Blackened Fish Tacos

Focusing on healthy recipes lately, here is one of our family favorites. 

The rub for the fish came from JoCooks. 

The rice and salsa recipes are something I threw together. 

Would love to hear from you if you make them! 

Created these super cute recipe cards on Canva.

Ornaments and Science Experiments

I am a mother of boys, and I truly love it. They have helped me to loosen up and explore. My little guy loves to do experiments so when I can I like to work those into our week. Over the summer we did several, his favorite was the exploding bag. We went through a lot of baking soda and vinegar. 

Earlier this week he asked me if we could do an experiment and I had found these Borax crystal growing ornaments. They turned out really cute! The boys were amazed at how the crystals formed overnight. We tried adding food coloring to the jars to color the ornaments but once they were dry the color was gone. 

MJ wanted an M.

We made spirals by wrapping around a pencil. 

The spirals are my favorite because they look like icicles.

Grant made a G. 

Strawberry Jam/Jelly Take 1

I know I have already written about the strawberries we have here... so I thought I would try and bottle some up to send back to Georgia. I had big plans to make some jam this week. This was my first attempt at making jam and canning it, I had all of my ingredients ready and thought I had figured out the correct amount of pectin to use. Turns out I need more practice... my jam turned out to be more of a jelly (if you want to call it that) I would say it is more like syrup. It tastes delicious the consistency is just off a bit. So hopefully this week or next week I will be attempting strawberry jam for the second time. 

Tomato's

Our neighbors moved this past weekend, the ones from Alabama that knew what we meant we when talked about kudzu or boiled peanuts, the ones that understood "y'all and bless your heart".
We miss them but we have been staying busy taking care of the garden that they had planted.

Yesterday I made tomato sauce:

I used a recipe from this cook book that my mom gave me over the weekend. It looks ancient but it is made by Southern Living so it is a good one. 

Here are the tomato's just some of the tomato's from the garden.
There are also roma tomato's and grape tomato's. Good thing I like tomato's. 

So you cut an X over the part of the tomato where the stem was.
Drop into boiling water for a few seconds and then into ice water. 

Into the hot tub it goes. 

It is hard to tell but you can see how the skin split open.
They were so easy to peel. 

All my peeled tomato's 

Here they are... peeled, cored (thank to Gram for the garnishing kit) and chopped. 

Into the pot with all the yummy spices, garlic and onions to simmer for 2 hours. 

After all the simmering you are supposed to put the mixture through a food mill... I don't have one so I chopped it all up in the food processor and put the mixture through a fine mesh strainer then back to the stove top to thicken.
This is the sauce I ended up with... I think I would have yielded more if I would have had a food mill. 

The sauce was delicious and we had it on our spaghetti for dinner last night.

Thanks to the Gardner Family  for all the fun times and now for all of the tomato's. 

Krispy Kreme and Me

So I have already written about blackberries but at the end of summer staff party there was a blackberry bake-off and the winner had to be the Cain's with their knock off Krispy Kreme blackberry filled doughnut holes. So on Tuesday I attempted to recreate those... because they are kind of like chips... I couldn't only eat just one. 

I have never made doughnuts before and let me tell you it was quite a process but I would say worth the work and all of the dishes in the end. 

The kids loved them, our neighbors loved them and we can't stop eating them. 

Doughnuts rising on the counter.
You can kind of see the overflowing sink in the corner of this picture. 

Set up and ready to fry. 

Don't they look so yummy... 

These have the blackberry's inside. 

I made a blackberry glaze and a regular glaze. 

Doughnut number one. 

Some regular glazed and some blackberry glazed. 

I've got more blackberries in the freezer... come and visit and I'll make you some doughnuts. 

Southern Food

Since moving I have been craving some good ole southern food. 

Some things I can make and others I just wouldn't even attempt to recreate like Brunswick Stew from Davis Bar-B-Que, it is so good that I know if I made it I would just be disappointed. Plus I don't have the recipe. (If someone would like to mail me some stew that would be awesome) I even dreamed about eating Davis Bar-B-Que Brunswick Stew the other night. 

Well I have made Chicken-n-Dumplins and Chicken Fried Steak and Gravy but I have really been craving biscuits.

 I have tried several times to make biscuits and they always turn out hard and dry. So last night I made one last attempt. I used the White Family Cook Book recipe (Thank you Hilary and Josh Tatum for the cookbook). Well I am happy to say that they turned out great! 

So I had these yummy biscuits what should should I put on them. 

Well what could be more southern than sausage gravy. Thanks to Jerry Davis I can actually make gravy. So we had sausage gravy biscuits, scrambled eggs and orange slices. It was a yummy dinner!