Home-made Dog Treats

So, I wanted to share with you this recipe I tried out last night to make home made dog treats, and I tried to take pictures, but my camera died.  My backup camera died.  So not my first camera, the one I took on our honeymoon that died in the middle of it.  Not that one.  The back-up.  The one I had to pull out of the back of a desk somewhere and change the batteries every two hours.  That one.  Dead.  Changed the batteries again and everything. Dead as a doornail.  (I learned where that expression came from once, but I forgot.)  So instead of my own beautiful photos, here's a picture of a cute puppy.  You're welcome.

Cool Pup

Anywhosie, here's the sweet recipe I sort of referenced earlier, it's so easy!

• 2 1/2 Cups flour (they're going to call for whole wheat or something healthy like that, but who are we kidding? You have regular flour in your cabinet just like me)
• Garlic Powder (I don't measure, I use my gut)
• 1/2 Cup Milk
• 1 Large Egg Beaten
• 2 Tsp. Flavoring (Chicken or Beef Broth, Liquid from can of Tuna, etc.) Note: you will need more than 2 tsps.

I used my beautiful apple green mixer with the dough hook attachment for this and it worked awesome! (Thanks Mom and Behne Family!!) Combine the flour and garlic power.  Begin mixing and adding the wet ingredients.  The dough is really tough, so you'll want to add more flavoring until it gets loose enough to work with.  It's also very elastic, so rolling it out was difficult.  Like stand on your toes to put all your weight onto the rolling pin and it still springs back into a ball, rubbery.  Eventually you can roll it out into about 1/4 inch thickness.  I of course used my bone shaped cookie cutter, but I'm also thinking of making them into candy bar shapes and making funny wrappers to look like candy bars.  But it's not, it's a dog treat, get it?! ha! ...anyways, bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Voila! I made my batches chicken flavored and Harley approved. It's obviously more work making these, but super cheap ingredients you've got laying around anyways!

Bone Appetite!

(I crack myself up!...)



Holiday Catch Up

Ok, wow am I a blog slacker! Finally I can breathe again! The holidays totally snuck up on me this year, so Nate and I had yet again a "up until 1am Christmas Eve finishing making and wrapping presents" kind of night. (I have the best intentions to stay on top of it, but never do...oh well) I'm warning you now, this post is picture hee-aa-vy!

This year, the weekend before Christmas, the best and I took our moms to Boston for a little girls' getaway shopping weekend. On our way in, we stopped by the Square One Mall on Rt. 1. I was totally impressed by Kate's Mass-hole driving, she could fit right in! We shopped a little and had dinner at a restaurant called Twitters. It seemed really cool, and the food was pretty good, although the service was awful. Our waitress took forever to get back to us, and never brought me a water, though I asked three times. I could have forgiven her, but as I was on the last couple bites of my Chicken Marsala I found a bug in my food! Talk about grossed out! The best part is, our waitress said she would take it off the bill after Kate shot her dagger looks, but then came back to the table offering us a free dessert instead. Kate lost it, went and found the manager, and gave him an earful in front of a bunch of busy tables. That's why I love her. :)

We went shopping in Faneuil Hall, which was decorated so pretty for Christmas. Kate was pretty impressed by this ginormous tree....

We had lunch at the Purple Shamrock, which was soooo good! I'd only ever been in there when it's a bar, but the Irish food...yumm-o! There were carolers in Quincy Market, and we sang with them. Kate and I decided this is going on our 24 before 25 list. (More to follow on that.)

We shopped and shopped and dropped into the Cheers store. They didn't know our name...

We stopped by my old stomping grounds, the North End, to get some lobster tails/dove tails/elephant tails (I never know which place calls them what, so I just stand there rattling off animal tails until someone understands what I'm asking for) from Mike's pastry. I never actually got anything from Mike's before, because man is it busy in there. Line is out the door. I used to just get my goodies from the little bakeries that are open 24/7, which is great for late night drinking snacks. Did I say that out loud? Anyways, Mike's Lobster Tails were delicious and HUGE!

As part of the trip and our Christmas gift to our mommies, we took them to see the Nutcracker!

The inside of the Opera House is so incredibly beautiful. I wish we had dressed up more, but we were shopping all day in our sneakers and jeans, lol. Makes you feel out of place when you're in such a beautiful old building. ....Maybe once CLT gets control of the Great Falls Building we can renovate it to look like this! Now that's dreaming!

Me, my mama and Aunt Kara going in to see the Nutcracker! Soo excited! My mom had never seen it before. Aunt Kara took me to see it while I was still living in Boston and we sat like three rows back. It was nuts, you could hear every brush of their step and the squeak of their toe shoes. We sat much farther back and up high this time, but could still hear that squeak! :)

The best and her momma, they were so pumped to see the Nutcracker!! I love watching Ballet. I get so mesmerized and lost in the beauty of it all. I'm so excited to go see Black Swan now too! It makes me a little sad and miss dancing, though. I've vowed to start taking yoga or dance again. I've realized the reason I loved ballet so much is because I'm controlling and compulsive. The fact that I can't control the world around me makes me absolutely nuts, but when I was dancing I had control over my body and got so much satisfaction from the precision and control ballet offered me. While dancing I could tune everything out and just be inside my own head, it was kinda nice, and I need to find time to do that again.

All in all we had an awesome weekend. We stopped into Kittery for even MORE shopping. Yes I am in the car! "Help! Get me outa here!!"

I don't know how we fit all our stuff! Next year we're totally going to do it again, but we'll be taking a bigger car and the Lydon and Pouzol women will only be allowed ONE suitcase! haha!

Ok, now fast forward to Christmas Eve Day. The best and I baked ALL DAY LONG. Morning to night, didn't sit down once! We pre-made 4 batches of dough, and as usually the case had the best intentions of making more ahead of time, but....we didn't. So we made most of the doughs that day.

Platters waiting and ready to be filled. We made 14 platters with 11 different kinds of cookies. We had grander plans that that, as usual again, but decided to bite of only what we could chew. (get it? he he)

Snickerdoodles baking in the oven....mmmmm.....

Eggnog cookies, while not my favorite, were so pretty cooling...

Worst part of peanut butter kiss cookies...unwrapping all the kisses!!

And the Thumbprint cookies defeat us once again! Ahhhg! That's Thumbprint cookies 2 - Kate & Danielle 0. What the heck?! We ended up using a pre-made sugar cookie mix to make the thumbprints.

And there you have it! So pretty :) So what kinds of cookies did we make? I will tell you:

• Peanut Butter Kiss Cookies


• Thumbprint Cookies with Strawberry and Blackberry Jam


• Chocolate Crinkles


• Eggnog Cookies


• Snickerdoodles


• Red Sugar Cookies with Frosting


• Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip Cookies


• Double Chocolate Chunk Cookies


• Chocolate Molasses Cookies


• Brownie covered Mint Oreos


• Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

Phew! Well there you have it. After all the craziness preparing for Christmas Nate and I had a wonderful weekend spending time with our families, relaxing, eating delicious food and just enjoying each other. It was very nice. :)

Ok, time to start preparing for next year!!....

Crafty Christmas, well under way!

Ok, I'm so behind on blogging this, but the best and I have gotten well under way with our Crafty Christmas! Firstly, we are baking up a storm. Every week we are each baking a huge batch of cookie dough then throwing it in my big chest freezer. Then the week of Christmas, we're going to spend a day baking and making Christmas cookie platters for friends, neighbors, and parties.

We didn't take pictures last week, but we made Eggnog Cookies and Chocolate Crinkles. The Crinkles were to die for. period. end of story, so freaking good. The Eggnog cookies were a little weird. Kate and I both liked them, but my hunnie Nate who's reaping the benefits of our cooking sprees, didn't like it all it. It kind of has that weird spiciness to it. The recipe calls to sprinkle them with nutmeg, but it was a little too much. When we make the big batch we're going to sprinkle with cinnamon instead.

This week we cooked up Pumpkin Chocolate Chunk Cookies and All-in-One Cookies, since honestly I lost my recipes and forgot to pick up any ingredients, and I already had everything needed for this recipe. Well it's been going really well...

We mix up huge batches of cookie dough...

Put them in the freezer to harden before putting them in gallon size zip lock bags.

There's a little bit of bowl licking...

And of course we have to test our creations....we decided to try the All-in-One dough as a thumbprint cookie with jam.....putting the jam on the cookie before cooking it...bad idea....

This is the face of failure. It's looking at you.


Spoiler Alert: if you are related to me, stop reading this.




Ok, so on to some of the gifts were making. Kate found a "recipe" for vanilla extract, basically vodka and vanilla beans, and found a site for these cute little bottles:

It's going to take right up until Christmas for this stuff to be ready. In the meantime I'll be designing and label for the bottles.

We've also made ornaments. Here's mine:


Kind of dark and hard to see, but we found some glittery floral stuff and pretty ribbons with glittered monogram letter stickers. Kate's are much more funky:

You can't really tell but that red ribbon is zebra print, and it's awesome! She also made these fun fish crayons! Cool huh?


Until next time,