GFCF MOM! You’re the winner!

GFCF Mom, you’re the winner of four dozen of my cookies.    I’ll e-mail you separately… I’ll need your address!

And… my hubby ate all of the cranberry almond cookies — well, that, and I forgot that I was the snack person at my small group, so between that event, and my hubby’s penchant for that particular variety, they’re all gone.    So, it looks like it will be chocolate-drizzled candy cane cookies, triple-lemon stars, chocolate-vanilla pinwheels, and chocolate-filled sandwich cookies.

Everything, by the way, is all natural (and GFCF), except for the candy canes used in the cookies.  I looked at thee different stores for all-natural candy canes, but no one had any!  But, they’re Spangler, and there’s a note on the box saying that they use dedicated equipment, and the canes are free of cross contamination from gluten and dairy, among other things.

Let me know if you have any other dietary concerns or restrictions, and I’ll try to accommodate you. 

P.S.  It was your Facebook posting(s) that won it for you.  My 11yo son is the one who pulled your name from the very low-tech slips of paper I’d written up. 

Last chance for the veggie contest!! Did I miss anyone??

I (finally) started to tally everyone’s entries into the veggie contest, and I’m afraid I’ve missed some of you!  Obviously, this was a little too challenging (to admit your veggie consumption, or possibly lack of it!), because if I’m counting correctly, I have only ten entries, and FOUR of them are for GFCF Mom!  I know I’m missing one tweet, but I can’t access the tweets any more… they must expire after a fairly short time.  So if that was you, give me a holler!

Anyhoo.  Here’s what I have.  If I’m missing, you, do comment!  If I err, I want it to be on the side of generosity.    Honestly, if postage wasn’t so pricey, I’d send at least a dozen to all of you!!!

• GFCF Mom’s blog post
• GFCF Mom’s tweet
• GFCF Mom’s FB post
• GFCF Mom’s comment on the original post
• Kathy’s FB comment (where, in minor distress, she said that she didn’t have the weights, because all her purchases were from a farmer’s market.  Don’t worry, Kathy, you ALWAYS count with me!!!)
• Daja’s FB activity — posting it on her page and on some friends’ pages (perhaps that should count for two??)
• Daja’s comment on the original post
• Myilie’s comment on the original post
• Jessie’s comment on the original post (and on a FB post of mine… where, in both, she said she doesn’t really eat veggies, but she’s TRYING to eat more, sort of.  I give her a cumulative point just for being honest!!!)
• Amy’s comment on the original post

So!  That’s ten of you.  If there aren’t any more by the time I get back from small group tonight, I really will draw a winner, just shy of one week late.  Daja credited me for extending the deadline, and it really wasn’t that.  It was me trying to get my act together to make cookies, and to tally all the entries, which ended up being more complicated than I had realized it would be.    And, just running out of time to post.  So, my slowness is your gain.  I guess!!

By the way, the winner will get four dozen cookies, all based on my blog’s perennial All Star post (59K+ hits so far!), Big Batch Christmas/Sugar Cookie Recipe (GFCF).  You’ll get a dozen each of:

• Cranberry Almond Cookies
• Triple Lemon Cookies
• Dairy-Free Chocolate Ganache-Filled Sandwich cookies
• Candy Cane Cookies

Alternately, the winner can replace any dozen with a plain dozen cut-outs, for you (or your child) to decorate on your own.

I throw down the veggie gauntlet. (A contest!)

**CLARIFYING**  You do not have to “beat” my family’s veggie consumption in order to win.  You just have to leave a comment with your own family’s weekly produce total.**

You could win a prize.  For real.  Homemade cookies, baked by yours truly.  Gluten-free and dairy/casein-free, and very tasty. As many varieties as I end up making.  You’ll receive three dozen.  Perhaps more.  So, keep reading.

Our current schedule has me grocery shopping every Wednesday evening.  It’s a marathon type grocery shop, in which I visit three or sometimes four stores, over the course of 3-4 hours.  I’m always trying to lessen the time it takes, but to little avail.  If I get home before 11:00, I’m pleased.

As I unload the groceries — in fact, even as I’m shopping — I start thinking, “How am I going to fit all of these in the fridge?  In the pantry?  We’ll never eat this much.  In fact, maybe I can get away with not shopping at all next week!”  But, it never fails:  We eat the food.  And, the next week, I have to go out again.

Baby bok choy

A huge portion of our grocery bill is from fresh fruits and veggies.  We eat a LOT.  A lot.  In fact, I decided to add it all up and figure out, on average, how much each member of our household eats.  Then, I thought I’d run a little contest…  I’ve decided against giving the award to the family who eats the most, because that would be too hard to prove.  So, you have to do is simply participate in order have a chance to win a package of cookies, mailed Priority Mail, from me!

I simply want you to get ONE WEEK’s worth of grocery receipts and total the poundage of all the fresh fruits and veggies, and divide that by how many family members you have, resulting in average pounds of produce per person, per week. OK?  If you purchased 16 pounds of various fresh fruits and veggies, and there are four people in your home, that would be an average of four pounds per person, per week.  And, I know that bigger people eat more than smaller people, but we’re going to ignore that for now, OK?

Rutabagas!

And why is this??  Just because I am curious if anyone out there eats more produce than we do!!  However, even if you eat way less, please play along!!

The only guideline is that it MUST be fresh.  If you purchased a 10 lb bag of potatoes, and you know you’re not going to eat all of them in one week, that’s OK.  It still counts.  Fresh herbs count, too.  Packaged veggies & fruit count if they’re fresh — like bagged salad — as long as there is nothing added to them, like croutons and the like.  Frozen, canned, or dried items, just for this contest, don’t count. Nuts don’t count, either.  For example, this last shopping trip, in addition to what is list below, I purchased six 15 oz cans of petite-diced tomatoes, four cans of green beans, two 12 oz packages of frozen peas and one 12 oz package of frozen baby lima beans, 0.94 lb of dried cranberries, 0.74 lb of raw sunflower seeds, and nearly two pounds of almonds.  But, they don’t count. 

I will pick the winner at random on Friday, December 3rd, 2010, so you have three weeks to enter.  Use only one week of produce purchases, though!  You have more chances to win if you publicize the game in more than one way.

1. Leave a comment below with your per-person fresh produce consumption (that is the only requirement).Other things you could do:
2. Write a blurb on your blog, leaving a link to this post and/or
3. Put a link on your Facebook page.
4. “Like” the OSC Facebook page
5. Um, I guess you could tweet it  (I don’t have a Twitter account, but I’ve seen other bloggy contests where the person hosting the challenge encourages others to tweet. )
6. If you find some other way to publicize the contest, just leave a comment here and tell me about it.

So, if you leave a comment, blog about it, post it on FB, add OSC to your FB “Likes”, tweet, and run a little blurb in your local newspaper, you’d get six chances to win. 

Not that anyone must write it out like this (though you can, of course, if you’d like!  I’d seriously LOVE to see what others are eating), but I’m going to list out all my fruit & veggie purchases:

At Lee Lee Oriental Market:

• 1.64 lb chin kung choy (baby bok choy)
  

  Mexican Grey Squash (a little squatter than zucchini, and much less bitter)

• 2.25 lb turnips
• 0.42 lb fresh ginger root
• 0.56 lb fresh peeled garlic

From Sprouts Farmers’ Market:

• 5 lb carrots
• 3 lb baby carrots
• 5 lb baby watermelon (guessing on the weight of that one — it’s two little seedless watermelons)
• 2.56 lb broccoli
• 1.5 lb celery (guessing on that one, too — one bunch of celery)
• 0.94 lb hot house cucumber (I weighed it — one cucumber)
• 1.83 lb Mexican grey squash
• 0.95 lb parsnips
• 4.0 lb pink grapefruit (they were 4/$1 — such a deal! — and I did weigh one this morning, and it checked in at one pound even, so I’m estimating the total weight)
• 1.06 lb red bell peppers (three small ones.  I weighed them on my kitchen scale)
• 0.50 lb red onion
• 2.54 lb red skinned potatoes
• 1.62 lb rutabaga
• 3.86 lb fuji apples

From Fry’s:

• 4.37 lb seedless red grapes
• 2.25 lb lettuce (3, 12-oz bags)
• 1.01 lb roma tomatoes
• 0.75 lb fresh mushrooms
• 4.67 lb bananas
• 2.0 lbs carrot chips (Yes, that makes ten total pounds of carrots.  We eat a LOT of carrots.)

That makes 54.28 lbs of fresh produce.  We have seven people in our family, so that makes our average per-person consumption at 7.75 lbs per week.

So…  What’s yours?

Something really pretty (a jewelry giveaway!) and something really NOT (ammonia-treated beef)

• A fellow homeschooling mom, much craftier than I, has a contest going until 10/22/10, a giveaway of two separate gift certificates — one for $25 and one for $10.  You can enter in a wide variety of ways.  She doesn’t require a purchase, but I went onto her Etsy shop (she has a second one, here), and I liked *EVERY SINGLE THING*.  I recently sold some curriculum, and used some of the PayPal balance to purchase three things.  I could easily have bought about fifty things, but I restrained myself.
• On a totally different note, as I was researching the use of ammonia (for in my home), I read the Wikipedia entry on it.  Color me SHOCKED when I read a blurb about large fast-food chains using ammonia to disinfect beef for its burgers.  The meat (or should I say, “meat”)  is obtained using a process that liquefies the fat in fatty trimmings and then centrifuges it out.  The fine sludge that remains is then treated with ammonia to kill e-coli and other pathogens.  Now, it appears that only a portion of each patty from McDonald’s and
  

  Beef Products Inc.'s ammonia-treated beef

  Burger King uses the low-quality ammonia-treated beef, but that doesn’t make me feel any better.  I can honestly say that it has been…  I think… two years since I’ve had any beef from either of those two places, but suffice it to say that — IF YOU HAVE TO pH TEST THE LEVEL OF YOUR MEAT TO MAKE SURE IT’S NOT DANGEROUSLY ALKALINE FROM HAVING IT TREATED WITH AMMONIA, then it’s not really anything I want to eat.  Ever again.  EVER.  Sounds too crazy to be true, right?  Too gross??  Sadly, no.  Do read the whole October 2009 New York Times exposé — it’s really interesting.  The focus of the article was primarily on the SAFETY of the meat, and all I could think about was, “THEY’RE TREATING FOOD WITH AMMONIA AND DISCUSSING THE SAFETY AND THE ODOR!!!  THIS IS NOT RIGHT!!!!!!”  Lordy.  Maybe this is one reason why Americans are having such trouble with food pH that is too high, too alkaline…  That’s a whole ‘nother can of worms, I guess. 

  • By the way, on the rare occasions when I have a burger, I really like In-N-Out.  I visited their website, and sent in an e-mail, asking about ammonia in their beef.  They replied, asking me to call their toll-free number, which I did.  Turns out, they do all of their butchering in-house (they have one butcherhouse which is the lone supplier of their meat), and they do not use ammonia in their beef.
  • Beef Products, Inc., the primary producer of this ammonia-treated beef also is a MAJOR supplier for public school cafeteria lunches.  (Add that to the ever-growing list of reasons why I’m happy we homeschool.)

Award for my Dad’s company

My Dad’s company, Neuric, got awarded the 2009 Tech Innovation Award for Software by the Austin Business Journal.  He told me that Neuric is sharing the award with another company, but still, that’s cool.  Woo hoo!

SoftLips Pure Winners!

I’m happy to report that — finally — I had my son Ethan draw winners for my recent blog giveaway of SoftLips Pure. I said I’d do it on Wednesday, but didn’t until Thursday, and am now posting it on Friday.  Better late than never, right?

Congratulations to Christy and Gina! Christy, yours will be in the mail today, and Gina, yours will be headed your way as soon as I get your address.

SoftLips Pure Review and Giveaway!!

First off, please let me express my apologies to the winner of my last giveaway, who had to wait a Long Time for her package, and in fact probably hasn’t received it yet, though it is (truly!) in the mail.  Partly, I was waylaid by illness that struck here with a stranglehold for a good 2½ weeks, but most of the delay was caused by a) my fear and loathing of five-kids-in-the-post-office, and b) my simple, regrettable forgetfulness.

This time, I should be much more prompt, as I can pop the items into a padded envelope, slap some stamps on, and put it in my neighborhood’s outgoing mail box.

Now, onto the real purpose of this post.

Pomegranate SoftLips Pure

When I agreed to review SoftLips Pure lip conditioners, I told the very understanding marketing exec that if I liked it (or mostly liked it), I would post a positive review.  If I didn’t like it, I just would post anything at all.  She agreed (unlike some other pushy marketers who have sent me stuff, in the past).  So… hopefully, y’all will believe that I’m being as unbiased as I can when I say:

We have a winner!

The Mom & Baby giveaway with pHisoderm and Lansinoh products is officially over.  Becky (comment #11) is the lucky winner!  Becky, I’ll be e-mailing you for your address…

Everyone else, don’t lose heart!  I will have another giveaway very, very soon. 

Special thanks to my son, Ethan, who pulled Becky’s number out of a brown paper bag (that was my high-tech selection process).

Mom & Baby GIVEAWAY!!!

One of the perks of blogging that was entirely unexpected by me is that periodically, I’ll be contacted by companies with offers of free stuff that they want me to review and/or promote.  So far, I have not had much success with what has been sent my way;  I haven’t liked the items, or haven’t found any need for them.  Rather than posting a negative review, I just don’t say anything.

This time, though, I’m SO HAPPY to say that I was recently sent some items, some of which even exceeded my expectations!  The company sent me some extra product, so I’m thrilled to offer my first GIVEAWAY, one for mom & baby.

Here are the four items — all going to one winner — included in the giveaway:

• Baby pHisoderm tear-free gel wash (I’m guessing that this is a very new product, because only the cream wash, which is not reviewed here, is listed on their website.)
• Lansinoh diaper rash ointment
• pHisoderm anti-blemish gel facial wash
• pHisoderm anti-blemish cleansing pads

Here’s how you enter:  Simply post a comment! (Feel free to forward a link to anyone you know who might be interested, as well — anyone is welcome to participate!)  The winner will be selected at random in one week’s time – Wednesday the 11th of February, 2009.  When you fill out the comment form, make sure you include an e-mail address that you check regularly.  (No one besides me will be able to see your e-mail addy.)  I will contact the winner by e-mail, offer my congrats, and ask for a mailing address.  The only bummer is that, since these items are fairly heavy and postage is pricey, you can only play if you live in the U.S.

Drumroll, please!

…Our gingerbread castle took second place!  There was — ahem — only two houses in the “group” category.  So, second place also means last place.

Funny, huh?

I also met some people associated with the first place house — they’re from a group home of disabled adults, and they had worked on their house for several weeks.  We worked on ours for 2.5 days.

Since our camera still hasn’t shown up, I don’t have any pics.  But, one of the ladies who has a daughter in the aforementioned group home took pics of our castle, and is going to e-mail them to me.  I’ll post ‘em when they come.

In semi-related news, I have been so relieved to see God taking care of us, like I knew He would.  Well, part of me knew He was/is going to take care of our finances and our Christmas, and part of me was afraid that, yes, He’d take care of us but in such a way that we still wouldn’t be able to provide gifts for our kids for Christmas.  Money is just tight — extra tight, more than ever in our marriage.  I am certainly rejoicing that my husband has a job in the homebuilding business during the worst period in decades for new homebuilding.  But…  I still wanna get my kids stuff for Christmas, you know?  But, God is good, and He’s merciful.  First, I got a $25 giftcard as a somewhat late present for Fiala’s birth.  Then, we got an unexpected $40 refund from my OB/GYN.  Then, the prize for 2nd place was a $50 giftcard.    God really is good.  And, my hubby let me spend the $40 at the fabric store, and I’ve been working on four dresses for Audrey.  I’m gonna make some headbands, too, with the extra cloth, and maybe even a couple of skirts.  Woo hoo!  I have other plans, too, to stretch our $$…

Must run.  Bitsy Fiala is waking.

May the Father similarly encourage you in these tough times!!!!