Easy Wontons

I made my mom buy wonton wrappers, because after all, how many times are you on pinterest and you see a recipe for mini tacos, or something and you have all the ingredients, EXCEPT one, like wonton wrappers. The thing is that we just ended up making wontons...

Ha ha, anyway, they're really easy to make.

What you'll need:

For the wontons

• Wonton wrappers (unless you're a pro at making your own, in which case you should leave your recipe in the comments :) )
• cream cheese 
• avocado oil (or olive oil, or canola oil...)

For the sweet and sour sauce (literally takes 5 minutes to make)

• 1/3 cup rice vinegar (can substitute white wine vinegar)
• 4 tablespoons brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon ketchup
• 1 teaspoon soy sauce
• 4 teaspoons water
• 2 teaspoons corn starch 

To start, you can roll up your cream cheese into balls. If you want to add a little more flavor, you can use flavored cream cheese, but plain works just as well.
You don't need to roll it, it's just easiest to keep the same portion size.

You'll need to wet the edges of your wanton wrapper so that it can seal. We just folded them into triangles.

Preheat your oil in your pan. We used just over medium heat. They brown up pretty quickly, so unless you have another person helping you, be sure to make all your wontons before you cook them.

I'm warning you right now, if those edges aren't sealed tight and the cream cheese spills out a little, the oil will spit at you! So be prepared.

Guess what? You're done! That's it!

For the sauce (makes about 1 cup):

Combine sugar, vinegar, and ketchup in a small sauce pan.

Bring to a boil.

Mix together corn starch and water (be sure it is thoroughly mixed before you put it on the heat)

Pour into sauce to thicken.

Done!

Make sure you watch those teaspoons and tablespoons. The first time I made the sauce I did a tablespoon of soy sauce instead of a teaspoon... don't even worry about it! Ha ha it wasn't bad, but it was definitely better when I made it the right way. 

And if you want a more desserty feel to your wontons, instead of sweet and sour sauce, you can just throw those babies in cinnamon and sugar!

Or skip the cream cheese and make some homemade crustos :)

Happy eating!

Tips and Tricks: Fast food condiments

So I don't know about you, but I love me some fast food condiments. And when I say I love fast food condiments, I mostly mean Chick-fil-a sauce, hot mustard from McDonalds, and french vanilla creamer from 7-eleven.

The problem is that I'm also super worried about getting food poisoning. You shove those things into the fridge and who knows how long those things have been in there for.

So I started writing the date on the bottom, so I can always know how long it has been!

What do you guys think?

Mini Pumpkin Cheesecakes (an experiment)

So I intended to make these. I may or may not have been intending to make these since Thanksgiving. Don't judge.

Original Pin, mini pumpkin cheesecakes

But, instead, I realized that I had none of the correct ingredients and I in fact did not need the no bake cheesecake mix.

So I made it up....

I just followed the directions on the package for the graham cracker crust. (Basically just sugar, graham cracker crumbs and butter)

 Then packed it down into my muffin cups with the bottom of a cup

 Made the filling according to the package

 Added half a can of pumpkin, a teaspoon of cinnamon, half teaspoon of cloves and nutmeg

two tablespoons of sugar

 Filled up my cups. Next time i would fill the dozen up to the top, I forgot that you didn't need to leave room for baking... :)

But this was the result! It didn't set up as hard as it normally would because of the extra pumpkin, but it still set up pretty well. It was delicious! 

Spicy Garlic Lime Chicken

Ok, so basically this is the best chicken I have ever had. I'm serious. Try it.

We got the recipe from a Costco cookbook, but we tweaked it a little. We had all sorts of grand plans to make things from the book, but we only made this and a couple other things. The other things were nowhere near as good.

What you'll need:

 4 boneless skinless chicken breasts

1 tablespoon butter

2 tablespoons avocado oil (or any oil you want)

2 tablespoons garlic powder

5 tablespoons lime juice

For the Spice Rub:

3/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/4 teaspoon garlic powder

1/4 teaspoon dried parsley

1/8 teaspoon paprika

1/8 teaspoon  onion powder

Mix together all your spice rub ingredients :)

Then Prep your chicken

 We stab ours a bunch of times so that the juice can soak right in

Trim off all the fat

Rub that spice in! We doubled our recipe since we did 6 chicken breasts and so there was extra spice rub, we used all the spice anyway and I'm pretty sure it made it extra delicious.

 Melt your butter and heat up your oil

We use avocado oil because olive oil actually loses its awesomeness when you cook with it. Avocado oil doesn't :)

 Juice your limes. The best way to get a lot of juice is to roll the limes against something hard like the counter.

I managed to get all 10 tablespoons out of two limes today.

Stir in your garlic powder!

Keep that handy for after the chicken is browned on both sides. About 6 minutes per side. We cook them over medium heat.

Then pour in your lime juice!

Flip them a few times, about 6 minutes on each side again. Check them after that, especially if your chicken is thicker. Then you're all done!

We served them with cabbage and I seriously could have eaten like 4 a piece.It has been a while since we made them, but I'm pretty sure that they really were extra delicious today. 

Dry erase marker laundry

Mostly this is just really genius! I tried it and didn't have to worry about my family ruining my clothes while I was at work. Easy! Try it! :)

Brownie Batter Milkshake

In an effort to venture away from hot chocolate (and because we already had all the ingredients) I decided to make this pin.



Super simple AND delicious. Now that is my kind of milkshake... or really anything that I'm making.
It occurs to me that I maybe should comment on these people's blogs and let them know that I'm trying out their stuff...

Anyway, all you need is Ice cream, milk, and brownie mix.Oh, and a blender. Those are good. I used a ninja, which I kind of think are awesome. And I'm not just saying that because I was an extra in one of their commercials once.

I did a couple of spoonfuls of mix, like three smaller scoops of ice cream, and a tiny amount of milk, Which was basically just enough to be about a quarter inch thick on the bottom of the blender.

I would highly recommend that you put the mix in the bottom and add the milk. When I put on the lid I got a nice puff of brownie mix in the face.

Yeah, I'm still working on photographing food and things. I'll get there :) Also, I was too lazy to actually make brownies to put on top.

And, for a little twist on the original, add a few oreos when you blend. It's delicious :)

Book Jar

Hello lovelies!

Brand new year! Bright shiny resolutions to work on :)

One of my resolutions always involves reading books and I did horrendously on that goal last year (I made a goal to read 30 classics, but only read East of Eden and 200 pages of Les Miserables). So this year I decided to be a little more realistic. Instead of 30 classics, I decided to do 10 classics, 10 church books, and 50 other books.

To help along with that I decided to make a book jar, based on this pin -->
My book jar is a little smaller than this, but hopefully I'll actually read all the books in it this year.

Best part? The whole pin was free to do :)

I took my ideas for books to read from my goodreads account.If you like reading books, then I highly recommend it.

 My empty jar and goodreads account!

 I just wrote the names of the books on scraps of scrapbook paper and then folded them up!

Stuffed full and ready to go!

What kind of books are you going to read this year? Let me know if you decide to make book jars! :)

Dollar Store Lanterns

I can't take all the credit for this one. I was out with my friend looking for glasses for my Soup or Bowl party, and she was the one that wanted to do this craft. I ended up doing two of the three lanterns. Here is the original pin :)


Instead of using super glue, we used a hot glue gun, although after having done it, I think I'd recommend using the super glue.

We just got some decorative sticks from the dollar store and then cut them into different lengths. It doesn't really matter what sizes you do as long as they're varied. I HIGHLY recommend organizing them into sizes. Originally we had them all just in a pile and I got so annoyed trying to find the size I wanted that I stopped and organized them.

We just superglued them on. No rhyme or reason to which ones you use when! It's totally up to you :)

We just added some rocks to the bottom and tea lights and voila! Beautiful lanterns :)

I just wanted to note that they don't even have to be vases! The smaller two are just glasses of different sizes :)

It only took us about one movie to finish the whole thing.

Good luck!

Hope you all had a great new year! We did a breakfast new year's day and made the french toast roll ups! They were a total hit! I even had someone ask if they could come to breakfast every day :)

Anyway, good luck with your resolutions! Especially if they have anything to do with making new things ;)