Well, our Polar Express Party was full of family, fun, food, and lots of love. I think everyone had a great time and it all seemed to have gone well despite the bad weather we were experiencing.
The cousins had a lot of fun visiting, playing hide and seek, enjoying all the sweet treats, and having a special movie night experience. The grown-ups also got to talk and enjoy the movie… I love these special memories that our kids will be able to fondly look back on when they are older.
I’m sure our Polar Express was a hit and everyone had a good time as they always do. Now we really need to focus on Christmas! Here are some of the things that we will be working on this week:
Continue reading “Getting Ready for the Holidays Week 10 (1 Week Before Christmas)”
I’ve definitely been trying to streamline things around here… in some ways, we need to look at our homes as a business and try to find ways to make things run a little smoother. I’ve had a master shopping list for a while although I’m not sure if I’ve shared it here. I might’ve been a little inspired by these vintage-style grocery boards**:
The problem with our previous shopping list was that it was outdated and our diets/tastes have changed quite a bit. I wasn’t quite as health conscious when I first made my grocery list so I did have things like Koolaid and Bisquick on there. We’ve also been growing some of our own veggies and making some of the convenience foods like ranch seasoning and onion soup mix so we don’t buy them anymore. We really want to try to grow some of our own herbs to make them even better!
I took a little time one evening while Mr. Awesome and the kiddos were out to look through our grocery purchases over the past year… yeah, it did take a little time to sort through the orders we have placed but it was worth it. I know the orders I went through didn’t show EVERYTHING we bought over the past year but it did give me a good idea of what we are buying regularly and how much we are buying. Some of those things were quite surprising!
When we did our pantry makeover, I really wanted to see just how much space I needed to dedicate to certain items before getting too happy with my organization.
I needed a quick recipe to throw together the other day and I happened upon this recipe HERE. I was totally exhausted after working so long in the new pantry and I really didn’t want to fuss with a lot of ingredients so this was perfect! I did make a couple of changes to keep this more keto-friendly and it was delicious!
We served this with some mashed turnips, steamed broccoli, and some black-eyed peas that had been cooking on the stove. The girls made some cornbread muffins and I made some keto cornbread to go with it.
Continue reading “Best Pork Loin”
This has been the topic of discussion for a couple of weeks here now but I really don’t have a definite answer yet. We know that we don’t want to do a ‘traditional’ meal so no ham or turkey this year. We may use the smoker to do some meat and maybe have some pulled pork in the crockpot.
I’m hoping to try to make some Christmas Tree Bread or a Christmas Star with our sourdough but I’m not sure if either of those will happen but they are on my wish list of things to do. I would love to do a traditional Christmas dinner like the one listed in the vintage dinner menu I mentioned HERE but I know that I definitely don’t have the time or patience for that right now.
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