Happy Valentine’s Day!

February 14, 2010

You must know by now that I love traditions – especially holiday traditions!

Valentine’s Day just happens to be one of my favorites!

Somewhere around baby number three we realized that finding a sitter and heading out to eat on Valentine’s Day was more expensive and stressful then it was worth.

So I made a special meal for the entire family – and served it by candlelight.

A tradition was born.

This year was no exception! But since we had a church activity on Valentine’s day – we celebrated early.  Dagmar was our chef for the evening and decorated the table with candles and napkins.

It is amazing how beautiful 25 cent silk flowers from the thrift store look in candlelight! It’s also amazing how candlelight covers up the baskets of unfolded laundry, the piles of toys, and the school books that never got put away!

Notice the napkins? Over twelve years ago I bought some nice red cotton material, cut it into napkins and hemmed them up. We’ve used them for Christmas and Valentine’s Day ever since!

The menu varies somewhat from year to year – but always includes red jello with Cool Whip. This year Dagmar got fancy with a heart mold and conversation hearts!

An Italian dish – like cavatini or lasagna is almost always our main dish. This year it was a yummy sausage lasagna! She added a lettuce salad and freshly baked baguettes. We filled our garage sale stemmed glasses with pink lemonade to drink.

Dessert is always cream puffs – always!

They are filled with French vanilla cream and topped with chocolate ganache.  Yummy! This year we fancied up the plates a little with Smucker’s raspberry plate-scapers.

There is usually a card or two to open, maybe a small gift or chocolate treat.

It’s a simple, but very special way to celebrate with my Valentine’s.

What better way to say “I Love You” then with food!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

By Country Gal | Posted in Family Traditions, Holidays, Thrifty Ideas | Tagged , , , , | Comment (1)

An Olympic Party!

February 13, 2010

I am an Olympic junkie!

For two weeks every two years, I live, eat, sleep and breath the Olympic games – and I’ve taught my kids to do the same!

For us the fun begins on opening night when we have an Olympic party and watch the ceremony together.

We try to make a meal that reflects the host country – Chinese sweet and sour chicken for the Beijing games, fresh pasta and bread sticks for the Torino games, etc..

But we were a little stumped about Canada.

We ended up making Canadian bacon pizza (now stopped laughing Pat and my other Canadian friends – I know that it’s NOT authentic! Sure tasted good though!)

For dessert we made chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting and decorated with Olympic rings made out of M & M’s.

Then we all snuggled in and watched the Opening Ceremony from the very beginning all the way to the torch ceremony!

I love the geography and history and even political lessons the kids get as the different countries march in. (Why won’t Iran march in beside Iraq?)

Now for the next several days, we’ll soak in the drama, the victories, the defeats,and all the  stories that will make Olympic history!

All the while we’re spending time together as a family – and creating more memories that will bind us together!

By Country Gal | Posted in Family Traditions | Tagged , , | Comments (3)

A Kings Cake for Epiphany

January 8, 2010

Epiphany Cake Epiphany – or the Twelfth Day of Christmas – fell on a Wednesday this year – and during yet another snow storm.

I decided that we needed a little fun -  so we made a King’s Cake.

It’s traditional in France to bake a cake and hide a trinket inside (usually a king figure). Whoever found the trinket in their cake would be the king of the party.

Well okay – so I’m not really French – but I took two years of it in high school – and it was cold and stormy and we needed a fun idea.

So – we found a basic chocolate cake recipe (you knew it was going to be chocolate – didn’t you!) and halved it. (We wanted to be sure to find the prizes that evening – not someday in the future when we finally finished off a big cake.)

Then we scrounged around for some prizes. We were kinda short on king trinkets – but I did come up with a key, a quarter, and a thimble.  Then, since we wanted everyone to find a prize, we added 4 whole almonds.

The finder of the key would be the “key” to our evenings activities – they got to choose what we would do.

The finder of the thimble was excused from doing dishes that night.

Whoever found the quarter got to keep it – and anyone with an almond got to choose a treat from the “candy jar”.

We pushed the prizes in the cake batter before we baked it.

When the cake was cooled – we made a half batch of frosting and covered it up!

Chocolate Epiphany CakeIt sat in the middle of the table during our evening meal and created quite a bit of excitement!

When the meal was over my husband carefully cut the cake and handed out the pieces randomly.

Some of the kids took bites of their cake while others immediately started cutting it up with their forks to find the prize!

When it was over – we had finished off the entire cake and everyone had found a prize – except yours truly – I’m still not sure how that happened! :(

But it did make one evening a little brighter in the middle of an increasingly long and snowy Iowa winter – and a new tradition was born.

By Country Gal | Posted in Family Traditions, Memories | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Frugal Family Fun

October 30, 2009

frugal family fun

The hubby and I loaded up our passel of young’uns and headed for the big city the other day.

Ya’ll know the big city? It’s the one with traffic lights and more lanes of traffic than I have lines on my clothesline.

We aren’t like most folks who head right to the mall when they hit town. No – we drove right on past it and stopped at Goodwill. Figured some other silly person can pay full price, wear it 6 months and donate it. Then we’d buy it for a few bucks.

Works real well.

We also hit the DAV and came away with real nice camo jackets for the whole crew, even found camo hats for a few of them.  We’ll be styling this fall!

Then we headed off to find us some vittles. There were lots of fancy eating places – but we kept driving until we saw Arby’s . The sign said 5 regular roast beef sandwiches for just $5. Now that’s our idea of good eating!

After a stop at the Arctic Cat dealer and a scenic drive we finished our day at Sam’s Club were we had a mid-afternoon snack of free samples.

And that’s what happens when the country folk hit the big city – some might call us cheap, but I think it’s just frugal family fun.

Photo by Leon7 / Wikipedia Commons
By Country Gal | Posted in Family Traditions, Thrifty Ideas | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

And the Relatives Came…

October 14, 2009

Carpet Ball

Ah yes, the relatives came.

All of my husband’s family – all 23 of them – descended on us for 4 wonderful days.

We meet and fell head over heels in love with our 2 new Ukrainian nieces.

The children played countless games of carpet ball and created a large scale Revolutionary War action game that covered at least 40 acres.

We took the entire crew to the roller skating rink on Saturday morning and made many memories (and bruises)!

The sisters-in-law had a big garage sale/thrift store outing.

We celebrated Poppa’s 80th birthday -a little early.

We ate lots of food.

We laughed together.

We sang together.

We cried together.

We played together.

And we prayed together.

It was hard to let them go.

By Country Gal | Posted in Family Traditions | Tagged , , | Comments (0)