Speaking of Prairie Homemaker. . .if you have a moment, check out the Prairie Homemaker Mall. The ladies there offer several different types of crafts and homey “stuff” like scrubbies, sewing patterns, gift baskets, etc.

Take a look!

Over at Prairie Homemaker, some of the ladies are sharing a week’s worth of their families’ favorite meals. I figured some people here might be interested in seeing the recipes. . .so here’s our family’s favorites, along with a few of the recipes. We’d probably not ever really serve all these meals in the same week because they’re too expensive to eat all back-to-back. Usually we alternate bigger, more expensive meals with cheaper ones to balance out the grocery budget for the week.

But, just for fun, here are our favorites:

Cubed Beef patties and white gravy over potatoes
Steak on the grill, with grilled corn on the cob and grilled carmelized onion and some other starch
Shrimp boiled with Old Bay Seasoning
Taco Salad – not your traditional taco salad – recipe here
Chicken and Dumplins
Homemade Pizza – crust recipe here
Homemade Stromboli – recipe here

Taco Salad
1 lb ground beef
1/2 lb muenster cheese, grated (has to be muenster – other cheese doesn’t substitute well)
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 can cream of celery soup
Fritos corn chips
shredded lettuce
diced tomato

Brown the beef, drain. Stir in the undiluted cans of soup. Add the grated cheese, and let it all simmer until melted and bubbly and the cheese isn’t very stringy anymore.

To serve it, you put Fritos on the plate first, and crush them (the kids always seem to like crushing them on the plate; I know my brothers and I sure did growing up!). Then pile on shredded lettuce and chopped tomato. Spoon the hot meat sauce over everything. YUM!

Stromboli – this is always a huge hit wherever I take it

Dough:
9 oz warm water
1 packet or 1 Tbsp instant yeast
2 Tbsp butter or margarine or olive oil
2 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1/3 cup dry milk powder
3 cups flour

Filling:
Meat and cheese – here are some of our favorite combinations:
Pepperoni and mozzarella and cheddar cheeses, served with pizza or spaghetti sauce for dipping
1 Cubed chicken breast, cooked with 2 cloves of minced garlic, and Italian blend of cheeses
Turkey and bacon crumbles and mozzarella or colby cheese
Ham and cheddar
etc…..

Dissolve yeast in water, add butter or margarine or oil. Then add the dry ingredients and mix well. Let rise.

Punch down and roll out into a big rectangle about 14″ by 8.” Sprinkle with cheese, then layer on meat, then sprinkle a little more cheese. Roll up jelly roll style, sealing all edges and ends so cheese cannot ooze. Place on baking sheet (I usually have to place it diagonally so it will fit) and let rise a second time.

Bake in a 375 degree oven. I start checking it at about 20 minutes, but sometimes it takes as long as 30 minutes. Slice and serve warm.

Homemade Pizza

Makes 2 9×13 crusts

2 Tbsp active dry yeast
2 cups warm water
4 Tbsp oil
2 tsp sugar
2 tsp salt
5 cups all-purpose flour

Dissolve yeast in warm water in mixer bowl. Stir in remaining ingredients. Beat well. Let rest 5 minutes. Pat crust into pan and bake for 5 – 7 minutes or until crust is no longer shiny but not browned. Top with pizza toppings and bake for an additional 10 to 20 minutes.

It’s so peaceful. Stephen just left for work, so I thought I’d sit down and check email quickly before I head to bed.

Shortly after I sat down, the rain began. It’s such a pleasant drumming sound on the roof above me. So soothing.

As I reflect on today, I realize that there are so many things to be thankful for. Health insurance. Paying a copay instead of having to wonder if we can afford to visit the doctor at all. Not having to wonder if we can afford a medication or if we’d have to go without. . .we were that way for so long, and there were some medications we did without because we couldn’t afford them. No longer. After going so long without health or prescription insurance, now that we have it, I count my blessings each time I pull out that little grey card.

Another blessing is what arrived in the mail the other day. After the confusion with our rental income for July, I had prayed that the rent for August would arrive early. It had never come before the fifth of the month before, so I just hoped it would come earlier than it had been coming. Well, it came this week. Not just on time, but early. Much earlier than I expected. It was a nice suprise.

When I got home today, Stephen was in the kitchen. I’m thankful for a husband who does the dishes (and scrubs dirty pots), so I don’t have to come home to a dirty house.

I am so blessed.

Poor little guy. I took him to our new doctor for a follow-up visit today. I like this doctor. It’s a family practice, and we should be able to get just about everything done there – Little man’s visits, and Stephen and my checkups, and even the womanly visits will be able to be taken care of there! I was very impressed.

I left an hour and a half before the appointment. I budgeted an hour for drive time and planned to get there thirty minutes early. It didn’t happen. I got turned around in town, and had to stop and ask for directions to get there. Mapquest is usually pretty good for directions, but I was about 4 blocks away the whole time and just could not find the office. Oh well. We were only three minutes late.

The doctor checked Little man over, and glanced in his ears. . .and we found out why he’s been so grumpy this past couple of days. Poor little guy has an ear infection on top of the upper respiratory infection. I asked them last week to check his ears, because when he gets a cold, he almost always ends up with an ear infection. The thing is, I never considered that he might get an ear infection while the respiratory infection was being treated. It was one of those, “Duh, why didn’t I think of this sooner?” moments.

So he has another follow-up visit in three weeks to check on his ears. I have an appointment there for that week as well, so we just put the appointments on the same day to save us some driving. I’ll have to take someone with me to watch Little man while I’m in my appointment, but since Stephen works thirds it won’t be too bad.

Oiy. Now I’m off to sit on the couch with Stephen and do a whole lotta nothin! :O)

Got up this morning with a full-blown case of the “yuckies.” I don’t seem to have all of Little man’s symptoms – I actually have flu-like symptoms – but it doesn’t matter. I’m sick. Little man is doing some better, but he’s still miserable. Poor guy, he really has no idea which end is up.

By lunchtime I was so weak that I called Stephen downstairs to help me fix lunch. I just didn’t have the energy to deal with Little man and cook at the same time. I’m so thankful for my sweet husband! He doesn’t mind a bit stepping in to do things around the house that are traditionally “my” duties, like dishes or cooking or whatever. He loves to cook, and is a good cook, in fact, he taught me how to cook. I just love cooking a big meal with him. But I digress.

Stephen decided that since I didn’t feel well that we should have chicken soup for supper. It sounded good, so I got a chicken out of the freezer and started to defrost it some before I threw it in the pot to cook.

The stove here has a mind of it’s own. One of the big burners doesn’t work, so we do most of our cooking on the large front burner. Well, this burner only works part of the time – you have to jiggle the pot on the burner sometimes to get it to come on. I guess the contacts are corroding or not connecting right or something.

Once the pot of chicken was finally bubbling well, I went into the study to read my Bible. I fell asleep praying. I awoke to hear noises coming from the kitchen. Since I wasn’t sure if it was Stephen or Little man, I got up to investigate. Good thing.

White smoke hung down a full 18 inches from the ceiling. My chicken had boiled dry. I have no idea how it boiled dry so quickly, but somehow it did. My big soup pot is ruined, I’m afraid. I scooped the chicken out of the pot, hoping that maybe we can salvage some of it for supper. The pot is soaking with baking soda and water. That was my favorite pot, and I’m going to do just about everything I can to see if it can be saved. I sure hope so!

We turned the ceiling fans on and opened the doors to air out the smell. It smells like someone is grilling chicken outside.

Today was such a different day. Although Little man is doing better, he still wasn’t feeling well enough for us to take him to church. Poor little guy – he’s just miserable enough that he doesn’t know what he wants.

Since we need to be moving soon, I figured I’d better get packing. No, we still don’t have a place to live (thanks for asking, Lora!), but I didn’t want to go nuts trying to pack everything all at once when the time does come. I started with things we don’t use as much.

That’s how I happened upon the diapers. As I sat there folding them, I realized that I had no idea how long it had been since we had put Little man in a diaper. Ok, we still use pull-ups at night, but that’s only because I haven’t been able to come up with a better idea for our still potty-training little guy. He just can’t go all night long yet.

Anyways, it was kind of a bittersweet moment packing away those diapers. It’s a great feeling to have him out of diapers now, but at the same time it stings a little because I’m not sure I’m ready for my little man to grow up yet. For a long time I also thought that the diapers would go straight from Little man to his little brother or sister. . .but that is not to be. No little sibling for him yet, at least not that we can see. It was strange to see that dream before me again, and yet, it too was folded up along with the diapers.

It amazes me how hard it is sometimes to let go of our dreams and surrender them to God. I know He knows best, but it’s not easy to just let go and hand our dreams over. I suppose God has a different plan for our little family. But then again, His plans for our family this far have been drastically different than I ever dreamed. Maybe I should hold on to Him and just enjoy the ride, huh?

Yesterday was something else. . .today seems to be headed in that direction as well.

On the way home from grocery shopping (woo hoo!) yesterday, I noticed that Sam had a cough. I didn’t like the sound of it, so I just figured I’d keep and eye on it. When one of the VBS workers took him, she commented that he felt a little warm, and that maybe he had a fever. He’d been a little warm at home, but I didn’t think too much about it. . .but his fever had definitely risen. This sweet lady kindly watched him all evening, and kept him out of the nursery so we wouldn’t get any other kids sick.

At VBS, the game the kids played involved peanut butter and marshmallows. They got to smear peanut butter all over our faces (we being the crew leaders), then the kids stood a few steps away and threw marshmallows at us. The leader that had the most marshmallows stuck to their face won. Thankfully, they did give us garbage bags to protect our clothes. The prize? All the kids on that team received a water balloon to throw at whomever they wished. I won, and my girls were kind enough to hit me with their water balloons. Funny, it didn’t help wash the peanut butter off any. . .

I went inside and washed my face with the handsoap that was by the sink. I had some in my hair, but I wasn’t too worried about it. I figured I’d just shower before bed, and didn’t give it another thought.

When we got home, we looked out the window and saw that the work had been begun on our back yard. Our landlord is opening up the basement and adding a walk-out door on one wall. The dropped off the backhoe while we were gone and had dug some of the dirt for the footer.

We only had a very little bit of time to get Stephen something to eat, pack a lunch for work, and get him out the door. By that time, Sam was coughing quite a bit and was burning up. When we got home we took his temperature: 102.4 – higher than we had ever seen it. What concerned us the most was how quickly he started feeling poorly. When I left for town yesterday morning, Sam seemed to be doing just fine, but by 9:30 last night, he was very sick. His cough had gotten drastically worse, and he was jerking and trembling in his sleep. We decided he needed to see a doctor immediately, rather than waiting till morning.

Since we’re new to the area still, we didn’t have a doctor for Sam yet. I hopped onto our insurance website. The closest urgent care center I could get in touch with was an hour away, and with Stephen leaving for work, there was no way I could get Sam there before they closed. We ended up driving Stephen to work so I could take Sam to the urgent care center in that town. It was listed on our company’s website, but I hadn’t been able to contact them by phone. When I left the plant, we got stopped by a train, so we ended up having to go to the emergency room. It turns out that the urgent care center we were looking for only accepts medicaid patients (which we didn’t know), so we wouldn’t have been able to go there in the first place.

The diagnosis: Sam has an upper respiratory infection. We were given a prescription and sent home. We went back to the plant to tell Stephen, and thankfully, he was given the rest of the night off. What a blessing. I would have done it if I had to, but it sure was nice knowing I didn’t have to turn around in 4 hours to go get Stephen from work, especially since the drive is 30 minutes. We didn’t fill the prescription immediately because we had no idea which pharmacies our insurance covers. That’s why I’m on the computer right now – I sat down to check the website to see where I should take the prescription.

We were awakened this morning at 7:30. It was our pastor’s wife, wanting to know how Sam was doing (I had called her before we left).

Then at 8 the men came back to work on the house. . .and the concrete truck was pouring cement by 9.

Yep. . .what a day. . .can’t wait to see what else is in store for the day. Hopefully the meds won’t be too expensive. . .