Noodles, Noodles, and more Noodles

We love homemade noodles at our house. Chicken noodle soup is my favorite. If I am going to make chicken noodle soup, I am going to make homemade noodles. They are really easy. They do take some planning, but they are not hard. Give it a try.

Here is how I do it:

For every 1 cup if flour, I use one whole egg and 2 egg yolks. If you don't want to waste the egg whites, either make a yummy egg white omelet or you can instead use one cup of flour and two whole eggs. I use prefer the first way. I have made both, and both are good. This amount is about two servings.

Put the flour in a bowl and make a well in the middle. Beat your eggs and pour the eggs into the well you have made. Use a fork or a your fingers to mix it together well. Once it is mixed together well, dump it out and knead it till it is smooth, about 5 minutes.

Here comes more choices for you. When I am rushed for time, I roll it out, slice it up, and boil them right then. Sometimes we roll it out, and use small cookie cutters to make fun shapes. That takes a lot of time, but D sure loves making chicken and stars. The last, and best way I think, is to roll them out, let them dry, then roll them up like you would a cinnamon roll. It makes it easy to slice them thin. If that didn't make sense, check out this post by The Hidden Pantry. She has pictures to explain it.

Another thing I recently learned from The Hidden Pantry in you can freeze your fresh noodles. I had never thought of that before. I make extra noodles last night and froze some. D and I had them for lunch. They were yummy! I plan to do this all the time. I would make sure your noodles are dry before freezing so they don't end up a big sticky mess.

This week's goal, get some noodles made and into my freezer.

The Family: A Proclamation to the World Video Project

One of my favorite blogs, Chocolate On My Cranium, teams up every year with another wonderfully uplifting blog, Being LDS, to celebrate The Family: A Proclamation to the World. It is a month long celebration in September. This year they are creating a video presentation that you can be a part of. Click on link above, and you will find all the information about how you can be involved.  D and I have already started to memorize one of my favorite parts of the Proclamation to the World in hopes that we can be a part of the final video. I encourage you to all do the same. 

"Seek ye out of the best books"

One of my favorite scriptures about my role as a mother and wife is found in Doctrine and Covenants 88: 119. It reads:

Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing; and establish a house, even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God

 It is not the most profound or deep, but I have always liked that it was a blueprint for me. It contains building blocks for our family and home. Each building block helps us to create a house of God in our home, a place where the Spirit can dwell.

Of course there is another part of the blueprint we do not want to forget. It is the foundation of a strong home.

And now, my sons, remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall. (Helaman 5:12)

This idea of a blueprint may be oversimplifying things, but it allows me have a measure of how we are doing as a family and how I am doing as an individual. Today I was thinking about how we are creating a house of learning.

This brings me to the idea of "yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith" (D&C 88:118).  Although I feel gospel learning is the most important thing we can study and learn about, secular knowledge is also important. That is why we have been taking the time to homeschool D at a preschool age. During our schooling time today I realize something. My hubby spends his time at a job in academics, where he is always teaching, as well learning and growing himself. I plan activities and lessons that help D to learn and grow. But I wasn't doing anything to help me learn and grow. I was stagnant as far as my secular learning was concerned. I felt I should be a better example of what I believe to be an intricate part of life. I believe education is not only for schooling years. It is about growing as people, about using the gift of the ability to reason and to understand. I decided to start my education again. It starts here:

I ordered a calculus book today. I bought an older edition for $8. I used to love math and it has been years since I have used it. Maybe calculus isn't the most practical choice. Maybe I should spend my learning time on something I would use more often, but I am actually excited to relearn something I loved before. Plus, it helps when you are married to a math professor, right??? (I was actually surprised he didn't have a calculus book in his vast collection of math books. I guess it is just too simple of math.)

So, I feel really quite nerdy for being so excited, but I am. I think I will find joy in learning and stretching myself. Yea for education!

How do you keep the process of learning alive in your life?

Moments That Matter Most

A friend shared this with me. It really touched my heart. I hope you can take something from it the way I did.

My New Favorite....Cleaning the Bathroom

OK, so that's not completely true. OK, OK. So it is not true at all. I hate cleaning the bathroom. But now I hate it a little less. I found a new product I love, love, love. Introducing bleach foamer!

It was an impulse buy. I had tried everything to clean the nasty grout in my apartment bathroom, even wiping it down with bleach. I saw this and decided to give it a try. It was like a miracle! No, Clorox is not paying me to say this. I was just so excited by my find that I wanted to share. All I did was spray it on and walked away for a while. When I came back to wipe it off, the grout was white. No scrubbing required (trust me, I had tried a lot of scrubbing, with a toothbrush.) I am pretty sure it cleaned off grime that was there when we moved in. Ewwww, I know. Now my bathroom looks awesome, well, at least the tile.

*Note: I did think the fumes where stronger than just bleach. It might have been because I covered my shower with it, but consider yourself warned. 

Oh So True

Source: Uploaded by user via Nicole on Pinterest

The last one is a favorite of D. Always with the "Carry me." Do your kids have a favorite?

Our Love Story

In the fall of 2003, both the hubby and I were attending college. We didn't know each other. I was actually dating another guy. Here is our story.

I was a junior in college and taking Calculus II. Math had never been hard for me until Cal II. I struggled. Luckily there was a guy in my class who I studied with who seemed to know his stuff. About half way through the semester he mentioned that the reason he knew what he was doing was because his roommate was a math major and that I should know who he is because he we were all in the same institute class together. I found out later the math major had noticed me in class, but I had never noticed him. Oops.

The next time we were in class, my math friend introduced me to the math major. I use introduced lightly. Basically the math friend talked to me after institute about math and the math major waited for him. I remember walking back to the college and the math major was talking about how much torque it would take for Superman to stop the rotation of the earth. He was (is) a true math nerd.

About a week later I saw the math major in the lab building and I stopped him in the hallway. I told him that he probably didn't remember me, but I knew his roommate and I needed help in Cal II in a bad way. He agreed to tutor me.

We started meeting at the library in the evenings.  Mostly it started out with me being frustrated about not understanding the class. I specifically recall arguing about Fibonacci's sequence. In my mind it didn't make any sense. He stuck with me anyway. For Thanksgiving I was headed out of state to visit the guy I had been dating. I told him this and he seemed not to care. But I cared.

The trip to visit the boyfriend didn't go well. Not only because I was now interested in someone else, but because I figured out we both had "in charge" personalities that clashed a lot. He kept talking about marriage and I wasn't ready. (Turns out I just wasn't ready to marry him.) That weekend ended the relationship and I headed home.

After Thanksgiving I started looking for more reasons to see the math major. I would try to be in places I knew he would be. Once or twice I even waited outside the tutoring center where he worked with a lame excuse I was waiting for someone else. Even if he did think I was stalking him, he kept tutoring me.

Wanting an another excuse to see him, I invited his roommate (the math friend) and him to the First Presidency Christmas Devotional in SLC. They both agreed to go, the roommate went grudgingly because he has a final the next day. That was it for me. I knew I wanted to at least be dating this guy.

Later that week, he was helping me prepare for my Cal II final and I suggested that we go get some ice cream because my brain was done. He suggested dinner instead, so that's what we did. We talked for hours and enjoyed some yummy Mexican food at a small local restaurant. When he went to pay, the lady said his card wouldn't work, so I ended up paying. (We found out later when his credit card bill came that it had worked. We both paid for the first date.)

After this, we were together all the time. He went home to visit his family for Christmas, about 45 minutes away, and I drove over after Christmas in a huge blizzard to pick him up and bring him back. That is a huge deal for me. I don't drive in snow, ever, if it can be avoided.

It was a crazy 6 weeks together and we got engaged. It was fast, I know. Maybe we were too impulsive, but it was what we wanted. The math major was planning on leaving for grad school in the fall, and I wanted to go with him. My parents were thrilled. His parents, not so much. I don't think it was me they didn't like. I think it was the whirlwind romance they didn't like. Either way, we were married 3 month later in the Bountiful Temple.

Eight year later and it is still the best decision I have ever made. My math major tutor became my hubby, my eternal math tutor. 

I want to thank Montserrat from Chocolate On My Cranium for encouraging such fun posts, like this one and A Day In My Life

TV Crackdown

Let me start off by saying that I am not against TV. My husband often points out that he watched a lot of TV and he has a PhD in mathematics. It didn't seem to ruin him. Plus, there are a lot of good shows to choose from. I am pretty sure D learned to read from Leap Frog and Super Why. That being said, once D starts watching TV, he fights me the rest of the day to get to watch more and more and doesn't want to take the effort to use his imagination. I was tired of the fighting and arguing. Then we started the TV tickets.

 At the beginning of the week he gets 5 TV show tickets and 3 movie tickets. He gets to choose when to use them. I thought this was important because it makes him accountable for his choices. It can be hard on me because, for instance, this week he used them ALL on Monday. Yup, I let him watch TV for about 7 hours. It went against everything I believe about kids and TV, but I let him make the choice. But here is the wonderful part. Since we have been doing this, on days he has no tickets left, he doesn't ask to watch TV. Not even once. Sometimes he will point out he wants to watch something but he can't till next week because he used all his tickets. Today he gathered up a bunch of his Friend magazines and looked through them and then asked me to read some of the stories to him. That would have never happened before. Last week he used them all by the end of Tuesday, and he found plenty to keep him busy the rest of the week. I think this system is a keeper for us.

*Note: Saturdays are the exception. I let him watch Saturday morning cartoons regardless of ticket status. It's the day the hubby and I have to relax in the morning. Maybe the anti-TV people would think this is still excessive, but it works for us. 

321 Cake

Have you ever heard of 321 cake? I hadn't until recently. It is an easy way to make a quick single serving of cake. Here's what you do. You mix one box of angel food cake with another box of any kind of cake mix you want. The reason one has to be angel food cake is because it has the powdered egg whites in it. I just dumped the angel food cake mix and a chocolate cake mix into a large tupperware, placed the lid on, and shook it till it was mixed. You could use a ziplock bag.

Now for the 321 part. Place 3 Tbs of the cake mix you just mixed together into a microwavable cup or mug. I used some small bowls I have from Pampered Chef. Mix in 2 Tbs of water. Microwave for 1 minute. That's it. You can eat it right out of the cup. I dumped D's out on a plate just because the bowl was hot. It's not bad. It's actually pretty good. It's chocolate cake with a sponge texture. Would be yummy with fruit and whip cream. I don't make cakes often because who needs a whole cake for 3 people? But D and Hubby love cake, so this will be great. Now if I could just find a way to have single serving of ice cream......Forget it. I'll just eat the whole container.