What's Cookin'?

I have to finally share my family's newest favorite dinner option: Biscuits and Gravy Casserole! We have been known to highly enjoy breakfast for dinner, but that usually consisted of pancakes and eggs. With our crazy work/school schedules having breakfast at "Breakfast Time" is pretty much impossible. We often times enjoy it in the evening instead.

I found this recipe on lemon_sugar.com.  At first I was a little nervous about making any sort of gravy from scratch let alone sausage breakfast gravy. My mom has set the bar quite high with her "famous" gravy! After "sucking it up" and trying my hand at it, it ended up being not so bad! Good enough that the boys ask for it almost every week!

Ingredients list:

(I make a double batch as a single just isn't enough at my house!  This is the amount for a single batch.)

• 1 can flaky, large biscuits

• 1/2 lb. ground breakfast gravy

• 3 tablespoons flour

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1/2 teaspoon pepper

• 2 1/2 cups milk

 

While warming up your pan for the gravy, preheat your oven to 400 degrees, spray your pan (I use a 9x13 pan), and cut your biscuits into quarters.

Once your oven is preheated, place half of your biscuits in the bottom of your pan.  I bake mine for 5 minutes as the 10 minutes the recipe calls for seems to be too long in my oven.

 

On to the gravy! 

Brown your breakfast sausage as you usually would. Once it is browned, sprinkle with your flour - this will help avoid clumps in your gravy is says! Stir for a few minutes to avoid burning.

Start adding the milk and stir until combined. Add in the salt* and pepper and stir frequently until slightly boiling and starting to thicken (*I choose not to add the salt in my gravy due to the amount of salt in the sausage and my boys added it in as needed while they are eating).

It's now time to pour the gravy into your pan with your pre-cooked biscuits! Top with remaining biscuit quarters and pop it all back into the oven.

The recipe says to bake for 25 minutes, but I found that is way too long for my oven so I only bake mine for 10-15 minutes, or until browned.

Once the biscuits are browned, pull it out and let it cool off just a bit.

It's now ready to enjoy!!

I hope everyone enjoys this super yummy, cozy meal as much as we do!  It is a great meal to enjoy when it's cool outside like it's starting to turn in our neck of the woods, gets you warm inside and out (especially when paired with yummy hashbrowns)!

P.S. It even makes good leftovers if you are lucky enough to have any left anyways!


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An Organized Land of Legos

As does anyone with boys knows, Legos are THE THING! They can get out of hand before you know it, along with all of the instruction booklets that come with them!

Last week we began our (what seems to be) our monthly clean-up of our toy room. While trying, unsuccessfully, to get some order going on with our Lego area, I finally reached my limit of madness with all of those pesky instructions.

How ridiculous is this madness?!

I had been seeing where moms all over Pinterest had been making some nifty binders to hold all of their munchkin's instructions in a nice, neat (hidden) way; so of course I had to give it a shot!

From my recent clean-up of my office, I had found a bunch of extra binders and clear page protectors (score, no need to purchase anything).

 

 Each page protector got its own "theme" so all of the similar styles of Lego projects are found together. Not that my Little really cares about such details, but it I'm doing the organizing then like things are together!

 

To make this even more user friendly, and less of the "take instructions out and not put them away" situation, on the larger sized booklets I even separated the pages so you can follow along IN the binder!

 

All-in-all, I would say this project was a nice, quick project that makes a world of difference in the madness that is our toy room, which is a constant work in progress!

"After"

 I do believe we may need a bigger binder already, by at least it's a start!

Much love,

 

Less Stress Meal Time

In our neck of the woods, dinner time has always been this side of total chaos. Not in the sense that we are all going in 20 different directions (well, I guess that sometimes happens too!), but when dinner time came around every day it was an ordeal to get all three of us in agreement on what to have and to have all of the ingredients needed for said meal.

Our routine had always been: make a small list of meals that sounded good every few weeks to a month, head to the store and pick up a bunch of random items to fill the fridge and pantry, within a few days be frantically grabbing what was needed to make the meal decided on (about 2 hours earlier) as I rushed home from work to beat the school bus up the driveway. Almost everyday this would be the way it went...until about a month ago.

I had finally gotten so fed up with the madness surrounding the one meal a day we all get to eat together. It had gotten to the point that we were eating meals on rotation which equals - ONE BORED MOMMA!

Thanks to my love of Pinterest (or obsession as some may call it), I was able to find THE CUTEST recipe cards. Ok, I found a ton of cute recipe cards, but used my favorites! The recipe cards I use are from tipjunkie.com.  I love the fact there are four different designs in the set - uniform but not!

After finding my recipe cards and printing a bunch of them, it was time to get them filled up with yummy new recipes to try!  Luckily for me, my go-to stress reliever, a.k.a Pinterest, already had way too many recipes pinned that I had been wanting to try!

With my new recipe cards, I was set to make a weekly plan for dinners! It is so nice to automatically know what is for dinner and not having to frantically rush every evening. No more dreading meal time!

We used this system for a few weeks before I realized there was more to getting my meals organized than just using recipe cards. I needed something that would help me keep track of what we have on hand to know what we need on our newly set-up weekly trip to the store based on the meal plan.

I couldn't find an inventory list that worked for our house. We have our pantry upstairs that we keep our boxed items and the items we plan to use quickly. We also have a root cellar we use as a pantry for canned goods, jarred goods, cleaning supplies, etc. We needed a list that could cover both as well as to show me what was upstairs and what was downstairs. So I made mt own! By designing one, I was also able to make it similar to my recipe cards...added bonus!

Now I can sit down at the end of the week with my recipe cards and pantry inventory list and knock out the following week's meals in no time! After I have our meals narrowed down, I write them on our big white board calendar so that the boys will know what we are having as well. We use our white board to cover everything that's going on for the month so everyone can be on the same page! Very handy with our crazy lives.

And to finish up making our meal time planning as organized and stress free as possible, I used some plastic containers I had picked up at the Dollar Store and some Project Life cards I use in my planner and made some nifty little tubs for the boxes, cans, spices needed for each night's meal to be all in one quick place!

I am actually enjoying cooking again! We did have a busy week at one point and actually went a week without planning our dinners in advance...yeah that's not happening again! I felt so lost in the kitchen without a plan.

I plan on continuing to tweek our meal planning and will keep everyone updated as it becomes more of a routine for my family.

I hope that this helps you get your meal time a little less chaotic as well!