Real Mermaids Don't Wear Toe Rings: Chocolate Mug Cake

Aside from the cocoa...
we have the rest of the ingredients in our house all the time.

Jade's 5-Minute Chocolate Mug Cake
Original can be found here and in the book Real Mermaids Don't Wear Toe Rings. Below you will find a mixture of the two recipes, plus my own words, pictures and observations.

Ingredients and Directions
4 tablespoons flour
4 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa
Mix it well. Then add:
1 egg
Mix. Then add:
3 tablespoons milk
3 tablespoons oil
Mix. Then add:
3 tablespoons chocolate chips (optional...but, in our recipe it was a must!)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract (we used a capful each)

We won't talk about what that looks like
...it taste pretty darn good, though!

Then:

Cook for 3 minutes on high. The cake bubbles up like when you heat up a marshmallow, but don't worry. It just rises up not over. Let it cool for a bit (unless you want to burn your lips off). We let our cool until it had settled to a normal height and then dumped it out onto a plate. Tip it out onto a plate if you want it to cool thoroughly. ENJOY!

Notes & Tips

1] You may not need to cook the cake the whole 3 minutes...check it at 2ish, if you don't want it to be overly dry. It took our 3 minutes each and I used, as you can see, two different types of mugs.

2] You might need to add extra oil if it isn't moist enough.

3] Unless you are some sort of chocolate/dessert FA-REAK, this seriously makes enough for two or three, if one of them is a preschooler.

4] Eat it with ice cream it's delish!

5] My sister and I decided that the cake definitely must have the chocolate chips.

So, um, yeah my sister and I made this treat while our tiny people weren't around (don't worry they had the leftovers for breakfast! See, we're 'good' parents!). Here we are enjoying it while watching Sherlock. Seriously, it's pretty tasty with some ice cream. Does a little relaxation get any better than this?

O is for O.S.C.A.R. and other processed foods we eat at our house

A Masterpiece

Ok, so, um...Lila will eat anything...all sorts of fruits and vegetables (even Brussel Sprouts), so we can eat healthy easy at our house, and we do often, really. We have our fair share of strawberries and bananas and celery and delicious grains.

However, *enter dark cloud* we don't always want to eat healthy...sometimes *thunder and lightening* we like to eat like, well, like I did growing up. We love the processed food...McNuggets and Mickie D's pies and Spam and Chef Boyardi's Ravioli and Spagettios and fruit snacks and potted meat and Little Debbie's and Cheetos and cheese puffs and Pop Tarts and French toast sticks and sausage and pancake dogs and hot dogs and corn dogs and Deviled Ham and Vienna sausages and Cap'n Crunch and Fruit Loops and Velveeta and bologna. We deep fry those burritos you can get in packages of 10. Yes, we deep fry them. We love prepackaged foods...pickles and sandwiches from gas stations or vending machines. We love ketchup and mayo and brown gravy from a package and Cool whip and cheese sauce. We love food products. We especially like our food products to come in a can. We think it's cool when they can be squeezed out of a tube. We love those little pot pies that you can get in your grocers freezer for $.49. We like to eat most of this with white bread and we like to chase all of this down with a large glass of kool-aide or chocolate milk, the fat kind.

Hey, it's OK, don't worry about us, we always have our processed food with a side of broccoli... sometimes we hold the cheese.

Chef and restaurateur, Alain Ducasse, said in Time magazine, "...I think we can understand a society better once we have tasted its popular food. I enjoy hot dogs. They're an exceptional kind of street food." I feel somehow vindicated. Just so you know, all of this talk is making me hungry and nostalgic for a time when eating all of these kinds of food didn't matter. I think that the world was happier then.

Six Word Saturday #33

My life in six words
Please bring on the retro appetizers!

Devils On Horseback... put oyster's in the middle, they're
Angels On Horseback, I'd do that,
but we aren't that kind of group.

Cocktail Nibbles

Holiday Bacon Appetizers

Mistletoe Dip

Patio Dip

Rockin' Celery Boats

Rumaki

I'm one of the people in charge of bringing appetizers for our all day professional development day. I'm going retro and leaning towards Devils on Horseback, but I also found several other good ideas...

What do you think? Which one should I bring?

Want to play along? All that's necessary to participate is to describe your life (or something) in a phrase using just six words. For more information, try clicking here. Feel free to explain or not explain. Add an image, a video, a song, nothing. The full list and linky can be found here. And, here's where I found it.

Superbowl XLVI with the Ladies!

For the record the game was on. I know that the Giants won. I loved the Clint Eastwood commerical as I am a sucker for good All-American sentiment, I did not love any of the GoDaddy.com commericals...just felt dirty afterwards.

However, here's what I really did Superbowl 2012.

Bought the ingredients for some Bittersweet inspired cupcakes.  The recipe is from the beginning of Chapter 16
Lights, Camera, Cupcakes. I switched out chocolate coca-cola cupcakes for yellow made with Mtn. Dew instead of water and chocolate frosting...semi-homemade like Sandra Lee and I like it. Below is what they looked like afterwards...popcorn and peanuts and M&Ms and Raisinets, OH MY!

My besties came over (Chris left to watch the game with the guys) and we had enough dips to feed an Army. The recipes for all three dips can be found here; the other two are from Wallie World. We also had Guac with extra cilantro, Gushers (for the kiddo), and a meat and cheese tray. Yes, that was enough food to feed the four of us ladies, the kidlet and that army from 300.

We graded, read books, sorta watched the game (I think we saw all the major catches and that strange touchdown at the end), watched Madonna and Matthew Broderick (boy, I'm getting old), you know all the important parts were not missed. Lila Jane helped clean up afterwards (yes, she was still awake, frankly, she was still awake 2 hours after the Superbowl...maybe it was all those Gushers and cupcakes and cookies and dip).

BEST SUPERBOWL EVER!!! 

Hope we do it again next year, ladies!!!

Six Word Saturday #20

My life in six words
The best thing about Labor Day!

[Source]

ALL THAT FOOD!!!

Have a GREAT Labor Day Weekend, folks!!!

What will you be eating?

Want to play along? All that's necessary to participate is to describe your life (or something) in a phrase using just six words. For more information, try clicking here. Feel free to explain or not explain. Add an image, a video, a song, nothing. The full list and linky can be found here. And, here's where I found it.

50 Books in a Year: Book #14 Comfort Me with Apples

          I am a lover of food. I'd call myself a foodie, but since our high school Friday fish lunch makes me almost as happy as a seared Ahi tuna steak, we won't go there. I love food.
         You already know how I feel about cookbooks, but I also love a good food memoir and a good book that uses food to propel the plot. Books that are about food have the best of all books  in one neat little package. They are romantic and sexy, intriguing, emotional, and full of delicious recipes. Over the years I've read Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, Like Water for Chocolate, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Chocolat, and Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table.
         I read Tender at the Bone my first year of teaching. The feeling I had then, you know that of a single woman on her first adventure into adulthood was echoed in the adventures of Reichl and reading about her life set my mind at ease because reading about living with such eloquence, passion and drive, even in the dark times led me to have faith in my own little life. It was fun to sit around my apartment (that had been converted from a garage) reading this book, pausing only to buy ingredients to cook up some recipe (and I made several from the book), my favorite being the Deviled Eggs.
         Her second book, Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table, came out a couple of years later, but by then my life had taken over me, and I had all but stopped reading for pleasure. I put it on my list of "To Be Read" and moved on.
         I think it's funny how life works and when I started this blog and then started a reading challenge or two *snicker* I thought of this book. Food, after all, is one of the categories of the Non-Fiction reading challenge. This is the final book for my Non-Fiction challenge. I can't believe I finished it so quickly. I'm looking forward to reading more about Reichl, as I have gotten to know her more through her show on PBS and feel that her adventures will only help me with the rest of mine.

Marion's Deviled Eggs
(from Tender at the Bone)
4 hard boiled eggs
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1 teaspoon cider vinegar
1 teaspoon ballpark mustard
Salt and pepper

Shell eggs, cut carefully in half lengthwise, and put yolks into a bowl. Mash the yolks with a fork until they are smooth. Add remaining ingredients and mix well. The mixture should be thick and creamy. Fill each egg white half with the with the yolk mixture. Grate a bit of pepper on top. Refrigerate until needed. Makes 8 deviled eggs, or about 6 servings.

The Recipe for Success

I love recipes and I don’t care where they come from. I’ve found some of my best recipes online, sure, but I’ve also acquired recipes from magazines, books, church fundraisers, friends and their parents.

Some of my favorite recipes come from this really cool recipe box that I got at an estate sale. In this recipe box are notes and coupons dating as early as 1930. This lady cut out recipes from magazines, the backs of boxes and containers and collected them from friends (I know because she dated these recipes and wrote down the name of the person from whom she got the recipe). I’ve made several recipes from this box; one cup salad, peanut clutters with condensed milk and sour cream cake to name a few. It’s amazing to think that this woman’s family considered this box unimportant and sold it with a pile of other junk for about $5.

As I’ve been looking through my recipe books for something to make for New Year’s Eve, I’ve realized that I’m also a collector of recipe books. This all started when my friend was cleaning house and gave me a box of her old recipe books. In this collection were a set of Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks dating from 1967, our favorite to use is titled Favorite Ways with Chicken, Turkey, Duck and Game Birds. Its recipes detail using bone in chicken and the book tells how to cut up chicken (p35), how to have an elegant dinner; complete with menus (starting on p57) and “Wine Cooking and Serving Suggestions” (p63).

I’m also a sucker for the people on the Food Network and own many cookbooks from my favorite TV show hosts. Sure I know that you can get most of their recipes free online, but you don’t get cute informative introductions and sidebar comments online. Our favorite Paula Deen is The Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook (I just got my sister a copy for Christmas, so she wouldn’t steal mine, since college she’s been stealing my cookbooks J), which we use soooo much some of the pages stick together, our favorites seem to come from the dessert pages like Better Than Sex? Yes! (not sure what we’ll call this cake when the tiny tot gets older--this lady calls it Heath Bar Cake). I also have every Rachel Ray recipe book. Our favorite is Rachel Ray 365: No Repeats A Year of Deliciously Different Dinners. I think it would be daring if we tried each of these meals all in one year, so far we just stick to the ones we like such as Mac-n-Cheddar with Broccoli.

A cookbook that I treasure (from the same lovely lady who brought me the box of cook books ) is from a now defunct bed and breakfast called Andy’s Catch and this book is full of delicious, wonderful breakfast and brunch foods (side note:  I can eat B&G every day of the week and any time of day is the perfect time of day for breakfast) including breakfast casserole and breakfast pizza.

My latest find is a cook book I received from a friend for Christmas Are You Hungry Tonight? Elvis’ Favorite Recipes. I’ve already tried the infamous or should I say notorious Fried Peanut Butter sandwich and am looking forward to rockin’ the kitchen trying out all his favorite breakfast recipes. This book also has the recipe for his 6-tiered wedding cake and a meatloaf recipe I can't wait to try, as I have not met a meatloaf I didn't like. My favorite meatloaf recipe comes from Reader's Digest Kitchen Secrets (p237).

Well, gotta go whip myself up something to eat all this talk of food has made me hungry.

I’m looking forward to digging through all of these recipes for the perfect New Year’s Eve foods! If you have any suggestions feel free to send them my way.

Just a Handful of my Cookbooks...