Gluten-Free French Toast

No fancy pictures, as it's not really a recipe. For this gluten free French Toast, I used UDI's GF cinnamon raisin bread (which is also free of soy, nuts, and dairy ~ we love this stuff here!), eggs from our chickens, and coconut milk. I whipped the eggs and coconut milk* together and dredged the cinnamon raisin bread through the mix. Then I cooked it with a little dash of coconut oil. They were utterly delicious! Beaker said, "These are the very best dinners EVER!" and then he ate several pieces for dinner, another for breakfast, and insisted I pack them for his lunch, too. High praise, indeed!

(*Tip: Using a sweetened coconut milk, like So Delicious Vanilla or Chocolate flavored coconut milk, adds a perfect sweetness to your French Toast! You can also use soy milk, if soy isn't an issue, and we have had great success in the past using a flaxseed-water mixture instead of eggs. Mix it up and try different things - French Toast is a great forgiving meal to play around with!)

For his lunch, I sliced two pieces of the toast into strips and packed in a small cup of syrup on the side for dipping. He also has another little cup of roasted sunflower seeds mixed with allergy safe chocolate chips. There is a small cup of breakfast sausage sliced up into bite sized bits, as well as some broccoli and peas. To round out the lunch, Beaker has watermelon balls and blueberries.

Simple, easy, delicious ~ our favorite kind of lunches!

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Grab Life by the Ball

"If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball."

"What?"

"Now that's good clean family fun, Cotton."

"Nobody makes me bleed my own blood."

"Necessary? Is it necessary for me to drink my own urine? No! But I do it anyway because it's sterile and I like the taste."

One of my favorite movies ever. It isn't exactly high class, but it is hilarious and never fails to make me laugh. Doesn't matter how many times I have watched (um, several dozen, at least), I always have to stop what I am doing to watch when it is on. And then I laugh until I'm in tears. It never gets old. I love Alan Tudyk as Steve the Pirate, and Justin Long as the moony teenage geek. 

So, because I am nothing if not a giant cheeseball, I made a lunch for the Dude inspired by Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. Because laughing at lunch makes the day so much brighter.

"If you're going to become true dodgeballers, you're going to have to learn the five Ds of dodgeball: Dodge, Dip, Duck, Dive, and Dodge."

The Dude has a roast beef and havarti sandwich on sourdough artisan bread, with Club crackers, a hard-boiled egg, raspberries stuffed with chocolate chips, blueberries, and six (one for each player on a standard dodgeball team) red grape tomatoes.

"The ADAA?"

"That's the American Dodgeball Association, of America."

I promise the egg isn't suffering from a horrible disease. It was my first attempt at this method of egg dyeing. It didn't turn out so great. Maybe with store bought eggs it would work better. I used fresh eggs from my chickens and ducks and the shells were pretty thick. The dye penetrated slightly (as you can see above) on the chicken eggs, but the duck eggs didn't get any dye through the shell at all.

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Happy Brunch

Happy smiling pancakes for dinner means happy smiling pancakes for brunch!

To make happy pancakes, just use any basic pancake batter recipe and cook on this griddle.

For dinner I made smiling pancakes, bacon, sausage, sliced oranges and mangoes with blueberries, and egg biscuits. A delicious breakfast-y dinner! Leftovers went in to lunches for all four of the school kids.

I added a few scoops of yogurt with vanilla and blueberries and a tiny tub of syrup for dipping, too.

Since Bean doesn't like bacon, I skipped it for her and made a little 'flower' out of an egg biscuit and sausage instead.

The egg biscuits are easy to make, and they're tasty, too! I just mixed flour, baking powder, and salt with eggs and milk and whisked it all together. Pour into muffin tins and bake. They were a tiny bit bland this time - next time I'll dice up bacon to mix in. 

Brick isn't too fond of pancakes, and especially not when they smile back at him, so for him I tucked in two egg biscuits with ketchup (yick, but he loves it on eggs) and hot sauce.

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Are you ready for some football?

No, I am not. But thank you for asking.

The Dude is a huge football fan. Not quite painting-his-body crazy about the game, but definitely shouting-at-the-TV fan. And tracking-team-stats-online fan. He watches any game he happens to catch, but his real passion? The Seattle Seahawks.

The Seahawks lost the most recent playoff game and are out of the running for the Super Bowl now, but judging from the amount of shouting this season, I am guessing they did better than usual. Me? Not a fan. But Beaker is learning at his dad's knee how the game is played. When he sees the Seahawks logo or a football he yells, "That's footsball! That's my dad's show."

When he saw chocolate footballs at the store recently, he insisted he HAD to have them for lunch. I finally broke them out the other day and put together this football lunch for him.

He has a sunbutter football sandwich, made with the heel of the bread loaf for the dark color. The stitches are sketched on with decorating gel. He also has a car shaped hard boiled egg, colby-jack cheese cubes, blueberries, sugar snap peas, pretzel circles, and chocolate footballs.

He chose green and blue silicone cups. Seahawk colors!

For the Dude, Princess, and Bean, leftovers!

My mom (more commonly known 'round here as Nana) has been visiting. The other night for dinner she made Nana's Special Southern Style Fried Chicken. I whipped up a bowl of creamy devilled egg red potato salad, and we had a traditional Summer dinner, smack in the middle of Winter. Cold fruit and veggies on the side are a perfect compliment.

For the Dude, I packed leftover chicken and potato salad, with blueberries and strawberries and two Mini Dippers of dipping sauce. Barbecue and honey mustard, his favorites. 

Princess also had leftover chicken an potato salad.

For her I packed chicken and potato salad, with blueberries (decorated with star sprinkles) and a star shaped hard boiled egg, and sugar snap peas with ranch. A Dove chocolate makes a nice little dessert.

And for Bean, chicken and potato salad with barbecue sauce, blueberries and strawberries, sugar snap peas with ranch, and a little Dove, too.

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And from this week...

Woo! Finally caught almost up to date after all of the catching up. Here are some of the lunches from so far this week:

A lunch for the Dude. He has a thin sliced corned beef croissant sandwich with Havarti cheese and crisp lettuce. He also has cucumber slices, whole strawberries, and a few mini Chips Ahoy cookies.

It has to be Spring eventually! Yes, Winter just started a few weeks ago, but we're already daydreaming of Spring. Bean has a jumping bunny lunch here.

She has yogurt with sprinkles, jumping Annie's Organic bunny grahams, a pair of orange segments, some halved strawberries, a baby Baybel cheese, and a happy little bunny hard boiled egg.

And finally, for Princess, a family of little bears took over her lunch.

She also has yogurt with sprinkles, a few mini Chips Ahoy cookies, orange segments, and strawberry halves. Tucked up top she has chocolate Teddy Grahams, and in the middle she has cucumber slices and a teddy bear hard boiled egg wearing a little hat. A picnic lunch, even if it isn't picnic weather!

It's Beginning to Look a lot Like...

Winter! Well, Winter for the PNW, anyway. Rain, rain, and more rain. Glad it isn't snow!

Princess and Bean are of a different opinion. Every morning they wake up and immediately look out their bedroom window, hoping to see the ground covered in a blanket of white. Instead, they see our soggy boggy backyard. Generally our area only gets an inch or two of snow each year, if that much, so they aren't likely to see their wish come true anytime soon. But it doesn't hurt to hope, right?

Since the sky isn't providing the kind of snow they can walk in and toss around, I've been trying to provide a little bit of that wintery spirit in their lunchboxes. 

Today Princess has snowflakes in her lunch. A snowflake turkey sandwich, snowflake pretzels, snowflake yogurt, and snowflake Ritz. Think that will hold over her wish for snow for a little bit longer?

We love the snowflake Ritz. They're so pretty! I also cut some cheddar stars, and tucked in a few grape tomatoes, a Princess favorite.

The pretzels are white chocolate covered with a sprinkle of crushed peppermint. They're delicious! Definitely going to have to try making some myself soon.

For Bean, I packed a fun bunch of Christmas trees. She has a tree sandwich, yogurt with sprinkles (trees, snowflakes, and candy canes), apple pieces, star shaped crackers, and some star pretzels with tree gummi candies.

The sandwich is made with whole wheat white bread and turkey, cut with a tree shaped cookie cutter. It's topped with a cheddar star and decorated with sprinkles and decorating gel.

Both lunches are packed in Easy Luncboxes.

My lunch today was too pretty not to snap a pic of. Greek yogurt over banana slices, topped with berry granola. So very delicious! The Greek yogurt brings a nice tang, the granola a bit of crunch, and the bananas round it all out by lending sweetness. My favorite lunch!

In other random news, our ducks are laying! I was starting to think they were going to hold off until Spring, but then the Dude went out to add bedding to their duck house and found a whole cache of eggs hidden there. Ducks roll their eggs in mud and hide them under grasses to keep them safe from predators. Their eggs are huge next to chicken eggs, and packed full of protein. They taste just a tiny bit more rich than a chicken egg.

In this picture, the big semi-white eggs are from our ducks, and the smaller darker eggs are from our chickens.

To give a better idea of size... the egg on the far left is from Chick, our "mystery hen", or might be from Buffy the brahma. The one in the middle is either from Princess, Lady, or Peach  (the buff orpingtons), or Hawk-Stripe or Rosebud, the Americaunas. And the egg on the far right, and the three behind, are all from Olivia and Nut, our duck hens. Nut is a Pekin (she looks just like the Aflack duck), and Olivia (and her mate, Annie) is a mystery breed.

The story of how we came to have ducks, and our 'mystery hen', is actually kind of interesting. The short story is that a friend of mine posted to Facebook that a friend of hers had found a pair of ducklings and a chick abandoned in her yard. She couldn't keep them, so they were trying to find someone who could take the trio. I lived just a few blocks away and had just recently moved my hens from their brooder pen in the garage out to the chicken run in the backyard. I still had the brooder pen set up, and the Dude and I had been talking about getting a few ducks eventually. I picked them up the next day! 

We named the ducklings Annie and Oliver, and the chick... Chick. A few days later we picked up Cutie and Buffy, our brahma chickens, and added a Pekin (Nut) and an Indian Runner duckling (India). They all grew up together in the brooder pen and moved to the yard together. 

Raising ducks and chickens in the suburbs has been interesting. They're loud, but luckily none of our neighbors has complained (yet). We keep them from smelling by keeping the coop and duck house clean and well stocked with pine shavings and straw. Occasionally I take eggs to the neighbors, to help keep the peace. Shortly after we got our ducks, the couple next door started raising a pair of ducks, too, so definitely no complaints there! It's fun to go hang out in the backyard on warm days - our ducks and the neighbor ducks "talk" to each other through the fence. We can hear them quacking and gabbing back and forth.

Chickens are very easy to care for. Ducks are more work, and they're louder and smellier than chickens. But they're also adorable and a lot of fun to watch. Worth raising, if you're able!

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