Recipe: Cream Cheese Flan

Ingredients

3/4 cup white sugar

1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, softened

5 eggs

1 (14 ounce) can sweetened condensed milk

1 (12 fluid ounce) can evaporated milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). In a small, heavy saucepan over medium-low heat, cook sugar, stirring, until golden. Pour into a 10 inch round baking dish, tilting to coat bottom and sides. Set aside.

In a large bowl, beat cream cheese until smooth. Beat in eggs, one at a time, until well incorporated. Beat in condensed and evaporated milk and vanilla until smooth. Pour into caramel coated pan.

Fill a jelly roll pan halfway full with water, and place pie dish into jelly roll pan and put in oven. Bake in preheated oven 50 to 60 minutes, until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

Cool one hour on wire rack before serving. To unmold, run a knife around edges of pan and invert on a rimmed serving platter.

Serve and enjoy!

Cookies

Chocolate Oatmeal Raisin cookies anyone? Soft oatmeal cookies, I might add, due to a minimum baking time and the addition of a tablespoon of lemon juice. Delicious!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1 and 1/2 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup white sugar

3/4 cup brown sugar

3/4 cup softened butter (1 1/2 sticks)

2 large eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla

3 cups coarsely ground old-fashioned oatmeal, uncooked

1 cup raisins

1 package chocolate chips

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease two large cookie sheets. In small bowl, with wire whisk, stir flour, baking soda, and salt until blended.

2) In large bowl, with mixer at medium speed, beat white and brown sugars with butter until creamy, occasionally scraping bowl with rubber spatula. Beat in eggs, one at a time, bating well after each addition. Beat in vanilla and lemon juice. Reduce speed to low; gradually beat in flour mixture just until blended, occasionally scraping bowl.

3) With wooden spoon, stir in oats, raisins and chocolate chips until well combined.

4) Drop dough by rounded tablespoons, 2 inches apart, onto prepared cookie sheets. Bake cookies until tops are golden, 12 to 14 minutes. With a wide spatula, transfer cookies to wire racks to cool. Repeat for any remaining dough. Enjoy!

(Almost) Restaurant Worthy Pizza

Pizza is our family's Friday night tradition- two of them, actually, to accomodate our many family members :)

Once the dough is mixed together, and has risen for a while, it's time to roll it out. We always have many hands willing to roll, squish and pinch the pizza dough.


With our favorite toppings in place, they are baked for some minutes, emerging from the hot oven crisp and golden.

"It smells like Dominoes in here!" Viv exclaims as she runs down the stairs.
"Yummy!"

The Vegetables of our Labors

This year our family planted a garden... add a couple raised beds, some huge overgrown tomatoes, peppers, and corn, and you get our garden. Yep.
When we first planted our plants, everything was in neat, cute little rows, and everything was contained inside of the raised beds. People who walked by would often stop to admire our yard, complimenting Dad and Mom on "How nice it all looked!" I thought it was nice too.


Until everything decided to grow up.



Above are our pumpkins and corn. Our pumpkins were supposed to grow on the ground around the corn, but as you can see, they're almost half as tall as the corn!



What does all of this garden produce translate into? Canning. Of course.
I'm off work today so Mom's going to have me help with canning some more green beans and beets. Fun!!!

Nine!

Happy birthday Sophie! We all hope you have a wonderful day on you're birthday- nine years old! We all love you so very much, sweet girl!
-Hanna and all of you're siblings

Tagged... Again!

I was tagged by Moriah:

The rules are...
1. Pick up the nearest book- it has to have at least 123 pages.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five other people.

The book that is closest to me now is my Science book, titled Science of the Physical Creation, by Abeka. The four sentences read,

"These reactions may be described as A +BC - AC + B. In a single-displacement reaction, the element B in the compound BC is replaced, or displaced by element A; the result is a new compound, AC, with element B left on its own. For example, the bromine in the compound sodium bromide (NaBr) may be replaced by chlorine (Cl), yielding sodium chloride (NaCl) and bromine: 2 NaBr + Cl2 - 2NaCl + Br2. In a more spectacular single-displacement reaction, aluminum (Al) displaces iron from a type of iron oxide ("rust," Fe2O3) when a powdered mixture of rust and aluminum is ignited: Fe2O3 + 2 Al - Al2 O3 + 2 Fe.

My science book isn't always so hard to understand, its just that page number 123 fell into the chemistry unit! I don't think I'm going to tag anyone else.

*Note* I recently went to Florida for a few days, and I'm hoping that tomorrow will give me a chance to post about my trip.

Ramblings of a 13 year old

I am finally taking the time to post, lest you think this blog has been abandoned. I'm really sorry we haven't been blogging lately and I know that you've probably heard this before but, we are literally swamped! School takes up a fairly big chunk of my day, and afterwards there's always something to be done: laundry, cooking, cleaning and school corrections. Plus, our dad finished the master bedroom in our house, and then, much to the delight of my siblings and I, he started working on our 2 bedrooms upstairs. My dad decided to start on the boys bedroom first so they had to move into my bedroom, which included them taking all of their numerous belongings into my room (a.k.a. two hefty dressers, two boxes a piece of items that were too precious to throw out, two twin mattresses, and all of their extra paraphenalia.).
It was actually okay and very livable, but I can tell you it was a relief when they moved down into the living room for a while. Then dad thought he might as well do both of our bedrooms at the same time, so out we went into the living room, dressers, beds and all. Now the boys had to move down to the basement and we took over the living room, which is where we are at this moment. Dad has almost finished mudding the walls so we will soon be able to prime and then paint the walls which means that soon we will be able to move back upstairs! Hooray! - because the living room does all very well to sleep in, but it is rather crowded and when you have 3 little siblings who tend to be very destructive, and your "bedroom" is the first thing people see when they walk into your house, um, well, let's just say it makes for an interesting life!
Well, I think I'm going to head to bed now, seeing as there is school tomorrow. I am earnestly going to try to post a little more often, but I'm not going to make any promises! Until the next post (whenever that is!).

Curly Tops

Here is a picture I took of Viv, Soph, Rach, and Lil after a night spent with rollers in their hair. Rach spent the night with Soph and we had a lot of fun taking out their curlers and doing their hair. Aren't they cute?

Introducing... Helpful Hints!

Okay, so my mom and I were talking about things to blog and my mom had the idea to do a post every week on "helpful hints" - we'll include in each post a tip that we've found useful at our house. So, today I'm going to do the first one!

How many of you have dishwashers? Quite a few of us do! (We do mean the kind that run on electricity - not just two hands :) We have found that when you go to fill up the cups (both the pre-wash and the wash cycle cups) in the dishwasher with detergent, you don't have to fill them up all the way to have clean dishes. My great-grandpa once told my mom that he only used a tablespoon of dishwashing detergent in each cup and it was enough soap for the whole dishwasher. Well, we tried it and, to our surprise, it actually worked! Not only does this tip save going through dishwashing detergent so fast (especially for those of us who do copious amounts of dishes), but it also saves money! We've been using this tip for quite awhile now and none of our dishes come out dirty!

French or German?

German or French? French or German? This is the question I've been thinking about as the school year approaches. I'm entering high-school this year and so I'm obligated to learn a second language. Not that I mind as I've always wanted to learn another language! So far I have narrowed my list of languages down to two and, you guessed it, it's French or German!

Eiffel Tower in France.
On one hand, French is a beautiful sounding language, whereas German has a harder sound to it. Plus, if I ever went to Europe again, a lot of places speak French although a lot of people in Europe speak German as well. But, I could also speak French in some parts of Africa as well as in some parts in Spain. Then again, German is more widely known in Europe. What to do?

The Rhine River in Germany.
What say ye?

Ring Around the Tub!

What do you get when you add to one two year old boy: sand, fried chicken, cantaloupe, baked beans, cake, juice, mud pies, water, and did I already mention sand?! By the end of a fun-filled day, we had a major ring around the tub at our house! By the way, have you ever taken a two year old boy wearing overalls and tipped him upside down after playing in sand for hours? You should try it - it's amazing how much sand comes pouring out!

What We've Been Doing

As you can probably tell by the lack of new posts, we are extremely busy. I am doing a summer waitressing job at my grandparents local Cafe, -which keeps me hopping! Si and Chris are doing outside work for right now and Soph is visiting our other grandparents. And with our house being remodeled, our house is quite chaotic! Between that and the little girls being little girls (i.e. making messes, running around the house, making more messes :) we are swamped! Mom and I finally found the time to give Sam a haircut (which he badly needed). Note: make sure you have time for this activity, especially if you're giving a young child a haircut! Twisting and squirming to get down to play, Sam was difficult to entertain enough to sit still. But, in the end, he was finished and it turned out pretty well. Below is a picture of the finished product:

He's really cute in this picture, so concentrated on looking out of the window, he didn't even know I was taking the picture! Well, hopefully we will find more time in which to post, but for now, this will have to do!

Pecan Torte

My Grandma's birthday was this past Saturday and I made this yummy Pecan Torte- although instead of corn syrup I substituted maple syrup to make it a Pecan Maple Torte. Everyone liked it and grandma said it was 'one of the best cakes she had ever had'. This is a picture of the cake below. Enjoy! Go HERE for the recipe.

Is this California?

You would have almost thought that we lived in California by the 5.2 earthquake that we experienced this morning. Much to my consternation, I slept through it and didn't even know what had happened. At 4:30 in the morning both of my parents awoke to their bed shaking and the glass candles on my mom's dresser clinking together. My parents got up and turned on the TV and the computer to find out what happened, only to discover that an earthquake had hit the Midwest. When mom told Chris what had happened he said that "he had been woken up early this morning to his bed shaking, and he called to Si thinking that Si was shaking his bed!" Soph and Lil share a bed and Soph said that she woke up about the time of the tremor to Lil bumping her. Anyway, the rest of us slept through the whole thing, but Si and I wished we could have been awake during the earthquake!
The following site shows a map of the US and where earthquakes have hit in the past hour, day, and week.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsus/

Take care and God bless!

The Traveling Von Seven

In case you've been wondering what we've been doing lately (considering there haven't been any new posts) we have been -as always- very busy. A cousin of my dad's who lived in Arizona passed away recently so my parents decided to go to Phoenix for the funeral. This meant that all of us kids were able to go to our grandparents house for the weekend - including Sam! Sam is a very cute and sweet little boy, but as he is getting older, he is becoming more of a handful to watch. You literally have to watch him every minute to make sure that he is not getting into anything he shouldn't be!

My mom also has some relatives living in Phoenix so while they were there they visited them, also. The pictures are from their trip - it's really pretty there, isn't it?

We've been home less than a week now and this past weekend was Chris's birthday. Happy Birthday, Chris! Now we are back at school again. One other big thing is that Ri bought a new bike and we have been enjoying riding bikes together. Today is really warm and sunny out so we are heading outside to play. Have a great day everyone!

Spring Is In The Air

Lately our household has been fairly busy with a lot of things. School ALWAYS keeps us busy, piano class and practice for us four oldest, and this weekend our grandma who lives out of town is staying with us. In fact, two of our uncles are here and we are going to have a ham dinner together.

Another thing that has been going on has been some kind of flu bug or something that has been hitting a lot of people. First Daddy got hit and then it made the rounds with most of us kids. It seems like it has taken quite a while for us to get over it but we are thankful that we have!

Spring is almost here, our weather has been warming up, for which we are all grateful! Our Magnolia tree has started to bloom (we'll post pictures of that when they open up - they are SO pretty!) and robins have been circulating through our area. For me, when I see robins, that's a sure sign that spring is coming soon. I think I can speak for my siblings when I say that we are all glad that spring is finally here!

In Memory

We are sorry that there haven't been any new posts but this past month we have been very busy. I have been visiting my out-of-town grandparents and they have been visiting us. Of course we have also been busy with school but the most difficult thing of all is that our lovable puppy dog, Toby has died. On Monday, February 25th, our Toby was hit by a car and immediately died. The day that we got Toby was on August 25th and just the other day I realized that we had had him for exactly 6 months. For me, those 6 months were the best of my life. We all loved him very much and miss him very much. We are thankful that God brings us comfort even in the midst of heartbreaking circumstances.

Farewell!

I may have mentioned in other posts that my best friend, Ri, was house-training a dog named Rose. We called her Rosie and she was so adorable, fluffy and soft with big brown and white spots and brown freckles on her nose. Rosie is Toby's "aunt" - her sister, Sadie, is Toby's mom. You can see from the picture that Rosie and Toby actually look quite a bit alike. When Ri first got Rosie she was so excited because now we both had dogs and we walked them together and let them socialize with each other. After a month and a half, the time finally came when Rosie was ready to be sold and her last day with Ri came. I had wanted to take some pictures of them together so before she left I took Toby over to Ri's house and tried to get a picture of them together. I say "tried" because they were not cooperating and it took one of us to hold the dogs and the other to take the picture! Here is the result. Aren't they cute?

Increase Mather

Today in my American Literature I read a sermon by Increase Mather titled, Man Knows Not His Time. Increase Mather was a great Puritan preacher who entered Harvard College at age 12 and graduated at age 17, and started his preaching career at 18. The following is a quote from this sermon:

"A man knows not what changes shall attend him whilst in the world."

As I read this, the thought came to me that even though we may not always know what our future holds and what kind of changes may come our way, we can be confident in the Word of the Lord. Isaiah 40:8 says, The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever. Another verse which is found in I Peter says that we are like the withering grass, but that our God will stand forever. The thought that no matter what, God is unchanging and always there for us really blesses me! God bless!

Let It Snow!

Yesterday it started snowing and it continued on through the night and even part of this morning. In all, we got about 10 or 12 inches of snow! All of us kids are pretty excited because this is about the second big snow of the year. As you can see from the picture, someone forgot to put their bike in the garage yesterday... opps! (wonder who that was?) Well, Ri is here and we are off to go romp in the snow!