year, we decided to have a party in our backyard with a Carnival theme. She has so many friends from gymnastics, school, and Turkish community. We ended up inviting 22 kids and only one said she could not make it. When that happened, I decided to hire some help. I asked two coaches from her gym to come and help with the games outside so that I can focus on food, etc.

Since I am "organized", I made a list of games that they can play and gave to the coaches... I got a roll of tickets and they were given to kids after every activity. Then, I put out bags of goodies marked as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 which represented the goodies that they could get for their tickets. They got to pick the toys/candy from them and pay with their tickets. They also kept their candy from the pinata and put all of their stuff in their loot bags...

It was so much fun... The best thing was how appreciative and thankful Sude was after the party.
Here is a copy of my activity printout with some pictures...

Make a loot bag
- Use stickers and markers
- Make sure each one of them puts their name on the bag

Game with bean bags
- Draw circles and give a number to each circle
- Draw a line where they need to throw the bean bags
- Give them tickets for the total numbers they hit

Tattoos
- Give a ticket to each kid who gets a tattoo

 Decorate driveway
- Make a large rectangle and have everyone decorate it for Sude

Piñata
- Have everyone ready with their loot bags and they can put the candy in their bags

Swim games
- Diving and getting most of the circles from the pool (maybe 4 at a time) – give as many tickets as the things they get from the pool

Food to serve to kids (in this order)
- Popcorn
- Hot dogs and juice (we had some helpers...)

- Ice cones

- Cake (see separate post)

Orange chicken

For some reason I am always afraid of cooking Asian food. I love to eat it but I am always not sure what actually is in the sauce. I have found a recipe in the web and decided to use it as base and give it a try.
It was incredible, I have new found confidence...
Kids finished everything in their plates and there was none of it left at the end of the dinner...

Ingredients:
1.5 pounds of cubed chicken breast
1 tablespoon sunflower oil
1 tablespoon brown sugar
2 tablespoons ketchup
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoon orange juice
2 cloves of garlic, mashed
1/2 teaspoon of Asian spicy sauce
1/3 cups of warm water

Cook the chicken in sunflower oil until they are darker outside.

While cooking the chicken, mix all of the other ingredients in a bowl to make the sauce.

After chicken is cooked, add the sauce and let it simmer for 10 minutes. Your house will smell so yummy.

I served it over white rice with egg rolls (frozen, then heated by yours truly...). Yum yum yum... Try it, you will not regret...

Spaghetti pizza

I made this pasta dish this week and my kids loved it. I served it with steamed broccoli.

The original recipe was quite different and had different kinds of cheese in and on the pizza. We do have a family member (no name needed) not crazy about cheese, so I kept it out. But you can always put some shredded mozzarella on top of the "pizza" before you take it out of the oven.

Ingredients:
1 package spaghetti
2 eggs, beaten
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon of sunflower oil (or any liquid oil)
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 pound ground beef
3 tomatoes
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 teaspoon dried oregano
fresh basil (if available)

In a pan, put a tablespoon of sunflower oil and add chopped onions and minced garlic. Cook until they are transparent but not brown. Add the ground beef and cook until there is no juice left.

Take the skin off the tomatoes and chop them up while the ground beef is getting cooked (you can use a small can if you don't have fresh tomatoes. I had plenty at my house that day). Add the tomato paste and tomatoes to ground beef and let it simmer for 10 minutes. Add the dried oregano and finely chopped basil if you have any.

While you are making the beef mixture, cook the spaghetti based on box instructions. After draining, melt the butter and add back the spaghetti to the pot. After it is cooled off a little bit, add two beaten eggs to spaghetti and spread it to a circle pizza pan. Press on spaghetti and make it as flat as possible.

Then add the ground beef mixture on top and spread it to make it look like a pizza. Bake it for 20 minutes at 350 and you are done... If you like cheese you can add some mozzarella 10 minutes before taking the pan out of the oven.

Carnival (popcorn, hotdog, and fries) birthday cake...

This year Sude had a carnival themed birthday party.
I will have a separate post with the party details and the pictures later.

But a separate post MUST be dedicated to the cake. It was so much fun to make it.
I have browsed the web for a while to find the perfect cake. After combining ideas from different places, I decided to make a cake that is made of 3 items; a popcorn bag filled with popcorn, a hot dog, and french fries.

Ingredients:
3 boxed rainbow cakes
5 white vanilla icing (store bought cups)
4 packets of fruit roll ups
4 tablespoon of corn syrup
1 bag of mini marshmallows
2 teaspoons of cocoa
Green and yellow sugar candies
Food colorings

I have started with baking 3 rainbow cakes the day before I assembled the cake;
2 of them in  13" X 9" pans
1 smaller pan but still rectangular (the cake needs to be thicker for the hot dog)

I used the two bigger cakes to assemble the popcorn bag.
-  I started with cutting off the edges of each cake.
-  Then I split the cakes into two equal parts from the middle.
-  Then I put 4 cake pieces on top each other and sliced off the sides to make it shape like a popcorn bag. (I kept the scrapings to be used to make the hot dog)

- Then I spread icing between every layer and also on top. You can put the cake into refrigerator after the first layer of icing to cover the popcorn bag which would make it easier to spread the second layer.

The icing does not have to be perfect since it is a "popcorn bag". Mine wrinkled a little bit while I was working on it.
-  Then, I used fruit roll ups to make the bag's red stripes.

-  Then I put my kids to work to make the popcorn. You will need a bag of mini marshmallows. I used kitchen scissors to slit the edge of each marshmallow. You need to snip the edge of the marshmallow twice (rotate the scissors 90 degrees after the first cut) to give it a popcorn look.
-  Next I mixed yellow food coloring to a few table spoons of corn syrup. With a toothpick, you can paint some part of the popcorn to yellow so that it would have a butter effect. I painted the inside of the cuts (kids and my husband helped a lot). This is up to you, you can keep the marshmallows white, but they looked very nice with the "butter".
- While kids were coloring the popcorn, I took the smaller cake and shaped like a hot dog bun (see the next picture). I kept the center cake that I cut off to be used to make the french fries.

-  Then I covered the hot dog bun with white icing and refrigerated it for 10 minutes or so.
-  Then I placed all of the marshmallows on top of the bag. Actually Korman did most of that. He may have eaten some of them while working hard... It was a tough job after all.

- While the cake was in the refrigerator, I added a little bit brown coloring to the icing to make the a bun color. I covered the bun with that icing.
- Next, I prepared the hot dog. I used all of the cake scrapes left over from the popcorn bag. I added 1/2 cup of icing, 2 teaspoons of cocoa, a little bit of red food coloring to the cake crumbles and mixed it up in a bowl. I let it sit in the refrigerator until it was firmer and more manageable. Then I rolled it to make it a hot dog and placed it into the bun.

Then I started decorating;
- Yellow and green chopped candy for relish and onions
- Mustard color icing (use yellow, orange, and little green)

- Next, it was time for the french fries. I cut up the middle leftover cake piece from the hot dog bun to french fries shape pieces. I placed them to the top shelf of the oven with broiler on. It only took few minutes to brown them, so you need to be careful. I rotated them few times to make sure all sides were baked. Then I arranged them like french fries.

- Last but not least, I made ketchup with corn syrup and red/green food coloring. But if I had to do this again, I would use icing to make the ketchup for the hot dog. It was the right consistency for the fries but it did not work as well for the hot dog.

The final product was still remarkable...