Shannon's Thanksgiving Salad

I got an email from a friend yesterday asking what I was cooking for Thankgsiving next week. The next week part nearly gave me a heart attack. I quickly flipped to my calendar and sure enough, we are 10 days out from my favorite holiday. The holiday I love to cook for and for which I reluctantly give up hosting duties. I love that it is just about food and family and not presents and me me me. The latter is Christmas' job.

But OMG November has slipped through my fingertips and here I am 10 days out and I haven't even ordered my turkey!! I am going to race to my community store today to see if I can order my usual bird and seriously if I am too late you are going to find me face down in the parking lot crying. I've been ordering my fresh thanksgiving turkey from the same people for nearly 10 years and I just can't do a T-day dinner with out it!

In an effort to light a fire under my ass, I will share with you some of my favorite dishes from the past that I am likely to do again. First up is a salad I served one year in an effort to cover my ass timing-wise when some other stuff in kitchen wasn't cooperating. And it was so freaking good that it became a staple at our holiday table. It involves pancetta, a hail mary ingredient when you are trying to save your ass at a dining table.


It became known as Shannon's Thanksgiving Salad. I know, a creative and original name. Don't get too jealous of my recipe-naming-ingenuity. If you feel the need to rename it for me, leave a comment. Coolest name wins. (con't for recipe)

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I was absent today.

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A new thang for me.

Meal Planner. Recipe Organizer. Life Saver.

Finally, some help in the kitchen!!

 - PepperPlate.com

 PepperPlate is by far my favorite meal planning software ever! As you all know I adore messing about in the kitchen and putting a yummy meal on the table. But with three kids, a dog, a husband, the PTO, and oh yeah, me and all my crazy other interests, getting a plan together while also having the right food on hand is a challenge. I am always a sucker for that new meal planning device or app and frankly none of them have ever worked out.

Until now!

This is an app that I have on my iPhone but it wirelessly syncs to the website to update new recipes, menus, and calendars. It has enabled me to....

my recipe list 

New look for and old hutch

A few months ago I decided I wanted a very bright conversation piece in my dining room and had the desire to paint my mahogany china hutch bright turquoise. Since the hutch was a hand-me-down from my mom, I had to understand when she nearly fainted at the thought. So out with the old and in with the new. I started my hunt for just the right piece last spring and it wasn't until a few weeks ago that I stumbled upon it. For me, the thrill of the hunt is as much fun as getting a new pretty thing to look at in my home! I found a hutch that had all the right proportions, lots of great details like beveled edges and carvings, and had the option for open chicken wire doors or glass! Now we're talkin'!! And I tried not to burst into a toothy grin when the shop owner told me she'd give it to me for $200 if I would just get it out of there!



A week later, we arranged for the piece to be delivered and we tucked into a corner in the dining room next to the old china cabinet that needs to be delivered back to my mom. Seeing them side by side was interesting because I hadn't noticed in the store that the waist line of my new hutch was much lower than the one I currently had in my house. To me a larger top on a cabinet just feels a bit more European while the other one feels very Colonial. I couldn't be more pleased with my purchase. Now, I just needed to get it refinished without screwing it up!!

Christmas Gift Idea

Don't get me wrong here. I hate that Christmas seeps into the rest of the fall holiday season and threatens to kill off all those b-list holidays. It's as if it thinks it's better than all the other holidays and that they are just the preamble to it as the main attraction. Oh I know it isn't Christmas' fault. It is all those greedy retailers out there who even before Halloween clear out prime floor display real estate to make room for Christmas trees! {yes Target, I'm talking about YOU!}

But I can't help but show you a really cool gift for any little people on your Christmas list.

Photographs and your family memories

When you think back to your childhood, are some of your memories visualized by the photographs your parents took? Does the picture of you standing next to a bright yellow bike with a banana seat and a big red bow pop into your head when you think about your childhood birthdays? I grew up in a shutter happy family {actual darkroom in basement} and although we had wallpapered walls (really good 70's wallpaper I might add) we might as well have had bare walls because they were so covered with family photographs that you could barely notice the large format blue gingham print behind the frames. When I think back to 8th grade graduation or my neighborhood friends or that ski trip, I immediately think of a picture my mom took that is likely hanging somewhere in our house.

I love that pictures do that for us. I love that we are able to freeze time through a lens and preserve it for the future. And I love that the photographs I take today will hopefully color my children's memories of their childhood. I carry a DSLR with me pretty much wherever I go but thanks to some pretty cool technology, it doesn't require a keen eye or a fancy lens to get a special picture these days.

Money and Little People: The Conversation

This post was underwritten by BMO Harris Bank, which offers a matching $25 on a new savings account opened for your child through their Helpful Steps for Parents program. Learn more at bmoharris.com/parents.

A few years ago I found myself completely bewildered when my then eldest child was having trouble with the concept of money in her first grade currency unit. And when I say she had trouble with money, I don’t mean she had trouble with addition or was feeling the weight of mountains of credit card debt, she had trouble identifying the actually pieces of currency. We spent endless nights doing homework with her saying things like, no no the BIG one is the quarter and the LITTLE one is the dime.  Once she was able to identify all the coins, it was yet another task to learn what each of them was actually worth.

Dear God! By her age I knew exactly what a quarter looked like and what it was worth because it could get me a WHOLE candy bar.

But these days, treats, whether they are candy bars or Pokemon cards, are scooped up at the store with the swipe of a magic plastic card. And it dawned on me during those first grade years that my kids needed to see me using more CASH to really understand money and spending. Please tell me I am not the only mom out there who just never carries actual dollar bills.

Money is a slippery slope these days with our dodgy economy and job market so who knows what it is going to look like when my babes are released into the free world in about 12 years. As a result, we talk about money as often as we can at our house. I want my kids to understand how it is earned and how it is used. It took them a little while to understand that money doesn’t just come from an ATM machine and that we can take out only what we put into that bank of ours.

We do not have a general weekly allowance here at our house. I want our kids to grasp that the amount of money they get as an allowance is directly related to the amount of work they do. And some jobs pay better than others. We have what we call the pearl system. I have a large jar of pearls and each pearl is worth 25 cents. For each chore they do, they get a certain amount of pearls in their individual jars. The first day of the Pearl Program I told the kids, I needed someone to empty the dishwasher and someone to pooper-scoop the back yard. I’ve never seen two kids actually fight to unload a dishwasher. Before they were officially assigned their chores, I asked if they wanted to know the pearl value for each job. Pooper-scoopering would garner more pearls than the dishwasher. Hum. Now there was something to think about.

I am always on the look out for ways to engage my kids in a healthy discussion about money. I was excited to be chosen by BMO Harris Bank to do a post about kids and money because it is a topic I hadn’t thought of bringing here. I think it is a great conversation for parents to bat around so we can all learn from each other. How do you guys talk to your kids about money? I’d love to hear your ideas!

I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective. To learn more about BMO Harris Bank, visit their website http://bmoharris.com/parents.

babies, sharing, and dogs

Let me just put it this way. When my one year old is sitting in her highchair and she reaches for a piece of food, my also one year old labradoodle very diligently sits with rapt attention.  Yes, if you've put those pieces together you have realized that my baby is feeding the dog, the other baby in this house, from her highchair.

We have been trying very hard over the past year to teach our puppy to sit, wait, leave it, and drop it. The first two we have down pat. The third is hit or miss. The fourth however seems to be a lost cause. Once he has something he'll run for his life with it.

And because we like to up the ante, we also now have a baby in the house again who speed crawls EVERYWHERE looking to get into everything.  We are working teaching her where she can go and what she can play with versus what she can't. i.e. please don't tip over the dog's water bowl because here is a giant bin of toys to play with right here. When we say no, no, no both the dog and the baby look at us. Fun times.

Then there is that quandary about the fact that my baby has no friends.