Chicken Gyro Recipe

Last night was one of those perfect nights with friends- complete with bonfire, acoustic guitar, nostalgic story telling, crazy dancing, and burgers at 2am. It was also a little celebration for taking my final FTCE (Florida Teacher Certification Exam). I'm SO glad to be done with those exams. They aren't too hard, but pretty pricey and way too long. Bad news is I have to take two Tennessee ones now [sigh]. Hopefully these won't be too hard, either! Certification is a tricky thing, y'all.

So after (hopefully) acing my FTCE and staying up late last night, I was so happy to sleep in today and decided to make chicken gyros for dinner! I spent the summer of 2010 in Paris with Cru at UF doing outreach on college campuses and we absolutely fell in love with gyros, or kababs, as they called them. You have to eat them with fries stuffed inside and you have to have a banana/Nutella crepe for dessert. Sorry. Those are the rules.

See- House of Gyros, what more could you ask for?!

My first Parisian crepe. Oh baby. 

So tonight I had a little taste of Paris again. Awwww. Before I tell you about the food, let me introduce you to my IPad stand I use in the kitchen. It is magical.

I use online recipes A LOT (and listen to music) so it comes in handy.
You can find it here by Belkin. 

Anyway, important things: I used the gyro recipe from Hungry Girl and doubled it so we would have 4 servings :

Ingredients (original amounts for 2 servings): 
Sauce
1/4 cup plain fat-free Greek yogurt
3 tbsp. peeled and finely chopped seedless cucumber
1 1/2 tsp. chopped fresh dill
1 tsp. lemon juice
1/4 tsp. chopped garlic
1/8 tsp. salt
Marinade and Chicken
1/3 cup lemon juice
1 1/4 tsp. dried oregano
1 tsp. chopped garlic
1/8 tsp. salt
8 oz. raw boneless skinless chicken breast, cut into 1-inch cubes
Gyros
2 high-fiber pitas
1/4 cup chopped seedless cucumber
1/4 cup halved grape or cherry tomatoes
2 tbsp. crumbled reduced-fat feta cheese

All of the above. And fries. Duh. 

Mix your sauce ingredients, cover it, and put it in the fridge.

Mix your marinade. 

Chop up your chicken and put it all in a giant ziploc bag for at least 20 minutes in the fridge.

Dance to music in the kitchen until your 20 minutes is up [optional].

Then you saute the chicken on the stove, put the fries in the oven, and mix together the chopped cucumber, halved grape tomatoes, and feta cheese.

When you are ready to assemble, you can warm the pita up in the microwave, then put some sauce, chicken, and cucumber mixture in your pita. Fries go last ;) Also, I put everything INSIDE the pita because it was easier, but the website originally said to put it on top. To each his own.

Mmmmm so yummy. 

Afterwards, homemade crepes from Skinnytaste! With bananas and Nutella, of course.

C'est bon. C'est tres tres bon.

Hey, let's just run away to Paris and eat like this every night. Who's with me??

Decimal Activity

Happy Veteran's Day! We have the day off, and I've used my long weekend to recover from a cold. I had to use my first sick day this year on Friday, but I'm glad I did because Friday was the worst day of it and I was able to just sit in the bath tub and watch TV all day. Hehe, but some good news came to me Thursday night. I applied for Teach For America and was notified that I was invited to a final interview! I was just hoping to have a phone interview, but to find out that I can skip that step was so nice! So I have a final interview in December and will know the first week of January if I'm accepted. It would be really nice to know where I'm going by January- we'll just have to wait and see.

Eeeeeek! haha

Now that I'm starting to feel better, I thought I'd share a little activity I did with my kids last week. We're learning about decimals and they're expected to know through the thousandths place and how to pronounce them properly (which is something I have to be careful about, myself!) They really like using their dry-erase markers on white boards, so we came up with this:

So simple, but so much potential

Did you know you could put any worksheet in one of those protective sleeves and kids can write on them using dry-erase markers?! This changes everything. We did some practice like "Write the number one and three tenths" or "Write a number with a '4' in the hundredths place", etc.

Then we did a fun activity where everyone writes a number on their sheet, then passes it to their right. The next step is to write the number in word form, then pass to the right. The next step is to write in expanded form, then pass to the right. The fourth person has to check that everything is correct. Then you start over!

I have such great handwriting

You can mix this up in a bunch of ways. Sometimes we had the fourth step be "write an equivalent decimal", sometimes we made them stop at hundredths, sometimes they could go through thousandths. You could do this with normal place value, too! So many options. And when they're done, just erase!

Maaaaaaagic

I'm definitely going to be using these protective sheets for more activities. Hope you are enjoying your Veteran's Day weekend. We have four days this week and then two days next week before Thanksgiving break. Time is absolutely FLYING by!

Something is Not Right

Hello friends! Don't be alarmed by the title of this post, it's referring to Madeline by Ludwig Bemelman. Do you remember the story? The twelve little girls in two straight lines, the littlest one was Madeline! Why am I talking about Madeline, you ask? Well, one of our little ones had to get his appendix out =[ and ALL I could think about was Madeline. In the story, she gets her appendix out and gets bunches of toys and a cool scar, which makes the other girls want to get theirs out too!

Love using literature to connect real life situations

I told the kids about their friend and then read the book aloud while they made cards at the end of the day Thursday. It was a nice way to end the day and I know our sweet patient will love getting cards from all his classmates.

The book was also a really nice way to introduce surgery to the kids and we then had the opportunity to talk about being under anesthesia, having a scar, getting toys and/or ice cream, and how long until their friend was back in school.

Look how colorful the cards are! Didn't they do a great job?!

Hot topic with the kids: should you draw an appendix on a card or would that upset him?
What does an appendix even look like? They decided NOT to draw the organ, btw.

The kids are probably going to be a bit let down that he won't have a big ol' scar like Madeline did, but times have changed, kiddos! Homemade cards make everything better, though, and I can't wait for our sweet boy to be back with us this week =]

Immune System Failure

Ok so who predicted that after a mere 9 days of exposure to the kiddies I would come down with a head cold? We should really have made bets on this because it is so inevitable. I love those kids but they're like walking bacteria and I can feel my immune system screaming at me to just run away and never look back. But alas, I did not listen. I wasn't always so quick to fail, though, and I didn't miss a single day of my pre-internship last semester. Not a single day. Here's how and what I need to remember to do now:

1) Eat right and take a daily vitamin
You know the whole "apple a day" thing? It's real. Maybe that's why you're supposed to give teacher's apples? IT'S ALL COMING TOGETHER. That and a daily multi-vitamin. I started taking these this year and I swear it boosts my immune system. Do it. They're cheap and can only help.

So excited for those apples!

2) Hand sanitize so much your hands crack and bleed
Kidding about making your hands crack and bleed, but I am not kidding about hand sanitizer. I never kid about hand sanitizer. I am so careful about using it after I touch anything and definitely before I eat or touch my face at all. We have a giant hand sanitizer pump and I use it pretty much anytime I walk by it. Kill those germs.

Don't do this though. Seriously. Don't.

3) SLEEP
According to my mother, lack of sleep is responsible for all the evil in the world. Like, if only the terrorists got more sleep, they'd be more level headed, and if all the politicians slept better, we would have a nice, clean campaign. So obviously, whenever I'm feeling run down, sleep is to blame. The most annoying part of this is how right she is. If I don't get a solid 8 hours each night, my immune system gets all sassy and defiant and is all "Whatever, I told you to run. You're on your own. Peace."

That middle picture? See it? It's important.

That's what happened this weekend. Long weekend = hanging out without a bedtime = feeling like death on labor day. At least I had some yoga pants, hot tea, and the entire first season of Gossip Girl. Stay well everybody! And get some sleep!