*Diabetic Friendly Hot Chocolate*

Ingredients
2 cups water
1/4 cup Sucrolose
4 oz bittersweet sugar-free chocolate, melted
1/4 cup Dutch-processed cocoa powder

Bring water and Sucrolose to a boil in a medium sauce pan until the sweetener dissolves. Add the chocolate and cocoa. Stir gently but continuously with a whisk until on bubble pops on the surface. Remove from heat and whip the hot chocolate for one minute with an immersion blender or in a regular blender. Serve immediately.

This serves 2 very rich cups of hot chocolate or 4 luxurious demitasses.

Upcoming recovery period.

NaBloPoMo (also National Blog Posting Month) burned me out. I’m taking today and the next two days to recover and then I will work on posting more frequently. If nothing else, I’ve got that hot chocolate recipe I have to share with you! I hope you all have a great day. ♥

Posting is going to slow down next month.

Dear Reader,

November was a busy month for posting. I was participating in National Blog Posting Month. My goal was to try to post everyday here. I tended to manage multiple posts on a given day to get to the post count goal of a given day. It was exhausting and moderately stressful. I am not going back to updating this blog once a month at best.

I will be updating three times a week. Tuesdays will be more about home management. Thursdays this month are holiday recipes. Fridays are for dinner recipes. After the end of December, what will be posted on Thursdays will change, but there will be something new and lovely for you. And some weeks there will be extra posts in the week going forward. They might be on the same day as the usual posts or on a random day of the week.

I am even going to try to get some pictures going on here aside from stock photography. There’s nothing wrong with stock photography, but I have a feeling you want to see how I make things and the various steps to how to do it.

Holiday Recipes on Thursdays!

Dear Reader,

I am going to share holiday recipes every Thursday. Some will be flexible enough that they can be made in the standard fashion or for diabetics. (I have a killer hot chocolate recipe that you actually can sub the sugar with another diabetic friendly sweetener 1:1.) I have cakes, cookies, and other sweets that you can make and spoil your friends and family with enough leftover to keep for yourself.

Next week, look for that hot chocolate recipe. It is just like drinking chocolate. It’s amazing.

♥

The importance of rest.

Dear Reader,

Contrary to the image that may have been presented over the course of this month with my random flurries of posting, I am not constantly scurrying around doing this and that. Because I am disabled, I have to make a point of stopping myself from overworking myself and take some time to rest. I’ll be honest, I get anxious doing that because I worry that someone will randomly show up and see the mess around here and think I’m lazy. It goes back to how I was raised and how I was taught to keep home. I will tell you, I have changed a lot of things from how I was taught to do it for the better.

When you’re taught that you are supposed to clean until you are exhausted one day a week, and then you are berated because you missed a spot or didn’t get that one additional room done … well, who wants to keep that baggage. Just yeet it out a window and make yourself some luggage out of the lingering alligators. It’s a lot of hard work, but it is worth it and you’ll be happier for it.

FLYLady got one thing right on the nose, you have to finally love yourself. The act of cleaning your home isn’t penance or punishment. It is an act of love because you deserve a clean and comfortable dwelling place. It took me a little while to get that. The idea that taking care of your home is a form of taking care of yourself is revolutionary. It is just as revolutionary as saying that everyone deserves to be loved and respected, include ourselves. We’re not here to work ourselves to death. We’re here to love and be loved. Even single people deserve special tenderness and care from themselves.

The six days set aside out of the month as rest days and days to celebrate being alive are super important. You have to put down your broom and just do the minimum for a few days so you can emerge from this rest period refreshed, happy, and ready to take on the world. If those rest days mean lounging around in pajamas and slippers, go for it if you can make it work. If those rest days are date night with a special someone or a day out with friends, make it happen. You’ve worked hard and deserve these nuggets of joy that you can wring out of life.

In all things, love is simplest. It starts with just a little bit of tender care and devoted attention.

I am at a loss for what to post.

Dear Reader,

A strong cold front passed through last night around 0120, waking me up with a migraine. I haven’t been quite right all day because of it. The headache has passed. The post-migraine nonsense of struggling to make words do what I want them to and being utterly exhausted, however, has made today very difficult. Tomorrow, I will do my best to have better content.

As this is the second day of the Full Hunter’s Moon (my family call it the Hunter’s Moon because big game hunting season starts this month), I hope you have taken some time to pamper yourself and have a nice dinner. I know Turkey Day was just behind us, but the leftovers can be pretty awesome on their own too. And you don’t need the good china!

I hope you have/had a wonderful day. ♥

What odd but useful things to you keep around?

Dear Reader,

As you were going through the contents of the dreaded Junk Drawer, you probably found a plethora of odd but useful items that you keep on hand and use on a regular basis. In my household, we have a seemingly endless supply of twist ties. You know the things that they use to wrap around the end of a loaf of bread and twist down until you can barely pull it apart, those. We toss the little plastic clips they put on bread into the recycling because we have yet to find a use for them.

Also, I have a stockpile of laundry pins. I have lost count how many ways we have used them. Some get lost, but it’s like the level of the bag never drops. Perhaps they breed when we’re not looking.

What strange bits and bobs do you keep on hand? Chime in on the comments. ♥

What is the ‘correct’ way to clean a room?

Dear Reader,

If you ask this question to seven different domestic engineers (I like that term for housewife or househusband.) you will get fourteen different answers. An a fifteenth answer will emerge from their discussion. It’s not quite a free for all, but it is pretty close.

The method that I grew up using and try to still use today is cleaning from the top down. This would mean your first step would be to dust the walls, artwork, and things on the upper shelves of a room. Then you work your way down to table height and get all the nicknacks (and plants if you need to). When you are at that comfortable height to work, go ahead and water your plants (if it is the day to do it). Remember, water the feet and not the head. This protects sensitive plants from getting water damage, like African violets.

Once you have taken care of the things that are at table height, search for any piles of things on chairs, footstools, or similar items. Put them away and by this point you should be ready to polish your furniture. If you have no polish, a quick dusting will be enough. Be careful in your dusting process to use the right type of tool if you are dusting near or on electronics. While electronics are a bit more hardened against static electricity than they were in the 1990s, you still want to be careful. One jump of static can fry your cellphone or laptop and render it dead. The same is true for mixing water with electronics. Use a dry, soft cloth or a can of compressed air to clean your electronics in a casual way.

At floor level, give the baseboards a quick once over with a damp cloth. You may want to use said cloth to wipe down the doorway and window frames of the room. Now that all the dust from above has settled on the floor, this is the time to bust out the vacuum and do a quick job over the floor. If after all that work, the room still has a musty, dusty smell grab a bottle of air freshener and give it a quick spray. The process takes close to 45 minutes if your room doesn’t look like my living room with projects piled up on one half of the room and kids’ stuff on the other half. But we’ve got a path through the room. So there’s hope that we can work together to get it ready for a holiday tree and other goodies.

Turkey Meatballs & Marinara

Dear Reader,

If you are in the position that many are in, you have almost five pounds of turkey per person in your household left over from yesterday’s festivities. Yes, turkey sandwiches can make a dent into that pile, but not much of one. Here’s a solution and you don’t need a meat grinder to make it work. (I’ve done that, cooked turkey does not grind as well as raw.)

Take out your food chopper. Hopefully it is a nice big one, or you will have to do this in batches. Put your turkey in to the food chopped and process it until it resembles ground meat. Take your turkey and put it into a medium sized bowl. Process your next batch of turkey until you have 1 lb turkey bits. At this time, turn your oven on to 350 deg F. to preheat.

Add to your 1lb of turkey a quarter cup of bread crumbs and a generous portion of Italian seasoning. If your family is like mine, drop into the bowl a tablespoon of minced garlic.(You’ll be able to ward of vampires with no problem.) Add one egg, two tablespoons of milk, and mix together until uniform. You will get your best results using your hands to squish and massage the meat mixture. It may feel gross, so don’t be ashamed to use vinyl gloves. They make cleaning up your hands easier.

When your meat mixture is uniform, shape into walnut sized balls (that is walnuts with the hull on them). Place in a rimmed cookie tray approximately a half inch apart. Slide that into your preheated oven for 45 minutes. Now, locate your favorite pasta and favorite marinara sauce. Cook the pasta until it is al dente and then shock it with cold water so that it doesn’t continue to cook in the center of your colander. If you want to save a little of the cooking water to spoon over your pasta so that some of the starch grabs on to that delicious sauce, do this shortly before serving.

Cook up your marinara sauce according to directions. (Later on, I’ll be posting my slow cooker marinara sauce. That’s an entirely different beast and you can throw the meatballs in with it to soak up that flavor.) Not too long after now, your meatballs should be done cooking. Take them out of the oven and let them rest for a few minutes. They should have a little bit of a golden brown on top and spring back when poked. Carefully, transfer your turkey meatballs to the sauce. Lower the temperature to a slow simmer.

Call everybody to dinner. As you serve dinner put a few tablespoons of cooking liquid from the pasta on the noodles before adding sauce with meatballs. Make yourself a nice tossed salad and enjoy.

This recipe serves 6 people.

Turkey day has passed, have you survived?

Dear Reader,

The day of the Turkey has passed and many a household still have dishes stacked in the sink. I understand the exhaustion that comes after Turkey Day. If you feel as though a weight lies on your shoulders when you look at those dishes and pots, know that you are not alone. When you open your refrigerator and can’t find the milk because of the seemingly infinite stacks of leftovers, don’t give up.

While the world wants you to hop up and go shopping, the deals will be there tomorrow. Take today as a rest day. Do some dishes for 15 minutes and then take a break and have a cup of tea. If you can’t help being twitchy about the kitchen, take another 15 minute stab at Mt. Washmore. Pacing yourself, you can get a surprising amount of things done. But remember, it can wait as you recover from the effort of putting together a huge meal, hosting your entire family and all your friends, and all the work of clean up.