Making Banana Pancakes, Pretend Like It's The Weekend, Yeah!

We started the day with international flair. We brewed some left over, organic, fair-trade, bird friendly Cuban coffee that we brought back to the US from our vacation to Vancouver, BC Canada a couple of months ago. We prefer to use our french press for single servings to save on grains and make a really solid cup of java.

PAIN PERDU

Here we have some day old brioche that makes the most amazing French toast.

These were acquired from Le Pain Quotidien.

sliced brioche, dipped in egg and milk batter with a dash of cinnamon, griddled to perfection!

Banana pancakes made on the fly, the brioche were gone in 60 seconds!

Apples. Good for humans..............

......and many others!

Friends dropped in to share "THE best donuts in the world!" with us. There was actual crispness to the bite in these peaches. They really were good!

All the makings of our $2.50 dinner.

We kicked it up a notch by doctoring our inexpensive store bought sauce with some home grown goodness. Onion, tomatoes, garlic...............BAM!

FOOD FAIRE: You Win Some You Lose Some......

Afternoon Activity includes sampling at the El Roble Food Tasting Festival.

So the other day we spent a whopping $18 dollars (3 days worth) at Winco market. However, the trip will probably cost us $518 in all ($500 deductible for crunching rental car into pole). More reason to economize! With that, here are some step by step photos of a meal that cost around $3. James learned how to make these Spanish Omlettes (aka: Torilla de Patatas) while on international work camps in France. Here is our variation of the omlette a la hot dog. Still risky even with these cheap ingredients because one wrong move can create more of an inedible bomblette than an omlette.

Store bought bag-o-potatoes seasoned with rosemary, olive oil, and sea salt

roast them in the oven and figure out what to do with them later....

oh yeah, these were cut with an apple corer slicer!

Ingredients from our BIG splurge the night before. Meat ( turkey franks ) Cheese, potatoes, eggs, some garlic and a whole lot of imagination...

Get started by cracking eggs....

Chop some hot dogs and brown them in a pan.

Mix meat (can use any meat for this) and potatoes in a skillet.

skillet should be non stick or use enough oil to prevent sticking.

Stir everything a few times and spread out ingredients

Get ready to do a little dance and make a little flip when it all looks like this...

Place a flat plate over omelet and turn upside down

Then slide back into pan to cook the bottom that was just the top...

Voila! with all the fixin's

Appetizer Turkey Hot Dog Bites on a Stick

No tooth picks, no worries, a few broken dry spaghetti sticks do the trick!

The boys battle it out for the few last drops of hot sauce

Eden is content to have one of her favorite ingredients:

CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESE!

The thoughs of baby Jujube in response to his siblings

"can you all just be civilized please!" "geeeeeee wiz for reals!"

Not a Zippity Day.....

When life gives you lemons....

Life did give us lemons. Lots and lots of them. These lemons were so ripe that some of the seeds inside were starting to sprout. When life gives you lemon seed sprouts, add dirt, water and just stir.

A lemon bath.

Ok, so life didn't give us lemons..... our neighbors did. They acquired them from the tree of a friends house while helping them move. Here, John poses with some fully grown lemons in front of OUR lemon tree........ if you look really close, you'll see that ours have a way to go until they are ready for a bath of their own.

We wasted no time in getting those lemons to the chopping block . While making our breakfast of oatmeal and cantaloupe slices we also managed to SQUEEZE in some lemonade preparation.

We decided the best way to preserve all the excess juice was to freeze the squeeze ice cube style for single serve use later.

Keoni and his sugary elixir...... all the necessary ingredients for:

The Best Lemonade Ever

1 3/4 c. sugar

1 1/2 c. lemon juice

8 c. water

* In a small saucepan, combine sugar and 1 cup of the water. Bring to boil and stir to dissolve the sugar. Allow to cool to room temperature, then cover and refrigerate until chilled. Remove seeds from lemon juice, but leave pulp. In a pitcher, stir together chilled syrup, lemon juice and remaining 7 cups of water. Mmmmmmm!

The neighbors also brought us this GIGANTIC sunflower head from their Dad's house. Thanks again!

This flower head was super spiky. Not as fun as the last one. But somehow, we are still motivated to pick the thing clean. Food is like that.

Yup. We love our little Tonka truck. The kids made backing up sounds the whole time... beep, beep, beep.

Feeling totally inspired by the green smoothies workshop of this week, James pulls together as many free ingredients as he can find into our little smoothie maker. Apples, beets, sorrel, frozen grapes, lemonade and a little hope. Those beets really do give it color!

Lookin' good! Turns out though, that our little smoothie maker that (almost) could, is NOT a Vitamix. Our smoothies had to be....... well....... chewed a little bit. But the flavor was great!

It's that time again kids! What time?....... TOFU TIME! Yeah!

This soy curd basically takes on the flavor of whatever you put it with.... so marinating takes under an hour. At less than a dollar a pound, this is our go to protein source of choice.

Aleli tried out a new recipe which we later adjusted to taste a bit. The book said it could be used as a taco filling as well, but we had it over brown rice. To the above left: this is what bad tofu looks like. This block was accidentally frozen on the top shelf of our fridge then defrosted, frozen, and so forth till it looked like one giant brittle, punky sea sponge thingy........ not pretty! Good thing we had a couple pounds of good tofu on hand.

After dinner, we popped up some kettle corn for the road and headed out to the park for some live Reggae from the Upstream Boys. We had a blast dancing around in the half dark, meeting up with friends and munching on homemade snackies.

On a tip from a work friend, we drove out a town over to a store called WinCo. It was suppose to be a little like Costco but without the membership cards. We had never been before, but were told that there were great deals to be had. So we wanted to investigate for ourselves. There were carts for days and the biggest Jug-O-Corn Oil we've ever seen. Kai almost slips a disc just trying to pick it up. That's a lot of corn!!!!! We also found Mac-n-Cheese for .50 cents a box and Koolaid packets for .10 cents a piece (the best prices we've seen on those items to date).

Aleli and the kids check out while James bags up our purchase for the day. We came in with $18 (three days worth) and spent just under that.

Exhale. We stayed in budget and on task in that huge maze of food and products...... a herculean task sometimes with lots of tired kids. These groceries should help round out our meals for the next few days. It's always fun trying out new places as well. Learning, always learning.