Homemade Ice Cream Sandwiches

Did you know that July is National Ice Cream month?  Since we are entering the final weekend of July I highly encourage you to enjoy some ice cream this weekend.  That's why for this week's (delayed--but at least I'm doing it) Tasty Tuesday post, I wanted to suggest a delicious way to enjoy ice cream.  Even though I'm due for more of a savory recipe suggestion, I figured you could overlook my game plan change*.

Very Berry Sherbet

Oh how quickly a week can go by!  As I mentioned before, our summer schedule has us hosting family from the lower 48 almost non stop this summer.  This past week, started out with some fantastic house guests and then a couple of days to catch our breath and prepare for our next set of visitors due to arrive in two days.  I also threw some Bible class preparation into our schedule last week for an upcoming vacation Bible school our church is hosting in a few weeks.  So yes, it's been a busy week. :)

But I made sure there was time to make this DE-licious frozen treat.

Point and Shoot

 Sometime around spring break, we started letting our older two yahoos use our small point and shoot camera when we've gone out on adventures.  It's a camera that I got on a fantastic sale the day after Thanksgiving.  It's been great to have as an emergency back-up for our big dSLR and for when we don't want to lug it around.  But we've also found how fun it is to let the kids experiment with photography.  We've really enjoyed seeing the adventure through their eyes.

So for today's post, I thought I'd share a collection of photos that both the little miss and the little man took during a walk we did near the Mendenhall Glacier with my brother in June.  Hope you enjoy their perspective as much as we do.

Rotisserie Style Crock-pot Chicken

 ****I do realize that it's not Tuesday.  But due to circumstances beyond my control I had to bump back my Tasty Tuesday post by a day this week.  I do hope you'll allow me this scheduling change for the week.  And I really hope you enjoy the recipe this week.  We do at our house. :) ****

This recipe is quickly becoming one of our family's favorite chicken meals.  It is ridiculously delicious and quite simple to prepare.  Plus I REALLY like to use my crock pot and a recipe that uses a "cut" of meat that I can often find on sale is another bonus.

I've started buying several whole fryer chickens whenever our local Fred Meyer has them on coupon sale.  Then I put them directly into the freezer and pull it out to defrost a day before I plan to make this meal.  Whenever I make this, there's always plenty of meat for our family for several meals.

Extended Adventures

First of all, I realize I let Tuesday pass this week.  My apologies if you were looking forward to a tasty recipe, but celebrating Independence Day this week threw me off a bit.  And then I decided it would be better to separate two food posts with a non-food post.  You know, keep things from getting too predictable.  So I present to you today a post with no food, but plenty of pics of cute kids....

**************************

This summer we're hosting several rounds of visits from our extended family.  They all hail from the "lesser 48" and are in need of their Alaskan fix.  So far we've Shawn and his brother took their dad on a successful bear hunt in May and we had a really nice visit with my brother, Eric.

Raspberry Chiffon Pie

Recently, my brother came for a visit and we all enjoyed hosting him.  I don't know if it was the big sister in me or the baker--probably a little of both--but I couldn't stop making treats while he was here.  Of course, he had not problem with that and encouraged me to keep up the roll I was on.

Sadly, for you, dear blog reader, most of the treats I made were devoured before they could be photographed.  This particular one made the photograph cut.  However, I didn't get any pictures of the slices so that should also tell you how quickly we enjoyed it. :)  And also that good photographing light was fading.

Rookie Season

This spring our family participated in the tee ball division of our city's little league.  The Little Miss has been asking to play tee ball for nearly a year now.  So this year we made sure to get her signed up plenty early to try out this new sport.  She was placed on the Royals and had a great coach and teammates to play with.

Corn Bread

Whew!  What a week this has been.  Lately I've been trying to keep up a little better with the blog and get at least one post in between my Tasty Tuesday entries.  But this week has flown by and now it's Tuesday again--and a quarter to midnight at that!  So I guess I better squeak in my recipe recommendation before the clock strikes.

If you've noticed on my Tuesday posts, I've been trying to alternate the recipes I share between sweet and savory.  If I wasn't being intentional about alternating the recipe types my posts would probably be 90% desserts. If you know me at all, you know I'm a girl who much prefers to make and practice and talk about sweet recipes rather than savory ones.  Of course, in reality I only eat sweets occasionally--the recipes are just so much more interesting to me.

Chocolate Salted Caramel Layer Cake

It's been a long time coming, but I'm finally sharing my birthday cake from this year.  The month before my birthday, I made several birthday treats for some friends  So when it got close to my birthday, I suddenly realized that I didn't have to limit my baking to what other folks requested or the flavors they liked.  I could make whatever I wanted cause it was MY birthday cake.

New Baby Chicks

Confession Time: I've been holding out on you, dear blog readers.  It's been nearly 4 weeks since we had this exciting news to share, and I am just now putting it on the blog.  If you're a friend of mine on facebook, then you've already seen some of this.  And I guess that's where my guilt comes from.  I usually try to reward my blog readers who take them time to click over and visit my blog with the first information.  But in the busy-ness and excitement of the first day the ease and instant gratification of facebook triumphed.  So I apologize.  But the good news is I have some more recent photos to share.  And they'll be shared here first!

If you haven't figured it out yet, we got some new chicks to add to our backyard flock.  We were so thrilled to receive them in the mail.  The anticipation was intense the whole week right after our hatch day.  The hatchery co-op we ordered from sent us an email on the night of hatch day (a Monday for us) to let us know our chicks had hatched and had been sent out that night via the US Mail.  So then we literally waited by the phone for word from our local post office to pick them up.  They came on exactly the day we had anticipated and we rushed to the post office to pick them up.

Warning: Before you click that button to continue reading, you should know there are A LOT of photos in this post.  Prepare your self. :)  

Spinach Feta Pizza

Homemade pizza makes a frequent appearance on our monthly dinner menu.  Sometimes we have it weekly, but usually once every two weeks.  Rarely do we go an entire month with homemade pizza just once.

Chicken Love

 Our little babe has developed a deep love for our backyard flock.  He LOVES being outside with them.