Book Update: Our book club over “How Children Succeed” by Paul Tough was awesome! What a great springboard to some great questions about society, parenting, teaching and children. My new books are both by Abraham Mlodinow. The most recent published books is “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior” which is more psychology and physiology. His older book is also really interesting, but also reminds me how inept I am at higher mathematics. It is called “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” which is much more mathematical using algebra (Blah!), Pascal and Bournelli’s theorems (dah!) and statistics (okay… I can handle statistics). So, if you want to learn why we all choose Pepsi over Coke except Coke is purchased more, and why someone completely blind can still avoid physical obstacles in his path, or why the legal gets so many suspects wrong – then “Subliminal” may be for you. If you want to learn why there is no real “randomness”, why CEO’s and movie CEO’s should not really be fired for the past 5 years of past performance, why sometimes when you praise someone for something they perform worse on the next task, or want a refresher on probablities and statistics… then “The Drunkard’s Walk” may be for you. They are not my favorite reads (uh, cuz I suck at math)… but I find them really interesting and curious concerning how we tend to make conclusions based on very little data.
Recipe Update: I’ve seen various ways to do stuffed strawberries on Pinterest, so I thought I would just figure it out by look at a photo. Why I liked this recipe: well it has strawberries which is like my favorite food ever, it was relatively quick to put together, it was easy to do, and you can prepare it hours in advance of your event. For book club, I had these made in the morning while the Lemon Mascarpone Blondies baked and threw together a quick salad and stuffed celery (mixture of cream cheese and smoked mozzerella tomato blend). Boom – everything was out on a plate before people arrived in less than 5 minutes.
Cheesecake Stuffed Strawberries
about 20 strawberries (about 6-8 people)
20 medium to large strawberries
8 oz. cream cheese or light cream cheese, softened
4 tsp. lemon lime cheesecake blend, or 2 tsp. of lemon zest (add 1 tsp. lime zest optional)
1/2 cup Cool Whip, House Whip, TruWhip or real whipped cream
1. Soften cream cheese.
2. Make sure the strawberries are clean. Cut off the tops.
3. Hull out the inside of the strawberry with a huller or corer or paring knife. (Pampered Chef is selling their corer for $1 in their outlet this week!)
4. In a medium bowl: mix cream cheese and cheesecake blend or zest.
5. Fold in the whipped cream/Cool Whip.
6. Put the cheesecake mixture into a pastry bag or Ziplock bag with the corner cut off. I used the Wilton 1M tip on my pastry bag.
7. Fill the strawberries with the mixture.
8. You could add some crushed graham crackers to the top to add to the cheesecake effect. I thought they looked prettier without, so I left this off.
9. Serve immediately or wrap and store in the fridge. Since it is strawberries… they may last 1-2 days in the fridge. We ate ours so fast and cut strawberries get juicey so fast I wouldn’t want to make them any sooner.
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