Easy 20 Minute Chili

Looking for an easy recipe for dinner tonight that only takes 20 minutes?  Look no further. 

Copycat McCormick Chili Seasoning Packet Mix

¼ cup flour

4 tsp. chili powder

1/2 tbsp. crushed red pepper (add less if you don’t like it hot)

1 tbsp. dried minced onion

1 tbsp. dried minced garlic

2 tsp. white sugar

2 tsp. ground cumin

2 tsp. dried parsley

2 tsp. salt

1 tsp. dried basil

¼ tsp. black pepper

1/2 - 1 tsp. cayenne (only if you like it spicy)

Mix together and store in an airtight container. 1 Chili packet = 2 ½ tbsp.  So good!!

Simple Chili

1 pound cooked and seasoned ground beef

2 cans Kidney Beans undrained

2 cans Pinto beans undrained

2 cans diced tomatoes (or fresh tomatoes are even better!)

1 Chili Pack of Seasoning

Dump together in a pot and warm up on a chilly day.  Serve with some cornbread and honey-butter.  Or serve over corn chips, with cheese, green onions & sour cream.  This is sure to warm you up!

Sock Puppets

Living in Florida you don't have to wear socks...like ever.  So I had a bunch of cute socks that were just sitting in the back of my drawer and I have a toddler to entertain 24/7.  

Call me the crazy lady, but sock puppets it is! 

I used this tutorial and my imagination.  So if you have extra socks in your drawers or solo socks that are missing a match, make a puppet and entertain someone today! 

 

Painting Projects

I've done so many projects with paint in the last month.  Here are a few of my creations!

For Girl's Camp!  This one is almost 6 feet long...it was fun to paint.  The Young Women at Girl's Camp are Beautiful and they need to be reminded every time they walk by this sign.

My son actually did this one for his Grandma's for Mother's Day!  Love my lil lobster!

 

  

Water Color -Palm Practice  

 I finished an old Water Color - Heber C. Kimball Home:  Nauvoo, Illinois

 Water Color: Jerusalem Red Poppy....with a little swipe from my son.  :)

 

Water Color: Ponce Inlet by the Jetty, NSB 

Old Fashioned Banana Bread

I really don't like throwing out brown bananas.  I feel so wasteful doing that...so I make banana bread at least once every two weeks.  It's really easy and takes just minutes to make.


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Old Fashioned Banana Bread

½ cup of shortening

1 cup sugar

1 tsp. baking soda

2 cups all purpose flour

3 big ripe bananas

Nuts is so desired…

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease bread pan, muffin tins or bundt pan.  Mix bananas, shortening and sugar until creamy.  Than mix the remaining ingredients, until completely mixed.  Pour into prepared pan.  Bake for 35 minutes or until an inserted toothpick comes out of the bread clean.  Makes 1 loaf.  Great for 12 big muffins too!  For muffins set timer for 25 minutes. Bundt pan is around 30-35 minutes.  We like our bread a little on the soft side, so if you like it more firm, just leave it in longer.   Comes out perfect every time!  Quick and yummy!

Preheat your oven.  Cream the bananas, sugar and shortening together first.  Then add the other dry ingredients.  I prefer to use one of these baking sprays.   

Baking time is based on your oven temperature and baking pan. 

Tallow Candle

In my desire to learn essential Pioneer Homemaking Skills, I started off learning how to make a Tallow Candle.  Basically tallow candles are made out of the soft left over animal fat from any meat cooking.  One can use the fat on any animal to light their home in a survival circumstance. 

After cooking bacon one morning, I poured the left over bacon fat into a small glass jar.  Usually I save bacon fat tin a little jar anyway to cook and season other food, but this time I placed a candle wick inside the clear hot fat instead.  After the fat cooled it was a soft burnable consistency.  I lit the wick and had me a little bacon smelling candle. Haha!  Just think of how many I will fool, thinking that I'm making bacon! 

Starting to Blog

First of all, I thought that this shirt was hilarious.  Because that's how I feel about blogging and other tasks that always seem to drop to the bottom of my internal 'To Do,'  list.  So I'm going to take this blogging thing one step at a time.  Hopefully if I post at least one thing a month, I can deem this blog a success.  Here we go!

Homemade Bisquick Recipe

Cruising through Pintrest one day I stumbled upon this recipe for Bisquick.  I love Bisquick.  It's so simple to pull out of the pantry and make countless delicious things.  BUT...it's expensive here in Florida it's pushing $7 for a good sized box.  No thank you to spending that much on something that I could whip up by myself.  This recipe from the Discount Queen's is bomb.  Seriously.  I literally took under 2 minutes to make over 6 cups...while holding a baby.  It tastes better than the boxed stuff, and my husband didn't even notice the switch...which is HUGE.  So I'm never going back to buying Bisquick, if I can that easily make it myself.  So I made heart shaped biscuits after making finding this incredible money-saving recipe.     

Sugar Cookies!

 

 Best Sugar Cookies Ever! 

This recipe is the bomb.  I loved the cookies and how they came out.  Then the frosting recipe found here was fabulous to do the great decorating!  We did several bowls of different colors and just filled up ziploc bags to spread the frosting.  I loved the fun colors and the decorating possibilities are endless.  These cookies could be on a Christmas movie!

 

Simple Quietbook

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Quiet books are fun to put together.  This one is simple and for me to make was actually therapeutic.  I just eyeballed the measurements…no real measuring.  Velcro and snaps are a blast for toddlers.  The finger puppets are amazing for entertaining little ones at church.  I just am watchful for the little crazy puppet eyes.  There has been a couple times my son has ripped off an eye and it went straight to his mouth.  Yikes!

Toddler Hockey Stick

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Sometimes as a mom (well…most times as a mom) you must be creative in finding cheap entertainment.  My son loves to hit balls across the tile floor in the kitchen.  He will do this for hours.  So we have come up with a fun hockey stick made out of a cardboard wrapping paper tube and packaging tape.  Endless fun.  I’ll have to grab some colorful duct tape to make it a little more snazzy.