Encouraging women in homemaking, healthy eating and parenting
Char’s coming!! I can’t wait!! She’ll be here in two more days…and we’ll have so much fun!!! Woohoo!!!
But…
Do you think I should finish getting my guest room ready?
Okay, what in the name of complete and total insanity possibly possessed me to show that to you?
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You might remember me asking for prayers for our littlest guy, Malachi, and his struggle with his eczema. I’ve appreciated all of your comments and emails expressing concern as well as your prayers for him. I know some of you also have kids who struggle with severe eczema. It is SO NOT FUN.
We’ve continued to work with our chiropractor who has been so gracious and kind. We’re currently working to get to the bottom of some food allergy issues, and just continuing to work to get to the root of the problem.
In the meantime…now that the SUN is shining…we’re throwing Malachi outside as much as possible. It is AMAZING how much the Vitamin D from the sun helps him. Really amazing. (Go God!)
His neck was completely and miserably broken out, inflamed and itchy all winter long. It is now totally clear. His legs are usually covered…and they are mostly better now.
It has provided sweet relief for our sweet boy…as he usually doesn’t sleep well at night because he is so itchy. He’s had several nights recently that he has slept all the way through without waking up. That is one big deal for this three year old. (and his parents)
We’ll continue to pray and seek answers for Malachi. But for now, I’m super grateful that he is feeling better and has been given some relief. :)
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What are YOU grateful for? Write about it on your blog, then come link up with us here! Or leave a comment sharing with us about how God is working in your life!
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Heavenly Homemaker's Club Members: Access your homepage and all your fantastic resources here! Not a member yet? Please join us!One day a few weeks ago, I was getting ready to make my Giant Breakfast Cookie recipe…but decided to play with it a bit and create some kind of breakfast bar instead. (I LOVE playing with recipes!)
I came up with these yummy apricot bars and knew I’d have to share it with you.
And then I forgot. (So sorry.)
Then, last week, Marie emailed and asked if I’d try to come up with a good breakfast bar recipe (I think she said something about “since you’re so brilliant in the kitchen”…yeah, that was it.). And I was reminded that indeed – I had already come up with one. So Marie (and everyone else), here you go! (I hope you like them, but if you don’t, can we still be friends?) :)
Apricot Breakfast Bars
2 sticks butter
3/4 cup honey
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup buttermilk
2 eggs
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 1/2 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
1/4 cup sesame seeds
3/4 cup dried apricots
Melt butter and honey together. Remove from heat. Pour mixture into a mixing bowl and add baking soda, salt, vanilla and buttermilk and eggs. Stir in flour, oats, coconut and sesame seeds until well combined. Cut dried apricots into small bites (I usually cut mine into fourths). Fold apricot pieces into dough.
Bake in a 9 x 13 baking pan at 350 degrees for 25 minutes.
You can play with these yourself and add any combination of fruit and nuts – I know I’ll continue to mix and match different ingredients! Enjoy!
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Finally.
It’s been a while since I promised to show you the inside of my freezers and refrigerator. But finally…I opened ’em up and snapped some shots.
I’ve gotta be honest. (It’s not like I’m usually not honest. Why do we use that phrase anyway?) But seriously? Opening up my pantry and trunk to show you was a lot more fun and a lot less embarrassing. I almost took the time to clean out my fridge and re-arrange everything a little more nicely…but then…that wouldn’t quite be telling the truth would it? And my freezers? Well…let’s just say Laura needs to learn to de-frost occasionally.
Okay, ready?
Here are the two freezers we keep in our storage room.
Freezer number one…the meat freezer:
The top shelf is full of Smart Chicken brand chicken breasts that I found on sale for $2.29 a pound. I loaded up…can you tell? (And that’s the part that reallllly needs to be defrosted…can you tell?)
We bought a half a cow last fall and a whole lamb. Pictured is what’s left…plus some frozen baked goods and chicken broth and a casserole. And a pan of frozen buns. I just made them and as soon as they’re frozen, I’ll take them off the pan and throw them into a baggie.
Okay…moving on to freezer number two…the one I call my fruit and veggie freezer:
This freezer is looking a bit more bare than I like…but just wait until the end of gardening season!!! That’s when this freezer is so crammed full of food you can’t get even one more pea into it.
But I still have plenty of green beans and a bag of corn left. I also have strawberries, peaches, blueberries, grapes and rhubarb.
There’s also a big bag of ice for our shaved ice , and a jar of tomato sauce. The door of that freezer also has more tomato sauce…just in case I run out of all the tomato sauce in my pantry. (Which is not likely to happen…ever.)
(BTW…when one is typing the word “pantry” and speaking about things being in one’s “pantry” multiple times in blog posts…one must make sure one does not leave out the letter “r”. It is a mistake easily made…but a mistake one would want to be sure to catch. I’m just saying…)
Okay, moving on back into the kitchen to my fridge and freezer. I have a side by side. It was here when we moved in and it is very nice, but if I were given the choice, I would not choose a side by side. The freezer is too skinny and the ice machine takes up too much space. (But with two large freezers in my storage room…who’s complaining?)
In this skinny little freezer, I keep one bag of each veggie and fruit you saw in my other freezer, so that I don’t have to run out of the kitchen every time I’m making a smoothie or cooking vegetables for a meal. I also have butter and cheese in here, and chocolate chips and pecans and some frozen bananas. This picture turned out kind of dark, so it’s hard to see what a mess this freezer really is all the great food inside.
And now my refrigerator:
See my pretty brown eggs in the door there? And my pretty jars of milk under them? That’s my favorite part of my fridge. Again, this picture is kind of dark, but I’ll try to walk you through it anyway. I have a drawer up at the top where I keep a few random things like cheese sticks and homemade chocolate chips. I also have my rennet in there that I use for making mozzarella cheese. (Wanna learn about that sometime?)
Next I have my big ice cream bucket full of freshly ground flour. (By the way, thanks Marnie for reminding me that it needs to be kept in the fridge. During the winter my kitchen is so cold it doesn’t matter…but once the weather got warmer I forgot to put it back in the fridge!) Also on that shelf there are jars of pears and applesauce and homemade salad dressing. And a big container of Brown Cow yogurt. Yum.
Then of course, more milk, a quart of cream, and some bottles of juice for our shaved ice. I’m really looking forward to putting those juices into our new fridge down at our Shaved Ice Shack ONCE WE CAN FINALLY OPEN because they are kind of taking up space in my fridge and making it hard to keep everything as organized as I would like. (The open date has now been pushed back to June 17…don’t ask.) *ahem*
Under that shelf we have our crisper drawer which is currently full of carrots, broccoli, oranges, grapes and lettuce. And, in the drawer under that, we have 3 loaves of homemade bread and a bag of homemade tortillas. It’s a happy day when I can actually make bread and tortillas and have some left at the end of the day for future use. Yea.
Okay…I hope that freezer and refrigerator tour didn’t bore you to pieces. Don’t worry…I won’t tour you through my closets (“…and here we have our everyday shoes…and our shoes for working in the garden…and our shoes for when it’s raining…”) (snore).
Now that you’ve seen my food stash…we’ll continue through the series and I’ll tell you why we eat all this stuff.
I think my next post in this series will be about our food budget and how we manage to eat what we eat. Sound good?
Heavenly Homemaker's Club Members: Access your homepage and all your fantastic resources here! Not a member yet? Please join us!Today (Sunday) is Asa’s birthday which means he got to choose what we ate all day long! Mmm…great choices.
Sunday, June 8
Cereal (Asa chose this as a treat, since we rarely eat it!)
Grilled hamburgers on homemade buns, homemade potato chips, strawberries, chocolate pound cake with whipped cream
Nachos, grapes
Monday, June 9
Whole wheat pancakes (here’s a fun way to shape your pancakes!)
Grilled cheese sandwiches, fruit smoothies, carrot sticks
Deer steak, mashed potatoes, gravy, peas
Tuesday, June 10
Scrambled eggs, oranges
Sloppy joes, baked beans, cantaloupe
Grilled chicken, stir fried rice and veggies
Wednesday, June 11
Orange muffins, bananas
Pizza Casserole, corn, apples
Spanish rice with chicken, tossed salad
Thursday, June 12
Peanut butter honey toast, fruit and yogurt delight
Hearty bean casserole, pineapple orange slushies
“To Go” foods to eat while we’re at the Farmer’s Market (Homemade pretzels, cheese sticks, carrot sticks, apples)
Friday, June 13
French toast, fruit
Homemade chicken nuggets and fries, watermelon
Homemade pizza, fruit salad
Saturday, June 14
Homemade whole wheat donuts
Cheeseburger macaroni, steamed broccoli and carrots
BBQ meatballs, baked potatoes, green beans
And…if you’d like some free downloadable menu planners to help make your menu planning fun click here!
On the blogging menu for this week: I promise to show you inside my fridge and freezers and continue on with my “Getting Real With Food” series. (In case you need to peek into my pantry again, here you go!) I also plan on talking a bit about my food budget and how we eat real food on a real budget. And…Marie asked me if I could come up with a yummy breakfast bar…and I just couldn’t let her down! I’ll be sharing that recipe this week! :)
Have a great week…and I hope to see you back here soon. Head on over to Org Junkie to find more menu planning ideas!
Heavenly Homemaker's Club Members: Access your homepage and all your fantastic resources here! Not a member yet? Please join us!Remember how I mentioned that we were having a sleep-over this weekend to celebrate Asa’s birthday?
It was SO MUCH FUN!!! Everyone loved it…even me…the lone female in the house.
However…
Six boys came over ranging in ages from 11-13. And um…remember how I mentioned that maybe I should light some scented candles and air out the house before they came? *cough*
The boys began arriving at 5:00 pm on Friday. I am NOT kidding when I tell you that by 5:13 pm I began to wonder if I’d be able to make it through the night and continue to breathe at the same time. Shoooo-ey.
;)
I fed them the promised “Junk Food Buffet”…a lovely arrangement of pizza, hot dogs and french fries (with watermelon…I had to throw in some fruit!).
And then, we crammed all 12 of us into two vehicles (roll down the windows, please) and we went to the bowling alley. (We had free passes…so all the kids got to bowl for absolutely free. Wow.)
Okay, but is it just our bowling alley…or is there a universal bowling alley stink? Open the door…and you’re immediately greeted by this thick, heavy, slice-it-with-a-knife stink that grabs you around the neck and picks you up and threatens to knock you against the wall. After a moment of blinking really hard and fast and gagging a few times…then you just sort of suddenly get used to it and it becomes a part of you. After swimming in the stink for an hour and a half…you walk back out into the fresh air, relieved to be away from the deep fat fried cigarettes coated in sweaty shoes…and you think it will all be okay again. But no. The stink is now clinging to every part of you…and you can’t get away from it. It’s in your clothes, your hair, your skin, your eyelashes, your watch band and under your fingernails. If you move even slightly, a part of the stink releases itself from one of your skin pores…and you are now well aware that indeed, you stink. So, so much. And you can’t even try to get away from it. The stink has become…you.
So maybe your bowling alley doesn’t have the stink and you don’t know what I’m talking about. (I’m so happy for you.)
But we piled our stinky selves back into the van…came home and had some chocolate cheesecake. I enjoyed my cheesecake…but I gotta tell ya…I could hardly even stand to be around myself at that point. So much stink.
Having said all of that though…let me emphasise to you how much fun the party was. It was so stinkin’ much fun!
All of the boys that came are just super kids and played great together. What I appreicated most is that they all included my littler boys in their party without giving it a second thought. They let them join in all their games and they were so sweet to them. They were also all very polite to me and told me how great my food was. And trust me, there were plenty of times for them to tell me how great my food was. After the “Junk Food Buffet” and the chocolate cheesecake…we had shaved ice…and then strawberries, grapes and Pringles. (If you just keep putting food out there…it will be eaten. Wow.) For breakfast the following morning, I made two big pans of homemade cinnamon rolls. Oh, they really appreciated me for those. (I’ll try to post the recipe soon so that you can appreciate me too.)
Asa just had a wonderful time and loved every minute of the party he planned and put together. What a great kid.
It was just a stinkin’ good time.
Heavenly Homemaker's Club Members: Access your homepage and all your fantastic resources here! Not a member yet? Please join us!One thing I’ve never really understood about kid’s birthday parties is why some parents feel like they need to spend a large amount of time, energy and money to make it fun.
I feel like I LIVE in a circus…and certainly when you invite extra children to the party (which of course is what makes a party a party)…it becomes even more of a circus…therefore I’ve never felt the need to spend a lot of money to bring more circus to the circus.
This weekend we’ll be celebrating Asa’s 11th birthday <gulp>…and he’s invited several boys for a sleep-over. All the boys are SO excited (in fact…I’ve heard nothing but birthday talk now for the last few hundred hours)!! The excitement comes simply because we’re having a bunch of friends over. Nothing else. We aren’t doing anything big or extravagant.
We’ll have a nice “Junk Food Buffet” for dinner…birthday cheesecake…and shaved ice. And the kids will run around like crazy in and out of the house doing all of the things boys like to do. And that’s it.
I love it that it doesn’t take lots of money to make my kids happy on their birthdays!
But aaaagh…..it just occured to me what I’m writing about! My house is going to be filled with not only my boys…but six extra 11-13 year old boys!!! I think I’d better start airing the house out now and lighting some scented candles…
(Oh you know I love it!)
:)
Need some frugal ideas? Check in with Biblical Womanhood for Frugal Fridays.
Heavenly Homemaker's Club Members: Access your homepage and all your fantastic resources here! Not a member yet? Please join us!Our local Farmer’s Market opens tonight!!!
Every Thursday night now for the rest of the summer…that’s where we’ll be! I’m SO excited!
I NEED a fresh strawberry. Really badly.
And…along with purchasing lots of fresh, local, very good for us fruits and veggies…we’ll be setting up shop downtown right along with the other venders!
When we purchased our Shaved Ice Machine, one of our intentions was to take it to the Farmer’s Market each week.
(Side note: Our original plan to open up our “Shaved Ice Shack” on June 1 has been post-poned to June 13…due to all kinds of fun licensing and technicality issues. I’ll share more about that adventure soon!)
Soooooo…we’ve got our ice ready and our juices ready and our cups and spoons ready…and we’re very excited to sell shaved ice tonight!
AND…we decided that since we’re going to be set up with a booth at the Farmer’s Market anyway…we might as well bake some things to sell there too. (I had sold baked goods there a few years ago…and it went very well.)
So, today…I’m baking like crazy (which is one of my very favorite things in the world to do)!
I’m making my pretzels (although I’m using white flour and sugar, because it’s not always easy to get my wheat or honey these days…and I’m hoarding it to feed to my own family), applesauce bread, giant chocolate chip cookies, flourless peanut butter cookies and chocolate chip brownies (again with the white stuff).
Baking is very theraputic for me…therefore I will undergo much therapy today and be calm and cool as a cucumber by tonight’s market when I get to eat my fresh strawberry. Ahhh……
What kinds of crazy things do YOU do for therapy?
*UPDATE* Just about the time my therapy session ended (except for the wash all the dishes when you’re done with therapy part)…we got an email letting us know that because of the threat of very horrible weather…the Farmer’s Market will be cancelled for the evening. Grrr. Better safe than sorry though, of course.
Well…looks like for dinner tonight we’ll have Pretzels and Brownies with a side of Cookies. Anyone want to join us? :)
Heavenly Homemaker's Club Members: Access your homepage and all your fantastic resources here! Not a member yet? Please join us!I LOVE using summer time around here to work on fun projects that we just don’t seem to have as much time for during the school year. AND…I think summer time is a great time to focus hard on godly character training with the kids. (Yes…by summer’s end…I plan to rid my children’s hearts completely of all selfishness and pride and lazyness and…*ahem*…well…we’ll be working on it anyway…) :)
Seriously, there are all kinds of fun things to do with the kids during the summer time…and my kids are rarely bored. (If nothing else…we have a pretty big garden with endless weeds. And dirty toilets. And dirty dishes.)
My boys LOVE the summer library reading program in our town…therefore they are inspired to read like crazy all summer long!
Matt is great at assigning the boys outdoor projects…and they love doing these jobs with and for their dad! It is amazing how much help they can be with yard work, hauling stuff, cleaning up wood and sticks, etc. I LOVE watching them work with their daddy!
Inside the house, the boys and I have fun making up new recipes and cooking together. And we play tons of games of Skip-bo. And War. And Old Maid. And Crazy Eights. And we make up our own card games.
As the summer progresses…and we work on fun projects and activities together…I’ll be sure to share the ideas with you! Here’s one idea to start off the summer:
This week one of our kitchen projects was making cool shaped pancakes. Using this whole wheat pancake recipe with a couple of extra tablespoons of milk stirred into the batter…we filled a ketchup-like container with pancake batter and started getting creative with pancake shapes and letters.
This little tool didn’t make it quite as easy as I was hoping it would when I first read the idea…but it was really fun to experiment and play with! (And of course the pancakes tasted good no matter what they ended up looking like!)
Here, Justus is working on a “J” for Justus.
Here’s Asa’s name (And by the way…in case any of the rest of you are wondering ~I’ve been emailed with this question~ Asa’s name is pronounced: “ACE-uh”.)
We were pretty happy with the way this bear and bunny turned out.
We decided the bunny reminded us of Buster on Arthur!
I LOVE this extra “down time” with my kids! I’ll look forward to sharing more ideas with you during the next several weeks! Here’s to a wonderful fun summer with our kids!
Find more great ideas at Rocks in My Dryer!
[tags] kids in the kitchen, summer projects with kids, summer activities[/tags]
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I just needed to take a Gratituesday and appreciate blogging with you.
When I began my HeavenlyHomemakers website back in October…Char, who helped me with the whole thing, suggested that I also have a blog.
Laugh if you must (because I’m totally laughing)…but I had to ask her what exactly a blog was. <Roll your eyes here> I’d been living in a non-computer world for a while…and I’d heard of blogs, but I didn’t really know what I’d do with one. (“Will I need to feed it every day? Does it require daily exercise? What happens when my blog gets wet? Does it stink? Will it create extra laundry? ‘Cause I don’t need extra laundry.”)
Finally Char convinced me to begin a blog. It took writing about two blog posts for me to decide I LOVE blogging!!! And it’s all been exciting and wonderful since then!
The absolute best part of blogging has been getting to know all of you!!! What a wonderful way to be a part of a community of people who can encourage one another and laugh together and give each other tips and pray for one another and share the ways God is working in our lives.
I can’t imagine not having this. I can’t imagine not having this opportunity to get to know you.
Suezque would not have been such a big part of my life had we not been blogging friends as well as cousins.
I am just so, so grateful for this blogging world we are a part of. Thank you for letting me be a part of your blogging world. What a joy!
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What are YOU grateful for this week? Write aboout it on your blog and come over and link up! If you don’t have a blog, just leave a comment here to let us know what God’s been doing in your life.
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