Trash (talk) - Card Game Walkthrough

My parents went away for a week with my brother and family.  Whilst they were away, my nephew taught them all a new card game.  It was called "Trash".  It was easy to learn, and the most important part here, it was fun for all ages.  It is especially easy for very young kids to play, while learning their numbers at the same time. 

My girls spent the night at Grandma and Papa's house shortly after and were taught how to play.  They came home and immediately taught us how to play.  Here is my four year old who is can count up to 30 but is still learning what the numbers actually look like.  She can play this game no problem.

playing "Trash" with daddy

I had a hard time finding a pictured walk through on line that explained it clearly, so I made you one because the easiest way to learn a card game is to see one round in action! The game is very simple as a whole and once you learn the concepts you will be off and playing a round with your family and friends very quickly. A detailed explanation with pictures can be found below:  

First, get 2 decks of cards and deal everyone 10 cards total, arranging them in two rows of 5 in front of you. 

The rest of the cards not dealt become the "Draw" pile.  On your turn you draw a card from the draw pile.  
Let's say it's a "2"

you place that face up in your "two" holder spot.  

The card that held your two spot (that was face down, underneath, now turn it over, let's say it's a 5) 

It can now be placed in the five holder spot.  

Now we can look at the card that was under the 5 card spot.  It is a ten

You can now place that ten in the 10 holder spot

Now let's look under the ten holder card to reveal another two card.  Because you have already filled up that #2 spot, now your turn is over (discard next to the draw pile) and the next player would draw a card.

But, what if that card had been a King, which is a wild card?

Well it's your lucky day, because you can place that in any numbered spot that has not been turned over yet.  I chose the "one" spot.  (Note: If you end up drawing, in this case, an Ace any time later in this same round, {Aces are ones in this game}, you can replace the wild king with the ace and place the King in a new unturned spot).  Kings rock in this game.  Many a victory has come from over turning one of these bad boys. Now our turn keeps going as we can now look under the 1 spot card

It is an 8.  You continue in the same manner placing it in the 8th spot

When you check the card underneath the 8 spot, it turns out it's a Queen.  A queen (and also a Jack) will stop your turn. Discard the queen and the next player goes.  By the way Aces are "ones" in this game.

The first person to turn over all their cards is the winner of the 1st round.  The other players must keep their unturned cards with them and be dealt the remaining cards to make 10.  However.  The winner is now dealt only 9 cards.  Each time you win you remove a card, so you will have one less than you had in the round before.  (New 6.5.16) I had someone just ask me a question that I thought I would add here.  She asked, what if you have won three rounds and are only dealt seven cards, what happens if you draw a 8, 9, or 10?  So, they cannot be played and are discarded like the queens and the jacks. You will only be able to play if you draw cards up through 7 for that round.  However many cards you are dealt, you can only go up to that number, anything above that is discarded.

This game can take a while with a bigger group. Options are for each player to take their turn quickly like the game "speed".  The other option is to start with only 8 cards.  The grand finale winner is the one who only starts with one down turned card and gets rid of it.  Ah, sweet victory over your family.  Take that!

By the way, my dad (aka Papa Randy) took the name of this game one step further, and renamed it Trash TALK.  So now it's perfectly okay if mild insults are thrown around to other players while you are playing.  The first time I played this my 4- year-old she was apparently copying Papa because she looked at me,  pointed with both fingers mock aggressively and said, "You are going down baby, down down DOWN", and she meant it.  Other mild insults were you slimy hotdog and, wait for it... STINKY CHEESE! 

My girls quickly got addicted to this game.  I made them some lunch today and then was making some juice by the sink.  When I turned around they had dealt out a round of trash to play during lunch!  No adult even needed.  Wow.

 
This would be a great game for family reunions, camp outs, retreats, road trip hotels, and summer gatherings when there are many different age groups present. Have fun out there, and don't forget to talk some mild trash while you are playing Trash.

Patriotic Strawberries

Just a quick post, as we are busy getting ready for the 4th of July today, but last year we did yet another Family Fun craft that we fell in love with.  We loved it so much we made them not once, but two different times!  It was easy, fun, and only takes three ingredients. Feast your eyes on the Patriotic Strawberries.

Yes, all you need are:

Big, ripe strawberries, washed and dried
12 0z bag of white chocolate chips
Blue sugar or edible glitter
wax paper/cookie sheet

Melt the chocolate chips slowly in the microwave :30 seconds at a time (sitr between checks) until they are smooth and creamy. Make sure the strawberries are totally dry.  Any moisture or water drops will change the texture of the product.  Dip the dried strawberries into the melted chocolate 3/4 of the way up (It takes a bit of finesse to let the chocolate drip off while twisting the berry a bit to let the excess chocolate drizzle back into the bowl). Immediately dip them in the blue sugar about a third of the way up the berry (we used a small but deep little bowl to get the right effect).  Place dipped strawberry on a wax-lined cookie sheet to harden.

God Bless America says the strawberries

One bag of white chocolate chips will make about 40 berries, depending on their size.  Once the candy chocolate shell has hardened, these become a beautiful and delicious treat.  Seriously.  They are super addictive and so fun to eat.  A great "I can do it myself" cooking experience even the littlest of your small fry will love doing. Not all of them will be perfect but when you put them on a plate all together they look stunning!

These are just great to bring to your family gathering.  So if you have not tried this little Patriotic sweet treat I can say from personal experience we can highly recommend them!  It's your duty as a good American to try them now.  Happy 4th of July!

Spangled Sandwich Pops

Can you believe it's July already?  Less than 6 months of shopping days until Christmas... oops.  I bet that was the last thing you wanted to hear.  What you do really want to hear is how to do a fun, easy, edible craft for the 4th of July with your kids.  We got the idea out of our family fun magazine last year and it was a big hit with the girls.

Picture by Ann Marie over at "Just another glorious day" blog

Not to mention you only need a few things. 

Mini ice cream sandwiches
Popsicle sticks
Paper Plate (for sprinkle containment)
Patriotic sprinkles

Grab your cute small people and let's get started:

First unwrap your mini ice cream sandwiches (as many as you are going to make at once). You have to work quickly because it's summer, it's ice cream, and like the Wicked Witch of the East, it's MELLLTING....  Quickly place the wooden sticks firmly into the base of the ice cream sandwich.

By the way, Family Fun says to make them all cute and put them in cupcake wrappers.  I found it more practical to just make them right before you plan to eat them.   Next get a paper plate (you will thank yourself a thousand times over when the sprinkles won't fly all over the place).  Pour in the fun Patriotic sprinkles while big eyes watch your every move.

All you have to do after that is dip (pressing slightly) all the exposed sides in the sprinkles.

A pretty treat in the colors of America (or Great Britain, or France, or Norway, or the Czech Republic... hey these would work for school colors, any holiday colors, birthday party colors),!  The only thing left after that is to ENJOY!

And enjoy, they did!  Have a happy, fun, safe, 4th of JULY!

Library Card - Let's try this again...

So, today was a big day for us.  We decided it was time to try and obtain a library card.  Again.  Oh we've had one before in the distant past when the girls were 5, 4, and 2, but with such tragic results we've been scarred and scared away for over two years.  Should I share the story?  Well, I don't really want to, but okay, here it is.  The long and the short of it goes something like this: Two years ago we went to the library.  We instantly lost a DVD and simultaneously got pink eye.  We haven't been back since.  True. story.  

Yup.  The pink eye part is hands to God true.  We had not been out of the house in over a week, with the library being the only place we decided to visit on a whim.  There were a number of toys the girls played with as we were looking for books, then bam, two days later, we had a pink eye outbreak.  Gross.  We also had, on first check out, brought home a Veggietales DVD which we watched non-stop for a few days, then it mysteriously vanished.  A scour of the land high and low revealed nothing. Weeks went by, and it never turned up.  Ashamed, we returned to the library at the end of our 3 week borrowing time I humbly had to tell the nice lady behind the counter I had lost their property.  For an avid book reader this was a very deep shame.  Fifteen dollars later we were back on speaking terms but I knew I could never show my face in there again...

Flash forward to today and I decided, now that we've got ourselves a couple of little readers, we need to be immersed in books all summer so that when school comes around, we are ahead of the game.  (Side note: I even ended up finding that lost DVD a year later and saved it to bring back, even though I had already paid for it).  Would the alarms go off?  Would the library lady gaze sternly at me from behind her glasses?  Luckily, no. Once inside we found a nice lady who looked up our info and we were still in the system.  She gave us a new library card lickety split and signed the girls up for a summer reading program where they can earn prizes and a trip to the zoo to boot!  No long lecture on lost things, no "this is a big responsibility" speech.  Nothing. Just a smile and can I help you find chapter books for your future 2nd grader.  Sweet.  She trusts me!

Technically, we should have taken it slow and just check out a few books for our first time back, but truth be told we went a little bit gaga over the books once we were released into the kid's book shelf area. Each girl starting picking out books they wanted, and soon I was standing there with a tower of heavy books in my arms, thirteen to be exact!  Wow. These girls are excited about this.  They were even more excited to discover we could check these books out all by ourselves! Scanning with glee accompanied by a satisfying "beep" and all three girls wanted to scan their own books for checkout.

After the drive home the books were piled precariously on the floor, and I knew right away I was going to need a system so that our books are not lost forever, or find their way into our own book shelves, or worst of all, vanish into a painful time warp.  Within minutes of getting home we got back in the car.  We need something to store these books in, with easy access, and we need a big bag to take them to and from the library.  This is what I came up with.

Isn't this great?  I got it for about $5 at Walmart. It is made for file folders, which made it nice and deep for all of those over sized library books.  This was handy because the lid folded in two.  Therefore if we had a huge book, we could tuck most of them away under the lid but if need be, but the giant book would be free to stick out of the top.

Luckily all the books fit with the lid closed.  This surprised me because some of them were pretty big.

Hooray.  Now we can tuck this little tub somewhere and keep all the books in one place.  I made the rule that the library books can not go up stairs and this little tub is like our library shelf at  home.  I'll let you know how that works.  Also I have a little folder in here that keeps our print out receipt we got at check out so we can check off the list before we have to go back and get more books.  It also is holding their reading charts where they color in a star every time they read for 20 minutes.  All in one place.  Genius.  Speaking of more books, I don't want to be standing there loaded down with an unbalanced tower of books again, so I also got this cute "designer" reusable shopping bag for $4 to lug our books back and forth with.

Not bad eh?  So now I am feeling much more organized and ready to take on the responsibility of a public library card (also I think it helps if your kids are out of the toddler "wander off with everything" stage).  I want my girls to love reading as much as I do, and I think this is the first step to making life long readers out of them.

So far... so good (Doing the happy mom dance here)!

Teriyaki London Broil (Flank Steak)

Have you ever been asked what you would have for your very last meal?  You know, if you only have one more time left to eat in this world, what would it be? Would it be quinoa? Brussels Sprouts? A nice green salad?  Um, for most of us, that would be a big ol' NO ma'am.  For a long time my answer probably would have been BBQ baby back ribs.  But upon recent reflection, I have a totally new and improved answer, and I am pretty sure from now on it's going to be this:

Mmm, can you smell it?  It smells a bit like heaven... well if heaven was made of seared meat (which I sincerely hope it is).  Not only is this of picture of my new favorite Teriyaki London Broil there, in all it's glory, but along side is an herb and butter rice, tender steamed artichokes with home made garlic butter, and a tangy fresh fruit salad.  I won't even tease you with what we have for dessert (ok I WILL)... but I warned you, you asked for it... for dessert we had razzleberry pie with vanilla icecream.

There.  Done.  I have given you the perfect meal. Sigh.  It was soooo nice.  This by the way, was the meal we had for mother's day this year.  So delicious and "da bomb diggity", as the kids are saying now a days.  Ok so now onto the London Broil recipe.  You are going to pinch yourself when I tell you it is only two ingredients.  
TWO. INGREDIENTS.  I'm going to let that sink in.

First thing you do is grab a flank steak, skirt steak, London Broil... whatever you want to call it, and try to find them on sale or a 2 for 1 sale and stock up.  Once you have your desired meat poke it gingerly on both sides with a fork.  Place it in a zip lock bag and add, what I'd like to call, "Magic Sauce", aka Yoshida's Original Gourmet Marinade and Cooking Sauce. Do yourself a favor and get it in vat-sized tubs at your local Costco.  This stuff is awesome with any meat, especially chicken, veggies, and BEEF.

Shake it up to get all the spices floating happily throughout the jug and then pour a bunch of sauce into the bag to marinate.  The best thing is to marinate for a few hours before you want to grill.  My mom says you don't want to marinate overnight.  I'm not sure why, but she's an awesome cook and I don't question her.  Will it explode?  Will it disintegrate? I'm not sure, but I am not about to experiment with my new favorite meat. Be sure to push all the air out of the zip lock so the marinate is touching the meat at all times, then store in the fridge for the allotted time.

When you are about to grill, take it out of the fridge and let it come up to room temperature.  Also discard the marinade. This part I leave for my hubby, the grill master, but I understand you want to cook it on a medium high heat to sear in the meaty goodness.  How long depends on how you like your meat cooked.  For medium rare I read it's like 5 minutes a side.  For medium probably 6-8 minutes a side depended on the thickness of the meat. My mom loves to bring it in, let it rest, slice it up (on the bias click here if you need to know more about that because otherwise it could turn into fibrous shoe strings and not a slab o' tasty tender meat) and put it in a 9x13 pan where she pours more sauce over it.  She then puts it in a warm oven to heat the sauce up with the meat.  You could also just heat up some extra sauce on the side and pour over the meat on each plate.

 
And there you have it, a delicious hunk of meat.  The Yoshida's Gourmet sauce has a lovely warm teriyaki flavor that really makes a nice glaze or "bark" on the outside of the meat.  It's sweet with a hint of spicy and absolutely out of this world.  Here is the recipe if you need it one more time:

Flank Steak
Yoshida's Gourment Marinade and Cooking Sauce
Fork, Zip lock Bag, Grill

Poke holes in steak.  Place in Zip Lock Bag.  Pour in Sauce to Marinate
Grill according to your meat preferred doneness time.  So easy, it hurts!

Enjoy!

Homemade Chocolate Chip Mint Ice Cream

Well, it only took one batch for us to fall in love with our Cuisinart Ice Cream maker.  Let's move on to our second attempt. The overwhelming group consensus was that chocolate chip mint must be our next batch of ice cream.  A quick internet search brought up a few recipes, and I was still looking for a no cook version to make things easy on ourselves.  Well now I can say attempt number two was a big hit! Feast your eyes upon this:

Homemade Chocolate Chip Ice Cream with mint leaves from our garden

It was another easy to put together recipe, and the girls helped.  Also I've decided if we are going to be "professional" ice cream makers whipping up batches at the spur of the moment, we are going to have to have heavy cream and whole milk on hand at all times. Luckily, we still had some left over from our first batch. The other tip is to keep the empty canister in the freezer frozen at all times (you can keep bags or corn or peas inside of it to conserve space), so you are good and frozen when you are ready to roll. Here is what you will need:

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups whole milk (original called for 2% milk)
2 2/3 cups heavy cream
1 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt (original called for 1/2 tsp, I freaked out and only added a smidge)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon mint extract 
(original said peppermint extract, mint is more like the ice cream you would buy in the store)
3 drops green food coloring (optional)
1 cup miniature semisweet chocolate chips

Since I had all the ingredients except mini chocolate chips, my hubby gave me the idea of chopping up regular chocolate chips to save time and money.  So I got my handy-dandy Pampered Chef chopper out and whacked out some pent up frustrations on some tiny morsels of chocolate.

Take that, chocolate!!

Next we mixed the whole milk, heavy cream, sugar, vanilla, and the drops of food coloring in a bowl and used the electric mixture for 1-2 minutes until the sugar had disolved.

As you can see my "helpers" used a bit more than three drops of color, but we did get a great green color out of it

When you are finished you will have something that looks like a Shamrock Shake, the best drink in all of the land.

Pour this frothy mixture into your 2 quart ice cream machine and turn it on

You can actually smell a waft of mint if you stick your nose down in the hole as it spins around. You look ridiculous with your head stuffed down in the top of a machine, but trust me, it will be worth it.

At the 20-25 minute mark you can pour your "add ons" in, this being the crushed chocolate chips.  Let the machine spin for 5 more minutes or so and the chocolate will be incorporated through the whole batch.  After that you will need to chill the whole thing in a separate container in the freezer to harden up and be at a thicker consistency to serve.  By the way, this ice cream was creamy, but not as smooth and creamy as the strawberry ice cream.  My theory is that you need more heavy cream in a recipe than milk.  UPDATED: We tried this again and I updated the above recipe to reflect 2 3/4 cups heavy cream and only 1 1/2 cups of whole milk.  MUCH BETTER on the creaminess factor.  Wow.

Our family's choice for serving is this tiny mini cones (we call them baby cones).  They are just the right size for kids or a little sweet treat snack without going on sugar overload.  These little cones make our ice cream concoctions last almost a week, which is great.  I will continue to make a record of all the recipes we try and keep you posted on our favorites.

Bavarian Stitch (Catherine Wheel/Yarneater) Crochet

Have you ever seen anything so lovely and homemade you stop dead in your tracks and say, I must LEARN this?  Well that happened to me the other day.  I came across the most beautiful blanket I've seen in a long time.  The colors were absolutely stunning, and it featured a stitch I have not yet tried in crochet.  It's called the Bavarian Stitch.  Some people call it the Catherine Wheel or the Yarn Eater as well. Check out this blanket, it is amazing!  It is from the blogger over at MadMe.  I am in Awe. Check out her site she has more pictures of this blanket, which you will want to gaze at endlessly.

Photo by MadMe.  All rights reserved.

I was happy to see she had a link to my favorite you tube crochet guru Teresa, aka the crochet geek.  If you do not know how to crochet I highly recommend her beginner courses.  She has the basic stitches, plus walk throughs of many projects from start to finish.  Who says the internet is not helpful, I learned a whole new SKILL and life long hobby there!  Here is another shot of a Bavarian stitched blanket:

Photo by Cthulhu Crochet and Cousins, check out her site for pictures of this project

I would definitely consider the Bavarian stitch (now that I've tried it) an advanced stitch.  There are cluster stitches, and some of the time up to 8 loops on your hook (relatively rare for crochet).  If you want to see Teresa's tutorial on it, click here.  So I just grabbed some soft extra yarn I had lying around and decided to try it today.  I was able to do the center (the first two rows) in white, then switched colors to a soft pink.

After two rows of pink were finished (two rows make one "wheel) then I added a third color of light green.  I figured out this stitch is even slightly different than a regular Catherine Wheel in that the variation of crocheting around the posts of the row in front gives it the cool raised ridge effect.  Tricky to master but pretty when every thing is said and done.

So that is as far as I got.  I sure hope I am doing it right.  I was having a hard time with row five, so I did my best guesstimation off the pattern and just kept going.  Now I need to decide if I start the pattern over with white or add a 4th color... decisions decisions... I'll keep you posted.

Homemade Strawberry Ice Cream

Thanks to a bunch of gift cards to Bed Bath and Beyond for my birthday, (and a hearty recommendation from my Sister-in-law Sara), I was able to fulfill a long-time wish and buy a Cuisinart 2-quart ice cream maker.  We were so excited to make homemade ice cream from scratch, even using fruit from our own garden!

Here is a look at the machine, aint' she a beaut?  Ps, by the way, I was able to use their 20% off one item coupon that can be found online, or sent to your smart phone, so instead of paying $89 I saved like $17 and the total came to about $71 - which was just covered by three gift cards!  Sweet.

We decided to try one of the recipes that came in the little booklet with the machine: Homemade Strawberry ice cream.  By the way, it should be noted that this product claims you can make ice cream in about 30 minutes, which on the surface it sort of true.  There is some prep work and chilling involved to really maximize your ice cream pleasure.  The inner canister really needs to be frozen for 12-24 hours before you make your first batch of ice cream, and any ingredients you use must all be fully chilled as well.  After 30 minutes you will have something akin to soft serve, that needs to be transferred to another container and frozen to a hard ice cream state.  Other than that everything was pretty easy.  There are only a few parts and one giant knob that goes from on to off.  It's pretty fool proof.  Okay, now onto the recipe: Printable Recipe here

Fresh Strawberry Ice Cream

3 cups of finely chopped strawberries
1/2 cup sugar
4 TBSP fresh squeezed lemon juice.

1 1/2 cups whole milk
2 3/4 cups heavy cream
1 cup of sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

So let's start with the strawberries.  Chop them up and put 3 cups worth in a bowl

Add the 1/2 cup of sugar and squeeze 4 Tablespoons of fresh lemon juice in

Mix together and then chill for 2 hours (another hidden time they didn't mention but needed for good ice cream)

Two hours later the berries have all macerated and formed their own syrup.  Drain off the juice and leave just the strawberries behind in the strainer (be sure to save the juice in a bowl underneath).

Now smash half of the berries.  Check out my hubby in action here. Those strawberries didn't stand a chance...

Now it's finally time to add the milk and cream ingredients together.  Pour the 2 3/4 cups of heavy cream, 1 1/2 cups of whole milk, and 1 cup of sugar into a mixing bowl and blend until the sugar dissolves, about 1-2 minutes.  It helps if you have adorable people helping you with this process.

Next add the 1 1/2 teaspoons of good quality vanilla

Then you want to pour in the smashed strawberries, the reserve strawberry juice and stir gently together.  (By the way, save the left over 1/2 of berries that were not smashed to stir in during the last five minutes of the ice cream process). This way you will get nice chunks of fresh fruit with the strawberry flavor.

Remove your super frozen center canister from the freezer (use oven mitts) and place in the center of the machine. You are now ready to pour your mixture into the ice cream maker!!  (My hubby's super rad and retro Atari shirt can be found at Target, FYI)

Now turn the big knob from "off" to "on" and watch it start spinning!  How exciting.  Place the paddle in the center and snap on the lid and, that's it!  Now set a timer for when you need to add the stir-ins (aka extra chopped strawberries) and watch it spin about.

So riveting they can't tear their eyes away even for a second...

At the 25 minute mark we poured in the reserve chopped berries right into the hole in the top of the machine.  Also, during the spinning time, we put an oven mitt gently over the hole at the top to help keep in the cold.

We let that mix for another 5 minutes until everything was blended nicely together.  If you notice there is a little ridge at the top of the canister, so if your ice cream expands too much it will flow into that reserve space.  Be sure to measure everything properly, as the mixture does expands as it is freezing.  Now let's check out what we have:

Try to resist as you may here, but we all got out some spoons to sample what we had created.  It was delicious!!!  As you can see it's still pretty soupy so this is where we poured it into another container and let it sit in the freezer until it was a much harder consistency (which took about 6 hours).

After all that work we were rewarded with the best tasting, creamy, sweet, decedent strawberry ice cream I've ever had!

Homemade Strawberry Ice Cream - it doesn't get better than this

We kept saying to each other that it had a nice rich "mouth feel" that was awesome!  The kids wanted to try some the next day and so scandalously, we ended up having mini strawberry ice cream cones for breakfast.  We are currently taking nominations for the coolest parents ever.

I will keep posting each recipe we try, as I have found there are not a lot of 2 quart recipes out there (most are for the smaller 1 1/2 quart machine).  Next on our list will be chocolate chip mint.  Stay tuned! Ps. By the way, this machine also makes frozen yogurt, sorbet, gelato, sherberts, slushies, and drinks!  So excited to try more recipes.