Straight Stitches

Saturday, January 19, 2013

A Trail Mix Primer

Dana January 19, 2013 0 Comments

Whoo! It's been a crazy couple of weeks, hasn't it? Holidays tend to do that. I'm back, though, and I have lots of yummy things to share. This week, though, is a pretty easy one...some assembly required.

Homemade Trail Mix

This is the ultimate make-your-own food! Trail mix is, quite possibly, my most favorite snack of all time, and, in my own non-professional opinion, it's really healthy too as long as you follow some guidelines. Here's my theory...where's my trail mix soapbox?

Chocolate - Lets address this right off the bat, chocolate is not energy food, it's happy food. Do I love chocolate so much that I would voluntarily jump into a river of it and pretend to be Augustus Gloop without the panic? Heck yes! Does it make me feel like a fluffy unicorn running through a field of rainbows and butterflies. Undoubtedly! Do I think it belongs in trail mix? ...Eh...I guess I could be convinced, but only if you use dark chocolate and it does not comprise any more than 1/8 of the total mass of ingredients...I'll get to that formula later.

Dried fruit - I like to make sure I have an almost 50/50 split between dried fruit and nuts and seeds. Any more than that and I feel like I'm just phoning it in. Personally, I love raisins, dried cherries, and dried cranberries, but there are loads of options out there. You could go tropical with bananas, pineapple, mangoes, etc. Or go all-American with blueberries and apples. Get fancy with goji berries! Whatever you like. Do look out for dried fruits with sugar added, though. Fruit already has the perfect amount of sugar in, so why add more?

Nuts and Seeds - Number one rule: Get unsalted! I know some people love salty snacks, but you need to make sure you and you alone are controlling your salt intake here. It's your kitchen, after all, so take control! Personally, I'm a bit sensitive to salt, so I go without completely. If you really feel like you need it, buy your nuts and seeds un-roasted and then add salt before you roast them.

To roast, spread your nuts/seeds out on a baking sheet, add salt if desired, and pop them into a 350 degree oven for no more than 10 minutes. You want to be able to just smell them getting nutty up close, not from outside the oven. If you can smell them from outside the oven, they're already burnt.

As for what to choose, again, that's up to you. There seems to be a bit of a battle out there over the most superior nut...Almonds, peanuts, or pistachios? You could do all three. Personally, I like almonds and sunflower seeds. There are also flax seeds, pepitas (pumpkin seeds), chia seeds...you get the idea.

But wait! Isn't squirrel food like this really high in fat? Balance, people, balance. You know what else has a lot of fat? A delicious slab of lamb or a perfectly grilled steak. I'm not saying eat 8 pounds of this stuff a day. Lets stop freaking out over what has the most fat and remember everything in moderation, which leads me to...

Portion Control - Trail mix is not a meal. Let me repeat, trail mix is not a meal. This is meant to be a snack, so treat it like one. I got a set of leftover containers from Ikea for about $1, and it came with a ton of two-ounce containers. Those are my trail mix carriers. I take one to work and that is my snack food for the day. It's so satisfying, though, I usually don't eat the whole lot in any one day.

Cost - Fun fact: Making your own trail mix is cheaper than buying it! You have to make a bigger investment on the front end, though. All of my numbers are based on Trader Joe pre-packaged products, so your store's prices will vary, especially if they are having a sale. Also, I cannot speak to bulk pricing, as 1) we can't buy bulk due to the risk of cross contamination and 2) I have always found it to be very expensive, which is odd because I've always heard the opposite. $8.99/lb of almonds vs. $5.99 for a bag of the same weight at Whole Foods (my Trader Joe's doesn't have a bulk section) is hard to argue with, though. Again, maybe your store is different.

A 1-lb bag of trail mix = $5 (technically $4.99, but lets keep this simple)

My ingredients

A 1-lb bag of roasted, unsalted almonds = $5

An 8-oz bag of dried cherries (by far the most expensive ingredient) = $5

An 8-oz bag of dried cranberries = $2

A 1-lb bag of raisins = $2.50

A 1-lb bag of roasted, unsalted sunflower seeds = $2

Total = $16.50 for 4 lbs of trail mix ingredients, which equals $4.13/lb

*According to my 1/8 chocolate rule, I could have added a bag of dark chocolate to this mix if I wanted to.

And the best part is that my trail only has things I like in it and none of the stuff I don't. It can turn out to be even cheaper too, depending on your choices.

Here's a picture of my stash after a few weeks of me munching on it...still going strong. Wine bottle included for scale.

So what do you like best in your trail mix?

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Thursday, January 10, 2013

Hey Ferb, I know what we're going to do today.....

Heather January 10, 2013 0 Comments

So how many of us know Phineas and Ferb? I do! I do! I do!

Actually I may like the show as much if not more than the boys do. It reminds me of the awesome cartoons that I used to watch as a kid. BTW, total disney freak. Loved Darkwing Duck, Duck Tales, Tale Spin, Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers, TMNT (the original cartoon series), GI Joe, etc.....

So when these new cartoons started coming on, well, I just couldn't stand them. Until Phineas and Ferb. I love Candace and I actually really love Dr. D and all the songs.

Harrison and Dev decided that they both wanted Phineas and Ferb birthday parties, but definitely not the same party. So Harrison had Phineas and Ferb, Devlin had an Agent P party, but being as I decided to have his party 3 days before Christmas, I did not go all out like I usually do. I did make some pretty awesome birthday invites, and we had cookies for our goodie bags, and a neopolitan birthday cake. :)

I googled some birthday invite ideas and this is what I came up with:

It was pretty simple and I could fit 2 of these invites on a 4x6 photo, so it was pretty cost effective to print out as well.

Then it was time to make the cookies for the goodie bags.

I used a box sugar cookie mix and just made a whole bunch of circle sugar cookies that I then decorated with royal icing. I think they turned out pretty well. :)

The cake was another matter. Dev wanted neopolitan cupcakes for his class when I brought in cupcakes, well I had enough batter left over from those that I was able to get a cake out of it as well.

I know that it says, Happy Dev, but when we brought out the cake at the party, we had a candle that said 7, so it really said Happy 7, Dev! Hey, it works in a half-ass kind of way.

The cake was gobbled up and really that's all that matters.

Here are some pictures of things we saw on Dev's actual birthday. The boy wanted to head back to the Natural History Museum at the Smithsonian, so that where we spent the day.

These are butterflies from the live butterfly exhibit in the insect wing.

that's a big mammoth from the ice age exhibit

There's Dana with the boys in front of a triceratops skeleton!

I'll be back with more stuff that we did on Christmas break later!
Heather

Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Getting back to it.....

Heather January 08, 2013 1 Comments

PHEW!!!!!!!

Christmas took a whole bunch out of me. I got a crap ton of things made and I will be sharing, but first - I kind of need photos of everything I made, durn it! I knew I forgot something.

Then New Year's. Oh lord did New Year's take a toll on the family. We're finally recovering from a nasty cold that hit the family New Year's Day. So much fun.

Then there were the round of appointments. Eye doctors. Nutritionist and our GP. Luckily, everyone has a clean bill of health, even if the boys were angry most of yesterday evening at me, because I opted to have them get flu shots. You'd have thought I was killing them - for over 2 hours - yesterday with all the racket and complaining they did.

So I'm going to share stats on my guys, cause I can. I'm their mom and its my blog and I can gloat and brag a little if I want to. :) My big guy turned 7 on the 27th and I just can't believe it. He's 7!!! Where the heck has time gone??? Anyways, so here are the stats.

Harrison is a whopping 41" tall and finally weighing in at 32.2 pounds. He's 91% for height, but had been 17% for weight, and the nutritionist visitor. We can't get him to gain weight. He weighs what he did at 2. He's grown, a lot, but he's just getting skinnier. I can see that he's starting to chunk out in places which is good, but we've got to stay on him about getting the good fatty calories in him.

Devlin, on the other hand, is still huge. He came into the world huge and he's still that way. Although, I don't have an accurate height measurement on him because he won't stand up straight when it comes time to get measured. We had his cardiologist appointment back in the middle of December, and all checked out. He's got a murmur back, but the Doc said that it was an innocent one. It was just turbulence in his heart because its still growing. The membrane is still stretched across his left atrium, right above the mytrial valve, but its only about the width of floss. So nothing to do about it, but still monitor it. So he's weighing in at 67 pounds, but at the card. appointment he was 51" and yesterday at his well child he was 52". I seriously doubt he grew a full inch in 3 weeks, and we'd have a better number for his height if he'd had his heels against the wall and was standing up straight. So he's 94% for weight and 97% for height. We're finally not off the charts!