Andres made his most favorite thing... Deviled Eggs

Really, the kid would eat two dozen if left alone.  He kept asking "where do you buy those?".  When I told him "you make them" he said, "But Uncle Cody brought some, he didn't make any!"  Guess he forgot Aunt Shannon came along too.


Anyway, I just sent him to the kitchen to boil eggs, which was way more complicated than I realized when I had to tell him how to do it.  There were only a couple ruined, so it worked out fine. 


We used this simple recipe from HEB


And it was a success! Only the waiting for them to chill seemed to be a problem. 

HEB comes through again! (they also saved me with a quick cupcake tree for Albert's birthday yesterday)

My brother says I need a job because I'm starting to eat garbage.

If you don't know my brother, he's a very sharp guy & frequently uses that intelligence to be snarky. Mostly to me & various liberal posters on news stories.  We invited him for dinner last night, Mom made an old standby bbq chicken from our childhood & I cooked up some mixed greens & tomatoes.  Cody isn't a fan of healthy so he figures greens are trash then to top it off I brought out the pickled watermelon rinds for a garnish with the BBQ.  Yeah, that's when he said I needed a job so I didn't have to feed my family garbage.  Hilarious right?   Now I have a job interview in a few hours.  That'll slow down the cooking progress huh? I blame Cody & I'll still be eating "garbage", it'll just be coming from fast food joints now. 


Anyway, the dinner was good, the kids  both really liked mothers "BBQ Chicken", which is actually an HEB roasted chicken shredded cooked in the following sauce:

• 1 can tomato sauce
• 1/2 cup lemon juice
• 1 t Tabasco
• 6 t Mustard
• 2 t chili powder
• 3/4 brown sugar
• 6 t vinegar

It tasted like home! The HEB roasted chicken is a definite improvement compared to Mom boiling it all day stinking up the homestead when we were kids.

I promise to get the ice cream stuff together soon to post. I have to say that I will miss having the extra time to learn and do stuff with my kids & my mom if I end up back at work.  The thought of what I'll miss with my boys is a little heart breaking.  I never thought I'd be in this place, not wanting to work outside the home.  But heck, I've had a new exciting job that I knew absolutely nothing about for only about 18 months and I'm just starting to get the hang of it all.  The progress the boys made in the last year has been astonishing.  I hope it was more due to our finalization of the adoption and a stable family than it was to me devoting all my time to them.  I hope it can continue if I'm back in the hotel business.  Either way I'm anxious to keep up this project as much as I can, so any suggestions or feedback would be appreciated!

Pickled Watermelon Rinds

Wow! This was a ton of work, but oh my, I love these things! With BBQ or on a burger, they are the perfect sweet/sour/acid combination.  But holy cow it was a long process.  Here's the recipe link again in case you are looking for it & here are some pictures of the process.  
We did use a relatively small watermelon that didn't produce all that much rind, so we didn't can anything just used a rubbermaid container. The most time consuming part of the deal was pealing the green part off the rind, I was glad mom was here & I had two sets of hands for that part of the project.  Maybe that's what makes me so much braver when she is in the kitchen with me :).  I wished I'd left a little more of the pink on the pieces just for the way they look. We are still enjoying this batch & I'm not sure I'll tackle it again this summer, but maybe next!


pickled-watermelon-rind recipe

Albert helped out with this project, adding the spices & cutting the lemon in super thin slices.

Albert & Mimi getting the pickling syrup ready to cook.

Rind on the left, syrup on the right.  It sure smelled good!