Cooking Days

Above is how my chicken arrives in my kitchen, as a huge pack for £19.99. It usually contains anywhere between 16 and 20 chicken fillets depending on their weight. Out of this I make a variety of dishes to freeze and spread out throughout the month. Out of this box I made chicken curry, chicken escaloppes x 3meals, chicken glazed with honey and mustard and chicken cordon bleu plus the chicken pieces for lunches all of which can be found in the Fix Freeze Feast Cook Book. Chicken pieces dredged in eggs and then flour and oven baked for half an hour or so until cooked, then throw in freezer so that I have something handy for a quick and easy lunch; delicious in a buttie with lettuce and mayo. Below are the sauces ready for the freezer, the dark ones are BBQ, yellow one is curry sauce, then red sauce used for lasagne, pasta, or spanish rice, or basically any recipe calling for a red sauce. These all get thrown into the freezer ready to be used when needed; if I'm organised I will get them out the night before but usually I'm making a mad dash across the garden to get it out the freezer last minute. If this does happen (and it does alot) I just whizz it in the microwave for a few minutes and ta da! A slightly blurred photo of uncooked chicken pieces, dredged in flour, eggs and then bread crumbs and frozen, ready to bag up and put in freezer until needed. I like to have plenty of these on hand as everyone enjoys them and they are so quick to do. After I'd cleared away we had delicious bacon butties for lunch, yummy! We also bought a huge packet of bacon, 4 gammon steaks, 4 turkey steaks, 4 beef steaks, and two lots of sticky ribs all of which were on offer so the freezer is well and truly stocked up for this month.

More I.T. work or is it ???

Above my youngest has edited photos of most of her animals for the front of her latest lapbook and below we have a dilema over where we should file this piece of work because it is obviously I.T., but then again is it Religious Education being about St. David or is it English, or maybe we should do three copies and put one in each folder? ;o)

Manga Art

After a trip to the library my youngest has borrowed this art book. I'm not thrilled with Manga Art as I find some of the drawings can be suggestive to say the least, you only have to take a look at the cover of this book to see that but once inside it does teach how to draw bodies and faces properly, as long as you're selective about the drawings that you practice with then I think you'll be alright.

After practising for a while my youngest chose quite a sweet picture to copy.

The same picture coloured in using her new pens bought for her birthday especially for Manga Art, they do have a name but I can't remember it off the top of my head ;o)

A Manga face typically has small features with huge eyes as in my daughter's drawing below.
She also got me a slow cooker recipe book, mmm I wonder what she's trying to say....

Guess what we did yesterday...

No words needed except 'yummy!'

Ladybirds, ladybirds fly away home....

Now I don't usually leave my garden baskets up throughout winter but this year I had a good reason for it. When I was taking them down to compost the dead plants and give them a wash out I found a crowd of ladybirds hibernating underneath, yes really, they were all huddled together keeping warm.
I was amazed by this because I'd always thought that they just died off after laying eggs and then new ones were born in the spring.



Here's the first group:


and here's the second group:

I thought they might have gone by now but they're still there so I've put the baskets back up even though they are unsightly; ladybirds are too precious to let die as they do such a good job in my garden :o)

Education Round Up

Well... I seem to have misplaced the 'Cultures around the World' lapbook, hence no photos yet but it must be here somewhere so I'll hunt it down and then get some up as soon as possible.

We've moved on from Algebra on MEP maths, infact we've moved on from MEP altogether. Youngest was struggling with Algebra so we went back to Conquer Maths and she's flying through it. I also enjoy the freedom it gives me (to do the ironing) whilst she's listening to the tutor :o)

Youngest has finished researching all she wants to know about the Elizabethans for now so we're going to move on to more recent history, say the 20th century I think.

Science was dithering a little, we either did alot all in one go or nothing for ages but not anymore, oh no, now we do Super charged Science!
I'm really enjoying it as it is so easy to do, just watch a video, read a bit and do the experiments and have a quiz at the end to check understanding. I think youngest is enjoying it even though she isn't a science person, and my son keeps watching the videos too and I feel sure that he'll join in when we get to the harder stuff :o)

So that's it for our round up I think. We obviously do many more things but these are the ones that have changed so far this year, no doubt there will be more ;o)

Getting ready for Spring!

I really wish I had a photo of the huge hole in the wall but I wasn't in when it was taken down, and when I came home and saw it you could say I was in too much of a shock to bother with photos.
The only proof I have that the french doors are new are the curtains, as you can see they are too short for the french doors and we didn't get the blinds ordered in time before hubby cracked on with it.
This was home ed in action as hubby taught himself all he needed to know to do it; now I'm just waiting on the blinds* to finish it off.
Molly certainly likes it as you can see and I can't wait to get out into the garden and start planting and weeding again and get some nature study back into our home ed life as that's really been curtailed with the horrid winter we've had.

*company we ordered blinds from has gone out of business and having a job getting our money back so new blinds will just have to wait a while longer, sigh!*