Greens & Beans Soup

This soup is perfect for winter, and it is so easy to customize. Just change out the meat, greens or beans to your liking. It's simple! I have done this with smoked sausage and kale, but the picture above is with the ingredients listed below. It's even better the next day!

Ingredients

• 1 lb turkey Italian sausage, casings removed
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2-4 cloves garlic, pressed 
• 1 package frozen collard greens (12-16 ounces), thawed
• 48 oz. of chicken broth (or 1 32 oz. container and then add water for remaining ounces)
• 2 cans navy beans, drained and rinsed
• salt & pepper

Directions

Brown onion and sausage together until sausage starts to brown. Add garlic and cook until sausage is completely browned. You can drain the fat at this point, if desired (I leave it in for flavor). Add broth, beans and greens, and bring to a boil. Turn down heat and simmer for 15-20 minutes. Season with salt and pepper, to taste.

This goes great with cornbread!

Raw Ice Cream?

I will admit that the sound of "raw" ice cream doesn't necessarily sound great. And, when I heard the ingredients, I was skeptical. But, when my sister made it for me, I was hooked!

 If you are looking for a great way for you or your kids to eat more raw spinach, this is definitely it. The original recipe is here, but I listed the ingredients that I used below, for your convenience.

Into a food processor (or blender that has a great motor), put:

• 2 cups loosely packed baby spinach
• 12 oz frozen cherries
• 1 frozen, ripe banana (peel before freezing!), sliced
• 1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa
• 1/2 cup vanilla Silk Lite soy milk

Process until smooth, taking time to stir around the ingredients and scrape the sides. Be patient--if you add more milk to help the flow, it will be less firm and more like a smoothie (and not as tasty, per my kids).

A blender will work, but the friction caused by the motor bogging down (unless yours is a good one) will, again, cause it to be more like a smoothie.

I used my food processor for this batch and it came out like very soft, soft serve ice cream. All three of my kids loved it and begged for more.

This recipe makes about three 1/4 cup servings, but it isn't recommended that you double it, since it is so hard to process as is.

Spinach has calcium and iron, and the cherries are great for your joints. Be brave and try it, you won't regret it! . . . You may just want to hide the ingredients from your kids, in case they are like my dad.

Dad hated all things pumpkin, yet he gobbled up dozens of my pumpkin chocolate-chip cookies. That is, until he found out they contained pumpkin, and then he never ate another one. Such silliness.

And talk about silliness--I have not posted that pumpkin cookie recipe yet! I will need to take care of that right away. Which, of course, requires baking some.

Stay tuned! 

Christmas Cake Fun

This is a picture of our fun Christmas cake that we made for dessert yesterday. You don't need a fancy cake pan to do this, just make a Christmas tree pattern and use a serrated knife to cut it out. To make it easy, we folded our paper in half and drew the design on one side, so it would be symmetrical.

If you have time, the cake is easier to cut and holds up better, if you freeze it first. I think a few hours would do it. Just wrap it in plastic wrap first. If not, you can do like we did and just put icing on the top (the sides were too crumbly to hold the icing and were trying to fall apart).

Anyway, to make this, you need:

• a boxed cake (we used white), and eggs & oil to make it
• a 13 x 9 baking dish
• homemade icing (recipe follows)
• mint extract
• sugar cubes (we found them at Food Lion)
• matches
• dropper or pipette

Homemade Icing

Ingredients:

• 1 lb powdered sugar
• 1 cup cream cheese (I used the 1/3 less fat in the little tub, which incorporates easier without being room temp)
• 1/4 cup butter spread (I used smart balance)
• tablespoons of milk, as needed
• dash of salt
• 2 teaspoons pure orange extract (or whatever you like, but this is great)
• food coloring

Directions:

Dump everything in the mixer, except the milk and food coloring, and mix on low, adding tablespoons of milk until it gets to spreading consistency. Do this carefully, so your icing doesn't get runny. Mix on medium to get everything incorporated well. If making the presents, scoop out several half cups of icing into bowls for tinting various colors, then color the remaining bulk of your icing green.

After we iced the cake and presents, then came the fun part!


When you are ready to eat your cake, arrange a few sugar cubes (not many--we used six) on your cake, as though they are lights. Put a few drops of mint extract on each cube and then light them with a match.

Quickly turn off the lights and ooh and ahh for a few seconds while they burn a pretty blue!  Fun times. :-)

Please note:  If you put too many cubes on your cake, some will go out before the others are lit--they burn quickly. And my kids said the post-burn cubes don't taste good, although our dog begged to differ.

(We got this idea from a Christmas book called The ADVENTure of Christmas.)