Monday Meals: One-Dish Chicken & Vegetables

Here follows the recipe to one of our favorite meals ever! 

It comes from the Busy Family Cookbook (not being paid to say this), so you know it’s fairly easy to prepare, and the ingredients are not difficult to find. (Onion soup mix makes everything taste more flavorful!)

Friday Pie-Day: Black Forest Freezer Pie

I had never made black forest anything before, but when I saw this recipe in my pie book from Taste of Home, it looked intriguing, so… I made it! (Pie of the month this year!) Not only was it simple to make, it turned out beautifully and tasted wonderful!

Toddler Flower Wall

This was one of the fun things we did when we learned about flowers. (More coming soon!)

Monday Meals: Tea Party Recipes

This weekend I hosted a tea party for several of my lovely coworkers! We had a lovely time, but I couldn’t have done it without my family’s help!

Friday Pie-Day: Blueberry Lemon Pie

By now you’ve probably figured out that our family loves pie. It’s our fourth year of making a different pie every month, and I’m just now getting caught up on the previous years’ pies. (This was from April 2012.) But here’s a disclosure: my favorite kind of pie is a hot fruit pie, so this one hit the spot! 

Rainy Day Crafts for Toddlers

April showers bring crafty powers!

Because some afternoons in Florida look like this.

Monday Meals: Guacamole

Yes, I have made a meal out of guacamole. I actually avoided trying it for several years because I didn’t know what was in it (stupid reason, I know), but after a dear friend introduced it to me last year, I have fallen in love. Since then I have made it many, many times, and yes, it has definitely been a filling lunch for me on a few occasions.

Toddler Stars

I have so many things to blog about and ideas to share that I am just now getting around to our toddler class’ shape for December, which was predictably the star. (My new full-time job is a little bit of a distraction too… in a good way!) Anyway, as with our other shapes of the month, it is all about fun and learning through play. Here are 4 things we did with stars in addition to all our other Christmas activities.

Friday Pie-Day: Raisin Pie

I made this rather quirky pie in 2011 as our "pie of the month," and it’s one of my mom’s favorites! I must say it exceeded my expectations, and it was quite tasty and fairly easy to make.

Toddler Color Bottles

Toddlerhood is so exciting – everything they do is a learning experience. The explosion of vocabulary manifests itself all throughout the day, so they are able to verbalize the things they are discovering. (Of course, it helps to have attentive adults who can assist in labeling experiences and objects for their ever-growing minds.) With all this comes the beginning of learning the “things they need to know,” such as animal sounds, body parts, numbers, letters, shapes, and… COLORS!!!

Monday Meals: Chicken Tarragon

The first time I made this meal, I felt like a gourmet chef. Not that it’s difficult, but I did learn how to julienne because of it. (I admit I turned to Youtube.)

Homemade Granola

Every time we make granola, I ask myself why we don’t make it more often. It’s so fast and easy to make, it doesn’t take a lot of ingredients, and it tastes amazing! Maybe the answer is that it’s gobbled up so fast that I don’t always want to have that temptation. And yet, it’s healthy, so what’s the problem?

Friday Pie-Day: Lemon Meringue Pie

“The century was young, the horseless carriage was making a tentative appearance, and ladies’ skirts still swept the ground in the early 1900s when this classic recipe was printed on the Argo Cornstarch package.” So reads the introduction to this recipe in Best Recipes from the Backs of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Jars, a book we found on our shelves when we were searching for a good lemon meringue pie recipe. We actually had Argo cornstarch in our pantry, and guess what? They are still printing this recipe on the back!

DIY Magnet Boards

Magnets are something every child should get to play with, and I wanted to incorporate them into our science center, but they’re just so expensive! Then I saw this idea on Pinterest, and I knew I had to do it! So I did!

Secret Church

This Good Friday, I had the opportunity to join with 63,000 Christians worldwide for a “secret church” service via simulcast. It was an incredible, humbling, life-changing, instructive, awesome, worshipful, overwhelming experience. I will be doing it again next year if at all possible!

April Fools Brownies

This was what I laid out on the staff break room table today.

And when my coworkers pulled up the foil, this is what they saw.

Monday Meals: Easter Lunch

Instead of a normal recipe for this week’s Monday Meals, I opted to share our Easter lunch menu with you. We came up with Bible verses to go along with all the dishes.

Slow-Cooker Turkey

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I have longed to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were unwilling.” – Matthew 23:37