It's Fri....oh wait, it's just Thursday

This morning: "mama I have a sunburn in my eye! no it's a booger." -B.

Also this morning - I did the unthinkable, almost the unforgivable. I made the girls breakfast. They insist on cheerios every single morning. Cheerios and a banana since before they were two. I used to fix them eggs every other morning or so, but they decided they didn't much like eggs (I don't either so who am I to make them suffer eggs?). Lately, they have even protested the Saturday morning bacon and eggs with Daddy - crying for their cheerios. This morning they said they would like eggs (it was a suggestion of mine to try and lure them away from the cheerios for one morning). However, I got this brilliant idea to make french toast because we are slightly overstocked on milk.

To my great surprise (and theirs too I think) they actually ate it - and seemed to like it. I cut the toast into strips and gave them syrup for dipping. At first glance they said, "this is not eggs" -ha. But A must have been hungry because she just started right in and B followed suit. Granted they didn't eat it all - but they did eat most of it, and a lot more quickly than usual. Maybe I'll try cooking breakfast again sometime....

I had one other pretty major (for me) success last night. Totally by accident I came up with a recipe for homemade ice cream that both Jer and I and the girls liked. Our previous attempts have been ok - but just not right. First there were the little packages of mix that are made specifically for the maker we have. They were good -but had that packaged, chemical taste to them. They also needed to be put in the freezer after the ice cream maker or they had the texture of cool whip. After those we tried the recipes that came with the maker - one was 'custard style' I guess - it has you use eggs but they are slightly cooked. The other had no eggs. Both used 4 cups of whipping cream - which is pretty expensive. So last night I was browsing the Internet looking for an ice cream recipe that didn't use eggs - the custard style has to be refrigerated for several hours and we wanted to make the stuff right away and the raw egg homemade style has all sorts of warnings about not giving it to young children - or whipping cream because I just had half and half. I found one that used ingredients that I had - but required a few substitutions because I didn't have all the right amounts. Then I ran out of sugar...I had a cup and a half or so of white and used another half cup of brown. The husband just knew I was ruining everything by putting in brown sugar!!!

The final result was much less creamy than the stuff we had been making but tasted more like we thought homemade ice cream should taste. It also didn't have a long prep time or any egg issues. AND half and half costs about half (haha) of what whipping cream costs - so that's a big bonus.

I'm going on and on about cooking - but I don't have just a ton of success when I experiment. Stuff is usually edible but is rarely delicious or worth making again. I did not get my mom's throw-stuff-together-and-produce-a-culinary-masterpiece gene. My sister got that. But I won't go into the unfairness of our family's gene distribution!

*side note* My husband insisted that the only place to plant my cilantro was right next to the oleanders - I think that the poison of the oleanders will get into my cilantro and at least make me sick, if not worse, if I try to eat the cilantro...I'm looking into this...