From Petrifiying to Pretty. A Pantry Tale

It's time for another Tackle It Tuesday hosted by the fabulously talented women at 5 Minutes For Mom.

My tackle this week was my pantry. The state of my pantry was truly petrifying, it had me crawling up walls and clawing at my own eyes thoroughly frustrated and unable to find things.

The Petrifying Pantry



I chunked carefully placed all of the food items on the floor well above my toddler's level and proceeded to scrub the heck out of the floors and shelves.
I then pulled my ever growing collection of cookbooks out of hiding and put them on the shelf at eye level: But Rachel, Why? Ah, good question dear reader. Because this way they are stored with the food and I'm constantly reminded that variety and garlic is the spice of life. I crack open a cookbook, get some inspiration and get to cooking tonguegasmically tantalizing and healthy(ish) meals for my family!
Then, I organized everything by 'family' and put my 'tools' on the top shelf out of monkey's ever growing reach and placed kid approved snacks and cereal on the bottom shelf. The floor is reserved for large griddles, woks and cake carriers.

The Pretty Pantry


This whole project only took me about 3 hours, and that's with Monkey's really enthusiastic help.

My next project on the pantry is to add a knob to the other side of the door and then use a sliding lock to keep the heathens Monkey and Princess out of the goodies.

Do you have a home improvement or cleaning project around the house that you've been putting off? Pop over to 5 Minutes for Mom and get some inspiration. Then Tackle your own project and join in the fun!

Mouthwatering Monday: Monkey Bread

Doesn't that picture just make your mouth water? Monkey Bread is one of my favorite breakfasts because it's easy, tonguegasmically delectable, just has a fun name and it's so versatile.

Recipe

* 2 cans of buttermilk biscuits (10 biscuits per can)
* 1/2 Stick of butter
* Sugar
* Cinnamon
* Vanilla
* Optional: Apples, Brown Sugar, Walnuts, Coconut, Raisins, Cranberries
How To:
Pre-heat oven to 375. Lightly spray a bundt pan. I use the Butter Spray with flour for baking.
In a large ziploc bag combine roughly 2 C of white sugar with a couple of teaspoons of cinnamon and a dash of Brown Sugar (optional). The exact measurements on this are at your discretion, it's a taste preference.
Tear or Cut each biscuit into 4 pieces. Drop the biscuit pieces into the bag and shake vigorously until well coated. Drop the biscuits into your bundt pan, it'll fill it about 1/2 way. If you want to add nuts, coconut, apples anything of this sort, add them in between layers of biscuits.
In a small saucepan over medium heat bring 1/2 stick of butter, 1 C sugar and roughly 1 tsp of vanilla to a boil.
Pour this evenly over the biscuits in the bundt pan.
Cook for about 25-30 minutes.
The Monkey Bread will look like this when done:


Take your Bundt pan and flip it over onto a wire cooling rack.
This is what you'll see.


Give the Monkey Bread a few minutes to cool off before you tear into it because the Sugar Coating is like Molten Lava.
Are you drooling yet?
If you can't wait.. Just use forks to tear it into pieces.

Nom Nom Nom


I serve this with Milk, Coffee and Fresh Fruit. It's fabulous for Brunches, Holiday Breakfasts, Bible Studies, Baby Showers, you get the idea.

Weekly Winners: May 18th to May 24th

Into the deep


Puttin' on the dog


These little piggies got a pedicure


Told y'all


Weekly Winners is the brilliant creation of the superb Lotus of Sarcastic Mom fame, or is notoriety? Either way. She's brilliant and talented and you can join the fun and visit others' weekly winners here.

Under Her Umbrella

She's learning early
to protect her precious skin
from the sun's harsh rays

The South Texas sun
harsh, bright, brilliant, friend and foe
It's warmth is tempting


May is skin cancer awareness month. Teach your children now about the damage the sun can do. Knowledge is power, arm them well.
Check yourself, get tested, know your type and risk level.



For more haikus check out Jennifer's blog or A Mommy Story's blog

Bring on the Bananas

It's that time again. Time to put on your best dress or your tux, dust off those heels, well except for her because she wears them every day, get your hair did and get ready for the party and the paparazzi.
That's right ladies and gentlemen, it's Royal Banana Award Ceremony time again.

Today's honorees are an eclectic group of men and women who inspire, amuse, and leave me in a constant state of awe and envy for their talents and all around awesomeness.
Without further ado, here are the newest inductees to the Royal Banana Hall of Fame.

First up is a man whose struggles leave my heart weeping, yet his strength and humor throughout his plight are truly awe inspiring and often leave me laughing through my tears. The darling author of Xbox4NappyRash is today's first recipient of the Royal Banana Award. If you haven't discovered him yet, you are truly missing out.

Next up is the fabulously brilliant woman behind Absolutely Bananas
. She is humorous, lovely, inspiring, hysterical, honest and really she's one of my favorite daily reads. I just recently found out that she thinks I'm cool enough to comment on her blog which I've been stalking reading quietly for a couple of months now. She is also proud of being a Mom who Blogs, and I say Hell Yeah to that!

Next, we have the uber fashionable OhMommy of Classy Chaos fame. OhMommy writes adorable and witty anecdotes about her life with her fabulous 3, her heel obsession, photography, family and being the child of immigrants. She is inspiring, gracious, snarky and someone that I am dying to go out and have a drink with! Get thee hence, if you do not already stalk read her daily.

Next up, Joeprah. Joeprah can appear somewhat intimidating because his blog is mind bogglingly technical looking and his posts are fabulously well thought out, fun, easy for parents of all stages to relate to and his self deprecating humor is awesome, but in reality he is anything but intimidating. He is sweet, helpful, funny and a wonderful guy. In short, he rocks.

The last, but in no way the least of today's Royal Banana Honorees is Megan over at Velveteen Mind. I must admit that my blog has a bit of a bloggy crush on her blog. She is a fantastic writer, she cracks me up and she wrote this post the other day about licking Matt Lauer that everyone just has to read. She is brilliant, funny and I think one hell of a blogger, mommy or otherwise.

Well Ladies and Gentlemen those are all the awards for today. Thanks for attending today, enjoy the after parties, don't drink and blog...no wait, please do.. it'll make for some great reading.

As always, I expect acceptance speeches and if you decide to pass the love on to others, leave me a note so I can go check them out :-)

Choose your button and wear it proudly.




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(a href="http://www.asouthernfairytale.blogspot.com")(img src="http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p202/redray19/award200.gif" border="0" alt="Photobucket")(/a)


Code:
(a href="http://www.asouthernfairytale.blogspot.com")(img src="http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p202/redray19/award150.gif" border="0" alt="Photobucket")(/a)

I am truly honored. David McMahon of Author Blog fame, featured this post as his Post of The Day on his blog. Thanks David!

An Apple A Day ~ WW

Xbox4NappyRash asked for the original... so here it is.





Visit other Wordless Players at 5 Minutes for Mom or The WW homepage

The day the vagina nearly wrecked the car

Y'all remember that clip from Varsity Blues right? The one where the "hot" stripper teacher is teaching Sex Ed and tells her students to all chant:
"Penis, Penis, Penis, Vagina, Vagina, Vagina"

Well, I don't believe in teaching kids to call body parts nicknames like 'hoo ha' or 'pachingo' or 'nonny' or 'tallywhacker' or 'winkie' or anything else along those lines. If you teach your kids different names for them, party on.
That's just not my cup of tea.
So, my daughter knows what a vagina is and that girls have vaginas and boys have penises, as was obvious from this post.

Now, obviously my husband knows this fact of life. We do have two kids, you do the math :-) But, it makes him super squeamish to hear his precious little Princess say those words out loud. Which I swear doesn't make me giggle like a schoolgirl or anything, honest.

I'll spare y'all all the lovely details but one day Princess had BBV (bubble bath vagina). For those of you who don't know what that is, it's when girls (big and little) take too many bubble baths and their inner lining gets irritated. It feels like you're peeing fire.. well, we were out at dinner when she felt it.
If you live in Texas, I'm pretty sure you heard her screams.
Anyhoo... I explained to her what had happened and that some Tylenol and a cool water (no bubbles) bath would help once we got home... she was actually pretty good about it.
We left the restaurant and got in the car to go home, we're on the highway Nathan's driving and we hear this:
"Dad, my vagina burns when I tee tee"
He looks at me with this poor helpless mortified look on his face, I swear I wasn't giggling inside at all.
"Mom, do boys penises burn like this if they take too many bubble baths?"
At least that's what I heard. I'm pretty sure all Nathan heard was his precious litle daughter saying: "Vagina, Vagina, Vagina, Penis, Penis, Penis" Now, since she isn't allowed to date until she's 30, I'm pretty sure she isn't allowed to actually have a vagina until then, too.
It continued: "Mom, does your vagina ever burn?"
Okay, I nearly choked on my Diet Coke and I swear if it wouldn't have killed his family, Nathan would have jumped head first out of the car to get away from this conversation.
We got home safely and Nathan's head didn't explode. Princess got her cool water bath and Tylenol and all was well in our world.
So there you have it, the day the vagina nearly wrecked our car.
:-)