New recipe sucesses

In a recent post of mine, I said I was going to try new recipes, hopefully one a week. So far, we've actually done well!

The first thing we tried was a shredded beef taco with jicama slaw. I just used leftover roast from a pot roast dinner and cooked it up with red onions, garlic and taco seasoning, served it on tortillas with a mixture of jicama, red onion, dried cilantro and Italian dressing. Surprisingly, my three year old loved them, when my hubby wasn't a fan. And I should have saved some jicama without the dressing, as my one year old liked the bite she got while I was chopping, but she doesn't like Italian dressing. But still, I say its a success!

The latest dish I attempted was a wild rice/potato soup thing with rosemary tilapia. We just made a thick potato soup and added wild rice (rice-a-roni) and served the pan fried seasoned fish on top. Huge success, flavor wise, and everyone loved it, I just need to cook the rice and soup separate next time....

So, does anyone have any yummy recipes that you think are different/unusual that you'd love? Please share!

Reader's Gold!!

Is just read The Maze Runner series (however not the prequel ... Yet...) And thought they were pretty good. The language is a little off - the author has made up his own curse words, but very suspenseful story line. Over all, I'd recommend if you like action/adventure books, especially if you liked the Hunger Games and/or Divergent books.

Speaking of which, I came upon a gold mine while trying to find The Maze Runner, as my local library had two copies and over 100 holds on each...

http://www.ibookpile.com/2014/08/maze-runner-series-james-dashner.html

I have a Kindle app on both my tablet and my phone. That site has tons of ebooks to download! There's a search box in the top right corner that is started with by searching for the titles of books I know are being made into movies, buy after I exhausted that list, I just looked in the 'series' tab. For me - Pure Gold!!! Things like Divergent, Kingdom Keepers, Percy Jackson (and other Rick Riordan books) and more are there!

Most books were an epub format (and all super easy to download), which doesn't work with kindle or kindle apps, but there's another website, www.epub2mobi.com, which converts the files to the right format. (Some didn't work with this site, so I had to use a different one, I just Googled 'convert epub to mobi'). Also, I had to do the converting on my desktop, it wouldn't work on my tablet.

After I had that finished, I could transfer the files strait to the kindle folder on my tablet by connecting via USB.

However, to read the books on both my tablet and phone, I download another of Amazon's apps on my desktop, 'Send To Kindle',  find those files that you converted , right click, and select 'Send to Kindle'. I found added 100 Free ebooks, mostly from the ibookpile site, and still have oodles of space on Amazon's cloud!

(If you have a kindle app, you should automatically have Amazon Cloud Drive storage space,)

(You may not have to convert your files from epub if you are using the Send to Kindle desktop app, I just barely wanted access on 2 devices so mine were already all mobi format)

I hope this will be worth something to someone, as I had a hayday finding all these free ebooks!!!😁😄

Oh I probably should mention, both my devices are android- not sure what format ebooks with kindle on apple would take - if they'd even be different...

Grocery challenge: complete

So its been a while, but I was sorta waiting till I has completed the challenge I had issued myself before I added any new thoughts.

Anyways, the Sam's club grocery challenge from my last post was indeed a success - not only did my family like most of the recipes (except for the one with quinoa) on the list I found, but it lasted us many more meals then the 20 it was intended for. Plus, 2 month's later, we still have a few freezer meals left, and some groceries left from the initial trip!

I considered trying the 20 meals for $150 Costco list, but I decided with the new year I'm going to just try at least one new recipe a week. I have so many cookbooks with so many yummy looking or sounding recipes, and I still plan my menu ahead so we can do budget friendly, and I want my girls to continue to be so adventurous and willing to try at least one bite of anything with out fights.

So here's to some adventures at dinnertime!!