At Home My Way

Last week my niece sent me a facebook message asking if I could make her baby son a football beanie (crochet)?  "Uh.... YEA....!". I'm always looking for someone who actually WANTS some of the busywork that keeps me occupied.  I whipped this up in only about 20 minutes and its so adorable! From the picture that my niece found on Pinterest, I searched for a basic double crochet baby beanie pattern and found a terrific blog that actually had beanie patterns for different sizes.  Perfect! This is what I came up with.  Turned out cute and fit her baby's little head perfectly!  And we think he liked it.  He didn't even jerk it off his head like my babies would have done. Here's the blog I found with the instructions for the beanie.  Easy peasy! http://familybugs.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/basic-beanie-free-crochet-pattern/

Update to this picture made 5/9/17.  Also -  Love making this in my big muffin cups now!  Perfect service size and easy to eat on the run. I made another one of Lynn (from Lynn's Kitchen Adventures ) wonderful Baked Oatmeal recipes this morning.  Lynn calls hers Banana Baked Oatmeal . This is truly delicious!   She is such an inspiration!  I made mine with bananas, chopped walnuts and cinnamon and it tasted just like a piece of banana bread. (Lynn bakes hers with chocolate chips, which would be equally as delicious!)  I keep overripe, thick chunks of banana in my freezer for making smoothies and I just thawed some banana chunks in my microwave, drained off the water, and mashed them for using in this recipe.  My kitchen smelled delicious this morning and breakfast was a definite treat!  So easy and so inexpensive.  Mmmmmm!  It reminded me of my Tin Can Banana Bread .  If you want...

Lemon Glaze Cake   This past weekend my daughter and her boyfriend were in from college.  We didn't do a whole lot, but it was SURE good to see them!  I always like to feed college kids.  I think it is in college when kids most appreciate the person who cooks in their family.  They eat enough cafeteria and restaurant food or their own cooking to really be grateful for a plate homemade family favorites!   I had a smoked pork loin in the freezer so Friday night I mixed up some Homemade Tangy Barbeque sauce and made pulled pork sandwiches with cheese fries.  Definitely cannot go wrong there and since I already had the meat cooked and in the freezer, it was simple enough. I made homemade biscuits Saturday morning which we ate with the homemade peach jam that my daughter herself made from the few peaches we got from the little tree in our backyard.  There's really nothing like a pan of hot biscuits slathered in but...

  Super Simple Vanilla Ice Cream       I have been craving ice cream all week!  Really longer than that.  This week I decided to mix up a batch of vanilla ice cream.  My mother-in-law has a fabulous recipe that uses sweetened condensed milk, half & half, whole milk, and vanilla, and she uses one of those big ice cream makers which uses lots of ice and rock salt.  I happen to have one of those big ice cream makers (several actually since we have the electric version, the hand crank version, and a new one with a plastic tub).  But I also have a smaller countertop ice cream maker, which my mom got me for Christmas one year (thinking I would never use it) but I use it all the time!  It makes a perfect small batch of ice cream.   This is my ice cream maker:   I found some on Amazon here .   I also remembered seeing a recipe similar to the one my mother-in-law uses on one of my most favorite blogs, Fin...

Last night I made one of our favorite crockpot meals, Chicken -n- Biscuits .  While I had the oven cranked up, I decided to pop in one of my favorite things to have for lunch.  Corndog Muffins!  My husband thought this was a hoot.  He thought I was making cornbread muffins for supper and so when he saw hotdogs peaking out of the muffins, he just about cracked up!  (He doesn't know what he's missing!)  These little jewels are so tasty.  The combination of sweet cornbread and salty hotdogs really is yummy.  I especially love that in the morning, when I'm tired and can't dream up a thing to take with me to the office for lunch, I can grab these out of the freezer, stick them in a little container, and out the door I go.  At lunchtime, I just pop them in the microwave for a few seconds to warm them. I use my favorite homemade cornbread muffin recipe to make these Corndog Muffins.  This recipe is one that I got fro...