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very thankful

By on November 28, 2011 in Holidays, Recipes, Traditions
The past week has been one big blur…  So much is going on around here, so many things to do and decide.
It seemed as though I came home from New York and three days later it was Thanksgiving.  Our Thanksgiving was wonderful, full of lots of food and music, surrounded by Poppa and our children.  Can we as mothers really ask for anything more?  I did not pull of any new Thanksgiving outfits this year but we were all together, safe and warm and enjoyed each others company for the day.  Lots of movies on the couch and casseroles, pots and pans covering every inch of counter space.
I wanted to share two little parts of our Thanksgiving celebration with all of you. 
The first is our sage sausage and berry stuffing which I promised to share with a friend.
1 pound ground pork sausage
1/2 cup total of chopped onion, celery and green bell pepper
1/2 cup dried berries (raisins, cherries, blueberries, whatever you like)
1 large Granny Smith apple
1 tbsp flour
2 tsp dried sage
1 can chicken broth
6 ounces cornbread stuffing
Preheat the oven to 450 F.  Crumble sausage into pan and sautee, add onion, celery and bell pepper and then the berries.  Cook until the sausage is well browned. (This tastes pretty good without the sausage too for my non-meat eating friends ; )  While the sausage mixture is cooking, peel and chop apple into small pieces.
Stir the flour into the sausage and cook for a few minutes.  Stir in the apple, broth and stuffing mix until all blended.  Grease your baking dish and transfer the stuffing to the baking dish.  Bake for 20 to 25 minutes.
The second I want to share is our Thankful Jar.
The thankful jar is a little tradition that we keep from year to year.  Everyone is to write at least 5 things they were thankful for in the past year.  They each write them on a slip of paper and put them in the jar.  This year Erica decided to cut them with a fancy scissor which made it hard to keep them from jumbling up together.  At dinner we remove the previous years slips and that brings forth so many memories and little things that we may have forgotten about, then we read this years and put them in the jar.  I keep the slips of paper from all the previous years together in a box to read someday when everyone is all grown up.  You could also do this for New Years and I think it would be great.
The day after the Thanksgiving festivities were over, Poppa and I had to leave for a meeting in Miami 
(more on the tomorrow) and it was so hard leaving my kids behind but I did get to spend the night at my parents house and that was wonderful though much too short.  We got back yesterday and crashed in a bed.  I am hoping to have a much more productive week this week.  I hope to share my advent preparation sometime this week and the rest of the photos from my New York trip.
What have you all been up to?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or follow me by email at the top right hand of the screen to have future posts sent to you. Tricia (Crunchy Catholic Momma)

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Handmade Christmas Craft Along Week 3 : Gifts from the kitchen, Perfectly Chewy Granola Bar Recipe

By on November 10, 2011 in Handmade Holidays and Celebrations, Recipes

This weeks gift ideas all come from the kitchen which in my home is the heart of our home so these are gifts from  the heart : )

Gifts from the kitchen are so special.  Spanish women love to feed people, it is how we show our love.  Anyone who has ever eaten at my parents house knows this.  They will feed you until you cry uncle.  If you do not eat they take it personally, kind of like you don’t like them.  In my world, food is love.  I love to make food for those I love and even those I just kind of like too.

Do you remember my hunt for the perfect granola bar, well a few weeks and many many batches later I finally came up with a recipe that my family loves.  I took a bunch to park day and everyone there liked it (at least they said they did).  In one day my kids and friends ate 40 bars!

Some of this years goodie bags will have these granola bars in them so I am sharing the recipe with you in case you want to make them too.  I wrapped them in parchment paper with a strip of brown paper bag from Whole Foods which I turned to the blank side then tied it with embroidery floss.

Chewy granola bars

2 c oats
1 c wheat bran (this stuff is really inexpensive in the bulk food section)
1 c sunflower seeds
1 c puffed millet
1 c raisins
3/4 c brown sugar
1/2 c honey
4 tbs butter
2 tsp vanilla bean paste (substitute extract if you don’t have paste)
1/2 tsp sea salt

Preheat oven to 400 F.  Toast the oats and sunflower seeds in the oven for 10 minutes.

In the meanwhile,  in a saucepan, bring to a simmer the sugar, honey, butter, salt and vanilla.  This will be the glue in the recipe.

Put all the dry ingredients in a nice big bowl

pour in your “glue” and mix it all up really well.

Grease a baking pan (or line the pan with parchment paper).  I did not use the parchment paper but it does make it easier to pull out the granola from the pan.  Press it all into the pan really firmly with the spoon then cover it with some wax paper and press down really hard all over.

turn out granola onto a counter and slice into bars

Wrap them in parchment or wax paper and don’t forget to keep some for yourself.

Ok, so onto other peoples ideas:

I love gifts in jars.  Here is a super easy one.

and here

to top off your jars, labels

Now imagine you open a pretty little box and inside you find homemade Twix bars.  Check out the tutorial here.

I had many more ideas but my computer is taking an hour to upload each picture : (

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or follow me by email at the top right hand of the screen to have future posts sent to you. Tricia (Crunchy Catholic Momma)

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