Idea Queen Tips & News

The other day I went begging for additional ideas to be put up under our new Thanksgiving Ideas section. A few have come in already, so I figured it was time to share! Remember if YOU have an idea, you are ALWAYS welcome to drop us a line. All the pages have an easy way to contact us. The more ideas the better is what I always say!

These two ideas are already up on Idea Queen as of today. One is under the Thanksgiving crafts for kids, and the other under Thanksgiving placemats There’s a few other ideas on other Thanksgiving pages, which I’ll be posting over the next few days.

Enough of my rambling, here’s the ideas!

Thankful Tree
April Barney, My Little Monkey Boutique
www.mylittlemonkeyboutique.com

Need:
Small branch (with limbs) from tree in yard
Small Pot
Filling for the pot (craft green foam, branch like pieces)
Construction paper
Ribbon
Paint
Paint brushes

Directions:
Cut about 5 leaves out of the construction paper. On each leaf write one thing you are thankful for. Paint the pot any color you choose. Let it dry. Place the green foam and other material in the pot and then stick your branch into the foam so that it is stable. Hole punch a small hole in each leaf and tie a ribbon or string through it. Hang a leaf on different parts of the branch limbs. You can use the Thankful Tree as a table centerpiece or decoration around the home. Make time to talk about what is written on each leaf and the things you as a family are thankful for.

I am Thankful for…placemats
Lexi M. Heart of Texas
www.oneofakindbylexi.com

When my son was younger, we made fall placemats using a large sheet of contruction paper (about 11×15″) and lots of die-cut shapes, stickers and glitter! We picked out stuff that he was “thankful” for - some included: a heart for those who loved him, a teddy bear for his favorite toy, leaves for the beautiful world around him, and (as my son was 2 at the time)…a pawprint for Blue’s Clues.

At the top, I wrote, “I Am Thankful For…” and underneath, my son glued down all the shapes. I wrote by each of them, what he was thankful for, in his words. At the bottom of the page, I wrote his name and “Thanksgiving” and the year. We laminated it, and voila! My son had his own special placemat for thanksgiving. We ended up making enough for the whole family. After thanksgiving, we hung his placemat on the wall with all of his other artwork.

You could also use die-cut letters and spell out each person’s name on separate sheets and then decorate with die-cut turkeys, fall leaves, pumpkins, seasonal stickers, or even draw your own free hand designs! Laminate the finished pieces and set the table with your personalized placemats! This can be done with both young children and older ones learning to write on their own.

You may have noticed how few posts we make on party tips. There’s even less on birthday party ideas. Granted there is an entire section on Idea Queen just for Birthday Party Ideas, but they seem to lack here on the blog.

Why is that?

Well I guess I feel like what should be posted on the blog should be more “here and now” posts. Things we can relate to on any given day. I mean how often do we plan birthday parties? Depending on the number of kids you have and how many others you are responsible for, it’s usually not that many. Maybe 4-5 times a year at the very most. Planning milestone birthday parties happens even less for us (really - how many times in your life do you plan a 50th birthday party?).

So maybe I’m wrong, but I just don’t think daily readers are interested in seeing gobs of tips on party planning. Seriously though, DO you want to see more? Or is what’s on Idea Queen right now sufficient? I’ll let it be your call….so post some comments!

This is one of those ingredients I always have in my home. Must to my surprise, it’s something some of you may be looking for as well! While most of these don’t use powdered milk as the main ingredient, it’s still important to the recipe.

Homemade Pizza Crust

Homemade Pizza Crust
3/4 c. warm water about 80 degrees F
1 Tbl. olive oil
1 Tbl. brown suger
1 tsp. italian seasoning (avoid garlic - yeast will not rise)
1 Tbl. powdered milk
2 1/4 c. Unbleached white flour
1 tsp. active dry yeast.

Add ingredients in order in bread machine, making small indention in flower for yeast (Make sure it does not touch liquid). Set bread machine on “dough”. If you don’t have a bread machine, mix ingredients together and kneed dough for 5 minutes. Lightly coat with olive oil and place in bowl. Let rise for 30 minutes. Use half the dough for thin crust (freeze the rest), or all the dough for thick crust. Bake for 5 mins at 425* before adding toppings. (For “mega pizza” with loads of toppings, skip the baking before adding toppings).
White Bread Recipe

We posted this one the other day, but thought we had better post it again because it does use powdered milk. This recipe probably does need a bread machine, unless you want to kneed it yourself. A normal bread machine has a dough cycle of an hour and a half, most of that time spent letting the bread rise. Here’s the recipe:

Classic White Bread
3/4 cup water
2 cups flour (unbleached)
1 tablespoon nonfat dried milk
1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon butter (original recipe was applesauce)
1 1/2 teaspoons yeast

Put ingredients in bread machine on dough cycle. Grease bread pan with butter, and preheat oven to 325*.

Quite a few of our bread machine recipes use powdered milk, so if you have a bread machine you might want to check out our bread machine recipes ebook.
Milk Bath Recipes

These recipes do use powdered milk as the main ingredient. There are far too many to list here, so we are just going to give you a link. You can find all the milk bath recipes at Idea Queen. It’s part of our bath and body recipes collection, which is currently under “Money Saving Ideas”.

Other Recipes for Powdered Milk

Pasta is something I use powdered milk in quite a bit. Have you ever had the Pasta-Roni angel hair pasta? My homemade version sometimes includes powdered milk, depending on how I make it. It helps make the pasta stick together a bit, and includes milk without using “real” milk.

If you have recipes for powdered milk, do be sure to leave us a comment!

While the main focus of Idea Queen has always been content (and lots of it), we’ve decided to do something slightly different. This week we’ll be busy adding a brand new section to Idea Queen that focuses on actual products.

I’ve been talking a lot lately about my new favorite site, Organize.com. I’m so in love with this site, I decided to put up pages at Idea Queen that features some products to help you in certain areas of the house. This page is still work in progress, but soon we’ll have an entire list of ideas and products to help you organize your house.

Right now you can find a few pages, as well as the “coming soon” lists. By the end of next week we should have them all up. When it’s done, you’ll find ideas and products for organizing your kitchen, craft rooms, kids rooms, closets, and some extra ideas for organizing. We may not even stop there - we may decide to add more!

As always, if you have any suggestions, please be sure to drop us a line!

PLEASE just follow the rules!

Just copy paste THIS and everything below up until my Five links:

I’ve been tagged! Lara thought it would be cool to have a meme where we post links. We can post up to five. Then we tell five more people to share their links. If we all share who tagged us, our links are sure to be seen!

They can be business links, favorite sites, affiliate links, whatever you want…

There are Five Rules:

1. MUST be clean. No R rated sites.
2. Only FIVE links.
3. MUST tell 5 people.
4. A link back to the person who tagged you
5. Lara’s Place is the meme originator. (an active link is appreciated)

———– end copy paste ———————————–>

My Links:

1. Prairie Soy Candles - It’s that time of year! Candles make great additions to family gatherings (especially the Christmas scents!), and also great gifts.

2. Mommy’s Helper Community - I have to give a shout out to Anita. This is one of my favorite communities for work at home moms.

3. Organize.com - I’m completely in love with this site. My wish list is about a mile long. If anyone needs organization, it’s me.

4. Eve’s Best - Not only does this site offer some fantastic products, but there is LOTS of information here as well. I’ve know Evie for awhile - she has done her research well!

5. RecipesForMom - In need of a few quick recipes? There’s some good ones here. This is actually a sister site to Idea Queen.

I Am Tagging:

1. Anita
2. Val
3. Lauren
4. Bev
5. Stefani

Have fun ladies!

We can always use money saving ideas, right? The money saving section at Idea Queen we’ve been dying to add on to, and finally got another page up. Hopefully there will be a few more to come soon.

Anyway, you can now find money saving ideas for school under the money saving section. While it’s long past “back to school”, hopefully these will arm you for next year or even help with up-coming after school activities.

As always, if you have something to add to the site, be sure you use the contact form to send in your ideas! If you need more tips for saving money, also see our full section on money saving ideas.

I’ve buried myself in my own house. Quickly finding something in here is a thing of the past, and I can’t take it anymore. It’s not that my home is “messy”….it just lacks organization. I use to joke that I had an “organized mess” and knew exactly where everything was (or what “pile” it was in). The joke is no longer funny.

So the other day I went searching for recipe organizing products, such as binders and what not. Figured I was going to start there, because I dig through that drawer the most (several times a week usually). What I ended up finding was a site I’m TOTALLY in love with.

Not only did I find stuff to organize my recipes, but all kinds of products to organize my entire site. I’m currently making a very long wish list of products for organizing, because I need all the help I can get. Big giant shipping boxes are far and few between, and they never last as long as I’d like them to (in fact, I have a big mess in a hall closet because of a box that gave out!).

Anyway, I highly suggest checking out Organize.com. This site has everything! Plus I made sure to sniff out reviews for the company, and they were awesome. Thumbs up and a must see!

It use to be we worried that our kids were getting enough to eat. But now it seems more often than not we worry that they are eating too much. Or rather they just aren’t as active as they should be. Toddler fitness games could be your solution.

Now on Idea Queen there is a page for family exercise ideas. These ideas are pretty simple, and give you some ideas on places to walk and things to do. There is one idea in particular I think we can expand on a bit though. That idea is #4 - Country Exploring.

If you don’t live out in the country or have a huge backyard to roam in, this activity would be best at a park. You can take a day trip to a state park and make up some fun games while you are there. Pack a healthy lunch and let your creativity run wild.

For example, you can write a list ahead of time of things to do. These things could be “run around a picnic table 5 times”, or “hop on one foot around the biggest tree”. Think of other things you normally see in your park, and other forms of exercise you can put with them. Make it a game by seeing how fast they can complete the entire list.

If you’ve got more than one toddler, you can have races to see who can do each task the fastest. You can also use incentives to give to the winner if they need a bit of encouragement.

Have fun, and don’t forget to be creative!

The other night I needed something quick and easy for supper. Something that I could make early in the day, and have done by the time we came home from dance class. I figured it was time to pull out the crockpot again. I dug through the freezer and pantry for ideas……and came up with a pretty good solution.

Now I usually don’t even think about supper until at least lunch time. By then it’s usually too late to do a slow cooker meal. Unless you use the high setting that is.

The first thing I did was put frozen chicken, about-to-expire milk (it HAD to be used, so this was a perfect solution to “waste” it), and 3/4 block of cheese in. I did put it on high, because the clock was ticking. I did worry it was going to be done in time, especially with the chicken being frozen. But by 4pm, it was looking pretty good. It had already been in there for about 4 hours, and was cooking very nicely. The chicken was pretty much done, and starting to pull apart very easy. Sweet!

Just before we left to go to dance class, I put in the egg noodles. When you do this, make sure it’s done SLOWLY so you can see how much liquid you have left in the bottom. Those noodles will soak it up fast! I ended up having to add more milk and cheese, because I added too many noodles. I also added alfredo sauce to give it more flavor and liquid texture. I set it to low, and we took off to dance.

By about 6:30pm, it was done. Started at noon on high, added noodles around 4 and set to low, then 2 hours later it was ready to eat. It fit so perfect into our schedule, I know we’ll be using this recipe again. You can tweek it to your liking too, since there’s a lot of room for play.

Enjoy!

We’ve finally gotten around to making some free printable recipe cards. It’s about time! I mean if we’ve got the recipes, we should have the recipe cards too, right?

There are only a handful available right now, because these are very time consuming to create. However, be sure you leave us a comment here or use the form on the detail page if you want us to make some more. We LOVE requests, and will be sure to add more of a selection if you just ask.

Anyway, you can see all the blank recipe cards on our free printable recipe cards page. Enjoy!