Amy Houts Blog

My Favorite Biscuit Recipe

3/21/2019

Place biscuits about 1-inch apart on cookie sheet.

Serve biscuits in a napkin lined basket, ready for butter and jam.

I've tried several recipes for biscuits. This one has the taste, texture I like best. The small amount of sugar doesn't make it taste sweet, but adds to the tenderness. Because I used almond milk, the biscuits didn't brown as much as they would with regular milk.

2 cups unbleached white flour
1 scant teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 cup shortening, butter, or margarine
2/3 to 3/4 cup milk or almond, soy, etc.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.

Stir together flour, salt, baking powder, and sugar in a medium bowl. Cut in shortening, butter, or margarine with a pastry blender or two knives until it looks like meal. Add milk and stir with a fork just until mixed.

Turn out onto a floured board or cloth. Knead about 10 times. Use a rolling pin to roll about 1/2-inch thick. Cut with a 2 1/2-inch biscuit cutter or use a drinking glass. Place on an ungreased cookie sheet about 1-inch apart. Bake for 10-12 minutes or until golden brown. Remove from cookie sheet to a napkin-lined basket. Best served warm with butter and jam.
Yield: 10-12 biscuits

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Mix-in-the-Pan Applesauce Cake

3/4/2019

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The cake pan is your mixing bowl.

Add the applesauce, water, oil, and vinegar.

Ready to bake.

I've cut the sugar by 1/4 in this yummy, easy-to-make cake.

1 2/3 cups unbleached white flour
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups allspice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/2 cup water
1/3 cup oil
1 teaspoon cider vinegar
Powered sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. An 8x8-inch pan is your “mixing bowl.” Measure flour, brown sugar, baking soda, allspice, and salt into pan. Stir with a fork. Mash any lumps of brown sugar. Add applesauce, water, oil, and vinegar. Stir with a fork just until combined. Use a rubber spatula to get into the corners.

Bake for 40 minutes, or until wooden tooth pick comes out clean. Let cool. Shake a strainer with a spoonful of powdered sugar over cake. No need to frost. Serves 9.

Sprinkle with powdered sugar before serving.

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Involve Kids in Organizing Their Clothing

2/21/2019

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Last weekend while visiting my daughter, Emily, she asked me to help her organize the boys’ clothes. Because of the size of the bedroom, the dresser for her five-year old twins sits in the walk-in closet. We made two piles:

Hand-me-downs for their little sister were composed of a few special items like a Chicago Cubs shirt.
Clothes to sell or giveaway were composed of items that were too small or ones they hadn’t worn because they didn’t like the style.

The boys helped by sorting items and giving input. Emily asked pertinent questions:

“Do you wear this?"
"Do you like this?"
"Does this still fit you?”

And then she listened to what they had to say. Most of the time, these boys wear comfortable styles and activewear made from knit that pulls on rather than khakis, jeans, or button down shirts. But we kept a variety of styles for different occasions.

We hung up or folded the clothes to keep, making everything nice and neat. With two overflowing boxes of clothes to sell or give away, and a stack of shirts for little sister, we were feeling pretty good. And now there was room for clean laundry and new clothes for these growing boys. How do you keep your kids' clothing organized?

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Cookbook Shelf

1/17/2019

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My daughter, Emily, keeps her cookbooks in a cabinet above the stove. When I visited last week, she mentioned that I might help her organize it, so when her two-year old was sleeping and the twins were still at school, we got started. Here's what we did.

First, we took everything down, all the books, magazines, loose recipes, appliance info, coupons, and menus.
Then we reshelved the cookbooks by grouping them in these categories from left to right: baking, cooking with kids, quick and easy meals, booklets, miscellaneous, and basic cookbooks.
We looked through the loose recipes, deciding what to keep. We placed them in plastic sleeves in a three-ring binder. (See "Recipe Keeper" above.)
We gathered all the coupons in a plastic organizer and stacked the menus in a similar plastic envelope.
We began looking through the cooking magazines and clipping only those recipes that Emily was sure she wanted to make. (I stored the rest of the magazines on a low bookshelf for Emily to review as time allowed.)
Finally, I took the appliance info to the basement.

Now Emily and her husband have a neat, organized cookbook shelf that they can easily use. What are the steps you've taken to organize an area of your home?

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Twins Makes Tortillas, Step-by-Step

1/14/2019

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My twin grandsons had such fun learning how to make flour tortillas. Their father taught them how to work and roll the dough. Dr. Mary L. Gavin writes about a few of the benefits of cooking with children, such as building basic skills, boosting confidence, and exploring with the senses in her article here titled "Cooking with Preschoolers." My cookbook, Cooking Around the Calendar with Kids here, includes over a hundred pages of recipes to help children experience each season of the year.

Tortillas are stuffed with chicken, peppers, onions, and cheese.

Their younger sister, Charlotte, looks on.

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Birthday Cake Baking with Kids

1/14/2019

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Preparing the cake pans. My first mistake.

While visiting my grandchildren, Toby and Charlotte wanted to help bake a birthday cake. Both their mom and grandpa's birthdays were in January and we were going to celebrate! First, I showed them how to grease and flour the pans. But I should have cut and placed a circle of waxed paper or parchment paper in the bottom. That would have helped the cakes to stay in one piece when removing them from the pans, but I forgot.

My second mistake was preheating the oven to 350 degrees F. I knew that the temperature for dark cake pans needed to be 25 degrees lower, but I forgot. So the cake was dry.

My third mistake was waiting too long before turning the cakes out of the pan. At home, I usually put the timer on for 10 minutes. I got distracted playing with the kids and lost track of time. It was probably an hour. And yes, they fell apart.

My fourth mistake was making frosting that was too thick. Trying to spread the frosting to "glue" the cake together was not working very well. A thinner frosting would have been easier to spread.

I was too embarrassed to share the end results until my daughter encouraged me. Even cookbook authors like me have failures! It makes me appreciate the successes so much more. At least one way this experience was a great success was spending time with grandchildren baking. And the frosted cake tasted great! What mistakes have you made? And your great success?

The really bad side.

The better side.

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Reversible Christmas Magazine Rack

1/14/2019

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I bought this galvanized steel tub--the perfect size for a magazine rack--for our newly remodeled bathroom. I loved the Christmas pickup-truck, and discovered that I could turn the picture toward the wall to use the tub all year 'round. Plus, 35% off for an after-Christmas discount helped make it affordable. I bought the copper-handled trash can at another store. Are galvanized steel accessories new this year, or am I just noticing them? I like the farmhouse look, especially for our outdoor theme. The painstaking removal of the 1990s pink-flowered wallpaper border, which we had added when our daughters were young, was well worth it. And because of using the wrong kind of cleaner that etched our porcelain tub (yes, I did that!) we had the tub reglazed. That's what started this transformation. One thing led to another, but now it's done and we can relax and enjoy it! What are you working on, big or small, in your home?

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Baking Painted Sugar Cookies

12/28/2017

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Play with a lump of dough.

Carefully place shape on cookie sheet.

Beat egg yolk with 1/4 teaspoon of water and a few drops of food coloring.

Use clean paint brushes. Paint before baking.

Grandpa helps, too.

Best fresh out of the oven.

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Going to Grandma's: A Thanksgiving Game

11/21/2017

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The game board for Going to Grandma's

Going to Grandma's: A Thanksgiving Game by Amy and Steve Houts available in a consumable book from Houts & Home Publications LLC. Here's the info.

Object of the Game
The bear family is walking to Grandma’s house through the woods to share a big Thanksgiving dinner. Which path should they take? They have to cross the river. Oh, no! The bridge is out! They will have to go another way. The object of the game is to help the bear family arrive at Grandma’s before the roast turkey dinner is ready. Can you help?

Play and Learn
Develop fine motor control, foster cooperation, learn to follow rules, practice color recognition, and more.

A Cooperative Game
Going to Grandma’s is a cooperative game, meaning all the players work together. Everyone wins (or loses) at the same time when everyone has arrived at Grandma’s house in time for Thanksgiving dinner. Research shows that cooperative games—where everyone works together—help to foster friendships and help to prevent bullying.

What’s Included:

Game board
Rules and Instructions
Teddy Bear Family
Thanksgiving Food Cards and more

Amy Houts is an author of over 70 children’s books, cookbooks, and board games that feature early learning concepts, family themes of love and friendship, and holiday celebrations. Amy has created five cooperative board games for children with more in the works. Amy’s husband, Steve, is a retired middle school math and science teacher. This is the first time they collaborated on a book project. Amy and Steve have two grown daughters and three grandchildren. You can often find Amy at home writing with her Australian Shepherd mix, Gina, by her side.

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Houts, Eugene Field Elementary School Receive Microgrant for Recycling Game

9/15/2017

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Local author Amy Houts shows off a prototype of her upcoming cooperative board game, Race to Recycle. Houts worked closely with Eugene Field Elementary School to apply for a KCP&L Energizing Our Environment Microgrant to provide a copy of the board game to each kindergarten and preschool classroom as well as each preschool and kindergarten student. Photo by Tom Pinney

Article from the Maryville [Missouri] Daily Forum by TOM PINNEY from September 6, 2017

A local children’s author’s latest cooperative board game will soon be available for free to some students at Eugene Field Elementary School. Thanks to a Kansas City Power & Light (KCP&L) Energizing Our Environment Microgrant, Amy Houts’s upcoming cooperative board game Race to Recycle will be given to each student in preschool and kindergarten at Eugene Field Elementary School, Maryville, Missouri. An additional copy will be available in each of the preschool and kindergarten classrooms as well. Houts said the game will have a do-it-yourself component, which is normal in her cooperative board games, as the pieces all have to be put together before game play begins.

“The game starts after a big outdoor festival takes place, and there’s a lot of trash that needs to be recycled,” Houts said. “The kids can work together in groups of two to four players to move down the board and get all of the recycling picked up.
“The die goes up to three, and when you roll it, you move that amount of spaces on the board and pick up that many bottle cards to put in the recycle bin at the end of the track. If you land on a tile with the recycling symbol on it, you get to put in an extra bottle card, but if you land on the mischievous monkey, you lose one. The goal of the game is to have all of the bottles picked up and put into the recycling bin by the time you reach the end of the track, and if you do, everyone wins, but if you don’t, you have to start from the beginning.”

Most of the board games Houts has put out so far in her career have all been cooperative, rather than competitive. Instead of having one winner, Houts said, the point of a cooperative game is that everyone wins if they work together.

“It teaches cooperation and sharing,” Houts said. “The students can only clean up the park if they work together. The game also helps to develop the students’ counting and fine motor skills. It’s a great game for the students to have fun and learn important lessons.”

With the grant from KCP&L, Houts will provide around 150 total copies of the game to the students and the classrooms. Eugene Field assistant principal Kim Walker said Houts took the lead when it came to applying for the microgrant.

“(Houts) approached me in late July and said there was a grant being offered through KCP&L in an effort to make an environmental difference in the community,” Walker said. “She asked what I thought about applying for the grant to pay to get her upcoming board game in our classrooms and our students’ hands, and I thought it would be a good idea. She did all of the legwork on this microgrant. We’re very appreciative of her and the work she did to make sure we got the funding.”

Twenty-three different microgrants were awarded this year through the KCP&L Energizing Our Environment Microgrant program, which Walker said varied from starting recycling programs to implementing gardens on the property of schools, among other proposed projects. The grant Eugene Field received is worth $1,675.
Article URL: http://www.maryvilledailyforum.com/community/article_d95f519e-9305-11e7-9e45-17e8d1d0057c.html

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<<Previous

My Favorite Biscuit Recipe

Mix-in-the-Pan Applesauce Cake

Involve Kids in Organizing Their Clothing

Cookbook Shelf

Twins Makes Tortillas, Step-by-Step

Birthday Cake Baking with Kids

Reversible Christmas Magazine Rack

Baking Painted Sugar Cookies

Going to Grandma's: A Thanksgiving Game

Houts, Eugene Field Elementary School Receive Microgrant for Recycling Game

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