Dave and Buster's Cheeseburger Pizza (Modified)

Ingredients

1. 1 tbsp cornmeal
2. 10 oz pizza dough
3. 2 tbsp olive oil
4. 6 tbsp ketchup/mustard mix (50/50 mix of each)
5. ¾ cup cheddar cheese -- shredded
6. 1 cup Ground Beef -- cooked
7. 2 tbsp Dill Pickles -- chopped
8. 2 tbsp Red Onions -- chopped
9. ½ cup mozzarella cheese -- shredded
10. 1 tbsp Catsup
11. 1 tbsp Bacon -- crispy, crumbled
12. 2 tbsp Red Onions -- diced

Directions

1. Dip the pizza dough in flour and roll out the pizza dough to form a 10 to 11 inch circle. Place on a pan that has been lightly dusted with cornmeal.
2. Ladle on ketchup/mustard mixture and spread almost to edges. Place cheeseburger cheese evenly over pizza.
3. Place the chargrilled diced burger, pickles, red onions and the shredded mozzarella cheese.
4. Bake the pizza in a preheated oven at 450 degrees F for about 12 to 15 minutes.
5. When the pizza is cooked, remove from the oven and place the following items on top evenly to the edges: spicy ketchup, crispy crumbled bacon bits,, diced onions.

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Sweet and Sour Pork Roast (Freezer Meal)

Sweet and Sour Pork Roast

Ingredients

1. 3 lb lean pork roast
2. 1/4 cup ketchup
3. 1/4 cup soy sauce
4. 1/2 cup vinegar
5. 1 cup sugar
6. 1 20-ounce can crushed pineapple

Directions

1. To Prepare for Group:Combine ketchup, soy sauce, vinegar, and sugar in sandwich bag. Bag pork roast. Place sandwich bag in bag with roast. Label pineapple.
2. Cooking Day:
   Brown the pork roast on all sides and put it in your slow cooker. Drain pineapple.Mix pineapple with sauce and bring it to a boil, then pour it over the meat. Cook on low for 4 hours or until very tender (spoon the sauce over the meat every once in a while).

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Japanese-Style Sesame Green Beans

Ingredients

1. 1 tablespoon canola oil
2. 1 1/2 teaspoons sesame oil
3. 1 pound fresh green beans, washed
4. 1 tablespoon soy sauce
5. 1 tablespoon toasted sesame seeds

Directions

1. Warm a large skillet or wok over medium heat. When the skillet is hot, pour in canola and sesame oils, then place whole green beans into the skillet. Stir the beans to coat with oil. Cook until the beans are bright green and slightly browned in spots, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat, and stir in soy sauce; cover, and let sit about 5 minutes. Transfer to a serving platter, and sprinkle with toasted sesame seeds.

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March - Week 1 Meals and Grocery List

This morning I was reminded why I like to go grocery shopping by myself. *sigh*  I know J wants to help, but I like to read labels.  Usually, I go while he is at school.  Yesterday, however, a migraine kept me from moving, so we made a trip to the store together this morning.  It was definitely an adventure.

I'm going to try putting up recipes and grocery lists to go with the meal plans.  I know there a lot of ways to do grocery shopping.  I read an article yesterday about a lady who claims to spend only $200 a month on groceries.  That sounds great, but I don't shop that way.  First, I try not to buy a lot of processed foods.  I also shop organic and from the health market sections a lot, which increases my bill.  But, the biggest thing for me is I just don't coupon or stock-pile.  If you do, great.  I just don't find it worth my time.  I do look for printable coupons and use what I find, but I don't shop based on the coupons.  I clip coupons based on what I need.  For example, today I used a whole 1 coupon.  Yep.  That's it.  For $1 off Splenda, which was on my list anyway.  So, you can probably save a lot of money on groceries if you use my plans and list, but add in coupons.

Since this is my first post on grocery lists, I'll tell you how I put my list together each week.

Step 1: Decide When to Go
That sounds pretty easy, and not all that important, right?  Well, actually, it's a very important step.  I usually try to go to the store on Tuesday mornings while J is in preschool.  So I shop for Wednesday evening through the following Wednesday lunch.  Why Wednesday and not Tuesday?  Well, what if someone is sick (like what happened to me this week)?  Or if it storms?  That way I can be a day off, and not be completely out of luck.

Step 2: Meal Plan
This is where I spend most of my time.  I talked about how I do my meal planning for dinners here.  You can get my complete month of dinners for March here.  For grocery planning, though, I only need this week.  So, here is this week's dinners:

• Wednesday: Church Dinner
• Thursday: Apple Glazed Roast Pork, Creamed Peas and Potatoes
• Friday: Teriyaki Meatball Bowls with Jasmine Rice, Sweet and Sour Vegetables
• Saturday: Beanie Weanies, Corn Bread
• Sunday: Vegetable Soup, Crackers and Cheese
• Monday: Fajitas, Chips and Salsa
• Tuesday: Spaghetti Pie, Salad, Georgian Cheese Bread

Breakfasts.  I usually pick out a few things that sound good, but don't assign them a day.  Muffins, scones, etc. I will freeze and have around for other days. This week, I planned:

• Peach Cobbler Protein Shake
• Samoa Protein Shake
• Chocolate Chunk Muffins
• Lemon Poppyseed Muffins

Lunches.  I plan Saturday lunch, we eat out Sunday lunch after church, and then I choose weekday lunches without assigning a day.

• Saturday: Cannelloni (since I was sick Tuesday, I didn't cook.  So these are moving to Saturday lunch), Salad
• Beet and Pomegranate Salad with Cottage Cheese
• Spicy Thai Noodles (I'll use chicken instead of tofu)
• Baja Style Chicken Bowl
• Chicken Taquitos and salad

Step 3: Make List of ALL Ingredients
That's right.  I list ALL of the ingredients for ALL of the meals I'm going to make.  That way I can go through the list and check off the things I have and I don't miss anything.  For this week, you can find the list here.

Step 4: What do you Have?
Go through the fridge, pantry, freezer.  Cross off anything on the list you already have.   For me, this usually takes off about 1/2 of the list.  This week, unfortunately, I needed a bunch of staples.

Step 5: Coupons
If you do use coupons, this is where you would do that step.  I also take the time to go through the ads for our local grocery store.  One of the great things about our story is their Fuel Saver card.  If you have a HyVee store, definitely look into it.  I look through the Fuel Saver ad each week and see if anything I need (or use, but don't necessarily need this week) I add it to the list.  Most of the time, I end up with about 30-50 cents/gallon off my next tank.

Step 6: SHOP!
So, go ahead and take the recipe list in step 3, do your shopping and have a great week!

(Moving On...Week 2 can be found here.)

March Menu

Here is the template for March.  Notice that I put the 31st at the top.  This just kept me from having to make a whole new row just for one day.  If that confuses you, you can renumber it.  Now I’ll fill out my meal plans using the steps I outlined here.

Step 1:

Our family doesn’t have a whole lot going on this month that will force us to eat out.  Don’t get me wrong, we have lots of evening activities (cub scouts, dance classes, science fair).  We’ll just plan to eat early enough to make it out of the house in time.

Step 2:

Once again, Wednesdays are going to be Church Dinner nights.  So, that’s one meal a week already taken care of.  And there are two holidays in March: Easter and St. Patrick’s Day.  Easter is (obviously) on a Sunday.  We’ll probably do something nice for lunch, so I’m not too worried about planning a great dinner.  I’m thinking a nice broccoli cheese soup and some bread would be awesome for Easter supper.  St. Patrick’s Day is even easier.  It’s a tradition to make Corned Beef and Cabbage for my family for St. Pat’s.  This year, it’s even easier since one of our co-op meals from February was Corned Beef and Cabbage. :)

Step 3:

Now we move on to Co-op meals.  I have a few meals left in the freezer from the last few months that need to be used: 

• Sweet and Sour Pork Roast - slow cooker meal
• Balsamic Brown Sugar Pork Loin - slow cooker meal

This month I'm bringing home 6 meals:

• Sri Lankan Beef Curry - Mongolian Monday
• Spaghetti Pie - Tuscan Tuesday
• Crockpot Shredded Chicken and Noodles - Fix-It-Up Friday (And I’ll have to remember to have something on hand for M because of his allergies - fish sticks maybe?)
• Cuban Pork - Fix-It-Up Friday
• Ravioli Soup - Soup/Salad/Sandwich Sunday
• Colorado Style Beef Enchiladas - Mexican Monday

Once these have taken their place on the calendar, I can begin filling in the rest.

Step 4:

For the remaining main dishes, I started with magazines I’d dog-earred.  From Taste of Home, I pulled out Beef Bolognese with Liguine.  Nothing else really inspired me, so I just pulled out some standbys for this month, and then searched for a couple of new recipes.  Specifically, I needed something for the crock-pot.  Usually, we have a lot of crock-pot meals for co-op, but this month, not so much.  So I found Jerk Pork Wraps with Lime Mayo and a Vegetarian Minestrone.

Up next is side dishes.  I’d found a recipe for Rosemary Dinner Rolls in Taste of Home that would go with my Broccoli-Cheese Soup for Easter.  There was also some Lemony Broccoli that looked good, so I stuck that in with Scalloped Potatoes and Ham.

The Finished Product:

Here is the menu for March.  Hopefully this inspires some ideas for you.  Some of these recipes look super yummy to me.  I plan to start sharing recipes tomorrow.  We just got back from a trip to Disney World, and I’ve been playing catch-up the last week.  

Introducing "Unicorn"

 Every spring, the kindergarten classes at our elementary school have a unit on pets.  So far this week, our daughter has come home wanting a mouse, a guinea pig, a rabbit, and a baby turtle.  We told her she would have to settle for a dog and a cat...which we already have.

As a part of the unit, the kids have to create a "pet" out of recycled materials.  They will have a class pet show where they all stand up and introduce their pets for the parents.  When C was in kindergarten, his pet was "Buster", a turtle made from styrofoam plates, tin cans, and an egg carton.

This year it is G's turn.  She chose a snake.  I was happy with this choice, as a snake seemed like a pretty easy one to do.  And I had everything on hand except spray paint.

• Cans - we used 7 of various sizes
• Spray paint
• Acrylic paint and brushes
• An awl (I think that's what it's called?)
• Yarn
• Hot glue
• Pony beads
• Googly eyes
• Scrap of felt

We started by punching a hole in the center of the top of each can.  We used some tool from my husband's workshop.  I think it was an awl?  Or something.  Tools aren't my forte.

Next, we sprayed the cans green.  This was G's choice.  It was a very bright green!!! (The cans are on this odd shaped board so we could spray them in the garage and bring them inside to dry.  It is too cold to dry properly out there.)

Once the cans were dry, they got decorated.  We used acrylic paint that I have left over from some project.  Here is a picture of G painting...

And the finished cans:

Then we had to assemble the snake.  This sounded so easy in my head.  Just tie a knot in the yarn, thread it through, and tie another knot on the other side so the can stayed in place.  Yeah.  I have pretty small hands, but not small enough to tie a knot inside the can close enough to keep the can from moving.  Plus, the holes in the cans were so big that we would have had to quintuple knot the yarn to keep it from sliding through.

Luckily, I had the hot glue gun all warmed up to attach the eyes, so we just improvised.  I tied a double knot in the end of the yarn, slid it to the hole and covered it with massive amounts of molten glue.  Once that set, I tied another double knot at about the bottom of the can and repeated the routine.  We followed this system until the last can.  The last can we put on the opposite way so that there wasn't an empty hole at the end of the snake.

Now for embellishments.  We added several ponybeads for the "rattle" on the end of the yarn.  Again, I used copious amounts of hot glue to hold these on.  Googly eyes went on the "head".  We cut a tongue out of pink felt and glued that on.  And then the snake received her name...Unicorn.  Don't ask.

How I Stopped the Hair Combing Fits!

I have a 5 year old girl.  This means I have a 5 year old eardrum-shattering banshee when it comes to hair combing time.  I have tried everything...hair detangler, combing it wet, combing it dry, leave in conditioner, sleeping in braids.  It doesn't seem to matter what I try.  It's wailing, "I hate you", screaming, sobbing torture.

And then came a stroke of genius.  A friend had her daughter's hair done really cute for dance class one day and mentioned that she had these cards with different hair-do's on them and let her daughter pick one that morning  I think they were American Girl cards?  Anyway.  I thought maybe if I let G pick her own hair style, she would agree not to throw a tantrum.  It's worth a try, right?

Rather than buy cards, I decided to make my own hair-do catalog.  So I sat down on the computer and used Pinterest to find some cute dos.  I think I pulled off 18 - anything from a really simple ponytail, to this complicated-looking braided flower thing.  I made 3x5 rectangles in a word processing program.  I put a picture of each hair-do in one.  For the complicated ones, I put instructions in another box.  Then I printed them off.

Now to make a book she can look through.  I gathered up the supplies:

• The pages I printed
• Index cards
• Colored Markers
• Glue stick
• Scissors
• Contact paper (someday I will get a laminator...sigh)
• Paper punch
• Small piece of ribbon

Then I started making the book:

1. I cut out all of the photos and instructions.
2. I wrote the title and colored a pretty cover on one of the index cards
3. I used the glue stick to put a photo on the front and the corresponding instructions on the back of each index card.  The exception was a few really easy dos.  For these, I don't need instructions.  So I put a picture on each side of the card.
4. I laminated the cards with contact paper (Mine is really old and has been crumpled up in the craft cabinet, so the pages aren't as smooth as I would like.  Again, wishing for a laminator...)
5. I punched a hole in the upper left corner of each card and tied them together with a pretty pink ribbon.

This was a really easy project, but so far has had great effects!  We've been using it for 3 days now, and I haven't had a single tantrum.  AND her hair has looked super cute.  Her kindergarten teacher told her yesterday how pretty her hair looked. :)

Here's the finished project: