Kids Summer Calendar

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Easy, Healthy & Delicious Family Food - French Market Soup

Happy Spring!!

It's been a while since I've posted but I wanted to share about an easy, healthy delicious soup that can be enjoyed year-round.  First of all, let me start by clarifying that I do not consider myself to be a wonderful cook/chef/baker and I don't aspire to be one.  I am a mom to four kids ages seven and under and like most people, I like to eat!  :)  My main goal is to provide my family with mostly healthy meals and I'd like to think the most important ingredient in all of our meals is love.  Whether it be frozen waffles or a rare made-from-scratch anything meal, I do a little prayer as I make the food and ask that the person/people eating the food will feel loved and nourished.

My Grandma Wilson passed away a couple of years ago but one of my cherished memories is going to the tea room in Stratford called In Good Company with my her, my mom, and usually at least one or two of the kids.  We would go at least once a month for as long as I can remember.  Grandma's favorites were butterscotch pie and scalloped chicken (in that order).  One of my favorites was a bowl of French Market Soup.  The tea room closed in October 2014, but thankfully the owner, Janet, created a cookbook with a compilation of all of her delicious recipes.  Excitedly, I flipped through the cookbook to find French Market Soup and was thrilled to see it but not so thrilled to see that it yielded 1 and 1/2 gallons of soup.  That is a lot of soup for 2 adults and 4 kids ages 7 and under so I gave up on trying it for a while.

We sold our old home and moved into a new home in January and I started thinking about the soup again.  Isaac was going to have a birthday in early March and we would have enough relatives over to possibly eat 1 and 1/2 gallons of soup!!  I stopped by Story City Locker to pick up the meats and was greeted by the owners, Bobbie Jo and Ty Gustafson.  This was the first time I had been in their store (I had been meaning to go for a while) and it was so clean and they had all sorts of goodies for sale.  I left with a whole chicken (recipe calls for 2 chicken breasts), 2 packages of smoked andouille sausage, and a ham steak.  I'm telling you, this soup is a complete meal in itself!

I love how the meats have the farms listed on the labels where the meat came from!


Here are the non-meat ingredients - since this recipe came from a cookbook, I can't share it exactly on a blog, but you can probably guess:



Also, all of the meats were cooked except the chicken.  I got the chicken the afternoon before the party and it was completely frozen.  Bobbie said I could just "crock it" and I'd never heard of this before, but I followed Bobbie's advice and put the chicken in my crockpot and turned it on high for a few hours, maybe about 4 or so, and then turned the heat down and continued to cook the chicken after it had thawed.  My chicken was so big it didn't quite fit but I put aluminum foil all around the lid and crock pot to seal it up and it turned out great!

I had to take a picture of the dry beans in the pot - so pretty!!

After I had cooked the beans for a while with the recommended amount of water, I added the tomatoes.  I noticed some of the water had boiled off so I added some more hot water and decided to put a lid on the pot to help keep the moisture in (and I read that this is good when cooking beans for soups, makes the beans more tender).


Meanwhile, this was happening in another pan (again, so pretty!):


And then we added the meats, the smoked andouille sausage was lean and the seasonings were wonderful, not too spicy but very flavorful:

And after a little more simmering, this is what the soup looked like - it smelled so delicious!!

I come from a mostly Norwegian family so I was a little concerned that the soup might be too spicy for my folks but everyone loved it and most people went back for more!  I served it with two loaves of fresh bread, some crackers and cheese, a bunch of fresh cut fruit and I had bought mixed salad greens and in all of the chaos I forgot to serve them with the meal but I know they would have also been great with the soup.  I loved making this special soup for some special people in my lives.  This soup is all about the meats and even though there was 2-3 pounds of meat in this soup, I felt nourished and satisfied, but not too full.  The meats were filling but not heavy and I loved it so much that I'm thinking of making it again and freezing half or sharing it with someone.  Thank you, Story City Locker, for some wonderful local meats that made our special birthday even more special!

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Homemade Kool Aid Play Doh

Homemade Kool Aid Play Doh

We officially have a new baby at our house and it's been a bitterly cold winter so we've been spending a lot of time inside.  One of my favorite things to do with the kids lately is to make home made play doh with the bigger kids so I can also spend time with the newest member of our family.  The kids enjoy making it almost as much as they like playing with it & only costs about $1-$1.50 a batch so we have made several colors/flavors!

Here is a wonderful recipe I got from a fellow mom and friend:

 2.5 cups of flour (probably closer to 3 or even 3.5)
1/2 cup salt
1 tablespoon Alum
3 tablespoons cooking oil
2 cups boiling water
packet of Kool Aid (or food coloring)

Combine flour, salt & alum. Add oil & Kool Aid to boiling water and stir, then pour over flour mixture and mix.
I used an electric mixer but you can also stir with a spoon and then knead with hands. If mixture is sticky, add small amounts of flour until you can use a cookie cutter and it comes out clean. I added about 1/2 cup of flour and it seemed to form a nice ball and sort of fell off the mixer attachment.

One thing I love about this mixture is that if the play doh gets a little dried out, you can just add a little water and knead it with your hands and it springs right back.  I have been storing it in gallon zip bags and they work great.

I am such a fan of this play doh that I am even going to make a variety of colors/flavors and divide them to use as party favors for my son's birthday with preschool friends.

Here's a link to the Kool Aid website with an alternate recipe:
https://fb.kraftapps.com/koolaidshake/Content/pdfs/Kool-Aid-Play-Dough.pdf
This recipe has more intensely colored play doh but makes about 1/3 of the recipe I posted.  I have been wanting to try adding two packets of Kool Aid to my friend's recipe for more intense color but haven't tried it yet.

Color Guide:
Red - Cherry, Fruit Punch
Pink - Pink Lemonade
Orange - Orange
Yellow - Lemonade
Green - Lemon Lime
Pale Green - Green Apple
Light Mint Green - Blue Raspberry Lemonade
Blue - Mixed Berry
Purple - Grape


Barbie bedding

After a fairly extensive online search for Barbie (or similar sized doll) bedding, I found very little that I liked and thought I'd come up with my own instructions for fairly easy Barbie (or Monster High girls, Equestria Girls, Elsa, Anna, etc) bedding.

You will need:

2 pieces of coordinating (or same) fabric measuring 11" x 6" (for comforter)
2 pieces of coordinating (or same) fabric measuring 3.5" x 6" (for pillow)
a piece of some sort of batting (I used an old towel) measuring 11" x 6"
some poly-fil stuffing for the pillow
a needle
thread
scissors
a sewing machine is optional but it does make things go much faster

For the pillow:

Need 2 pieces of fabric measuring 3.5" x 6" each



Stack rectangles with right sides of fabric facing each other


Pin and sew 1/4" from edges, leaving 1-1.5" open so you will be able to turn fabric inside out


Carefully cut corners of rectangle, this will help corners look nicer


Turn pillow inside out, can poke corners out with a stuffing tool, pencil, or chopsticks


Place stuffing in corners first, fill pillow to desired firmness


Using a needle and thread, sew the pillow shut