Tomato Salad

I was inspired by a friend's way of sharing her perfect bagel, so here is my version of a perfect tomato salad.

Step 1: Pick an orange tomato. The only other option we have here is a slimy red or super tough green. It turns out the orange tomatoes work well because they are more firm than the riper red ones.

Step 2: Slice the tomato into 6 or 7 circles and lay out on your favorite plate. **(those of you who knew me in college, don't judge. These plates continue to serve me well)**

Step 3: Cut a ball of buffalo mozzarella cheese into quarters and then slices and sprinkle over the tomatoes. I find that the older the cheese, the softer and I like me a good soft cheese.

Step 4: Take some palmito (heart of palm) and slice it the same as the cheese. I only found this in chunks in the US which will make it just that much more convenient. Spread this over the tomatoes.

Step 5: This is a new addition to the salad, I found it in a hole in the wall shop while out souvenir window shopping. These are tiny little pickled peppers. Yummy!

They don't have too much of a bite, but just enough to interest the taste buds.

Spread these around on the tomatoes also.

Step 6: The next ingredient is the inspiration behind the dish. I found this super festive vinegar while shopping one day and decided to try it. It was in a tiny bottle, but at that little whole in the wall that I found the peppers, I found the big bottle of my "Taste of India" vinegar. It makes me funny because one of the ingredients is "dedo da moca" which literally translates to "finger of the young girl." Apparently it is a kind of pepper. Probably that red one in the front of the bottle.

Anyway, throw a liberal amount of vinegar over the top of the salad.

Step 7: I am in Brazil, so nothing is ever eaten without a little olive oil. This is not-so-liberally poured on top.

Step 8: This is the final step, and must always be the final step. I learned that the hard way. Grind some pepper and sea salt over the top of the salad. If this is done at any time before, the freshly ground goodness will run off the veggies and right onto the plate. No good.

I like to eat each tomato slice in quarters, making sure that there is one of every kind of ingredient in each bite (name that movie). Near the end the bites get better as I scoop up the shrapnel on the plate.

Sometimes, just to offset the healthy feel of the dish, I dip some plain potato chips in the oil and vinegar mixture left on the plate. But that is just sometimes.

This is my new comfort food. Since the ice cream here is either super expensive (super-tiny serving of HagenDaz for $5) or tastes awful I needed a substitute. There are also no Cheez-Its or pre-made frozen cookie dough. These are my comfort foods of choice. All not good choices, so I am happy to have found a healthy alternative. Go me!

The Boy's Birthday Festivities

This posting falls into the "better late than never" category.

The boy had his birthday on Feb 11. It is now March 29 and I am letting the whole world know how the festivities went.

Of course, he had a birthday countdown calendar. The best stickers I found (that were not princesses) were Spiderman and bugs so I created a web between two buildings and had a red, blue and black theme. I'm pretty sure I took a picture when I hung it up, but can't find it. Here is the calendar with a week left until the big day.

Due to the combination of daylight savings time and bus pickup at 7:15, we have been having the opportunity to wake up to a beautiful sunrise every morning. Here is the view at 6:50am from our living room window.

And here is a silly birthday boy at about the same time.

Here is the view when the bus arrived early at 7:05am.


Of course, we needed to have a school celebration. We compiled orange gift bags with modeling clay, a tangram puzzle, silly glasses and, of course, the infamous slide-whistle. I contemplated many different themed cakes and finally decided that cupcakes were easier to transport and serve. Of course the frosting HAD to be orange and just to surprise my boy (and all his friends) I decided to put a Gogo on top of each cupcake. I had a great time buying 15 2-packs of Gogos at the neighborhood news stand, opening them all and deciding which ones were suitable for distribution among the boy's friends. I kept the best ones for him at home. I made all the cupcakes (German chocolate cake mix) but when I went to get the food coloring for the frosting, I couldn't find any. I had left it at church after an activity.

Oops!

I called (facebooked) my friend to see if I could borrow hers and then realized I didn't have time to get there, get back, get it all made and get to school before lunch. So, thanks to Debbie, I took all my supplies over to her house and made the frosting there, using her mixer, recipe, food coloring and counter. The color turned out awesome!

Unlike the girls' school, parents are invited and encouraged to visit their children's classes at the boy's school. I was invited to share desert with the kids after lunch. I got there while the kids were still at lunch and set up a cupcake and napkin at each desk. The kids came in with looks of amazement on their faces. Especially the ones who play with or collected gogos.




Now, being the great mom who plans ahead and always has everything perfect, I forgot to pack my camera into my bowl of frosting ingredients and my cell phone died during the walk to the classroom. I have no pictures of the orange-faced children eating their cupcakes (or just licking the frosting) or the look of complete joy that was on my boy's face when he was sung three different versions of the birthday song. Or the "what have I gotten myself into" look on the teacher's face when the kids opened their gift bags and found the slide-whistles.




I have to say that it was a success. The boy really liked it and all the kids said thank you. I even got to take home an extra cupcake so I could get a good picture.

When he got home from school, the boy opened the last pocket on his calendar. Each pack of gogos comes with two small sheets of stickers. In this final pocket he found ALL the stickers from the 15 packs we used for the cupcakes.

There is an album that goes along with these stickers that he had been talking about for a long time. Now, Daddy had meetings into the night so he couldn't come home for a party on his very birthday, but the boy agreed that if he got the album for his birthday on the very day, we could put off the cake and presents until Saturday. So the boy spent the afternoon sorting and sticking and matching his current gogos to his new stickers.

Here is the completed calendar with Pucca, Spiderman, Hot Wheels and bugs.

As a part of the Saturday birthday celebration, the boy got to choose anywhere to eat lunch. He picked Pizza Hut with no complaints from me.
Mmmmm!!


The boy dipping pepperoni bread sticks while his pizza cooled off.

The baby trying to accommodate THE WHOLE THING in her mouth.

The girl being eternally adorable.

For the cake at home, I ran into the same problem.

Still no food coloring.

I made a pan of brownies, frosted it and then used a familiar can of spray food coloring.

Anyone recognize it?

It is left over from the favoritecolornumberfourbirthdaycake. Who knew that food coloring spray kept for so long?

I wrote the boy's name in multi-colored crocantes (not quite mini malted milk balls, but the same idea without the great flavor) and had, by this time, located the missing birthday candles.

It looked and tasted great!

Here is the excited birthday boy with cake, balloon bouquet and pile-o-presents.

Here is the excited boy with his formerfavoritecolorcrunchyballbirthdaycake.

Opening presents: Spiderman playing cards from the first-one-grandma and an I-Spy computer game from his nother-one-grandma.

The look of joy on the face of a 7-year-old opening a new box of legos: Priceless (+tax, tags and license)

Gogos, gogos and more gogos! He actually got two exactly the same in different packages on the same day.

Twins!

Here is the whole kit and caboodle.
And a happy boy.

The concentration of building a lego masterpiece.

I don't know what this pose is all about, but the ship sure looks cool!

A little view of some of the boy's gogo collection.

Randomness

As I was checking on the kids on my way to bed one night

(and many subsequent nights)

I came upon this scene:

She has an ipod shuffle, but earphones are too big for her head and earbuds fall out of her ears, so she got this Ipod dock radio for Christmas. Her complaint the next morning was that some songs were too loud and some were too soft.

Solution: Cuddle up to the radio.

After the kids refused the green eggs and ham

(read: scrambled bacon cubes and eggs in green food coloring)

they requested more appetizing (???) colors.

Pink eggs for baby...

Orange eggs for the boy...

and an "I'm going to puke if you even try to get me to eat colored eggs" face from the girl.

The baby put the rainbow slinkies on her arms so she could be a dancing, spinning robot.

We had a friend of the boy come over and play ALL DAY on Saturday. This kid helped show us that 6-7-year-old boys are all the same.

He was a dolphin in the water, although it occasionally looked like he was drowning, and helped both the girl and the boy build up courage and confidance in the water.

More to come later. I just wanted to give my dedicated blogstalkers something new to see.

Everything's amazing, nobody's happy.

I LOVE THIS!!! It is so true.

I have no idea who this guy is, and I could have done without Conan, but it is worth the watch.

Because my arms are painted on

We have a laundry problem at our house.

We have a great system where everyone is supposed to put their dirty clothes in a 25 gallon rubbermaid tubby (the basket) under the sink in my bathroom. The keywords there are

IN and UNDER.

This is a picture of the laundry basket on a monday morning. The laundry was all done and put away on Friday. Oh, and not pictured below are the three !!!! pairs of my sweetie's socks that were behind me against our bedroom door. You'd think that we wore every item of clothing in our closets for the overflow to be this dramatic.

After all, it is a 25 gallon tubby...

Nope. That is not the case.

Everything does, in fact, fit inside the tubby, but my sweet family members (ALL of them) are just too lazy to make sure that the clothes actually get

IN the basket UNDER the sink.

(I have to admit that those are my jeans now on the top, which logically had been on the bottom of that pile)

How does something like this happen?

LAZINESS.

That is the bottom line.

I should applaud the small miracles though, because at least there are not little piles of dirty clothes all over the house.

Or are there?

Instructions and links about Pettiskirts

Blushing Buttercream Pettiskirt GIVEAWAY!!!!

I am totally going to figure out how to make these (or get my mom to do it) awesome skirts that my girls will love!

Baby's Birthday Bash

Last year I found a cool idea to celebrate a birthday. A countdown calendar! I downloaded the instructions and then took some creative license and made my own. Instead of creating a birthday scene with what is inside each day's pocket, I bought stickers and created a scene above for the stickers to go. My kids love stickers. This year I made a garden scene for the baby with princess, flower and butterflies stickers.

Before

After

The baby's school has a no parents policy. Even for birthdays. So the tradition is that parents send in a cake, drinks and goodie bags along with a camera so everyone can enjoy the day. Last year Serena tried desperately to go to her daughter's birthday party without any luck. I just gave in and sent a birthday in a bag.

I bought some silly FUN Services type toys downtown and put together bags for the kids (including a slide whistle, a flashing necklace and a slinky. I got a foam puzzle, finger paint, crayons and a sketch book to make it more than just annoying for the other moms. This all went together in a "tnt" bag with a cute label. I think I did well, especially since the bags didn't tie with the big sketch book in it.

The baby ADORES chocolate so what else would I make for her than a chocolate, chocolate brigadeiro cupcake? This is from a Brazilian cake mix so I wasn't sure if the outcome would be anything like the Betty Crocker cakes of my dreams. I followed the recipe exactly (measuring in mL instead of cups) and the cupcakes ended up more like brownies, not so fluffy like Betty's. That's ok, the baby like brownies, too. I made brigadiero frosting and put about at thick a layer of frosting as cake. I'm sure the kids at school were very sticky. Mmm.


We have a cool bakery/restaurant supply store nearby with all kinds of neat packaging. I got this neat box and put 16 cupcakes in for the 10 kids in the class. This way I have cupcake security without the risk of losing my cupcake tins (they don't do them here) to the pre-school abyss.

I even had extra gift bag toppers that I taped to the side of the cool box. There is no way that this party in a bag would be given to the wrong class.

What I didn't do was send my camera. I was just not that trusting. The teacher did say that she took cell phone pictures, but I never saw them. Oh well.

What I did do as soon as they all left for school was make a cake for the family party. This time Betty Crocker helped me out. I did it in a bundt pan and after I put it in the oven and was reading the cooking time, I realized that I forgot to flour the greased pan. Luckily, the cake came out of the pan anyway.

Again, we had brigadiero to put on the top. The cool part about using a bundt cake for this is that the extra brigadiero pools up in the middle and flows out when it is cut giving it a nice effect and extra frosting. And what is a brigadiero without sprinkles? I tried pouring the sprinkles down the sides, but it all just pooled on the plate so I asked Penha how this sprinkling process was done. She took a handful of sprinkles and threw it at the cake.

Sprinkles everywhere!

I was reluctant to do this because of the mess it made, but she said that there was no other way and, hello!! I didn't have to clean it up. I had her blessing to make a mess! Too cool.

I figured that since I was making a mess anyway, I would get the girls in on it, too. We put the cake on the floor and threw sprinkles at it. The girls giggled and laughed the whole time. The boy giggled and took pictures and video. Eventually we got a thoroughly covered cake.

Here is our final product with both the mess and the cake.

The girls were appalled at how many sprinkles remained on the floor and wanted to help clean it up. The baby went to get the broom and the girl went to work with her tongue. Once again, because of my Penha I knew the floor was clean enough to eat off of. I'll have to break her of that when I am the boss of cleaning again...

The licking got old fast and we moved to more efficient methods of cleaning, eventually enlisting the help of my Penha on the left of the picture (she runs out of the room when the camera comes out).


Additional Penha side note- her shoes say "kiss me" and I asked her if she knew what it meant. She said that she liked the colors and knew that it must be cool because it was "Americano."

Here is my attempt at professional photography of stuff (usually food) up close. That will be another post someday when I am hungry. Notice all the extra sprinkles and frosting on the edges. Just imagine what kind of delicious feast is waiting inside this volcano of a cake!

Baby was excited all afternoon about her cake. We had to hide it to prevent fingerprints in the sides. When daddy got home, we got presents together and, along with some friends had a little party. When we went to look for birthday candles they were nowhere to be found. She doesn't need candles, right? No way, not this fire fiend! I got out some tea candles from our emergency supply and she had "biggest candles ever!!!" on her cake.

You can just see the happiness in her eyes from having such special candles on her cake.
The current movie obsession of the baby is Barbie Diamond Castle. We just had to have all the fixins: hats, cups, plates and napkins. We also had the soundtrack playing in the background.

We did a pretty good job demolishing this cake along with the ice cream daddy had made.

Here are some of our guests enjoying the party.

Then came the presents. She opened every present very carefully.

Grandma and grandpa sent some pony puzzles.
Our friends brought a face-making game. She now thinks that whenever that friend comes he will bring a present for her.

Grandma and grand-daddy-daddy sent a hair kit with glitter paint and elastics. The sweet baby had glitter everywhere but in her hair for at least a week. It took four washings to get it all the way out of the girl's scalp.

We had a gift bag left over from school (apparently there were only nine kids) so we had something fun for our little friend to take home. The slide whistle was a huge success.

To burn off some of the brigadiero energy, the girls danced. Our other little friend (a year and a half younger) is a super dancer.

The evening ended with a sandwich hug between her fun friends. Notice the slide whistle.

I think everything turned out fantastic. The girl is a year older. We had yummy cake. We had fun friends. Mommy survived without stressing.