Quesadilla Maker Pancakes!

Hi people :-)
I have not posted in awhile..... it seems :-/  
I have been concentrating most of my energy right now on my garden.  I just put my Tomato and pepper plants in the ground and I planted almost all my other stuff about a week and a half ago and it is fun to see all the little baby plants coming up :-)  In my next post I will share with you what I have been doing with my garden this year.
Enough about my gardening fetish and lets move onto Pancakes!

I saw a while back someone somewhere  talk about how they make pancakes in their Quesadilla maker and I thought to myself, Don't I have a quesadilla maker?  So entered my dark cave (garage) where I store all  my rarely used appliances and sure enough there it sat way up high on a tall shelf where it has literally collected dust for about 3 years maybe 4?

 I had forgotten I had it!  I could have used this all this  last year as my 3 year old has begged me for quesadillas for lunch.

I wanted to also try this IHOP pancake recipe I found on pinterest;.  I thought it would be fun to try them both out and have breakfast for dinner.

They were so Yummy!  I doubled the recipe and after a family of 6 people ate this is how much was left pictured above.  I also added blueberries to half the batch.  What I liked about them is they reminded me a little bit of heaviness of German pancakes, but with a lighter texture. I also found these smaller triangles were perfect sized for my 3 year old who cannot normally finish a big pancake.

Some tips:.
1. spray your Quesadilla maker with cooking spray before you pour the pancake batter in.
2.  I poured about a 1/4 cup per triangle section.
3. Cook for about 2 min.  It gets pretty hot so check it at about a min and a half and poke the fattest part.  if batter oozes out you know you need to shut it and cook a little longer. But I found two minutes was pretty perfect except for the batches I made with blueberries had to go a little longer than 2 min.
4. You can pull it out as one big pancake with triangle sections still attached per each persons plate. or break it up in smaller triangles like I did for people to take as much as they wanted.  I did find that people ate 5-6 triangles(besides the 3 year old she had two)  so it came out to about the same.
5. For the pancake recipe I did not have buttermilk so I just added 2 tablespoons of vinegar per 1 and 1/4 cups of milk. since I doubled my recipe It was 4 tablespoons of vinegar and 2 1/2 cups of milk. I still added a little more milk than they said because the batter was still a little heavy and thick


So if you have a Quesadilla Maker that you have not used in awhile, or have debated if it needs to go off to the thrift store.  Try using it for other things besides Quesadillas :-)  Every time I type the word quesadilla I hear the way Napoleon Dynamites grandma says quesadilla :-)

Easter Eggs with Words of Affirmation

I Just thought I would show you all some of what I have been up to lately.  I made a custom order of eggs this week for one of my Etsy customers :-)  She got a set for each of her daughters and herself.  I wood burned the words of affirmation and designs and then painted and polished the eggs to a smooth shine :-)

Here are some pics closer up.  

I love how they look so simple and cute!  

                     

Wooden Easter eggs!

I have a new batch of eggs I wood burned yesterday to add to my Etsy store :-) I will be painting them today and hopefully have them ready for my store tomorrow!

This is one I am still working on.  I need to wood burn the flower petals.(which takes a lot of time and concentration!)

I also picked up these wood boxes at the dollar store and thought it would be fun to wood burn designs on them.  The design on this one is All about my Mom :-)  She loved Lilacs and nature.  I do too :-)  

I can't wait to paint all this stuff !

New baby chicks!

We lost a couple of our older Hens over the Winter.  I went to Cal Ranch to pick up 3 new ones and ended up coming home with 7!  I now have 12 chickens!  What I was thinking I do not know.  I just could not make up my mind on what kind I wanted ;-/  Luckily they wont be laying eggs for a few months, but when they do we will be getting a dozen eggs a day.  I suppose we will have to start selling fresh eggs :-)

If you are thinking of getting new baby chicks this year for the first time here are a few tips that I have learned.

1. Make sure you have a heat lamp.  It was so cute yesterday after we brought the new chicks home and put them in the bin when we added the heat lamp and turned it on they feel asleep almost immidately!
2. Make sure you have a special chick feed.
3. They also need plenty of water
4. It is best to get feeders and water containers especially for chicks.
5. get a bail of straw (not hay) for bedding.
6. Make sure you have a suitable coop to transfer them in when they are old enough.  You can buy a coop, but it is much cheaper to make your own.  If you are turning a rabbit hutch or something like that into a chicken coop make sure you have a a roosting pole for them to sit on.  At dusk every night they love to go in their coop and hop onto their roosting pole and fall asleep.
7. Also make sure you have a chicken run attached to your coop.  Chickens do not enjoy just sitting in their coop all the time.  they like to get out and walk and scratch around. We turned an old dog run we were not using into a chicken run.
8. The more you handle your chicks the more they get to know you and become tame and social.  But when they are new babies you don't want to handle them too much.  picking them up and petting their little heads a couple of times a day should be enough.
Once they are old enough you will want to get them feed that is more suitable for an older chicken.  In the summer they eat  bugs and stuff so you want a summer feed that has less protein in it, but in the winter when they have less opportunity for protein you will need a winter feed that had protein added.
9.  Make sure you clean out old straw and replace with fresh straw every few days.  the old straw is great in compost.  Chicken poop is a great fertilizer, but it can burn your plants if it is to fresh.  I just had mine to my compost bin and let it cook and breakdown with every thing else.
10.  Have fun with your chickens they really are social animals and they have personalities too :-) We like to pick ours up once in awhile even after they are big and just pet them. they love it!
11. Let them out a couple of times a day to grass feed and find bugs and stuff.  I let mine out first thing in the morning and let them peck around for a while and then I feed them their feed and water which gets them all to come back running to their coop with no trouble because they want their food.  then I let them out again in the evening and they go back in their coop on their own to roost.

If you have any other questions that I did not cover just contact me :-)

More Russian dolls and a Menorah puzzle :-)

I have decided that I must have an have a thing for Russian dolls because I keep making them!
This set is a mother and her two girls.  I have learned that groupings look better in an odd numbered set.  So I made this one as 3.  Typically Russian dolls come in groups of 5.  I actually have a set of 5 that is wood burned and ready to paint, but it is in my church bag because my 3 year old loves to play with them all the time. So I never get a chance to finish them :-)
 I hope you all are not getting tired of my little wood projects that I seem to be addicted to lately.  Maybe I will try something new soon.  Anyway back to the dolls.
I should have taken a picture of these wood dolls before I painted them, but I did not think of that until after I had painted them :-/ Anyway I woodburned the designs and features and then I water colored it and sealed and buffed them.

This set is larger.  You can see how big they are from the picture above where I am holding them in my hand. This set would be a cute decoration in a kids room or they can play with it. The smaller ones would be easier to play with though.

The mother looks kinda ornery huh, but I decided I would make this set more realistic :-)  I was trying to show how Russian  pheasants really looked and felt. 

Another project I have been working on is this custom order from my Etsy store.  A lady liked my Nativity puzzles and wondered if I could make her a Menorah puzzle.  It was a lot more complicated than I thought it would be, but It turned out pretty I think.

How it works is there is a space under each candle for a chocolate coin and it is like a advent where each day you pull out a candle puzzle piece and then you set it in an upright position and eat the chocolate coin underneath. fun :-)  

Any way I made three of them and I am sending it off in the mail so I thought I would take a picture of it before I send it because it is a custom order and I may not make one again.

Wood Egg update!

I decided to watercolor the wood eggs that I wood burned recently.  These eggs would be fun to have and use every year.  Kind of like Christmas ornaments. You could make a new one every year to add to the collection :-) Here is how a couple of the eggs turned out.  If you would like to see how they all turned out check them out at my Etsy store.

Fun with Wood eggs!

So I posted a couple of wood eggs a little while back and I finally made a few more this week.  I have not painted them yet.  I am still undecided as to how I want to paint them.  Water color? acrylic? just stain?  Hmmmm....
One thing I have realized is that eggs are hard to photograph!  Because they are round it is hard to give a true idea of what the designs really look like.  In real life they are much cuter, but this gives you an idea  :-)

This first little bunny likes to  hop along in the nice spring landscape. And on the other side of the egg is his little house :-)

Next I have another little bunny hopping around happily in the spring grass and flowers!

This next egg.  Cute mushrooms with a cute little ladybug on top.  the back side is grass and flowers.

Sticking to the mushroom woodsy theme I made some cute gnome garden girls.

This next egg was inspired by my Laying hens :-) I have a hen on one side and a rooster on the other.

And last some butterflies :-)  

Eggs are fun to wood burn, but because they are round it makes in kinda tricky to work with.  It is much easier to wood burn a flat surface :-)  

I can't remember if I showed this little peg doll yet.  In the past I have usually just painted my peg dolls, but I have tried my hand at wood burning the last couple I have made and I can't decide which I like better.  

Happy crafting!