JELLO

So most of you know I love to cook and I love to eat.  I have had many a friend comment to me on the strange things I make for our family to eat.  Now I don't think they are strange but I guess others do. 

Despite my love of cooking there are a few things that I think most of the world must have perfected but leave me dumbfounded.  Jello is only one.  Yes, I know, how hard can it be?  You add boiling water and cold water and waaa-la it's jello.  For some reason no matter what I seem to always have a nice grit at the bottom of my jello.  My mother didn't feed us a jello salad every Sunday growing up, really I don't think she ever fed us jello salad.  Maybe it's in the genes.  Mike's a purist and only will eat simple jello anyway no fancy add ins for him.

Tonight I decided to make burgers since my kids like burger king burgers.  I thought every time I shape them myself they shrink into little hockey pucks and are tasteless.  So this time I actually bought already shaped burgers in the ground beef section of the store.  Nothing was added to them but I thought maybe they'll work better.  I added some seasoning to each side and grilled them up.  They didn't shrink so much but they were pretty tasteless and I burned half of mine.  I believe BK is the only way to go for us.

To go along with our burgers I thought I'd use up some Tater Tots a friend left me when she moved.  Because I'm not educated in the way of tater tots I didn't get them into the oven before hand and read the package that said to pan fry them for 5-6 min.  as opposed to the 25 min. in the oven.  Let's just say that they weren't tater tots when I was done with them.  I didn't even use my non stick skillet so the crunch parts were all stuck to the bottom of the pan and the rest was , well, hash browns.  No one ate them and I don't blame them. 

So that's my confession of a few items I seem to lack the specific skill in preparing.  What to do with ground beef?  I just don't know.  On to cardamon chicken and shrimp saag and ginger glazed salmon oh and I made a really yummy chocolate pear upside down cake.  What's your particular cooking challenges?  Do you have any tips for me? 

Do ya think I can manage to not eat any more candy until Christmas?  I told Jack tonight if he saw me eating candy I'd pay him a quarter.  He smiled and is plotting to put candy in my path.  Sneaky kid.

Train to Seward Fall 2010

Isn't this beautiful.  I took this picture from our moving train.  Lovely! Though the train was fun I don't really recommend doing it like we did.  We got up about 5am to get to the train station and then rode there and were totally tired and got back pretty late that night.  Want to say it was about 10:30pm.  If I were to do it again I'd stay overnight.  It was a great trip though.

We made a picture list of all the things we wanted to do this summer.  One of those was ride the train another was to walk around on rocks by water.  Here they are.

Jack

David

Sam

Another photo from a moving train

riding in the top of the viewing car, it was pretty fun

We finally saw Beluga whales.  I've been trying to see them for three years now and it took a train ride to make it happen.  It was so fun.

My David Boy

Here's me and my sweet little David boy.  He was the only one on our train trip to Seward who would pose in front of all these fun statues.  He's such trooper. 

                                                  David and a huge anchor

David and the captain

David and the bear

David and the eagle

David and the fish

David and the Orca AKA Killer Whale

crazy hair day

Now that I work at the kids' school I try to participate in some of their fun school spirit days.  Here's a few photos of our crazy hair days.