Beach Body's Black Friday sale....

Hey friends.... holy cow, it's been a while. Sorry about that! Life just kinda took over & got in the way. I missed you all!! ;) 

But I'm back & better than ever. And.... I have the most exciting news to tell you about.... 
Beach Body is having their Black Friday sale on a bunch of their products!! Merry Christmas to us... right? 

Take advantage of this amazing sale and Give the Gift of Health this holiday season!! 

This is the prefect time to try out a program you have been wondering about, and to stock up on gifts for yourself and others!!  These programs would make great stocking stuffers, or secret santa gifts, and not break the bank!! Plus... you get me as your personal Beach Body coach.... now really, who doesn't want me as your cheerleader for a Christmas present? ;) But, you had better hurry... things are already starting to sell out!! The sale goes from November 23rd - 30th.

If you have questions about any of these programs, or which ones would be the right fit for you or a friend, feel free to message me, here, on FB and I am more than willing to help you out. I am excited to help you get started on your fitness journey!! 

Click here to get all the info on this amazing sale!! 

Clean out the Pantry soup, or as I sometimes call it "garbage soup"

Hey friends... sorry this post is a few days late.. I've been on vacation & didn't get back until Tuesday. So, there was no time for blogging recipes! I didn't even cook for 6 days... it was AWESOME!!

But normal life had to resume... I had to come home, and I had to start cooking again. Today's recipe is actually the meal I made on my first day home. It's called Clean out the Pantry Soup, or I sometimes call it "Garbage Soup".  Although the nick name "Garbage Soup" is a little hard to sell to your kids when it comes to getting them to eat healthy! Here is the link to the actual recipe, and the site that I got if off of.

It's so fast and easy to make. You literally take all the extra bags or containers of veggies in your freezer or fridge & throw it all in the crock pot with some chicken broth, beans, and corn. Then you cook it all day in the crockpot. It's a meal that I don't have to go out an purchase anything at the store to use to make it & it cleans out my fridge and freezer. It uses up stuff that you know is destined to be thrown away in another month or two!

I needed something on this day that I could literally throw a bunch of unprepared stuff into a crockpot & have it cook all day & turn out good. This recipe is my "go to" recipe for days like this. It is always different & it always turns out so good. I have never had this soup turn out bad. This time I used green beans, brussel sprouts, carrots, onions, and celery.

It's full of veggies & stuff that your body loves. It was a perfect "rest my body" meal after eating out and crappy for 6 days.  And... it's soup, so it's already good for your soul & makes you smile. It was perfect for this day, because it was totally raining & cold outside!

So go ahead and give it a try one day & let me know what you think! :)

Oven Roasted Chicken

Happy Healthy recipe Tuesday everyone... Today's Recipe is Oven Roasted Chicken.

So this recipe I got from my mom... and it is sooooo good. It's for a whole chicken, and the seasonings are amazing & the chicken always comes out so tender & juicy. Even for someone like me... who over cooks any type of meet I try to cook & it always comes out really dry and boring. But not this recipe... it has ALWAYS turned out perfect!!

I have step by step pictures of this one.... some of them are gross looking so this is your warning... there will be pictures of raw, cut up chicken in this blog post.... But if you can get past raw, dead chicken.. you will have an awesome meal!! :)

Step #1 - Preheat your oven to 425 degrees. Take your whole chicken, rinse it off and pat it dry. Place chicken on a cutting board, and with a good pair of Kitchen sheers, cut down both sides of the back bone and remove. 

Then take a knife and cut it the rest of the way in half!

Then... season evenly, on both sides with all of your seasoning.  Heat oil in a large cast iron skillet and place chicken skin side down in the pan, brown for about 5 minutes. 

 Once chicken is browned, turn over and place in roasting pan & put it in the oven.  Bake for 30 - 45 minutes, or until the bird has reached 165 degrees.

Then they come out looking like this & smelling soooooo yummy!! 

This recipe is the best for baking up a bunch of chicken for either a family dinner, or to cut up, shred, and freeze, and make other dinners with. I typically will cook up 2 whole chickens at a time so I have enough for dinner that night & some to save for later. I love having tasty, moist chicken already cooked up and ready to go for a list minute dinner like BBQ chicken sandwiches, or yummy home made chicken noodle soup when you are sick. 

Here is the actual recipe...

Oven Roasted Chicken

4lb whole chicken
1 T Kosher salt
1 t Garlic powder
1/2 T Dried Thyme
1/2 T Ground Black Pepper
olive oil

Heat grill, or oven to 425 degrees. Take your whole chicken, rinse it off and pat it dry. Place chicken on a cutting board, and with a good pair of Kitchen sheers, cut down both sides of the back bone and remove. In a small bowl, mix together the seasonings and rub evenly all over the bird. In a large cast iron skillet, heat a small amount of olive oil over medium hight heat. Once the oil has been heated place chicken skin side down in the pan, brown for about 5 minutes. Once chicken is browned, turn over and place in roasting pan & put it in the oven.  Bake for 30 - 45 minutes, or until the bird has reached 165 degrees.

Ham and Cheese braid

Yay... it's new recipe Tuesday... Today's recipe is a Ham and Cheese braid. Here is the link for this recipe. 

So you know how a few weeks ago I mentioned that we had to put off our Easter Sunday dinner because we were all sick? Well, we ended up having our Easter dinner the Sunday after. We had everyone over and had so much fun.

We had ham... and it was so good. Even though we gave a bunch of it away to family, we still had a ton of it left. There are only so many days that you can eat the same leftovers. So I had to come up with a new way to eat our leftovers. I hopped on Pinterest & this is where I found this recipe.

It looked a little weird... and I wasn't sure about the Honey Mustard, but I had all the ingredients already for this recipe. So I just went for it. One little change I made, was that I used my home made, whole wheat pizza crust recipe instead of using the canned crescent roll dough it suggests. Here is the link to that recipe.

It was a HUGE hit! Everyone loved it... even my crazy picky 5 year old... the sounds of "yum" actually came out of his mouth after he was forced to take his first bite. :)

This is what my leftovers looked like after everyone was done....

I think this picture speaks for it's self! :) So, next holiday, if you cook a ham, this is the perfect leftover recipe for the whole family! :)

Whole Wheat pizza curst

Whole Wheat Pizza Crust recipe

This pizza crust recipe is so fast and easy to throw together. It's also pretty healthy as far as pizza crust goes. We use this recipe a lot for several different things. Here is that recipe...

Whole Wheat Pizza Crust

1 package of Yeast

1 cup of warm water

1/2 t. salt

2 t. olive oil

2 - 2 1/4 cups of whole wheat flour

Dissolve yeast in warm water, add salt and olive oil, then mix. Slowly add flour until dough is lightly sticky. Let rise about 45 minutes. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Roll out dough and place on pizza stone. Add toppings, and cook in oven for about 12 minutes. 

Friday Donut Day

Hey friends, guess what today is... it's Friday Donut Day again!!  What kind of donut are you going to have? I am thinking I'm going to have to skip my donut again this week. (major sad face going on here...)  I'm going on vacation in less than 2 weeks and I really want to look my best. So... I'm going to summon all my will power and try and stay away from donuts until I am actually on vacation! :) So... I want someone to eat a donut for me & Jennifer today. Make sure to send good vibes our way! :)

Today I am sponsoring a great woman by the name of Jennifer Roeling. Here is a picture of her and her cute family.

She is the cousin of a very good friend of mine and she needs our help. I have been in contact with her, and she has emailed me her story. So I'm going to go ahead and post what she has written....

"I'm 36 years old. I'm happily married to my husband Richard, we'll be married 8 years this year. We have 3 beautiful kids, 2 girls and 1 boy...Lindsay is 15, Landen is 8 & Taylor is 6. I'm a stay at home Mom and my husband is a hard working man for all of us. I've dealt with a lot of medical problems and chronic pain after my last baby. It's always been one thing after another I feel like I never get a break from pain issues. It's hard dealing with so much pain and trying to take care of my kids, so I've had to have so much help with kids the last couple years. It's one of my struggles as a mother. I hope they grow up knowing I did everything I could for them and still try everyday, I hope they know how much I love them and pray everyday that I can be a fun active mom for them and take care of them by myself like I use to.. My biggest struggle of all is not being a normal mom everyday. <3

About 4 years ago I started experiencing knee pain in both knees, my left knee has always been worse then my right. I went and saw a few Doctor's for this pain they have done so many X-Rays and I always got the same answer, that they didn't see anything wrong and they just wanted me to do to physical therapy. I did what they wanted me to and it never helped. There's been so many times that I've fallen down because my knees would get week, there's been so many times that I couldn't walk on my own, if I would hold my kids it made me so week in the knees and felt like they were going to collapse on me. I couldn't understand why the Doctor's I would see didn't know what was wrong with my knees.  I decided to talk to my new Doctor that is my pain management Doctor for my chronic pain. I told him how bad my left knee was and I haven't had answers for years. He decided to do an MRI, something that none of the other Dr's did. In November 2014, I got my follow up after the MRI on my left knee, I thought it was going to be like all the other results I've gotten, but nope it wasn't. I found out that my femur bone was dying/deteriorating because of bad blood flow. It was the worst day of my life I was so devastated, I cried & my husband cried. My family and my best friend also cried and had a hard time with the news. My Dr sent me to see a bone specialist and she told us that I have AVN-Avasculiar Necrosis it means I don't have blood flow at all in the femur bone, and it's caused by smoking. I also found out that the issues with my femur bone is not connected to my knee pain and we still don't know what's causing the knee pain. Which is really frustrating not knowing what's going on. We still had to run a bunch of tests. It's scary that AVN has no symptoms. If it wasn't for my knee pain I would have never known about the AVN, or that I needed to quit smoking. 

In February I found out the hard way that I couldn't walk on my own because my knee were hurting so bad. So I called my pain Dr to get me in as an urgent visit and they got me in the next day and he wanted to repeat the MRI on my left knee to see if the AVN has progressed at all. He also wanted to do an MRI on the right knee. I got in right away and back to my Drs 3 days later. He told me that the left femur bone has progressed rather quickly. When I first found out about my femur bone on the left the AVN was at 7.4% and now it's already at a 8.8% and that I also have AVN in the right femur bone. The Dr told me that we need to do a Stem Cell Implant, which is a bone marrow transplant. They'll take bone marrow from my hip and put it in my femur bones to get the blood circulating again so they'll stop dying off. If it reaches my knee joint I can lose my legs so it needs to be done asap. This procedure is not covered by any health insurance and all together it'll cost $10,100.00. To hear that was heart breaking and it scared me to death. My depression got worse, and my husband also got really depressed. The next challenge was quitting smoking and It's been the hardest thing I've ever done. It's been a huge challenge in my life. Ever since we found out how bad it is we've been trying every way we can to raise money. I posted about having a fundraiser yard sale and I was amazed by how many people stopped by to donate stuff for my yard sale and it was a great success. I'm so very blessed to have so many people in my life that want to help me. Its all been a huge challenge for me, but I'm hopeful and trying my best to stay positive."

Jennifer also want's her story to be about smoking awareness. She encourages everyone who is currently smoking, to seek help for their addiction. 

Jennfer has an account set up through Cypress Credit Union that you can donate to, just go in and tell them you want to donate to the "donate to Jennifer Roeling" fund. Also she has a go fund me account, the link for that is here. 

If there is any way you would be able to donate at all to help save Jennifer's legs, it really would be a huge blessing. Even a few dollars is better than nothing. Little amounts can add up fast. 

Thank you for taking the time to read Jennifer's story! I hope everyone has a great weekend!! 

Hand sewing your quilt binding

To hand sew or machine sew your binding onto your quilt... that is the question of the day.  Now I am sure some of you normal people are thinking "why would you ever hand sew anything when you can just use a machine and get it done a lot faster." But then there are us crazies out in the world who hand sew all of our bindings onto our quilts.

(Okay... ignore my scary looking "toe thumb"!! Also yes, that is my steering wheel in my car. And no..  I wasn't driving when I took this picture. When you take the time to hand sew your bindings, you just have to fit that in whenever and wherever... like when you are waiting to pick up your 10 year old from her piano lesson. Don't you just love that fabric???) 

I don't know what it is, but I can't handle NOT hand sewing a binding onto a quilt. It's like a using a machine for this last step & finishing up the quilt is cheating or something. Or like it doesn't mean as much if you don't leave a little piece of yourself on that quilt. I know that spending hours cutting and sewing the whole quilt top all together is a little like leaving our "mark" on the world, but actually doing that last little bit by hand just makes the quilt feel complete & makes the world a better place! :)

I feel a little like the character "Frank Navasky" played by Greg Kinnear in the movie "You've Got Mail". You know how he's obsessed with type writers & and always freaking out about how the computer is going to ruin all of society... I'm a little like that about using a machine to sew your binding on. It's like using a sewing machine for everything is killing the past or something... I don't know... I am slightly crazy about sewing and fabric. :)  I just love the feel of the fabric on my fingers & cuddling up under my blanket while I am finishing it. We really do get to bond during this process! :)

But there is my 2 cents on sewing on your bindings! If you are in need of some binding advice, here is the tutorial that is my "go to" for bindings. I used to watch this all the time when I first started out & it was so helpful! :)

I am curious to know, how do you sew your bindings onto your quilts? And it's okay if you machine sew them..  we can still be friends! :)