Cooking for Friends

I love cooking for friends, but I'm sure if you are anything like me more and more of your friends are on restrictive diets.  This week for small group we had the theme of "Pies" for dinner.  After naming the theme I immediately realized that many of our members are gluten free and most pies have gluten in them.  We also have several members that are dairy and egg free.  Here is my solution:

Dairy Free, Egg Free, Gluten Free Shepherd's Pie

To start I used Alton Brown's recipe and just applied some minor tweaks:

Ingredients
For the potatoes:
 2 pounds yukon gold potatoes
1 1/2 -2 cups chicken broth

3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup olive oil (to taste)
1/2 tbl. The Melting Pot's garlic and wine seasoning (to taste)

For the meat filling:
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, minced 

2 pounds ground beef

1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoons corn starch
2 teaspoons tomato paste (I had some, but I didn't have the original container so I omitted this ingredient)
1 cup chicken broth
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon freshly chopped thyme leaves
1-2 cups frozen mixed vegetables 

Peel the potatoes and cut into 1/2-inch dice. Place in a medium saucepan and cover with cold water. Set over high heat, cover and bring to a boil. Once boiling, uncover, decrease the heat to maintain a simmer and cook until tender and easily crushed with tongs, approximately 10 to 15 minutes.  Drain the potatoes in a colander and then return to the saucepan. Mash the potatoes and then add the chicken stock, olive oil, MP seasoning, salt and pepper and continue to mash until smooth.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

While the potatoes are cooking, prepare the filling. Place the oil into a 12-inch saute pan and set over medium high heat. Once the oil shimmers, add the onion and saute just until they begin to take on color, approximately 3 to 4 minutes. Add the garlic and stir to combine. Add the ground beef, salt and pepper and cook until browned and cooked through, approximately 3 minutes. Make a slurry of the corn starch and 1/4 cup chicken stock.  Add slurry the tomato paste, chicken broth, Worcestershire, thyme, and stir to combine. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to low, cover and simmer slowly 10 to 12 minutes or until the sauce is thickened slightly.

Add the frozen vegetables to the beef mixture and spread evenly into an 13 by 9-inch glass baking dish. Top with the mashed potatoes, starting around the edges to create a seal to prevent the mixture from bubbling up and smooth with a rubber spatula. Cover with aluminum foil and place on the middle rack of the oven and bake for 25 minutes or just until warm and bubbly.  Because these potatoes do not have milk or butter in them do not expect them to brown! Remove to a cooling rack for at least 15 minutes before serving. 

I hope you enjoy this recipe!  Like any other recipe be sure to check all of your ingredients before beginning for allergens!

Babysitter Info Sheet

I first thought of making this sheet when I wanted to build my "Love Folder".  After all, if you were to die tomorrow, what important information would you want those left behind to have about your kids??  But then I began to see how my babysitters would probably also love to have the same information.  I've had it up in our kitchen for about 2 years and I get comments all the time about how much my babysitters love it.  Here is my sample document for you to edit and enter your own information:

If you don't already have the dosing charts for the meds you keep at your house, you can print them off here:

• Motrin
• Tylenol
• Benedryl
• Delsym

Of course you may want to double check with your pediatrician that these doses are correct for your child.

Remember the Milk

I may have just eliminated my need for a paper planner!  I have had a paper planner for as long as I can remember.  All through out middle school up through college my favorite part of August (other than my birthday) was picking out a new planner!!

Now that I am a home manager the need for a planner is even bigger.  So far I have depended on Google Calendar, my iPad, and a paper planner to stay organized.  I've tried to use larger planner systems, but it never quite worked out.  The problem has been I don't always have my iPad and I don't always have my paper planner to write things down in.  Enter the iPhone!  Verizon recently changed their data plan and I was able to finally buy an iPhone with some left over Christmas money that was collecting dust.  Now my Google Calendar is ALWAYS with me :)

Last week my sister was telling me about a list app that she was enjoying and I remembered that Simple Mom had suggested Remember the Milk years ago.  I decided to try it again since it now has an iPhone and iPad app.  It has been wonderful!  I decided to splurge and get a pro account so that my lists would always be synced across my devices, but this is definitely not necessary.

I love this task manager for a couple of reasons:

• you can organize tasks by lists.  So far I have: Blog posts to write, Evening Routine, Gift Ideas, Home Management, Kids, Money Matters, Morning Routine, School, Study, and Tidy Up Tuesday.  There are also two default lists of "Inbox" for routines you email yourself (or Siri sets up for you) and "Sent" which I think is used for tasks you share with others.
• you can use shortcuts to set up when a list is due, priority, when it repeats, where it takes place, and to add tags.  Tags help you to sort your task based on subject.  I have a tag for computer tasks that I use to help me get things done while I'm at the computer.  You can also use tags to sort by tasks that you have for different children.  Here is the list of shortcuts:

          If you wanted to use these shortcuts it would type this in the "add a new task" section of the website:  "Call Betsy ^tomorrow !2 *weekly"  Then a new task will be created with all of the parameters you have specified.  You can also email this to your RTM account and it will set up the task for you.

• you can also set a task to repeat based on when it was last done instead of just when it was last due.  This is helpful for things like taking your vitamins.  You want to take them once a day, but if you forget them today you don't want to take two tomorrow.
• you can associate notes or a URL with each task.  I do my grocery shopping on Monday, so I have a reminder on Sunday night to do my meal planning.    I use the note feature to keep track of meals that I see during the week that I think would be interesting.   

Even if you don't have a smart phone remember the milk can send you text messages or email reminders when tasks are due.  I choose to do most of my household cleaning on Tuesday hence the list "Tidy up Tuesday" I have a morning and evening routine based on Tsh's book 52 projects to a simpler life.  She encouraged readers to choose 3 to 5 things you do every morning and every evening. this helps bring structure to an otherwise unstructured day.
 Here is a view of my current account:

I have just started using Tsh's suggestion of identifying three things a day that are your most important tasks and marking them priority 1 (orange in color).  I do not mark anything else with that priority so that each day I can choose three new things.

Please ask any other questions you have in the comments section.  I hope I've given a quick overview and have helped you get started with this great website!

Organization - Winning the never ending paper battle

We recently added a huge piece of furniture to our family and it has exacerbated an already losing battle. It is a beautiful post master's desk with a nice flat surface area. I don't know about your house, but at ours where there is flat space there is paper!! We have mail coming in everyday, school papers for Ethan, church papers from all of us, receipts and coupons.

The Post Master's Desk

While reading Tsh's book "One Bite at a Time" I was inspired to rethink how we handle paper in our house. Project 7  in this book was to downsize your book and magazine collection, 8 was managing your mail and 9 was streamlining your receipts. All of these tips made me want to tackle our paper problem. With all of these categories I think the first thing we all should consider is what comes in to our house. Tsh talks about the fact that if we stop the paper before it makes its way in to the house then we don't have to organize it! One of the things I need to get better at is not bringing home receipts. More than half of the receipts I'm handed during the week can be put directly in the trash!  The same thing goes for mail...before you set the mail down in your house sort through it and throw the trash away immediately!

Note - This is not technically a "before" picture since I took the huge amounts of paper out before I took it.

We have a organizing device on our desk, but it never seems to organize anything in a way that is accessible. I've fixed that by coming up with categories of paper that comes in and I've made folders for these categories. Now the folders can be pulled out and papers can be filed and accessed easily!  For me this works better than a "home notebook".  I like everything in one place, but I don't want it all together all the time.

School folder with calendar taped to the outside.

A place to keep all of our school handouts.  I'll bring this folder with me to school meetings and such.

Final organized desk! 

My folders include:

• River's Edge - a place for school newsletters as well as handouts from meetings and such.
• Correspondence and bills - a place for all bills or other piece of mail that needs a response from me.
• Money - we don't get bank statements by mail, but I do get quarterly reports from Philip's retirement plan and occasionally we get other important financial papers.
• Love folder - this is not done, but having it here helps to remind me to work on it!

Down at the bottom is also my half-size clipboard that holds sermon notes.  To the right of this desk there is a notebook on the bookshelf that contains room for papers dealing with current projects.  Currently it has a folder for coupons and one for the boys birthday party.  Next to it is a small notebook where I can keep receipts that need to be kept for a time (birthday gifts and such).  Also not shown is a magazine holder for all of the magazines I need to look through (save that project for another day).

I know none of this is new, but I hope I inspire you to tackle your paper problem.  We will see how well this works in the upcoming weeks.

Does anyone have tips for school papers??  In the fall Ethan will be in Kindergarten and I know he will be bringing home worksheets everyday.  I know he worked hard on these, but we can't keep them!  Do you have a grace period before you chunk something?

RSS Reader

Sometime last year my friend Meg introduced me to a beautiful thing....an RSS reader.  Now, I consider myself a technical gal.  I like pretty much all things technology and I had heard of an RSS feed before.  I had seen the little RSS icon:

But what is it?  How do you use it?  Well, that my friends is what I'm about to tell you.  RSS stands for RDF site summary, but really it means updates from a website sent straight to your feed (we'll get to what a feed is in a minute).  I love to read multiple blogs.  I have friends who have blogs, but I also love blogs of people I don't know, but that have really interesting content.  An RSS feed allows you to receive all of the updates from all of the blogs that you like to read in one place.  Think of it like a subscription to all of your favorite blogs or websites.  Instead of having to search out new content from the places you like, all of the new updates are sent directly to you!

Where is this "place" that the updates are sent?  Most blogs will allow you to receive email updates, but what is neat about readers is that they do not clog up your email inbox.  Instead the updates are stored in a second location and you can read them at your leisure.  I am currently registered with Google Reader.  Google Reader is where I subscribe to all the different blogs that I like.  Anytime any of my favorite blogs posts something new the updates come straight to my reader.  Now, I can read these updates on any computer (since Google is internet based), but I choose to read them on my iPad using a free app called Mobile RSS.  This app downloads my recent updates to my iPad and allows me to read items in my feed even when I am not connected to the internet (score!).

If you like to read multiple blogs I really think using a reader can simply your life and cut down on the amount of time you just "poke" on the internet.  Once you are signed up with a reader service add the blogs you like by typing in the web addresses or just look for the RSS symbol above and subscribe!  Here is what the icon for Google reader looks like:
 
Do you use an RSS reader that isn't Mobile RSS or Google Reader?  I'd love to hear about the different readers that are out there.

Family Organizing Corner

This week officially begins our journey into the education system.  It will last for at least the next 15 years and I'm a little apprehensive to see what it will be like.  In anticipation of this day a few weeks back I took everything down off our refrigerator and re-made it into a family organizing center.  Let me show you what I mean:

 I'll explain the corner from top left moving clockwise and ending on the bottom left.

• First I have "Wise Words for Moms". For a full explanation of this chart you'll have to read my other post.
• Next is a calendar that I picked up from Borders.  I love that is has the "at a glance" week view that I can fill in at the bottom.  I plan on using this with Ethan to show him how the week progresses.  To the right of the week view is a note pad which I like too!
• Next are two copies of my meal planning worksheet.  They are both folded in half.  On the left is this week's meal schedule and on the right is next week's grocery list.
• Finally there is a magnetic clip where Philip can put the bills.  We lost a bill a couple of months ago and I hate paying late fees!  Now there is a convienent obvious place to put and store bills until they get paid.

How do you keep your family organized during hectic seasons of life?  I'd love to see your ideas!

Learning Scripture

These are two great CDs that our family just loves:
     

These CDs have scripture set to music in a way that is fun for all members of the family.  It is one of those CDs that I don't mind listening to over and over.  And besides teaching your children scripture, you will memorize it too!  On Amazon you can either order the actual CD or download the MP3 albums.  They are worth every penny!