And I’m trying out a new theme on this blog – what do you think? WordPress has so many lovely themes! It’s a brighter theme to get us through the long, dark of Moria winter.

Then I saw that Campbell’s commercial where two children are talking about their favourite meals and the boy says something in praise of Chicken Broccoli Divan. What is a divan? Could this be the same dish I have such a fond memory of? In searching for the recipe, I inevitably came upon many that were indeed including a can or two of condensed soup. We don’t eat a lot of canned soup in our house, preferring instead to make our own soups and sauces from scratch and wholesome, identifiable ingredients. Then I stumbled upon a recipe that doesn’t use canned soup. I had most of the ingredients on hand and with a few modifications came up with our own Chicken Broccoli “Divan”. It was easily doubled to make a second casserole to pop in the freezer. Gotta love that!

Chicken Broccoli and Rice Divan

adapted from Hundred Healthy Dinners

Rice
Chicken – whatever you have on hand (we used thighs)
4 cups chopped Broccoli – about 1 large head (my kids like the stem so I use that too!)
2 – 3 cloves of garlic (I used dried since I didn’t have any fresh!)
1/2 chopped onion
Bit of dried shallot – use fresh if you’ve got it!
1 yellow bell pepper – diced
Salt & Pepper and other spices to taste(ie dried basil and oregano)
A double recipe of cream of chicken soup (see below)
3(ish) cups of sharp cheddar – grated
1/2 cup bread crumbs or wheat germ or cracker crumbs

Cook rice according to directions. (I had leftover rice from the Hawaiian Beans)

Cook the chicken in a pan with a bit of butter and/or olive oil until no longer pink. You can season it with salt and pepper too. Remove it and set aside. Leave the drippings. If needed add a little more oil to the pan.

Add garlic, onion and shallots and saute for about 30 seconds. Add the broccoli, peppers, salt and pepper, and any herbs or spices. Splash a little bit of water and stir.

Cover for about 5-8 minutes until vegetables are slightly softened and flavorful.

While it’s cooking dice up the chicken and preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Combine the cooked rice and chicken with the vegetable mixture along with 2 cups of the cheese and the soup.

Put it into a greased casserole (or two!) and top with the remaining cheese and bread crumbs.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes until the cheese is melted and a little golden.

Enjoy a great oven to table meal sure to please even your pickiest kids!

Cream of Chicken Condensed Soup

from The Kitchn
makes a little over a cup, equivalent to one can of soup

3 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons white flour
1/2 cup chicken stock
1/2 cup milk
Salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat then add the flour. Cook, stirring rapidly, until the mixture is thick.

Add the chicken stock and whisk until smooth, then add the milk. Bring to a simmer and cook, stirring, until thickened. Remove from the heat and add salt and pepper to taste.

This will keep for a couple days in the fridge, but it’s best to use it the day you make it.

Enter one of my favourite recipes: Hawaiian Baked Beans. This is a go-to recipe for us. It is healthy, nourishing food that pleases the palate, the waistline, and the many diets of our combined families! We first had a version of this dish when I had E. A woman from church dropped off a meal one day and it was a sweet, tangy, saucy, baked bean dish. By simply searching for “Hawaiian Beans” I found many, many different versions.

This version is adapted from the one at www.ecomii.com – I usually modify it according to what I have on hand. It’s such a hit that we’re serving it at a school fundraiser next month! We got many compliments on it last night from several people including the meat eaters!. My grandmother even asked for the recipe.

Photo Credit: Juan Carlo via ecomii

Hawaiian Beans

8 Servings

2 teaspoons olive oil
1/8 teaspoons crushed red pepper
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 stalk celery, sliced
1/2 cup sliced scallions
few slices of bacon, chopped
1 2/3 cups shredded or finely chopped carrots
1/4 cup Mirin
2 (15 ounce cans) pinto beans
1 (14 1/2 ounce can) diced tomatoes
1 (8 ounce can) crushed or tidbit pineapple, packed in juice
1 Tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
squirt of ketchup (optional)
2 Tablespoons nutritional yeast

Heat oil and crushed pepper in a large pan for 1 minute. Add garlic, celery, scallions, bacon and saute 3 minutes.  Add carrots, cook 2 minutes and add Mirin. Cook mixture 5 minutes and add beans, tomatoes, and pineapple. Lower heat to medium low and add mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and yeast.  Simmer 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Serve with rice.

This can also be done in a slow cooker. Simply do the sautéing and then dump all the ingredients in the cooker. Yesterday I set mine on low for most of the day.

One of the great things about this recipe is that it is very adaptable. Vegetarian? Omit the bacon. No pinto beans? Use another kind. Need more kick? Add more spices. It is easily doubled for a large crowd, freezes well, and can be made fairly quickly on the stove or slowly in the crock pot.

We serve our Hawaiian Beans on whole grain or mixed grain rice. I cook up whatever rice is in the cupboard. Last night it was the end of the wild rice package and a bunch of brown basmati.

Enjoy this wonderful meal and you’ll feel like your on a beach even though it’s snowing outside! (at least it is at my house!)

What a cutie! He’s made with doughy French bread, ham, cheddar and mayo, and decorated with edible food markers. E liked him so much (and she’s been eating a lot lately!) she asked to me to make her another one, so he is joined by his girlfriend today. Her lunches are mostly packed in a Goodbyn that she decorated herself. Love this lunchbox!

Well, that concludes National Cookie Cutter week, but I still have the cookie tree to post. I’ll have to get to it later. I didn’t have time to get it together before J’s party on Sunday so the cookies are in the freezer and the icing is in the fridge ready for the next get together.

PS: You moms of three (MOTHs) and four (MOFOs), do you ever get “back on track”? I feel like each day I get further behind in life! Some days it’s all I can do to get everyone fed and dressed and keep a moderate semblance of tidiness in the kitchen plus referee the sibling screaming.

The Olive Press

Have you heard of Buck Denver? Jelly Telly? Phil Visscher? Veggietales? Well, Veggietales was created by Phil Visscher. He has gone on to create a new animated Christian franchise called Jelly Telly and one of the main characters is Buck Denver. Buck’s got a new DVD out called “Why do we call it Christmas?”

which is part of the “What’s in the Bible?” series. Have you seen it? If you haven’t, I highly recommend it, for your kids and for yourselves! You’ll find out about the history of all the different Christmas traditions we have from trees to St. Nick and Santa to Dec 25 and more. I learned as much from it as my kids did!

Stay tuned! Maybe I’ll get a free minute after parent-teacher interviews tonight…

Using delicious Trader Joe’s peanut butter and some Crofter’s Strawberry jam. I was going to pack it in her Theodore Tugboat lunchbag but ended up tucking him into a bento box with the rest of her lunch. Thankfully, J drove her to school because, unbelievably, THE BOY IS STILL SLEEPING!

Yes, my friends, it is 9am and he has been sleeping since about 10pm. THAT’S 11 HOURS!

Let’s not get our hopes up too much about nights to come. The night before last he was up most of it with a stuffy nose and sore throat. On the other hand, the doc says he’s doing great. He’s a little 6 months, at just under 13 pounds, but since starting solids (mostly avocados) he put on a pound in 2 weeks! The month before that he only gained a pound,  so he’s twice as fast since the solids. We call him Fatso sometimes:

Super hilarious to us because we do not have fat kids. We don’t even had chubby kids, nor slightly round. Neither are they plumb or cherubic. In fact, lil C seems to be in a holding pattern just under 30 lbs at 3 1/2. Here she is in her fashionable glory at Anthropologie (love the new one in Vancouver!):

And E’s pretty much a ballerina without the training. Oh wait. She’s wearing a snow suit here so you can’t really see it. Oh well!

No fuss, no muss. It also happened to be that we were out most of the day and then the dinner hour was wonky and I didn’t realize until 8pm when I was feeding Mr. T his nightly avocado that I hadn’t done anything. But hey, we’re into creativity here! I traced both the outside and inside of the cutter to get the different sizes.

The yellow fat one reminds me of the Super Mario Bros star. Now that brings back memories!

Here’s a pretty photo of our Jesse Tree. The girls do simple colouring of symbols from here and we glue them onto construction paper and hang them up with bent paper clips. We also do the devotions from here at dinnertime. This is the first year we’ve done it and it’s been a lovely and meaningful way to celebrate Advent and anticipate Christmas. It’s reminiscent of Resurrection Eggs at Easter.

And just for fun here’s a picture from J’s birthday cake on Sunday. It’s a Reese peanut-butter cup ice cream cake. Yumo! In the picture right before this one, Mr. T is staring at the candles ready to pounce. Someone gave him pencil crayons to distract him:

Also I’ve got ideas to do it in sugar cookies, ginger bread, and even Rice Krispie treats and make a little winter forest. I think we’ll decorate that this year instead of a gingerbread house. This is the Rice Krispie house (from Rachel Ray) we made when E was not even 2 and I was pregnant with lil C:

How cute and little is she!? And to think that now she’s a first grader. And lil C is even older than E here. And Mr. T is eating avocados. Boy it goes fast…

Anyway, I’ll attempt to do something with cookie cutters each day and post with pictures what I come up with.

What kind of holiday eats are you going to do this year?

What?!?!

No, seriously. ALL OF THEM ARE SLEEPING AT THE SAME TIME. AND IT’S NOT THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT.

This is insanity. Whatever shall I do with myself?

Oh I know, have a cup of tea and cookie and fold some laundry. How’s that for multi-tasking? Turn on a little Netflix and me-time, here I come!

*This post brought to you by me. Happy me. Yay sleep!

**Can you tell that I’m giddy? Sleep and faster memory. REM and RAM. What a beautiful pair.

Taps dispenser. “What is this?” (things)

Pulls knob. “What are these, mommy?” (things for people)

Pleading look. “Who are they for? What do you do with them?” (they’re adult things)

Genuine concern. “Do you want one?”  (no thank you)

“I need one.” (no you don’t)

Examines diagrams. “Can I have a quarter?” (no)

Sticks hand up the opening. “Look, I got one.” (leave it there.)

“Why, mommy?”

And that, my friends, is the child’s question for everything. Even when they are “out” of the why stage, they are always in the why stage. Because they are children and they are learning all the time.

Lord, let them be little and let us not try and make them grow up any faster.

Except when they don’t work. Or work very, very slowly… We’ve had an iMac since 2008, so 3 years. That’s getting on in the computing world. And for the last year, this computer has been slow. Not just a little slow. Old PC slow. The spinning beach ball was starting to get more screen time than anything else. I do a lot of stuff on my computer – email, web browsing, photo editing, downloading music and videos, word processing, spreadsheets, you name it. We have all of our digital life on this little machine. And I spend so much time on it that the slowness of it was becoming a problem. Not just a little problem – a BIG problem. I spent half my time on the computer just waiting. For programs to load, things to save, web pages to refresh, emails to pop up. It was painful.

Last week or so my iPhone updated to the new iOS 5 software which includes iCloud. I had already been intrigued by iCloud and the new OSX for my desktop, Lion. I was considering buying it but was waiting for some time to sit down and research it. I played around with iCloud and decided I liked it. So I went to the Mac App store to purchase Lion.

I couldn’t buy it. I needed 2GB of RAM. My computer only has 1. ONE! Uno. Solo.

Could that be the reason for the slowness? I started to research in my web browsing way. And lo and behold, this iMac is capable of 4GB. It has 2 RAM slots which can handle 2GB each. Well I’ll be! I started to research some more and found a Canadian online company, CanadaRAM, with very good reviews. They sell RAM for this Mac (Apple doesn’t, it’s too old!). They also have a quote system whereby you tell them what you have and what you want, they quote what you need and then guarantee that what they quote will work. If not, you return it. No problems.

So I ordered 4 GB on Wednesday. IT CAME IN THE MAIL THE NEXT MORNING! Seriously! That was fast. So I installed it before dinner and now my tired old iMac has a new speedy lease on life. Applications load in a snap. Multiple programs run without crashing. Application switching is lightning fast. My iSight doesn’t have a lag. It’s almost miraculous.

I even took pictures of changing the RAM so I could post a little tutorial. But really, it’s super-easy. Let’s upgrade!

Very carefully lay your baby iMac screen side down onto a clean soft towel. This will protect the monitor from scratching and give you access to and visual of the memory compartment. Notice the lovely diagram printed on the base, detailing how to do EXACTLY WHAT I’M ABOUT TO TELL YOU.

Locate the memory compartment by gently lifting the stand. Be careful because it only pivots just enough for you to get at the compartment. Notice all of the dust and vow to clean your office more often. Or at least once.

The instructions (on page 33 of your “Everything Mac” guide) tell you to use a #2 screwdriver. I used a 3mm Phillips from my handy-dandy mini screwdriver set.

The cover is pretty easy to remove as it’s only held with one screw.

You’ll see two memory slots each with a black plastic tab tucked over them. As you can see, only the right slot has a card in it. Untuck the tabs…

And pull on the tab with the card. I had to give this a good tug with both hands. The card contacts are very tight.

The card will pop part way out so you can slide it the rest of the way. Slide it out and keep it facing the same way so you can match up the new card(s).

These are my new 2GB cards. Here you can see all the fancy numbers and stuff. But notice that they are the wrong way up.

For some reason this pic is a different size. Oh well, it’s fitting as the old card is smaller than the new cards. I’m boosting my RAM 400% from 1GB to 4GB.

Slide the new cards in and give each one a good push until it “clicks” in. I had to push pretty hard. At first I wasn’t sure they were going to go in, but eventually they did.

Remember to tuck in your tabs. Screw the cover back on, stand ‘er up, plug ‘er in, turn ‘er on, and fire ‘er up! I noticed a difference right away.

Happy Mac-ing!

Disclaimer: **This is shameless Apple love but it is only because I really like Apple. I haven’t been paid or anything for this write-up. I am also not a tech expert, just a geek who does this kind of stuff for fun. If you need help, call your IT guy or visit an Apple Store.**

I have a few big things to get off my plate before I think I settle into a less hectic state. Seriously, my floor is constantly unswept (I’m trying to teach E to do it), the laundry is constantly piled up (moreso than usual), the office floor is half covered in paper (I’m drowning in it), and there are tulip bulbs still to be planted.

But on the other hand, E is enjoying school, C is enjoying preschool, T is enjoying the Exersaucer, J in enjoying vball and I’m enjoying rehearsals. We are all enjoying church life and family life and FABULOUS sunny weather. We have even snuck in some holidays.

So, with that all being said, we have not dropped off the face of the planet. Rather we are starting to emerge from the newborn cocoon. He’s 5 months now and starting to sleep longer. It’s amazing how once that fog of sleeplessness starts lifting, life just starts coming together. Praise God for sustaining us! There will be much up and coming posting starting soon – I have so much to share! Pictures, videos, travels, recipes, crafts etc.

For today, please enjoy this video by Terry Kelly. And do not forget. Nov 11 is next week. It is so important for us to remember the sacrifices men and women make for our country. We cannot, as people, move ahead to create a better nation and world if we do not remember the fallen and learn from our past.

Wear a poppy, thank a veteran, and attend a ceremony. Make it a family trip and turn it into a tradition. Contact your local legion or municipal leaders to find a ceremony near you.