Recipe Series: Friends and Fajitas

I decided to start writing down some of my recipes to share with you all.  This is very hard for me!  I am the "dump it in until it tastes good" kind of cook, if I'm cooking meat I just shake my spices in until it looks and smells right. Seriously I don't think I have ever made something the exact same way from one meal to the next.   So many times I have found a recipe online, looked at the ingredients and then just kinda went with it.  I don't think I have ever fully followed a recipe when cooking.  

(Disclaimer: I always bake by the recipe, too much science goes on in the oven, I haven't mastered that yet.) 

First up on my Recipe Series is Friends and Fajitas!  One of my spiritual gifts is hospitality.  I love to cook for people!  Micah and I like to do what we (mostly I) call Friends and Fajitas on Wednesday nights.  We try to have someone over that we haven't seen in a while and eat Fajitas! Yes, we eat fajitas almost every week.  It is a fun way to get to know new people and to see old friends we don't get to see very often.  Plus, getting good fajitas in Phnom Penh is a big deal.

So, here you go, my recipes for Fajitas and Garden Salsa (because salsa is kinda hard to find here)

Fajitas

• 2 chicken breasts
• 3 onions
• 2 bell peppers (color of your choice, we like red and yellow)
• 3-4 garlic cloves
• 1-2 Tbs cumin
• 1-2 Tbs chili powder
• 1-2 Tbs chicken powder or bouillon
• salt
• 1-2 Tbs Olive oil
• Tortillas and whatever toppings you like…lettuce, tomato, sour cream, cheese, guacamole….

Cut chicken, onions, and bell peppers into bite size pieces (remember the veggies will shrink to about half their size) add spices and stir fry in pan with olive oil.  If you are making this for a lot of people it is best to cook the chicken and veggies separate - just divide the spices equally.  The key to good fajitas is the cook time.  Just because the chicken is cooked through doesn't mean it is done.  Wait until the veggies have caramelized and start to get dark spots.  Basically take it off just before it burns. J  Play with your amounts of spices, do what suits you!  We like more onions than peppers so sometimes I only put in a half of each pepper just for the flavoring.  

Note: One chicken breast can easily feed two people with this recipe.

Garden Salsa

• 3-4 medium fresh tomatoes
• 1/2 can diced tomatoes
• 1/2 yellow bell pepper
• 1/2 red bell pepper
• 1 onion
• 3-4 garlic cloves
• juice of 1/2 a lime
• a handful of cilantro
• salt to taste (at least 1Tbs)
• chicken powder to taste (about 2 tsp)
• (chicken bouillon is fine just reduce amount of salt)

Mix all together in a food processor until it is the consistency you like. Micah likes more chucks, I like less chunks.  Play with the amounts… if I am making it for myself I put more garlic and lime, if I am making it for Micah I put lest garlic and sometimes leave out the canned tomatoes.

This salsa is so good!  The other day I mixed some with cream cheese for an awesome veggie dip.  Another time I put it in my Chicken Zoodle Soup (chicken noodle soup with zucchini for noodles instead of pasta)  it was Amazing!!! 

That's it for now!  Let me know if you give them a try!  Also, let me know if I need to clarify anything or if you made any modifications that turned out yummy! 

Trials of Many Kinds

² Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, ³ because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. ⁴ Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. 

James 1:2-4

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³ Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, ⁴ and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, ⁵ who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. ⁶ In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. ⁷ These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 

1 Peter 1:5-7

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What do you do in times of trial?  I can tell you one thing.  The last things on my list when I face most trials are joy and praise.  It is true that we as Christians face many trials in many different shapes and sizes and colors and nastiness.  Today I was faced with a trial that I never thought I would have to face.  Everything in me wants to write down the whole account and tell you how the other person was wrong and I am right but that isn't what matters.  I am not writing this because I want to redeem myself, I am writing this because through the pain and heartache of this particular trial I learned something.  First I remembered that I am not a perfect person (actually I remember that on a daily basis), I saw how my sin affected someone else, I saw how Satan takes little bitty things and makes them explode into a nasty nasty ugly mess.  As I was dwelling on how hurt I was by the situation I realized that this pain was good, but dwelling in it would not help anything.  God was using this incident to refine me in the fire.  He was using this pain to clean out the sin in my life and make me pure.  I never fully understood the verses in James and 1 Peter until now.  I can consider this trial pure joy because while yes it still hurts and it isn't even over yet, I know that as long as I pray before I act and seek God's will I will come out of it refined, the genuineness of my faith will be proven and for that I give God all the praise, glory and honor.

Count Your Blessings

One of my favorite songs is Count Your Blessings from White Christmas.  

When I was younger and had trouble falling asleep I would actually try to "count my blessings instead of sheep."   It was very rewarding and I would always end up lumping a bunch of things together as I got more and more sleepy. ;)  

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It all started this morning with a stolen sleep-in day.  As my alarm went off I started trying to figure out ways to stay in bed just a little longer.  Melody woke up and Micah went and got her.  Right when I was about to get up with her, she snuggled in.  I told Micah, I needed to go get the big girls and he said they were still asleep, I didn't argue much.  As I lay there I was deciding we didn't really need to do Math today (we started home school this week by the way!), then I decided maybe we should get the pool out today and just have some fun.  Before I knew it Abby was knocking on the door and it was almost 8:30 (an hour and a half after I was going to get up).  So I told her to get some clothes on and I would be there in a minute. A few seconds later she came in again saying there was some water on the floor in the kitchen.  Racking my sleepy brain over what she could possibly be talking about and why she had gone down to the kitchen all I could think of was the tiny leak we had in our ceiling.  That's when all the things that could possibly go wrong went through my head. "Oh no! The leak is getting bigger and now we are going to have to replace the ceiling and that is going to cost thousands of dollars and we aren't going to be able to pay the layer (for adoptions, blog coming at missioncambodia.blogspot.com) and, and, and....."  So I got up prepared for either a miscommunication from our six year old (like that ever happens! :P) or the worst.  

As soon as I opened the door I could hear water running.  

This is what I came down to....

If you can't tell, that is about an inch of water throughout our whole ground floor!


After a little inspection we found out that it was our brand new water filter that had a hose come loose.  Easy fix! Whew!

Isn't it wonderful!  We can now have clean water without having to carry big jugs from down the street and I can wash my veggies right in the sink without spilling water everywhere!  Yay!  Micah put the hose back on and we decided that we just needed to watch it and make sure we turn off the valve at night.

So, to make lemonade out of our lemons.....

 The girls got to have some fun in the water before breakfast. :)

As I was sweeping that inch of water out the door and drying it up I was counting my blessings.  

1. Tile floors are so easy to clean!

2. We didn't have anything electrical or important on the floor to get ruined.

3. The leak in the ceiling is still just an minor annoyance.

4. The girls got to play in water and I didn't have to fill the pool.

5. Water in Cambodia is very cheap.

6. My school morning wasn't ruined because I had already planned on doing something different today.

So, next time something in your life goes wrong, remember to count your blessings.  It makes that thing that happened not seem quite as bad. :)

Mom Arms and Toothpaste

I didn't notice until just the other day but I have a case of awkward mom arms.  All day and even sometimes during the night a moms arms and hands are busy with something.  Whether it be holding a child, cleaning something up, or really anything else my arms are almost always busy.  At church a couple weeks ago my grandma was holding Melody and the big girls were in Sunday school. I had nothing to do but listen to the sermon. I realized quickly that I didn't know what to do with my arms.  Straight down to the side wasn't comfortable, hands folded seemed weird,  arm up on the pew was awkward too. That's when it hit me that I had awkward mom arms!  What do you do with them in that rare moment when there is nothing to do with them? I tell you what I did.  I grabbed Melody's milk cup and held it to "make sure it didn't leak". :p

Okay so since this post really didn't have any meaning other than just a slightly weird realization I thought I would add in a cleaning tip for you!  :)

Since we have returned to Cambodia we have been cleaning and fixing everything in our house to get it back to livable.  The door in the girls room had some scribbles of permanent marker from a previous owner and I had remembered seeing on Pinterest that toothpaste would take it off.  At first I thought it was a Pinterest flop. I was scrubbing and scrubbing and the marker was just barely coming so I decided to just cover it all in toothpaste and come back to it later plus really wasn't invested in spending too much time on this task because it wasn't needed to get our house back in working order.  To my amazement it barely took any scrubbing at all!  By the time I got all the toothpaste off the door the marker had come with it! So there you go.... Toothpaste for the win!

Is This Really My Life?

If you had asked me 5 years ago if I was going to home school my children I would have said no and not thought about it again.  For that matter if you had asked me if I was going to be a stay at home mom I would have also said no.    Not because I think it is wrong to stay at home or to home school, just because I had never thought about it.  My mom always worked and we went to public school. That is just how it was, so that's what I knew.  The funny thing is Micah had completely opposite answers for those questions.  If you asked him if his wife was going to stay home and home school the kids he would have said yes without another thought. That is how he was brought up.  So when we were dating and started talking about the future we decided that wherever God had us when we had kids would make our decision on me staying home and if our kids would be home schooled.


Well, life right now has us in a situation where I can stay with the girls and Abby is needing to start kindergarten.  She actually should have started in August but with her birth year mix up (a blog on that coming soon) we are a little behind.  So my plan is to get her caught up and finished with Kindergarten by Christmas.  Being new to home schooling I have been looking at different curriculum companies and trying to decide if I was just going to figure something out myself or invest in actual books.  The books I like the looks of are called Horizons.





The draw back is that it is $230.  That is not bad as far as workbooks go but still more than our budget allows.  So, I was wondering if anyone would like to help sponsor some of this cost.  It would be a huge help to me as a mother of three and I would be able to reuse it for all three girls as well as any new BYKOTA kids that need kindergarten. I am also open to suggestions and advice! I won't claim to know everything so please! Any advice you can give is greatly appreciated!

And Next?

Abby has been on a kick lately of using the phrase  "and next?" or "then what are we gonna do after...."  IT DRIVES ME CRAZY!  Some times at lunch even before we eat she will be asking what is for dinner. Or as soon as she wakes up in the morning she is wanting to know what we are going to be doing after nap time.  My answer is almost always, "don't worry about it, worry about what is happening right now."

The lesson that I am trying to teach my daughter is one I need to learn myself!  It is one that God has been teaching me ever since we decided to come to Cambodia.  Even before we got here we were trying to plan what we would do after our nine months.  Well, God laughed at that and brought two beautiful brown game changers into our lives and nine months turned into an unknown amount of time.

Then this year has been a huge season of living one step at a time trusting in God's faithfulness.  In April we began paperwork for foster care and had to wait for laws to open up, then in June we got our papers turned in and had to wait for approval, then in August we got approved and had to wait for travel permissions, then we had to wait for passports, then for visas... the whole time we didn't know what the next step would hold.  At any time our plans could come to a stop with just one thing not being approved.  Even though the whole process only took 7 months (way shorter than most) it was a lot of sitting and waiting.  We knew the plans we wanted, we knew we wanted to visit family for the Holidays but we were unable to plan until everything had gone through.  I felt like Abby, always saying "and then what?"  But God only gave us one step at a time.

This is how life is!  If we could plan our whole lives we would never live!  We would always be looking forward to the next thing and forgetting what is now!  I find myself looking forward to November 12th.  I am so so so excited to go to America and see my family that I keep thinking "Ugh!  this week is dragging by!"  Instead I should be enjoying each day.  I should be living in the moment.  I should be getting excited that Melody has learned to zerbert and is very very close to her first tooth.  I should be taking the time to play with Abby and Lily rather than spending time worrying about how they will be on the plane.

My challenge for this week, for myself and for you, is to live in the moment!  I know it is cliché and you can find countless quotes saying this same thing but maybe that is for a reason!  Maybe its because we have such a hard time with it!  I know I do!

Reward System For The Win!

I am horrible at sticker charts!!!  Especially here in Cambodia where nothing stays on the wall without a screw.  

Ever since Melody was born Lily's potty training has slowly digressed.  She was completely in underwear (even at night) for two months before Mel was born but afterwards it just got worse and worse.  I kept thinking surely she's gonna snap out of it, she can't be wet the bed and have accidents forever!  But the closer she gets to four years old the more  I'm wondering if it's ever gonna happen.  We tried sticker charts but like I said before, I am horrible at them.  They wouldn't stay on the wall, I would forget to give her her sticker, I forgot to print a new one.... the list goes on.   

Recently I noticed some Frozen night gowns at the market and an idea struck me!  Having a tangible reward for staying dry might just do the trick!  So I bought one for both girls.  When I got home I needed a way to display them as a reminder and also needed a way for them to earn them (since sticker charts are a no go).  So I tied a string up with several knots down it to create loops and hung the gowns on hangers in the first loop. 

Now every time Lily stays dry all night all we have to do is move her gown down one loop.  When it gets to the bottom it is hers!  I didn't want to leave Abby out so we decided that every time she sleeps during nap time (something she has always struggled with) she could move her gown down.  

Believe it or not Abby has slept 4 days in a row and Lily has been dry 3!  

Another reason I like this system so much is because the girls are able to earn the things they want through out the year.  A down side to having birthdays and Christmas fall just a month apart is no presents the rest of the year!  With this reward system they still get new things but have a reason for getting them.  :)

Here are their dresses.  You can really see the stings because they blend in to the curtains.