St. Patrick's Day Shake

I was looking at recipes again and found this one for a copycat McDonald's Shamrock Shake.  This isn't my own recipe, just one I found online to try so the link to see the post from the author is here on the Holidays website.

 

 

 

The ingredients are so easy: vanilla ice cream, milk, mint extract and green food coloring (which I thought about skipping, but added for the St. Patrick's day charm.) 

Combine them in the blender.

Each time you do it you get two shakes.  The one on the right is lower as my son wanted to have a small one too!

My husband loves to get these, but we have been trying to go out less, so he had more than one shake at home!

 

I tried to do the math to figure out how much it cost to make them at home.  Our ice cream was the value size for $6 and could be used 8 times to make a shake, the milk was about $4 and could be used 6.4 times, the mint extract was $4 and I guessed it could be used at least 20 times, and the food coloring was $3 and could be used 20 times as well.  I kind of guessed for the extract and food coloring, but I really knew the amounts for the other two.  It works out for two shakes to be $1.73 or $.87 each shake.  Sometimes being in the kitchen really pays off!

Just like me!

Last night I was catching up on the most recent episode of Episodes on Showtime and something Beverly, one of the main characters, did reminded me of myself.  If you don't watch the show, Beverly and her husband moved from London to Los Angeles to write for a TV show that was to be adapted from their hit show in London.  When they arrived the show is changed all around.  Instead of being a boys boarding school with a funny but proper teacher/headmaster they end up with a show about a hockey coach (played by Matt LeBlanc spoofing himself) at a boarding school with a sexy librarian.  The show is going on hiatus, so Bev and her husband are going to move back to London.  She is in the kitchen making stir fry and her husband walks in and asks about what she is cooking and she tells him that it is stir fry that has gotten a bit out of hand.  She doesn't want to waste any food so she is adding all sorts of things to the chicken stir fry like raisins and biscotti.  His comment is that, "You know not everything has to be an ingredient, right?"  I hate wasting food, so I have been known to add little bits of left overs to things to use them up.  I made my own soup once with left over pork and vegetables, but had three meatballs still in the frig, so I cut them up and added them too.  I will look up and create recipes with what is left from making something else so as not to waste it.  Last week I made a lemon pie because I had condensed sweetened milk left over from these chocolate caramel shortbread bars I made, but I didn't have enough for the first recipe I found so I found a similar key lime pie and changed the amounts to make it lemon instead.  Anyone else out there obsessed with using everything for something?

Recipes and Facebook

Lately, whenever I log into Facebook, I see a lot of recipes.  I must have liked something at some point that makes recipes show up in  my feed.  So I click on them and save them for later.  Sometimes I even try them right away.  Some are hits and some are misses, but while stuck at home this winter I have felt very often like "I could eat" and it has motivated me to try something.  The best thing I have made lately were hot pretzels for the Superbowl that tasted like they came from Auntie Anne's!  I need to go and find that recipe and repost or link to it here because it really was a winner!  Yesterday I tried out Hawaiian Rolls and I am thinking about making homemade Oreos, except we are almost out of milk and our cars are still snowed in, so that just may have to wait!  I am going to have to break out the camera and start recording my kitchen experiments!