A happy Saturday to you all!  This roundup includes a thought from the week, my blog roundup and interesting posts I have read.  And bonus, I added the chick cam at the end of this post!

This week was not a good week in the kitchen.  We have been trying to eat healthier, cook more meals at home, and experiment with new foods.  This week I saw a recipe on one of my favorite sites for a healthy chocolate pudding.  I won’t name the site because I don’t want to give it any negative attention.  The recipe involved blending a banana, half of an avocado, some cocoa, vanilla extract and cinnamon into a chocolaty pudding.  In theory this sounded good since we like all these things.

I knew we were in trouble when I started blending this up in the food processor.  Our 5 year-old was helping me and she was pretty grossed out.  We whisked up the whipped topping that was made of coconut milk and it tasted pretty good.  I put the little parfaits together and set them in the fridge to set up.  Our 5 year-old did not want to try one.  The baby went to bed before I had a chance to let her try one.  My wife and I sat down to try one and we made it through a few bites.

Failure!  Although this morning there has been success.  Our 15 month-old baby loves these chocolate parfaits.  She had one for breakfast and barely let me slow down long enough to get a quick pic of her devouring one.  So, there was a silver-lining for this recipe, but it won’t be going into our book of “keepers.”

That’s the way it goes when you’re trying new things.  Sometimes you have great successes and other times there are flops.  Earlier this week I found a tasty recipe for scratch made red velvet cake.  I whipped up the cake batter on Wednesday afternoon with our 5 year-old after I got home from work.  By the way, this was not a healthy recipe 🙂  The batter turned out beautifully and the cakes baked up nicely.  In a hurry to get the cake finished so we could get off to mid-week worship, I rushed things and ruined one of the layers of the two layer cake.  Adapt and adjust.  We frosted the other half and had a nice single layer cake, with sprinkles on it of course.

We learned some things that work for our family this week and some things that don’t work.  The best part, we spent some time together doing good things and having fun, learning together.

My week of blogging:

This week I had two very successful posts at the beginning of the week.  Things have been a bit calmer here at the end of the week.

Monday – The High Cost of Eating Out and Goal Update – I was honestly surprised that this post took off as fast as it did.  It actually set the record for most views in one day for my site.

Tuesday – The God of Football? and Family Devotional Week 6 – A lot of new people looked at my family devotional post this week because of the catchy title and subject matter.

Friday – Kata Laptop / Camera Backpack: Favorite Things Friday – My favorite bag!

Some favorite blog posts I read:

It feels like Spring is here in Texas.  Neil Sperry, our local outdoor and gardening guru, has been posting a number of resources about gardening.  I found this chart about fruit and nut trees to be especially helpful since I have some young peach trees that need some attention.  If you are on Facebook or Twitter you might consider adding Neil Sperry for a constant flow of tips and tricks.

Earlier this week I found a good article on getting out there and trying things that you have been talking about or dreaming about for a long time.  Jonathan Fields wrote about “Stop Talking. Start Doing.”  The post detailed his disconnection from email and ‘connecting’ so he could refocus on ‘doing.’  All of his posts are thought provoking. Along those lines, I also saw this quote from Henry Ford – “You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.”

And finally another one from the “How I Work” series at Lifehacker.com.  This time they interviewed Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote.  I found it interesting that he makes it a point not to do any work on flights.  He plays games, reads, sleeps…just relaxes.