What do you think?

Anyway, there are meat dishes that are still off limits; burgers on a bun, meat lover pizza or deep fried foods, like chicken fingers. While there’s GF bread to use as a bun, even GF pizza crust, there’s just nothing to work in the deep fried area of the food pyramid. So I fixed that!

Using some gluten free biscuit mix as the breading, I cut up the chicken breasts into better sizes and took care of business. I “floured” the chicken, dipped in an egg wash, and re-dipped into the “flour.” After some sitting, I let the chicken bath in a pot of 350 degree oil until done.

I hope this helps some other gluten free people who have been missing chicken fingers, I know it did Heather.

I’m sure my kids are no different then yours, next to Christmas and their birthdays, Halloween is a favorite holiday. While the costumes are always fun, let’s face it, what they love is the candy. Lots of candy. Too much candy. Every year the candy haul seems to get larger. Of course, it’s not like we as parents have nothing to do with that. We buy more candy every year to hand out, and take our kids to more parties and more neighborhoods to trick-or-treat in. What started off as a small plastic pumpkin with 20-30 candies, has now become a pillowcase that’s 3/4 full of teeth rotting, sickness inducing, sugary treats.

Again, like most parents, we don’t allow the kids to eat candy before it’s inspected, so it all comes home where it is poured out and given a through inspection to make sure there’s nothing bad in the pile. Yeah, I know, I’m probably a little paranoid. After 11 years we’ve never found anything that needed to be thrown away, but still I don’t think we can be too careful. Once the candy is all spread out, we count them, the tax is set at 10% of the take, so we need to know what the total is. Let’s say it’s 100 pieces.

To make it fair, an important aspect of keeping everyone happy, I allow the kids to set aside 10%, or in this case, 10 pieces, that I can’t take the tax from. This gives them a chance to save the full-size candy bar, or that favorite gummi candy aside and not worry about me taking it. After they’ve pulled their 10, I get to choose 10 pieces that go to The Man as a taxation. Fair, easy and straight forward. Everyone comes out a winner, even the dentist.

Why go through all this when as the holder of the debit card I could just go to the store buy all the candy I want? The easiest answer is, it reduces the amount of candy the kids have, forces them to share, and it give us, the parents, a small variety of candy we don’t often get without having to buy multiple bags. However, it also teaches the kids a little about the way of life. When I come home from work with my paycheck, there’s this line, actually multiple lines, where money is taken out to go to various government entities. It’s a little stretch, and it’s only once a year, but I think it gives the kids a little taste of taxation, that they will certainly experience more of in life.

Are you gonna tax your kids candy haul? Let me know what you think.

My department went to lunch today to celebrate a birthday, which is always exciting. Unlike many places I’ve been, work picks up the tab. Yay for that. Half the time we seem to end up eating sushi (always a good thing), the other half is pretty random. This time we ended up at Thai-Rrific Restaurant. I haven’t eaten there in forever and that was just silly. The food is really good and well priced, but the discovery of the day… Thai Iced Coffee. Right, yeah… Coffee.

I know and love a good Thai Iced Tea, but had never seen a Thia Iced Coffee. The drink still has those yummy spices from the tea, but the coffee seems to complement, instead of over power the drink. Of course, if you’re sensitive to caffeine, you might want to save these for lunch only. It’s definitely my new favorite non-alcoholic drink. So next time you’re eating Thai food, consider a Thai Iced Coffee and let me know what you think!

I knew, due to my work schedule and school starting tomorrow, that today would be a difficult day for celebrating. Which is one of the reasons we took a motorcycle ride and had such a nice dinner on Friday. However, we did head out tonight as a family and ate at Chili’s. The food is normally pretty good and tonight was no exception, but what was amazing was the manager. We had mentioned that it was our anniversary tonight and the manager came by and spoke with us. It was a great conversation and he shared with us some wisdom of his 27 years of marriage… “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” Most amazing was when the bill came… he gave us a huge discount on our bill! We were not expecting that. Major props.

Thanks to everyone for the well wishes and thanks to the manager at Chili’s!