Best recipe find: Hamburger Helper – Home-style from my beloved More with Less: World Community Cookbook. (I love Extending the Table and Simply in Season as well.) It seemed kind of plain and simple, and I confess I thought the troops might not be impressed, but they all raved. It quickly became a weekly staple.

Hamburger Helper – Home-Style
Serves 4

Brown in Skillet:

3/4 lb ground beef (or ground turkey)
1 t. salt
1/2 t. pepper

Add:

1 T. finely chopped onion (left in large pick-outable chunks or omitted for my crew)
1 stalk chopped celery
1/4 c. frozen or canned peas (We have used whatever chopped veggies were in the fridge or freezer.)
2/3 c. fresh ir canned tomatoes, chopped

While beef is browning, cook in salted water:

1 c. crinkly noodles (we use whatever pasta we have. I used some left over macaroni and cheese the other day – well actually, it was KD – and omitted the cheese below. It was really yummy.)

Drain noodles and spread over meat mixture. Sprinkle over all:

1/2-3/4 c. shredded cheese or 1/3 c. grated Parmesan cheese

Simmer uncovered 15 minutes to blend flavors. Serve from skillet.

submitted Marie L. Berg, Kan.
A program on world hunger motivated the contribute to invent her own economical skillet dinner.
Taken from Page 121 of More with Less: A World Community Cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre, commissioned by the Mennonite Central Committee and published by Herald Press, copyright 1976.

Best used clothing find: Bathing suits for three of us in November! It was an exciting moment for those of us who desperately needed more coverage in the pool!

Best website find: Book Closeouts. I got the entire Narnia series in hardback for far cheaper than anything else I’ve found! The LittlePages have been building their Little House collections. The site’s catalogue is huge and I don’t usually browse there, but I always go there first when looking for in-print books that mainsteam booksellers no longer want.

Best used book find: Lord of the Rings trilogy in paperback. MrPages has been waiting years for his own copy.

Best used household find: A cast iron dutch oven which will be perfect for period appropriate cooking at living history. No more mooching off the other settlers.

Best music-related find: Zen Creative 2GB MP3 player. This mp3 player, while less popular, is actually more functional and offers more flexibility that an iPod (which MrPages refuses to buy). It has a slot for SD cards (like in cameras) so we can have a card full of our Librivox recordings, and one with classical music, and one with Christmas music. We have it plugged into speakers that are in various places around the house, or we use a small FM transmitter to listen in the car. You don’t need special software to use it, you can just drop mp3 files onto the thing and go. Audiobooks on the highway are the best time-killer ever.

Best techno-geek find: MrPages sometimes does gratis computer work for friends and friends-of-friends. He often comes away with old, mostly unusable hardware, which he, in turn, takes somewhere to be properly disposed of. Just before Christmas, someone dropped off an old broken laptop. It apparently worked find, but the plug-in jack was broken. MrPages made a few $10 Ebay purchases, dismantled the whole laptop down to shiny metal parts and lots of tiny screws, managed to put it all back together (just to have to take it all apart again to fix that one incorrect screw), and now we own our very first laptop! We plan on using it as a portable DVD player. (Our fifteen year old TV is hard to lug around the house.)

And I think that about uses up my creativity and so sums up our year.

Work on the house is a more steady job, with no layoffs in sight. It is looking good though and I do expect that we will be moved into the basement for winter next year, if not earlier. After the basement the main floor walls and flooring need attention. Ten years of finger prints and toys, mini-cars, and tubs roving across the hardwoods are beginning to show. Significantly. And then the kitchen desperately needs to be attended to. It is in a sorry, sorry state. For all the renos we’ve already done, the kitchen is the most daunting. While we were willing to be without a functional basement for four years, I really can’t imagine washing the dishes in the bathtub until NotSoLittlePage1 graduates.

Decluttering is also going slow but progress is being made. It took me four sick pregnancies in five years to get to the point we were at in December of 2005. So I am trying to remain upbeat about it taking three years to get back. (I thought about posting pictures. I have some from 2005, but I’m not yet ready to admit that it was that bad, and that it’s still not as good as I would like. Perhaps next year.)

School is going extremely well this year. I spent most of the spring and early summer praying over our school direction and what it should look like. The results are that we decided to use Ambleside Online. Again. I had used it in the very beginning of our home school journey, but was uncomfortable with some of the book choices. I’m older and wiser now and realize that it’s okay to just not do a part of the curriculum that I don’t like! So we’re are happily back at Ambleside. The children are each doing their own year, which makes for a busy day for me, but more ownership for them. SO we are currently working on a combined Year 1 and 2, Year 4, Year 5 and Year 7. I’ve made quite a few substitutions (since we focus on secular education), but any replacements would be similar in scope, so you can get a real feel for what the Pages are doing. As an aside, I recently asked them if they liked the “new way” of doing school. They generally agreed that things are harder and they have less free time, but they all love it and wouldn’t go back to a more informal way. Someday I may find to time to tell you all about how I plan and execute four different plans simultaneously.