Bread Bowls for Soups or Salads

Jared and I were huge fans of the bread bowl salads at Perkins and were very sad when they took them off the menu. I was determined to learn to make my own so that we could still have them once in a while. You can use frozen bread dough or your favorite bread recipe.

Tex-Mex Stew

I found this recipe in Parent's Magazine and thought it looked very similar to my Cowboy Skillet recipe, which everyone in my family loves, so I thought I'd give it a try. It also looked like a pretty easy recipe for a weeknight meal.

Fingerprint Christmas Cards

We had a wonderful Christmas spent with family and friends. I thought that I'd share a quick project that the kids and I did together this year. I'd have posted earlier but time got away from me.

Mr. R., Miss E., Miss A., and I made up some fingerprint Christmas cards as one of our 12 days of Christmas activities.

First, I printed up 2 cards with this text onto one piece of cardstock. 

Then I cut it in half using a paper cutter and folded it.

Our Christmas Tree Fingerprint Cards

Step 1: draw a zigzag line for the tree with green permanent marker, colored pencil, etc.
Step 2: draw the outline of the tree's trunk in brown
Step 3: fill in the trunk with zigzags
Step 4: using yellow paint, place a fingerprint at the top of the tree for the star (I later painted the outline of a star in black over this but forgot to take a picture)
Step 5: using all different colors, place fingerprints all over the tree for ornaments

Mr. R and Miss A painting their tree cards

Miss E painting hers.

We also painted the front of a Christmas card to look like Christmas lights. Yes, this was another idea that I found using Pinterest.com. The original creator's instructions can be found here. I liked the the original "landscape" format better than my "portrait" format but forgot to plan accordingly when I printed the text for the inside of the card. 

Step 1: using all different colors of finger paint, place fingerprints all over the front of the card.
Step 2: draw lines connecting each finger print, so they look like a strand of Christmas lights.

Roasted Red Pepper, Feta and White Bean Dip

I saw this recipe in Parent's magazine the other day and thought it sounded just delicious. I'm a huge fan of bean dips. They're so creamy and flavorful (and they are usually fairly inexpensive to make). I made it for one of our college/career activites and it was delicious.