Saturday, November 17, 2012

Corn Souffle

image credit

 This is one of my all-time favorite recipes and things to eat! I had it all growing up, as my grandma Crandall used to make it for lots of family functions. When I got married and started cooking, I just had to get the recipe! This corn souffle becomes everyone's favorite when they try it! This year, for Thanksgiving, I was going to try a new recipe for a corn souffle with cheese and bacon that I found in a magazine, but my sister-in-law wanted to be sure that I was going to make my corn souffle! So I just decided to make my tried and true recipe that is oh-so-good! It came from an old church cookbook, and though the ingredients will make you wince because of their lack of nutrition, you are allowed to make this recipe for special functions and you will not get penalized!! And it is seriously the easiest thing to throw together and then let it cook for an hour and a half! Let this be your new Thanksgiving side! I promise you will not be disappointed!!

Corn Souffle
Leroy Community Chapel Church Cookbook
Recipe via Kathy Keeney

2 eggs, slightly beaten
1 can whole corn, drained
1 can creamed corn
1 cup sour cream
1 cup melted butter (2 sticks)
1 pkg. Jiffy cornbread mix
salt and pepper to taste

1. Stir together the eggs, whole corn, creamed corn, sour cream, and butter.
2. Add the package of cornbread mix. Add salt and pepper to taste. Mix all ingredients together.
3. Pour into a buttered casserole dish and bake at 350 degrees for 1 1/2 hours.

So easy, and so amazing! Try it this Thanksgiving!
So sorry for stealing the picture from Flickr; every time I make this dish I forget to take a picture of it! It goes fast!

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Family Holidays!

Briana and her family in Branson
I'm so excited that my sister and her family are coming to visit for Thanksgiving! We haven't gotten too many visitors since we moved to Oklahoma, and I was so happy when she said they wanted to spend Thanksgiving with family! So we will all venture over to Tad's family's house for a big feast! I can't wait! And it just so happens that Tad is off work on Thanksgiving and the day after, so it works out perfect! We saw my sister and her family this past summer in Branson for our family vacation, but it will be nice to get the cousins together (our kids only actual cousins!) again and show them all where we live! I warned them there isn't much to do in our town, but they are looking forward to just spending time with family! I always have to throw that disclaimer in there, especially after everyone was used to visiting us in Chicago where there were so many fun things to do! All you have here is us in Oklahoma!
The cousins!
 I'm still in the middle of planning my part of the menu for Thanksgiving! I pretty much had everything picked out, and then I realized that I was making a lot of fun extras and not really helping with the traditional sides. Then my mother-in-law told me that she wasn't going to assign me ANYTHING since I will have family in town. Well, if you know anything about me, you know I just LOVE to cook and I look forward to Thanksgiving especially because it is so fun to make so much stuff. So anyways, I know I am going to make Pioneer Woman's pecan pie, as usual. And I think I will make my homemade applesauce. I still need to figure out which traditional sides I should help make. I just love cooking outside the box, and making different, exotic, yummy tasting things but Tad's family isn't used to anything like that, so I have to stick to traditional things. But that's okay!

Homemade applesauce!
We are just getting over being sick, and got a little "fall break" from school, if you will, so it's nice to have a little bit of extra time to get things done. The stomach flu is making its way through our family right now, and I'm wondering who it's gonna hit next! But it's a really fast bug! Hopefully everyone will be better by Thanksgiving!

What are you making for Thanksgiving? Any fun new websites, recipes, or ideas you could share! Please share in the comments section!

Friday, November 9, 2012

Classical Conversations - Weeks 10 and 11


Well, I am playing a bit of catchup! Again, I got busy this week (and sick) and didn't get a blog post out for week 10 so I will do a double post this week for weeks 10 and 11! Forgive me! I cannot believe we are nearing the end of the semester of CC! We are almost halfway through Cycle 1! It seems like just a few weeks ago that it was summer and I was anticipating the start of the year! Where did the time go?
Well, we have had some fun, creative grammar review games in the last couple of weeks, and I really like mixing it up so the kids are always doing something new. I'm excited to share those with you! I am now preparing for week 12, and then we have our long holiday break. I am planning our holiday party during snack time and I'm excited to send my kids home with some little take home goodies and a craft that they can do at home over the break! I just wanted to throw something fun in there and I'm sad that I won't see them close to Christmas, so I wanted to send them home with a little gift from their CC tutor! So here is what we did for weeks 10 and 11:

Timeline: learned new cards and hand motions
History Sentence: Heian Empire and Byzantine Empire: used hand motions to go along with the songs.
Geography: Used their big maps to find the new geography and color, underline, or trace it with a dry erase marker, they always get to glue their passport stamp onto their own passport for that empire.
Latin: For review of 4th Declension, they played musical "worm" which is essentially musical chairs just set up in a worm formation. I never take a chair out so they can all play each time. But there is one chair missing initially. For the intro to the 5th declension, I always use the clip art sheets off CC connected that has pictures representing each sound. Then they can take these home for practice.
English: learn new hand motions, practice the whole preposition song to the tune of Yankee Doodle, which is what our campus is doing.
Math: I always find worksheets off CC connected and we turn the song on and they point with their finger and follow along on their sheet. (squares and cubes)
Science: Leaves and leaf parts: I was using a binder from another tutor, and she had pictures of each leaf printed out, so we used those and I made up simple hand motions from looking at each picture to remember them. Parts of a flower: showed them the acronym (which is how I remember it, but they might be too little) and then we used a picture off CC connected with labeled parts and I had them circle each part we were learning, and then below that they could draw a picture of a flower and try to draw the specific parts we just learned, which were in the picture above.

Grammar Review: Human Tic-Tac-To, used tape to make the board on our floor, they were divided into 2 teams, each person from each team had a chance to answer a question, and they would stand on the board holding papers with X's or O's.
Candyland: I have heard so many tutors say they use this game! I used the review cards that are printed by CC, and divided up the kids by 2's and there were 2 kids to 1 game piece. Whatever color they landed on there was a corresponding color of review matching cards and we would either review it or they would have to tell me about it. It worked quite well! 

And as always, they have sticker books that they get to put stickers in periodically in class if they are good, and they have sticker charts, and if they are good throughout that class, they get a sticker on their chart, and every other week we have a treasure box for whoever gets both stickers. I have had to take some people's stickers away, but not without ample warnings, and they usually were much better the next week!

Any questions, comments, suggestions, please comment below! I have learned much from you!



Friday, November 2, 2012

Life Around Here

 Well, life has been pretty crazy around here. We have been extremely busy! I must say, this is the busiest I have been as a mommy! We are doing Classical Conversation once a week (a classical, Christian homeschool education) and I am a tutor (which is the teacher of the class, they like to reserve the title "teacher" for the parent who directs their child's education), Maddy is taking ballet/tap/jazz class once a week, we have church, worship team, and many other things that fill up our schedule! And of course, we are enjoying being close to family who we can share all our adventures with!
Tad, Judah and Ruth hanging out at the park!
 Our weather is like the Ohio summers I am used to, so there are still lots of days we spend our afternoons outside or take evening walks on the path behind our house. We usually do that when Tad is working a double and we need to get out of the house!
 This is Ruth with her Aunt Lydia! She works at a salon and a bakery and goes to school, but in her "free time" she comes over and visits us, and we love it! I think they love Aunt Lydia more than they love me! And sometimes she brings the kids yummy stuff from the bakery! I seriously don't know what we will do without her next year when she goes off to college!
 It is fun being near family, and sometimes we get to go a little bit outside of our town and see extended family. On this particular day, we were invited to Tad's uncle's house to help build onto their house, and for a birthday party! It was so much fun to see family and the kids had a blast!

 Pops (Tad's dad) got a Spyder motorcycle and the kids were playing around on it. He even let Tad and I take it for a spin around the neighborhood; it was pretty fun! I can't wait until Tad can get his motorcycle fixed! We still have plenty of warm days left!
Ruthie is eating solid food 3 times a day now. Hmmmm. She must not like this one. But she is adorable! And she does like a lot of the baby food we feed her! She is probably my least picky baby eater out of the three!
Cute as a button! She looks like a little "who!" Her hair always seems to be in a mo-hawk. I can't figure out if her hair naturally does that, or if someone (AKA Tad) always puts her hair like that. Anyways...
Just a little bit of what we are doing around here! We have Classical Conversations for 2 more weeks and then we are off until around mid-January! So that will be a nice break and hopefully I can get some more things done and not feel as crazy busy as I am right now! I'm looking forward to the holidays, and we are excited to get our Thankful Tree going like we did last year! Hope this finds you all well!