All Rileyed Up

Q: What do you get when you cross one of my favorite times of year with one of my favorite foods to eat?
A: An aaaaa-vo-caaaaaaa-doooooooh Halloween treat, oooooh! (I hope you read that with your ghostliest voice)

Behold the Green Goblins!

The Green Goblins are a quick n’ easy recipe with Mexican avocados (AKA the Hass variety) that you can serve at all your Fall Festival-slash-Harvest -slash-Halloween-slash-whatever other politically correctly name exists-parties. Of course, when it comes to avocados, you’re probably thinking April through June, cool dip for a hot day, but hey, guess what — you can get avocados all year long, and when you have a food that is naturally green and gooey, how could you possibly pass up using it in a Halloween dish?

Ingredients:

4 Hass avocados
Juice from 1 lemon
1 tablespoon finely chopped cilantro
2 teaspoons finely chopped green onion
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
4 turns on a black pepper mill

Box of Sesame crackers or Triscuits (Triscuits are in the picture because, ahem, I got carried away taste testing the sesame crackers)
1 can of sliced black olives
1 bag of julienne carrot strips
1 bag of shredded red cabbage
1/2 cup ground pumpkin seed (optional)

How to Make:

Mix the avocados, lemon juice, cilantro, green onion, salt, nutmeg, and black pepper all together. You can put it in a food processor or mash it with good old fashioned elbow grease. If you’re cooking with children, you can put all the ingredients in a Ziploc bag and let them mash it up.

Lay out the crackers and snip the end off the Ziploc to pipe out the mashed avocado, or use a watermelon baller to scoop it onto the crackers.

Place two olive slices for eyes, and then poke the carrot strips into the middle. Use a piece of shredded cabbage for the mouth.

Once you have a full platter, sprinkle with ground pumpkin seed (I made mine by popping a handful of roasted seeds in my Magic Bullet for 10 seconds).

You’re done! Eat!

You can make up your own avocado recipe and enter the Spookamole contest, as well as check out other Fall-themed avocado recipes at the Avocados from Mexico website.

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I wrote this review while participating in a Spookamole blog tour by Mom Central Consulting on behalf of Avocados from Mexico and received avocado items to facilitate my review and a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate.

The Boy went in for his six-year-old well check yesterday and like a fool, I forgot to bring the school form that I needed the doctor to fill out. Which means I’ll be making another visit to the doctor. Not that going to the doctor is such an uncommon thing for me.

When your child has severe eczema, your child is an easy target for infections, which means you visit the doctor. A LOT. I saw my doctor’s admin at the community center over the holidays and she totally knew my name. I hate to say it, but this level of recognition isn’t really par for the course any more in doctors’ offices, so you KNOW I’m there a lot.

The good news is that Doctor thought The Boy looked pretty good at his well check yesterday. He’s growing, getting taller, gaining weight, has normal blood pressure, and she proclaimed his skin “not bad for The Boy.”

Happy dance!

So, of course, Doctor wants to talk about how we’re treating his skin. A combination of obsession, dietary changes, advice from alternative health practitioners (chiropractor, naturopathic, acupuncture), and limited use of topical steroids.

I’ve unfortunately been through many prescription drugs in the past six years to treat eczema. For those of you with drug use history, you might relate well to the uncomfortable moments when you asked for a refill only to find out that such-and-such drug has been recalled. This has happened twice to me in the past, once with a topical non-steroid-but-prescription-strength cream (now available again on the market) and an oral steroid that I enjoy administering about as much as I might enjoy eating the dirt cleaned out of my toenails.

If you haven’t been in this situation, here is a brief reenactment:

Me: Why was it recalled?
Former Doctor: Hmm. I don’t know exactly. Something like causing cancer in monkeys? Or something like that. But don’t worry about it.

While you’re at it, why don’t you give me a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice on it?

Now, between you and me (and, you know, the internet-reading public), I think it’s best to avoid prescription drugs whenever possible. I’m always making an effort to use as little steroid as possible. But sometimes, it just happens that that prescription drugs come in handy, like when I had a MRSA infection that wouldn’t go away until I took crazy antibiotics. But I’ve always been paranoid about how to keep track of drug information, like recalls and bad reactions, which is why it was even more upsetting to not once but TWICE be caught unawares by a recall.

And this is why I’m glad to be a member of MomCentral. I recently received this message from them about Drugs.com and MedNotes:

“MedNotes provides a free online personalized medication management program that can be used to track the whole family’s medication profiles… you can enter the names of all the medications being taken and then register to receive drug safety or interaction alerts to ultimately help reduce dangerous side effects and avoid unwanted drug interactions. In addition, MedNotes will send you new drug and specific condition news released by the FDA or drug makers related to the medications your family members take.”

Thank you, Drugs.com and MedNotes, for relieving my worries. Now if I could just get everyone in the house to a point where we didn’t have to use the drugs at all…

Today, I snuck off on my own to do a bit of Christmas shopping. It’s both exciting and frustrating to go gift shopping. For instance, the $10 Guiness shaped can that can be used as a piggy bank once you’ve removed the Guiness themed boxer shorts from it seems like a cute stocking stuffer, but also like an inordinately overpriced piece of trash. Are we really going to use the piggy bank? No. The Boy might, but am I really going to give him a fake can of beer to use as a piggy bank? No.

I’m constantly not sure about whether or not to get this one thing or that other thing. I prefer buying practical presents, but I also don’t want to be known as the woman who gives kids toothbrushes and underwear for Christmas. This is why I enjoy browsing Gift Guides (though I find Beck’s take on Oprah’s gift guide even better than the real one).
Mom Central, a network of mothers which I belong to, also has a Gift Guide. See the new nifty button on my sidebar? Here it is again:

I rather liked this gift suggestion For Him:

After you get over the notion of your own insignificance, it’s really cool to see how beautiful and striking the world beyond our planet is.

These cards For Her are also cute:

I am a sucker for note cards. What can I say, they’re pretty. When I was a kid, I used to try to make them myself with cut outs from magazines and such. They often came out sticky from too much glue. These are much nicer.

There’s plenty of gift ideas, and also lots of categories — Baby/Toddler, Kids, Tweens, Teens, Pets, and, of course, what would a website be without Giveaways. To be eligible to win prizes, register here with the Mom Central Testing Panel.

Enjoy your shopping!