Food Friday

I do not claim to be a good cook but we don't starve either. I think I would like cooking dinner a little more if that was not the time of day my children decide to melt down on a very frequent basis! I do like trying new recipes so I thought I would use Fridays to share some of the new ones we try out and some of the old ones that were passed down to me from my family. Feel free to try them out :) and if you have a recipe that your family enjoys let me know I am always game for trying out new ones, although sometimes my family is a little reluctant.

We usually rate new recipes on this scale:
* Yuck, lets just order pizza or carry out
* OK, well it feed us for this meal but we don't want it again
* Yummy, we will add this to our list of frequently eaten meals!

I'll just add that we have never had a YUCK meal. We have always been able to eat my new finds but lots of times that is the only time we have them. I still try new ones though because we have found several very YUMMY meals mixed in with some of the OK ones.

Today's Food Friday recipe is a slow cooker (or as I call it a crock pot)recipe. I have at least one crock pot meal a week, on Tuesdays because Trinity has gymnastics and it is during the time when I would be preparing dinner. So with a little meal preparation earlier in the day we can come home to a usually YUMMY meal.

Tangy Barbecue Sandwiches
3 cups chopped celery
1 cup chopped onions
1 cup ketchup
1 cup barbecue sauce
1 cup water
2 Tbsp. vinegar
2 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
2 Tbsp. brown sugar
1 tsp. chili powder
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper
1/2 garlic powder
3-4 lb. boneless chuck roast
14-18 hamburger buns

1. Combine all ingredients except roast and buns in slow cooker. When well mixed, add roast.
2. Cover. Cook on High 6-7 hours.
3. Remove roast.cool and shred meat. Return to sauce. Heat well.
4 . Serve on buns.
(Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook, Feasting with your Slow Cooker)

A few side notes: I am gong to use a rump roast next time, the chuck roast was a little tougher than I would have liked and because of this it was really time consuming to shred! I am also going to try it with a little less water (1/2 cup instead), we prefer for the sauce to be a little thicker than it was. It would also be delicious with a pork roast of maybe even chicken breasts.

This was really YUMMY! My children even liked it!! It was added to our recipe binder and I will definitely be making it again.
Next Friday I will try to add a picture, I meant to this time but forgot about it until we had eaten it all :).

The Farm Park

There are many things that we do not like about living in Illinois; being so far from family, horribly high property taxes, being so far from family, most of it is flat and just plain ugly, being so far from family....well you get the idea. However one thing that we have found that we really like about Illinois is their parks. There are parks everywhere! They are very well maintained and have great picnic and playground areas. There are even playgrounds at most Illinois rest stops, something that I wish more states would do since we travel so often with our kids!


Today we were introduced to the Farm Park by a friend from church....Thanks Becca, Cameron and Caden :)! There were several buildings; a barn, an old fashioned school house, a hen house and a "museum" of grandma's kitchen.

There were lots of farm animals; a calf, horses and a pony, chickens, roosters, turkeys, lambs and ducks. There was a large fish pond and a duck pond. It was just so stinkin' cute!! We bought feed cones to feed the animals as we went through and the kids loved it. Trinity's favorite part was feeding the goats because they would nibble on the cone if you held it up to the fence.
Keenan loved the turkey, almost a little too much! The turkey had his tail feathers all ruffled up and every time he re-ruffled them Keenan laughed and "talked" to him.

He also tried to chase the worker driving the John Deere Gator across the park, he is into all things that go.
They also enjoyed the chicken coop. It had plenty of stuffed chickens, roosters and barn cats to go around.

For lunch we visited the playground and tried not to blow away in the wind (45 mph gusts were in the forecast!). Keenan decided to be a shutter bug at the park, and Trinity enjoyed playing in the sand.


We will definitely be visiting there again this summer!!

A New Experience

Since I had Trinity 4 1/2 years ago and then Keenan 18 months ago I realized that they do and say some really funny things and my mom's words always ring in my ear "You should write that down because you think you will never be able to forget those things but you will"! So this is my effort at writing those things down, to share them with you but mostly to preserve them for myself and my family.

As for the name, well that took a while. With the enlisted help of my husband (who steered me away from my list of cheesy titles I had come up with) I hit on Experienced Amateurs. He suggested the use of an oxymoron, but I am proud to say that I came up with the exact oxymoron you see at the top of this blog :)! You see I am not that great at creatively naming things so this was an accomplishment. I liked it, it seemed to sum up my life in just two words. I have had many, many experiences and will certainly have many more and I am even experienced at several things: teaching, laundry, talking, talking, boating, bike riding, playing with my kiddos and talking (I think I forgot to mention that one ;)) the list could go on and on (remember experienced does not always = mastery, ha ha) but even with all that experience I am still an amateur at life and everything about it. I am reminded this daily by my two beautiful children, I never know what they are going to throw my way so even with all this experience and these experiences I am still just an amateur. I am learning to take each day, hour, min and sometimes even second as it comes and trying to do it with all the experience an amateur can have. Praying that this amateur can do it with kindness, gentleness, peace, laughter, joy, compassion and a whole lot of patience.

Here's to the experiences that this blog will bring me and to the hope that it will be a fun journey!