Katrina's Super Sweet Steamburgers

Okay, so I have to give much deserved credit to my friend Katrina who gave me this recipe. She had brought over a crockpot full of steamburger mixture some time ago and my entire family fell in love with them. So now we make them almost once a week! Thanks Katrina!

What is a steamburger you ask? Well basically this recipe would probably be compared to sloppy joes, but in my opinion, and Katrina's as well, these taste much better.

I have been wanting to try this recipe with Boca or MorningStar Farms meatless ground crumbles, but have yet to try that variation.. when I do I will let you know how they turn out!

This recipe makes a large amount, lets say for a group of people or a large family.. so let's say you're making it for a small family, just split up the ingredients. Okay, so let's begin:

4-5 lbs of hamburger
chopped onion (I use dried onion flakes)
2 cups ketchup
4 tbsp vinegar
4 tbsp sugar
4 tsp mustard
4 tsp worchestershire sauce
1 cup water
salt & pepper

Brown your hamburger with the onion. Now I can't stand chunky hamburger. I need my hamburger super fine..as I related my problem to my friend, she went out and bought me this meat masher thingy. Now I have no idea what it's REALLY called, and honestly I use it to mash all sorts of stuff including potatoes, so it's wonderful. I recommend this tool to everyone!

After your hamburger and onion are nice and cooked, drain (and rinse if preferred). Add the rest of the ingredients and stir. Simmer 5-10 minutes before serving (or however long you want the meat to soak up the yummo flavor).

I serve my steamburgers in hot dog buns so the meat has less places to fall out..
So there you have it! I recommend this recipe to anyone who loves sloppy joes.
Thanks Katrina!

Paint With Your Hands!

So this weekend we did a lot of painting with our hands.. our first was an attempt at making Christmas cards, the other was to make hand print Christmas trees. The cards would have turned out better if I would have purchased cream-colored blank cards instead of white ones, but I had initially bought the white cards for another project that failed, so we were stuck with the cards we had. Oh well...live and learn! ;)

So our first project was the Christmas card fail: cute but you couldn't really see the white paint on the white cards. Nevertheless, I will show you what we did, because I think these would turn out great on any other color of paper.

So we began by painting Jake's hand.. Here we are using Tempura paint, which I LOVE. It's super easy to clean off of hands, feet, etc!

After the paint dried, I stenciled out a hat and he added glitter to this part..

This was our finished project. Kinda cute, but you can barely see the white paint against the white background of the card :(

This is where the inspiration came from. :) Oh well.. we still had fun painting and glittering!

The other project was to make Christmas tree pictures from our hand prints.

Caleb wasn't too sure what we were making him do.. haha.

And here is our final result. Pretty cute, I think ;)

Uber Yummo Spinach Dip

I've recently become a fan of spinach dip and so I thought I would try making it myself (as I did with the hummus). This is my friend Heidi's recipe which she gratefully gave to me (thanks Heidi!) after I tried it at her book party. She had pulled this recipe from her memory and in the recipe it says to add 2 pkgs of lite cream cheese- now I thought this was too cheesy in the end result so from now on I think I'll try 1 1/2 pkgs, but that's completely my preference. If you're a cheesy-lovin spinach dip person, stick with the 2 pkgs! :)

What You'll Need:

2 packages of lite cream cheese
1/2 cup mayo
1/4 cup grated parmesan
2 tsp pepper
1 can spinach, drained & squeezed as dry as possible
1/2 cup artichokes
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
1 can water chesnuts, sliced then minced
salt to taste

Now, I had no idea how to ' drain and squeeze the spinach as dry as possible', and tried squeezing the spinach with my hands, while wasting and getting spinach all over my sink. Thank goodness chef extraordinaire Irene came over to help me with this part. She put the spinach in a paper towel and squeezed over the sink. Thanks Reenee! She also showed me how to get the cloves of garlic out of the bulb and mince them. Reminder- I am a newby when it comes to this stuff ;)

So, basically throw all of your ingredients in a saucepan over low heat on the stove. Gradually increase the heat until it gets 'melty'. Stir continually to avoid sticking.

Yummo! We enjoyed our spinach dip with some awesome pita bread. Mmmm.... :)

Christmas Stars

Okay so this is an easy peasy craft..but there's something about foil stars that I love.. oooh shiny.. ;)
After I decorated my hearth for the holidays, I thought it was missing something.. stars! I'm in love with stars. It's ridiculous. So here we go..

First, grab a buttload of boxes, and some star stencils.. and a cat. Just kidding about the cat part..the cat is not actually necessary, although a great helper at being in the way during cutting, taping, the stringing up of said craft, etc.
I am so glad my recycling hadn't gone out yet, so I had plenty of boxes on hand, YES!

Trace the star shapes on your cardboard. I guess you could do it straight onto the foil, but I thought using the cardboard would end up being more sturdy (hell-o, we still have another MONTH until Christmas, and who knows what these poor little stars will go through in that amount of time).

We used a glue stick to glue our stars to the foil. Here Jake is pretending to attack his star with the glue. School glue might work better, but I was afraid it would leave 'glue lines' showing through the foil on the other side..

We then cut out the stars, leaving a little foil around the edges to secure it, and taped some twine to the back and hung them up.

Ta Da! Easy peasy and kinda cute.. We had extras.. I think we will either hang them on the tree or use for gift tags.. :)

Heidi's Hummus

I have to begin by saying.. this hummus is delicious! I've never made hummus before and had never eaten any hummus I really liked, so when my friend Heidi threw a book party and served hummus, I grabbed only a minimal amount so I could try her variation. I had always heard how good hummus was for you and a lot of my friends ate it, so I really wanted to get in to it, but the store versions I thought were gross.

So, that being said, I must name this post 'Heidi's Hummus' after her fabulous recipe. Enjoy :)

For this recipe, you will need:
1 can chickpeas, drained (my can says garbanzo beans chick peas)
Juice of one lemon
2 cloves garlic
1 tsp cumin
1/4 cup tahini (if you don't know what this is, it's found in the middle eastern section of the supermarket)
1/4 cup olive oil
salt to taste

Okay, so just throw your ingredients in your blender and puree until smooth! Mine was really thick and my blender was having a tough time with this process..my friend Irene suggested a food processor.. we had to stop the blender a couple of times to mix by hand and then return to pureeing.

Doesn't it look delish? It is! And WAY too easy to make! Yummo snack!

Creating a Blog

Okay, so this is my attempt at creating a blog.. I chose the name one two three jump! because many things I aspire to do, I have never done, and have really little knowledge in. I find something I like, and jump in to do it. One great example is this blog ;)

I am really big on being crafty, hence the idea behind this blog. I am always wanting to create new works of art with the kids and try new ideas I find on the internet, and thought how wonderful it would be to post pictures and tutorials of these to share with others, as I have seen.

So I hope I do this right.. we will see!
Thank you for reading..