Petite Cheesecakes

Every other week or so my brother-in-law and sister-in-law come over to our house after Elliott is asleep and play games with us.

Usually it's Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride. But we throw in some Fast Food Franchise, Power Grid, or Blockus in the mix. (While two person Blockus is fun, Matt and I have abandoned two person strategy games from our playing line-up. When you have two competitive people living in a house you have to adapt, you know? It's the little things we do in order to stay married.)

I like to take these opportunities to bake something fun -- because, well, there are two additional people and that means there is less of a chance that Matt and I will eat an entire batch of whatever it is I feeling like making. 

Tonight: Petite Cheesecakes! I had half a bag of Costco's individual Philadelphia Cream Cheese that was expiring next week. Either we were going to eat nothing but bagels or I was going to make a cheesecake.

While these are normally made with vanilla wafers, I had Oreos. So, I substituted those instead and...let me tell you...best decision ever...

These are super easy to make and really delicious -- plus you can play around with the presentation too. (Or mix up the flavor of Oreos: vanilla, mint.) 

So, place an Oreo in a cupcake liner.

And then spoon in your cheesecake batter.

Bake and serve!

You can either place it cheesecake side up or Oreo side up! (Inexpensive red wine is a nice addition too!)

Here is what you need:

- 16 oz of cream cheese

- 3/4 cups of granulated sugar

- 1 Tbs lemon juice

- 1 tsp vanilla extract

- 2 eggs

- Oreos

- Toppings (cherry pie filling, cookie crumbs, caramel sauce)

And here it what you do:

Soften the cream cheese and beat until smooth. Add in the sugar, lemon juice, vanilla, and eggs. Beat the mixture for several minutes until it's well mixed. Fill the muffin tins 2/3 full and bake at 375 for 15-17 minutes.

Cool. Chill. And serve. 

Enjoy! 

Things I Love Mondays

Well, it's been an interesting Monday so far. My husband Matt has had some bizarre and scary health stuff going on and then his car broke down. So, we've been having an interesting day so far.

Cue the "waa-waa" trombone music!

(Speaking of which: THIS is pretty funny.)

I think that a Monday like this calls for a double dose of things I love. For your pleasure, here are TWO things I am really excited about today.

Thing #1:

Posters from Snapfish.com 

I finally got the poster I made of Elliott's first year in the mail today and I LOVE it. I decided to frame it myself instead of having Snapfish frame it for me because I have a 50% off any frame at Michael's coupon. So, yeah, that's pretty awesome.

The picture doesn't really capture the cuteness of this poster; so, you'll just have to take my word for it. There are so many cool ideas for these posters! The teacher-brain is spinning...


Thing #2:

Jewelry from Mountain Girl Silver.

My friend Alicia gave me an "Elliott" necklace and she just added the "Isaac" disc for me. I adore this necklace! And I just learned that the owner of Mountain Girl Silver is local -- her business is based out of West Linn, Oregon.

These disc necklaces are a perfect baby shower/mother's day gift. You can get them with art or with birthdates, anniversary dates. I also love her personalized wine charms. You design it and they're great. I get so many compliments and I love it.

(BTW -- when you go to her site, you can check out the Heaven Warrior Charm Necklace! And even after my intense morning...that is what made me cry today! So cool.)

Donuts Part 2

If donuts are the next cupcake (or maybe cake pops are the next cupcake and I've got a post about those suckers soon!), then I am uber trendy with my donut pan.

Fried donuts are out; baked donuts are in! Some of my naysayers have been silenced!

I took donuts to Book Club on Saturday -- here is my tray ready to go:

Are those Maple/Bacon donuts you see? Why yes, yes they are. Everything is better with bacon!

And the glazed donuts were so much better this time -- drizzling the powdered sugar/milk mixture over them when they are warm and then letting them cool was so much better than my dunking method. The glazed donuts were virtually indistinguishable from something you'd buy for yourself on a Saturday morning at some fancy-pants bakery. 

Want to make these donuts?

Head back to Eat, Live, Run's blog to grab the basic donut recipe.

And here are the recipes for the frosting!

Chocolate Glaze


1 cup of semisweet chocolate chips
1/3 cup heavy whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Toss into a saucepan on the stove, warm over low heat, and stir until all those chips are melted!

Dip the donuts into the mixture while the glaze is still warm.

Maple Frosting

4 1/2 cups of powdered sugar
1/2 cup of butter
4 tablespoons of milk
2 tablespoons of maple flavoring (I used McCormick)

Whether you want to go with the powdered option (dust those suckers in sugar), cinnamon and sugar (melt butter, create mixture, dunk in butter, dunk in mixture), glazed (1 tablespoon of milk, 1/2 cup powdered sugar - drizzle), or any of the above options, you are sure to have a foolproof treat to take to parties, picnics.

Thank you US Weekly

My mom is a workaholic. She doesn't ever truly rest until her work is done.

My dad is a work hard, play hard kind of guy. (And before you go and have images of what "playing hard" looks like for my dad, let me paint a picture: It could be settling in for a four hour marathon of the food channel's Best Crab Shacks in America; staying up all night to compose music; umpiring tournaments for ASA softball; or writing down bad puns on a sheet of paper to use on waitresses when we're out to eat as a family.)

I fall somewhere in the middle.

If I'm working really hard at school, my housework and family obligations suffer. For instance: Grading papers while Elliott was taking a bath one day = every single toy (electronic, stuffed) ended up in the tub with him. And from September to June, Einstein just doesn't get walked.

If I'm feeling like my home is suffering, then school gets shortchanged. Assignments collect dust before I look at them and instead of spending four or five hours prepping lessons, I'm trying to find out how to make watching the first season of Battlestar Galactica relevant to our unit on contemporary literature. Okay, okay, I'm teasing. I wouldn't show them the whole season.

Could I do it all? Sure. And I'm certainly going to try. But let's not get crazy here...I'm not about to drive myself insane just for a small stack of vocab quizzes or for a small pile of laundry. If the students have to wait or we have to wear the same pants for a week...then so be it. Because I am the queen of taking time for myself. Sometimes I have to sneak it in. For example, it's time I make a confession: I lied to Matt about the intensity of my hemorrhoids in order to take long baths uninterrupted by children.

It was really brilliant on my part. Hemorrhoids are a valid ailment during and post-pregnancy netting myself several months of this trick. And what husband is going to say, "Another bath? Really? I'll go buy you some Preparation H or TUCKS for those things and we can cut back on our water bill."

It's only a pseudo-confession because Matt was already on to me. I said I was going to take a shower, 60 minutes later I emerged from our bathroom to two screaming kids and a stressed out husband.

Matt: What took you so long?
Me: [Hesitating] I was...shaving my legs?
Matt: Your legs still look like a Hobbit. You are a liar.
Me: Okay! Okay. When the water got cold, I crawled out and read US Weekly and ate a Cadbury Creme Egg.

Matt's says he has been on to me for a long time and allowed these escapades to go without comment as a testament of his love for me.

When it comes to what I want out of "Shelbi time", it's really simple:

- I want to read a magazine or a "candy" book (Sue Grafton, for example)
- I want to be warm (in front of a heater, in a bath...on a beach in Hawaii would be nice)
- I want a two liter of Diet 7-up/glass of red wine/Fresca/black coffee -- most often a combination of several of these beverages at once

There are variations to this theme. Sometimes I want to have "Mommy makes herself pretty time" which includes all of the above and then adds: Shaving legs, exfoliating, moisturizing, putting on a mud mask, applying make-up, curling hair, and then sitting around on my couch pretending someone is going to pick me up for a night out that didn't have to involve finding a babysitter or expressing milk in the passenger seat of a car. (Which is a far cry from making out with boys in the passenger seat of cars.)

During the ninth month of my pregnancy, I told Matt I needed to go grocery shopping and just came home with this:

And since Isaac's been born, I've acquired a pretty nice collection of US Weekly Magazines from each trip to Safeway that I've done sans Matt.

Adding these tabloids to my shopping cart is something I can do just for me. Of course, in the seven years I've been reading them, I've slowly lost touch with who some of these "celebrities" are -- but I don't care. The men are cute and the women don't have spit-up in their hair. I've never seen a "Stars are just like US" picture that showed an A-lister buying Starbucks with half of her shirt soaked from a faulty/leaky breast pad. (Oh yes, welcome to my TODAY. But the choice was go in with a wet shirt or no coffee. Which one would you choose?)

As a matter of fact, if Matt does the shopping by himself and I tell him to "bring me home a present" that is a code phrase for: You better come home with a magazine. When he buys me the magazine he knows that he's okaying the time I will need to read it too. Sometimes that means I will share a bathtub with a toddler who drives his cars up my back and points to moles I didn't even know I have and say, "Yuck." 

But when it means that I can find somewhere to hide while indulging in the lowest form of reading available to me...I'll forgo dishes, grading, and good parenting skills.

Every mom should have her one thing (for me, it's my several things) that she needs to sustain her. Hey, an US Weekly and a bottle of wine is cheaper than therapy.

Celebrity gossip, spring cleaning ideas, and amazing one-dish dinners? I've got you covered. Just need an hour alone...

Friday's Book Review

Before we begin our book review for today...somebody went to the playoff Blazers/Mavericks game last night.

Isn't that just the cutest Trail Blazer fan you've ever seen? He was a champ too -- I only had to nurse him in the bathroom once! (I'm the queen of nursing in public bathrooms -- not that this is something to be proud of. When Elliott was a baby, I nursed him in the bathroom at my brother's high school graduation and my skirt fell in the toilet.)

Of course, I didn't even take into account that the Rose Garden's playoff noise would be eardrum shattering; so, I felt like parent of the year trying to cheer for a basketball game while holding my hands over his little ears...and someone behind us spilled beer all over the Baby Bjorn...but whatever -- barring permanent hearing loss, I think it was totally worth it.

It's Friday and that means it's random book review time. Here's our book for this week!

The book is "Out" by Natsuo Kirino. (PS. The above picture is for my colleague Stacy who said I was looking uncommonly primped and ready to go for pictures seeming as how I have a newborn and a toddler in my house. I didn't primp for this. It's three-days-unshowered Shelbi. And seconds after I took this picture, I was drinking wine from the bottle (Earth Day = saving water not washing wine glasses) and spilled it down my white shirt and on to my child. Parenting fail.)

I read "Out" in 2007. But the book has stuck with me and I think it's a necessary read for fans of Japanese literature and gruesome crime dramas. (Be forewarned: There is a particularly graphic scene of mutilation ala the "Saw" movies!) It's gritty. But it's not just a make-you-uncomfortable thriller -- this book is also a social commentary on Japan's working class and it's view of women's roles in a post bubble economy. It's got the Yakuza too! And powerful things to say about love and abuse. What I loved the most was the marriage between the banal and the extraordinary.

Each of the women are fully fleshed-out characters and the themes are genre-bending...which makes this book more literary than pulp. 

Here's the blurb if you're interested in the plot basics:

Facing the daily burdens of slavish work conditions, stale marriages, and a society refusing to show them proper respect, the women on the nightshift at a suburban Tokyo factory are all looking for one thing -- a way out. When pretty young Yayoi takes a beating from her deadbeat husband, her coworkers do little more than help their friend keep pace with the line. But a new kind of sisterhood emerges when Yayoi requires assistance in disposing of her husband's dead body. 

My passion for books written by Japanese authors, set in Japan, or about Japan is a pretty big part of who I am. I think Kirino's work is great. I have her next book "Grotesque" on my to-read list. 

Thank you IKEA

When Matt and I put together the nursery for Elliott we bought some sports themed wall hangings that were on clearance at Babies 'R Us for less than five dollars. Elliott was already several months old at that point and we thought, "Well, something should go on the walls." I never particularly liked them. But whatever.

When we found out about Isaac, I knew I wanted to actually have a nursery with a theme. And in the process of upgrading Elliott to a big-boy room, I wanted to have some fun in his room too.

So, today I put up wall art that I LOVE. And all for the cost of $9.

First thing I did was buy these frames at IKEA. (I like anything at IKEA that will take me less than five minutes to assemble -- which limits me to their decorative items and kitchen supplies.)

Then Elliott and I had an art session:

After he drew me some pictures, I cut them out to match the frame and we hung them on the wall in his new room -- right above his art easel too. Every artist needs inspiration in their own little art corner!

A close-up picture of Elliott's talent:

He's kinda in a "random scribbling" phase right now. Pretty soon we'll upgrade to a "Mommy is supposed to recognize this, but I have no idea what it is" phase.

I love the idea of framing the art your child draws for you and using it for decor. It beats any mass-produced paintings that are overpriced anyway.

For Isaac's room, since he's too little to draw me anything -- I tried to put the crayon in his hand, but at 6 weeks old, he's severely lacking in dexterity; I'm working on it though. I have him enrolled in newborn Picasso class -- we just went the boring route of framing things we already had around the house. I bought these for Elliott's first birthday. They are now scattered throughout the house and so I framed three that fit our theme and perfection: We've got art!

I hung the little wooden animals today too -- I don't know if I like them there...but I was trying to avoid placing them within grabbing distance of the crib...because knowing my kids, one day after nap I will walk in and someone will have licked all the glitter off.

From the words of Erma Bombeck

I wrote about Elliott growing up in this post. I was hoping I would feel inspired to write an original blog post; but as I meandered around the Internet this morning, I found someone else's words that deserve to be reprinted instead.

Plus, I hadn't cried yet today...so, it figures I should run across this Erma Bombeck column. Man Erma...you've got a name that probably won't come back into style despite its "old-timeyness", but I think you are funny, poignant, and honest.

Parents: TRY to read it without tearing up. I dare you.

I'm a glutton for punishment, aren't I??

(Sorry it's so melancholy. And it probably won't get read as much as the entry from yesterday because I didn't write "vagina" in the first paragraph.)

From the brain of Erma Bombeck...

A young mother writes: "I know you've written before about the empty-nest syndrome -- that lonely period after the children are grown and gone. Right now, I'm up to my eyeballs in laundry and muddy boots. The baby is teething; the boys are fighting. My husband just called and said to eat without him, and I fell off my diet. Lay it on me again, will you?"

OK.

One of these days, you'll shout, "Why don't you kids grow up and act your age!"

And they will.

Or, "You guys get outside and find yourselves something to do ... and don't slam the door!"

And they won't.

You'll straighten up the boys' bedroom neat and tidy -- bumper stickers discarded, bedspread tucked and smooth, toys displayed on the shelves. Hangers in the closet. Animals caged. And you'll say out loud, "Now I want it to stay this way."

And it will.

You'll prepare a perfect dinner with a salad that hasn't been picked to death and a cake with no finger traces in the icing, and you'll say, "Now, there's a meal for company."

And you'll eat it alone.

You'll say: "I want complete privacy on the phone. No dancing around. No demolition crews. Silence! Do you hear?" And you'll have it.

No more plastic tablecloths stained with spaghetti.

No more bedspreads to protect the sofa from damp bottoms.

No more gates to stumble over at the top of the basement steps.

No more clothespins under the sofa.

No more playpens to arrange a room around.

No more anxious nights under a vaporizer tent.

No more sand on the sheets or Popeye movies in the bathrooms.

No more iron-on patches, wet, knotted shoestrings, tight boots, or rubber bands for ponytails.

Imagine. A lipstick with a point on it. No baby sitter for New Year's Eve. Washing only once a week. Seeing a steak that isn't ground. Having your teeth cleaned without a baby on your lap.

No PTA meetings.

No car pools.

No blaring radios.

No one washing her hair at 11 o'clock at night.

Having your own roll of Scotch tape.

Think about it. No more Christmas presents out of toothpicks and library paste.

No more sloppy oatmeal kisses.

No more tooth fairy.

No giggles in the dark.

No knees to heal, no responsibility.

Only a voice crying, "Why don't you grow up?"

and the silence echoing, "I did."