Savory crackers aren’t really my thing. At snack time I am more likely to go for the sweet than the salty (or savory), but here we are.

Have you ever tasted something that you just can’t stop eating? Like, I meant to eat one or two but looked down and the whole sleeve of Girl Scouts Cookies were gone…nope, that’s never happened to me before either.

I found this great recipe from How Sweet Eats and have made it at least a dozen times. Every batch comes out better than the last. First you start out with Saltine crackers. But then, you dress them up with butter and brown sugar and all sorts of delicious spices. You end up with these smoky, delicious, buttery crackers that go with just about anything but taste amazing on their own.

These would be a great addition to any cheese plate, a nice garnish in your soup or even crushed up as a Mac and cheese topping. I can’t wait to try making these with the mini saltines!

Check out the recipe on How Sweet Eats here. Try the recipe out and let me know what you think!

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Picking up from where my last post left off, my muffin tins have been getting quite the work out during this pandemic. I loved these carrot cake cupcakes – I mean, that’s basically eating a vegetable, right?! I really think I I just love the cream cheese frosting and the carrot cake is just a vehicle to get the frosting into my mouth. Here’s a link to the recipe.

A dinner favorite, and well, a breakfast favorite at our house are egg muffins. Make them ahead of time and then just warm the up in the morning for a quick grab and go breakfast. I use a dozen eggs for a regular muffin tin that makes 12 muffins. Whisk eggs and add a little dairy if you like. Coat the muffin tin with non stick cooking spray. Fill muffin tin with the toppings of your choice – we like ham and cheese or broccoli and cheese the best – but you could literally put anything in yours. Fill the rest of the tray with your eggs and put in the oven at 350 degrees for about 15-20 minutes.

I use muffin tins for all kinds of craft projects – to hold beads or paint, even sprinkles when we are decorating sugar cookies. My kids loved popping popcorn and then adding all kinds of treats to them – everyone had their own customized snack for movie night!

Sheet pan pancakes are probably the smartest thing I have ever made in my house. Not only does everyone get what they want as toppings, but I don’t have to stand over the stove making mutiple batches that I can’t keep warm. Because you know who is going to be the one eating cold pancakes… Meanwhile, muffin tin pancakes are a close second favorite to the sheet pan pancakes. For sheet pan pancakes, make your regular batter. Spray a cooking sheet with non stick spray. Pour batter (and toppings) onto the cooking sheet and cook at 425 degrees for about 15 minutes. Muffin pancakes are the same thing. Make your favorite batter, add in toppings, cooking time will vary on muffin size – we love both the regular size and the mini muffin pan (because everything mini tastes delicious, doesn’t it?)

And finally, the grazing board muffin tin. I did a sweet one, but we do this for lunch time as well with turkey and cheese roll ups, veggies, hummus, grapes or other berries – the possibilities are endless.

What is your favorite thing to make in muffin tins?

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While we may not be entertaining, I still like to make grazing boards. They’re fun to put together, they’re pretty to look at, and my kids love them. Here are some boards that I put together over the course of the quarantine. I love the leaf tortilla chips from Trader Joe’s, which is also where I picked up the maple sandwich cookies, the chocolate turkeys and the dried orange slices.

Here’s another fall themed board, but this time, I added yogurt covered pumpkin cookies from Trader Joe’s, Halloween themed Oreos, marshmallow pumpkins from Williams Sonoma, Reese’s ghosts and pumpkins and a fun little s’mores dish. You can make the s’mores dish by buying the individual Keebler graham pie crusts. Cut up some chocolate to go on the bottom and top with mini marshmallows. Put them in the toaster and broil them for a minute or two. Add on two candy eyes and viola!

Fall continues with a cranberry and cashew nut mix from Trader Joe’s, dried apricots, raspberry star thumbprint cookies, chocolate pumpkins from Vermont Nut Free Company and gingerbread sandwich cookies from Trader Joe’s. Are we seeing a Trader Joe’s theme here?

Moving into Halloween, I used Utz pumpkin shaped pretzels, frosted animal crackers, Halloween themed pirates booty, bat shaped gummy treats and how cute are those ghost veggie chips?

Moving from fall and Halloween into the holidays, this fun grazing board uses gingerbread sandwich cookies from Trader Joes, peppermint chocolate covered Oreos, iced gingerbread cookies, gummy candy canes, Reeese’s nutcrackers, tree shaped marshmallows, Lindt peppermint truffles, Pepperidge Farms hoilday sugar cookies and cute little candy cane tic tags in the corner!

Valentine’s Day I decided to do a muffin tin snack board – my kids love their snacks this way – a little bit of everything to choose from. Heart shaped shortbread cookies with chocolate on the bottom, XO pretzels from Utz, Kisses, sweet tart hears, heart shaped veggie chips, Reese’s hearts, and some cute gummy hearts.

What does your favorite grazing board have on it?

To find a Trader Joe’s location near you, click here.

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Valentine’s Day may be over, but I love hearts all year round. Between working on our school Valentine cards, our crafts at home and our grazing boards for friends, we have been celebrating all month long.

When I have the time, I like to make things from scratch, but usually, because the littles are running all around the house, I take a few short cuts. For example – those cupcakes above? Made the cake from a box mix. Made the frosting from scratch because, I mean, let’s be honest, nothing is more important than the frosting!

These cookies I make from a sugar cookie recipe I got from a friend. I love them because they aren’t sweet, as some sugar cookies can be. The frosting is just confectioner’s sugar, milk and vanilla so it is SUPER sweet – but paired with the cookie (that isn’t sweet), it just works out to the right amount of sweetness.

I always stock up on sprinkles. Those cute ones on the cupcakes – the multi colored hearts – were a cute find at Michael’s. I love all things pink and red, but these were a refreshing change of pace. At Michael’s they have smaller $1 packets of sprinkles and you can always find some cute things at Home Goods.

I put together this cute grazing board for a play date: vanilla cupcakes, sugar cookies, M&M’s in Valentine colors, cinnamon hearts, gummy hearts and Starburst jelly bean hearts. Let’s not forget The Happy Chocolatier in the mix with their cubze – the fun messages inside just make me smile.

For play dates, I sometimes like to have one structured activity and then have some free time to play. My go to is decorating cookies. The kids could really care less what the cookies taste like, so if I’m in a rush, I just pick up a roll of cookies from the market and cut them out in fun shapes. I buy the frosting from a jar and divide them up into little cups to keep things from getting too messy. My secret trick is doing everything on either baking sheets or disposable aluminum plans (which work well because the kids can just take these home afterwards). I give each child a set of their own sprinkles – I put them in egg containers that I cut in half. It has been a hit at every play date!

One of my other favorite activities that we did this month was decorate mailboxes. My kids like to play “post office” all year round. I picked up these cute mailboxes at Target for $1. (Full disclosure, I made this one as a sample) The kids decorated them with stickers and fun washi tape. They had a great time writing each other letters and “delivering them” to friends.

Put together this cute little plate last minute. A strawberry shortcake from Whole Foods, Linzer cookies from the Whole Foods bulk cookie bin, those cute vanilla and chocolate hearts are from Whole Foods too (sensing a pattern here?) Chocolate cubze from The Happy Chocolatier, and assorted heart candy from Priscilla Candy Shop in Concord (which by the way had some really good prices on candy).

I have a few rules in my house, one of them being, we NEVER do glitter. Let’s save that for school and let the teachers clean that up But I kind of allowed it for this project. My kids had a BLAST making them. We started off with some self seal laminating sheets. We peeled back half of the sheet and put on our glitter directly to the sticky side – you can use glitter, or in this case, we tried out confetti. When we were done, we peeled off the second half of the paper and folded it over the confetti, making a 5×7 sheet. Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be perfect – ours had wrinkles in them! For the hearts, take two pieces of construction paper and fold in half. Cut out large hear and a smaller on inside. We taped the laminated confetti sheet to one side of the heart and then glued the other heart on top of it We left some of the hearts plain, but you could certainly embellish the construction paper with markers, stickers or washi tape. Punch a hole and add some string/ribbon and you have a fun Valentine you can hang in the window! Another idea, if you really can’t stand the idea of using glitter or confetti is tissue paper – find some cute heart paper or some pink striped paper and cut into thin strips! You can make this any time of year just by changing the heart into a circle or any other fun shape.

What are your favorite things to do for Valentine’s Day with your kids?

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Don’t worry mom, not my baby.

We ended 2019 with a whirlwind of parties. We went right from Thanksgiving to a baby shower, then a kid’s holiday party with Santa, a neighborhood adults only party where I cooked for 40 people, Christmas Eve with the cousins and Christmas Day with good friends. I needed most of January to recover.

We have one of the best neighborhoods – summer block parties, holiday parties, Thirsty Thursdays – I couldn’t ask for a better community for my kids to grow up in. So, when our new neighbor found out she was having a baby, I wanted to give back and host – since the other ladies of the neighborhood were kind enough to throw me a shower (for my third no less).

I hosted with another young mom/friend in the neighborhood and she loves a good theme for a party. We decided to go with blue and gold.

I had been waiting for just the right moment to order macarons from Mac Lab, an amazing bakery in Georgia. These geode macarons come in a variety of colors and are almost to pretty to eat. They are mailed individually wrapped, so you don’t have to worry about them breaking in the mail. The gold macarons are hand painted and are coffee flavored.

I’m a big fan of candy boards – just a fun thing for the guest to pick at while they are gathered around the kitchen island. This time I chose blue rock candy lollipops, blue fruit slices, Jelly Belly jelly beans in a few different colors, sour laces, blue cubze by Happy Chocolatier and prosecco balls from Sukker & Sweet.

While the candy bar is fun, I wanted guests to be able to take home soem treats too – so I added some Lindt chocolates to the table as well. The sequin runner was from amazon and I made the baby letters using wooden letters from Michaels, spray adhesive, scrapbook paper and an exacto knife.

My friend who made the cake also made these delicious chocolate covered pretzels. They’re my absolute favorite!

Don’t worry, we did have real food at the shower as well. Keeping with the board theme, I went to my favorite cheese shop in Wellesley, Wasik’s, to pick up some things for the charcuterie board. We went with a Bavarian Blue from Germany, a Brie de Lyon from France (cow cheese) and Ossau – Iraty from France, a sheep milk cheese. I added blueberries, mixed olives, spicy soppressata, truffle salami, dried apricots, raincoast crisp crackers, and Effie’s Oatcakes.

I love edible (or drinkable) favors for parties. We went with LaMarca prosecco, blue and gold paper straws attache with some cute blue heart washi tape.

5 Things to Bring in Your Hospital Bag

I packed all of my things in a Sea Bag XL tote, it was big enough to hold all of my things and if it got dirty, you just wipe it down – no muss, no fuss!

1. Phone Charger: Seems obvious, but buy an extra one to just leave in your bag so you don’t have to race around looking for it when you go into labor. While you’re at it, download some shows to binge watch while you’re at the hospital!
2. Snacks: There will be moments when you get hungry and the cafeteria isn’t serving meals – and all the nurses station has is saltine crackers. But also, line up those friends to bring in sushi or cheese or whatever you’ve been craving for after your delivery!
3. Your Own Towel: When we got married, the woman who helped us register told me I HAD to get the bath sheets – you know, those enormous towels that you can only put on in the washer? Never used it…until I had a baby. The towel that they provided was like…the size of a face cloth…and that’s not what you need right after you’ve given birth.
4. The Most Luxurious Bath Products You Can Find: That first shower after you have given birth, for me, was life changing. I think I stood in the shower for a good hour, probably using up all of the hot water. I turn to look for soap and they have one of those hand dispensers with that “hospital smelling” soap in it. Trust me, enjoy this moment with the nicest smelling things you can find.
5. Clothes: Bring that cute matching outfit for you and the baby for that Instagram photo, but bring a couple of extra outfits for the baby. Also, bring clothes that you don’t mind throwing away…because after giving birth, things can get messy.

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