Rustic fall crafts - child friendly

Hello everyone. I saw this YouTube video a month or so ago and I thought her outdoor fall decorations and instructions were right up my alley.

Samantha Medlin fall decorations YouTube video

And then I saw my husband had lots of wood scraps in his shop.  

I looked on Pinterest and saw even more easy fall crafts and decided we had the right size scraps to make some friendly monsters and some chunky pumpkins. 

I gathered up paint, brushes, a cover for the table, permanent black markers, a hot glue gun and gloves for me. 

When 3 of our grands were here yesterday,   they did the painting,  

We ended up with10 pumpkins made from scraps of 4 by 4 posts.  Our stems are made from old thread spools and wood craft balls.  They were hot glued on along with some silk maple leaves.  

I kept 5 for our front porch and the grands took 5 to their home, their mom put theirs on their mantle.  

I saw these happy monsters on Pinterest and wanted to make them too.

They are scraps of 2 by 4s that the grands painted.  When the paint was dry, I added some of the facial features with black markers.  Some of the eyes are eyeball stickers.  

I don’t do scary anything so our monsters are all cheerful and friendly looking. 

They will be standing in this living room window during this season. 

The pile of blankets stayed on the couch because grands were here for 2 days in a row and the youngest ones all take afternoon naps.  

The post pumpkins are on our front porch in between a bunch of ........

Osage Oranges that grow on a tree near a pond in our addition.  I pick them up most every fall to decorate our porch.

We are having a very mild fall. We still have zinnias in full bloom and we still have monarch butterflies.  

I thought monarchs migrated before cold weather arrives?

5 of the grands were here for lunch- we all enjoyed quesadillas, grapes and bananas on Tupperware dishes. 

Meals don’t have to be fancy or elaborate. 

Their afternoon snack was popcorn. 

And here’s 2 year old JackJack since you can’t see his face in the group photo

.  

He’s cute, right? 

And you know the reputation Two Year Olds have? 

Well,  that’s our JackJack.  His name is Jackson but he calls himself JackJack and I like it.  

But his other two year habits......I know they will pass but he is a handful right now.  

We love him lots! 

In Rhonda’s Kitchen ............

Hello everyone

I’m still making salad boxes that stay in our fridge. 

We like having salad whenever we want, toppings for sandwiches and chopped veggies to have with tuna or cottage cheese.  

I cooked an old but favorite recipe - Pampered Chef Taco Ring.  The recipe and variations are all over Pinterest.  

It’s taco meat and cheese, baked inside a ring made of Pillsburg crescent roll dough.  It is easy and good.  

Two of the grandsons were here for taco ring and they both enjoyed it.  

We really like the homemade spreadable butter and I’ve since made a second, bigger batch.  I used 1 pound of softened real butter and beat it with an electric mixer, then mixed in 1 cup of oil.  It’s easy to spread straight from the fridge and doesn’t taste weird like some other purchased butter spreads. 

We had some spreadable butter on this new oatmeal waffle recipe.  It’s a good recipe and one I will keep.  

Another new recipe is this soup recipe..  I saw this recipe in a recent Taste of Home magazine but I changed it up a bit.  

stuffed Pepper Soup this is the Taste of Home link 

Here is my version, and it was a great way to use some of bell pepper harvest. 

My version uses less beef, less brown sugar, more rice and I added onions 

Rhonda’s Stuffed Pepper Soup 

1 pound ground beef- brown and drain

Stir in

1 diced onion

2 cups diced bell peppers

2 15 ounce cans tomato sauce

2 15 ounce cans diced tomatoes

1 t salt

Almost 1/2 t black pepper 

2 t beef bouillon granules 

1 T brown sugar

Bring to a boil, then cover and just simmer for 10-15 minutes or until the veggies are done to your preference.  We like our veggies still a bit crunchy.  

3 cups cooked rice- stir in and simmer a few more minutes and then serve.  

It makes a lot, more than 2 quarts.  

For the rice- we had taco rice bowls on Sunday and I cooked extra rice knowing I wanted to use it in this recipe.  

We really liked this soup and will make it again.  

I saw a new to me recipe to make almond joy cookies with just 4 ingredients. 

They were very quick to make but my husband and I  both rated them as “just OK”

I’m not sharing the recipe because I won’t be making them again and wouldn’t recommend them,  

But if you do look up this recipe and make them,  I hope you don’t burn half of them like I did 

😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱

Tonight’s supper was a good one.  

We had baked green enchiladas.  

My version is very easy- I use just the below ingredients along with a little diced onion.  

Just grease your 13x9 baking pan.  

Add a little of the green enchilada sauce.

Then layer in the corn tortillas, diced cooked chicken, diced onions, grated cheese, green sauce, another layer of tortillas, the rest of the sauce and the rest of the cheese. 

Then bake at 350 about 30-40 minutes or until golden on top and bubbly.  

I didn’t take a photo of the finished casserole but here are the leftovers.  It just looks like a basic casserole when done.  

But it tastes so good! 

I dished up some to take to my parents and the rest will be our supper in a night or two.  

My big project for the last 6 days has been organizing all of my recipes.  

I had recipes in a card box, a stack of printed recipes and 3 notebooks.  

This was what our dining table looked like this morning but it looked lots worse earlier in the week.  

I went through every recipe and discarded quite a few.  

They all ended up in 3 notebook binders that have vinyl pocket sheet protectors.  

The recipes are in 3 categories- main dishes which is all meat or protein entrees, 

Baking which is all breads, desserts, etc. 

sides and misc is all side dishes, non food recipes like bubbles and some old menu plans.  

The 2 old phones on the table are running off our WiFi and earning Swagbucks.  I don’t do Swagbucks too seriously but do try to do them while I’m doing something else.  I can earn a $25 gift certicate without much effort each month or even double that if I work on them more.  

I used decorative paper and stickers from my craft room and reused the notebooks I already had.  I spent a lot of time on these new cookbooks but no money.  

Some of the pages have scrapbook paper and some don’t.  

I trimmed down a lot of the recipes with decorative scissors. 

I’m very happy to have completed this project.  It’s been needing done for quite some time. 

I rediscovered some old favorites I’ve forgotten about and plan to cook again soon. 

My 100 day sewing project has been completely neglected this week.  Last week, I did cut out 5 garments but they are all sitting, waiting to be sewn.  

But that’s my homemaking life.  I do lots but there just isn’t enough free time to do it all.  

Can I get an Amen? 

😄 

A little yard stuff, a bit of cooking and lots of grands

Hello everyone 

We had another round of peppers ready to pick.  These grandsons had a big time helping Grandpa pick them.  

Then (again) we roasted, peeled and chopped the chilis and sliced all the bell peppers.  They’ve all been frozen to enjoy later. 

There are still jalapeños in the fridge that I plan to pickle.  

Two of our grandsons live on a small farm and raise Guernsey Show cows.  They showed one at the Tulsa State Fair and a local tv channel did a feature story on them which turned out so cute.  

My husband has been making some decorative knives.  He gets fancy wood scraps from a friend with a high end cabinet business. 

The knife parts are blanks he mail orders.  

We grow zinnias most every year.  It is really easy to harvest their seeds.  

I just trim off the flowers when they’ve turned brown.  

Then I leave them to dry for a few weeks.  

After that,  I’ll just take them apart, keep the seeds to plant next year and then throw away all the non-seed parts. 

There will be thousands of seeds once I separate.  

There could be bugs so I’m leaving the sack of zinnia heads in our tornado room to dry out.  

We mowed and edged the yard this week and we hope it’s the last mowing of 2017.  

I keep an old pair of shoes that are just for yard work.  I’ll wash them and then they’ll be ready for more yard work in the spring.  

It’s been feeling more summer like than fall like but that changed yesterday when a cold front moved into our state yesterday. 

I think it’s amazing that it was 41 in one part of Oklahoma and 94 in another at the exact same time.  

Our daughter in law is a hair stylist.  This is a recent photo shoot at her salon where her 2 daughters posed as customers.  

Both little girls have lots of long dark thick hair. 

I think these photos turned out so cute.  

I’m wondering who had the most fun,  Charlie and Andie or their momma, Sheena?  

I think it was an afternoon to remember for all of them.  ❤️

I just put our supper in the crockpot- Cowboy Casserole from Cheryl’s frugals corner. 

I think it will taste especially good on this cool fall day 🍁 I’m a big fan of simple recipes like that this that just use basic pantry ingredients. 

Blogging via Blogspot on an iPad

iPads update every few months.  When mine updated this week, I could no longer use the Blogger app that was barely limping along anyway. 

My blogs are all on Blogspot and I hear Wordpress is great but I don’t want to change right now. 

I looked online for help but didn’t find much. 

First I bought the BlogPress app but it was complete waste of money and time. I couldn’t even log into my blogs through it,mart alone post. 

Then I saw the Blog Touch Pro in the AppStore.  I bought it and it works perfectly for the kind of blogging I do. 

I can add 5 photos at a time, do links and bold or italics with ease. 

It also edits photos but I haven’t spent enough time on it to figure that out.

The only weird thing is it posts my photos so big. I had to change the margins so they would fit.  

But I like the big photos so it’s ok with me. 

The Blog Touch Pro app is $5.99 right now.  I think it was $4.99 when I bought mine last week. 🤔 

Anyway, for using Blogspot on an IPad, Blog Touch Pro is the solution I needed. 

In the Kitchen - Hello Fresh review and some homecooking

Subscription meals are very popular but I had never tried them.  

In September, I loosely followed a plan called “ShelfTember” and my goal was to use up ingredients that we’ve had for awhile.  I used up lots of oddball ingredients and freezer leftovers. I also did very little grocery shop in September. 

Near the end of September, I saw a coupon code to get your first Hello Fresh shipment at a big discount.  So, I thought we’d try it.  

Above is my 2 year old grandson sitting beside our delivery- it came by USPS.  

Near the top of the shopping crate is where these 3 bags were.  They contain the ingredients needed for each recipe.  

The shipping box was very insulated with several ice packs.  

The fresh meat was in the bottom. 

All the cold ingredients were very cold when delivered and they stayed fresh in our fridge until I cooked them.  

Hello Fresh sends very easy to follow recipe cards and nutritional information.  

Inside the brown paper bags, are the exact ingredients needed for a recipe. 

(At home, you will need to have basic cooking tools with salt, pepper and cooking oil) 

Below is the ingredients is for Sesame Beef Tacos.  

This plat contains 2 of the sesame beef tacos and we added Homemade refried beans from our freezer.  

This was our favorite of the 3 meals ( but we truly enjoyed all of them) 

We’d never cooked cabbage with our taco meat or had pickled vegetables on tacos. The Korean Red pepper flakes were a new spice to us, it is hot but mostly just spicy and delicious, 

This is our Sizzling Hoisin shrimp.  

My husband said “fabulous, absolutely fabulous” will he was eating,  

Our last meal was Creamy Dill Chicken,  the sauce was so good! 

We won’t be regular Hello Fresh customers but we did enjoy these 3 meals.  

I may order again we have a staycation or if we take a vacation and stay in a condo.  

The food is restaurant quality,  the meals are easy to prepare.  

I do plan on sending a gift certificate as a wedding gift for a couple of med school students that getting married this fall.  

An

This week, I baked 2 batches of sandwich buns and 2 loaves of pecan raisin bread.  

I also made some spreadable butter for the first time.  

I beat together 1/2 pound softened butter with 1/2 cooking oil in the mixer and then stored it in little Pyrex containers.  

So far, it’s great.  It is easy to spread on our morning toast.  

We cut what it probably our last watermelon of 2017.  

It was a really good one! ,

Have a wonderful weekend everyone ❤️