Yummy Recipes!

Dennis has been wanting some new snacks, so I took to Pinterest and have been testing some out. 

The thought of Cinnamon Sugar Almonds really appealed to him. So I found a recipe for the crock pot. Yeah. That didn't work. I found another for the oven and oh my. They are good. It's going to take all I have to not eat them all. 

Here's the original recipe. 

Cinnamon Sugar Candied Nuts
1 large egg white
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
3 cups almonds

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper; set aside. 
In a small bowl, whisk together egg white an 1 tablespoon water until frothy (about 2 minutes). 
In a medium bowl, combine sugars and cinnamon, set aside. 
in a large bowl, combine almonds and egg miture until well combines. Stir in brown sugar mixture until evenly coated. 
Spread almond mixture onto prepared baking sheet in an even layer. Place into oven and bake for 25-30 minutes, stirring at halftime. 
I also stirred when they were taken out of the oven, then 5 minutes after sitting out. 


The kids (even Grace!) absolutely LOVE this one. 

You can find the original recipe here

Peanut Butter Oatmeal Bars

1 cup peanut butter
1 cup honey
3 cups old-fashioned oats

melt peanut butter and honey
stir in oats
press mixture in 9x9 pan 
cover and let harden overnight


Have fun making yummy snacks!

Naturally Cold Remedy and Road Trip

Many things going on this week, we'll see what gets done with the impending snow storms-those always throw a wrench into things. 

Grace had her birthday on the 17^th. How can my baby be 1 already?  The cake was just a regular box cake, I substituted the eggs (called for two) with two 4 oz jars of banana baby food, each jar was mixed with 1 teaspoon of baking powder.  Tasted pretty good. 

We went car shopping and got a new van. It was time, it's nice to have one reliable car in the house although the payments mean more penny pinching until we get it paid off.

(excuse the messy garage...)

 I love it, although I do feel very small (like I'm driving a truck) and have a feeling I'm going to making a pillow to sit on so I can see out the rear window properly.

Grace caught a bad cold. She's been raspy and lost her voice for three days now (writing on Monday). Nothing touches it. Nothing. I have tried everything I can think of, not even commercial cold medicine could help her sleep. It seems the only thing that does help is eucalyptus oil, even if it is briefly. Eucalyptus helps break down mucus so you can breath easier (along with many other things). I have some mixed in coconut oil with lavener and peppermint for a homemade vapo rub (2 drops of each per 1 tablespoon of coconut oil), which she gets lathered in every diaper change, much to her dismay. I hav also been dripping four or five drops on a towel and keeping it close while she nurses. She is still coughing some, but is able to sleep on her own with no medicine with an end of the crib mattress elevated (I put the boppy pillow under there). 

We are hopefully going to Nebraska again this weekend to see Adrianna and my parents. This will be the first of many road trips in the Sedona.

What I do to prepare for road trips with a 4 year old, 3 year old and 1 year old.

Prayer

Food

Kid Songs

Leave in the middle of the night

LOL That about sums it up. I have my MP3 player loaded with kid songs, but we also have a trial of Sirius XM in the van that I will be using. :D

I make cupcakes of some sort for breakfast, make sure the kids have a bottle of water (Grace still gets cheerios), I get coffee and also have extra snacks of whatever is around the house for later and extra water.

We leave early, then hope the kids go back to sleep.  Both us and Nebraska are set for winter storms this weekend, so the trip is up in the air. 

Ads Are out! Shopping Trip 2/12

Whew! Ads are out again! And I'm very happy to say my shopping is (at least for this month) back to early Thursday morning. Stores won't be as busy. I'm happy about it. :) 

Enjoy your ad shopping. 

Hy-Vee
Fareway
Sunshine Foods

 My menu plan isn't so grea this month, in fact, I only have half my meals planned-but I'm getting plenty of yummy meat so it shouldn't be a problem.  

For Breakfast: Eggs, hashbrowns, bacon, toast, pancakes, waffles, oatmeal, cold cereal 

For Lunches: Tuna (of some sort...), salads for hubby, mac & cheese, quesadillas, cheese sandwiches and chips

For Suppers: tacos, chili, Creamy chicken and broccoli, lemon mustard chicken, pineapple chicken stir fry

One of our supper meals is birthday dinner for Grace (she is turning one on the 17th!!!) and for Hubby.. Since Grace is too little to really care what we do, we are doing the meal that Dennis wants (his mom bought steak) and the cake for Grace. I'm also going to get Dennis some GOOD ice cream (all we have local is Blue Bunny and limited flavors) and pray it doesn't melt on the way home. 

I just finished my list and am pretty sure I am not missing a thing, I'm set to be right around $303 again.  I figured high on the chicken, because I never know how many pounds whole chicken or chicken parts are until I'm at the store. 

No Egg Recipes

My mother in law was kind enough to make my cake, so I had to change my blog post for this week. :) 


I've discovered more allergies in our family. Grace is having issues with eggs, so I'm looking at alternative recipes and egg substitutes.  

With pancakes, I can just leave the egg out and they turn out perfectly fine.  

I attempted waffles. That didn't work out so well.  I tried again today and they turned out better, but the recipe still needs something.  I have a friend who has offered recipes, so I'm messaging her today for help.  

Not too much is going on around here.  Going a little stir crazy in the house, but we are geting through it. 

Have a good week! 

~Tabitha

Birthdays, Birthdays and More Birthdays!

The first four months are chock full birthdays around here.  In January we have Eva's, my dad's, mine and my mom's. February we have Grace's and Dennis'. March has Adrianna's and April has Andrew's.  

The kids get to tell me what kind of cake they want and what decoration they want. We also do their favorite food for lunch (that way they have time to run off the sugar of the cake before bed time). 

For Eva's birthday, she wanted a Thomas the Train cake and pizza for her birthday.  So we got frozen pizza to bake and the kids 'helped' with the cake. (Read as: they ate icing as I was trying to decorate.) 

I was really excited to try out my new cake pans. I finally have round cake pans so I can do a little more with cakes rather than just rectangles.  I wasn't able to get as fancy as I wanted because Grace was sick and getting very grumpy in the high chair. But Eva loved it, and that's the important part. 

I did discover I needed more icing than I made.  There just wasn't enough to my liking. :)  But then, I do have a sweet tooth.  I also didn't realize how little room there was on a round cake and should have put the train on before I wrote the letters, but oh well.  

Hard to believe my little girl is 3 already. Goodness knows she has the attitude to go with it.  


I have plans for my cake, just hope it turns out ok.. That will be next week as we are doing it early... Then the week after we'll do my parent's cake... As long as they let me make it at their house anyway. :)  Just so many cakes going on! :) 

There's my birthday girl.  Complete with pizza sauce. 'Scuse the messy floor behind her. 

Shopping Trip January 17, 2015

Things continue to be crazy around our house. My husband went through a period where he didn't want me to meal plan, just use what we had.... I'm going a little crazy, so back to meal planning. 

There seems to be a few good sales running around stores this week, so it looks like I'm going to be hitting a few more stores to get the sales.  Hopefully Andrew holds up and doesn't go crazy on me. At least the weatherman says it will be a little warmer, hopefully it will. Then the kids can just bundle in sweatshirts and hats and we won't have to take coats on and off half a dozen times. :) 

Well, As it is. Ads are out for this week. I don't have my meal plan made out.. but I do have a few meals in mind, so we'll see how they fit with the sales.  

Here's your ad links

Hy-Vee

Fareway Food Stores and this one too

Sunshine Food Stores and this one too

Happy Ad shopping. If you use HyVee, don't forget to check out the digital coupon section on the site. They download straight onto your fuel saver card, so when that gets scanned for fuel saver points, the coupons come off and you don't have to remember to give them to the cashier. 

Stay Warm!  Our 'high' is around 40 this weekend, hope it gets that warm lol. 

Budget Saving Ideas

I'm sure it's no secret by now we try to save money wherever we can.  One of the biggest things that always plague budgets is TV. Satellite or Cable? Well now there's new options.  

A year ago we found a little box called a Google TV. Amazon has their name brand and Roku also has one. It basically allows you to get online through your TV and watch things, play music.  I even got on Facebook a few times through it. It's come in handy. I think it cost us $100.

A few months ago, my husband found the Google Chromecast stick.. yet again Amazon and Roku also has their own, but Amazon videos don't work well unless you buy theirs, so if you watch a lot from Amazon Prime, keep that in mind. This handy little dude plugs into an HDMI port in your TV and you download an extension on your browser to cast or mirror (depending on the site) anything on your internet browser to your TV. It's pretty awesome. There's also an extra extension to put on your browser that casts things that would normally mirror (including Facebook videos), but make sure you put on the adblock plus extension before visiting the free movie sites or you'll go insane with the popups.  

Just to be clear, "mirroring" means it still plays on your computer, but you can watch it-with the sound-coming through your TV. "Casting" means it sends whatever your watching to your TV and you just have to keep the browser up. 

Hulu mirrors, while Netflix and YouTube cast. YouTube also lets you create a playlist to cast to your TV.  This little stick cost us $30.  Netflix and Hulu subscriptions are $8 each a month. 

Now, we are weird people and listen to music at night, so that's been our major stumbling block here.  We had found a surround sound speaker system we bought initially for the TV...but it didn't work like we thought it would and thought we had wasted $130.. But now that we have it figured out (we aren't exactly technically savvy around here), we have our night time music problem solved. It is a wireless system, we hook in the MP3 player or an old smart phone through our Wifi network on Pandora and let the music go. It will put music in both the kids' rooms, too, because we bought extra speakers.  

We're all set now to give Dish Network the boot... we barely watch TV anyway, it's almost all Netflix or YouTube. We are just waiting for the power cords to come in to keep the smart phone with power all night. 

There are cheaper speakers out there.. or you can just chromecast Pandora through your computer if you don't want it in your bedroom. Once we get rid of Dish, our monthly TV cost will be $16.  It still remains to be seen if Dennis will want to pay to watch Football next season, but it's not a very big fee through ESPN.com.  

The site we use that's free, has a HUGE database of movies and new shows is www.primewire.ag. You want to add the AdBlock Plus extension before you go there. Just do it. You can turn the extension off and on by clicking on it. In the Google Chrome browser, click on the three little bars in the upper right hand corner, go into 'settings', on the left hand side there is an option for 'extensions'. Click it then find Ad Block Plus. 

The only show I haven't found through any of these ways is 19 Kids and Counting. That's because TLC is stingy :( So I'm impatiently waiting to be able to see the new episodes.  

We're hoping we can get on the network web sites after we cancel Dish.. But as for now, it's blocking us out because we have to sign in through Dish... But I have friends telling me they can watch episodes on the sites. 

Hope this helps somebody else.

Tabitha