Stuffed Pepper Recipe

Today I have a food recipe for you. :) The food recipe is quickly becoming a popular staple in our household, so I thought I would share it with you.

Stuffed Pepper Recipe

I found a yummy and quick(!) stuffed pepper recipe while reading Mama Laughlin's blog, that actually looked good to me. I decided to try it out with a couple of changes, and have since made it several times. It's super quick (especially if you make the rice in advance), and even the hubby likes it (after lots of convincing to try it :) ). Here's how I made it:

Stuffed Pepper Recipe:

Makes about 8 peppers

1 lb lean ground beef

1-2 cups cooked homemade spanish rice (recipe to come later this week :), but could substitute any recipe, or boxed/frozen version you like)

1/4-1/2 cup chopped bell peppers

1/4 cup low fat sour cream (just enough to get everything to stick together, could substitute for plain low fat greek yogurt)

1/2 cup low fat mexican blend cheese

8 Bell Peppers (any color you like, I normally just buy a couple packages of the tri-colored peppers because the hubs likes the red peppers and I like the yellow and orange ones. I use the extra pepper and the tops for the copped bell pepper)

I start by turning the oven on to 350 and browning the ground beef with about 1 to 1 1/2 tbls of taco seasoning. While the ground beef is browning I remove the tops and inards of the peppers, reserving the tops to add to the filling. I start a pot of boiling water and boil the pepers for 3 to 5 minutes, just until they start to soften. I then pull the peppers out and let them cool in the baking dish. I chop the tops and remaining peppers into bite size pieces and add them to the ground beef.

At this point I normally get out a large bowl and dump in the rice, sour cream, 1/4-1/3 cup of the shredded cheese (approximated to how cheesy I want the filling) and ground beef/pepper mixture. I just stir it all together until everything looks like it's evenly mixed and holding together, then I fill the cooked peppers with the filling and top with the remaining shredded cheese.

You can then put the baking dish of peppers in the oven for 25-30 minutes, or until the cheese starts to brown.

This has become a new staple in our house. The last couple times I've decided that I'm too lazy for all the work with the peppers though and have just made the filling into a casserole with some extra chopped peppers. We also tried a variation with shredded chicken and left-over black beans, that was really good. The ground beef is still my favorite, but the black beans may have to make their way into our regular recipe. :)

A Simpler Life

I was reading the blog of my newest follower and came across her post on simple living. It really struck me, since this is something the hubby and I have been trying to work towards. This probably should have been my first post of this new series, although frankly I'm still trying to figure this out as we go.

Our simpler life:

What is a simpler life? What does that mean for us? We've started by trying to declutter our home, and change our spending habits (I'm forcibly dragging the hubby through this one :) ) to support as many local and sustanible products and services as possible, but is that really simple living? They are steps toward where we want to be, but not the whole.

I was really struck. A couple Saturdays ago, the hubby and I went and spent the day at Barnes and Noble, researching our next trip. We got a bottle of water in the cafe, collected a couple books from the travel section and broke out a spiral notebook and the laptop. We didn't need anything fancy, or to be running from one entertainment to the next. We were content to sit with a couple of books and just talk to each other for hours. I was amazed by the fact that it was probably the most fun Saturday we had spent together since I started getting Saturdays off a couple months ago.

All that is to say that we found our bliss. Doing simple tasks with minimal fuss and distractions.

I am also working to make our lives more sustainable by removing unnecessary chemicals and energy drains. As you might have seen, I have been using up the last of our chemical laden cleaning supplies and switching them out for homemade non-toxic versions. It has been exciting and satisfying to find recipes that work, though some have required a few experiments first. I'm finding that it is making me impatient to get rid of the products I use less often.

Needless to say, we still have quite aways to go, but for now this is how we are trying to simplify our lives.

And because no post is complete with out photos... Here are two of my cat acting like a jerk:

And here is one where he saw the camera before I took the picture. He wanted to make sure he looked nice and normal for the camera : P

Less Dryer Month

For the month of August we participated in our version of no dryer month.  We live in an apartment with a tiny balcony, so no room for a line. I have been hang drying everything possible on hangers. I'm trying to convince the hubby that we should get a drying rack, but he's not quite on board with the crunchy clothes thing.

My first load of clothes came out pretty stiff and crunchy. I've progressively reduced the amount of laundry detergent in each load, trying to reduce the amount of soap left in my clothes as that's what makes them crunchy. I've also started adding vinegar to the rinse cycle to help remove left over residue from past washes. I'm thinking I'm going to have to do 2-3 vinegar rinses per load until I can get the clothes to dry without crunchiness. I'm amazed that when I hang dry my clothes instead of popping them into the dryer I can actually see the soap residue when they're dry. Some of my heavier cottons have a slight white film on them. :( Yuck!

And because every post need pictures...

 I did try to hang dry a load of bath and kitchen towels, but after hanging all day the bath towels were still soaked. I have been hanging the kitchen towels and smaller rags, since they do dry well, but I gave in on the bath towels and have been drying those in the dryer. Luckily we use the same bath towels for about a week and a half so I've only had to do two loads so far this month.

Has anyone else had success without their dryer?

Farmer's Market

I have a new love of farmer's markets!

Since trying to simplify our lives, I have been trying to get into the habit of buying everything we can from a farmer's market. The food is fresher, I enjoy supporting local small businesses, and I feel better about the quality of product we're getting.

Some of the fresh produce I got :)

So far we've tried five different markets, still trying to find one that has everything we need. So far though we've been able to find meat, cheese, and bread products along with the traditional produce and crafts.There are times I wish we lived a little closer to Seattle so we could grocery shop at Pike Place on a regular basis. Or even better that there would be a market like Pike Place north of Seattle. Preferably somewhere with parking. :)

I've actually started considering joining a farmer's market. It's a little scary as that would mean getting a real business license and starting my own real business with taxes and regulations and being committed. In exciting news though I had my first sale this last weekend. :)

This has been a hard post for me to get through for some reason, so I think I'm just going to leave it as is. Tune back in later this week for sofa cleaning and how my less dryer month went.

Joined a Sunday Social :)

Hope everyone is enjoying their Sunday! This is my first link party.

1. What is the first website you log on to each day? Gmail

 

2. Give us some funny websites you visit that we need to know about:

mamalaughlin.com

pintester.com

These girls are hilarious and real! :)

3. Pinterest or Facebook? Why? Pinterest because...

 

4. Twitter or Instagram? Why? Neither. I just don't understand them....

 

5. Favorite youtube video...post it!

6. Biggest online pet peeve? Vague status updates/blog posts, and/or updating/posting pictures of everything throughout the day.

Stop back by tomorrow for an update on our simplifing journey. :)

Oven Cleaner

To continue from last week's post- my oven cleaner journey (yes, it was a journey... :) )

The next soap we ran out of was oven cleaner. This one was a little trickier. I tried three different recipes before I found one that really worked, but the last one I tried was AMAZING! Better than any store bought cleaner I had used before (If only I had taken before and after pictures...although now I don't have to post how dirty I let my oven get... :) )

I don't remember where I found this first recipe because for the life of me I can't find my pin on pinterest for it (I think it might be this one), but it was essentially making a paste with baking soda and water. I was excited to try it, because frankly I pretty much only had baking soda on hand, and anything else would have required a trip to the store. I tried it on my drip pans first. I left it be for about 30 minutes while I cleaned other things around the kitchen. When I came back to it, I tried to scrub the gunk away, but had very little success. Mostly it was just the big stuff that had fallen down and then been absorbed by all the grossness (yes, that is a word. I just made it up. :) ). -Fail #1

My next oven cleaning adventure, after a trip to the store, was this- a paste from baking soda and hydrogen peroxide. I scrubbed this in a little and then let it sit and do it's magic. Lots of scrubbing later I was still disappointed with the results. This definitely got more than the baking soda and water alone, but still left a lot of gunk in the drip pans. -*Sigh* Fail #2

At this point the hubby was definitely rooting for me to give in and by the commercial, chemical laden cleaner, but I knew there had to be a way to get the oven clean before commercial cleaners were popular. I decided to put in the effort and use one of the more "complicated" oven cleaner recipes. I used the one from Crunchy Betty. I subbed the dish soap for my homemade liquid soap, but other than that I did everything else the same. I did leave it overnight (and by overnight I mean a couple nights...oops).

Once I got around to scrubbing the now many layers of baking soda out of my oven it was a little daunting. Ovens are very deep and I am short. I started with a warm wet rag. After wiping away a pile of baking soda there was still grime on the oven door. :-/ I grabbed my scrub brush and started trying to scrub. Unfortunately the bristles were a little too long, and therefore weren't stiff enough to do much good. I tried getting the hubby to help me scrub at this point, because my shoulder was getting sore, and it was making me a little lazy. :) The hubby tried scrubbing and after a couple minutes of no success, deemed this cleanser a failure too.

I refused to give up. There was no way I put in that much effort to have this not work. I went back into the kitchen and grabbed the sponge. I swirled a little of the baking soda around on the scrubby side and starting scrubbing. Miraculously the grime started disappearing. I have never had a commercial over cleaner work as well as this one. And because nothing's proven until there's a picture, here are two. :)


Sorry for the glare. There seems to be no good way to take a picture of my entire oven...

This shot's a little easier to see the lack of grime. I will also mention I am really bad about remembering the cookie sheet below things when I bake, so there were a lot of big black spots on the bottom of my oven before cleaning.

What homemade cleaners have you tried, successes or failures?

Homemade cleaners

So as I mentioned in my last post I have been slowly switching us to homemade cleaners as we use up our chemical laden ones.

The first soap we ran out of was dish washing soap. I found a recipe here. Instead of the castille soap, I used the liquid soap I made. So far we've used about half of the soap. It seems to clean well, the only downside I've had so far is that it tends to separate. The problem could be with my soap though as it might be a little heavier than a true castille soap.

After that I tried a homemade solution for cleaning the microwave (which is now on it's way to storage :) ). Several posts and pins had suggested just microwaving a bowl of water and vinegar- I think this is the exact recipe I tried. Anyway, we tried this and it worked wonderfully. I wasn't the one scrubbing it, hubby got that fun, so I can't attest to ease of scrubbing but it looked sparkly when he was done with it. We used a glass bowl to microwave in and then used the heated vinegar water to scrub/wipe the microwave. Be very careful if you use the water, it's VERY hot.

I was originally going to post my oven cleanser saga in this post as well, but it was getting to be waay too long, so tune back in for more homemade cleanser fun! :)