Homemade gnocchi = crazy delicious

Last Sunday morning, my darling husband awoke with a spring in his step and offered to take the Sadester for the day so I could relax. Relaxing isn't exactly my forte, so instead of reading a book or watching a rom-com, I spent the day unwinding the only way I know how. Cooking!

I drank some coffee, slapped on an apron, and made my very first batch of gnocchi.

Now I'm not a pasta lover. Heck, I avoided the stuff for years. (Carbs! Egad! Silly, 20 year old Sarah). But gnocchi is different. Throw some sweet potatoes and squash in with all that flour and voila! It's healthy(ish). Plus, Sadie LOVES pasta, so I wanted to give her a homemade version of her favorite dish.

Sadie's Gnocchi Delight (recipe modified from myrecipes.com): 

Gnocchi:
1 c cottage cheese 
3 c sweet potato/butternut squash mash (boiled, cooled, mashed/pureed) 
3 tbsp brown sugar 
1/2 c parmesan cheese (good ol' Kraft will do just fine) 
1 tsp nutmeg 
3 1/2(ish) c flour

Mix the first 5 ingredients in a large bowl. Add flour until a soft dough forms. Sticky dough is a pain in the butt to work with, so add as much flour as needed for a malleable dough consistency. Working on a floured surface, divide dough into 8 portions. Roll each portion with your hands into a snake, then cut into 1 inch pieces. Drink a beer, thinking about HOW MUCH FUN rolling gnocchi snakes can be!

 

 

 

 

 

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium. Working in batches of 25, drop gnocchi into the water, stirring to prevent sticking, and cook until all of the gnocchi float to the top of water. I love this part because when they're done they just pop up, as if to say "eat me now, oh gnocchi master!". Scoop out the gnocchi into a strainer and then transfer it onto to a lightly oiled pan to cool. Boil/strain/cool the rest of the gnocchi.

Remaining Assembly:

1/4 c butter (mmmmm) 
2 cloves minced garlic  
1 minced sweet onion 
2 c chopped spinach leaves
salt and pepper to taste
1 tbsp pesto  
parmesan cheese

Sauté the first 6 ingredients in a pan, add gnocchi, sauté some more, then dish it up, sprinkle on some parmesan cheese, and enjoy!

 

It turns out making gnocchi was easier than I thought, tastier then I could imagine, and it's Sadie's new favorite food. Oh happy day!

Dust bunnies are a baby's best friend.

Well it looks like I didn't get around to writing "Our Summer Vacation(?) - Part 2". C'est la vie!

So instead, I'm going to blog about dust bunnies.

Sadie has, oh gee let's see, approximately 50 toys. She has toys that spin, toys that whirl, toys that talk, sparkle, spin, bounce, roll, stack, and sing. However, her favorite toys are those which hide under dressers and inhabit the dark, scary corners of the house: dust bunnies.

From 5 meters across the room, she will spot the little suckers, crawl past her miscellaneous other toys (at lightning speed, I might add!), then proceed to inspect said bunnies...

...by sticking them in her mouth. Bleh. Ick. Yucky. Gross.

She spits out the furry carcasses when I ask her to, although there was that one poop that resembled that of a coyote, or some other scavenging carnivore.

The Sadester - AKA Dust Bunny Hunter

 I need to get my hands on a Dustbuster Mini Vac and put this kid to work!

Our Summer Vacation(?) - Part 1

If one more person asks me how our summer vacation went, I may just throw my empty box of wine at them.

No, I suppose it wasn't THAT bad. In fact, overall we had a pretty spectacular time. Hmm. Where do I begin?

We had this trip planned for months. Some of our close friends from our Toronto days invited us to their wedding, which sparked the whole voyage. We decided to make the wedding an excuse to do a big ol' family road trip to Ontario to visit my husbands family, our friends, and of course, to attend the wedding. 

3 week road trip? With a baby? Pfft no problem! We'll take it slow and roll with the punches. Ahhh so naive, we were.

We packed our bags, Sadie's bags, Sadie's toys, Sadie's gear, and Sadie's food, and headed west. I once backpacked around South America for 2 months with a knapsack and water bottle. The times have certainly changed.

After 2 days of driving and 2 nights of sleeping (courtesy of the Econo Lodge, and my welcoming and lovely aunt and uncle), we reached our first destination, my in-laws rental cottage on an island in Algonquin Park. 

* Since I'm a self proclaimed foodie, I have to quickly blurb about our food stops en-route. Timmy Ho's, Subway, and more Timmy Ho's (coffee, coffee, java, java, ya, ya, ya). We also dined in a couple of family friendly diners in Quebec. I use family friendly loosely. We walked into a restaurant called "Restaurant" (that should have steered us away right off the bat, but Sadie was hungry and they had high-chairs), sat down in the packed, yet eerily silent dining room, and ate our shitty food shamefully while Sadie schreeched and squeeled LOUDLY in delight at her peas and rice pudding. The head shakes and eye rolls made it pretty clear that our kind wasn't welcomed there.

We totally redeemed ourselves, though, when we stopped for lunch at Montreal's Cafe Santropol. We were greeted with servers smiling and gushing over our baby, sat in a garden patio, where Sadie could hurl her watermelon and bread in any direction she pleased, and ate some of the best sandwiches we've ever encountered.

Noshing at Cafe Santropol, Montreal

Ok, back to the cottage in Algonquin Park. Long story short: mosquitos + snoring + other nighttime noises = Sadie waking every 15 minutes + the whole cabin waking every 15 minutes = a short cottage trip + a swift drive to Owen Sound to decompress in my husband's parent's country home. We ate, slept, swam, and regained our sanity. Bliss!

The Little Mermaid

TBC. Part 2 coming soon!

I Am Mama. Hear Me Brag.

I mean c'mon. C'MON. Seriously? How did I produce something THIS beautiful?

I'm having one of those days. Fellow mommies out there know what I'm talking about. It's a day where I'm completely in awe of how awesome my baby is.

Every parent believes their babies' shit doesn't stink, so I know I'm a smidgen biased because she's my own spawn, but C'MON! Look at those cheeks. Don't you wanna just kiss em'. Not to mention zerbert the heck out of that beautiful, baby belly!

It's quite possible that Sadie's genetic makeup consists of the best genes my husband and I had to offer. She's a blond-haired, blue-eyed, baby bombshell. (And yes, 2 brown-eyed parents can have a blue-eyed baby. Although there was that one time with our 70 year old mailman...).

So the pretty little thing above is the reason I haven't been blogging as frequently. I simply can't take my eyes off her. Not only is she cute as a button, but she's uber fun right now. Over the past 2 weeks she's learned to eat with her hands, sit up from a laying position, semi-crawl (well, crawl/nosediving/face planting), and in the blink of an eye has morphed into this little, vocal, independent being.

Ok. I need to go peek at her while she's sleeping, then clean something.

Welcome To Play Group

If there is one, single piece of advice I could give a parent-to-be, it's to join a play group the minute the wee one is born. My husband and I moved into an uber family populated neighborhood just before Sadie arrived, and we were lucky enough to be invited into a local group. For those of you who are curious on how these things operate, here are some rough guidelines:

Welcome to Play Group.

The first rule of Play Group is: you do not talk about Play Group.

The second rule of Play Group is: you DO NOT talk about Play Group!

Fight Club is my favorite movie. But for reals...

The third rule of Play Group: Don't be shy! Play groups are great for the kiddies, of course, but they're also a way for parents to chat about the joy/ridiculousness that is parenthood. Share, share, share. Chances are the other parents have been through it, are going through it, or will go through it at some point.

The fourth rule of Play Group: Don't compare your baby with the other babies. All babies are unique individuals, and develop at different rates. I've lost sleep over the fact that the Sadester is slimmer than other babies. Then I realized that all of her food is fueling her upward growth. At this rate, the kid's going to be 6'2" in preschool.

The fifth rule: It's impossible to keep your child 100% safe from germs. Your baby will drool on other babies' toys. Other babies will drool on your baby's toys. It's just how it is. However, if your little tyke is sick and contagious, best to keep the little Petri dish at home.

The sixth rule: If hosting, be sure your large, scary looking doggie doesn't charge the door barking when others arrive, resulting in a room full of crying babies. My bad.

It's ok kiddies. My bark is worse than my bite.
Unless you're a cat. 
Or a squirrel. 
Or a mailman. 







The seventh rule: Don't offer to host unless you've baby proofed your home first, or at the very least, have hidden the fireplace tool set (specifically, the machete). Yup. My bad again. To my credit, we're renting and the machete doesn't actually BELONG to us. To my discredit, I was oblivious to the fact that it was there for about 5 months.

I like to be a jokester in my silly little blog, but seriously, my daughter and I are so, so, so happy to be part of such an amazing group of mommies, daddies, and kiddies.

See you Monday, friends!

Smorgasbord O' Sugary Sweets

It appears I only have time for one extracurricular activity in my life. Now that I'm baking for the Sunday Musquodoboit Harbour Farmers Market, I fear my blog is going down the crapper.

So below is the best I can do for y'all this week - an agglomeration of my weekly creations.

(And yes, I came up with "agglomeration" by looking up a synonym for "smorgasbord" on thesaurus.com. My wearied brain couldn't come up with a word THAT good on its own.)

Rolo Surprises

"Heavenly Hash" Brownies (Not to be confused with Heavenly "Hash Brownies")

Carrot Cake Cookie Sammies with Cream Cheese Frosting

GIANT Double Chocolate M&M Cookies

Cinnamon Buns

 Hand-Dipped Peanut Butter Chocolates

Mini Chocolate Cupcakes

Chocolate Raspberry Cupcakes with Raspberry Buttercream Frosting (See my recipe)

Banana Chocolate Chip Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting

 Mini Vanilla Cupcakes

And I'm spent.

Honey, I'm Home!

* Warning - The following blog post contains boasting, bragging, and tooting of my own horn. Reader discretion is advised.

I'm the luckiest stay-at-home mama in the whole wide world. Motherhood has been surprisingly easy on me so far. I often wake up singing with a hop in my step and a big ol' grin on my face. Other mothers often ask me "Sarah, what's your secret?"

My secret? (Other than the fact that I have an awesome baby, of course!)

My partner works from home. 

I don't have to watch him leave for work every morning, or count down the minutes until he pulls into the driveway at night. No sir! His office isn't a car ride away. It's a stroll down the hall.

My heart goes out to all those moms or pops out there who don't have this luxury. I also cannot IMAGINE how single parents do it. I'm spoiled, so very, very spoiled.

So what's a typical work day in the Miller home?

6:30am - The Sadester awakens.

6:35am - I head straight to the coffee maker, miraculously making coffee without actually being conscious.

7:30am - Sadie is changed, fed, loved, and her play stations are already destroyed.

8:30am - Robin stirs and I throw Sadie at him. I then shower, eat, walk our pooch, and make Robin's morning "oatmeal supreme". Yes, he eats oatmeal every morning. So weird.

9:30am - Robin puts on his work clothes (jogging pants) and heads down the hall to his office. Sadie and I play, stroll, eat, and sleep the morning away.

12:30pm - Lunch time! I throw Sadie at Robin and eat my lunch. Being the good little housewife that I am, I make my man some grub too. No Subway or McDonald's for this guy! Homemade soup & sandwiches everyday.

1:30pm - Sadie and I play, stroll, eat, and sleep the afternoon away.

5:30pm - I hear the glorious sound of Robin shutting off his computer then promptly do a jig. Sadie also shuts down her computer so she can spend time with her daddy.

Gotta meet my milk quota. My boss is such a hard-ass.






I should also mention that I annoyingly pop my head into the office throughout the day. "Robin! Look at the size of Sadie's poop!" "Robin! Sadie ate blank this morning and now her farts smell like blank too!" You get the idea.


But alas, all good things must come to an end. One day Robin will be needed back in his main office, and poor Sadie will be stuck with me all day. Until that day comes I'm going to milk this for all it's worth, and not take for granted how wonderful our situation is.