Some meals include those wonderful blow-out recipes.  The meal includes a special menu that calls for special ingredients.  Then some days, when you’ve been really busy and just need a good wholesome meal, you peek into the freezer and pantry and make a meal with what you have!  Enter yesterday’s Sunday dinner.

I had spent most of Saturday doing some cookie baking and then making my homemade pizza

Homemade Herbed Cheese Pizza

for our Saturday night meal. (This is a great recipe!) After supper we had the awesome privilege of heading out the door to join friends for the Johnson City Symphony.  Such fun!  When I returned home Saturday night the last thing I wanted to do was get back into the kitchen and make a big Sunday dinner.  Sooooooo, I concocted a simpler menu in my mind and took care of it Sunday morning!  This is real life, folks.  It’s where we all live.  So, rather than not post about my pretty ordinary meal, I decided to share it, in the event that you, too, will need a simple go-to menu for a busy day!

I found some great little pork chops on sale at Ingles last week.  The nice thing about them is that they don’t require much cooking time.  I popped them into the crock pot on low.  I seasoned them with salt and pepper, then covered them with apple butter.  I added about a cup and a half of water to the crock pot to keep them moist.

After I got home from church I cooked up some apple slices with a  little water, sugar and cinnamon. Then I topped my pork chops with them.  Yum!  I love pork and apples together.

Pork Chops and Cooked Apples

Green beans are a staple vegetable and soo easy to prepare.  Add the can of beans to a skillet, undrained.  Add a couple tablespoons of butter or margarine.  Cook until the liquid evaporates.  Season with salt.  I added a couple tablespoons of almonds.

The baked potatoes have that nice, crispy skin.  I accomplish that by spraying them with cooking spray after piercing them with a knife.  I add coarse salt to the outside and bake them on my timed oven feature for one hour at 400 degrees.  The oven turned off five minutes after we walked in from church!  Hot, crispy potatoes.  Such a great, easy Sunday vegetable!

This is simple, but just proof that a home-cooked meal is doable – even on busy days.  Use what you have, be creative, and serve it in style.  Your family will be thankful, as well as full.  =)

With love from my country kitchen,

Yesterday I posted about planning ahead for Thanksgiving by making a list weeks away and moving up to the day.  A dear friend of mine, Kim Ledford, has  recently discovered another great way to work ahead.  By packaging up the ingredients for baked goods and then adding the fresh ingredients when it’s time to make it she saves time and energy!

 First let me introduce you to Kim.

This lovely young woman is a stay-at-home mom. She believes this is the place where she can best serve the Lord and her family.  She and her husband, James, have a one year old, Hadley, who keeps them on their toes!  A baby boy is on the way to add his joy to their home! Her laugh is infectious, her personality bubbly and her desire to grow evident.   Kim loves the Lord and is hungry to be the woman God would want her to be.

Out of her  desire for fellowship and Christian friendship, Kim joined a MOPS group.  It was there that she learned more homemaking skills, such as prepping for this Apple Pie.  Let’s take a look at the process and the results!

Here’s the whole recipe:

Apple Streusel Crumb Pie
Ingredients:
·         (1) unbaked 9” pie shell
·         (3) large granny smith apples, peeled cored, and thinly sliced
·         ½ cup sugar
·         ¼ teaspoon salt
·         ½ teaspoon cinnamon
·         ¼ teaspoon nutmeg
·         1 tablespoon flour

Topping Ingredients:
·         1 Cup flour
·         1 teaspoon cinnamon
·         ½ cup packed light brown sugar
·         3 tablespoons of oats
·         ½ cup butter, softened

Directions:
1.       Preheat oven at 375 degrees with a cookie sheet on the center rack. Mix peeled and sliced apples in a large bowl with sugar, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and flour.
2.       Pour apple mixture into pie crust
3.       Make the streusel crumb topping by mixing together with a fork in a medium bowl the flour, cinnamon, and light brown sugar. Then mix in the softened butter with a fork, stirring and blending until the mixture resembles crumbs.
4.       Top the pie with the crumb topping, place on cookie sheet in the preheated oven and bake for 40-45 minutes until the crust is a deep golden brown and the filling bubbles!

A note from Kim:

 My MOPS group prepackaged the filling and topping ingredients in zip-lock bags. Then, all we had to do was peel, core, & chop the apples, mix with the filling mixture, add butter to the topping mixture, and put it in the pie in the oven and bake! SUPER SIMPLE & FAST if you prepare the mixtures beforehand! Then when you need to bake a pie quickly, you can!  

Thanks for sharing this with us, Kim!

You can do this same kind of procedure for muffins, biscuits, pie crust, cakes, brownies or cookies.  Simple separate the dry ingredients that are added in, put  them in a Ziploc bag, label the bag and then store until you need it!  I will also write on the Ziploc the cookbook and the page number where I’ll find the rest of the recipe.

Freshen up your preparations by prepping ahead!

Be refreshed,

Thanksgiving is two weeks away!  I’m so excited that we are getting to host my parents, daughter and son-in-law, both of my sisters and brothers-in-law, and one nephew and his girlfriend.  There will be twelve of us gathered (Lord willing and the snow doesn’t fly!) to give thanks to the Lord for His blessings.  It will be so special to have everyone here and to spend a couple of days together as a family.  We will eat, talk, share our blessings from the Lord in the past year, which will make us cry (we call this our “Puff Moment!”), play games, talk about Christmas sales, and I”m sure watching football is bound to be in there as well!

No one wants to be so stressed so as not to be able to enjoy all that fun, so I’m trying to plan and do as much ahead as possible.  This week I’ve made my pie crusts and frozen them.  I also made up cookie dough that I’m going to bake up as “place cards” for the tables.

I’ve made out a list of all the things I can think of to do beforehand, to help me be organized and not neglect anything.  You see my list below, and you can also go here if you’d like to print one off for yourself.

If you’re hosting Thanksgiving this year, perhaps this will help calm you, too!  Listed below are some sites that offer a timeline to keep you on track while planning and preparing for Thanksgiving, if you don’t want to make your own.  Here are some I found:

Real Simple

Martha Stewart

BHG – Timeline

Food Network

Williams Sonoma

Home Made Simple

All Recipes – If you only have Wednesday to prepare, this is for a Last Minute Thanksgiving.

Blissfully Domestic – Plans, dishes used, minute by minute schedule for Turkey day
I’m especially fond of this list found on Epicurious.  Though their list began with plans from five weeks away, it will help you be really prepared ahead of time!

Are you hosting Thanksgiving?  What do you do to stay ahead of the game?

Happy planning!

I then placed a couple of cute throw pillows as a back and voila! A bench seat is created. I’m hoping it will add to our seating when I host Thanksgiving for my family in a few weeks.

I think I’m going to hang a shelf high up over the pillows. Yep, it’s still a work in progress!

What projects are you working on?

With love from my country porch,

You know an “aha” moment as soon as it happens. It occurred last Sunday when my husband announced the title of his message; it was, “Prayer, The Hope for America.” The Lord brought to my mind a prayer I had prayed just a few days ago; “Lord, help me to know how to pray.” I thought of that prayer in that moment and the Lord spoke to me saying, “Listen. This is your answer.”

My pen was readied and my heart attentive for whatever the Lord was going to teach me. You see, I had asked the Lord to teach me to pray because I was feeling frustrated in my prayer life; I had been struggling as I prayed. I can’t always seem to say quite what’s on my heart. There are times when heaven seems so far and the Lord’s presence distant as well. Was I missing something?

In case someone else struggles with this, let me share with you the two simple truths (my “Aha’s”) that spoke to my heart: