Monster Cookies

1 cup peanut butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 egg and a bit of vanilla.  Bake at 350 for 12 minutes or so. Made by visiting monster Brooks.  Yum!

Grilled Peaches

Delicious!  Andrew made these beauties last night.  Here's the recipe in his words:

Agrodolce Grilled Peaches

Glaze: 1 cup Red Wine Vinegar, 1/4 cup honey, 1/4 cup peach nectar, salt/pepper. Reduce until a syrup for glazing. Cut in half. Grill about 3-4 minutes face down (brush with Canola oil). Turn and repeat. drizzle with sauce. (Via Bobby Flay). I reduced the glaze while grilling the Tri-Tip, but you could do it ahead of time. Soo freaking good! Enjoy ;-)

Lemonade

Angelica brought 6 lemons over today with a request - "to make lemonade".

Ingredients:
6 lemons from the tree in Angelica's backyard (or about 1 3/4 cups lemon juice)
8 cups water
1 cup sugar

I washed the lemons and then each kid rolled 2 lemons on the countertop to loosen up the juice.  We took turns juicing them while 1 cup water and 1 cup sugar boiled on the stove to make simple syrup. Instead of letting the simple syrup cool we added cold water and ice, stirred it all up and enjoyed a delicious cup of semi-tart lemonade.

Better than McDonald's

All summer we've been hearing the radio commercials for McDonald's Mango Pineapple smoothies.  I promised the kids we could make a better one...

Chicken Yakitori

Andrew did his version of Bobby Flay's Yakitori Chicken tonight - AMAZING!

What to do with a head of cabbage...

This week's farm share box included a head of cabbage.  Having never prepared cabbage I was excited to try something new.  With half of it I made two recipes from AllRecipes.com:

Winter Lentil Vegetable Soup
Apple Cole Slaw

Both were really good.  I made the soup in the crock pot.  Just threw it all in and cooked on low for about 8 hours.  Here it is before cooking... I forgot to take an after picture.

The Apple Cole Slaw was a hit with all of us and Baden even had seconds.  This would be fun to bring to a summer barbeque.  It looks pretty and tastes great.

I still have half left so plan to make Five Spice Pork Tenderloin with Cabbage from my new favorite cookbook, Time for Dinner.

Salsa Chicken and Black Bean Soup

I've been wanted to make this recipe from the A Year of Slow Cooking blog for a while now.  I finally got around to it today.  It was really good and really easy.  I soaked the beans overnight and used frozen chicken breast tenderloins, then cooked it on low for about 7 hours.  When I got from work I took the chicken out and cut it into smaller pieces, put some of it back in and used an immersion blender to thicken it up a bit.  The beans still needed about an hour but the chicken was done so I left the rest of the chicken out and added it back in later.

Baden reluctantly tried it but ended up eating all of his.  Paige commented that the sour cream was sour. Hmm.. I remember having the same discussion with my sister when we were little.  "Heather, it's not really sour, it's just CALLED sour cream."  She didn't buy it either.

I'll make this soup again!