Monthly Archives: February 2012

I ordered this book because I read an article last year from Mother Earth News about planting potatoes in an old trashcan and was intrigued by the idea of doing it.  I’m looking forward to planting the potatoes and attempting other projects from this book.  I’m going to have to make sure I double check the city codes since my neighbor is one of Dubuque’s Finest and may disapprove of some of the more interesting endeavors contained in this tome.  I’ll keep you informed as I plan out my Spring and Summer projects.

Some mornings I don’t want to go to all the trouble of making a big breakfast, so I make the boys Monkey Bread.  Monkey Bread is so easy to make.  All you need is three tubes of cheap refrigerator biscuits, sugar, brown sugar, butter and cinnamon.  If you want to be creative, you can add nuts and/or raisins.

First you begin with a sugar and cinnamon mixture.  (I’ll give you the recipe, don’t worry).  You can put it mixture in a bag to shake, but I prefer a big bowl.

Take your biscuits and using a shears or scissors, cut your biscuits into fourths.  Every once and awhile, dip your shears in water to make sure the cuts are clean and don’t stick to your shears.

Once you have a good number of cut up biscuits, shake your bowl to coat the biscuit pieces real good.

Pull the coated pieces out of your bowl and place into a well greased bundt pan.     Continue cutting, coating and placing pieces in the pan until you and finished all three tubes.  Make sure you are evenly spacing them while you build up in the pan.

Here is what they will look like when you are finished putting them in the pan.

Next, pour over your brown sugar/butter mixture and put in the oven.

After baking for 35 minutes it will look like this.  Make sure you cool for 10 minutes in the pan, turn over onto a plate and  . . .

Homemade Monkey Bread!

Saturday was Caleb’s birthday.  Originally we were going to have a party for him at the house with homemade pizza.  Unfortunately, sickness was visiting most of his cousin’s, so we opted to postpone his party to another day.

Instead of going to Applebee’s with the family, Caleb decided that he wanted to have homemade Chinese for supper.

Unfortunately, I forgot how long it takes to make homemade Chinese from scratch, so instead of starting in the afternoon, I started at 5 pm.  We didn’t eat until 9pm, but it was darn good!

Here is a the boys’ plates before they dug in.

I made fried rice.  I did have a seasoning packet to make it, but it really isn’t that hard even without a mix.  Pork egg rolls.  Caleb and Koehler made assembled and Caleb deep fat fried them.

Homemade cream cheese won-tons “crab rangoons.”  Beth likes them a little sweeter so I add some sugar to the cream cheese.  Again Caleb & Koehler assembled them and Caleb deep fried them.  Steam rice.  Ho Hum.

General Tao’s Chicken and Orange Chicken.  The General Tao’s was from a recipe, but I doctored up the Orange Chicken from scratch.  It was ok, but I think I’ll look for a good recipe.

Sweet & Sour Chicken without the sweet or sour.  I made some sweet and sour sauce, but Beth doesn’t like it with the sauce.  Also, I didn’t have any chunk pineapple.  Basically, I used the same fried chicken for all of the dishes, just added some different veggies and sauces.  Last time (the first time) I used a recipe for some batter for the chicken and it was a mess.  This time I used my southern fried chicken coating with a milk/egg wash and then fried in a pan with oil.  Worked much better!  And tasted much better.