Holiday Recipes

It's really time to get back on track with everything this year. We managed to still cook a lot over the holidays, but we're really just now getting back in the swing of things. We've spent a lot of time the last week or so organizing upstairs to move my new gym equipment up there, and also reorganizing the attic. Next week we'll get back on our FlyLady zone house cleaning, because that has really helped us get the house more clean and organized before the Holidays.

We also stayed in our Grocery Challenge Budget for most of the holidays. The week before Christmas we spent $113 and the week of $130 (or that might be backwards). Considering all the places we had to take food plus cooking our own meal that's really good. Before we really starting watching it in a normal week we'd spend $150 easily. The week right after Christmas we were back to $74 and last week we were a few dollars over and spent $80 (and saved 20% with coupons - organic chicken was on a good sale so I stocked up a little). Still great improvements! The pictures in with recipes this time are from Brent and I making homemade bread for Lilli's teachers. About $5 in groceries has made us 4 loaves of bread so far, and we can probably make about 2 more with the ingredients I had to buy. We're backing away from grocery store breads - there's way too many unidentifiable things in there.

Recent good dinners:

Rotel Chicken Spaghetti - easy and good!

Grilled Lemon Chicken - simple, healthy delicious!

Marshmallow Fudge - I had to convert the squares into choc chips, I added some nuts and used red and green Christmas Marshmallows to Christmas it up. Very good and it looked so cute in our Christmas goodie boxes!
Always have to make sausage balls for Christmas. I add an egg into the mix and use hot sausage. I still thought they were missing something this year though.


We love cookie dough ice cream, so I thought this recipe for cookie dough bites would be good. It was incredibly easy and they were ok yummy. Not my fave, but they would be great to even mix in with ice cream in the summer.

The recipe for the delicious Herb Bread. We gave that to her teachers along with seasonal pasta and sauce. It was SO good - it tasted like the oil and herbs we love to dip bread in.

Cajun Chicken Pasta - We've been making this for years and it's always a fave. We use penne pasta, typically.

Chicken Marinade - sometimes you just want to soak it, forget it, then grill it. It was super easy for a weeknight and pretty tasty.