Quote Monday is a light sleeper

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Evie: “Daddy, I want to cut open your stomach and look at your skeleton.” – This is why I’m a light sleeper these days…that’s a hell of a non-sequitur!

Evie: “Daddy, is it okay if I talk in my sleep? Because sometimes I have to whisper, ‘Flying Chair! Flying Chair!’ if I want to go anywhere.”

Sara, on a Monday: “We will use the new blender on Wednesday.”
Evie: “You shouldn’t have told me that! Now I won’t be able to sleep!”

Evie: “It must be hard to be a zebra. Or a monkey. Or a Japan.”
Sara: “Japan is a country.”
Evie: “Oh.”

Sweet Potato Fries

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The Reason:

Sweet potato fries are delicious, not to mention healthier than regular fries. This one is double good, since you’re not actually frying the french fries in oil. Believe me, this is a much better use of sweet potatoes than those gross, marshmallow-topped dessert/vegetable dishes so popular around Thanksgiving.

The Journey:

The hardest part about this is peeling and chopping the potatoes. Sweet potatoes have a much tougher, sort of papery skin than a regular potato does, so you definitely don’t want that in there.


For my money, you want these to be pretty decent size. I guess that’s just personal preference, but they shrink up a little bit in the oven, so you want to start bigger than you want.

Once you have them chopped up, the rest is easy. Mix them in a bowl, put ‘um on a sheet, and bake ‘um.

The Verdict:

They’re great. We make these all the time, so obviously we like them. The kids love them too. It’s sort of a race to get a hold of any, since everybody gobbles them up as fast as possible.

The Recipe:

Modified from Ingrid Hoffmann’s Sweet Potato Oven Fries recipe.

  • 3 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into strips
  • 2 teaspoons olive oil (significantly reduced from original recipe!)
  • 1 teaspoon paprika
  • 1/2 teaspoon chili powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
  • Coarse ground rock salt and freshly ground black pepper (optional, but we didn’t use any)

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees F.

Place the sweet potatoes in a large bowl and toss with olive oil until the sweet potatoes are coated. Add the paprika, chili powder, coriander, salt, and pepper; toss to distribute evenly.

Arrange the coated fries in a single layer on the prepared pan. Bake for 20 minutes on the lower rack until the sweet potatoes soften. Transfer the pan to the upper rack of the oven and bake 10 minutes longer, until fries are crispy.

Missing: One Garden Worth of Produce

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Remember how I bragged back in July about how our garden was growing like crazy, and we were harvesting a ton of lettuce and strawberries? Well, not a lot has happened since then.

Our tomato plants and beans grew and grew and grew like crazy, consuming our entire garden to the point where we have to hack our way in every time we go to water it. The bean plants in particular are constantly grabbing onto our tomatoes and the tomatoes in the garden next door, like some kind of hungry tentacled monster.

This seemed like a good sign, but where’s all the produce?

I believe 2 of our 12 tomato plants (8 planted tomato plants and another 4 or so naturally occurring) have actually made tomatoes. And even those are hardly producing. The beans have just offered up a handful of beans, but I’m hoping that’s because we started them late.

Why aren’t our tomatoes producing? We currently have 2 theories. The first is that it was just too hot at the wrong time. My sister said that the plants won’t produce flowers when the temperature is over 100. This could explain it, since we had a heat wave right at the time that the plants should have been blowing up. The other theory is that we seem to have some aphids this year. We also have ladybugs, so the situation seems to be controlling itself, but one gardener posited that perhaps the tomatoes were worried about growing defenses rather than fruit.

Luckily we got 13 pounds of tomatoes from my dad, so we spent 3 1/2 hours on Sara’s birthday canning 7 quarts of tomatoes.

The only things that seem to be going well in the garden right now are the peppers (and the eggplant). Specifically, our jalapeno plant is going like gangbusters. I picked 15 large jalapenos the other day, and there were still more coming. This was after we had already frozen about all that we would probably use (I have to admit, we don’t use a ton of jalapenos in a year, especially since we haven’t canned any salsa so far this year).

I’m still holding out a little hope that the tomatoes are just delayed, and we still may get some kind of tomato explosion. Then we can all look back on this post and have a good laugh together, as we try to give them away to anyone who will take them.

Please?

That’s flat out rediculous

/ Shane / 1 Comment

The motor on Sara’s new blender is so powerful  that, if you put veggies in to blend for soup, the friction of the blades will actually heat it for you to the point that you don’t have to cook it…and it only takes 5 minutes to do so. That’s faster than on the stove!

Ostrich Eggs…tell me you don’t want to try that

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These days it seems like there are all kinds of fancy stuff showing up in super markets. I guess it’s easier to ship around the world, and people are always curious about trying new things (or at least showing off their fanciness to other people, if nothing else).

Why not ostrich eggs?

One egg weighs about 3 1/2 pounds and can apparently create an omelette big enough to feed 15 adults. It takes an hour to boil them.

I would definitely give it a try, but that’s a big egg. Are there 14 other people willing to try an omelette with me?

The article also mentions these crazy potatoes:

Originally the world’s most expensive potato, selling for £400 a kilo in the UK and $300 a pound in the USA, they are now being grown in Jersey instead of France at the friendly price of £2.65 a kilo.

They used to be $300 a pound??? How good can a potato be?? And if they’re that good, and now they’re only about $2 a pound, why aren’t we all eating  La Bonnotte super-potatoes exclusively? Probably because they just taste like regular potatoes, and were artificially expensive to make them sound exclusive.

Even still, I’m dying to try them!

Link via Sara.