BBQ Chicken Pie

Do your children whine at most meals like mine?  There are only a few meals that everyone will eat without complaining, and today I’m going to share one of them.  As a bonus, this meal only uses 4 ingredients:  chicken, barbecue sauce, cheese and pie crust.

To make things easy, get yourself a ready-made refrigerated piecrust and slide it on into your pie pan.  Using a fork, make a bunch of holes in the bottom of the crust and bake it in a preheated 425 degree oven for 10-12 minutes.

Next you need to shred some cooked chicken.  If I have leftover chicken (like the weeks the large bonus packs of chicken breasts are on sale), I will have Dave grill all of them and use the extras for this recipe.  If I don’t have any leftovers, I buy a pack of chicken breasts or tenders and boil them until they are cooked.  Today I am using leftover grilled chicken breasts.  Using two forks, pull the chicken apart into small pieces.  This works easier when the chicken is hot, so if you have boiled chicken, shred it as soon as you pull it from the pot.

How much chicken should you use?  Well, the more the better, but sometimes when I’m using leftovers the pie is a little thin…and that’s okay.  A 3 -4 pack of chicken breasts will work well though for this recipe.


Next mix all that chicken with some barbecue sauce.  Maybe you have a great recipe for sauce, but we all like Sweet Baby Ray’s.  Squeeze as much or as little as you want in there to coat the chicken, maybe a half to one cup.

Now throw in a handful of grated cheese-any kind will do-I usually use cheddar or monterey jack, and mix it all up.  Then microwave that mess until it’s hot.  Pour the warmed chicken/cheese mixture into your baked piecrust and add another handful of cheese to the top.  Bake an additional 2-3 minutes until the cheese on top melts.   And there you have it!

This recipe was adapted from a Pampered Chef recipe.  They suggest you use green onions (which my children would whine about so I don’t use) in the chicken/cheese mixture, and that you lay slices of cheese on top of the baked piecrust, under the chicken mixture, which I don’t do.  They also suggest you garnish the whole thing with piped sour cream and cherry tomatoes, which sounds really good to me, but which I also don’t do (one guess why).

Here’s to a dinner with fewer dirty looks and a bit less sulking than usual!!

I am linking this post with Foodie Friday!

We Know How Charlie Brown Feels…

Last week was…well, it was rainy, overcast, gloomy, and windy.  But one day was sunny and windy, and we headed out to fly our kite.  Little did we know it was to be our kite’s last flight.

Maddie went first (it’s good to be the oldest.)

She mostly stayed in place.

Time for the hand off…  Jack mostly did not stay in one place.

Even Dave got a turn.  It was funny.

Well, Jack thought it was funny.

And then I went inside the house to check on supper.  When I peeked out a few seconds later, Maddie was running across the yard chasing the kite with Jack on her heels.  She made it to the fence just as the kite picked up speed and flew to freedom.  AAUGH!

It didn’t get far. 

Dave cut it down out of the neighbor’s tree, tried to retie the kite string, but called the kite officially done-for as of 6:04 p.m. E.S.T.

Good grief.

A Lesson in Patience

Last fall Jack found this guy:

A swallowtail caterpillar!  Or at least I think that’s what he’s called.  My neighbor, Beth, a butterfly expert, told us that he would eventually transform into a swallowtail butterfly, so we gave him lots of parsley (courtesy of Beth who grows it in her garden just for this purpose) and waited.

He ate A LOT.  Just like the hungry caterpillar in the book.  Conversely, he also pooped a lot, a bunch of tiny little black balls! 

Eventually he got into position at the top of the bug keeper, strapped himself on, and stopped moving.

September 6

We watched and watched but he didn’t change much.  One day we checked on him and…

September 10

September 12

And then we waited and waited and waited.  Beth told us it should take 7-10 days, if I’m recalling correctly.  But it never happened.  Eventually, I put him down in the basement hoping he might decide to join us in the spring.

A few weeks ago I remembered him and brought him upstairs into the warmth.  I didn’t announce it because I didn’t want to disappoint Jack if he was actually dead in there.  But yesterday, Jack walked by the bug keeper and said, “Hey!  Who put a butterfly in the bug keeper?”  Holy cow!

(Note all of the little black poop balls from last fall at the bottom of the cage)

And of course, an empty chrysalis:

I can’t believe we missed seeing him emerge!

Unfortunately, our weather is too cold to release him yet.  For now we are keeping him in his bug keeper and he’s drinking from a cotton ball soaked in sugar water (Beth’s idea, of course).

When the temperature is consistently above 60 degrees  during the day with no freezing night temperatures, we can release him.  His life span is short, so I’m hoping it warms up soon so he can go enjoy the outdoors.  In the meantime, he’s helping us feel like warm weather is just around the corner.  He was definitely worth the wait!

I Want to Be Laura

Is anyone else out there a big Little House on the Prairie fan?  (And I am talking both the books and the television series).

I know you will be so surprised to hear that I grew up while Little House on the Prairie was on television,  as I’m sure you thought I was much too young to have grown up in the seventies and eighties (ahem), however I did, and I looked forward to Monday nights at 8:00 p.m. even more than I looked forward to the Facts of Life/Love Boat night, and that’s saying a lot.  I will never forget watching Mary go blind, being on the edge of my seat when Laura was on the runaway caboose, and relishing the never-ending feuds between Laura and Nellie.  I cried when Laura’s baby brother died and the blind school burned down and Mary’s baby died (lots of deaths on LHOP).  I wanted Ma and Pa to be my parents (no offense intended, mom and dad)…Ma, so sweet and forgiving; Pa, so fun and full of good advice.  At one point in middle school, I had my future children named:  Charles, Caroline, Mary, Laura, Carrie, and Grace. 

When I was in third grade, my Aunt Carol bought me Little House in the Big Woods for Christmas and I was hooked.  I saved up my money over the years and bought each book in the series as soon as I could afford it and I read my way through Laura’s pioneer triumphs, trials and tribulations.  When I moved into my own apartment at the age of 22, all alone, the first night by myself I was scared.  I pulled out my Little House books and read my way through the series again and by the time I was finished a few days later, I had gotten used to the night sounds and wasn’t so scared anymore.  Maddie loves the books too.  My old copies were mildewed and falling apart, but luckily I had found her a complete set at a yard sale when she was two (I just knew she’d be a fan).

I’ve also read lots of other Laura Ingalls Wilder books over the years, ones she published for adults about her life and journeys after those first horrible four years of marriage, and books written by other authors about Laura and LHOP.  I am a true fan.

So can you guess how excited I am about this new book:  The Wilder Life, My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie?  The author, Wendy McClure, and her husband, spent many months exploring Laura’s world:  they waded in Plum Creek, they toured her homestead in De Smet, South Dakota, and even headed to the Wilder farm in New York state.  Can I tell you how much I want to do that too, now?  <Stop rolling your eyes, honey, I won’t make you go> And I will probably never get to all these place (although wouldn’t that be a great idea for a tour?  I would sign up for the LHOP tour in a heartbeat!) but I can read the book. 

By the way, I also recently read Prairie Tale: A Memoir, and it was a pretty juicy account of Melissa Gilbert’s life before, during, and after the filming of LHOP.  The book was a bit gossipy, but there was a lot of fun information about the cast and filming of LHOP, the different guest stars on the show, and how Melissa came to be Laura.  And then it degrades quickly into Laura’s wild Hollywood teenage years etc. etc., but the first two thirds of the book were riveting to a Little House fanatic.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to churn some butter and darn some socks.

Bunny Cake

One of our Easter traditions is the Making of the Bunny Cake.  This came to me from my sister-in-law Sue who made the cake for Dave’s family’s Easter dinner every year.  About five or six years ago, Sue had a very busy spring and I was so happy to take over the Making of the Bunny Cake for her…and for some reason we’ve done it every year since.  Each Easter I hope she doesn’t ask to take it back, and so far I’ve been lucky!

I almost always make the cake a coconut cake or carrot cake.  Coconut cake is my absolute favorite cake in the world…so instead I will be making the carrot cake this year (Ha! to you, Deb!  My diet will not be derailed by coconut cake this year!)  I don’t really like carrot cake, so I will be happy with a few bites.  Click here for my carrot cake and cream cheese frosting recipes, and I’ll include my coconut cake recipe down below, but you can make any old cake you like.

Basically, make two round cakes.  One cake will be the bunny’s face, the other will be his ears and bow tie.  The face cake stays intact, then you cut the two ears and bow tie from the other cake (see diagram to right).  Place the pieces on your cake board and frost.    Cover the bunny’s face and ears with coconut (if you like coconut) to make him look furry, then use candy, marshmallows, sprinkles, etc. to give him some personality.  At our house, the kids rotate decorating the ears, face or bowtie from year to year.  If you study the pictures, you can usually tell which part the oldest child decorated and which part the youngest decorated!  You can also put the coconut in a ziploc bag with a few drops of food coloring and shake to color the coconut.  We did that one year to give the bunny a pink coconut bowtie (see left). 

Check out some of our bunnies from the past:




It’s so easy to do, especially if you use a box cake mix (in fact my coconut cake is a doctored cake mix, though it won’t taste like a box mix at all).  I hope you try it, it’s such a fun part of our Easter!

Peg B.’s* Coconut Cake

1 box Duncan Hines White Cake Mix

1 small box Coconut Cream instant pudding

1 c. water

4 eggs

1/2 c. oil

handful of coconut

Grease and flour two round pans.  Mix all ingredients together and divide between pans.  Bake at 350 degrees for 28 minutes (that’s exactly the time for my oven…yours might be 27-30 minutes).  Allow to cool for ten minutes then remove from pans to a cooling rack to finish cooling.  Assemble into a bunny and decorate. 

For this cake I use a slightly different frosting than for my carrot cake:

4  1/2 c. powdered sugar

1/3 c. water

1/2 c. Crisco

3 oz. cream cheese, softened

1 t. vanilla

pinch salt

remainder of bag of coconut used making coconut cake

Mix together all ingredients except coconut.  Spread coconut on top of frosted cake.


*Peg was an older lady at my church who often brought this coconut cake to church picnics.  She did not give out her recipe to people because she was a bit embarrassed that it started with a mix.  One time I did a little favor for her, and she made me a coconut cake to thank me and included the recipe.  When Peg died, one of the discussions at her funeral was how much we would miss her coconut cake as well as missing her.  I am so proud to be one of the few persons with her recipe and I think of her every time I make it.

I am linking this post with Foodie Friday.  Happy Easter!

Spring is Sloooowly Arriving

Someone is building a nest on the wreath on our front storm door.  This has happened before and it is a huge inconvenience, initially because once Mama Bird lays her eggs, you’ve got to go in and out of the door very carefully so the eggs don’t fall out, and if you forget, Mama will fly out unexpectedly and scare the heck out of you, and then once those babies are born, the mess is tremendous.  However, since it’s on the glass storm door, if we open the inside door carefully, we will have a front row seat witnessing the births and infant/toddler stages of the baby birdies, which makes the mess and inconvenience worth it, I think. 

What else is happening?

Fickle April is halfway over.  May will bring warmth and sunshine and planting, field trips, playgrounds, flip-flops, popsicles, and happiness.  Goodbye, Winter.  Don’t let the door hit you on your way out, dude.

Be Careful What You Wish For…

Ben and I are both thinking that right now.

I complained in my last post that nothing was going on around here, nothing blogworthy anyway, unless you’d have wanted me to write about the meals I'd made that got whined about, the toilets I hadn't cleaned, the guinea pig cage I did clean, and the abundance of worms I found on the street after the huge rain we had last week.  Mm-hmm.  I didn’t think so.

And then on Sunday night-- BOOM!  I got my wish to have something happen.  I’m not sure how much you’re going to want to stick with me though, it’s definitely not a post for ye of weak stomach.

It all started with Jack falling asleep on the sofa.  In the middle of the day.  Jack collapses in his bed each night and passes out within five minutes from the time his head hits the pillow, because he is going going going all day, he is a motor-driven, mile-a-minute, talking-playing-running-whining-climbing-jumping machine.  He don’t need no steenking nap!  Yet there he was, asleep on the sofa.  By bedtime he had thrown up (on same sofa).  I made the comment that he’d probably be staying home from school the next day, which was when Ben fervently wished he could be sick too so he could also stay home.  Words Ben regretted about 3 hours later.

Ben threw up around 11:30 p.m.  As he lay in bed he threw up all over his pillow, sheet, two stuffed animals, and comforter.  But oh my…I am just getting started.  He must have also “projected” that last meal too, as it was sprayed onto the wall down to the floor, and stuck down in between the boxspring and the bed.  I got him cleaned up, put him in the shower, and stripped everything and put it all in the washer for my first load of the night.  I got him settled into his sleeping bag on the floor, checked in on Jack who was sleeping peacefully, then headed back to bed.  Ten minutes later, Jack was throwing up.

The boys spent the rest of the night alternating their spewtrid episodes every 20-30 minutes.  Really, it was very polite and efficient the way they scheduled it for me.  I was never taking care of two boys/stripping two beds/scraping two carpets at once.  They always took turns.  My sweetheart boys! 

Ben’s most exciting moment of the night was when he rushed to the bathroom with his mouth closed, hoping to make it to the toilet.  He almost made it, but sprayed his mouthful onto the wall and back of the toilet instead of down into the toilet bowl. 

It was a long night.  We all got some sleep from about 3-5 a.m. when Ben woke us up with yet another round of toilet brimming fun, and he did indeed earn Monday home from school and even a bonus day (today) because he vomited again last evening.  Jack developed an ear infection which bought him another day home too, although he’s not as happy about it as Ben is as he is missing art class today.

This whole episode was reminiscent of the Christmas of ‘08.  During Christmas Eve mass, Ben told me his belly was feeling sick.  Mine was also feeling queasy, but we were headed to a family party after the service and I ignored my symptoms and Ben’s and soldiered on, certain that a positive attitude would pull us through and beat down the building nausea.  Five minutes into the drive, Ben, who was sitting in the seat in the far back of the minivan, threw up.  Dave pulled over to the side of the road, I went back to help him, and my queasiness hit me hard and fast.  I jumped back out onto the street and threw up too.  Jack started to cry because Mama was throwing up, and then Maddie threw up too (she never likes to feel left out of things).  Dave drove us all home, which was when Jack finally joined us all in the family fun.  Dave spent the whole night helping various kids, washing loads of sheets, and wrapping the stocking stuffers/big presents I hadn’t gotten to.  I spent the night in bed/in front of the toilet.  Good old Dave.  I hope he got some good presents the next day.  I don’t really remember.  We all sat around half-heartedly opening gifts and then we all took turns napping.

Many thanks to Karen, my one and only commenter to try for the Real Or Fiction quiz.  Thanks so much, Karen, I appreciate your effort and will be dropping a pot of pansies off at your house this week.  Karen got an amazing seven answers right. Here are the correct answers:
True:  1,4,5,6,7,10
Fiction:  2,3,8,9

Many thanks also to Deb for being a good sport.  She emailed me that although she was honored to have made the list, “it seriously made my palms sweat, and I totally had to think, consciously, YOU ARE NOT PREGNANT.”  No, Deb is not pregnant, and she has been working hard on our Biggest Loser:  Blogger Edition and doing great (darn it).

Now I wonder…if I wish for warm sunshine, the scent of blooming lilacs gliding in my open windows on the soft, fluttery breeze, and flip-flops and capris…could I possibly get those too?

Making It Up

Nothing is going on around here.  I mean, so much nothing that I have absolutely zip to write about.  Which isn’t good when you’re a so-called blogger who is trying to get about 3 posts out there a week, a blogger who generally enjoys observing, thinking, and writing, but has nothing to observe, think, or write about.  Like…I got nothing, people! 

I may have to resort to making things up for this blogpost.  I feel just a little guilty about that, but I am including this disclaimer so you get a blog to read, I get a blog to write, everyone (except my morally uptight childhood Sunday School teachers) will be happy!  Not all of what you read will be fiction, but some will.  Hey!  I have an idea!  If you can figure out what is real and what isn’t, you may or may not win an awesome prize!  (See what I did there?  Is the prize real or not?  Ooooooo.  Tricky.)

And we’re off!

1.  This week Jack told me he’d like to move to Las Vegas when he grows up.  When I asked him why, he told me, “Because then I can do a lot of gambling.  That’s what they’re famous for there.”

2.  Herbie can now squeak the National Anthem.  We are so proud!  I am going to see if I can get him to squeak /sing at the Super Bowl next year.

3.  Dave spent this past week in Florida at a conference for work.  While we sat up here in the rain.   I may or may not have drawn mustaches on and blacked out his teeth in all of the photos I have of him.

4.  Maddie’s artwork is on the cover of her school’s Art Show invitation!  We are almost as proud of her as we are of Herbie!

5.  I cleaned out all three children’s rooms this week for my Forty Bags in Forty Days.  I got forty bags at least in those three rooms alone.

6.  Ben cried when he came home from school and saw that I had also rearranged his furniture.

7.  This morning Jack fell climbing out of my bathtub and got the wind knocked out of him.  Scared the poop out of both of us.

8.  Ben has recently learned to fart on command.  He has moved to the top of the proud list ahead of Herbie and Maddie.

9.  My good friend Deb shared the news that she is pregnant!  Awesome Deb (and well done, Matt!)  I guess I will definitely be winning our Biggest Loser:  Blogger Edition.  I think a shot of her in a bikini holding her gestating belly will work come June.  I can seriously hardly wait!

10.  I managed to get my three blogs in this week, even with very little to write about, though they admittedly may have questionable entertainment value…so there, SUCKAHS!

Now if you would like to take a chance at winning (or not winning) the fabulous prize, leave a message in the comments section that looks something like this:

True:  1,2,3,4,5

Fiction:  6,7,8,9,10

Don’t miss this opportunity to score yourself something amazing (or possibly just be very proud of yourself for trying!)

Jack the Photographer

Jack really wants a cellphone, specifically a phone with a camera loaded with lots of awesome apps and movies.  But until he gets one-- many, many, many years from now, he bugs the heck out of anyone who has one with the hopes of talking them into loaning it to him for just a second.

Most people politely shrug him off or pretend they don’t hear his incessant “Do you have the fart app?” questions. 

Aunt Jamae is a sucker and always hands hers over to him.  She is nice and very cool. 

I am not so nice nor so cool.  But when we’re waiting to pick up a big brother or sister from somewhere or if we’re waiting for the oil to get changed in the car, or if he’s just thrown up all over himself on a playdate, I will hand over the phone.  He likes Angry Birds and the cupcake-making app and Bejeweled, but sometimes he will sneak in a photo session.  And if I am desperate, I will let him. 

Today we went shopping. 

Today I was desperate.

Today he was a photographer.

“This one represents my complete lack of privacy around here.  Mom ALWAYS has her eye on me.”

“See.  What’d I tell ya.”

This one pays homage to my kindergarten teacher who always said “Set your sights high” and to my Dad who says “Turn off that darn light if you’re not going to be in the room.”

“Some might just call this an accidental picture of a finger.  To those who criticize my genius…I’m thinking of a finger.”

“The stark black and white is meant to convey how much I don’t like wearing shirts.”

I think you’ll agree with me the kid shows definite promise.  If only someone would loan him their darn phone.