Because I’m all about Amazon Prime… I order most of my kitchen gadgets online…
I just got an email from Amazon yesterday because this onion chopper I ordered has been recalled.
If you have the M-700 model, you’ll want to get a replacement so you don’t risk being added to the list of those injured.
www.muellerdirect.com is their website. It was down yesterday… Probably from the high traffic of other kitchen gadget enthusiasts… But I was able to open the site today and it says to email recall@muellerdirect.com if you want to apply for a replacement.
Bagel Bites are another thing that’s super convenient… But maybe not the healthiest. I love that an entire pack fits into my Power Air Fryer XL. I’m all about my Air Fryer, and we are all for pizza. 🍕 We are part Italian 🇮🇹, so it kinda makes sense. In trying to make room in our freezer before my Costco run, I found a pack of English muffins… I also saw an almost empty bottle bottle of Marinara in the fridge and a pack of pepperoni… And we always have shredded cheese. So… Mini Air Fryer Pizzas was invented… This morning. 😂
Super easy, the kids can even help!
They could have helped… Except I did it before they caught me. I was trying to get to Costco early, but that didn’t end up happening. First, I made a batch of Boiled Eggs in my Instant Pot because I wanted to make room for fresh eggs. Then I made these mini pizzas and by the time I got to Costco, I had missed the Clorox Wipes 😕. I saw a guy walking out with the prized possessions and when I got to the back corner there were none to be found. We don’t even use Clorox wipes at home, but it’s on the school supply list for second grade, so I’m on the hunt now.
Cut your English muffin in half to make 2 mini pizzas. Top with marinara, or your favorite sauce, add some shredded cheese, and some toppings, then a little more cheese. I would add more cheese on top to help with the casualty we had…
4 mini pizzas ready for the Air Fryer!
Gently place them into your basket.
Set the timer for 5 minutes.
And voila! We only had one major casualty… One pepperoni flew off and landed in the middle. I just put it back on top of the one pizza with only 2 pepperoni. Nobody knew. 🤷🏽♀️ But I would use more cheese next time to try to keep the pepperoni from flying. One did curl, I’m assuming the heavier cheese would have kept that one flat as well. I didn’t get to taste them since they were gone before I got home, so I’ll take that as a good sign that the kids approved!
I used whole grain English muffins since that’s what we had on hand. Next time I may try to make our own. 🤔 I did finally buy yeast for the first time ever, so watch out… This Mama is going to get to baking!
I’ve always been not so keen on the fact that I can’t actually see inside the store bough ones. 👀 Do you use reusable apple sauce pouches?
So I bought the little green pouch ones that I could fill up at home when my oldest was 1. I used those for a bit, until my kids chewed up the spouts. 🤦🏽♀️ And lost the caps. 🤷🏽♀️ It was always a little awkward trying to clean the bottom of the pouch, too. You would fill it from the top, next to the odd placed spout, and good luck cleaning all the crevices. Plus they weren’t see through. I knew what I put in though, so… I did have a little more peace of mind than the store bought ones.
Then, I went back to the prefilled ones…
For no other reason than because it’s just easier. Plus… there were organic options… So they have to be better than the ones that people have found mold inside, right?
But then… Amazon…
Totally popped these up as something I might be interested in. These pouches have a mostly clear backside! And the spout is on the top, like the kids are used to!
So you fill it from the bottom, it even has a line to tell you where to stop filling so it won’t spill over when you zip it closed!
And I found these super cool soft spouts you can attach over the hard spout. They come with a built in cover! These totally help you to avoid spills if your little ones are anything like mine were. Do your kids squeeze the pouch as soon as your hand it to them? Mine would make a mess at the most inopportune times. They will have to get used to the extra suction required. But, you won’t have to worry about a big mess if they squeeze the pouch a little too hard. I’m sure it’s totally possible that they could grab a full pouch and squeeze it just to test it… You can even attach these spouts onto the store bought pouches too! So, if you are just looking for a little bit of safety while handing prefilled pouches to your kids, get you some!
The kids are getting older now…
Hopefully my kids won’t bite the spouts again, because they are older now. But since we are hoping to grow our family through foster to adoption, these may come in handy for our newest youngest.
I filled these with apple sauce today. You can buy the big container of apple sauce for less cost per serving and fill your own containers at home. Did you know that you can often find out the cost per serving right on the price labels at the grocery stores? Plus, I find that my kids eat so much more fruit when it’s already ready for them to grab and eat! You can even make your own apple sauce at home, but I haven’t been that brave just yet.
I plan on making a big batch of yogurt too in my Instant Pot, and filling up more pouches so those can be grab and go as well.
These can be great for school too!
These can even be grab and toss into the lunchboxes when the kids do get to have lunch at school again. We found out yesterday that our kids do get to go back to school in person. It will be day camp style, almost 3 hours a day, with half their class, and with their real teacher in person! I’m super excited too, because our middle child will be starting kindergarten. I was not looking forward to having to try to teach him fully at home through distance learning. Many are having to do this, and I don’t envy them at all. I know everyone is doing the best that they can, and that’s all that you really can do. Do your best, let God handle the rest!
So if you’ve got young kids who like their snacks in pouches, you have got to check out the reusable apple sauce pouches for your kids!
If you want to check out more of our super favorite things, you can find them here!
My son would have Uncrustables for every meal if we let him.
And he eats them frozen…
I’m a little worried about how he’s going to react when he opens his lunchbox at school and finds a thawed out Uncrustable 😱.
Not going to lie, they are super convenient too… He can grab a bag out of the freezer and have his meal ready to go.
But… Then there’s the ingredients. 🙄 And the high fructose corn syrup is a deal breaker for me.
So… I started making my own at home with these cool sandwich cutters!
I know exactly what is going into them, and I can freeze them and store them in one big zip lock bag for less trash waste too! Plus, it saves money since we buy the peanut butter and jelly in bulk!
I put peanut butter on both pieces of bread then drop a spoonful of jelly on top of the peanut butter to try to keep it from squirting out of the bread as I use the cutter and sealer.
Next thing on the to do list… Find a good recipe to making my own bread at home so I can stop having to read all the bread labels… 🤔
So I got a sweet Garmin Vivoactive 3 delivered yesterday from my company… Because… Well… They are awesome and they actually show us they appreciate the hard work that we are doing my rewarding us with gifts to help us on our health and happiness journey. ❤️
I was so excited when I saw all the watch faces I could choose from in the Garmin Connect IQ app 😍, so I downloaded 6 of them. Then I went to apply them and 5 of the 6 had an error 🤦🏽♀️.
So obviously I scoured the internet to figure out why the faces wouldn’t work. I found a long thread about things that worked, then didn’t, like rebooting, but I tried that… 3 times already and still couldn’t see the faces🤷🏽♀️.
Then I found the solution of all solutions… Garmin Express! You download the application to your desktop then hook your Vivoactive 3 up with the power cord to your USB slot and it will sync and make updates to your smart watch that didn’t happen from within the watch menus (I had checked for updates within the watch menu and it had said it was up to date 🤔).
After the updates were complete… I had all my watch face options available! 🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼
So I slept with my new Vivoactive 3 on 1 wrist and my old Fitbit Blaze on the other to see how they compare. I’ll be wearing both the whole day today too to continue my research 😂.
I’m a database analyst, so you probably won’t be surprised that I chose a face with all the DATA (Data Lover 🤣).
I think my favorite thing about my Garmin is that I can wear it while swimming, giving the kids a bath, washing dishes… You know all the things I can’t do while wearing my Fitbit Blaze. But I’m still a Fitbit fan because that’s where all my friends are that I do fitness challenges with.
Are you into fitness? How’s your health? You can’t outlift or outrun an unhealthy gut. 😝 But I’ve got something that might help. ❤️
Since I’m trying to figure this out again… I think I do this every year (that we send Christmas cards), I’m going to just write it out for myself, and for anyone else that it may help. (Update: I never actually published this last year when I wrote it, and I had to figure it out again this year when I came to search my blog and couldn’t find my post… so I’m finishing it in 2019 so I’ll have it for our 2020 cards)
We have our Address List Master in Google Drive so that we always have it with us wherever we go, and we can update it as we need to.
First, I made all my updates, highlighting records for people I knew had moved, so we could follow up with them, removing people who had passed away in the last year, or people whose cards were returned to us with no forwarding address, and adding any new friends we had made throughout the year. After I got my Google Drive list updated, I copied it into a new Excel document and saved it with this year’s name.
Here is where I always run into trouble… I got into Word and cannot figure out how to update my data source. I love data, and I love databases, and it seems like this should be something simple, but I cannot figure it out… maybe… if I used the same file name, then I could just go into the same Word document and just refresh the data… but I am going the wizard route… yet again. If I get it figured out before next year, I’ll update this. But… Christmas is only 4 days away and we need to get these cards out.
Sorry if you get one from us and it’s late… we tried.
Open Word
Go to Mailing
Go to Start Mail Merge – then select Step-by-Step Mail Merge Wizard
You’ll see options open on the right side of the page, click the Labels option button then click on Next: Starting Document
Click on Label Options
A window will pop open and you’ll choose your Label vendor and Product number (we use Avery #18660) then click OK then click Next: Select recipients
Click on Browse, then
Double click on your Excel list that you just created/updated then click OK, it should show you a preview of your address list, follow the wizard to confirm.
Click Next: Arrange your labels, click on Address block, then click on Match Fields, you’ll want to make any updates here to make sure your sample looks ok. In my list I have first and last name in one column, so I make sure the First Name references my Name field and the Last Name doesn’t reference my data at all or it prints the entire name twice. Once your updates are made, Click OK. Then click the Update all labels button before clicking on Next: Preview your labels, then click on Next: Complete the merge
Select Next: Preview your labels, and then Next: Complete the merge.
If everything looks good, you can choose to Print, but I choose the Edit individual labels option because we almost always have a few more records we are waiting to get addresses back on, but we don’t want to wait to print the rest. We click Merge, then All and it writes every address to the Word document so you can make any updates before you print. I save my document to my desktop then when I am ready I load my labels into my printer and print them. (Make sure you are loading your paper the right way, mine has to be print side down in the tray).
I hope this helps you! And I am sure it will help me next year when I’m trying to figure this out again!
I had never tried meringue cookies until a few years ago when we were visiting our friends that live in Las Vegas and they had a container of them in their pantry.
It’s not something I had ever seen in the grocery store, but I did find them at Whole Foods and bought myself a container… Once after trying them in Vegas. 😂
So that was the only two times… In my LIFE… that I had meringue cookies, until… I saw them on Pinterest recently. I don’t know how Pinterest knows just the right things to show me 🤷🏽♀️. I think I was actually looking up royal icing and since you make that with meringue powder it noticed the connection and had to throw it out to see if I’d bite… And I totally did.
But, I didn’t see any recipes that used the Wilton Meringue Powder, only recipes that say how important it is so make sure you only have egg white and nothing else… AT ALL. Sorry, but I don’t have time for all that madness, I just wanted an easy recipe using my cheater meringue powder… Which was also not easy to find.
I was trying to order from Amazon but they won’t ship to California… They’ll ship to every other state… But California 🤦🏽♀️. So I asked my trusty Facebook friends and they said I could find it at Wal-Mart. I went on my search for all things baking and there was no meringue powder to be found 🙄. But… I thought I remembered seeing baking things in the craft area as well on a previous visit, so I made the trek across the store and found it! 🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼 If you are looking for meringue powder make sure you check by the baking pans in the craft area… Baking is an art after all! 😘
Since Pinterest wasn’t much help for a recipe using meringue powder, I had to try to navigate my way through the Wilton site… I did find a recipe but I wouldn’t say it was the most descriptive… So I’m going to write it in easier to understand (for me anyway) terms and hopefully you’ll me able to follow along.
A mixer (I used my mother-in-love’s old Kitchenaid mixer and am loving it, but this one looks like it has all the same attachments and is much more affordable)
Piping bags with tips (I bought this set and these bags are amazing! The tips are pretty cool too)
Baking mats… you could use parchment paper, but I didn’t have any so I ordered both parchment paper and these baking mats from Amazon at the same time and I don’t know how I lived without these mats before… LOVE them!
Before you get started, you should know that these need to cool in the oven for several hours, so they are best made at night so they can stay in the oven overnight and be ready in the morning.
Step 1
Preheat oven to 250°F. Place your baking mats into your baking pans.
Step 2
In large bowl, whip Meringue Powder and water with electric mixer on high speed until soft peaks form, do you even know what soft peaks are? If you don’t, I took a picture, essentially it’s when you see little lines forming and it isn’t a runny texture anymore. With mixer running, gradually add sugar. Whip until stiff peaks. Add vanilla extract and icing color and whip until well combined, scraping down bottom and sides of bowl as necessary.
Step 3
Fill your piping bag with the meringue and squeeze out 2 inch circles onto your baking mat about 1 inch apart from each other. I also did smaller little stars between my bigger circles and they turned out super cute as well.
Step 4
Bake 50 minutes or until outsides of meringues feel firm and crisp, turn off the over and let them cool for several hours on the pan. If you make these at night they can stay in the oven overnight. Once cooled, peel cooled meringues off of baking mat. Keep them in an airtight container at room temp for up 2 weeks.
Tips:
Use granulated sugar, I felt that it kept the consistency better for piping. I tried the second batch with powdered sugar and it seemed way too soft.
You can experiment with different flavors, but…. after trying 4 additional flavors, I think vanilla is still my favorite, even thought I love almond and coconut flavors, they just didn’t taste as great as the vanilla.
You can double the recipe. This is actually half of the recipe that Wilton has posted and it made so many cookies that I was glad I only did half because my oven wouldn’t have had the space for 4 pans.
I also bought these spatulas with my other baking goodies and they make it much easier to load your meringue into your piping bags towards the tip and not have to squeeze it down from the top.
Please let me know what you think and if you have any other fun ideas for me me to try!
Because I failed miserably the first time I went live on Instagram, and had to search the internet, just to find out that there was no way to recover my Instagram Live if I didn’t click on the Save button before posting it… But I did find that I could do a screen record, as long as it was still in the 24 hours that my Live stayed… well… live. So… I made a video to share with others who may run into the same issue that I did.
Hopefully this will help you before you do your first Instagram Live…. or in case you made the same mistake I made, hopefully it’ll help you learn how you can still save a copy with a workaround. Below is my second live on Instagram, I did click the Save button before I posted it, and it did save to my phone, so I was able to upload it to YouTube. 🙂
And I use this video editor to crop out anything outside of the screen that I’m trying to capture.
And if you didn’t know…. IGTV is pretty awesome. It allows you to upload videos between 1 and 10 minutes… you know how you can only load 1 minute clips to your posts on Instagram or in your Stories??? Well… with IGTV you can post a longer video, then you can share a clip of your video as a post on your feed, and you can also share the clip to your story so that people can click on it and it will take them to your longer video. I thought it was pretty fabulous when I learned I could take longer videos and not have to crop out only my favorite minute.
We got to sleep in, then wake up and had a homemade delicious breakfast with family thanks to Ryan’s sister! She was amazing for driving all the way to Cedar City and back to pick us up for the night the night before, and by the end of the day, she would do the same trip again. Thank you, Jen! You really made an unfortunate situation soo sooo much better!
After breakfast, the kids enjoyed throwing rocks into the pond, playing guitar with Uncle Brian, then Auntie Jen told us about the splash pad, so… we got the kids swimming gear together (that is one of the things I packed when we knew we may be without the RV for the whole weekend) and headed out to the splash pad. There were playgrounds there too! If you are ever in Alpine, Utah and looking for a cool place for the family to hang out, you should check out Alpine Splash Pad. While we were at the splash pad, we got 1 call from Amen diesel saying the replaced the clamps on the hose where the coolant had been shooting out. They were going to take it for a test drive, then let us know if that fixed it. A couple hours later, they told us it was ready.
I had Ryan leave me and the kids at the house, so that he could make the 3 hour drive back to Cedar City with his sis to get the RV, drive it back 3 hours, then pick us up so we could continue on to Idaho. I didn’t think the kids would do well with 10 hours of driving in a day when they could just have a 3.5 hour trip. We had reservations for the night in Montpelier, Idaho, it was the closest place we could find to Yellowstone that had vacancies. Apparently, you need to book in January if you want to stay in Yellowstone, and since I was booking our sites in May and June… I had to take whatever we could get. If we stayed one extra night in Utah, Old Faithful would have been an 8 hour drive away, which easily turns into 10 hours with gas stops… and then we had another almost 3 hour drive to Cody, Wyoming where we planned to stay the next night. So I stayed in Alpine with the kids, did a couple loads of laundry, helped the kids shower, which meant I got completely soaked, but they all got clean, then I turned on The Greatest Showman on the tablet for them to watch while I showered, and they were all asleep before Ryan got back.
I packed up and waited up… he arrived around 11:45 pm, we loaded the kids, laying down, drank our Active, then hit the road. It was really dark… and we were driving through a lot of trees, with those signs that say watch out for wildlife… but thankfully we didn’t have any animals dart out in front of us.
Tips for Day 3:
If you plan to visit Yellowstone in the summer, and want to stay there… make sure you make your reservations really early or you’ll be stuck staying further away. We tried to stay in Alpine, Wyoming, but that was booked too. Montpelier, Idaho has a great KOA and it’s only a couple hours away from Jackson, Wyoming.
Speaking of trip planning… you MUST get the RV Parky App. I originally tried to plan our trip on RoadTrippers, but before we could even start our trip, they started charging and limiting the number of stops you could add to your trip for the free version. However… RV Parky lets you add unlimited stops. And I love that you could add your destination, then search around there for places to stay. The places to stay included reviews, so you could know ahead of time if it was a good option for you. We were in a really big RV, so some of the reviews helped me decide that we likely would have trouble getting in and out. And while I only planned to stay at Walmart 1 time, we ended up staying at at least 3 Walmarts in our 21 days.
Allow for more time. I booked our trip solid. The purpose of the trip was to go to my sister’s wedding in Michigan, and while I planned for about 6 hours of driving a day, it took way longer than that, most days. So, we had to rush to see what we were going to see then keep on moving so we wouldn’t get behind schedule.
I’ve been in planning mode for the last couple months. And we leave in around 57 hours and I am still trying to book the last couple nights of our trip. Now, it is a 3 week trip, so I still have some time, but I hoped to get everything booked before we left so we’d have a plan. Not that that means anything, since this is our first RV trip, we may find that we can’t do everything as fast as we had anticipated, so… we plan, but know that things may actually change, and we’ll roll with it.
A big bummer was when I was looking into where we could park/drive at Monument Valley and I found out that we can’t actually drive the RV through Monument Valley… To get there and back to the Grand Canyon from Scottsdale, AZ adds about 6 hours to the trip. So rather than drive all the way there to see what we can see before we can go no further, we are going to skip Monument Valley this trip and spend extra time at the Grand Canyon. We had originally planned to stop in Chicago for a night, but the Memorial Day murder rate helped me decide we could skip it this trip, and plan for that when the kids are older. We also planned for a stop in St Louis to see the Arch, but the 2 RV parking areas around there sounded like they weren’t in the best neighborhood, then there was the whole flooding, so… we’ll just pass by the Arch on the freeway… I think… (I haven’t actually solidified the exact routes yet, but we do have apps for that) and keep moving on to our next stop, and plan the actual visit to the Arch for when the kids are older as well. Part of the hesitation for just getting an RV site and Ubering is that we have 3 kids in car seats still, so if we were to Uber, we’d have 3 car seats to contend with wherever we are Ubering to. Thankfully, my parents are renting a minivan for while we are in Michigan for the wedding so that we can get around and leave the seats in the car while we go to the wedding and reception.
Since we will now have over 24 hours at the Grand Canyon, I found out we can take a train ride (https://www.thetrain.com/) to the Grand Canyon, so that saves me from trying to figure out where we should stay and how best to get to and park at the Grand Canyon with an RV, plus it means we can stay put for 2 nights. And, the train actually has an RV parking area so we can pull in for the night, wake up early, head to the train, spend a few hours at the Grand Canyon, then ride the train back to the RV, and wake up early on the 31st for our long drive home. They actually give a AAA discount too, so that’s a perk. However… you do get charged $35 for entry into the Grand Canyon unless you have and NPS Annual Pass.
What’s an NPS Annual Pass??? It’s a pass you can get for $80 that will allow you into all the parks on the list for an entire year. And you can buy it online… however… you can’t print your pass, they have to mail it to you, and since I am just looking into this 2 days before our trip… I don’t think that’s enough time to order our pass and have it arrive. You can pick up a pass from any of the parks though, so I am going to have Ryan try to run out to Lake Kaweah tomorrow to grab a pass, then hope that we can enter our pass online to save the $35 on the train tickets. If you are planning a trip to several parks this year, look into getting the America The Beautiful annual pass to save you some money https://www.nps.gov/planyourvisit/passes.htm#CP_JUMP_5088574
Here’s the locations you can visit with the pass: https://store.usgs.gov/s3fs-public/PassIssuanceList.pdf
I’m sure I’ll learn more as we go, but for now I need to figure out how we can do a tour of Hoover Dam since… that is actually our first stop on day 1… so I better get to figuring that one out sooner, rather than later. https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/service/DamTour.html Looks like we won’t be taking the tour since you can’t go on the tour if you are under 8, and our kids are only 2.5, 4.5, and 6.5. Guess that will have to wait for another trip as well!
And what time are we actually leaving on Thursday morning? I don’t know yet… depends how late we are up on Wednesday night loading up the RV. I do have boxes all over the house right now with things I have already packed. And I’m praying that the kids aren’t taking things out and leaving them where I can’t see them because I am mentally checking them off the list as I put them into the boxes… Worst case… we can buy what we need on the road, thought I’d rather not spend money on something we already have… but the most important things for me to remember are… my grandma’s China that I am taking across the country for my sister, and our wedding attire… since we kinda need that for the wedding. Everything else… can be replaced… but I’m going to try to remember much as I possibly can so we can limit the amount of stops we have to make to buy what we forgot.
You must be logged in to post a comment.