Cooking and fun with grands

hello everyone 😄

One of my current goals is to cook all our meals and use the meal plan I recently posted.
So far, it's going fine!

January 1- I cooked the traditional foods that most all Southerners eat on New Years Day.
Black eyed peas cooked with a little onion and ham served over rice & stir fried cabbage

January 2- 2 grands came over and I thought letting them help make pizza would be good. 

We don't have any premise sauce so I put a smaller than normal batch of my regular pasta sauce to simmer in a crockpot.  I ended up with 3 meal size containers of sauce to freeze for future meals and of course, some for the pizza. 

The pizza crust dough was made in the bread machine,  then it was put in an oiled bag and sealed to hang out in the fridge all day.  

When it was time to prepare the pizzas. I cut the dough into 2 small pieces and 1 big piece.  

The grands rolled out their dough and both of them ended up with heart shape pizzas. 

Then they put theirs on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper - because I knew they would be messy with the toppings. 

They added sauce, mozzarella and pepperoni. 

I also made one large pizza with the rest of the dough.  

See why lining their sheet was important?  It sure saved me lots of aggravation and scrubbing.  

The pizzas were delicious.  On the side, we had fresh mandarins and Oreos. 

They were so good, husband and I had the leftovers for supper tonight on January 3rs. 

All of the grands that are old enough to, love to craft.  On this sleepover, they each painted a $1 kit of 2 sun catchers  from Dollar Tree.  

We also did some Perler beads.  

This supplement is always in our Sunday newspaper and I think cover is the best one ever,
Throw kindness around like confetti

The last day on 2016

Hello everyone, 

All the Christmas decorations have been packed up and stored away for next year. 

But we didn't take down our 4 foot tree.  It is now decorated with winter themed things.  Come February, we will switch it to heart decorations. 

Mostly we enjoy the twinkle lights early in the morning or in the evening.  

every New Years, we display this New Years baby statue that I bought at a thrift store years ago. 

Last year I thought the statue resembled our grandson but this year, as JJ has grown, I think JJ and the statue are almost twins,  😍

I'm so glad I bought that funny little boy statue years ago but I never dreamed he looked like my future grandchild,  

From the new meal plan, for last nights supper we had "pork chop and potato casserole" from Allrecipes.com, with green beans, green salad and rolls left from Christmas.  

Grandsons Braeden and Gavin were here for this meal.  

Tonight's supper was soft beef tacos.  I cooked about 4.5 pounds of ground beef and seasoned it all with homemade taco seasoning,  Thr extra went in the freezer in meal size containers for future meals, especially when we need something in a hurry.  

The Oklahoma sunset was especially pink and pretty last night.  

We have a new calendar but it didn't have holes for  hanging in the top.  So I added a binder clip and that should hold it just fine.

I am sure blessed with cute grandchildren ❤️

Happy 2017 everyone.