Tasty Tuesday #3 - Spreadable Butter

For this week's Tasty Tuesday, I will give you my recipe for an excellent margarine replacement. My family has a history of high cholesterol created by their bodies rather than from food. Food does exascerbate the situation though and as we know Trans Fats are a bad thing for high cholesterol. Margarine has Hydrogenated oils in it, which turns to trans fats, they don't have to note it if they have less than 1% per serving, but it all adds up.

Anyway, I make my own Spreadable butter. I don't have any pictures of this one though.

Ingredients:

1 stick butter, softened
1/2 cup light oil (I use light olive oil, but you can use canola too)
*If you use unsalted butter, you can add 2/3 tsp salt if desired

put ingredients in bowl, blend together with mixer, pour into container and let set for a couple hours or overnight. It doesn't look as pretty as the ones you can buy in the store already done, but it is less expensive and just as yummy.

This is my recipe for Tasty Tuesday, add yours here to Mr. Linky.

Tackle It Tuesday #16 - Cookbooks

As I told you last week, I love recipes. Last week I started to tackle the loose recipes, this week, it's my cookbooks, and boy do I have a lot of them. Now I do use most of them, but there are a few that I don't or that I only use for one recipe, so it's time to purge.

The bottom shelf of my bookshelf is cookbooks.

This is the shelf after the purge:

Not a huge change, but I have a lot of books on cooking with kids that will eventually go but since my 5 year old really likes cooking with me, I'm keeping.

Here's what I'll be donating to my library:

This is what I'm tackling, check out 5 Minutes for Mom to see what other Mom's are tackling and let us know what you're doing.

Tasty Tuesday #2

Here we are for another edition of Tasty Tuesday. This week I'll share my recipe for Taco Casserole.

Here are the ingredients:



12 oz recipe crumbles (or 1 lb ground beef)
2 tsp. Onion Powder
1 c Taco Sauce (hot or mild, your choice)
3/4 c Water
1 can (4oz) Diced Green Chiles
1 Pkg. (1.25 oz) Taco Seasoning Mix
1 Pkg. of 12 Taco Shells (or about 1 to 1-1/2 c tortilla chips)
8 oz Shredded Cheddar Cheese
1 can refried beans.


Preheat oven to 375 and grease 11 x 7 baking dish.

Cook recipe crumbles in a little oil with onion powder (no oil needed if using beef).

Stir in taco sauce, chiles, water & seasoning.

Cook on low for 5 minutes.

Break taco shells or tortilla chips into pieces.

Sprinkle 1/2 of shells on bottom of dish.

Layer 1/2 crumble/meat mixture.

Cover with 1/2 the can of refried beans.

Sprinkle with 1/2 of the shredded cheese.

Repeat with remaining ingredients.

Bake 20-30 minutes, or until cheese is melted and bubbly.

This is my recipe check out what other Mom bloggers are making this week here:

Another beautiful snow day

I love snow, I hate driving in it but I'm like a little kid when it snows, it brings such a sense of wonder and awe and today, like most of the east coast, we have snow and in our case serious snow. We're around 6 inches so far and it's supposed to keep snowing for the next 5-6 hours.

This is our backyard , well part of it, from the backdoor.

This is a close up of our deck so you can see how high the snow is.

This is a shot out of a side window where you can see our side yard and our neighbor's fence, see how high the snow is on the fence.

Needless to say we will be outside later playing in the snow, maybe making a snowman, but at least I'll be pulling my son around on his sled, I really need to find a good sledding hill soon.