Twenty days after Little Girl's birthday, is her cousin's day. Same year. It snowed on the day he was born, and the whole city was a sheet of ice. I remember well - I was stuck at home unable to get a babysitter, and wondering how I would even drive to the hospital if I could get someone to drive to my house to watch the kiddos... We have missed all of his birthday parties since he lived in Houston, but this year he was in town right around the special date, so we gave him his gift in person. Can you guess what I made him?
Homemade play-dough! Yes, I have "real" Play-doh in my gift closet, and yes that would have taken less time and energy. I knew his mom would appreciate homemade though, so that's what I did. Here's the recipe:
1c flour
1/2c salt
2t cream of tartar
1c water
1T veggie oil
liquid food coloring
dump all of that in a pot over med-low heat, and stir until it forms a ball. Knead it on a work surface until it feels like it should :), and play, play, play! I halved the recipe for each different color, and that worked great. I knew I was using small containers to package it in, and the recipe makes a pretty big batch, so even after halving it, I had leftovers.
Taking from the project I did for Little Girl's birthday party activity,
I cut numbers 1-10 out of construction paper, along with a shape in the corresponding amount (the number 6 and 6 hearts, etc.), and using a glue stick glued them on white paper, then laminated each card, punched a small hole in the top corner, and connected them with a metal ring. They turned out really cute, and they can be used for play-doh or anytime to practice colors, shapes, number recognition, counting, etc. Little Girl has an order for some on the way!
(There's a big Playmobile school bus inside the rather large gift bag, in case you were wondering...)
Last week, I made my own egg rolls! I had never done this before, but I had a coupon for "egg roll wrappers," which I thought I would find in the frozen foods section of Whole Foods - you know, like it was just a fancy way of saying egg rolls. Well, I finally found them, and guess what the package contained? Egg roll wrappers. Go figure! I was not deterred. I just grabbed a head of cabbage, and took those wrappers home to figure out how to make my own egg rolls. I found a recipe online, and tweaked it a bit. Okay, I tweaked it kind of a lot. Here it is:
Cook 1# ground pork with 1t ginger and 1t garlic powder, until no longer pink (I usually continue cooking until it is starting to really brown well), and drain.
Shred 1 head red cabbage and about 4 large carrots (I used a cheese grater with large holes)
Mix together.
Then just lay out the wrapper (mine were Nasoya Tofu wrappers) and fill with about 1/3 cup of the filling,
and fold it up to look like an egg roll! I sealed the last corner down with a paste of flour and water, which worked great!
There were instructions on the wrapper package for baking or frying, so I decided to go the less messy and less oil-using route, and bake them. In my mind, I took a picture of them all lined up neatly on the cookie sheets - about 20 of them I think there were - and then another picture of them baked and nicely golden brown on the serving platter... Apparently those pictures were only in my mind! But there were NO leftovers. They were a huge hit!!! We ate them with rice and some sauteed vegetables.
The only thing I would do differently next time, is maybe go with about 3/4 of the head of cabbage, instead of the whole thing.
