Dairy Free Ranch Dressing

Our son, Mr. A is allergic to milk.  We found out right after his 4th birthday, and have been learning and experimenting with dairy free cooking ever since!  One of the first things we needed to find was a dairy free ranch dressing.  They do exist at the grocery store, but they are expensive!  Like $7-8 and more for a small bottle.  yuck!

With just a little searchingI found this awesome recipe from Genius Kitchen.

I have since changed a few things, but the basic ideas are still the same.

Also, as I often do, I quit measuring the seasonings after a while, you kind of get a feel for how much of each seasoning you need!

For my version of Dairy Free Ranch Dressing, you need:

*1 cup mayonnaise
*rice milk
*1⁄2 teaspoon dried parsley
*1⁄2 teaspoon dried dill weed
*1⁄4 teaspoon garlic powder
*1⁄8 teaspoon salt
*2-3 cracks of fresh ground black pepper

Dump everything but the milk in your container.  You can use a salad dressing bottle, or a mason jar, or just about any container you can shake and has a lid.  Then add a tablespoon or so of milk and shake.  Then add more milk as needed till you get to the consistency you want.  It won't thicken or thin, so get it where you want.  It can be eaten right away but the flavors develop much better if it gets to sit for at least an hour before use.

Enjoy!

Grilled Pizza - Papa Murphy's Pizza!

I'll do another post later about how to make your own grilled pizza, a favorite of ours, but today I'll show you how to grill a Papa Murphy's Pizza!

Of course papa Murphy's comes as a take-n-bake in a paper pan.  Normally you turn your oven to 425* and bake for 12 minutes.

This works great, and we love Papa Murphy's because without cheese, they are dairy free for Mr. A, but it REALLY heats up the kitchen to cook those pizzas!

Enter, The Grill

You will need:
* Papa Murphy's Pizza - size Large or smaller.  The Family size won't fit on my grill, if yours is massive it might!  Pro-tip: Tuesday is $10 Tuesday!  Any large pizza only $10!  Also, get on the text list, they have regular deals!  This week was 2 large 2 topping pizzas for only $6.99 each!
*Pizza Stone or cookie sheet, something you can put on the grill as a barrier between the PAPER pan the pizza comes on and the grill
*Oven Thermometer our grill actually has a thermometer right on the lid, that works fine too!
*Timer trust me!  There's not much "Oops-how-long-has-the-pizza-been-cooking" time here!
*Hot Pads probably a no-brainer, but have them handy!

Our grill has four burners, so my instruction will be written accordingly.  If you have more or less you can adjust as needed.

Turn on all four burners!  If you want it to heat up fast go ahead and turn them to high!  The goal here is to get the oven to around 425* and to hold steady with two burners.  I use all 4 to heat it up then turn off the two middle burners off so they are: On-Off-Off-On.

Either while you are heating up the grill or once it is hot, put your pizza stone or cookie sheet directly on the grill grate.  The pizza stone/cookie sheet needs to heat up for 15 minutes before you put your pizza on.  It seems like an insignificant step, but unless you like doughy, floppy crusts, it is important!

Once the pizza stone is hot, unwrap the plastic wrap from your pizza, and put it directly on the pizza stone in the paper pan!  Now close the lid and set the timer for 5 minutes!

Now it really doesn't take long to cook!  Last night our first pizza took a grand total of 6 minutes to cook to perfection!  That is why I HIGHLY recommend the use of a timer!  After 5 minutes check your pizza!  If it's golden brown on top, lift the pizza off the paper pan a bit and make sure it's done underneath.  If it is, use your hotpads and take it off!  If not, rotate 90* and set a timer for 3-5 minutes more (depending on how close you think it is to being done.

From here it's pretty simple, cut and enjoy!  Best part is, the house isn't any hotter than when we started!  And there's no cool down time from the oven cooling off from 425*!

Pro-tip!  If you're doing more than one pizza, ALWAYS let your pizza stone warm up for a solid 15 minutes between pizzas!  If not subsequent pizzas will have floppy crusts!

Enjoy!  and Remember:

If You Can Cook it - You Can Grill It!

We live in Arizona and as Summer is coming at us full force I just DON'T want to cook in the house!  Our electric bill alone gets up to $400 a month in July/August/September and that is just crazy for a student family to afford!  Now cooking in the summer you feel EVERY BIT OF HEAT the stove, oven, crock-pot, or even instant pot produces!  Yes, even a crock-pot or instant pot you can feel the difference! By the time I finish cooking I just want to lay under a fan and drink a tall lemonade!

After spending the winter in New Mexico (we were up at 8,000 ft above sea level!) It just seemed so much worse than before!  I just had no desire to heat up the house!  The highs in New Mexico before we left New Mexico were low 80s, in Arizona we keep our house set at 78 degrees, it was just too much to cook and add to that!

So I decided that I was just going to grill as much as possible!  But really, you can't eat hamburgers, hotdogs, and grilled chicken for every meal!

So we decided to see how much we could Grill!

And you get to follow our adventures through a new series called,

And I mean what I say, I really plan to grill everything I can cook!  

Our grill has four burners in the grilling area, and outside the lid we have one burner (that we haven't used yet, key word yet) that we could use with a pot.

Check back regularly to see what we've grilled this time!!!

Where Have I Been?

I'm back!  Maybe...  I'm sure going to try, but lets be honest, as our family grows up and our kiddos get bigger, it just gets harder and harder to find the time to blog and share the things we do!  Nearly 18 months ago a beautiful baby girl joined our family and life is wonderful!  Princess O is the most loved sister in the world!  Mr. A and Mr.C adore her!

Since she was born we had another wedding in the family (I did the flowers again)!  Thanksgiving in Utah and Christmas in Arizona.  Then we spent 4 months in New Mexico while my husband did an internship for his schooling!

Now we're back home, things are quieting down, and I hope I can start blogging again! 

Easy Easter Eggs!

We wanted to have an Easter Egg hunt with our kiddos and their friends, so we all got together and decided that everyone would bring 12 eggs for each of their kids, then we'd mix them up and everyone would get a variety.

I didn't want to encourage any crazed-sugar-ified-toddlers, so we went small and only half sugar!

I got a sheet of 3-D easter stickers from Walmart, cut them apart and added three jellybeans and one sticker to each egg.

Then, to thwart the toddlers a tiny bit, and keep them from popping open on accident, I put a small piece of washi tape on the eggs and called it a day!

Favorite Blanket fix - Round 2

Do you remember when we did a Favorite Blankey fix-up?  It was, oh, 6 months ago I put a new binding on Mr. A's favorite blanket to save it from certain destruction!

Well despite efforts by my mom to get him a new blanket, this is still his blankey and still crucial to bedtime!  He has gone to bed without it (a stark improvement over not that many months ago) but it is still his go-to-comforter!  Well, now the problem is all the ties are coming out!

All the red-paw prints are missing ties... (they seem clustered closer at the top because of the angle the pic was taken at.  The are all very even placed in reality)!  The yellow circles are untied-ties just waiting to come out!  The rest of them are just little knobs of yarn.  I tell you he loves his blanket!

So, it was time to re-tie his favorite blankey!

I know there's probably at least one person out there thinking, good grief! time to put away that blanket and move on!  He's old enough!  Well, that's not how I do things, and hey, I love a challenge! It doesn't hurt anything to let him have his favorite blanket and he won't take it to kindergarten!  (or then again maybe he will, as a smaller version of the current blanket, but that really won't hurt anything either!)  

So first thing I did was borrow a quilting frame from a lady in our ward.  I wish I had one of these myself, but that just isn't feasible right now!  So you could totally use the big wood frames that are so common, that it is what this blanket was originally quilted on, but I just didn't want that in my house and it is such a small blanket, I really wanted something smaller!  

 

I tell you, I want one!  This is a Q-Snap Floor Frame.  So snazzy!  Check it out!  you just use the plastic grips to snap the blanket around a pvc frame!  The frame takes less than 5 minutes to assemble  and very, very little storage space!

After I put the blanket on we started to snip the ties that remained and re-tie the missing ties.  My Husband and I just tied as you normally would, working our way around!  

Mr. A & Mr. C both helped us best they knew how.  We ended up putting them to bed and finishing it later that evening, but all said it took us no more than an hour!

Mission Accomplished!  I have, yet again, given his blankey a few more months of life!  Until next time!

What have you done to rescue your little's favorite comfort item?

At it Again! Wedding Flowers - Part 4

Can you believe it??  I'm at it again!  More wedding flowers!  This round is not super elaborate, but still going to be a lot of fun!  This time we are doing silks for the bridal pictures and the centerpieces on the tables.  Then the day of the wedding, there will be live for the wedding party, etc.  

Silks are always a bit of a toss up with silks, some are awesome, some are, meh.  But these ones are really nice and I have to admit, it is really nice to be completely done with the centerpieces and be 4 days out from the wedding!  

So here is what we have!

Bridal Bouquet, before it was wrapped!

Aftermath of our living room from the bridal bouquet!

One of the biggest struggles with silks tends to be the stems.  Some of the nicer ones have realistic looking stems, but they still often come in bunches and the stems on bunches are always super-super skinny.  To combat this I used the super long, nice stems, that extended below the length I needed.  After I wrapped the original stems I hot glued the extra stems anywhere that was lopsided or skinnier to make a nice rounded and fat!

Then I wrapped the stems again with the tape 

Then I wrapped the stems with ribbon and lace as normal.

Whew!