Monthly Archives: May 2012

Alfredo with Any pasta!!!

Posted on by

Ingredients:

 

1 bar of 1/3 less fat cream cheese

1/2 a stick of butter or margarine

1 tsp of garlic powder ( add more if ya love it)

A pinch of salt and pepper

A cup of Milk

1/2 cup of Parmesan cheese

Directions:

Melt butter, and cream cheese with milk on medium to low heat. (needs to melt, watch for scorch)  Use a whisk to break it all up.  Add garlic, salt and pepper.  Once the mixture melts Parmesan will be your thickening agent.  Stir in slowly with whisk.  Use pinky to sample.

If you like more garlic, add it!  If you like chicken, add it.  If you love a creamy ravioli, buy your favorite frozen or make your own (coming soon) and add it.

This is a sauce that you can reheat.  The sauce doesn’t break and you can double your batch and add it to your favorite noodle.  It is a kid favorite for sure!

Souvlaki made easy ( I promise :) )

Posted on by

What You will need: 

1 lb chicken

garlic powder

olive oil

lemon juice

soy sauce

Feta cheese

onion (optional)

red pepper (optional)

shredded lettuce (optional)

sour cream

dill spice

ranch powder

onion powder

flat bread or tortillas

Prepare a lb. or more of boneless skinless chicken.  

By prepare I mean cut it in to skinny strips ( I hate exacts)

You will also need tortillas or flat bread

Ingredients: (marinade)

1 cup of soy sauce

1 tbs olive oil

1 tsp of garlic powder

1 tsp of onion powder

1 big squirt of lemon juice

Any veggie may be added:  I use red bell pepper and onion.  You can’t mess this up adding one of your favorites to it!

Seasoning is relative, if you like more, use more.  Watch adding more salt because soy sauce is salty.  If you add more it will be overpowering.  If this marinades for a day it will be much more flavorful!

Directions II:

Prep your dill sauce: 1 cup of Sour cream, ranch powder,  tbs of dill, and a squeezer of lemon juice.

After chicken is prepped and marinated. Add a few drops of oil or cooking spray, and Cook with or without the veggies you want in a wok or skillet on medium heat.

Warm the flat bread or tortillas when chicken is thoroughly cooked.  You can do this between two plates in a microwave.  It creates a nice steam pocket and makes them more pliable.

Directions to eat: Spread on delicious dill sauce, add chicken and feta cheese with maybe some shredded lettuce.  You’re welcome 🙂

 

 

Molly’s Simple Alfredo with any pasta!

Posted on by

Ingredients:

 

1 bar of 1/3 less fat cream cheese

1/2 a stick of butter or margarine

1 tsp of garlic powder ( add more if ya love it)

A pinch of salt and pepper

A cup of Milk

1/2 cup of Parmesan cheese

Directions:

Melt butter, and cream cheese with milk on medium to low heat. (needs to melt, watch for scorch)  Use a whisk to break it all up.  Add garlic, salt and pepper.  Once the mixture melts Parmesan will be your thickening agent.  Stir in slowly with whisk.  Use pinky to sample.

If you like more garlic, add it!  If you like chicken, add it.  If you love a creamy ravioli, buy your favorite frozen or make your own (coming soon) and add it.

This is a sauce that you can reheat.  The sauce doesn’t break and you can double your batch and add it to your favorite noodle.  It is a kid favorite for sure!

Our First Stop…Lincoln National and Lincoln State Parks

Posted on by

It’s always a pleasure to start out the summer with a trip to Lincoln Park. It’s small and unpretentious. There is a little museum there, and I always have the children look through it and then try either to remember or to guess at the most important tool the pioneers had. They look at the tools, the bedding, the clothes, the wagon, the cow, the spinning wheel, and they report all those things. The answer is the ax.

We visit the grave of Abraham’s mother and then walk up to the model of Lincoln’s boyhood home. It’s a one room cabin with a fireplace and a loft. There is always cooking there, and as the fire burns on a hot day, one can glean just how uncomfortable it must have been wearing a woolen dress that had been washed maybe once in the past month. 

There are cows, sheep, chickens, horses, and a garden to look at. Some of the children love the whole thing. Some don’t get it at all…mostly because they left their DS on the bus. It’s hard to try to explain to the children what it must have been like back then. Spending a few minutes at the little farm won’t warm many hearts. The rangers are fabulous and tell us so many interesting things. But it’s hard to put on any real sense of historical perspective. 

Historical perspective is something most adults can’t bring themselves to understand. But we will take aim at the twenty-first century and see how many children come to understand just how lonely, how scary, how  independent these people were who came and built our country.

None of our children will remember the twentieth century. No one will remember going without a toilet, or not having running water. Few will remember such things as a milk man or know what a green grocer is or a haberdasher, a milliner, a butcher or baker. But on this trip, we will try to tell them stories that will endear them to the past. 

Part of our summer is an attempt to educate beyond books. It’s a time when we experience different kinds of things, take them in and store thoughts, memories and ideas that will create a broader and more intelligent and respectable person. This world of the pioneer is our introduction to this “broader life.” 

When we finish with the cabin, we will trot across the street and play on the playground, eat a fabulous lunch and then visit the cultural center for a talk about pioneers…just after we cross the dam and look at the lake where we will swim later this summer…

This is one of my favorite trips because I could live at that farm and be as content as a pig in a poke. But then I’m a child of every year. I know how to do all those obnoxious things like weave, spin, quilt, find wild fruit and make jam…bread…grow stuff…cook over a live fire…and that kind of thing I find is peaceful…

Such is Life…

Posted on by

So I’m checking out at Rural King…you know, the K-Mart for farmers, and I’ve got one hundred and sixty pounds of ground corn cob for my guinea pigs to play in, a small bag – forty pounds – of potting soil, some last minute veggie plants all heading to school. So there I am, at the check out lane…so glad it went without a hitch, because my precious and wonderful son called from Detroit on his way back to Germany so he can be home for his son’s birthday.

Now my precious and wonderful son builds Proton Therapy Units all over the world for cancer treatment. He’s the top guy and flies everywhere — in the next month he will probably be in St. Petersburg, Riyadh, Taiwan, San Diego, and probably many places in Europe. It’s his job. When he tried to take his female lawyer to Saudi Arabia, they asked if he “owned” her…you get the picture.

So here is a young man with an important job talking to his mom who is now sitting in a very used parking lot in the light industrial section of Evansville, Indiana, in her seventeen year old jeep loaded down with ground corn cobs and potting soil. He’s in a business suit with five hundred messages waiting to be answered on his phone, and I’m wearing short blue jean shorts and a $3.00 shirt from Walmart and using my “smart phone” which is usually smarter than I am.

How does this happen that a dichotomy of life styles has grown up between  mother and child to this extreme?

Hope.

I have come to believe that hope is the magic word…the magic wand in rearing children. I love what I do, where I am and my life. I wouldn’t change anything about my life…it’s sweet…but at the same time, my life is not my children’s. It’s mine. So while I’ve been living my own life, I have had great hopes that my children could do the exact same thing…live their own lives, doing what they want to do, and doing it well.

When my son was born, I hoped that he would do good things with this life, and I encouraged him to do great things at every point in life. I told him that he could reach for the sky and get there with enough effort and enough solid living.

When my daughters were born, I hoped that each of them would do good things with their lives, and I encouraged them in the same way I encouraged my son. “Anything is possible if you work hard enough.”

I’ve gone round and round with several people over the years who believe that hope is a worthless passive waste of time. For me, hope is all the possibilities tied together…it belongs to a life lived cautiously, carefully, and prayerfully. It is open, healthy, broad, and encompasses all the human passions while it remains gentle and lovingly looks forward instead of back.  Hope is life’s polish.

So as the sweat is dripping from my smart phone into my ear in the worn jeans, car, and parking lot, I talk freely about family, the cancer of a friend, his travel schedule, what Patrick wants for his birthday until they call him to board the plane. I’ll talk to him again when there’s time. Meanwhile he’s living a good life and doing good things for others, and I’m living my life enjoying it to the hilt!

Been Ill

Posted on by

Normally, I am slightly suspect of people who are chronically ill. Those who simply always don’t feel well; those who dwell entirely on the self as a virus abused individual; those who can’t stop medicating; those who are ten years their own senior because they have been raked over the sick coals. You know the type.

As for me and my house – I’m never sick, and I think it has a lot to do with H2O, sleep, a fairly good diet and being active. Also, I think it has something to do with sleeping hot…at any rate, I’m rarely if ever sick…until last week. Somehow, I picked up a staph infection. I didn’t even know what it was for a couple of days…then it invaded my person like a wildfire. Head, neck, ear, face, leg…I did the prescribed “MEC” gig, and they apparently put a band aid on a hemmorage.  By the time I got to my own doctor, she said, “Oh, my God…it could have killed you” and treated me with a super antibiotic which she said would probably rip me apart. Well, it didn’t. I engineered a ways and means of taking the drug so that it didn’t bother me.

The wound drained for seven days. I was unsightly and stayed home. Actually aside from the day I went to MEC, I felt fine during the ordeal. So this was my maiden voyage in illness. Yes, in 60 plus years, I’ve had a couple of colds and I had the flu once for four hours, and I’ve had a few bronchitis experiences when my son brought home an atypical virus…but generally, I feel good, and I want to keep it that way.

My compassion level has risen for those who fight the chronic attacks of sinusitis, allergies, IBS, arthritis, and other body disturbances and malfunctions. I can’t fathom what it must be like to struggle with this daily. It was bad enough for ten days…

What I can’t understand, however, is how someone can “live sick” and not do something proactively to change their situation for the sake of feeling good! People who could make their situation better by changing diet, losing a little weight, getting more exercise, drinking water instead of soda, and getting to bed on time. These are simple enough to do, and if the alternative is chronic illness…good grief.

I love being healthy…you might say I’m an advocate. Hope this speed bump doesn’t indicate a future filled with obnoxious hurdles to be jumped every couple of months. That would truly be a nightmare. I like my freedom. I like being free of medications, free of body aches, pain, and that feeling that “I can’t.” Truly, I am very grateful for being free.

Now let’s consider the kids…it’s no different with children. Parents build children’s bodies from the first moment of conception. What you give your child from conception to college is health through good habits and discipline. We’ve been talking about setting good examples at school, how that works, who should set examples, and how it’s done. When parents offer great habits to their children, children benefit for the rest of their lives.

Here are the questions to ask about setting some basic health examples:

Is my child sleeping 10 hours at night?
What is my example for him or her? Am I up all night and then drag out of bed every morning?

Is my child drinking water during the day?
Am I drinking water in front of my child, or is my 1000 calorie latte or supersized soda providing my health example?

Is my child eating 1000 quality calories every day?
Am I weaseling out of my nutritional duty by stopping to pick up worthless calories for dinner too many times a week?

Is my child getting two hours of exercise every day?
Am I getting any exercise? What is my strength and vitality example for my child?

Is my child washing his hands EVERY time he comes indoors?
Am I?

It’s a start.