Homemade cinnamon pull apart bread!
New flowers in the yard!
Mark and I went shopping and he wanted in on the Sees' Candy visit. Love it!
Chinese Sunday and a movie. Best. Tradition. Ever.
Stagecoach this weekend! So excited!!!
Tag Archives: home
Banana Bummer
10 AprI keep buying bananas from Costco even though I know I just can’t possibly eat them all before they turn brown. Sometimes I go on strange food kicks and this is one of them.
After having great luck with banana bread, I decided to take it a step further and make these Skinny Monkey Cookies. At first I did not like them. They looked like rich chocolaty deliciousness but tasted like slightly chocolate bananas. As it turns out, I still like slightly chocolate bananas- just not when I am expecting rich sugary chocolate. But on the plus side, I can adjust my expectations for a 47 calorie cookie.
Skinny Monkey Cookie
It gets even better. The ingredients in this bad boy are bananas (duh) and applesauce, hence the skinny bit of the name. Even though I am willing to try a brand new recipe in search of another cookie to eat for breakfast, I am not willing to take an extra trip to the grocery store. So it an ironic twist of laziness, I made the applesauce from scratch to avoid going to the store.
I forgot how much I liked home made applesauce. So the benefit of this story is I like my semi-chocolaty banana cookies and I really enjoy home made applesauce. Both excellent ways to get my sweet fix without turning into a larger version of myself. Thank goodness for skinny cookies and natural sugars.
Leftover applesauce and cinnamon.
Banana Bread
4 AprI really like bananas. They are tasty, they go well with some of my other favorite things, coffee and oatmeal, and they are yellow which I appreciate.
Mark does not like bananas. He doesn’t like it when we purchase bananas, even if they are for me and he does not have to eat them.
Sometimes when we get bananas I eat all of them. But when we get them at Costco, even though they are an excellent deal, I have a hard time eating 15 bananas before they go bad. (I said I really like bananas – I am not a crazy bananas for every meal person!). So I needed to find a way to get Mark to eat bananas with me. Kinda like the zucchini situation. Unlike zucchini, I could not shred a banana into his lasagna. I don’t think. If you have successfully made banana lasagna let me know.
In any case banana bread it was. But Mark doesn’t even like banana bread so I had to find something that was enough like cinnamon bread that he would go for it. Ta-da! Banana bread with Mark’s stamp of approval. I used this recipe, but I didn’t have milk so I used vanilla creamer (don’t worry it worked), and added a little bit of nutmeg.
So good!
We ate it on the front porch. That made it even more fun. 
Backyard Garden
3 AprA few weeks ago Mark built a little garden space for me in our backyard. But with all the rain we just were able to plant in it this past weekend. I am so excited. We got basil, cilantro, strawberries, tomatoes, sweet peas, zucchini, cucumber, peppers, and the coolest thing: artichokes. It will be a while before we will get to pick anything from our garden, but it was fun to plant it with Mark. We had a blast.
Mark and I getting ready to plant. We look pretty creepy but we are excited. He had to hold his fav - the artichoke!
So may fun things!
Lexi was curious but dogs are not allowed in the garden!
Everything is planted!
This is 100% staged. I never use that big 'ol shovel. But I did help plant the garden!
The Same
28 MarMark and I love our house. It is so fun to have our own place and we really love seeing things come along as we fix it up. But some things are boring. I don’t so much mind if we have to do some hard work to get things clean or tidied up. That type of thing is boring but at least we have something to show for it.
But last weekend we had a really depressing project. Mark and I spent four hours roto-tilling the backyard to get rid of roots and rocks and weeds. FOUR HOURS. It lowered the level of the dirt so the planter dirt did not flow out into the pool. But here is the thing, at the end of the day, it looked EXACTLY the same!
Sad day. We have some new projects coming up soon that will make a lot more difference than the rototilling. But that’s for another weekend.
For now, the main differnce in our backyard is Meisje and her new toy. A tree root. She runs around with that thing all day! Forget trying to purchase toys she chews up in a day. This thing lasts for weeks!
