I love to shop at Aldi. I remember my first trip there. It was with my friend, Erin, from The Humbled Homemaker. I was visiting her and she told me we HAD to go, because I didn’t yet have an Aldi at home…but now we DO!
My favorite thing about Aldi…okay that’s a lie. I have many favorite things about Aldi! We’ll get to that shortly, and we’ll talk about what I buy at Aldi that is whole foods friendly.
[Read more…]I have made fresh bread for our family for many years now, and the recipe I use (the Bread Beckers’ Basic Dough recipe) makes two, one-pound loaves. Depending on the week’s meal plan, sometimes I only need one of the two loaves. Sometimes I share the second loaf with friends or neighbors, and sometimes I use the other dough on something a little different. In this case, I decided to make homemade pizza rolls!
This recipe works with any dough recipe that you’d normally use to make loaf bread. You basically need one pound of dough. If your normal dough recipe is something than a single pound, keep that in mind. Like me, you may choose to make one loaf of bread and these homemade pizza rolls. It’s your dough – do your thing. 😉
I made one loaf of bread like usual, then took the other half of the dough and rolled it out like I was going to make cinnamon rolls. I then sprinkled it with pizza toppings (minus sauce), rolled it up and cut it into slices. Place the slices onto a baking sheet and let them rise about 15 minutes. Then bake at 350 for about 15 minutes. Cool slightly and serve warm with pizza sauce.
If you’re already making dough – this is how you can get some extra bonus super-cool mom points from your kids. Just sayin’. WE ALL LOVE THESE – and this recipe is a great way to whip up a quick lunch if your kids are also Hoover vacuums. I usually serve the pizza rolls with some sort of veggie and add some fruit on the side.
A few times I year I go through what I like to call: The Cooking Rut. It almost always happens right after Christmas and then again right before summer, when we are finishing up school. I know it’s coming – and it used to bother me. But now I know how to ride it out, so I wanted to share with you three things that help me.
Before I go any further, let me encourage you to listen to that burn-out/rut feeling. It’s okay to have it. It doesn’t mean you’re a terrible homemaker and you’re failing. It just means you’re human and providing three meals a day can get old day after day after day after day. Give yourself some rest – maybe take a few weeks off from planning/cooking hard core. Two weeks is probably a good length. And then resume, with these tips.
[Read more…]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.
[Read more…]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. 😉
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.
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.
[Read more…]I’ve been making Overnight Oats for many years. At first, I started because it was a cool breakfast to eat in the summer months when it’s HOT as soon as your feet hit the floor and you just want to sit in the nude and eat cold food. What? Oh, that’s just me? Oh well.
And then, my kids fell in love with them so I found myself making them all the time.
[Read more…]I think this is the place where bananas come to die. We LOVE them. But no matter how many I buy, at least 4 are always in a state of decay. I’m not talking: eh, those are a little gone. I’m taking: if you pick it up, it will smush in your hand. Banana pancakes are one of the solutions to use such “smushy” bananas. 😉
[Read more…]When we had Ruthie, our church delivered several meals to our house – because they’re holy like that. And we love them. Our pastor’s wife, Miss Sally, (I know, I know, it is technically “MRS. Sally”, but the name Miss stuck) is the most amazing woman of God you’ll ever meet. She’s gentle. She’s kind. She just casually dropped off a chocolate cake. Like it was no big thing. And friends, I had never had Miss Sally’s cake before. But I can tell you, I never want to be without it AGAIN.
[Read more…]Do you like chicken but don’t want to break the bank? Read on for some yummy AND FRUGAL real-food chicken dinner recipes!
Y’all, there are some things I don’t mind spending money on. Every five years, I have an absolute breakdown and go spend some major birthday money on clothes that fit the body I actually have at that point. Also, date nights…Even if our budget gets very tight, we will scrimp and save to spend time together – eating, most likely. Because date nights together are that important.
But I will tell you something I do NOT like to splurge on.
It’s chicken, y’all. Whenever I see meals calling for prosciutto, and two and a half large chicken breasts PER PERSON, stuffed with some rare French cheese and umpteen fresh herbs…I click that ol’ browser shut as fast as I can. I’m sure it’s delicious, but I cannot afford to serve every member of my family three pounds of chicken in one sitting! No way.
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