Donuts (doughnuts?) and Side Dishes

Here is the link for the donuts that we made for the pumpkin patch. It was our first experience making donuts and I can't wait to try a different kind. The donuts were a lot easier to make than I thought they would be.

http://www.mondaymorningdonut.com/2013/05/glazed-old-fashioned-rings-and-holes.html

I don't know about you, but I struggle sometimes with what to serve with my dinners during the week. I have my standby frozen vegetables that I steam, but sometimes I want something different. Here are a couple of simple side dishes that I have made recently.

Tomatoes and Cucumbers
tomatoes, diced
cucumbers, diced
ranch dressing

This was super easy. I just diced some tomatoes and cucumbers. Then we put them on our forks and dipped them in ranch dressing. We have had a lot of tomatoes (from other peoples' gardens) and cucumbers (from our garden :) ) recently. This was just another way that I found to use them.

Sweet Carrots
bag of baby carrots
butter (1-2 tablespoons depending on how many carrots you use)
brown sugar

Carrots are naturally sweet when you steam them so I decided to play on this idea. I steamed my carrots, which takes forever!! When they were steamed to the desired tenderness I tossed the carrots with some butter and brown sugar. It ended up making a kind of syrup. Tyler told me after this that steamed carrots are one of his favorite vegetables. I never would have known?!

Happy cooking!
Heather

THE Muffins!

okay ladies... no pictures here, but these are THE muffins that are going to blow your mind!  Okay, maybe they aren't THAT amazing, but I have made them at least 10 times already.  I made them for a new mommy that I visit teach so that she could have something easy to grab and eat when she needed, I made them for a little family that just got home from vacation and didn't have food for school on Monday morning, I made them about 5 times for Brinley who requested them in her lunch box and I made them for conference morning and we called them conference cupcakes!  Ready go...
2/3 cup vegetable oil
2 large eggs
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup white flour
1 cup wheat flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 cup shredded zucchini (about 1 medium zucchini)
1 cup shredded carrot (about 2 carrots)

grease 12 muffin cups, bake at 375 for about 20 minutes. you can sprinkle cinnamon and sugar on tops too if you want, I also add about 1/2-3/4 cup of chopped pecans.
Enjoy,
Shae

Before and After

I feel like this is a bit of a cop out. I must admit that food has not been a high priority for me lately. Especially making it!! Really doing a whole lot of anything hasn't been appealing lately.

I'm going to share some before and after pics of our home. It has been keeping us busy for the last six months. I don't think we have any more projects on the horizon, but you never know :)

The railing was definitely what sold us on the house :)

I should have taken a picture when my flower pots looked better. Maybe it adds to our Halloween decor.

Another lovely railing and nothing, but dirt and mud.

Our new stairs, patio, and fire pit.

A taste of the green color and the...dirty color.

This is where most of the green was.

We have a lot more pictures of bedrooms and dirty carpet, but I figured this was a good glimpse of how we changed things. Hopefully I feel more like a food post next time or have something more creative to share.

Love ya,

Heather

Mini Conference Breakfast!

I haven't posted in here for a LONG time - and I'm glad to see y'all are still faithfully posting!

I haven't done much since joshy was born besides cuddle with him and admire him all day, so cooking much (besides heating up something frozen) has definitely been out of the question. so today I made a breakfast I can actually post!

I saw this on Pinterest and had to give it a try. It's definitely not hard-just a different twist on something we already make. 

For Conference morning today we had MINI GERMAN PANCAKES! I loved them-something fun and different. Just use your regular German pancake recipe and pour it into a greased muffin pan and bake at 425 for 18-25 minutes. There is a recipe attached to the pin I found on Pinterest but I'm pretty sure you can use any German pancake recipe. Also-I just sprayed the muffin pan with cooking spray and that eliminated the extra butter and it worked great! This will make 12-16 muffins. I only made 12 and you can see how huge mine came out! I could have filled them less full and got more pancakes. But having big pancakes was fun too. :) We served them with diced strawberries, powdered sugar, syrup, and of course a big glass of milk. Making a fun syrup would have been a good addition too!

Enjoy!

Kristi 

Tooth Fairy Pillow

I just wanted to share my latest creation thanks to Pinterest! No loose teeth yet but I will be ready when it happens :)

There is a little heart pocket for the teeth in the back and a convenient location for the tooth fairy to leave money. 

I just love Pinterest!!

5 Dollar Dinner

When we we're kids we used to do what is called five dollar dinners. I remembered this last Saturday when it came time to fix dinner, I didn't want to, and we were heading to the store anyway.

Here's how it works each family member, or group gets a certain amount of money. When we were kids it was two dollars, so for our family of six dinner was only twelve dollars. On Saturday we split into two teams, because obviously Taylor isn't old enough to do this on her own. You have ten minutes to spend your money on things for dinner. The only rules are with that whatever you decide to get there has to be enough for everyone and you can't go over your dollar amount. *Warning these may not be the most nutritious dinners at your house.*

Taylor was on my team and Ty was a team of his own. I asked Taylor what she wanted for dinner in typical kid response she said, "M&Ms." Did we have M&Ms for dinner? You bet!! I had a picture of what we had for dinner, but it somehow got deleted so I'll just have to tell you. Prepare for this totally awesome dinner....Bagels with cream cheese, M&Ms, chips, string cheese, and ice cream. As I said before totally not healthy, but fun and something different where everyone is apart of the dinner planning, buying, and making process.  

In an unrelated note. What are your Halloween traditions as a family, and with the kiddos? Taylor is finally to the age where she is starting to understand what a holiday is so I want to start some fun traditions. The only tradition we have is we go trick-or-treating at Tyler and Sharon's work places. I want to maybe try these waffles http://the-wilson-world.blogspot.com/2011/10/jack-o-lantern-waffles.html for breakfast and maybe a pumpkin soup for dinner. What activities or fun things do you do?

Love ya,
Heather

Cozi

For the past few years I have been flip flopping between a paper and a digital planner/home organization system. I love having a binder that I can throw all my calendars,lesson ideas, Jackie's school papers,etc into; but there was a big problem. I don't always have that binder with me. So I wasn't able to see our monthly menu at the grocery store, or jot down our activity for FHE when the inspiration hits me during church, or look at my to do list. And I didn't want to have 10 different apps to help me get things done.
And then I found it. An incredible digital home organization/planning app. And its free.
Let me introduce you to Cozi (unless of course you already use it :)

Here is what I LOVE about it:
1. There is a mobile app and an online version for your desktop. So I can type up what I want to at my computer and then access it whenever/wherever I want on my phone.
2. It's free. There is a Gold version- which looks pretty cool- but its 30 bucks a year and I am too cheap to subscribe to it. The free version is amazing anyway.
3. I can add recipes.
4. I can import the ingredients to those recipes to my shopping list... which is SO handy when I am at the store!
5. There are different categories of shopping lists- so you can organize your lists by stores.
6. I can create a meal plan. And then I can print that meal plan and stick it in my binder if I feel so inclined! :)
7. There is a journal section. I am so bad at remembering to journal so this makes it easy. I can add a pic to the journal entry and then share it with others if I want.
8. There is a calendar. There are different colored items for each member of the family and I can look at just my calendar items, or Aaron's, or our entire families.
9. All family members have access to the app and can edit calendars, meal plans, shopping lists (so if Aaron is at the store he could see what we need to buy without having to call me. I say "could" because I have yet to convince him to download the app. He thinks its too girly. Whatever! Its awesome!)
10. There is a pretty cool to do list section. You can add your own lists- categorize them by the different people in your family (again- imagine how cool it would be to digitally add items to Aaron's to do list!) You can also import other cool pre-made lists like Fly Lady's zone cleaning lists or What Your Child Needs to Learn in Kindergarten.

OK- there you have it! An awesome app that you might have already heard of but if not you should totally try it out!
Love you all!
Happy planning! :)