House

Yummy Chewy Almond Sugar Cookies

by

I’m a total chocolate chip cookie fan… I’ll almost always choose that over sugar cookies… until I found a recipe that uses Almond Extract… What??? How have I lived my whole life without Almond Extract?

So I made the cookies, with the Almond Extract, and they were a hit! So much so that I made them a few times in a row… that was dangerous.

I was actually supposed to roll them into balls 🤷🏽‍♀️… so they don’t look so pretty.

The kids have been asking for Chocolate Chip Cookies, so I used my old faithful Bisquick recipe… super easy…

And today Bobby started asking for muffins when he saw them on the Bisquick box that I pulled out to make the Chocolate Chip cookies… so I made those next.

And finally… I made the Almond Sugar Cookies… then Hot Chocolate from a can since it was already running late and we still wanted to get the Christmas Tree up and let the kid start decorating it.

I only had one extra stick of softened butter when I went to make the Almond Sugar Cookie recipe… so I tried to halve it… and I am horrible at measuring things, mostly because I don’t like to have to wash my measuring cups between ingredients, so I try to make do with other clean cups and do the math in my head… good thing I’m pretty good at math and fractions. Ha! So I may have used the 1/8th of a cup 10 times to measure out 1 1/4 cups of flour…

Anyway, here’s the recipe that you should follow and not try to do my halved one.

Chewy Almond Sugar Cookies

  • 1 cup butter, softened
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 2 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1/2 tsp almond extract,optional, but it adds an extra layer of flavor
  • 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 1/4 tsp salt

Topping

1/4 cup granulated sugar, for dipping

Instructions

  • Preheat oven to 350 degrees and coat a baking sheet with baking spray.
  • In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy, about a minute. Add in the egg, vanilla extract, and almond extract and beat until combined.
  • Next, add in the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Mix until just combined, making sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl every now and then.
  • Roll dough into 1″ balls, and roll in sugar.
  • Place on baking sheet, about 2″ apart. Bake for 10-11 minutes, or until cookies have set.
  • Allow to cool.

Enjoy!

You can frost them or cover them with a glaze, if you like… I like them just the way they are.

We got the tree started, maybe we’ll finish going through the boxes tomorrow to finish decorating the house, or maybe…. just maybe… it’ll take us a few days… or weeks until we are ready for Christmas.

Eureka!

by

I forgot how much I loved this thing!

We definitely want a new vacuum for the house, and I found a list that shows the best vacuums for wooden floors, with Shark Navigator Lift-away Professional being listed as #1, and I actually found it on sale at Costco this week… But I didn’t buy it yet, because I hadn’t read reviews from real people. It’s $50 cheaper at Costco in Visalia, right now, than it is on Amazon if you are in the market for a new vacuum.

Actually… As I did more digging, I found out that even though it’s called the Professional… It’s a different model than the one sold at Costco. The one at Costco doesn’t have as many features, so it doesn’t cost as much. It’s probably still a really good vaccum, but we’ll likely stick to Amazon to order the right model based on the reviews for wooden floors usage.

But…. If you are just looking for a small vaccum, I’d say hands down, this Eureka Blaze is amazing for the price! I’ve been sweeping with my microfiber floor mop lately and this vacuum saved me so much time. We’ve had the vacuum attachment off for so long that I was thinking I had to use the mini attachment, which takes too long when cleaning up hundreds of kids crumbs, but with the rolling attachment it just took a few minutes.

Couch vs the Marker

by

So… Remember that time I was glad that Alexandria only got the marker on her skin and the kids chairs, and was really happy she didn’t get it on the new couch 🛋?

Until my hubby noticed a few days later that she actually did get it on the side of the couch 🤦‍♀️

My friend Kendra mentioned that she cleans her couches with alcohol and water. So… I gave it a go.

It seemed to work, it just doesn’t smell the best. Then, I remembered my Theives cleaner that gets stains out of the carpet and it smells good too!

I’m happy to report that I was able to get the marker off the couch 🛋 🙌

And I even got most of the marker off of Bobby’s chair

Cleaning grimy cabinet tops

by

Let me start out by saying that we got a really great deal on this house…

When we were looking at houses, I was primarily looking at single story houses, but there weren’t that many that had a big yard, and I really wanted a big yard for my kids and our dog. This one came on the market the night before we were going to tour houses on our list that met most of our criteria. Our realtor was able to get us an appointment to come in and look at it the next day. Even though it was two story, the back yard was exactly what I was looking for, and there was a huge loft upstairs that could be used as a play room, so… we put in an offer and they accepted it!

However… we had a lot of work to do. And one of the things I noticed when I was putting decorations on top of the kitchen cabinets was the layer upon layer of dust… yuck!

But… we’ve been a little busy working, taking care of the kids, and getting everything else around the house in order that this cleanup was left for later.

Now that the painters are almost done, and I can finally put things back in their cabinets, and I had to get up on top of the counter to pull down the glass dishes to put back where they go, I knew I had to just get up there and get it done.

Cleaning isn’t on the top of my list of fun things to do. And cleaning other people’s mess is definitely on my list of things that I prefer not to do. But, we’ve been in this house 7 months now, so… I got up there to get it done.

I first tried to clean with one of the scrubby cloths from Norwex with just water… it didn’t clean up the grime. So… I added dish soap, not Dawn… we like to think of Costco as our grocery store, so we use the Kirkland Dish soap. It would start to get the layers off, but I’d have to climb off the counter to keep rinsing the cloth because it was getting covered in the grime rolls. Plus, there was the little accent that also had dust in it. So… I went upstairs to grab this scrub brush we had, and looked up ways to clean grime off cabinets and decided to try White Vinegar. I used a Norwex Envirocloth with the vinegar and it was working, until the cloth would get coated in grime, then it was just spreading it around. So I started using the scrubby brush with vinegar, until the scrubby brush was covered in grime, and I’d have to get down to wash the brush. The dish soap did great at cleaning the grime off the brush, so I made a combo mixto, mixto combo with Vinegar and Dish soap. That seemed to get a lot of the grime off, but still left the bottom sticky later.. and I did have to keep climbing down to wash off my brush.

The recipe I found that I loved for getting the last layer of grime off was vegetable oil and baking soda. You use one part vegetable oil and 2 parts baking soda. And you just put it on and rub it off with paper towels. I probably went through an entire roll of paper towels, but I got to make much fewer trips off the counter to wash out bowls and brushes and cloths, since I could just throw away the dirty paper towels.

I thought I may be able to skip the vinegar and dish soap step, but the vegetable oil and baking soda alone didn’t do a good job of taking off all the layers of grime.

So… my best combo for cleaning the remaining shelves was to mix vinegar with dish soap, scrub scrub scrub most of the layers off with my scrub brush, then second pass was vegetable oil and baking soda with a paper towel, then I did one last clean up any leftover grime rolls from the corners with a bottle of plant enzyme spray cleaner and a paper towel.

It’s not perfect, but it’s so much better than it used to be. I’m probably going to be really sore tomorrow, but I’m so glad that this is done!

Here are before and afters…

To see it done MUCH faster than it actually took… watch it here!

 

Saving money 💵

by

We are all about saving money…

Especially when we can just do something simple like link up our credit cards, or take a picture of our receipt or just open an app to get to a website we were already planning to go to and we get money back by clicking the link through the app.

This week we found this new website where we can get money for saving energy!

Tonight is our first time “powering down” for an hour, and since it’s pretty warm inside without any electricity, we came outside to play.

I think this is going to be fun!
https://ohm.co/ryanedwardjennings

We played Red Light, Green Light in the trampoline, it was a short game…

Then we played Simon Says. Victoria was pretty good and only did a couple if the things I said without saying Simon Says, but poor Bobby… he did every thing I said… even when I didn’t say Simon Says… Oops! He just learned the game today, so I’m sure he’ll catch on soon.

Alexandria had fun unloading dirt from the sand bucket and getting nice and dirty… especially since today was bath day.

I accidentally turned on the light when I went to the restroom (we don’t have windows in the bathroom downstairs) and Victoria did the same a few minutes later, until I came in and turned on the flashlight on my phone so she could still see. She questioned why it was ok for me to use my phone when we were trying to save power, so I shared that my phone was powered by a battery.

Now that we can use power again, we are enjoying some Sophia the First with the lights turned off… let’s see if we can get our power bill back down. It went up pretty steeply between our last two bills.

Also, I don’t even know if we’ll get paid for tonight, but it was good exercise anyway. I think we have to wait for our power bill to approve our submission, but we got our Nest Thermostats connected and I think we have some points or tokens in our account. If you don’t have Nest… I highly recommend both their thermostats as well as their cameras! Our home isn’t completely “smart” but it’s partially smart. 🙂