Serendipity Mommy

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Top Healthy Finger Food Menu For The Perfect Party

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Whether for the holidays, a special occasion, or just because you feel like it; everybody loves a party! One of the most important parts of any festivity is the food. The hors d’oeuvres we serve are always a treat, but they don’t always treat our bodies as well as our mouths. Luckily, there’s no reason your next party platter cannot be both delicious and healthy. In that spirit, here is a healthy finger foods menu which you can prepare at home, or hire a caterer like Flavours Catering to provide, which is sure to have your guests gossiping about what a smart party planner you are!

Cauliflower Crackers

Chips and dip are classic party fare, but the fat and salt add up fast. You can control both by making these savory crackers. Simply chop one head of raw cauliflower into large chunks and steam until tender. Allowing them to cool to room temperature first, you will want to transfer them into a food processor and mill until they have the consistency of dried oats.

Next, add spices like oregano and garlic powder for an Italian flair. Blend in a tablespoon of your favorite olive oil, two eggs, and enough flour to bind into a dry but malleable dough, and spread the mixture evenly onto an oiled pan. Pop them into a 400-degree oven for about 30 minutes, or until golden brown, and allow them to cool before slicing the sheet into any finger-sized shape you like! These savory crackers pair well with any dip, but tapenade is a particularly apropos choice.

Avocado Crostini

Sometimes the best foods are the ones you fuss with the least, allowing the natural flavors to be the center of attention. Crostini topped with slices of rich, healthy avocado and cherry tomato halves is the very embodiment of this culinary principal!

Simply cut a whole grain baguette into quarter-inch slices, brush them with olive oil, and dust with freshly cracked pepper before toasting them for 15 minutes in a 350-degree oven. Once they’re golden brown to your liking, top them with spoonfuls of avocado, garnish with a cherry tomato, and finish them off with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.

Prosciutto Wrapped Grilled Shrimp

Bacon wrapped treats, and seafood dipped in buttery sauces are a staple of any party scene. While decadent, they are also loaded with extra calories. By substituting prosciutto for the bacon, and substituting the buttery sauce for one rich in healthy fats, your guests can enjoy all of the decadence without the regret.

You can begin by steaming shrimp or buying them pre-cooked from your seafood counter. Cut your prosciutto into thin strips which you can wrap around your shrimp and roll them up. For the sauce, drain a can of crushed San Marzano tomatoes and blend with olive oil and sweet basil. Add a few teaspoons of crushed horseradish for a healthy, spicy take on cocktail sauce.

Time for Tea: Top Tips for the Perfect Afternoon Tea Party

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When was the last time you truly cherished an aromatic and enticing cup of afternoon tea? If it wasn’t yesterday, it’s surely been too long. Afternoon tea is one of life’s little niceties and can make any day more gracious and serene. If you’re unsure how to go about presenting the perfect tea party for your favorite friends, do read on. We’re going to tell you everything you need to know about afternoon tea.

Do the Brits do it best?

When you hear the phrase ‘afternoon tea’ what image comes to mind? If you’re like many people, you envision well-mannered English ladies lingering over a ‘cuppa’ rich, flavorful tea. With cream or without, sweetened or sans sugar, afternoon tea offers a wonderful peek back to a more gracious and relaxed way of living.

A typical tea party in the British Isles presents aromatic tea brewed just so, along with an assortment of light snacks, ladylike sandwiches, and sweet baked goods. There isn’t a set rulebook to guide your baked selections, but you can do quite well by serving scones with jam, prettily iced petit fours, lemon pastries, thin sweet cookies, and flaky tea biscuits, notes British Broadcasting Corporation TV show, Good Food.

Avoid serving soggy sandwiches when you prepare your fillings in advance and stow them in covered containers in your refrigerator. Assemble sandwiches just prior to guest arrival, and you’ll never worry about wet bread again. Perfect fillings for afternoon tea sandwiches include shredded carrot and raisin with hummus and mint on deeply brown bread and open-face sandwiches piled high with smoked salmon and sliced avocado on rye. Both are a nice twist on traditional English tea sandwiches.

To caffeine or not to caffeine

If you desire an afternoon pick-me-up, go for a typically caffeinated tea. Selections include Ceylon silver tips tea, golden monkey black tea, and bergamot-infused Earl Grey. White teas are a lovely option for guests who prefer something with little caffeine. Specialty tea shops such as Teavana offer a splendid assortment of white teas blended with fruits and flowers for an extra boost of healthful antioxidants.

Cups, saucers, tea sets, and table linens

Martha Stewart recommends tea service to turn practically any gathering into a grown-up party. In summertime, lighten things up when you offer tall tumblers, a bucket of ice with tongs, and a selection of garnishes such as lemon wedges, ribbons of lemon peel, fresh spearmint or peppermint leaves, and single-serving sugar cubes.

As far as your tea set is concerned, haul out your grandma’s antique silver service, or shop thrift stores to find an eclectic assortment of mismatched cups and saucers that work together wonderfully. Remember, the most imperative factors of afternoon tea are relaxation, grace, and camaraderie.

Don’t overtax yourself or wear yourself out. Delegate cake and sandwich duties to other guests, if pulling it all together starts to feel like stress to you. Invite an amusing array of guests with varied interests to keep the conversation lively and engaged.

Fall Treats For The Whole Family

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Every year you hear people declare their love for autumn.  Between the richly changing foliage, the smell of pumpkin spices in the air, the excitement of back-to-school, and all the feasting at Thanksgiving, there’s plenty to love. As November inches on toward December, take a moment to soak in the last few weeks of autumn with some rich seasonal treats that make the most of the harvest.

Apple Coffee Cake – Lately, pumpkins and pumpkin spices have been getting all of the love from autumn people, but the apple remains the original harvest fruit, with many varieties coming into season in late September and early October. By November, crisp, sweet, and yellow Opal apples have come into season, which can otherwise be a quiet time for new types of apples. Beyond apple pie, apple coffee cake is a great treat that’s perfect for a weekend treatfor the whole family. All you need is flour, sugar, butter, cinnamon, milk, apples, and Ontario eggs, with 30 minutes in the oven for a fluffy, moist apple cake that will go down great with the morning’s first cup of coffee.

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Pumpkin Maple Bundt Cake – Nothing says fall like pumpkin spices, but you can put a unique spin on things by sweetening this Bundt cake with maple syrup. This recipe from the Egg Farmers of Ontario uses 3 eggs, pumpkin puree, Canadian maple syrup, and the gamut of pumpkin pie flavours: cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, and vanilla.

Pumpkin French Toast Bake – If you can’t get enough of the combination of maple syrup and pumpkin spice, try making a pumpkin French toast bake that will make mornings warm and easy with just a little bit of preparation on a Sunday evening. Cube some cinnamon raisin bread and moisten them with a whisked mixture of eggs, butter, brown sugar, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, and milk. Let it sit in the fridge overnight and warm it up first thing in the morning, then drizzle maple syrup over top before serving.

Spiced Egg Cookies – As November turns into December and the Christmas displays start going up in the department store windows, people inevitably start to think about the holiday season. These tasty treats from getcracking.ca use eggs, flour, baking powder, baking soda, cloves, almond extract and toasted almonds to bring a seasonal taste (and smell) to your kitchen as the chills start to breeze through the air and the tinsel finds its way out of the box.

Eggs play an important part in baking fresh, warm goodies for your family as a natural binding agent that keeps those cakes and cookies together after they come out of the oven. But they’re also nutritious and protein-rich, and when you buy them at your local Ontario supermarket, you know you’re giving your family real, wholesome eggs. You can learn all about Ontario eggs at getcracking.ca,including their health benefits, and more great recipes for the season that capture the feeling of smoky fall smells and leaves crackling under your footsteps. Let your family fall in love with autumn and enjoy it for all its worth with these delicious treats.

Put Your Shopping Skills To Use To Save Money on Utilities

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christmas-ideas

When it comes to gift giving, you already know the importance of shopping around. You likely have a list of cheap (all under $25) Christmas gift ideas. If you don’t find what you’re after at one store or website, you will just go to the next one. In that way, the U.S. is a consumerist paradise.

Many citizens of the world do not have this privilege. Their grocery stores do not have 17 different brands of catsup in 12 convenient size, in your choice of glass or plastic bottles. We not only have that kind of choice for catsup, but for everything. It seems we often forget that as there are some things for which we still do not shop around. Here are a few things you might consider applying more of those well-honed, consumerist skills:

Utilities

For a long time, utilities were among the necessities of life for which we could not shop around. The government fixed the prices so that they were the same for everyone. While that seemed fair on the surface, it just meant that we were all stuck with no choices for service providers. And innovation in the energy space stagnated near the point of death.

According to Just Energy

Deregulation gives consumers choice – the power of the buyer. A deregulated market allows you to choose your commodity supplier. It also motivates retailers to differentiate their products from the utility and those of competitors by developing innovative features, pricing plans and options that would have otherwise not been available to you.

Just Energy is one of the newer suppliers of energy made possible by deregulation. Alberta residents can find their offerings, and many others at AlbertaEnergyProviders.com. There, you can find competitive rates with innovative services and solutions.

One of the areas where competition has really heated up is natural gas, and cleaner electricity options. You might have to pay a little more for more environmentally friendly options. But thanks to deregulation and the ability to shop around, more eco-friendly options are now on the table.

Cell Phone Service

The two things on which people tend to agree regarding the cell phone service situation in the U.S. is that we don’t have enough choice, and that all carriers are evil. For most Americans, choosing a provider is a choice of the least available evils. Sticking with the theme, people tend to go with the devil they know.

Making matters worse, carriers tend to engage in a number of tactics that make it nearly impossible, and terribly expensive to move to a different provider. T-Mobile, however, has been on a campaign to change all that. They have been marketing themselves as the Un-Carrier. Moreover, it is not just marketing. A consumer research group found that T-Mobile was actually making a difference in the industry:

More broadly, CIRP found that T-Mobile’s “Uncarrier” plans are quickly changing the way we pay for smartphones: 13% of Verizon customers, 16% of AT&T customers and 18% of Sprint customers who were eligible for new phones decided to take advantage of their carriers’ new early upgrade plans. In this way, consumers are shifting more toward paying monthly increments on their mobile device so they can upgrade sooner instead of agreeing to two-year wireless contracts.

This research was done about two years ago. Since then, T-Mobile has made several more moves. Most recently, they started offering unlimited video streaming that doesn’t count against the data caps of customers who do not have unlimited plans. This is not to say that anyone should ditch their carrier of choice and jump ship to T-Mobile. It is only to point out that there is now a real choice, where once before, one carrier was much the same as the other.

This post is not about me picking the best services for you. Only you can do that. It is just to remind you that in areas where you may have once felt trapped, you now have a real choice. That can only be a good thing.

4 Delicious (& Healthy) Vegetarian Recipes Kids Will Love

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veggie-kids

Eat your greens! It’s that age-old dilemma: how to get your kids to eat those green vegetable-looking thingys? Mealtimes often end with a sad, conspicuously arranged pile at the edge of the plate, and a stubborn shake of the head when you urge them to just try them, go on…for me? Luckily there are literally tons of delicious recipes packed full of greens that your kids will love. I headed over to the folks at BBC to gather some of the quickest and easiest dishes to get your kids eating the good stuff.

Cauliflower Cheese and Spinach Pasta Bake

Kids love pasta. Kids love cheese. Throw in some cauliflower and spinach and they’ll never tell the difference. Or better yet, they will tell the difference and love it even more so. This pasta bake is incredibly simple yet packed full of goodness, a substitute for macaroni cheese with ten times the nutrients for your young ones. A tried, tested and firm favourite in my household:

Click here for recipe.

Stuffed Tomatoes

Another deliciously easy dish that your kids will love – and love to help you make! Simply stuff tomatoes full of mozzarella, basil, peppers…and whatever other veggies you fancy (you can also add couscous or rice to make them more substantial), pop them in the oven and you’re done! Finally, serve them on toasted bread and you and your child can admire (and enjoy) your handiwork!

Click here for recipe.

Veggie Lasagna

This is an absolute staple – a meat-free lasagna, easy to knock up and (provided you chop them up small enough) packed full of veggies to make sure your child is getting the goodness they need. Let your child help with the layering of the sauce, cheese and lasagna slices to make it more fun – my 9 year old loves to help me out with this.

Click here for recipe.

Pea Hummus

An ingenious way to get your child eating peas, this is simple to make and really useful for packing into lunch boxes as a healthy alternative to Dairylea dunkers. Whizz up peas, tahini, garlic and cannellini beans in a processor for a protein-rich dip to be enjoyed with breadsticks, pitta bread or crudités – your kids will love it!

Click here for recipe.

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