Blueberry Muffins

Today my daughter's best friend's family invited us to go blueberry picking. 

I hadn't done that since I was a little kid. 

We had such a great time and we have tons of blueberries now as the bucket below got filled to the top 

when my daughter's friend decided we needed more blueberries and dumped her bucket into ours. LOL.

So, time for some creative recipe developing by yours truly! Blueberry muffins were first on the request list, 

and they turned out so delicious - I thought I would share with you guys!

:: Ingredients ::

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup sugar

1 tbsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup vanilla soy milk

1/2 cup butter (1 stick) melted

1 large egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups blueberries

:: Directions ::

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Line muffin pan with muffin cups. Recipe will make about 16 muffins.

In a large bowl, add flour, sugar, baking powder and salt - whisk together.

In a separate bowl, beat together milk, melted butter, egg and vanilla until blended.

Add liquid mixture to dry mixture until moistened. Then fold in blueberries.

Spoon batter into muffin cups. Bake 20-25 minutes. 

Immediately remove muffins from pan and let them cool on wire rack.

July 4th, 2012
Made these for brunch today and changed the vanilla extract to almond extract + I added the zest of one small lemon -- so so good!!!!

Activities Board tutorial

Hurray, it's summer! Well, maybe not.

My daughter is out of pre-K and has been moping around the house, saying and I quote, "I'm bored out of my mind." Where does she come up with this stuff?
So not wanting to hear THAT all summer, I got to work trying to find some inexpensive activities to do in our city. Well I found more than I thought I would and to keep track of all of them,
I created...voila, an activities board.

This is a super easy project.

I completed mine in about 2 hours and most of that was paint drying time. 

So, all you busy moms out there, you can definitely do other things 

while you are waiting for that to happen.

• find a 16 x20 frame that you're not using anymore, preferably one in which the glass has broken and you were wondering what you would ever do with it. LOL.
• Grab a can of spray paint, something fun and bright. (I picked teal blue to match my home office where I was planning to hang the board.) Follow the directions on the paint can and spray your frame. 

• I already had the cork which I purchased at Home Depot, I found it in the section where they have contact paper. So easy, just peel and stick it on the frame backing!
• I found lots of activities (for free) at our local library, so I printed out their calendar of scheduled events for the summer months. On MS Word, I made my own schedule of summer $1 movies that play at our local Regal Cinemas every Tuesday and Wednesday to hang on the board. Plus I made a list of places for possible day trips in the area. The internet is so handy, don't ya love it?
•  When your frame is dry, reassemble and arrange your activity ideas easily so you can figure out what you are doing day-to-day without too much searching. I circled all the library events we were going to in red pen and showed my daughter, she was very excited!

Now hopefully my daughter will be entertained until Fall when kindergarten starts! :-)