Pawesome Pastabilities!

The other day the girl brought her lunch to work and she wanted M & I to sample it.  She didn’t out-and-out say she wanted us to try it, but we know that is what she wanted because when the phone rang she just left her lunch sitting on the table….. she is very shy… she doesn’t like to ask for things…. we’re working with her on this.  Anyway, she’d brought some leftover spaghetti and meatballs that she’d made for dinner the night before…. It smelled pretty good, so M & I didn’t mind giving it a try.  OMP!  It was totally pawesome!  There were three meatballs, so we figured that she wanted us each to have one….  We could tell that she was really excited that we’d tried them… she was jumping up and down and waving her arms while she was still on the phone.  As soon as she hung up she came running over to see what we’d thought.

Oh, my paws!  It was totally Pawesome!

Later she told us that the meatballs came from an idea she had after making a Parmesan Meatloaf that she’d found on Pinterest.  With the Balloon Festival fast approaching the girl has been all in a tizzy.  We don’t know what she is complaining about!  We’re the ones who have to greet all the people popping in the office!  Geeze, she just plays on the computer and talks on the phone all day….. like that’s work?!  But, she says that she is very busy and is so tired when she gets home that she doesn’t feel like cooking.  She told us that she took the meatloaf recipe and made THREE different meals with it!  We were totally impressed ’cause usually we just eat kibbles for every meal…. Three DIFFERENT meal!  Wow!

The girl just has one pet human, B, and herself to cook for, and she says that the Parmesan Meatloaf recipe made too much for the two of them.  So she made the full recipe but only made a third the mix into a meatloaf.  The remainder she made into meatballs.  And then she used the meatballs to make Spaghetti & Meatballs AND Shepherd’s Pie!  Wow!  We were worn out just thinking about all that, but the girl insisted that it was pretty easy.

Day one: Make the meatloaf mix.  One third of the mix gets shaped into a loaf and stuck in the fridge for tomorrow (or frozen).  The other half gets made into meatballs.  Spaghetti & Meatballs for dinner!  Pour some of the extra spaghetti sauce over the meatloaf.

Day two (or whenever, if you froze your meatloaf): Meatloaf and mashed potatoes for dinner!

Day three (or the day after you ate the meatloaf & mashed potatoes…): Shepherd’s Pie for dinner!

You see how there’s an order here?  We didn’t get it at first, but the girl had taken photos…. (we don’t know why she does that, but it did come in handy)…

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Parmesan Meatloaf 

slightly adapted from Mommy I’m Hungry

1 lb ground turkey
1 lb ground beef
2 eggs
1/4 cup breadcrumbs
1/2 teaspoon dried basil
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1-2 cloves garlic, finely minced
1 small onion, grated
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 cup mariana pasta sauce
1/2 cup shredded cheese

Pre heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Mix:
In a large bowl, combine the ground turkey and beef, eggs, breadcrumbs, thyme, oregano, basil, garlic, onion, salt, pepper and Parmesan cheese.

Meatballs:                                                                                                                        Shape mix into 1-2″ balls and cook in a skillet until lightly browned.  Finish cooking the meatballs in an oven heated to 350 degrees. (25-30 minutes)

Meatloaf:                                                                                                                          Place 1/3 of the mixture in the loaf pan and form into a loaf. Top the meatloaf with pasta sauce.  Place filled loaf pan on a baking sheet and bake in the preheated oven for 45 minutes – 1 hour. Remove the meatloaf from the oven and sprinkle the top with shredded cheese. Place the meatloaf back in the oven and bake until the cheese is melted.

Make mashed potatoes to serve with the meatloaf.  You will need about four cups of leftover potatoes for the Shepherd’s Pie…. so make about 2-2.5lbs total (if you are making REAL mashed potatoes)

Shepherd’s Pie: Most Shepherd’s Pie recipes call for “ground” meat… so you could make 1/3 of your mix “smashed”, but meatballs are fun and easier to have cooked and frozen earlier…

Place two cups of mashed potatoes in a pie pan.  Sqhoosh it around to make a “crust”.  Fill the crust with the meatballs, and whatever veggies you like: corn, carrots, peas…. then top the whole thing with two more cups of mashed potatoes.  Bake at 375 degrees for 45-55 minutes…. crust will start to brown.  Top with a handful (or two) of shredded cheese and bake until the cheese starts to bubble.

Enjoy!

Meow-Out to the girl’s pet human, B!  Thanks for saving some for us, pal!

-M&M

Whatever the Weather

I gotta tell you, we’re not laughing anymore.  It wasn’t funny the first time, but it did kind of make us scratch our ears.

“Hot enough to fry a cat on the sidewalk.”

Yeah, its hot.  Not THAT hot!  And we’re not allowed outside anyway, so we don’t know why every third human who walks through the door tells us that!  Aaarrrggg!  One little record-breaking heat wave and our humans go all goofy.

We’ve been learning about weather in our Private Pilot Ground School Class.  One of our human friends, Terrible (don’t ask me, I didn’t name him), teaches the weather chapter of our class.  We learned that even airplanes don’t like these temperatures.  When it is hot the air is less dense and doesn’t allow an aircraft to generate enough “lift.”  M and I totally get that… when it is hot it is hard to generate enough lift to drag our tails off the chair.

Since it’s been so nasty out we decided we should make something nice for our class mates, but we didn’t want to make anything that took a lot of effort.  And we certainly didn’t want to make anything that required turning on the oven, so cookies were out…..

So we checked out our Pinterest board of ‘Crafty Ideas‘ and found these super cute notebooks that we’d pinned a while back.  We are always writing notes in class (since the Board turned us down for our own iPads) and we thought these would be fun to share!

Since it’s ‘back to school’ time the girl was able to find these little bitty note books… perfect sized for us and perfect for the humans to tuck into their pockets!

We liked THIS idea, but pretty soon we had strips of paper all over the office (it was kind of distracting…. M kept running off and chasing them!) and the girl was mad that we’d dumped the Mod Podge in one of her desk drawers….  oops!

So we decided to scale it back a bit….

You will need:

• Mod Podge (or you could use glue)
• Paint Brush
• Sectional Chart (or other pretty paper, but really… charts are awfully pretty)
• Notebook
• Paper Cutter

Get your supplies together

We cut our so that it fit exactaly at the top and bottom edges, but overlapped into the front and back covers…. like a book jacket.  ‘Paint’ the front cover with the ModPodge. Go slow with the ModPodge.. make sure you have everything lined up before you glue down the back cover.

Glue down the front and back inside flaps last.

Ta-dah!

Meow-out to our Instructor Terrible! I read the chapter…. M didn’t… she took a nap!  I’m ready for the next class, ask me anything!

M&M

Trees are not Mutants

Sweet Catnip!  We thought the girl was just yammering on like she normally does…. but this time she was actually on to something!  Fall really is the greatest season of all!  Okay, we know it’s only August, so it’s not officially Fall yet, but with the dip in the temperature this week (a cool 90°) she got all excited and started jabbering about pumpkin bread and cinnamon cookies…. I mean… we didn’t get the big deal.  Who has time to get all wound up about some silly spices when all trees are mutating!

Well… we did a bit more googling…. and discovered a.) Fall/Autumn begins September 22, 10:49 A.M. EDT – so the girl is WAY ahead of schedule…..

and b.) the trees are NOT actually mutating… they’re just dropping dead.  Totally different. And like zombies… which we will need to start preparing for as soon as the Balloon Festival is over because zombies infestations tend to happen around Halloween….(Google says so) the trees will come back to life in the Spring, so we don’t need to get too wound up about them.

So with tree mutation worries off our cute little minds, and zombie concerns looming, but not immediate, M & I were able to turn our thoughts to the ramblings of the girl.

Cinnamon and pumpkins…. We asked the girl to bring in something yummie for the next monthly Airport meeting.  See, we added something to the agenda …. M & I need our own iPads.  At the moment we have to use the girl’s iPhone or her Macbook…. it’s just not fair.  We need our own.  We have to study for our pilots license and we have lots of googling and blogging and Pinterest-ing …. and Tweeting to do…. So we’ve asked the board to buy us our own iPads….. soooooo we thought it would be a good idea for the girl to bring in something special, so the board members would be in good moods!

We found this recipe on Pinterest for Pumpkin Snickerdoodles…. OMP* These cookies are totally pawsome!

Pumpkin Snickerdoodles

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What you will need:

• 3 3/4 cups flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup dark brown sugar
• 1 cup pumpkin puree
• 1 large egg
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Sugar coating

• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• Dash of allspice

In a medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg; blend. In a large bowl, beat together butter and sugars on medium speed until well combined. Next, and pumpkin, egg and vanilla extract.  Once combined, incorporate the flour mixture.  Cover the dough, and refrigerate for one hour, until firm.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Grease baking sheets.  In a small bowl, mix together the sugar and spices for the sugar coating. Scoop dough (approximately 2 1/2 tablespoons) and roll into a ball. Roll the dough ball in the sugar mixture, and place on baking sheet, leaving about 2 inches between each cookie. Dip the tines of a fork into the sugar mixture and then press into the cookies, making little hash marks.

Bake the cookies for 10-12 minutes. Remove when the centers of the cookies have set. Let cool on the baking pan for approximately 5 minutes, and then transfer to wire cooling racks to cool completely.

* OMP – Oh My Paws

Visit us on Facebook and tell our board that M & I NEED our own iPads!

– M&M

Have You Hugged Your Human Today?

We love our humans, don’t get us wrong…. But they’re not the brightest pets.  Ya know?

Case in point… the girl.  She’s been trying to bake healthier treats for the other humans, but she gets so dispirited when she finds a yummie looking recipe then realizes that it’s high in sugar and calories.

The third time she brought in carrot sticks and growled her way through snack time, M & I decide we HAD to do something.  (Note: carrot sticks are awesome for batting around the office floor.)

M & I climbed up on her desk and instructed her to click away from Facebook (say hi, then tell her to get us some treats) and head to Pinterest.

She wanted to make a banana bread, but she thought her recipe had too much sugar.  Fine… so we Googled and discovered that we could replace the sugar with honey.  Honey is better for our diabetic friends because it “is composed of two simple sugars, glucose and fructose, honey is absorbed in a different manner and therefore causes a slower, more gradual rise in blood sugar.”  And to make matters even easier it can be substituted in equal amounts up to one cup.

Yay, we’d solved the sugar issue!  Now she wanted to eliminate the oil.  Back to Google: Apple sauce can be substituted for oil in equal amounts.  Yay!

We helped her play around with the recipe for a while longer…. lets add some cinnamon and maybe some flaxseed…. yum!  By this time we were worn out and decided to take a nap.  We patted the girl on the head and offered her reassurances that we were sure it would turn out great  (Silly humans!  Always need their paw held.)  and headed to our favorite chair for a well deserved nap.

Disclaimer: We’re not saying this a a “healthy” recipe…. or even “diabetic-friendly”…. we’re just saying this is healthier than we we started and diabetic-friendly-er.

Orange Spice Banana Bread

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You will need:

• 1 c Honey
• 3 T Apple Sauce
• 2 Eggs
• 1 t Vanilla
• 3 Ripe Bananas
• ¾c Orange Juice
• 3 c All-Purpose Flour
• 2 T Flax Seed
• 1 ½ t Baking Powder
• 1 ½ t Baking Soda
• ½ t Salt
• 1 t Cinnamon
• 1 t Nutmeg
•  ¼ t Clove
•  ½ c Nuts
• ¼ c Raisins

111 Calories Per Serving – 32 Servings

Directions:

Combine honey, apple sauce, vanilla and eggs; mix well.  Stir in bananas and orange juice. In a separate bowl, combine the dry ingredients; add to banana mixture.  Mix until just moistened.  Stir in raisins and ¼ cup nuts.  Pour into two greased 8-in x 4-in loaf pans.

Bake at 300 for 50-60 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean.  Cool for 10 minutes and remove from pans to cool completely on a wire rack.

Yield: 2 loaves

Our test-humans liked it too!  Woo Hoo!  YUM!

-M&M

Gifts from the Monkey Queen

We are totally excited!  Our human, the girl, has received a gift from the Monkey Queen!  Eeep!  How cool is that?

So we did some Googling (the source of all knowledge) and discovered that she’s not really a monkey (though she is a human…. so that’s kinda the same thing, but without a tail…. sad 😦  no tail) Anyway, 100th Monkey Media is pretty cool even if it isn’t what we were expecting.  Mich (we’re gonna keep calling her the Monkey Queen ’cause we like the way it sounds) is a super social media guru.  She teaches businesses  how to use things like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, e-mail and other social media platforms to better reach their customers.  We’ve been watching her YouTube channel all day… she’s such a funny human! We’ve learned all sorts of great things we’re going to have the girl do for our Airport.  If you aren’t as tech-savvy as me & M, you can have Mich do it all for you!  She teaches classes too, so be sure to like her on Facebook or Twitter (we do!) so you know what she’s up to.

We thought the girl was just goofing off when she was on Facebook, but apparently she was out learning things!  Since she likes and comments on 100th Monkey Media’s page so often she was named the Fan of the Week!  (We’re so proud!)  As the Fan of the Week the Monkey Queen sent her a mystery gift…… It’s a Crystal Growing Kit!!!

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Thanks Mich!  We had a ball helping the girl put together the crystal growing kit!  We tried to get her to follow all the directions, but she insisted on putting the crystals in a jar instead of the display pan that came with it…. perhaps that was a good idea after all…. sometimes we get over excited and eat our craft projects!

If you aren’t already a fan of 100th Monkey Media, you totally should be!

– M&M

ModPodge in our Whiskers

Apparently humans can’t drink from water bowls like we do… something about their tongues not being scratchy like our…. poor humans!  We’ve noticed they like to drag around cups with liquid in them…. and straws!  We have been trying to learn to drink from a straw like our humans, but we haven’t quite gotten the hang of it just yet.  When our humans leave their cups unattended we take their straw and add it to our collection so we can practice in our water bowl (we don’t like to drink soda… coffee, yes… soda, no.)  Even though we haven’t made much progress on learning to drink from them yet, we do have great fun playing with the chewed up straws.  Also, it gives our humans lots of fun chasing us around pretending that they didn’t want us to have their straw…. silly humans…. we know that if you didn’t want us to have it, you wouldn’t have left it unattended!  Duh!

The humans’ cups tend to leave little rings of water on our table.  We don’t like the little water rings… it gets on our paws and we have to shake it off and then water gets everywhere! Yuck!  We figured it would be too hard to teach them to drink from a water bowl, so we decided to make them coasters.

You will need:

• 4×4 tiles (we used some old bathroom tiles)
• Sectional charts (cut about 4.25 x 4.25 in)
• Mod Podge
• Foam brush
• Clear spray paint
• Felt (for the bottoms)
• Hot glue

We had the girl cut the charts into 4.25 x 4.25 squares.

Next she covered the tiles with Mod Podge and and applied the charts to the tiles…. take your time here, smooth all the wrinkles and bubbles out now, because it dries fast!

We tried doing the corners two different ways… When you fold the paper down over the sides you get a little flap that sticks out… first we tried just cutting te flap off, but it left an edge that we worried would eventually peel.  Finally we decided that we liked to just fold the flap over like wrapping a present.  It looks a bit neater, but takes a bit more effort to get to glue down.

Coat the top of the coaster with a coat or two of Mod Podge to seal it.

Once everything dried we applied a coat of clear spray paint to make it shiny.

We cut a piece of felt (slightly less than 4×4) for the bottom so it wouldn’t scratch the table…. Use hot glue to attach the felt.

FYI: do not get the mod podge in your whiskers… it is a nightmare to get out!

M&M