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recipe disclaimer

first off, i am, by no means, a gourmet cook, or even a 'foodie'. i do not watch cooking shows or have any aspirations to become a 'good cook'. i have crappy knives and most of my pots and pans are not stainless steel. BUT, i have a family to feed, and i want to do it right. i try to do 'homemade' as opposed to packaged as often as possible. i like things to be relatively simple, have less than 100 ingredients, have mostly ingredients that i can pronounce the names of, and can find at my local grocery store. i like soups and casseroles and good old fashioned farm food. i try to find things that my whole family will eat, but with a 'chicken nugget and hot dog kid', that's hard to do. that said, i DO NOT make more than one meal per night. if my kids don't want to eat perfectly good food that is in front of them, oh well. they will not starve.

but i digress.

i am NOT a “by the book” cook. i have trouble following a recipe exactly and usually feel the need to ‘fiddle’ with it a little. if you have trouble with terms like “a bunch”, “some”, “a few good shakes” and the like, you might be frustrated by my recipes. i’ll try to be as clear as possible when it really matters!

for convenience, i have a list of links to recipe posts on the side bar.

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week 30 in pictures

sunday:     our neighbors, who live on the lake, invited us for dinner. we had a lovely salmon dinner on the deck on a lovely summer evening. the kids enjoyed their hot tub, we had an amazing fly-by by two hot air balloons, and then we took a little paddle on the lake in one of their canoes. it was a very fun evening. we are blessed with a lot really wonderful neighbors. monday:      looked out the front window in the morning to see this pair feasting on my neighbor’s huckleberry bushes. we watched quietly and took pictures until they made their way across the street and toward my garden… then there was much shouting, window banging, and shane chasing them out of the yard! tuesday:    well, not really. this was actually sunday, but I don’t have a picture for tuesday, but had 2 from sunday. the weather was FINALLY nice enough for shane (and micah and layla) to try out the slip & slide he got for his birthday. it was VERY entertaining to ...

week 46 in pictures

sunday: when dave went in to wake up layla, this is how he found her. face, essentially, smooshed between the bunk bed rail and the mattress, and the covers pulled up over her head. monday: roscoe, chilling on the pooh couch. dakota figured out how to get it to open up to make a nice little doggy bed. roscoe just took advantage when it was vacated. tuesday: my 2 pages of allergy test results . the red ones have to go! wednesday: micah fell asleep during quiet time, snuggling a domino. he had been pretending it was a phone or a video game and insisted on taking it in with him for quiet time. thursday: the missing lug nut . friday: crazy busy day. kids had half days at school because of conferences. I has my workout in the morning, then came home and tidied up because tina was coming over at 11:30 to cut my hair, shane’s hair, and my mom’s hair. I even went to the bus stop w/ part of my hair clipped up because she wasn’t done drying it! then I had to run off to do back-to-back ...

poop phobia

i'm going insane! my daughter is the most neurotic person i have ever met. not to mention aggrivating. we are now on day 3 of this particular round of what i have come to call 'the poop dance'. every 3 days (or so, depending on how long she is physically able to keep it up), we have to deal with layla's absolute insistance not to poop. when i tell people about this, they get all concerned and say that she's constipated and that we should give her miralax, because that's what worked for their kid when they were constipated. well, let me just clear this up. she's not constipated. it's not that she can't poop. it's that she won't. she flat out refuses to poop. eventually it does happen, obviously, but everytime it does, she freaks out, cries, and then apparently makes a mental note of what caused that to happen and then remembers not to do that next time. she used to say, 'i need to poop.' now, you could pay her a million dollars (or m...

November Meal Plan

Meal plans are something that have historically had a big presence on this blog. Not so much in recent years. Well, actually not very much has had much of a presence on this blog in recent years. But I digress.  Meal plans were big back in the day, because the overarching focus of this blog (and my life) at that time was homemaking and all that that entailed. Planning meals was an essential part of that. Unfortunately, my kids were ungracious enough to grow up and I had to grown up with them and get a job, and thus, my focus has hence become divided.  That is not to say that I don’t still have to perform all of those homemaking tasks which, at the time, dominated the bulk of my focus and energy (and all that fun stuff like changing diapers and bathing children and dealing with fevers and runny noses and fighting with the never-ending onslaught of excessive toys), they just get shunted onto the back burner of my time and energy where they continue to taunt me with the guilt of ...

today…

my alarm went off today at 6:10. A full 40 minutes later than usual. Sick days (when you’re not dying and you actually have a pre-arranged sub) are awesome. I went downstairs, poured some coffee with eggnog, made a sandwich for shane, let the dog in, turned on the christmas tree lights, and sat down to catch up on all the excitement that is my FB newsfeed. The highlight is always the “on this day” reel. It’s fun to relive who I used to be. I also read about 2 different friends who have stomach flu going through their houses and made me want to put a plastic haz-mat bubble around the house and not let anyone out. took meds to rid myself of stupid pink eye and sinus infection which are the reason behind my second sick day in a row. after shane left for the bus, I woke up my other kids. micah is still sleeping in his tent. he says he doesn’t want to take it down until the first day of winter. you know, because camping in the winter is not the best idea. layla was not so enthusiastic to ...