After finishing up a Facebook Live making hot dog buns, I went to the blog to link up the recipe and was SHOCKED to find that I haven’t posted about these yet. While we don’t eat hot dogs super often, but I’ve been making my own homemade hot dog buns for YEARS. And they are SOOO good. I can’t believe I haven’t shared this before!

Like I said, we don’t eat hot dogs very often. Even if you find an organic, nitrate and nitrite free, all natural, all beef hot dog… at the end of the day, they are still very highly processed meat. But whenever I do buy them, I go for the nitrate and nitrite free beef hot dogs that my Walmart carries. I also like the chicken hot dogs that Aldi’s occasionally offers.

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In this family, we really enjoy Crock Pot Lasagna. I even have a Black Bean version in my Crock On Cookbook. This is just another doozy to add to my arsenal. It’s great for serving to company. Let’s hop to it! [Read more…]

I store all of my favorite and most-used recipes in page protectors in a 3-inch binder that stays in my closet. When I make my meal plan, I choose one or two new recipes and then the rest are old standbys from the binder. I clean it out a few times a year to make room for new recipes we try and love.  I’ve had several requests to talk about my favorite recipes by category, so let’s do this! Where should we start? Well…they do say breakfast is the most important meal of the day, so let’s talk about my favorite breakfast recipes.

Oh Breakfast, how do I love thee…let me count the ways.

I may have mentioned a time or two…or two hundred…that breakfast is one of my favorite meals. I could literally eat it every day for the rest of my life 😉 A while back, I shared my 10 Easy, Go-To Breakfasts and I received a lot of comments on how much y’all loved that.  I’ve also let y’all in on my secret to stress-free mornings with my Solution For Your Breakfast Woes. Make-ahead breakfasts for the win! This post isn’t quite that focused – in this post, we’re focused on a lot of my favorite recipes, but what you do with them and when is all up to you. [Read more…]

Over the years, I have gotten TONS of reader questions about food consumption and grocery shopping. Here are just a few:  “Stacy, how do you keep enough food in the house?” “Help Stacy! I can’t figure out how much to buy!” “Stacy my family eats so much food that I am constantly running out!” Dear Stacy, I don’t want to over-buy and waste food, but I don’t want to run out either. “How do I buy enough food, but not too much?”

The struggle is real, y’all.

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Some of you follow me on Instagram, where I always share our dinners each night and our weekly meal plan on Fridays. Y’all have noticed that our family has cut way back on our meat consumption, and I’ve been getting a lot of questions and comments about it. Everyone is curious – why did we cut back on meat?

About 8 years ago, we started down our path of healthy living.

We started too fast at first. At first, I wanted to do it ALL. Homemade sourdough bread, fermented foods, buy and make everything organic. I wanted to cook everything from scratch. I didn’t want to use any chemicals or anything toxic anywhere in the house. And as you might imagine, I very quickly hit burn out SO bad. I burned out so bad, that I did a 180 and started to go back to buying processed food, eating out a whole lot more, and as a result, we didn’t feel good.

That’s why I always encourage people to go slow.

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A while back I shared with y’all the solution to our breakfast woes – make-ahead breakfasts cooked in big batches for the week ahead. We LOVE this approach! This past week I made super easy, but really hearty and delicious breakfast burritos in a jar.

Breakfast burritos in a jar are so easy to customize.

Pinterest was my original inspiration for this recipe (of course!) and there were 100s of recipes with all kinds of interesting filling ideas. You could choose any protein you’d like from sausage, bacon, chorizo, ham, or ground beef to black beans, refried beans or quinoa. I used some sautéed peppers because it was what I had on hand, but you could also use zucchini, onions, mushrooms, baby spinach, or whatever else you’d like! [Read more…]

I’m about to let you in on a little secret. At night when my kids go to sleep, I eat chocolate. Chocolate chips, chocolate chunks, Hershey’s kisses, or on a really good day, my single serving chocolate cake. Sometimes momma just needs a little something sweet at nighttime after children go to bed!

If I try to eat any kind of chocolate (or any sweets) during the day, it’s like my kids have chocolate radar. They just know. Similar thing happens when I’m sweeping and I’ve got a pile of dirt in the kitchen. They somehow know to come sprinting through the kitchen.

Usually, we save special desserts for Sundays.

But it’s always nice to be able to whip these up when Barry and I have had a long day and just need a special treat! Anytime I make a single serving chocolate cake, I just preheat my trusty countertop toaster oven. It cooks almost identically to a regular oven, but preheats in no time, doesn’t waste tons of energy and won’t heat up the whole kitchen.  And I don’t know about you, but I personally think that single serving “mug cakes” you cook in the microwave are gross. They taste weird and overly spongy. I don’t like those at all. But this is WAY different.