Sunday, January 29, 2012

Pinterest and Quotes

I have a slight addiction to Pinterest. Recently I learned how to pin things to my boards. Then I learned how to make very cool signs on Picnik. So I have been slowly making signs with some of my favorite quotes. I am a collector of many things, quotes being one of them. I have a notebook where I write down quotes I find when I am reading. Here are a few of my favorites that I have shared on Pinterest lately!




2 Days late!

It's been quite a week here. We have been battling bugs of the head nature. I thought (wrongly) that because I have 3 boys, I would never have to worry about this. Boy, was I wrong. What started out as an innocent "What's in your hair?" while I was standing over my boys brushing their teeth, turned into an all out laundry fest. I think I have washed every coat, sheet, pillow case, and towel we own at least twice. Heads have been shampooed and hair has been picked over. I am hoping we are at the end. Then yesterday, we had an iPad tragedy. A fall from the lap turned into a crack which turned into tears. Lots of tears. So I meant to post this Thursday night, then Friday, then Saturday. So here it is.

The last challenge for The What's for Dinner Solution is to talk about my favorite kitchen appliance. Hands down, ny answer is the crockpot. I love being able to toss a few items in the crockpot in the morning, then not having to worry about working on dinner when I have kids to pick up, homework to help with, and fights to break up.

There are several great websites for crockpot cooking. One that has shown up on Pinterest several times recently is A Year of Slow Cooking. Another one a friend/Pampered Chef consultant told me about is Crockin' Girls. Both of these have some really good recipes if you are tired of the same old meat & potatoes dinner. Enjoy!

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Family Favorites

Welcome to day four of The What's for Dinner Solution blog tour. I am so excited to share one of my family's favorite dinner recipes. Anytime I can find a recipe that all six people in my family agree on, it quickly gets added to my recipe rotation. I have 2 very picky 6 year old twins boys. For an entire year of their life they ate toast (crust cut off) and pudding (they called it bo-bo). So I am trying my hardest to expand their palates. I don't want them to be picky eaters for the rest of their lives.
Here is the quick and easy recipe we can all agree on. It was originally found in my MOPS group cookbook that they put together. My youngest son calls it "Egg casserole" and he asks for it every other day!

1 pkg. crescent rolls
1 lb sausage, cooked & drained
6 eggs
2 cups shredded cheese (any flavor)
1/8 cup milk

Roll out crescent rolls and pat in an 8x11 pan. Crumble cooked sausage on top.
Mix eggs and milk together in bowl then add cheese. Pour this over the sausage.
Bake at 350 for 30 minutes (or until eggs are no longer runny)

*If you're feeling really wild (and your kids will eat it this way), you can add chopped red & green peppers and onion. I sometimes just sprinkle veggies on the adult half.
*I love to serve this with cinnamon applesauce.

Kathi Lipp's website has a place you can sign up for her newsletter. It is filled with great recipes and tips for every area of your home. Go check it out!

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

The What's for Dinner Solution Kitchen Tips


In Kathy's new book, there is a whole chapter on Organizing your kitchen space. I am not a neat freak and you most definitely cannot eat off my floors, but this girl does like her organization. I typically know where my son's Ipod, my other son's DSi, and my husband's keys are when no one else does. One way I keep organized it to clear off spaces!

I love clean counter tops without clutter. I hate piles of paper and junk mail. And I despise stuff everywhere. Having a clean countertop sure helps when it comes to meal preparation time. That way I don't have to spend 20-30 minutes cleaning up before I can even start working!

In the chapter "Organize Your Space", Kathi gives tips on how to reduce clutter and get rid of things you will never use that are taking up precious space in your kitchen. She even encourages readers to host a kitchen item swap. Maybe you will never use that deviled egg platter, but know a friend who would love to have it. I think that sounds like a great idea!! I'm going to look for things I don't use right now!

Why I am never doing another 1000 piece puzzle

You can scroll down to see my puzzle skills in reverse order. It took me almost a month to finish the thing. You can imagine how many times the table got bumped or moved and pieces scattered all over the floor. So I really should not have been surprised when I could not find the last piece. My husband told me that if all the pieces are out of the box, the puzzle is finished. Well, I tend to think the exact opposite. It's not finished. So I saved it until Monday to show my mom. Then I tore it apart and put all 999 pieces back in the box. She told me to donate it to Goodwill. That's just what every one wants to buy at the Goodwill....a puzzle with a missing piece. So I will hang on to it until I find the last piece (which will probably be next year), and then I can start all over because I will have forgotten I said I would never do another 1000 piece puzzle!



Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Tiny Prints Valentine's Cards


Just today on the way home from school I asked the boys what kind of Valentine's Day cards they wanted to get this year. We typically just pick out a box of cards at the store, then spend several evenings filling them out. Then I remembered hearing about this card company on a few of the blogs I read.

Have you heard of Tiny Prints? They have the cutest cards for Valentine's Day that I have ever seen. These really put the cards in the Walmart Valentine aisle to shame. I am totally in love with this owl design. It seems like owls are definitely popular this year, and I think this card is adorable. But since I have a 5th grader and two 1st grade boys, sadly I don't think I will be ordering any of these.
But I do think they would totally go for these two designs! Aren't they so cool? You can check out all their different designs on the Tiny Prints site. You can also follow them on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/tinyprints), Twitter (https://twitter.com/#!/TinyPrints), or Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/tiny_prints/).




What is a LOOP meal?

One of the things Kathi Lipp talks about in her new book is a LOOP meal. LOOP stands for Left Overs On Purpose. This means one day you cook then using what is leftover, you have the start for another meal later in the week. My favorite LOOP meal (although I've never called it that until now) is chicken. I buy a large whole chicken and then roast it in the oven. My family usually eats about half of the chicken in one meal. Then I take the rest of the chicken off the bone, take the skin off, then store it in a Pyrex dish in the refrigerator. Later in the week, I will use that chicken to make a big pot of chicken and noodles and serve it with mashed potatoes. I love not wasting food or forgetting about it for weeks. This may take a little planning on your part, but it is definitely worth the time it takes!!

Monday, January 23, 2012

The What's for Dinner Solution by Kathi Lipp

Almost a year ago, I wrote about an awesome book by Kathi Lipp. I also had the privilege of hearing Kathi speak and then meeting her in person at the MOPS convention in Nashville, Tennessee last summer. She is an awesome speaker and had us laughing, crying, and thinking all at the same time. So when Kathi was looking for bloggers to do her 5 day What's for Dinner blog tour, I quickly signed up. I got my book in the mail last week and am so excited to share parts of it with you this week.

For Day #1, I am going to share our menu for the week. One way to solve the "What's for dinner?" problem is to plan. There is nothing worse than buying a cart full of items at the Walmart, then come home and realize you have nothing to make dinner with. So I challenge you to plan, plan, plan! And then go shopping. Here is what's on the Evanoff menu this week:

Monday- Pork roast, carrots, potatoes in crock pot, crescent rolls, grapes
Tuesday-Baked chicken, corn, mandarin oranges
Wednesday-Chicken and noodles, mashed potatoes, green beans (This is my LOOP meal-lefotovers on purpose, more on that later in the week)
Thursday-Pancakes, eggs, bacon
Friday-Vegetable Soup, rolls, applesauce

Nothing really fancy. Just food that my whole family will actually eat. So today I shopped for the above list and actually have everything I need to make these 5 days of dinners. No more trips to the store (unless we run out of milk...which we probably will).

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

What I did over Christmas break!

If I were still in grade school, this is what my essay on the first day back from Winter break would look like.

I read 2 books over break. I finished The Hunger Games in 2 days. Then read Catching Fire in 4 days. I stayed up until 2 AM 2 nights in a row reading these books. Then I slept until almost noon 2 days. I felt like I was in college all over again cramming for finals!
We rarely go to movies at the theater, but in a 2 week time frame, I went to the movies 3 times. That is a new record for me. I ate way too much movie theater popcorn and my gallbladder is still paying for it! That popcorn takes a long time to digest, but it is so good!! We Bought A Zoo was my favorite movie, although it made me cry like a baby. My favorite quote from the movie is where the dad tells his teenage son, "You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it."
We went with our cousins to see Chip Wrecked and the kids of course loved it. My sister and I decided we are way behind the times on popular music, and I am okay with that!
And lastly I saw Dolphin Tale with Noah only. My mom watched the twins overnight, so Noah and I went to the cheapo movie theater and watched this. Now he wants to go visit Winter, the dolpin in the movie.
So that is how I spent my Christmas break. Very exciting, I know! I am also having a Purex crystals fabric softener and Jockey sports bra giveaway on my other blog! Please enter the contest, you just may be the lucky winner.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Denver Broncos Rock!

The boys both have their family projects due tomorrow. We only had 17 days to work on them. You would think sometime during those 17 days, we would have gotten them done. But no, I remembered them tonight. I was totally engrossed in the Bronos/Steelers game this evening, so we had to wait until halftime to work on them. After the awesome 1st half of the game, we decided to do them in Bronco blue and orange and add the mascot. Thankfully, the Broncos were able to pull out a win in overtime tonight, otherwise we would have felt rather silly sending these into school tomorrow.
So for tonight, the Broncos are #1!!!!

My 1000 piece puzzle!

Early in December, our local Aldi had 1000 piece puzzles for five bucks! Every week I passed by them thinking what a fun family activity that would be to do over Christmas break. Then I would quickly get back to the reality that my 3 boys won't sit down to do much of anything except maybe to eat. Sometimes they don't even sit down to do that. Finally after about 3 weeks of walking by the puzzles, I gave in and put one in my cart. It sat on the counter until the day after Christmas when I decided it was time to get out the puzzle. After all the card table was still up in the living room giving me the perfect place to work on it. So two weeks later, this is all I have gotten done. My mom stopped by our house last week and was so excited to see that I was working on a puzzle. She loves puzzles, her mom loved puzzles, her grandma loved puzzles...so it must be a genetic thing that none of my children have. Because aside from bumping the table and dropping pieces on the floor, my kids have not helped me one bit! At the rate I am going, my puzzle will be done in March. Maybe my mom will come help me out!!

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

I am obsessed!

Am I the last person on the earth to hear about The Hunger Games? Seriously, everyone I talk to has already read the series....months ago! I love love love to read. I keep a list of books I read all year. And I had never heard of The Hunger Games until a girl at work read all 3 books in one weekend and told me I had to read them. She helped out by giving me the last 2 books which she bought because she didn't want to wait for them at the library. So I put the first book on hold, checked it out on a Friday and was finished by Monday. Oh. My. I am obsessed. I am halfway through the 2nd book. I stayed up until 2 AM the other night reading about Katniss and Peeta! (Thank goodness we are still on Christmas break, and I was able to sleep in) Then I couldn't sleep after I closed the book because I kept thinking about the games.
Now I cannot wait for March 23, 2012 when The Hunger Games movie is released. I am trying to convince my 10 year old to read the book before the movie comes out. If so, he will be my date to the movie!

Monday, January 2, 2012

A Very Apple Christmas!

Each year we tell our boys they get one thing from us for Christmas. We have a whole closet full of toys that don't get played with. Ever. We are blessed beyond measure! We have a warm house and food in our bellies. So to cut down on the Christmas crap clutter, we buy one big ticket item. We knew as the years went by, their one item would get more expensive. Our ten year old was originally going to get a cell phone, but that idea got nixed after her lost his ipod at a friend's house (long story....we've never found it!). So he decided in November, he wanted an iPad. His argument was that it would not get lost. Ever. He wouldn't take it to friend's houses, he could use it for school work, he doesn't have a computer, and the list went on and on. So the other day at work, I decided Noah would get his iPad. Except it would come in the form of an eye pad! So I taped it to a book about the size of an iPad, wrapped it up in shiny paper, and that it what Noah got to open on Christmas morning. It was fun for about one second, then there was drama! After torturing him for another minute, we let him open his real present.
He was very elated to have a real iPad. He has promised to share with mom while he's at school...really he has no choice!
And the little boys got iPod touches and have been buying Apps like crazy! I think between the 3 boys, we will keep the App store in business.
Angry birds is definitely everyone's favorite game. Moose has the high score so far. And I have become addicted to fruit ninja myself!
Thankfully, they have an awesome dad who is patient enough to sit down and look through the apps and download everything they want to play. Thank goodness there are lots of free apps out there!
*This post was in no way endorsed by the Apple store. I am pretty sure they have never heard of me or my family.*

Sunday, January 1, 2012

New Year

I love a new year. A clean slate. An empty calendar. I think the one thing I learned in 2011 is that I am not in control. Imagine that. It took me 38 years to finally get it. My a-ha moment came in July when my son broke his leg. My very rowdy rambunctious son who never sits still for a moment. But we survived and God taught us many lessons. The most important being that He is in control. This is something I have to remind myself on a daily basis. It is God's agenda, not mine.
That being said, I do know what we have planned (I use that term very lightly) for the year 2012....so far!!

*In May, Megan will graduate from college. We just paid the last tuition bill for many years. Yahoo!!

*In June, Megan will marry her Colorado cowboy.

*In July, Dalton will have surgery to take his plate and screws out of his femur.

*On August 1st, the boys will start school. Our district is starting a balanced calendar for the 2012-2013 school year. They will have three 2 week breaks this year.

*In October (during one of the boy's breaks), we will be taking a trek to Disney World in Orlando.

And I am sure there will be many surprises to us along the way. Here's to a prosperous and happy 2012!!