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Flavored French Toast
My family loves french toast. We have it for supper quite often because it is an easy, filling, and inexpensive meal that pleases everyone. I grew up eating french toast with peanut butter spread on it along with syrup and that is how I still eat it. Everyone is always surprised and do not think that peanut butter on french toast would be good, but it is, it is really good. Everyone in the family eats it this way except Devin because he is allergic to peanuts and peanut products. We put cinnamon sugar on his now, but for years he just ate it plain with syrup. French toast is…
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How to Organize Cooking Utensils
As I have mentioned before, my kitchen is an older one and doesn’t have a lot of space. I try to organize and make my kitchen easier to use. I have a very limited amount of drawer space in this house. After purging my utensils and rearranging them, even putting some in the silverware drawer, I still have trouble finding what I need easily. I have seen a lot of kitchen doors fixed up all fancy with chalkboard paint and shapes traced on the doors. I do not do fancy organization, I just want things to be easy to find, grab, use and replace. I finally remembered to buy some…
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Little Homemade Cake
My mom has been making this cake as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, she had a huge garden. She grew enough food to feed us all summer, can or freeze enough for all winter and still had enough left over to sell to make a little extra money. One of the items she grew in huge amounts was strawberries. We loved them, and ate them all kinds of ways, but one of our favorite ways was mashed and spooned over the top of her little homemade cake. It is a smaller recipe that mom always made in a square pan. We liked it best warm…
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Should Kids Do Chores?
I think that everyone in the house should do chores or help to maintain the household. We have tried all kinds of systems over the last 20+ years. Our oldest is 24 and I am not sure exactly when he started helping out around the house, but do remember that our first formal chore chart with allowance tied to completion and behavior was at 5 years old. We gave him a quarter for each activity he completed up to $5 per week ($1 per year of age), but we also withheld a quarter if he misbehaved. I made a chore chart with simple tasks such as brushing his teeth, helping…
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Little Hamburgers in Gravy
This is an easy 3 ingredient main dish. We have been making them for years. I don’t remember where we got the recipe, but it is a family favorite. We make it every month or so. I don’t know what the real name should be, but we call it little hamburgers in gravy because that is what they look like. I assume one of the kids probably gave them the name and it stuck. It can even be made ahead of time and just finished off quickly when you are ready by making the gravy and heating the little hamburgers before serving. If making ahead of time, spread the patties…
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How to Plan a Tween Birthday Party
My daughter just turned 12 on Saturday. It was hard for her to decide how she wanted to celebrate her birthday this year. She is too old for the traditional kiddie birthday party, but still young enough to want to make it a big deal. She thought about going to the trampoline park or skating rink, but she also wanted all the family to be there. Since she is one of the youngest of her cousins most of them would not participate for jumping or skating. She thought about having a family party at a restaurant, but couldn’t decide on a restaurant and wanted to be able to invite friends…
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Skillet Onion Potatoes
I love potatoes. I love them fried, stewed, roasted, baked, mashed, and almost any way imaginable. If I had to pick one item to eat for the rest of my life, it would have to be potatoes. I cook some kind of potatoes for almost every meal. The potatoes are as important to me as the main dish, sometimes they are the main dish. I am fine with a loaded baked potato for a meal, but my husband thinks he needs at least 4-5 different items for each meal. I was craving my roasted onion potatoes the other day but didn’t want to wait the hour it would take to…
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Creative Organizing in the Kitchen
I have never been lucky enough to live in a house with a pantry. It didn’t matter much when we were first married because we didn’t have much to put in the cabinets. But as our family has grown and we acquired more possessions, this became more of a problem. I have had to be creative in organizing our stuff. The house we live in now has a very small kitchen. It was built in the 60’s and like most houses built in that era, the kitchen was not given much space or thought. I have very little counter space, even less that is usable. There are not many cabinets,…
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Clean and Organize a Little at a Time
Since I have been home for the last month, I have spent a lot of time cleaning and organizing the kitchen. Usually it just starts with something simple like cleaning the sink which morphs into cleaning the drain rack. Then I notice the cabinet under it needs cleaning, then I moved the toaster, then the microwave, etc… I did a deep clean on that area and then rearranged the way they were on the cabinet. I love it, angling the microwave made it easier to use and it looks so much better. I never would have thought of it if I hadn’t moved everything around to clean. This post contains…
Organizing, Crafts, Cooking, Saving Money, and Traveling
