My word of the year for 2011

*~RENEW!!~*

1. to begin or take up again, as an acquaintance, a conversation, etc.; resume.

2. to make effective for an additional period: to renew a lease.

3. to restore or replenish: to renew a stock of goods.

4. to make, say, or do again.

5. to revive; reestablish.

6. to recover (youth, strength, etc.).

7. to restore to a former state; make new or as if new again.

 

—Synonyms
3.  restock. 7.  re-create, rejuvenate, regenerate, reinstate, mend. Renew, renovate, repair, restore  suggest making something the way it formerly was. To renew  means to bring back to an original condition of freshness and vigor: to renew one's enthusiasm. Renovate  means to do over or make good any dilapidation of something: to renovate an old house.  To repair  is to put into good or sound condition; to make good any injury, damage, wear and tear, decay, etc.; to mend: to repair the roof of a house.  To restore  is to bring back to its former place or position something which has faded, disappeared, been lost, etc., or to reinstate a person in rank or position: to restore a king to his throne.  

 

I have a few very specific ways in which I want to invite ~renew~ into my life. But I hesitate to say too much just yet. I want to be still with it for a while and see where it leads me.

I'm looking forward to a wonderful New Year. 

Christmas 2010

We made it! Another Christmas in the books.
Special annual ornaments were sought but not found to represent the big event for us this year: moving.
So on Christmas Eve I threw together some quick and dirty crafty type ones. I just Mod Podged pics of the old house on one side and the new house on the other. Sparkly Mod Podge of course. It is Christmas after all.

Whatever works.
There was no particular theme for the tree this year. We just used all our yearly ornaments which makes for a pretty heavily decorated tree after all these years.

After wishing for pretty much my whole life to have a mantle from which to hang the stockings, we finally do! And yet, we decided that we kind of like them hanging from the stair railing as they have for the past 16 Christmases.  So that's what we did.

And I used the mantle to display some treasured Nativities and other keepsakes that I usually don't even put out because it's too hard to keep the little people away from them. The mantle is perfectly out of their reach.

tsk! tsk! with the power cords! Oh well...
We decorated cookies on Christmas Eve. It was just going to be the gingerbread men that I bought from the co-op but at the last minute I cranked out some sugar cookies from a mix to go with them.

Oh how I hate getting my picture taken. But at least there's proof I was present.

Kenzie got a special gift this year. The plague! She was just coming down with it on Christmas Eve and is still under the train today. Poor kid. As if that's not bad enough, today I took her to a podiatrist to get her toenails partially removed. But that's a blog post for another day.Don't worry. No pictures.

Jaxon was meticulous with the frosting...

And generous with the sprinkles!

Oh Holy sprinkly disaster Batman!!!
We had the obligatory mistletoe, of course.

Perfect for grossing out the preteen daughter every chance we get.
Traditional new pajamas on Christmas Eve? Check!

Stroke of luck finding that personalized t-shirt for Roger, eh?
Santa showed up as expected.

He brought Jaxon that awesome tool bench.

Emily received an mp3 player which has been permanently embedded in her ear since the big day. I guess it's a suitable upgrade from the Barbie one she's been using for a couple of years.
And Kenzie got what every teen always wants...

A fancy new phone. Well, not new new. She helped Santa search high and low for a fancy used phone because she is frugal and merciful.
Speaking of presents, I only made two this year. Not counting neighbor gifts. Rare for me to make so few gifts.
I made two quillows.
It's a quilt! It's a pillow! It's a quillow!!
One for my cat loving Aunt Verna

And one for my Mom. Frogs because she loves them,

With a special cover that has Kenzie, Emily and Jaxon's handprints on it because, well, she loves them too!

Kids, grandkids, my Mom, Aunt, Uncle and Brother all came over for our traditional Christmas brunch followed by watching movies while slipping in and out of a food coma. 
And that was that.
Except for the giant task of packing away all the decorations. Ugh!
I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas! And may we all have a Happy New Year!

Dining Room Table: Plan B

I mentioned that we finally refinished our big dining room table last month.
We planned to work some magic on the old chairs with a few cans of spray paint.

But a great sale on new chairs coincided perfectly with someone else really needing our old chairs, so we returned the spray paint and saved ourselves a lot of work.
Tah dah!

We love them! And now our table suits our home.

I guess this should technically be called Plan C. When we purchased the chairs I still had the idea of mixing up the colors. They had blue (totally doesn't work in our house), red, black and white. I decided the white would look dirty all the time. So we brought home 4 red and 4 black. Roger worked his fingers off assembling them, set them up at the table and I immediately hated it. Looked like something out of Alice In Wonderland with the red, white and black. ugh! So we he disassembled the red ones and we traded them for 4 more black.
In the end, it might have only been me that was spared a lot of work by not having to sand and spray paint the old chairs. Ha!

This, That and Another Thing

I mentioned that we have begun participating in two co-ops again.
Bountiful Baskets
and
The Community Food Co-op of Utah

LOVING IT!!!
Today we had two pick ups.
This is what we got from Bountiful Baskets

It was $15 for all the fruits and veggies you see, $8 for 4 dozen rolls (2 white, 1 wheat and 1 cranberry orange) and $6.50 for 12 gingerbread man cookies with buttercream frosting and a pastry tube included. The gingerbread house turned out so great that I thought I'd give myself a break and let someone else bake the cookies that we decorate every year. Hopefully the kids won't mind that they're gingerbread instead of sugar cookiesw. The fun is in the decorating anyway, right?

This is what we got from the Community Food Co-op

It was $10 for all the fruits and veggies you see there, $20.75 for the nuts (1 pound each of cashews, almonds, deluxe mixed nuts and pistachios) and $4.05 for 2 lbs of natural peanut butter.

That's sixty-ish bucks well spent! Our fridge is bursting at the seams!

I used those yellow squash and a zucchini that I had on hand to make a yummy lunch for myself today.

Parmesan Crusted Zucchini Sticks

serves 6 

3 PointsPlus per serving

6 zucchini (roughly the size of large bananas, if that helps)
1 egg, beaten well
2/3 cup Progresso Italian Seasoned bread crumbs
1/2 ounce finely shredded parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Spray a baking sheet with non stick spray.
Cut the zucchini into fourths lengthwise.
In a shallow dish such as a pie plate, beat the egg.
In a second dish combine the bread crumbs and parmesan.
Dip each piece of zucchini first in the egg and then in the bread crumbs.
Place on baking sheet in a single layer.

Bake 20-25 minutes until golden brown.

You can dip them in Marinara sauce. Most bottled brands are very low in points.
I dipped mine in Hidden Valley Ranch dressing in a packet, made with lowfat buttermilk and reduced fat mayo. 1 point per 2 Tablespoons.

YUM! Feels like cheating if you close your eyes and pretend you're at Red Robin with a big greasy pile of these in front of you. :)

And, finally, based on the heaps of produce in our fridge I have compiled the following meal plan to get us through till Christmas. At which time, points will not be counted for one day. Because I said so!

1-Sunday family dinner - Spaghetti provided by us and sides and dessert provided by others.
2-Breaded Fish Sandwiches with Cilantro Blue Cheese Slaw (using the wheat rolls and the coleslaw mix), Tomato Cucumber Salad
3-Chicken Caesar Salads (using the romaine lettuce), rolls
4-Indian Lentil Vegetable Stew (using some of the sweet potatoes), rolls
5-Linguine with Eggplant Ragout (using an eggplant from last week's basket)
6-Grilled pork chops, Roasted potatoes, tossed salad (using potatoes, romaine, cucumber and grape tomatoes)
7- Hmmm....I guess I'm short one. I know I have several green peppers now. Some from this week and some from last. Maybe stuffed peppers. We'll see.

Squash and Black Bean Chili, Corn Muffins

This recipe is from Good Housekeeping Family Vegetarian Cooking with slight modifications.
A great way to use up some of the MANY squash we had around from the co-ops.

Squash and Black Bean Chili, Marie Callendar's Original Corn Bread (from a mix)

Serves 6

6 Points+ per serving for the chili, 4 Points+ per corn muffin

4 teaspoons olive oil
1 medium butternut squash, about 1 3/4 pounds, peeled, seeded and cut into 3/4 inch cubes
2 medium carrots, peeled and diced
1 medium onion, diced
3 Tablespoons chili powder
2 15oz. cans diced tomatoes
1 4oz can chopped mild green chilies
1 cup vegetable broth
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 15oz cans black beans, rinsed and drained
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
6 Tablespoons reduced fat sour cream

1. In 5 quart dutch oven, heat 2 teaspoons oil over medium-high heat until hot. Add squash and cook until golden, stirring occasionally; remove squash to bowl.

2. In same dutch oven, heat remaining 2 teaspoons olive oil until hot; cook onions and carrots until well browned. Stir in chili powder; cook 1 minute, stirring. Add tomatoes with their juice, chilies with their liquid, broth and salt; heat to boiling over high heat. Reduce heat to low; cover and simmer 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

3. Stir in black beans and squash; heat to boiling over high heat. Reduce heat to low; cover and simmer until squash is tender and chili thickens, about 15 minutes.
Stir in cilantro and serve with sour cream.

Each serving is a generous (heaping?) 1 1/2 cups of chili topped with 1 Tablespoon of sour cream. And corn muffins as desired.

What we thought~
Roger said that the chili was very good.
I thought it was very hearty and just as filling and flavorful as the chili I usually make with meat. But healthier. Bonus! It's very thick and chunky and perfect for a cold night.
Emily liked hers with copious amounts of sour cream.
Jaxon mostly ate "corn cake". :)
I'll definitely be making this one again.

Note: I'm no longer estimating the cost of the recipes I post. I was doing that to show that making healthier choices doesn't necessarily have to blow the grocery budget and I feel that that has been well established by now.

This and That

So....I know I said I'd be back with recipes. And I will. I promise! But I've had a busy couple of weeks.
I did indeed refocus on my Weight Watcher's journey. I'm loving the new program. It's like a new project for me again and it's all fresh and kind of fun again. And I've already lost around 7 pounds in the first two weeks.
Because I'm back on the WW wagon I've renewed my commitment to ordering from the Bountiful Baskets and Utah Food Co-ops again.
Still happy as ever with what we've been getting although I'd be fine if they'd just give up on the tomatoes till after winter. They're not even good in the stores right now. Blech!

Last week I ordered their gingerbread house kit and Emily and Jaxon and I had a great time decorating that. Best gingerbread house I've ever had the pleasure of helping to construct!

Jaxon was surprisingly patient at building it. He meticulously placed almost every one of the roof "shingles" by himself, even carefully breaking them for the halves that were needed.
And Emily put the Smarties "siding" on 3 sides of the house before she ran out of Smarties. I finished up the 4th side after a trip to the store for a few more rolls of smarties.
If you look closely you'll see a little gummy bear replica of our family (the ones who live here anyway).
Emily chose the candy strips for the lawn and we added some snow drifts around the edges. All in all, it looks a lot like our yard with the warm weather we've been having.
I've taken Jaxon to storytime at the library for the past couple of weeks.
The first time he sat on my lap with his hands over his ears during the songs. He said they hurt his hears.
And he refused to sing or dance along.
The second time he sat beside me and even scooted forward next to some other boys for short periods of time. He also got up and danced as long as I did it with him. Baby steps I guess. We still have several months to get ready for kindergarten. LOL.
He checked out a great pop-up book about dinosaurs and has spent every waking moment studying it. Some of his sleeping moments too.

Maybe Santa will be inspired to bring him his own pop up book since he loves them so much.
Of course there has been some crafting related to Christmas decorating. Mostly taking 20+ year old stuff...

stripping it nekkid...

and rebuilding it.

Speaking of crafting, there was a Holiday Lights contest in our neighborhood and my friend, Summer, nominated little old me to create a tacky trophy to be given to the winner. I'm not sure why she thought I would be particularly suited to tacky trophy building, but whatever. ;)
Here's what the lucky winner gets to proudly display on their mantle.

I know, you're jealous right? Guess you'll just have to move here and compete for it next year. ;)
And, on a random note, we got the sad news that a recent storm took out the beloved globe willow at our old house.
That tree was a canopy for weddings, receptions, a few pet funerals (shhh...don't tell the new owners!), thousands of days of playtime in the shade.
Marsha loved it too. When she came to visit she would sit at one end of our dining room table and just watch that tree sway back and forth in the breeze for hours. :(
Just look at it now.

So sad.
Well...that pretty much sums up what I've been up to the past two weeks. I have made a few vegetarian recipes from that new cookbook I mentioned. Two of them were just okay. Nothing special. But one was pretty good and I'll be sharing it here tomorrow.

Grandma's train works just like she did!

Which is to say...HARD!!!
When Grandma Marsha passed away, one of the things we kept of hers was this little Christmas train.

We thought Jaxon would enjoy it. We haven't taken it out of the box till this year because I was afraid he was too young to take good care of it till now.
It's a cute little train. It has a few ceramic houses to go with it and it plays a Christmas tune when the Engine passes the station. Before we changed the batteries it played a tune more suited for Halloween which Jaxon thought was pretty funny.
It even has a light and puffs a little smoke from the stack when it's turned on. I hope it's supposed to do that!

We got it all set up and put fresh batteries in it and found out pretty quick that this sweet little train was nearly unstoppable, just like Grandma!

 This thing goes so fast that you can barely turn it on and get your hand out of the way fast enough!
Then it flies around and around the track so fast that the whole train leans to one side as it rounds the curves.
Until it finally can't hold the track any longer.

What a metaphor for Grandma herself. She was a high energy woman. Going and going and going until she just couldn't hold the track any longer.
I'm so glad we got this train out of the box this year. Emily and Jaxon and I played with it for at least an hour and laughed and laughed over this supercharged train speeding round and round.
And Jaxon hasn't let it out of his sight since we opened the box. He wanted to snuggle with the engine when we put him to bed last night and it was the first thing he picked up when he got out of bed this morning.
It's definitely not the romantic little chugger you see rounding the Christmas tree in movies. LOL
I don't know how much Marsha enjoyed owning the train but I'm pretty sure she's enjoying seeing Jaxon and Emily have so much fun with it now.