Kara Frazier

Kara was a former student in my Biology class.  I would love to say her singing is due to being in my class, but it isn’t.  LOL  Please few this and like it.  You’ll be amazed at her voice.  She’s 16.  :)

Cabinets in Phil

Sir Husband has been busy fixing the inside of Phil, the camper, for the past month or so.  One of  the things he worked on was the kitchen cabinets.

Before:  Wide open space all the way through.  Our dishes would slide all over the place.

After:  added walls and shelves. Now there is room for everything and everything in it’s place.  Unlike our real home, where everything has a place, but it isn’t in the place.

The lower left cabinet holds our Tervis glasses.  Upper right holds smaller plates.

Well done Sir Husband!

Easy Granola

Started making this simple recipe for granola a while ago.  It is perfect for our camping trips.  Easy to store.  Easy solution for a quick breakfast.  Easy to carry while hiking.   Just plain easy.  :)

You can add anything extra to this recipe before baking.  I added about 1/2 to 3/4 cup raisins.  Nuts, craisins (all natural kind), shredded coconut is good too.

Simple Granola
Source:  Breadbeckers

• 1/2 cup cocount oil (all natural, unrefined)
• 1/2 cup honey (local if you can get it)
• 1 tsp salt
• 4 cups rolled oats

Melt together the coconut and honey.  Add salt and stir.  Pour over oats and stir well to coat.  Bake at 400 degrees for 20 minutes until slightly golden.  Stir twice during baking.

You may have to adjust the time for baking.  We found it takes us up to 25 minutes to bake, but the original recipe says to bake 10 minutes.

Yummy with milk, yogurt, or right out of the hand.

3 out of 6 family members will eat this, which means 3 out of 6 family members will go hungry if this is all we have, which means 2 out of 2 parents don’t care.

I will take a small jar with me when I am out doing errands to munch on between meals.  It fills me up and I won’t make that quick trip through a fast food joint.

This is good stuff people!

Camper Food

We visited Rainbow Springs State Park last week for several nights. To prepare for our trip, I needed to make several meals ahead of time.  This is what I did:

Breakfast:  Sausage Muffins.

I have been wanting to make these for several years.  This was a good time to give them a try.  You can find the recipe here.  We made only six.  Here are our thoughts on these:

• Eggs are a little rubbery when heated in Microwave.
• Needs a hot saugsage.  What we used was bland.
• The instructions say to reheat, bake in oven for 25 minutes.  WE feel if it takes that long, then we will just cook and freeze the sausage, then make the muffins the morning we want to eat them.
• We will not be making these ahead of time again.

Above in one bag is Chicken Teriyaki.  I diced up chicken thighs and marinaded them in soy sauce, red white, fresh ginger, fresh garlic, and I can’t remember what else. This can be easily frozen.  You can search for a recipe on-line for the liquid, then place everything in a bag to cook later.   Sir Husband cooked this on the grill.

The other bag is BBQ Beef.  Use your favorite recipe for the BBQ sauce, chop the beef, mix together and freeze until ready to cook.  We placed this, thawed, in the crockpot on one of our busy days out of the camper.  Cooked on slow for 6 hours.  It was ready when we returned.

For movie night we made individual pizzas.  Pizza dough was made and baked before we left.   The pizza sauce was also made before we left.  You can see it in the jar.   The recipes is Easy Pizza Sauce III, which is our favorite.  Sometimes I add red pepper flakes, but I don’t tell the kids I do that.  We had fun making these, but our iddy-biddy oven only fits one cookie sheet and we could only bake these two at a time. Some of us, that would be me, had to wait a long time for dinner.  Next time, Sir Husband will be making these on the grill.

Other things we took with us:  Granola, Chocolate Chip Cookies, fresh veggies, fresh fruit, milk, coffee, ice cream, and popcorn.

The  Simple Granola Recipe and Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipes will be given in another post.

We are really enjoying our camper and it is so much nicer to have things ready before we go.  No emergency trips to Wal-Mart or Publix.  Ok, we have been out camping three times and we have made an emergency trip on each occasion.  Hopefully we will have figured this out soon and won’t be making the shopping trips during camping.

If anyone has easy make ahead recipes, please send them my way and we’ll give them a try.  The recipes must be from scratch, no canned soups, no packaged seasonings, no store bought sauces.

Happy Camping!

 

 

I’ve done it again.

It is that time of year when the Biology class begins dissecting.  It’s what the Biology class lives for.  Well, some anyway.  I love to see their excitement and discuss.  It’s what I live for.

The last two years I have made the awesome Dissected Frog Cake.  This year I did something different.  I made the Dissected Perch Cake!  Oh yeah, my students are going to look at me with awe.

This cake was made just as the frog, with Rice Krispie insides and covered in Fondant.  I get the Fondant at Hobby Lobby with a 40% off coupon.  Don’t want to pay full price, because everyone throws it away.

So here is the covered photo.

I thought about having the students dissect the cake, but was afraid the fondant will  be stuck to the guts inside. So, decided to go ahead and peel back the skin.

The black wiggly thing in the mouth is suppose to be a worm on a hook.  It is obvious I lack in the cake decorating department.

Now I know all of you are wondering just what is in a Perch. Well, here is a labeled picture for you.

Just in case you don’t know already, a Perch does not have these far-out colors for guts.  It is completely consumable.

Make one for your class and report back to me.  :)

 

Sir Husband Loves Me

Birthday Roses

Library Bucket

Can you tell where we are at in our homeschooling life by looking at the books we checkout from the library?

• CollegeBoard Scholarship Handbook  2012
• The Thinking Parent’s Guide to College Admissions by Eva Ostrum
• How To Get Money for College by Peterson’s
• Essays That Worked, 50 Essays from Successful Applications to the Nation’s Top Colleges, Published by Ballantine Publishing Company
• College and Careers, How to Help not Hover, by Barbara Cooke
• Four-Year Colleges, Find the Right Four-Year College for you 2012, by Peterson’s

It’s hard to believe it was just four years ago, Sir Son entered ninth grade and two years ago he entered Dual-enrollment.  Now he is graduating this May.  *sniff* and *Hoo-Rah*.   Now my second child will be entering highschool in the fall, so here we go again.

Happy New Year!

I will be gone for several days, so wanted to wish everyone A Happy New Year now.

I have decided that I will occasionally work on this blog.  I have some science homeschool stuff I’d like to share.  I am at 991 posts, so I should at least get to post 1,000 before stopping.   I will limit my time on here and hopefully come back full time in several months.  We’ll see how it works out.

I have made the Apologia Biology quizzes public.  You can find them on the drop-down menu above, under Apologia.

Enjoy!

Merry Christmas

A Sad Change

It has come to a point in my life that I have to give up this blog.  :(

I have been thinking about this for months now and have decided that this blog is taking up way too much of my time.  I must tend to my family and other obligations.

I will update this blog one more time after Christmas, to change the background and to make the quizzes for the biology class public.  I might update, once in a while, to add any science activity sheets or projects I come up with.  Just things I’d like to share that might be helpful to other homeschoolers.

I hope you have enjoyed this blog as much as I have enjoyed writing it.  Please continue to use any of the resources for your personal use.

Michelle