Your Help Wanted- How Should I Make it?

I grew up with nativity scenes in the house. Both at my own house and my grandma's Christmas included a nativity scene. Or two actually. My mom had a large wooden olive wood nativity set, and a smaller plastic set she'd let my sister and me play with and arrange as much as we wanted. Since moving away from home the only "nativity" set I've had here has been a small ornament on the Christmas tree I bought one year on clearance after Christmas was over. Best way to buy a Christmas tree by the way. Seriously can get them for cheap!

image from reusableart.com

Have you ever made your own nativity scene? I am seriously considering it! One that my 2 year old son could play with during the day. Question is, which one? So far these diy sets sound feasible to me.

The first set is made from yarn and pipe cleaners

The second set comes from my mom's old 1970s Better Homes & Gardens Christmas book and is made from fabric scraps and wooden spoons. You paint a face on the bowl of the spoon and cut the handles to different lengths.

The third set comes from the blog Holes in My Shiny Veneer.

Fourth idea is to dress the peg dolls you find in Hobby Lobby in scraps of fabric.

I even found a suggestion online to make a set from salt dough.

There are so many ideas and so few weeks until the beginning of advent! So which should I make? Any other ideas for a homemade nativity set? Opinions?

Chicken Veggie Ricotta Pie Recipe

Yesterday T and I met some friends at the zoo after his nap. We spent all afternoon there. By the time we got home I was not in the mood for frozen chicken chili I'd planned on reheating for supper. It sounded too heavy. I really wasn't that hungry. Actually the only thing that sounded good to me was pho. Which, apart from a trip to the local Vietnamese restaurant, just couldn't happen. Especially at such short notice. I hadn't planned my meals yet for the week (oops!) so I couldn't bump anything over to take the frozen chili's place.

Quickly taking stock in the refrigerator, I realized I still had some ricotta filling left. There was chicken in the freezer and a large bag of frozen vegetables. Very large. I bought it at GFS. There was also a pie crust in the freezer. Now I knew exactly what was for supper.

Ricotta Chicken Veggie Pie!

1 lb chicken, cubed 

1/2 tsp cajun seasoning

1 c ricotta

1 egg

salt and pepper to taste

little Better Than Bouillon Vegetable for flavor

1 pie shell

frozen mixed veggies

some biscuits for the top

Saute 1 lb cubed chicken lightly sprinkled with cajun seasoning. Take pie shell and prick and partially pre-bake. Fill the bottom of the pie shell with frozen mixed veggies and mix in the chicken cubes. 

Mix ricotta, egg, salt, pepper, and a little bit of better than bouillon vegetable flavor. Pour over the veggie/chicken mixture. Top with your biscuits. Bake for 40-60 minutes or until the eggs/ricotta mixture has set. Let cool for 10 minutes before serving.

It was devoured! We can't wait to have it again. I literally just threw it together so these are estimations of the amounts I used. My husband said I can make this any time as a variation on our usual pot pie. 

Very happy with how this turned out!

Menu Plan Monday

Sorry this post is so late in the day. We did have a wonderful day today. T and I met with a friend at the zoo after his nap. Had a wonderful time and stayed until it closed.

Once again I'm joining in Org Junkie's Menu Plan Monday.

Here's the plan:

Monday- Chicken Veggie Pie

Tuesday- Curried Lentil Soup


Wednesday- Big Smokey Burgers and Baked Sweet Potato Fries


Thursday- Sweet Potato Burritos


Friday- Culinary Adventure


Saturday- Leftovers

Sunday- Pizza

Musgo - Fiasco?

Last night we had a musgo fiasco.

from Free Retro Graphics

Ok, well, that's stretching it a bit.

But supper was not a success. I'm not surprised honestly. I was simply making do. Thanks to my husband's work schedule my menu plan this week got shaken up. Last night instead of our planned culinary adventure (which will take place this weekend Lord willing!) I threw together a musgo version of spaghetti.

What's musgo? Everything in the refrigerator must go.

We had a couple things-- healthy things- that were not going to last the weekend. I needed to use them up. We had a quarter jar of Newman's Own pasta sauce and a 1/2 jar of a brand I picked up on sale to try at The Fresh Market. Both of them had a different texture. Not quite chunky, not quite smooth. We're not fans of that texture. Neither brand will be purchased again soon. Well, actually, I just need to throw together a batch of my mom's spaghetti sauce (a Frugal Gourmet recipe she's been making since the very early 1990s).

So, two brands of pasta sauce- neither of them favorites- were tossed into the pot. A quick glance in the vegetable drawer reviled 1/2 head of broccoli about to go limp. Hey, hadn't I read that people sometimes put broccoli in spaghetti sauce? 'Course I had. Plus, tons of vitamins! So into the pot went slices of broccoli "trees". Oh, and a touch of tofu. Just because it was sitting there begging to be used. Heat up some spaghetti, wash lettuce for salad, slice the remaining bread. Viola! Supper is served!

And oh, yes, the ate it. Not a ton but they ate it. They actually did better with the spaghetti than I did. I mostly stuck with salad!

from clker free clip art

Lessons learned:

1- Make sure when I get my tofu-to-sauce ratio right! If there are any chunks bigger than a little piece of ground beef, the texture won't be quite right and it won't blend in with the sauce the way tofu is supposed to blend with other flavors. Mash, mash,  mash and mash again.

2- If you add broccoli to pasta sauce, chop it really, really fine. You do not want large chunks of it- or any stems remaining- floating in the sauce because it makes it much harder to eat and less like spaghetti. The texture becomes a bit of a turn-off. To fix it, either chop it into really really small pieces, or put your pasta sauce with the broccoli in the blender!

3- Don't try combining two different brands of pasta sauce when both have been flops. If I must doctor them, get some spices, seasonings, and more tomato products and re-maker the flavors from the bottom up. 

What a Week- And a Big Thank You!

We're about to finish our unit on God Gives Us Homes. What sort of activities would you do with your toddler on a "home" theme? I plan to blog on some of these books soon. So sorry to all of you for my absence. It's been quite a week. Emotionally I've just not been up to blogging, or taking pictures of activities T and I have been doing this week. However things appear to be leveling out already so next week should be a much more active blogging week!

Thank you

 Jessica of  Healthy Mommy Happy Baby 

and 

Tiffanie of High Heels, Boots, and Binkies 

for awarding Wee Wonderings the Liebster Blog Award!

Apparently it's an award specifically for up-and-coming blogs with less than 200 followers. I'm so surprised and thrilled to receive my very first blog award. Please take the time to visit these two blogs. You really won't be disappointed.

The rules of the Liebster Blog Award are:
1. Thank the person who awarded it, and link back to their blog.
2. Choose five up-and-coming bloggers and pass the award to them, notifying them on their blog
3. Post the award on your blog
4. Hope the people you passed the award to will pass it on even further!

My top 5 picks are:

1. Two Steps Behind Six Little Hands
2. Real Women Cook
3. Love Like Rockets
4. Peaceful Parenting 
5. Gratefully Growing in Grace

To get the button, right-click on it and select "save image as". Save it to your photo folder on your computer. Then create your blog post and insert image using the upload images from your computer button in the post as you would any other photo!

I hope you enjoy these blogs as much as I do!