Valentine Ideas

Ok... every blog I have been on lately has been talking about valentines day! I really LOVE this day as well. What better way to celebrate love then to stuff your face with tons of chocolates, use red food coloring to dye everything (including your fingers) and use those heart shaped cookie cutters for breakfast, lunch, supper and snacks! So here is my post on treats and special things we have done over the years to celebrate this day of LOVE.


Hubby and I did made these delicious cupcakes for a pot luck we had this past weekend. I found the recipe over on Amys notebook which is orginally taken from The Farm Chicks.

The recipe was so easy to follow and they tasted delicious!! The frosting was so sweet and like nothing I have ever tasted before. We used my pampered chef decoraters to get creative. Since the recipe made 24 hubby and I each decorated 12 cupcakes. Most of mine were valentine themed




and hubbys were creatively done!!

Last year we celebrated valentines at our small group so I whipped up these cupcakes to take there. They are a chocolate cup cake with a cream cheese heart baked in the center. They looked a lot nicer before they were cooked!! hehehe...I must keep working on that recipe.


A treat I made this week for moms club was Cinnamon hearts


For our youth group last night at the church I whipped together some sugar cookies (a recipe I usually only make at Christmas) and we used the left over icing from the cup cakes to decorate them. I am not sure if the kids even tasted the cookie with all the colored sugar and candy hearts that were on them.


Each year we enjoy doing a special breakfast, usually heart shaped pancakes topped with fruit, syrup and whip cream dord the trick for us!


A couple of years ago when I was doing my internship hubby whipped together this specail evening (after he cooked me my favorite meal; KD and Hotdogs!!) of a fondue pinic on our living room floor.


I have been using this valentine for years now. When we were in university our Christian fellowship group decided to make these and hand them out all over campus with our information the back. What an impact they had and what a turn out we got. Its Awesome to think that God sent the first valentine and how cool is it that we get a special day to to celebrate and show Christ's love!!


There are lots of cool ideas out there to do for this day and as the babe gets older I plan on doing lots of fun things to celebrate LOVE. Here are a few cool ideas for you readers!

Butterfly lollipop cards (views best in internet explorer)
Printable valentines
Heartfelt memory game
Crafty valentine ideas (views best in internet explorer)
Valentine's day games and gifts


Enjoy and have a happy LOVE DAY!!

For more frugal valentines ideas head on over to Biblical WomanHood

Cinnamon Hearts

This week I was signed up to bring the "healthy snack" to our moms club. Even being a dietitian I still am unsure what "healthy snack" is. So I put my creative mind to work and came up with a little twist on one of our favorite treats.


Cinnamon sugar tortilla crisp are a big hit around here in the summer time. We really love them dipped in strawberry salsa, flavored cream cheese or just by themselves. I also like making different flavors, such as spicy, to go with our Mexican dishes or Parmesan to dip in soups. But this valentines day here is a "healthy snack" you can send with the kids for their school party, take to work or serve the family at home.

Homemade Cinnamon hearts


10 tortillas
melted butter
Cinnamon sugar mixture
red sugar (optional)
Heart shaped cookie cutter

1. Cut out heart shapes from the tortillas.
2. Melt butter and brush onto hearts
3. Combine 1/4 cup of sugar with 1-2 tsp cinnamon (for these I wanted them to have the same hot cinnamon flavor as the little candy's so I added more cinnamon)
4. Sprinkle mixture over hearts
5. Bake at 350 for 4-5 minutes or just until brown

~ Enjoy them with a dip or by themselves.

Jump on over to Shannon's site for my great ideas.

Left over rice

Saturday was a very busy day for me as I had lots to get done before heading out to a friends baby shower. Hubby was home and decided to make a traditional Saturday night New Brunswick meal of baked beans, scalloped potatoes and homemade bread. This was quite a project of him to take on but he did it with full force!!

I came home to hubby in an apron, potatoes boiling, cheese sauce in the making and the babe was stuffing his face with cheerios. Since we were having guest for supper I quickly washed up throw my apron on and got to work as well. After punching down the bread and putting it to rise in the bread pans I got to work on dessert since that had been over looked.

I knew that I had a big container of rice left over from our Mexican Lentil casserole the other night and when we have left over rice there is one dessert that I love to make. Probably why I cook too much rice sometimes!!




Rocky Road Rice Pudding
*I will give you the recipe that I have. However I always change it and just eye ball the amount of milk and rice because I always use leftover rice that we have opposed to instant white rice.

2 3/4 cup of milk (use about 2 cups if rice is already cooked)
3/4 cup uncooked Minute rice instant white rice (used 2 cups of leftover Basmati rice)
3 Tbsp sugar
Pinch salt
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup mini marshmallows ( I never use that many)
1/2 cup bittersweet chocolate chips
1/4 cup toasted pecans (or if you want a smore flavor use crushed graham crackers)

1. Combine milk, rice, sugar and salt in large sauce pan. Bring to a boil stirring constantly. Reduce heat and cook, sitting often (you don't have to cook too long if its already cooked rice)

2. Beat the egg with the vanilla. Stir some of the hot rice mixture into the egg (1/4 cup); beat the warmed egg mixture back into the remaining rice mixture. Cook, stirring constantly, for 1 minute. Remove from heat.

3 Preheat broiler. Spoon the pudding into oven safe serving dishes. Top each dish with an equal amount of marshmallows, chocolate and pecans. Broil on the middle rack in oven for 30-60 seconds, or until marshmallows are golden.

** One thing I did was I made up all the rice dishes then broiled them right before we were ready to eat dessert. This way they were nice and hot!


Hey to view some more kitchen tips head on over to Tammy's site!

Monthly Meal Planning

This month I actually planned my whole month out for meals. What a time saver that was this week since we were out all weekend. This morning I simply had to get the calender out of my house binder to see what I had planned.

For my month of meal plans I simply made each day a theme (Monday Meat/potato and veggies, Tuesday veggie, Wednesday leftovers, Thursday casseroles, Friday take out, Saturday random, Sunday Soup or stew) then under each day I wrote out 4 different meal ideas. Now for the easy part I inserted the meals into my calender to tada...my month is planned!!

So here is whats cookin this week


Monday: BBQ meat pie and twice baked potatoes

Tuesday: Curried Split peas over rice

Wednesday: Leftovers

Thursday: Sweet and sour sausages

Friday: Toastados

Saturday: Going out on a date!! Don't forget its valentines day

Sunday: Pot luck at church

For more meal plans and meal ideas check out organizing junkie

Paperless cooking

I am sure like me many of you have stacks upon stacks of cook books, recipe cards and lose pieces of paper stuffed in every cook book with recipes you got from friends scattered all over the kitchen.

During the Christmas season when I was taking things down to be replaced with my Christmas decorations I decided that it was time for some of my cook books to go and for some of them to be packed up to be stored down stairs. I decided to do this because the internet has such an abundance of recipes on it and whenever you are in a pickle and need recipe Google has TONS ready for you in seconds.

There are many sites that I love to go to get a recipe as I find the reviews are good. When I find a recipe that I enjoy I usually go to the print this recipe or printer friendly version; once there I copy the recipe and paste it into my google docs. Google docs is one way I keep my kitchen paperless. I love how all my recipes are stored there and they have a search tool so I can find all my recipes in a jiffy!!

Here are some great sites and great recipes


Taste of Home: Has delicious recipes and usually a picture to go with each recipe. I always like seeing what the product will turn out like. Also they have lots of different categories of cooking that you can search through. They have a membership as well that allows you to create your own recipe box there. I like this site because their recipes don't call for wacky ingredients that I usually don't have stocked in the cupboards.

All recipes I love this site because of the pictures and the reviews. The reviews always help make the recipe better as you can learn what not to do or what to add to make the recipe better. Also there are usually many different recipes for the one thing you are trying to make. I think there are at least 10 recipes for baked oatmeal. The search bar is great for when you are looking for a specific recipe.

This is a delicious muffin recipe, found at all recipes, that my friend made for us a couple of weekends ago when she was here.








Other sites that I use to search for recipes or supper inspirations

Tammy's recipes
$5 dinners
Niki
Dairy goodness
365 crock potting


If you have other recipe sites that you use please let me know so I can add them to my list!! Also for more frugal ideas head on over to Biblical Womanhood.

Bible Memory Game

Hey readers!

Some of you may have already read this post but I wanted to re post it to show how you can make learning scripture fun!!!


One of my biggest Christmas gifts this year was making a bible memory verse game for our nieces and nephews. You see last Christmas they received a gift from their parents which was the whole collection of PSALTY. Now I don't know how many of you readers know about Psalty but he is a big blue singing song book who sings praise and worship music. Micah and I have our own collection of Psalty and enjoy singing along. Eben has been hearing this wonderful music since he was in the womb and now dances around the house to it.



Anyways back to the game I made!! The reason the game is connected with Psalty is that Psaltys camping adventure is one of the best CD's and one that the kids love. On this specific CD there is on song called Hide Gods Word in Your Heart. Its a song that teaches kids how to memorize 26 verses!! What a great song. So my idea was born. I would make a memory game (since memory is one of their favorite games) using the bible verses from their favorite CD. Hopefully this will help them learn and memory 26 powerful verses from God's word.



The frist couple steps of the project were a little diffcult. Orginially I wanted to make the game out of costers but that was a lot of costers to try to find so my dad gave me 2 big sheets of pylwood. I sat down one night and drew 52 4* 4 squars, then my wonderful husband cut them out with a skill saw and together we sanded them so they would be smooth.

All the verses (list at the bottom) were typed on the computer, printed out and cut with fun scissors. Hubby made the logo for the tops of squares and the letters were cut out using a Cricut (a very fancy scrap booking tool that a lady from our church let me use).



I used Mod Podge to stick all the letters, logos and verses onto the wood. After they had dried I sprayed them with a stain. Now to play the game you simply take a few out at a time (it would be very overwhelming to be playing memory with 52 large blocks..haha) and put them face down on the ground so you see the logo like so

Then you take your turn just like memory flipping the blocks over to see if you can find the match. All letters were cut out in blue paper and the first letter of every verse was done in blue so the kids would have an easier job matching the verse to the proper letter


Hubby and I plan on making another one of these games for our own children. What a great way to get kids memorizing God's word. I guess it's not just for kids as I have learned the 26 verses and can almost sing along with the CD.

My time was the biggest investment into this gift because I think it coast me a total of $7.00 and that was mostly for the large bottle of Mod Podge.

For more cool ideas check out Rocks in My Dryer


Bible Alphabet Song

A: All have sinned and come short of the glory of God, Romans 3:23

B: Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, Acts 6:31

C: Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right, Eph 6:1

D: Depart from evil and do good, Psamls 34:14

E: Even a child is known by his doings, Proverbs 20:11

F: Fear not, for I am with thee, Isaiah 43:5

G: God is love 1 John 4:8

H: Honor thy father and thy mother, Exodus 20:12

I: I am thy vine, you are the branches, John 15: 5

J:Jesus weep, john 11:35

K: Keep thy tongue from evil, psalms 34:13

L: Look unto me, and be ye saved, Isaiah 45:22

M: Marvel not..you must be born again, John 3:7

N: No man can serve two masters, Matthew 6:23

O: O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good, Psalms 118:1

P: Praise ye the Lord, Psalms 147:1

Q: Quench not the spirit, 1 Thessalonians 5:19

R: Remember the sabbath, to keep it holy, Exodus 20:8

S: Seek ye first the kingdom of God, Matthew 6:33

T: Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, Proverb 3:5

U: Unto us a child is born, Isaiah 9:6

V: Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, Romans 12:19

W: Wait on the Lord, Psalms 27:14

X: Exceeding great and precious promises are given unto us 2 Peter 1:4

Y: Ye are the light of the world, Matthew 5:14

Z: Zion heard, and was glad, Psalm 97:8

Meal Plan Monday

Please forgive me if my meal plan post doesn't make sense this week but I am sitting at my parents house, with a wood furnace, and I am sure its 30 ++ degrees in here right now. Also I have my husband cheering at the top of his lungs at the TV as he LOVES the super bowl. Its funny cause we don't watch football any other time of year but this special occasion. I don't know if its the Nachos, chicken wings and pop that go with it that makes me even love the super bowl or what...so I will make this quick cause I think the first around of food is almost done!!


One recipe that I made this week to go with my spaghetti pie was these delicious garlic bread sticks found over here at Tammy's recipes.


The recipe was easy to follow, used ingredients all found in my pantry and tasted delicious. The recipe will go into our family favorites.

I will try to remember what I have planned this week cause I am working on a monthly meal plan for this month. I have give each day a theme (example: Monday casseroles) and have written out meals under each theme. Each week I will just pick meals from my list to make my weekly meal plan. Following me?? hehe...I will post my themes and meals for the Month when we get home.


Cookin in the kitchen

Monday: Turkey leftovers

Tuesday: Mexican lentil casserole with Taco chips

Wednesday: leftovers

Thursday: can't remember I will have to double check my menu.

Friday: out

Saturday: Baked beans, bread and scallop potato

Sunday: Leftover beans!!


For more great meal ideas check out Lauras site