Festive Glossy Fruit Salad

Festive Glossy Fruit Salad

Spring needs to get here now, and this fruit salad is my way of trying to coax it along a bit! This recipe, or something like it, is usually a staple at gatherings in summer, and since we have such bad cases of the winter blahs, we are having some summer in a bowl today. This is a very easy recipe to make, and it seems to be a crowd favorite with folks scraping the last few drops out of the container at potlucks.

It starts easy enough: open a few cans of fruit and drain the juice off all but one. Pictured below are pineapple chunks (drained), peach slices (that I rough chopped and drained), and mandarin oranges (with the 100% juice undrained). I dumped it all in a big resealable bowl.

 Next, I chopped up some fresh apples and tossed them in the bowl.

Then I sliced a bunch of strawberries into pretty quartered sections and added those to the bowl.

The next step was hard for me to do the first time I tried this technique just because it seems unusual. Take a box of vanilla pudding mix and sprinkle it over the fruits and the one can of fruit juice. Stir it up until all of the juices begin to thicken. Let the whole bowl of yummy fruity goodness get well acquainted in the fridge overnight.

When you wake in the morning, this is what you're going to want to eat for breakfast. See all that gooey, glossy beautiful fruit? It's almost ready to eat now.

 Add some beautiful whipped cream, and this is a bowl full of summer goodness.

Galatians 5:22-23 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things, there is no law.

Farm Fresh Eggs

Farm Fresh Eggs

I love the idea of farm fresh eggs. They're basically awesome. Eggs are healthy and versatile as well as being inexpensive and tasty. I use them an awful lot because these delights are something I can get my kids to eat, in some form, pretty much every day.

I wish we lived a little ways out of our town so I could have some chickens of my own, but that isn't possible right now. So the next best option for me is to buy local and fresh. These beauties pictured above are from a local farmer who happens to be a friend of mine who lives only ten minutes down the road. When I buy them local and pick them up from the farm myself, I have confidence in the quality of this product well beyond any grocery store that touts a cage-free egg. 

At just $2.00 per dozen, I can get a protein snack for about 17 cents each and only about 65 calories if I eat the yolk!  I like to boil eggs and keep them on hand for snacking or to make egg salad or to add some protein and textural variety to a salad. 

These are a few of my favorite egg things... 

Deviled Eggs- traditional or with bacon bits added 

Poached 

Over-medium 

Scrambled 

Eggs Benedict (there's an awesome variety at Lenny's in Clearwater, Florida that adds a glorious concoction of mushroom-y goodness to their Eggs Benedict...wow!) 

Omelets 

Egg Casserole 

What are your favorite egg dishes?

Why I Make Laundry Soap

Laundry soap can be a touchy issue with folks. I get it. We like to smell nice. We like to feel fresh in an ugly, dirty world. Our clothes are expensive, and we want to take good care of them. I get it. But at what cost?

Before I started making my own laundry soap, I used Tide. Tide only. Because it smelled nice, and it got nice and sudsy when I filled my washing machine with water and clothes. Tide made my house smell nice. It even smelled nice outside around my dryer vent. It's expensive though. I think we were spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $9 per small bottle about 4 times a month or about $17 if I bought the big one, and I needed about one and a half of those per month. So about $30 per month on laundry soap. That's about $360 per year I was spending just on detergents for me to keep our clothes clean.

A couple of summers ago when my husband and I were starting the conversation about how we could make it financially possible for me to stay home with our kids, this expense came to my mind. I had seen a couple of crazy people on Pinterest who were making their own detergents like one that was a powder. The particular one that I liked was interesting. It said it was about $17 to make a batch, so I decided to give it a shot.  (I would provide the link, but it has since been taken down. Thankfully, I wrote down the recipe.) Basically, you grind up some Zote or Fels Naptha, mix it with Borax, Oxiclean, Washing Soda, Baking Soda, and Purex Crystals, and you've got soap. One full batch takes about 15 minutes to make and about $17 in supplies, and it lasted me about SIX months! When I switched to using that soap, I saved our family about $326 per year!

Things I like about powdered, homemade laundry soap:

Cost

Fragrance is based on Purex Crystals

Ingredients are available at my local hardware

Easy storage (I use my Mega That's a Bowl from Tupperware)

Uses only about one tablespoon per load

A few months ago, I saw some Pins where some frugal folks were making their own liquid soap too, and I was curious how that worked. I got a recipe, tried it, and I liked it just as well. My husband doesn't like it as much as the powder, so I think I am going to keep a batch of both on hand.

Things that I like about liquid, homemade laundry soap:

Cost

Fragrance can be any essential oil you like (I used wild orange)

Ingredients are basically the same as the powdered version

Storage is in recycled gallon jugs from milk or other liquids

Uses about the same amount as store-bought liquid soap

You have to decide for yourself about your laundry needs, but I want you to know that I have clean clothes and an extra $300+ per year in my pocket that doesn't go to some big name company.

Link to the Liquid Laundry Soap recipe that I used: Liquid Laundry Soap

Hamburger Joes

An unlikely crowd pleaser created out of exhaustion!

My family has been sick. The up-all-night, get-another-set-of-clean-sheets, do-I-have-to-clean-THAT-up kind of sick. It started with my husband and me a few days ago, and then this bug started picking on our kids, one by one. So when dinner time rolled around last night, I was unprepared to say the least. I was tempted to head out and buy some food, but our budgeted amount for dining out has already been exhausted, and my miscellaneous money got spent on ginger ale and bananas for the sickly crew in our house. I had to make something at home. Ugh.

We like to buy our beef from some farmer family friends who raise their cattle in a big beautiful pasture just a few miles from our home, so our freezer is stocked with beef. Frozen beef. Very frozen. By the time I remembered I was responsible for making dinner, it was too late to thaw anything the way RESPONSIBLE people do. 

My husband requested a hamburger, but I told him that was out of the question because I had not planned to thaw meat while I was washing yet another load of soiled clothes and sheets. So I went to the freezer and grabbed a pound of super solid frozen beef. I decided I would try to make some kind of Sloppy Joe without a recipe, so I plinked the solid mass of beef in a skillet with a little water, a fair amount of black pepper and some Lawry's seasoned salt, and put the lid on and turned it down low. But when I got partway through browning it, a delusional thought struck me: maybe I could just make a Sloppy Burger or a Hamburger Joe.

The concept that struck my sleep-deprived mind was that even though I can't form these into patties, I will cook, drain, and season the meat, put it on some bread and top it however each family member likes. Guess what? It worked! My super picky daughter LOVED it! She said it was better than a McDonald's hamburger with ketchup only (which is essentially a five-star rating from a picky four-year-old).

Of course, I didn't have any sandwich buns in the house, so I used plain, old wheat bread.

I like cheese on mine, especially cheddar, so I added a good sprinkling of shredded cheddar. Sliced Swiss or American would be good. Or Muenster. Mmmm, Muenster.

I am a bit of a plain-Jane as far as hamburgers go, so I topped mine with ketchup and called it quits for toppings. My husband added mustard and pickle to his, but you could top yours off with some sliced tomato, onion, avocado, bacon (mmm, bacon) or anything your heart desires.

This is how mine turned out, and it was delish! I thought about griddling these delights in the skillet with some butter to make them a combo of a grilled cheese and patty melt, but I was too tired. And the clothes dryer was ready for me.

What crazy concoctions have you created out of necessity? This one worked well!

Apple Nachos

Apple Nachos are a hit in our household!

This is a quick snack for my family and me to be sure that my kids get some good nutrients in a quick snack, and they pack quite an energy boost for mom too with the protein in the peanut butter and the drizzle of yummy chocolate syrup. My mom started making these after I was an adult, but I enjoyed munching on these even as a grown up!

First, I started with some nice apples. I like Golden Delicious, but you can use whatever you like.

I sliced the cheeks from the core...

 and then sliced the cheeks into thin slices. You can see I left the skins on because they are full of nutrients. My kids hate eating the skins on apples unless I prepare them like these.

 Arrange the slices on a plate or platter of your liking. It took two medium sized apples to fill my luncheon plate.

Make a pretty design if you like.

 Get some good peanut butter.

 Put one tablespoon per apple in a microwave-safe dish. Heat it on high for 10 second intervals, stirring each time until it is runny. Think somewhere between maple syrup and corn syrup consistency. Mine took 30 seconds.

 Choose a lovely chocolate syrup.

 Drizzle your warm peanut butter over the sliced apples. It might get messy.

Swirl it into a pretty design like so.

 Drizzle the chocolate syrup on top now.

 Little hands will begin wanting to see what's going on.

If you're not careful, your apple nachos will begin to disappear.

Be sure to get a bite before your children gobble them all up!

All gone!

 We love this healthy treat, and I hope your family will too!