Recipe Tuesday: Low-Carb Tagalong Bars

I've been on and off the low-carb lifestyle since 2013, on this time since September of 2015. It's what works for me, and I've lost 55 pounds so far.

What I find most difficult is when the rest of my family is enjoying foods that I choose not to eat. We have a Girl Scout in the family, and I'm proud to say that I did not eat a single Girl Scout cookie this year. That being said, this morning when my husband pulled out a box of Tagalongs from his stash, I felt a pang of longing.

So, of course, I turned to my trusty internet, and found this fabulous and easy recipe. I didn't feel like shopping for any ingredients, so I made a few alterations, and I am extremely happy with the result. I used the sweeteners that I have on hand, and instead of using real peanut butter, I used pb2 powder.  I did this for two reasons; one because peanut butter is a huge pain for me to measure and clean up, and two because pb2 has significantly less calories. Even though I'm low-carb, calories still count! Here's my version of Joy Filled Eats Low-Carb Tagalong Bars.



"Shortbread" Layer
3/4 cup Almond Flour
1 Tbsp Granulated Splenda
2 Tbsp Powdered Swerve
pinch of salt
3 Tbsp unsalted butter, softened
1 tsp vanilla

Peanut Butter Layer
1/2 cup pb2 powder
3 Tbsp Powdered Swerve
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup water

Chocolate Layer
1 3.5 oz bar 100% cacao Ghirardelli chocolate bar (or anything over 80% cacao)
40 drops liquid Stevia
2 Tbsp Powdered Swerve

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and grease an 8x8 pan
2. In a medium bowl, combine "Shortbread" ingredients (I found a fork to be the easiest utensil to mix with), then spread thinly into prepared pan (this ended up being a lot thinner than I expected it to be, but I was able to cover the entire bottom of the pan)
3. Bake for 15-20 minutes, or until golden brown 
4. While that bakes, prepare your peanut butter layer. Mix pb2 powder and powdered swerve together, then add water and vanilla.  Mix until smooth
5. Pour peanut butter layer over warm "shortbread." Smooth gently into edges. The residual heat will help spread the peanut butter smoothly
6. In microwave or double boiler, melt chocolate and add sweetener. Pour over peanut butter layer and gently spread to edges (I just used a spatula for this part)
7. Place in refrigerator until hardened
8. To cut into bars, I upended the pan onto a cutting board, and the entire thing easily came out of the pan. I then used a pizza cutter to slice into bars.  The tops of some of the chocolate cracked, but since I'm the only one eating these, I wasn't too worried about it

Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures of the process because I didn't think about making a blog post out of this until I tried how delicious they are.  But if you head over to the original recipe, there are quite a few good pictures.  I hope you try these, and let us know if you like! 

Summer Part Two

This is the last week of school for four of the five kids. The Stinkboy will be finishing 6th grade, Spuddies and Boones are finishing up 7th grade, and The D is wrapping up his sophomore year of high school.

I'm not sure when or how all of these kids got so old. I was looking back at newborn pictures of the Missus, and even though these 17 months feel like they've passed in the blink of an eye, I can see how much younger each of the older kids looked, and the nostalgia can be almost overwhelming.

But enough of that sweet sadness. Summer is almost here, and what the heck am I going to do with all of these children?! I swear, used to look forward to summer vacation.

I do have some plans.

I did the Zombies 5k (which is the Zombies, Run! version of the couch-to-5k) starting in February of this year. I completed it in a little over eight weeks, and then continued running about three times a week since then. Now I've got two of the kids interested in running with me! They think that the zombies sound fun, and I think that they are a little embarrassed that they can't keep up with me when we go walking. So, starting this weekend, I'll strap the Missus into her jogging stroller and have the Stinkboy and Spuddies trailing behind me as I lead them to running a 5k before the end of summer! I hope they are both able to stick with it, because I don't plan on forcing them to go, just encouraging them. Hopefully having each other as accountability will help as well. I think I'll have them drag our dog Willow along, too. I've been wanting to bring her along, but I haven't been brave enough to wrangle a stroller AND a dog.

I'm not looking forward to a fight that will probably be coming up soon with the Stinkboy's father. Stinkboy has been on the receiving end of quite a lot of bullying at the middle school he's been attending in the next town over, and he's ready to try the small school here in the Village. His father has been fighting me on letting him go here for six years, but now that Stinkboy is the one who wants to go, I'll be giving it all I've got. Stay tuned for more drama on that front.

One thing that I've slacked on lately is my chore chart. The kids' schedule has been very chaotic lately. Stinkboy has only been with us weekends, while Spuddies has elected to stay with us full-time. The D and Boones are still with us every other week, but they also come over after school on their mother's week. Boones, however, stays after school quite a few days. So it's been kind of a headache trying to write up a weekly chore chart, and instead I've been asking the kids to do individual chores as they come up. But now that summer is here, and they'll all be home messing up the house all day, I'll be putting the chore chart to work again! I love it when the house is clean and I'm not the only one who cleaned it!

Summer

My oldest just had his last day of Kindergarten. I know. I can't believe how quickly the year has gone by! He's had summer breaks in the past, but his preschool went until mid-July so I only had 6 weeks without the structure that school adds to our lives.

Historically, this time has been, well, not good. Every morning would begin with some sort of screen time, and getting the screens turned off so we could go out and do something, anything, often resulted in a big fight. But this summer I want things to be different. And I think I know the key, but I don't really like it: I have to be on top of our daily and weekly schedules.

Over the past year I've been doing lots of soul searching (think Myers-Briggs and Enneagram, taking self-study courses and just trying to be more introspective about myself and the choices I make). I've realized that while I dislike a strict schedule, I also really like knowing what to expect each day. Yes, I realize that this is a contradiction, and it's something I'm trying to come to terms with and balance out. (If you care, I'm an INFP and a 9).

Here's my plan to both have a plan but not have a strict schedule:



Zeke and I are going to agree ahead of time to our basic daily schedule, and also a basic weekly schedule. So far it's been working!

What's working less well? My attempt at a daily schedule. I haven't been as strict at enforcing bedtime so far this week (which is not a terrible thing since my kids will sleep in if they stay up - I know lots of kids aren't like this!). So we've all been getting up later and we've been starting later. I'm trying to give myself grace this week to not be perfect, but I want to get us back to getting up earlier and getting out of the house before 11 o'clock.

That's my goal for next week! I will keep you updated on the whole endeavor, I'm sure you're riveted. But really being this disciplined is not my strong suit, so it's kind of a big deal that I'm giving it a go.

How do you keep your unstructured time productive? If you have kids, what are your strategies for summer? We love your comments and input!

Beginnings

a younger Miss Snow tormenting our chickens while a cat looks on.

Alex and I have been discussing at length whether or not to start blogging as we're both home with little kids all day and would love some kind of creative outlet. And while this seems all very 2009 of us, I think we are still going to give it a go.

I've been stymied by wanting to be too professional about it, and wanting to go with some kind of super fancy, slick layout, with a legit domain. The whole shebang. But I just impulsively decided that we could just go old school and free with it and try out blogger just to get ourselves started. So here it is, the silly first post that I'm trying to type out madly as Snow terrorizes our backyard chickens (yes, we're THOSE kind of Oaklanders, backyard chicken gentrifiers).

I'll type up an about me page next, and get Alex more on board (she's expressed interest but we both stalled out with the title. Then it just hit me: why don't we use our names? Duh. Such a simple solution, and has the added benefit of being original, since apparently we're the rare
sister set named Elizabeth and Alexandra (which is actually surprising to me). We have another sister named Catherine, but she has a "real" job, i.e., one that pays real money and allows her to leave the house alone for hours during the day.

Welcome to our little blogging experiment! Hope you enjoy the journey with us.