My daughter and I have been making this banana bread recipe with chocolate chips for what feels like years now. It’s a recipe that was shared by my sister-in-law’s stepmom who either baked the bread for us as a gift, or perhaps she brought it to a potluck, or maybe it was featured in her dessert bar at her annual Christmas dinner. Wherever we first tried it, it made such an impression that we’ve been using this recipe as...

Read More

The pumpkin patches are open, the leaves are changing colors, and we’re working on Halloween crafts to decorate our home. The only issue is that in Southern Cali the weather’s been in the mid to upper 80’s. Not surprising for us, but it’s certainly wrecking havoc on our Fall allergies. Bebe probably has the worst of the allergies but we’ve enjoyed the pumpkin patch on better days, as well as the park and a few...

Read More

  Sometimes, the simple things in life provide great pleasure. Such as a bag of frozen strawberries that I found buried in our freezer. We’ve been fighting colds, sore throats, fevers, allergies, asthma, and generalized tiredness from overexerting ourselves during the weekends, but for the most part, we are still healthy and well. Given all that is going on, I’m still keeping our meal repertoire quite simple and once again, I...

Read More

I still make oatmeal about twice a week on mornings I don’t make a green smoothie. Lately we’ve moved on from toppings such as caramelized bananas (recipe available here) to homemade granola (recipe available here), berries, fresh apples and fresh white nectarine slices. However, I recently remembered a dessert that my Auntie Sumiko made and I was inspired to try something new with oatmeal. The idea to top my oatmeal with soy...

Read More

  I’ve been thinking about green pancakes ever since a friend of mine posted a picture of the green pancakes that they served at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Santa Monica (website here). I knew both Bebe and Big Onechan (big sis) would get a kick out of seeing mini green pancakes for breakfast when they woke up on St. Patrick’s Day. I was thinking about how I could make the pancakes green without having to use food coloring, which...

Read More

One day, when I’m much older and the kids are all grown up, I’ll look back at this time and remember how much I enjoyed making a big deal of holidays such as St. Patrick’s Day. I always try to find a few arts and crafts for Bebe to celebrate with, but for a family that loves to eat, celebrating with green food on St. Patrick’s Day is also a lot of fun. This morning I made two dishes. The first, green eggs and bacon, is a...

Read More

Sometimes, I try something that is not original, yet somewhat new to my breakfast repertoire, and all of a sudden I'm obsessed with it. This tends to happen often, case in point my green smoothie obsession which has lately subsided, but I still get cravings for, if I go longer than four days without one. A few weeks ago I decided to buy plain Greek yogurt, which is different than the nonfat vanilla yogurt or fruity greek yogurt which...

Read More

I’m so glad that the sun has finally come out this afternoon. All this rain since Friday has really left me feeling down and blue especially after Friday’s tragedy in Connecticut. It was as if the Gods were crying with us all. It was raining again this morning and it was cold. I had to keep Bebe E from school today since she’s still fighting a cold, but I wanted to savor this lazy morning where we weren’t rushing to get...

Read More