Apron in action

Okay, my model had to get a little silliness out of the way first. ;)

Then we had to test out the apron. Pudding seemed a quick, easy choice for the trial run. Turn up your volume and enjoy.

Courtney had gotten in a hurry to tear open the package, so it didn't pour quite like she needed it to. I had to stop the camera and help out a bit.

She took off the apron while the pudding was cooking, and I guess we forgot to put it back on! :) Anyway, it worked well, and it even saved her from getting some of the pudding powder on her shirt when she was opening the package. Just what an apron is for!

After pouring the pudding into the bowls (done by Grandma)... well, you know what we do then!

We decided some chocolate chips would be a good addition to the pudding.

Voila!

Oops, not quite enough. Just a few more.....

Courtney enjoyed her pudding at snack time, and Grandpa and I ate ours for dessert for supper. Yum! And the apron tested out just fine! ;)

Cooking (and eating) with Courtney

Sorry, I'm again bypassing the birthday pics... because I haven't had time to do anything with them yet, and because I wanted to show you this first!

Courtney and I tried something new and fun for dinner (lunch, if you're from the city) yesterday. We made Spaghetti Dogs!

First we poked uncooked spaghetti through cut-up hot dogs:

That was very fun. And easy!

Then we covered them with water and cooked them.

And voila!!!!

Gross? Maybe! LOL

Since I didn't want to open a whole jar of spaghetti sauce just for this little bit, I decided to use ketchup instead. It worked just fine.

Delish, right? ;-)

Notice that I did provide her with a fork, but....

No, I didn't make her strip down to eat them. She got hot, so she took off her sweatshirt. Brrr! It barely made it to zero outside yesterday!

But it turned out to be a good thing she took it off:

It washed off just fine.

She ate all but one dog, and we topped it off with fresh fruit. YUM!!

I got the idea for the dogs here. Thanks, Megan!

(P.S. Grace, that IS a fresh braid. ;-) And the rest of the nice clean hair was only tied back to keep it out of the ketchup.)

Meatballs!

This came in my Christmas stocking from "Santa":

Actually there were two of them... the other one was bigger. Know what it is? It's a meatball scoop! (It could also be used for melon balls, etc.) Anybody out there love making meatballs with your hands? Y'know... scooping up that sticky mixture and shaping all those little balls? Not me. That's why I didn't make meatballs very often. That's why I was happy to find these tools in my stocking!

I gave them a try last week. Forgive me for the not-so-great photos. I was in a hurry... running late with supper, as usual. Anyway, here's my mixture, all ready to be made into balls:

Below are the first couple of balls:

They came out nicely, although I did have to scrape excess meat off the seam and the hole where the extra squished out. I started using a spatula for that, but being in a hurry, I ended up using my other hand instead. BUT, I still had only one hand sticky (or rather, just my fingers)! And using the tool was MUCH faster than shaping all those balls by hand!

Not a very pretty pan, is it? But if you consider it's been used for a bzillion things over the last 40 years, it's not so bad, is it? It's dark Teflon to begin with, so not quite as burnt as it may appear.

Yes, I baked them. I don't like frying meatballs. Actually, I don't like frying much of anything. Or maybe it's more the fact that I don't like cleaning up the grease splatters afterwards. Yeah, that's it. I DO like eating fried stuff, though. :-)

Here they are, all done:

I'd added a little Italian seasoning to my regular recipe, and then put them into spaghetti sauce. We had yummy spaghetti and meatballs, which Grandpa (and I) heartily approved. I will definitely be doing this again! Bigger meatballs will be fun, too.

Thanks, "Santa"! You know who you are.