Keeping the sippies clean

I'm going with the mommy theme again today. Sometimes I don't know whether to apologize for that or embrace it. It is our life here, after all, and winter is probably better for being crafty, anyway, right?

Once the kids graduate from nursing or bottles, I know most of us move them on to sippy cups of some sort. We have gone through several varieties in the last 5 years, but I have finally decided that I prefer Playtex.
Let it be known, first of all, that, to date, I have only purchased our sippies at Target. I choose from varieties that I feel like won't break the bank, but won't be replaced often. I have never researched all options found online or in specialty retail shops. I have found, however, some great comparison articles at Z Recommends which may introduce you to other sippy styles and brands (see links below).
For me, the Playtex cups stand out for 2 major reasons. They are easy to clean and don't tend to leak. Minor reasons for choosing Playtex would be that the lids and spouts are interchangeable and they are affordable.
It took me awhile to come up with a successful cleaning method for any sippy cup. It may be that I've struggled with it because I simply don't get around to washing our dishes as promptly as I should, but I don't think that's all of it. Some cups have clearly been more prone to grow moldy or have had very awkwardly designed parts making effective cleaning difficult.
I finally settled on pipe cleaners (chenille stems), toothpicks and the bottle brush for sippy cup maintenance. Pipe cleaners work wonders when washing dishes with crevices, spouts, and straws, and I was bowled over at my ignorance when my dad introduced that simple idea to me. Pipe cleaners are now a standard item found in the little vase that holds our dish washing brushes. Why had that never occurred to me?
I found these articles at Z Recommends interesting, but am also interested in other stories of success, or lack-of, in keeping sippy cups clean. Do you have one?

2009 BPA-Free Sippy Cup Showdown: Baby and Toddler Division, Top Picks

2009 BPA-Free Sippy and Straw Cup Showdown, Toddler to Pre-K Division, Top Picks

Summer fruit

Ahhh...don't you love the fruit of summer? I'm making my plans for strawberry-picking, blueberry-picking and any other picking we can manage. I just learned that Michigan is the number one producer of tart cherries in the US. Hmm. Wonder what we can do with that. For those of you in California and anywhere else with access, go pick cherries!

I have our belt tutorial ready to go, but am running short on computer time. I hope to post it tomorrow. And the Craft Social was awesome! We are expecting to gather and post pics soon.

Oh, I forgot to mention when I posted this earlier-I love my cherry pitter. I got this one a couple years ago after using a similar one at my parents'. It works great and I love the shield feature. It really makes a difference. Keeps the squirts off your shirts. For those of you not into the gadgets, I've seen several different methods for pitting cherries without it-paperclips, nails, pastry bag tips, pencils, bobby pins. Most of these methods are messy but frugal.

Valentine fingerprints and chocolate lollipops

My daughter is attending a Valentine party for the little girls in her preschool-homeschool co-op today and needed a card and treat for each girl. Due to my natural inclination to procrastinate, we needed something quick and easy. But cute, of course.
We ended up making these fingerprint heart cards and chocolate lollipops. She tired out before finishing writing the whopping 8 cards (I know, she's 4), so these are a combination of her words and mine. All her fingerprints. I got the idea for the cards after seeing these on The Crafty Crow. I don't have any stamp pads, so we just colored her fingertip with washable marker. Easy clean up!

For the lollipops, we used this Wilton mold. I guess I did plan that part in advance. I purchased the mold and some candy melts a couple weeks ago at Michael's. I heated up the candy, poured it into squeeze bottles, then let my kids fill the molds. All you do after that is add the lollipop sticks and refrigerate to firm up. Quick!

The thing I did not get at Michael's, however, was a set of lollipop bags. How else do you wrap these? After recently reading this post at Martha Stewart and this one at Zakka Life, I decided to use regular old plastic zip bags. I pulled out my sewing machine (already threaded with red, luckily) and stitched through a plastic bag to make several smaller candy bags. (Pay no attention to that heart shape there. Although, if you wanted to make a heart-shaped bag, I'd say create the same rectangle shape needed as usual, but curve the top. When you tie it around the lollipop it will look like a heart). After sewing the rectangles, I cut them out, pulled them over the lollipops and tied them off.
Ta da! Cute, quick, and easy.

P.S. I've used the candy melts for lollipops, truffles, and other molded candy recently and just can't get accustomed to that flavor. Any candy makers out there familiar with another chocolate used for candy that melts well and actually tastes good?

Apple recipe No.2

You may not need a recipe for applesauce, but then again....I'm giving you three ways to fix applesauce at home.

One, suggested by Mark Bittman in How to Cook Everything: Take about 5 lbs. of apples (mixture of varieties best), halve them (no peeling or coring), dump into a large pot with about 1/2" water at bottom. Cover, heat over medium. Once water boils, uncover and cook, stirring, until apples are mushy (about 30 minutes). Taste and add sugar, if you like. Pass mixture through a food mill.
Now, I don't have a food mill, so I just pressed mine through a wire sieve. Maybe more labor-intensive, but it worked fine.
This is the smooth sauce, above, in fairy pink.

Two, suggested perhaps everywhere: Core, peel, and slice a bunch of apples. Try using one of these wonderful Apple Corer-Peeler-Slicers. Dump apples into large pot. Add some water (I'd stick with 1/2" to 1" of water at bottom). Heat to boiling. Reduce heat, stir occasionally until apples are mushy. Mash apples with potato masher. Sweeten if you like.
This produced the brownish, chunkier sauce above.

Three, Caramel Applesauce, from a Junior League of Springfield, MO cookbook: Core, peel, slice about 6 apples. Heat 3 T butter and 1/3 cup brown sugar over low heat until butter melts. Remove pan from heat. Add apples, mix until coated with sugar mixture. Add 1/2 cup water, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, and a dash of nutmeg. Heat to boiling over medium heat. Reduce heat, cover and simmer, stirring occasionally, about 20 minutes until apples are fork-tender. Let apples cool, mash with a potato masher.

Weekend treats

Our first round of homemade ice cream this summer. Mmmm. Some of our yearly flavors are your typical vanilla, dark chocolate, peanut butter, and cookies and cream, with occasional new ones thrown in. This week I'll try to make strawberry ice cream while the berries are on sale and then I'd like to try some different flavors this summer. Green tea, or any tea, and tiramisu are on my mental list.
Pancake cups from Sycamore Stirrings. I decided to make ours in miniature, though, as we do many things to accommodate small person appetites. And also because they're so cute! I didn't have a lot of toppings on hand, but I had enough to create these combos: peanut butter and banana, strawberries and cream cheese, scrambled eggs with cream cheese and a spot of blackberry jelly. The egg one actually turned out to be my favorite.

My adjustments to the pancake cup recipe were 1) to make smaller pancakes and bake them in mini-muffin tins, 2) to thin them by spreading them with the bottom of the ladle after pouring into the pan instead of by adding some water to the batter.

Rice Krispies Cookies

Peanut butter-chocolate chewiness. This Rice Krispies Cookie was really my family's favorite variety of no-bake cookie. This was also the only variety of Rice Krispies cookie we ever made at home. Never once made the marshmallowy kind that I recall. These are great for summer since the cooking time is brief and you don't have to turn on the oven.
Here's the recipe:

1 cup sugar
1 cup corn syrup
Combine in large pot and heat until just beginning to boil. (Really, just as you detect a simmer. Cooking too long makes them hard and way too chewy). Remove from heat and add:
1 cup peanut butter
4-5 cups Rice Krispies cereal (I like about 4 1/2 cups)
Stir gently to combine. Spread into 9x13 pan.
Melt and stir:
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1 cup butterscotch chips
Spread over Rice Krispies mixture. Cool at room temp or in refrigerator. Yum.

Speaking of bar cookies, this is a favorite little tool of mine. A tiny spatula, just right for lifting bar cookies and brownies and such out of the pan. (I use this way too much.)

Sheet pans

My sheet pan is one of the most-used items in my kitchen. I love it. I highly recommend purchasing your own high-quality, heavy, aluminum, rimmed baking sheet. You can use it for practically everything that goes in the oven-cookies, vegetables, meats, galettes, breads, biscuits, etc. These pans (called half sheets, as they're half-sized compared to a full-sized commercial pan) bake/roast evenly, don't warp, and they're the perfect size for standard ovens. What's your new pan going to cost, you ask? King Arthur Flour sells one for $17.95 or 2/$30, Williams-Sonoma for $17.00 or 2/$30, but mine? I got it for $5.00 at a commercial baking supply store in Chicago. That was several years ago, but they haven't raised their prices too much. Now they're $6.50. That was worth checking around for!
Of course, along with your pan, you should get some parchment and/or a silicone baking mat. Parchment is wonderful. You can slide the entire sheet off your pan or lift your baked goods right off and reuse it until it's practically no more. Then you don't even have to clean your pan. Parchment comes in rolls or sheets from the same sources mentioned above (and can be used for a wide variety of things in addition to lining a sheet pan). Again, with a little research, you may be able to find this cheaper. I got a large stack of sheets from a caterer at little cost.
The silicone mats fit perfectly into one of these pans, are nonstick, and are super easy to clean. Haven't ever found a great deal on these, though.
For some professional opinions on baking sheets and liners see this article from Fine Cooking.
Now I have my eye on a quarter sheet pan for smaller recipes and for use in the freezer.

P.S. My sister crocheted the lovely hotpads in the photo above and I can't bring myself to actually use them for fear of ruining them!

Quiz: What is this?

Maybe I would have guessed if I hadn't looked these up by name and therefore known what they were. But then again, probably not. They're pretty octopus-like and I've never seen one of these in a store or anyone's home.
These two pictures are potato mashers by Chef's Toolbox and Simply Mash. The picture below all of this is my old masher.
The paint, or whatever it is, has begun chipping off my potato masher into our food and I figure that's not a healthy addition to our diet, so I'm looking for a new one. Not that I'll buy one of these funky models online (I'm sure I'll grab whatever version I can find at Target or Bed, Bath and Beyond), but it was interesting research.
As far as your basic potato mashers go, Cook's Illustrated (great source for product reviews) recommends the flat disk-shaped models, like mine, versus the wavy bottom ones...does that make sense? I don't think these new ones were around when they performed their tests. Of course, for ultra-smooth and silky mashed potatoes, you may want a ricer. Cook's recommends this one: RSVP International Classic Kitchen Basics Potato Ricer.
Thanks to our great teacher, the internet, I not only learned which products come highly recommended/which stink, I learned I can use my ricer for squeezing excess liquid out of cooked or thawed frozen spinach (I'm sure I never would have thought of that myself) and, perhaps most importantly, that the "potato masher" was a German stick hand grenade used from the end of WWI to the end of WWII. Thanks, internet!

Good Stuff for Kids

The Charlie and Lola series of books and videos are great! The mixed-media, childlike illustrations are fun to look at, the dialogue is actually spoken like a child, and you can't beat British accents. I love hearing my kids mimic it. We have only four of the many books and I think my kids can recite part or most of each of them. Currently, they are most intrigued by the colorful drawings and explanation of germs in I'm Really Ever So Not Well.
The DVDs each have a collection of several short episodes so they're great for brief periods in front of the tv. Or, should I say, the "telly."



We were given a Stokke Tripp Trapp chair for my daughter's birthday last year and are so pleased with it. You can adjust the height and depth of this chair (seat and footrest, individually) to fit your child and your dinner table. You can get it with a 5-point harness or without. With a cushion or without. With a guardrail or without. In red or not. You don't have to clean up a nasty tray or booster seat when they finish eating (just your nasty table), your child doesn't have to sit uncomfortably on their knees or some other contortionist position to reach the table, and, surprisingly, I don't often find myself telling my daughter to get back in it, as I do with grown-up or child-size chairs. If you find you hate your high chair or the switch from high chair to big chair, put one of these on your wish list.
Oh, and it holds up to 300 lbs, in case you have the world's biggest baby.




My Giant Sticker Activity Book. This is...well, a giant sticker activity book by Roger Priddy, who has tons of kids books I'm sure you've seen or own. It comes with topical pages, like shapes or animals, and corresponding pages of brightly colored or photographic stickers. Each section has a simple explanation or question pertaining to the stickers to be placed in it and color-coded shadows showing your child where exactly to place the sticker. My kids love it. They are young enough that I have to do it with them, but it is pretty fun and a good teaching opportunity. Older kids could entertain themselves with it.
A great thing about this sticker book, besides just being fun matching the stickers, is that when your kids are finished placing the stickers you can go back and reread it like a regular book and they can (somewhat carefully) remove and replace the stickers.
We enjoy this at home, but it would be a great plane-ride surprise activity.