Archive for the ‘Family Life’ Category

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The Best Minnestrone Soup

Friday, October 26th, 2012

minestrone-soup

My friend Carla from church came over several years ago to help me do Once-a-Month Cooking. She and I were in my kitchen for five hours, cooking and freezing enough food for a month. It was wonderful not to have to cook from day to day.

This minnestrone soup has been requested by many people and is perhaps her best recipe. She did not give me exact amounts, so years later I have attempted to list the exact proportions of each ingredient. I would take out the 1 1/2 cups of sliced carrots because unless you make it at the beginning of the day, the carrots will still be crunchy when you serve it. (I made this soup recently four hours before dinner, and it tasted delicious except for the crunchy carrots. So skip the carrots if you are not letting the soup simmer the entire day.)

  • 1 pound of ground beef
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • a teaspoon of crushed garlic
  • Italian seasoning to taste
  • 16-oz. can of diced tomatoes
  • 1 green bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 1/2 cups peeled and sliced carrots
  • 3 beef bullion cubes dissolved in 4 cups of hot water
  • 3 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce
  • 2 16-oz. cans of kidney beans, not drained
  • 1 can of corn, drained
  • 1 can of green beans, drained

My friend threw the onion, garlic, and at least a tablespoon of Italian seasoning into some olive oil in a pan on the stove. We caramelized the onions for about two minutes before adding the ground beef. (I always cook the ground beef and onion together, so this step seemed strange to me. But she definitely knew what she was doing because her soup was so darned good.) After browning the ground beef in the onions and garlic, we dumped the contents of the pan into an enormous crock pot. (The pot has to be enormous, or the contents won’t fit. You could always simmer it on low on your stove in a large pot if your crock pot is not big enough.) Dump all the ingredients into the pot except for the green beans. Add the green beans during the last half hour. At the end of the day, your house will smell delicious. This soup is enjoyed best with freshly baked bread.

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Posted in Cooking and Baking | 4 Comments »

Making Your Own Flavored Popcorn

Wednesday, October 17th, 2012

making-your-own-popcorn

Autumn is a great time to experiment with making your own flavored popcorn. If you pop it yourself in a large pot on your stove, it costs way less money, and it’s super fun for your kids to look through a clear lid to see the popcorn kernels popping around like crazy! It’s not that hard, really.

First pour 1/4 cup of vegetable oil into the pot to coat the entire bottom of the pot. Put it on medium heat. Pour 1/2 cup of popcorn into the pot. Don’t forget to put the lid on the pot. One time I was making popcorn at my friend’s house with her kids, and we were watching the popcorn on the bottom of the pot. The phone rang and for some reason we all walked out of the room without covering the pot. Five minutes later there was popcorn all over the kitchen! The air was full of flying popcorn! And it was impossible to put the lid on the pot when it was spitting out boiling hot kernels in all directions. We laughed hysterically, accidentally crushed popcorn under our feet, and finally got the lid onto the pot. It was a lot of work to clean up.

So don’t do that. Remember to put the lid on.

popcorn

Let me back up to say that you need to take the pot off the heat for one minute after you hear the first popcorn kernel pop. Then return the pot to the heat. Shake the pot continuously back and forth, taking turns with anyone else in the room, making sure their turns are longer than yours so that you do less work.

As soon as the popcorn stops popping, shut off the stove, open the lid, and dump the popcorn into a large bowl. If you are having a party, everyone can make their own toppings in their own bowls or paper bags. My favorite flavor of popcorn is cheese popcorn, you know, the kind that actually looks orange. Well, I had no idea that you can get the same basic flavor by shaking Parmesan cheese on some air-popped popcorn. And it’s not bad for you, because it’s real cheese. It contains calcium and protein. Of course cheese has calories, but at least they’re not empty calories.

If you eat the air-popped popcorn with salt on it, it has almost no calories at all. Only do this if you’re on a diet, because it’s a whole lot better with butter. Real butter. Melt butter either on the stove or in the microwave, and pour it on top of your popcorn. Yum.

I’ve tried making mixtures of chili popcorn by using chili powder, garlic powder, and cumin, but I didn’t really like it that much. Maybe if you mix it with Parmesan and don’t go overboard on the chili powder, it would be more delicious, if you are in a spicy sort of mood.

make-your-own-popcorn

Of course, the grand finale is caramel popcorn, which takes longer to make, but it’s delicious. Cook 1 cup of brown sugar, 4 tablespoons of margarine, 1/4 cup of corn syrup, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt in a saucepan under medium heat, stirring continuously. When it bubbles, stir another five minutes. Pawn this task off to your children, who have way more energy than you do. At the end of five minutes, stir in 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda. Then pour it over the popcorn that is on a foil-lined cookie sheet. Bake an hour at 200 degrees, stirring every 15 minutes.

If you are impatient and want to eat the caramel popcorn without baking it at all, go ahead. It’s a lot stickier, but it’s still yummy. Especially if you’re pregnant and you have a craving for caramel popcorn, you definitely wouldn’t want to wait an entire hour!

 

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Posted in Cooking and Baking, Fun Autumn Activities | No Comments »

The Bird Wouldn’t Have Survived Anyway

Tuesday, October 16th, 2012

bad-kitty

I was praying one morning out on the back porch, pacing back and forth. The cat came up to me and started pacing, too. She stopped and looked at me, indicating that my walking was pointless. The cat yawned and walked away.

I continued to pray. About twenty minutes later, the cat came back with a beautiful yellow bird in its mouth. “Put that bird down!” I shouted. The cat dropped the bird. I picked up the cat and put her in the house. Closing the sliding door, I walked over to the bird, hoping it was still alive. It didn’t move. “I hope you’re just pretending to be dead. Get up and fly. Here is your chance.”

I went back into the house, walking into the dining room and sitting in the window seat. I watched the bird. It wasn’t moving.

I told the kids that our cat had just killed a pretty bird. The kids ran to the window to see. They yelled, “Bad kitty!” to the cat. But I answered, “No, she isn’t bad. She was doing what she does instinctively. One of the reasons we got the cat in the first place was so that she could kill the mice.”

As I walked down the hallway, I heard the sound of the sliding door. I turned around and ran back, asking Rachel if she had let the cat out. “Yes,” she said. I ran to the dining room, looking out the bay window, and sure enough, the bird was gone.

“Sweetheart! Why did you let the cat out? I purposely put the cat inside to get her away from the bird!”

Rachel started crying. “It’s okay,” I said. “The bird was dead anyway.”

“No, it wasn’t! I saw it move!” my daughter wailed. I looked at her. She realized it was her fault that the bird was finished off.

“The bird wouldn’t have survived anyway,” I consoled her. “Birds that are hurt don’t last long.” As she was crying, I asked God what I could teach her so that her sorrow wasn’t wasted. It came to me. “Rachel, before you act, you need to think about the consequences of your actions. You often act before you think. You must learn to think before you act.” She stopped crying and thought about it.

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Posted in Family Life | 18 Comments »

Top 10 Reasons to Rest

Monday, October 15th, 2012

reasons-to-restToday I will be sharing the top 10 reasons to rest. In our modern society, rest has fallen by the wayside as productivity seems to be all-important. But if we don’t take the time to rest, our bodies will suffer in many ways. In order to avoid these negative effects, we must remind ourselves daily to actually rest!

Top 10 Reasons to Rest:

  1. Rest makes you more productive. If you feel refreshed, you can get more accomplished than if you are tired.
  2. You get sick more easily if you don’t rest.
  3. Rest helps you to think rationally.
  4. You eventually get burnout if you don’t rest, and it takes longer to recuperate from burnout.
  5. Rest helps you to deal with your emotions in relationships.
  6. You have better conversations when you are rested.
  7. Rest helps you to not be as stressed.
  8. Rest helps you feel more optimistic about life.
  9. God invites us to rest (Matthew 11:28), gives us an example of rest in the week of creation, and includes Sabbath rest in the Ten Commandments.
  10. Rest gives you an opportunity to reconnect to God.

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