Crock Pot Corn Chowder

The idea for this crock pot corn chowder recipe came from a church cookbook. Seeing as how I have about 20-30 of them, I get lots of ideas there. 🙂 Some of the ideas turn out good. Some of them don’t turn out at all and I have to scrape them out with the assistance of a chisel and a sledgehammer.

I used to feel bad about this fact – until I read that most great chefs get their groundbreaking ideas from something they see somewhere else. They just put their spin on it, add something new, or use a different technique. So, if a chef can do it, so can I! Take a seat, Chef Boyardee! After all, no recipe will ever come out that hasn’t been made before. I just have to “Stacify” them.

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How to Be a Work at Home Mom

I’ve been a work-at-home mom for the past ten years. I remember this because one of my very first posts on the blog was about throwing a bubble-themed birthday party for my oldest daughter. It has been a big learning experience, but I have found working at home suits me (and our family) really well. With the right attitude, the right office setup, and the right resources, working at home is something that may just work for you as well. I’ll share toward the end of this post about my actual workspace, and tell you about the desk and chair I recently received from Autonomous, the sponsor of today’s post. If you prefer to watch a video about this, jump over to my YouTube channel where I just posted a video about it.

With kids, what does working at home look like?

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Oatmeal Peanut Butter Bars

There is always a hunt for a healthy dessert recipe. But really, is dessert supposed to be healthy? Isn’t it supposed to be an indulgence that we have occasionally just for the sake of the pure enjoyment of food? Sure, it’s cool to say “Here is my apple, it’s my dessert.” But really, an apple is not dessert. You can say it’s dessert – it can stand in the place of dessert – but it’s no piece of chocolate cake. So let’s try a real dessert recipe that’s actually somewhat healthy(ish) – oatmeal peanut butter bars.

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How to Make Homemade Bread

I keep getting requests for how to make homemade bread and more specifically, for bread machine tutorial videos. I get it #becausebread. I have done these types of tutorials many times on Instagram, but I finally got around to a full three-part series about how I make homemade bread in the bread machine for our YouTube channel.

But that doesn’t mean you should jump over to YouTube just yet. Let’s cover some basics in this article first which will really help you know the tools and method better.

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How to Cook Steak in a Skillet (on the stove)

I’ll be the first to tell you, cooking steak was never my forte in the kitchen. I had never been good at it – and grilling is also a skill that I haven’t acquired because I don’t spend enough time trying to learn the ins and outs of it. But you always should experiment – and so I set out to learn how to cook steak in a skillet on the stove.

I knew it could be done because my friends did it – and I knew that butter HAD to be the answer. I mean, isn’t butter the answer to most of life’s problems?

Dry? Butter. Tasteless? Butter. Old? Butter. Stuck? Butter.

And while we’re on that topic – can we all agree that REAL butter is way better than the cheap garbage that was made in some chemistry lab or factory? Okay…moving on.

So to Google I went – on my quest to research the elusive steak-at-home perfection! Let me just tell ya – there’s about forty trillion tutorials for this on Google. But let me save you a bunch of time so you can just get to the good stuff. Keep reading. 😉

The Steps to an Amazing Steak in the Skillet:

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Chocolate Chip Banana Snack Cake

Kitchen Therapy

Getting in the kitchen and baking/cooking is therapy to me. Well, up to a point. When I happen to be worried about something or I’m just out of sorts, getting my hands into flour and batter just really helps me – and it’s cheaper than a therapist.  But then there are those times when getting the kitchen makes me feel like I NEED A THERAPIST. I burn everything and throw a hissy fit. The smoke alarm goes off (again). I get mad and throw a dish. Annie says, “what is THAT?” So, yeah. But baking is still cheaper than a therapist. A chocolate chip banana cake to therapy session is about to begin!

I wish I could explain to you the deep satisfaction that I get when I take a conventional recipe and turn it into something healthy (or healthy-ish). It’s a deep sense of calm. There’s a deep sense of pride. It’s a deep sense of humility – because the next time I try to do it, it tastes like sandpaper and you can’t even choke it down. But, I would have to say that about 75% of the time, making a recipe healthy turns out well – and I can suffer through the other 25% that it doesn’t. I’m SURE Barry is going to remind me of that the next time I sit in the floor, crying, rocking, and holding on to a pan of sawdust cake.

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Crock Pot Maple Bacon Wrapped Chicken

I’ve been known to say that you can make dirt taste good by adding bacon. I stand by that statement. Bacon is like ketchup, but BETTER. If you want your kids to eat something, add bacon or ketchup. Or sometimes even both. Do you know that my brother in law puts ketchup on everything? E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G. Of course, we can’t really stand by his culinary genius, because he also wraps his Pop Tarts in cheese. So, he doesn’t count. Take maple, bacon, and chicken, and you’ve got a real winner.

But yes, I am a bacon lover. Hardly a day goes by that we don’t have bacon in SOMETHING. Last night on Pinterest I saw someone wrapping their Cinnamon Rolls in bacon. Now that, my friends, is culinary genius.  Chocolate Bacon. Bacon Bacon. Candied Bacon. The world has gone crazy over bacon. And I hate to say this…but I liked bacon before liking bacon was the cool thing to do. Of course, I was frugal before frugal was cool too – I hope eventually that OCD will also be cool and then I’ll really fit in.

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Homemaking vs. Housekeeping

It seems that over the last 100 years or so, the ART of homemaking has been lost. What used to be something that we coveted as little girls, became somewhat of a burden. We were no longer taught that we should desire to be homemakers – that it was LESS THAN. Instead, we should desire a career only and also wanting to keep a home was beneath us.

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Crock Pot vs. Instant Pot

When the Instant Pot became all the rage, a lot of my friends get rid of their slow cookers because they didn’t think they would ever use them again. It became a Crock Pot vs. Instant Pot “thing” for some reason. But they’re both pretty amazing in their own ways.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Pressure cookers are nothing new – they’ve been around for a long, long time. I had already been using a stove-top pressure cooker for about two years when Instant Pots became popular, and yet I still had my Crock Pots. Why? Because I used (and still use) both.

While the Instant Pot (or other like versions) do offer the slow cooker option, a lot of times (from what I have read), they don’t work as well as a “real” slow cooker and have a tendency to burn food. I know that’s likely not the case for ALL Instant Pots; however, I think it makes sense for me to have both and I’m going to tell you why. 

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Relationships and Money: 5 Things Every Couple Needs to Know

A lot of you are new around here, so I’ve been spending some time recapping some of my favorite content written since Humorous Homemaking was born in May 2010.  One of the ways I’m determining which content is best to share with you anew, I consider the most frequently asked questions I get via email, Facebook, etc.  By far, the most common set of questions falls under the heading of relationships and money or marriage and money.

I get TONS of questions on how to get husbands and wives to agree on money.  Why? Because I firmly believe when you said “I do” you made a commitment for life. Unfortunately, the reason that commitment is most commonly broken is due to money problems.  When I started providing financial counsel, I quickly learned I often provided a lot of marriage counseling too.

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