This has become a favorite recipe of ours and I thought I would pass it along!
Slow Cooker Lasagna
Ingredients:
1 lb ground beef
26 oz jar of pasta sauce
12 oz cooked bowtie pasta
12 oz container cottage cheese
16 oz shredded mozzarella cheese
Brown the beef and drain. Add pasta sauce to beef. In the crock pot, layer half each of beef mixture, pasta, cottage cheese and shredded cheese. Repeat. Cover and cook on low 6 hours.
We had some friends over and had chicken spaghetti today from my Pioneer Woman cookbook. It was really good and not hard to make.
image from Pioneer Woman
You can find the recipe by following the link above. I think the secret to the “zip” of this recipe is the tiny bit of cayenne pepper and the seasoning salt. It makes the taste more interesting than you would expect. The little bit of red is pimento and the green is green pepper. I diced it nice and small so my kids wouldn’t pay much notice. It seemed to work!
We had our friends, Tom and Jen, over tonight and I tried out one of my recipes from my Pioneer Woman cookbook (thanks for the cookbook, Kylene!).
Yummy Enchiladas!
Isaac loves his friend, Jen!
We had so much fun and now we’re tuckered out and ready for bed!
Sundays are my usual day for menu planning and grocery shopping. Yesterday, as I was planning out our meals for the week, I decided that I really wanted to plan meals that we can look forward to enjoying together. I know it sounds really obvious, but I’m thinking about food a little bit differently. I eat a lot. Most of what I eat is junk or not something I really love. It’s there so I eat it. I’m trying to cut out excess munching, grazing and snacking. Having good meals to look forward to can help with this. At least I think and hope it will.
Tonight we had simple comfort food, but it was yummy. Chicken noodle soup, honey bran muffins and broccoli with cheese. It’s probably not something that everyone would enjoy, but we liked it and there was enough for lunch for Nathan for tomorrow!
Note the Christmas table cloth. I thought it added a nice touch 
We’re adjusting to the return to standard time. Today was harder than yesterday. Isaac was a little more difficult. Everyone is a little tired. I hope everyone perks up for Nathan’s birthday tomorrow.
What better way to celebrate the change of seasons than with a yummy new recipe! I found this one on allrecipes.com
** I would add that the batter is kind of thick. Spread it out a little after pouring it on your skillet so that you can get it cooked all the way through.**
*Warning- Long, detailed post about running our 5k. There will be lots of details you don’t care about and it may make your eyes glaze over.
Today was the day of our big race! I’ve been gearing up for today for awhile so my sleep was kind of crazy last night. I had the strangest dreams. I remember one of them was about how someone or a group of people were trying to kidnap me. It must have been the anticipation of today that had my brain all wound up while I slept!
I got up early and showered and ate my breakfast. I wanted to get some food in my stomach early enough that it wouldn’t give me a tummy ache while running. Now that I think back, I think I forgot to eat a banana. I was planning to, but I just ate two pieces of english muffin toasting bread (I’m sure you are happy to know that detail!). At a little after 7:00am, Audrey and I went to get some ice at the local grocery store and scout out the race path to see if there were signs and mile markers put out. I drove out to the section of the trail where the runners were supposed to double back and walked down the path a tiny bit to see what the sign said. Yes, I am a nerd. I wanted to know what it said!
I wanted to be at the starting place to check in and get warmed up at 8:15. Nathan drove me there and went back home to wait on Tim and Erica and Chloe. It was raining. I was hoping we wouldn’t have terrible heat and humidity and we didn’t. We had rain, and, to tell you the truth, it didn’t really bother me. If you’re going to run with much moisture in the air, it might as well be raining!
I did a little warming up, asked Rebekah (a really sweet young gal who I now call my friend because she “friended” me on Facebook and I’ve seen her a half-dozen time at our friends’ house) what time it was every 5 minutes, did a prayer huddle with Erica, Marie, Kimberely, Nathan(? were you there for that, Nathan?), and finally lined up for our start.
After a minute of instructions, we were off! The adrenalin rush of being at a race had me starting out pretty fast. The maximum speed I hit was 9.6 mph which is a 6:20/mile. I didn’t hold it for very long at all. Not sustainable for someone at my level! My first mile was finished in 8:56. I was feeling pretty good until I got to the 2.5 mile point and I thought I might die or have to walk. I walked for some of the last race and really regretted it later. I was determined not to walk even though I was tempted. I slowed a bit for a short while even though my Garmin pace alert was beeping at me. I had set it to alarm any time I started running slower than a certain pace. I wanted to conserve a little energy for the hill I knew was coming up.
As soon as the hill started to level out, I decided it was time to kick it into high gear and use up every last bit of energy I had and fall over dead at the finish line which was about 300 meters ahead of me. I was thrilled to see that I had beat my last race time. I came in at 28:38. That’s 1:12 faster than my previous best. I’m going to have Nathan post his own recap for you when he gets a chance.
It was so nice to have the Fairchild’s agree to watch the kids for us while we did our race. If it hadn’t been raining, they would have cheered us in at the end, but the rain was pretty steady and Ethan, Audrey and Isaac had much more fun at home staying dry and playing with them. They made a sign and hung it on the door to greet us when we got home. When we came in the door there was a lot of cheering!
My friend, Kimberely, came to cheer for me. She stood outside in the rain for me! Well, she sat in her car for a while too because there was no reason to stand in the rain while I was a mile and a half away! But she was there cheering at the end and I was encouraged. She joined us and the Friesens for a leisurely afternoon that included playing Wii Sports Resort, hanging out and feasting on hamburgers, brats, and other picnic-like fixin’s. We topped our meal off with birthday cake and ice cream and homemade waffle cones.
It was a lovely day. I have to add some of my favorite non-race moments:
*Chloe and Audrey doing somersaults.
*How Chloe says, “Chloe?” when she wants something
*Audrey’s random assortment of artwork and trinkets that she gathered by herself and put into WalMart bags as gifts for Erica when she found out it was Erica’s birthday tomorrow.
I don’t have any race pictures, but I’ll leave you with a photo of the cake I made for Erica’s birthday:
I was looking through cake ideas online and I asked Ethan if he would like a robot cake. He thought that would be a fine idea. I had planned to have time a little earlier to work on it, but this week ended up being crazy! We canceled birthday party plans that involved having people over and planned to let Ethan have a fun day with us here at home. So, I did the cake on Saturday.
I used the template and instructions from bettycrocker.com and it worked pretty well. I had trouble getting the cake out of the pan, but a little frosting fixed that. Ethan wanted chocolate frosting on the cake so it’s obviously not the grey color that shows on that link.
I should be looking happier in this photo, but I was exhausted! We had a good weekend when it was all said and done. Nathan and I both wrote our Love and War posts and it was fun to discuss our thoughts on the first chapter. Our whole family was at church- together! It’s been a long time since we were all healthy and in town to be able to do that. Ethan, Audrey and I had a squirt gun war in the front yard. If you ever wonder what to do with my kids to entertain them, grab a squirt gun and you’ll be ready to go! Isaac is doing very well! Thank you for praying for him.
I have no idea why this recipe is called “Fudge Nut Bars” when there aren’t any nuts in it, but I’m happy with it. I’m not a fan of nuts in baked goods.
*Additional disclaimer*- This is a recipe my mother wrote out for me. One of the roommates I lived with after college had the same recipe from her aunt Shirley and she called them “Shirley’s Fudge Bars” or something like that. The only thing I’m positive about is that she used the word “Shirley” in the title of the recipe. My mom never met “Shirley” so my guess is that neither woman actually was the original author of this recipe. I’m sure you’ll enjoy these bars much more knowing all of that!
Fudge Nut Bars
Mix together-
1 cup- Butter
2 cups- Brown Sugar
2 Eggs
Add these dry ingredients (I mix the dry ingredients separately before adding them to the “wet” ingredients):
3 cups- Quick Oats
2 1/2 cups- Flour
1 tsp- Soda
1 tsp- Salt
In a separate bowl melt these ingredients together for the fudge and set aside:
I pkg of Milk Chocolate Chips
1 can Sweetened Condensed Milk
3 Tbl- Butter
2 tsp- Vanilla
Press 2/3 of the cookie mixture into a greased 10×15 pan. Spread fudge/chocolate over the top. Spoon the rest of the cookie mixture over the top of that in spoonfuls. Bake at 350 for 20 minutes.
Additional hints- I cut mine into 35 pieces that makes these about 260 calories each. Yikes! They could easily be cut smaller than that. Also, make these on a Sunday night or early in the week so you can send most of them with your husband to work.
This week was Gideon’s birthday. He’s our friend’s little boy and he just turned 3 and he loves trains. He’s obsessed with them. I suggested to Marie that she make a train cake. Then I decided she had enough work to do with mothering 10 children. So, I decided to make the cake.
Lucky for me, my son watches “how-to” videos on cake making and he was able to tell me exactly what to do. *Okay, this isn’t exactly true. I found a tutorial online myself. But then Ethan saw it and told me exactly what was in the video and what the name of the site was. He had actually seen it before without me!*
It looked easy enough. It didn’t require any special cake decorating skills or tools that I didn’t already own.
I prepared one cake mix and split the batter between two loaf pans and baked them.
I cooled them in the freezer for about an hour and then I cut one of the loafs in half and then cut each of the halves in half again (leaving me with 4 equal size pieces). These will be the train cars.
Then I made some buttercream frosting and split the frosting between 4 different bowls and added a little food coloring.
I then did a few more things that are kind of complicated to write out and prove that I just am not cut out to be a food blogger, but here are pictures of the progress:
Isaac did a little cleaning for us:
And the next thing we knew, it was all done.
Then, we brought it to the birthday boy and he said, “Choo Choo” and were so relieved that he recognized it as a train!
If you’re interested in all the details of how to make this cake, check out the tutorial video at howdini.com Happy Birthday, Gideon! I loved making this cake for you!
