The Lazy Cook

In my house, my husband does most of the cooking.  I used to do a lot of the cooking before we had two kids and before he decided to be a health nut.  Now that he's watching what he's eating, I just let him do the cooking because he needs to know all the proteins, carbs, and what-not in stuff.  Today, I decided I would try to be the helpful wife and make a quick and easy meal in the Instant pot.  I feel like a soup would be good.  I am a home health nurse, so I eat a lot of my stuff in the car and I think that drinking a soup would be easy. So I look up "easy healthy instant pot soup."  Up pops this beauty!  I look at all the ingredients.  I have them....ish.  I don't have fresh veggies, but I have frozen broccoli, and a frozen broccoli normandy blend that has the cauliflower and the carrots it calls for.  The recipe calls for sauteing onion....well some onion powder will do and almond milk?  Ummm....skim milk will be fine.  And parmesan from the can will also work just fine, right?  I threw everything in the instant pot, frozen and all! 10 minutes on the steam mode and then used the immersion blender and all was done!  It was easy peasy and yummy!!!

Magnificent Magnets!

So, a few years back I made a magnet board out of an oil drip pan for the boys' play room, similar to this one that I saw on Pinterest.  It's just a simple oil drip pan I got at Walmart and spray painted it to match the colors of the play room.

(My personal magnetic board isn't pictured because it's in the boys' play room and well....it's a huge mess!)

When I first made the board years ago, I used the magnetic letters on there so the boys could play with them.  However, as they got older and knew their alphabet, I started thinking that they needed different magnets.  I ordered some picture magnets from Shutterfly, but those add up quickly!  Then I came up with a genius idea!  Use the magnets that businesses give out for free and put stickers on them!!  The magnets are so thin that you can easily cut them into any shape! It was a fun activity because the kids could help me by picking out the stickers they wanted and putting them on the magnets. It's a fun quick way to add some fun to hanging up all their "masterpieces."

Pinterest Makes Me Happy and Motivated

It's been 4 years since I decided I wanted to share my adventures in comparing myself to people on Pinterest.  I failed miserably at following through with what I had in mind, like many people on Pinterest!  Well, I'm going to give it another go!  I figure writing something up once a week will all me to set a goal, think of fun things I have done, think of time I have spent with my family, doing something for someone, even just spending a few glorious minutes alone on a computer without doing work or mindlessly scrolling something, I will be doing something to better myself!

Look at this quote I found on Pinterest: 

Today, like many days lead me to Pinterest. Max, the younger of the two boys, wanted to make banana muffins.  Okay, sure, we can do that. i have TONS of frozen bananas in the freezer for when we make smoothies.  Well, those are "too brown."  Well, we went to the store and got some barely yellow bananas. When we got home, it was off to Pinterest to find an easy recipe.  We decided on this one.  It looked simply and easy enough.  The only problem then is that we didn't have any baking soda.  My husband decided to use the last of it for the hot tub to even out the pH levels.  Hmmmm....well off to Pinterest to see what I could do for a baking soda substitute. Yay!  Other people have fallen into this problem and the nice people at Tollhouse even made a nice graphic to help me out!

After getting all the ingredient squared away, we were able to make some lovely banana muffins out of some barely ripe bananas.  I'm not sure if the state of the bananas or that Max picked the super large muffin tins, but these took 10 minutes extra to bake than the recipe stated and they are still very moist in the middle.  They taste good, actually more banana-y than normal.  I think it's because I generally use REALLY ripe brownish bananas.