Mama's Blender Pancakes

I can't help it, I want to share a recipe that I have now made three times with amazing kid success. What I love about this recipe is that it's super simple to make, clean-up is reasonable, and it has ingredients that are good for growing kids. Winner in my book!

This recipe makes pancakes so light that it's close to a crepe. Almost Swedish pancake-esque but without all the hassle of whipping up egg whites.

• 6 eggs
  
• 1 cup cottage cheese
  
• 1/2 cup flour
  
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 3 tbsp oil (I use canola)
• 1/4 cup milk
  
• 1/2 tsp vanilla

In a blender combine all the ingredients and blend thoroughly. Heat griddle over medium heat and pour batter straight from the blender onto hot griddle - about 1/4 cup for each pancake. Once bubbles begin to form, flip the pancakes and finish cooking on the opposite side.

Personal notes: My kids like it with peanut butter, but I bet it would be divine with fresh berries or anything else you might eat on a crepe. To cut down on the yolks I use 4 whole eggs and the whites from 3 eggs. I use 1% cottage cheese and milk. I use half whole wheat for the flour. I plan to try it with oatmeal the next time I make these.

This Is A Hot Dog....

This is a hotdog....

...For whatever reason, hotdogs and most other kinds of processed sausages have plastic wraps. Does this replace a casing? Not sure.


This is a frog...

...I found in my sink. He is a sticky frog so don't touch him. It feels like snot. Even though he is little he can jump really good.


This came special delivery...

...from the states. We got a DHL delivery the other day with some paperwork I need to register for Baby's US citizenship and it came packed with some extra love for me and the kids.


This is a big kid...

resting in the baby swing.


This is my little chunk...

...she is getting so big. Already 8 weeks old.

My Lunch Guisado Recipe

I decided to do another food posting here. One of my jobs as a stay at home mother (SAHM) is to feed not only the kids, but also my husband lunch and dinner. Some days my cooking is nothing but a sandwich and some chips but some days I do actually cook. I didn't know what a "guisado" was until I moved to Honduras. I was struggling to find things to cook with my new role as a SAHM. My husband says, "why don't you cook a good guisado?". Huh? What's that? The following day my dear husband showed me how to cook his version. It was good. Very salty, but good. Hondurans have a way of making things very, very salty in my opinion.

Okay, so I found out that "guisado" is "stew" in Spanish. I have made stew before. The kind that you might want to eat on a cold day with dumplings on top. But that is slop to my husband and he pretty much refuses to eat it. Now this other kind of stew - aka guisado - is acceptable.

I have played around with making this since I learned of this dish and kind of follow the same kind of recipe all the time now. You can make it with chicken, which is very delicious too. Sometimes I throw in different kinds of veggies. Corn is a good one. Below is a recipe for my beef version I made for lunch the other day. I'm not the best at writing out recipes and usually my measurements can vary. That's the beauty of guisado - it's very flexible! Maybe you will want to try it too.

Mamasprout's Carne Guisado recipe

Ingredients

• 1-2 pounds top sirloin (cut into 1-inch cubes)
• Adobo seasoning
  
• 1-2 tsp salt or to taste
  
• pepper to taste
• 3 garlic cloves minced or pressed
• 1 tablespoon oil
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 1 green bell pepper, chopped
• 2 tomatoes, diced
• 2 medium potatoes, cubed
• 1/2 cup tomato sauce (I use regular pasta sauce)
• 1/4 cup sofrito (can sub with pasta sauce)
  
• 1/4-1/2 tsp oregano
• 1/2 c chopped fresh spinach
  
• 1-2 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro plus some for garnish
• water as needed
  

Directions

Cube and season meat with adobo. Heat a little oil in a lg skillet over medium heat and place meat in when hot to sear. Cover and simmer until meat is about 3/4 cooked. Next, add 1 tablespoon of oil to meat and add onion, bell pepper, garlic, tomatoes, and potatoes. Let cook until onion and pepper are soft. Add spinach, oregano, cilantro, and stir in 1 minute. Add tomato sauce, sofrito and a little bit of water and simmer for approximately 20 minutes over low to medium heat or until potatoes are done. Add a little water and cover if it becomes too thick. Salt and pepper to taste as it's cooking.

Serve with fluffy rice. Good with cheese on top too and of course cilantro to garnish. Buen provecho!

p.s. if you use stew meat or another tough red meat, a pressure cooker is invaluable to speed cooking time.

Would you like a scone with that strawberry?

We picked up a big package of strawberries a few days ago at the more expensive grocery store in town called Los Andes. They have more hard to find items and imported types of foods. I sent Papa over there in search for some bread flour to use with my new (used) bread machine my friend gave me. (Thanks Joy!) Papa picked up some all purpose flour not remembering why I needed "bread flour" when I had explained to him that bread flour has more gluten and makes better bread in the bread machine. Doh! So I have an abundance of all purpose flour and a bunch of strawberries. So like the saying, "when life gives you lemons...."

I made strawberry scones! Yum! I think the baking bug is starting to come back for me.

The strawberries Papa bought were not Honduran like we usually buy. These were imported from Guatamala and boy are they huge. Really big and nicely colored. Usually it's a mixed bag when we buy the Honduran kind and can be half molding already and they are about half the size too. The Honduran strawberries cost us about $1.30 but these really big, pretty ones from Guatamala were about $5! Papa didn't realize their cost until he was paying for them. Brother just had strawberries and yogurt this morning for snack. I really like these. Great treat!

Speaking of yogurt...notice anything wrong with this yogurt container?

Crazy Corn

Elote, originally uploaded by Honduras Sprout.

This past weekend we went to a mountain festival in a town called San Juancito. It was a great time and I very much enjoyed the fresh air. The kids had a great time too. I know sister likes something when she asks if we can move there. There was very little electronics in use and it was a nice change to cool nights for cozy sleeping wrapped up in blankets. I haven't had time to compose a proper recap of the weekend, so until then, here is a short post from my other blog. The SPS daily photo blog.

These corn on the cobs are not sweet corn. They are called elote. They have a bland corn flavor. The bucket of corn is being cooked by a heater of some kind in the box with the corn cartoon. You can see the fuel tank with a line under the box. The corn is then put on a stick slathered in mayonnaise and sprinkled with grated cheese that is similar to parmesan cheese. This treat they call "crazy corn".

Here are some photos of a few young kids enjoying their treat.

What's Crackin' ?

One of the problems about living in Honduras is finding convenient and somewhat healthy packaged cracker type snack foods for kids. Especially when one of those kids has a genetic propensity for high cholesterol (Sister). Most of the fats used in the crackers they sell in the stores are made with all the bad fats. Like shortening (aka Manteca here), or Palm oil or some kind of hydrogenated vegetable oil. All of which are bad, bad, bad. Especially to the cholesterol conscious. Even the bread at the grocery stores is made with the bad fats. I had to search and search until I found one that does NOT have some kind of hydrogenated fat listed as an ingredient. If it's palm oil they use in my bread listed as "vegetable oil", at least it's not providing as much fat as the the others I looked at and it also has enough fiber to be worth eating.

No wonder so many Hondurans have big bellies. Oh, if you didn't know that about Hondurans, it's true. It's very common to see. Lots and lots of belly fat. Maybe that's another topic since today I'm doing show and tell of what I made for the kids in an effort to avoid these saturated and trans fats in the snack foods the kids want and enjoy.

Sister is supposed to keep her saturated fats around the 9 gram mark per day. That is not easy to do and it's hard to abide by this when she is the pickiest eater that I know who also loves all the junk foods that kids love. She has a selection of about 5 healthy things she'll eat every day depending on her mood. Thank goodness for Pricemart selling Jennie-O's turkey burger patties.

Crackers for snacks - they usually go over pretty good and they travel great. I've experimented with 3 different kinds of crackers so far, but the overall family favorite were the home made graham crackers. The wheat thins were a no go, except for me. The banana ones were so-so. I still need to try making soda crackers and I'd like to try a different vanilla cracker recipe too.

I'd write out the recipe I used, but I ended up kind of creating my own and did not write down what I did. This is very common for me. I seem to have a complete inability to actually follow a recipe. Usually this is in an attempt to make it lower in fat. For these crackers I know I used skim milk and less butter. Here are some links of recipes I looked at if you'd like to try making these on your own.

I made a log of dough and sliced pieces out and flattened them on the pan.

Here the crackers are all flattened and pricked with a fork ready to go into the oven


Hot out of the oven. Good eats!

Shrimp Dinner

My husband can cook. He is kind of meticulous about it too. If he is in the kitchen you had better stay away. He must cook and wash all at once and everything must be done just so. Back when we lived in the states he cooked a bit more. We were both working and though we didn't cook great meals most nights and did a lot more take out/eat out, we did take turns a few times each week to cook a breakfast or dinner to share and enjoy together.

Here...now that I am home the meals all fall on me and I can count on less than both my hands in the last 7 months how many times Papa has cooked for me or the family. Mostly he mans the grill and that is his baby. I sometimes wonder if his lack of cooking may be due to his being in a more machismo culture where men in general do not cook. Not exactly sure, and I don't think he would admit it even if he has re-assimilated back into that line of thought.

Tonight was a special treat. I had mentioned to him that I had wanted some shrimp not too long ago. He went to the fish market and found some shrimp at a good price. This is what I got and it was devine. Look at how he did the presentation too. He is just a goof. He loves his food to be just perfect. I can't say much for my photo taking because it does nothing with how good it looked on my plate and the way that it smelled. To be honest, I was just hungry and wanted to get to eating and wasn't too concerned with how well the photo turned out.


The shrimp was sautéed in some fresh garlic butter with a hint of cayenne and black pepper. Mouthwatering. The salad is chopped red and yellow peppers & carrot in a red wine vinaigrette, sliced roma tomatoes on top of some local organic lettuce. After we sat down and started to eat I mentioned that avocado would go nicely with the salad. We had some ripe, cut a few slices and it definitely completed the salad. A simple baked potato to even out the flavors and the meal disappeared in no time. Oh the luxury of having a husband that can cook. Now if I could only get him to do that more often. Sigh....

Calabaza ~ Calabeza

I hope everyone had a festive Thanksgiving with all the yummy trimmings. The holiday crept up on me and before I knew it I was scrambling in my head on how we were going to celebrate the day. Sister's school had a half day on Thursday and they celebrated with a few parent volunteers who came in with a Thanksgiving meal cooked for all the kids. No stuffing, sweat potatoes or green bean casserole; but turkey, corn on the cob and some mashed potatoes, which I guess were so goopey and runny Sister didn't even know what they were. She said they were really yellow too. Maybe it was yellow gravy? Or butter? Sister brought some leftover turkey home and it was good, but dry. I'm guessing the women who cooked it hadn't cooked a turkey before, though it is easy to dry a turkey out roasting. It was a cute attempt at an American tradition.

I, on the other hand decided I would cook chicken, tzimmes (which are a Jewish carrot/sweet potato dish), a can of green beans (creative -huh?) and mashed potatoes. Sister was begging for pumpkin pie and I thought she would enjoy this little idea I had (see below). I stopped at the grocery store on the way home thinking I'd be able to find a can of pumpkin.

I searched the canned goods aisle with no luck. It's not uncommon for them to put holiday items someplace other than the obvious, so at the checkout I asked if they had any "calabeza". Okay...let me stop here for a moment. I would say that my Spanish is equivalent to a two year old. I often say things wrong or put words in the wrong order and definitely have horrible conjugation of verbs. All this might be cute for a two year old. So what did I ask for??? Well, I guess that would maybe translate as "pumpkin head"? Ha ha ha!

Calabaza = pumpkin. (cal-ah-bah-sa)
Cabeza = head (ca-bay-sa).
So you put the two together and what have you got? A pumpkin head!! I told Papa when I got home and he had a good laugh on me. Doh! See? I told you I needed Spanish lessons.

On with the post. We never got our can of pumpkin that night and Sister ended up having a school program in the evening so we never even got to eat the Thanksgiving meal I made (that night anyway, though we had leftovers for a few days). By the time we left the school event we were starving so just stopped at KFC for kids meals. KFC popcorn chicken is pretty yummy here, by the way.

On Saturday, I needed to make a run for another grocery store here in San Pedro Sula that sells whole wheat flour. Guess what they had? Pumpkin! Yep, we bought a can and here is what we made. It is soo good! And lowfat! We used fat free vanilla yogurt and Cool Whip light. I also used fresh ginger instead of dried and used just a pinch of nutmeg instead of the 3/4 tsp. It didn't freeze completely by the time we ate it, but was stiff and a little icy. The next day it was frozen through and perfect! Maybe you'd like to try it? So here is the recipe I used.

Frozen Yogurt Pumpkin Pie

Ingredients:

Graham Cracker Crust
1 1/2 Cups Graham Cracker Crumbs
2 Tablespoons Sugar
1/4 Cup Margarine, melted

Or store bought crust!

Pie Filling
16 Ounces Pumpkin
3/4 Cup Brown Sugar, packed
1 Teaspoon Cinnamon
3/4 Teaspoon Ginger
3/4 Teaspoon Nutmeg
2 Cups Yogurt, Skim Milk
1 Cup Cool Whip Lite, thawed

Directions:
Heat oven to 350~. Mix ingredients for pie crust. Press firmly and evenly against bottom and sides of 9" pie pan. Bake for 10 minutes; cool. Mix pumpkin, brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg in medium bowl. Stir in yogurt. Fold in Cool Whip. Pour into prepared crust. Freeze 4-5 hours or until firm. Remove from freezer 45 minutes before serving. Freeze any remaining pie.

Mixed Green Salad

This green find made this mama very happy. There are pros to living in the city. There are big grocery stores with a lot more variety. I must have looked like someone that just found lost treasure when I saw this sitting on the shelves at the grocery store. My eyes bugged out & my mouth turned a smile. The office that I used to work in had a cafeteria and a really good salad bar to get all the greens and veggies I wanted. I have been missing those salads. Spinach grows in Honduras too, but it's a little different than what you find in the states. Still pretty good, except I think it would be better for cooking than in salads. Anyway, I picked up these greens and a bag of spinach and we had very good salads for a few days.

Although Honduras has a lot of good soil and the right climate to grow a greater variety of good foods to distribute, because of lack of resource and infrastructure to properly package and distribute there are a lot of missed opportunities, I think. But there is a growing amount of smaller "green" farms that I've heard about and Greenhouse Harvest was on of them that helped give me my yummy salad.

Slushies

Click on link to see the slideshow.

Funny Looking Fruit

Brother Sprout has found a new fruit he likes. They are in season here in Honduras and you can find them sold on the streets and street markets. I haven't seen them at the super market though. The name of the fruit is pronounced sounding like "leeches" in English, as in the things that will suck your blood. I'm not sure what spelling they use here, but here are a few ways I found at Wikipedia:

The Lychee (Litchi chinensis), also spelled Litchi (the U.S. FDA spelling) or Laichi, is the sole member of the genus Litchi in the soapberry family Sapindaceae. It is a tropical fruit tree native to southern China. It is also found south to Indonesia and east to the Philippines.

Aren't they cute little things

You break them open and inside hides a tasty white fleshed fruit

There is a seed inside and you have to eat around that.
The taste is similar to a grape, I think.