“Can-Do” No Cans Cream of Mushroom Soup
Cream of Mushroom Soup
I don’t know why it took me so long to start making my own cream of mushroom soup. I use it in many different casserole dishes. I was out of the canned soup one day and making a family favorite recipe and decided, rather than run to the store, to make my own. The recipe came out perfectly – the flavors were spot-on.
Using fresh mushrooms and your own broth, you can make it without using a can-opener even once.
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3 TBS butter (if using fresh mushrooms, add 1 more TBS butter)
2 TBS flour (I used fresh ground whole wheat)
1 tsp Kosher or sea salt
⅛ tsp fresh ground black pepper
1½ cups whole milk
½ cup heavy cream
2 cups broth ( chicken, turkey, or vegetable broth, I used homemade turkey broth)
1 cup chopped mushrooms (fresh or 2 4-ounce cans)
1 tsp grated onion
1 tsp paprika
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heavy saucepan
food processor or sharp knife/cutting board
cheese grater
wooden spoon
whisk
measuring cups/spoon
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If you’re using fresh mushrooms, chop them. In a skillet, saute them in 1 TBS butter over medium heat until soft.
If you’re using canned mushrooms, drain them and process them in the food processor.



Grate onion.

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Melt butter over medium heat in saucepan. Whisk in the flour, salt, and pepper.

When it gets bubbly, whisk in the milk, cream, and broth.

Bring to a boil. Boil for 1 minute.
Stir in mushrooms and onion. Stir in paprika.

Cook, stirring regularly, for 10 minutes.

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6 servings
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~*~ | |
| Good source of CalciumGood source of Vitamin A | ![]() |
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| ~*~ | ||
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I would love to hear any feedback about this recipe. Did you make it? Did you enjoy it? Did you make any adjustments to it?
Hallee
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Ma-Maw Ryta Gail’s Blanket

Right after Gregg’s 8th birthday, his mother died from breast cancer. One of the few things that we have of hers is a box of blankets that she crocheted.
For years, that box sat in storage. One day last year, I came across the box and decided that, if I had crocheted a box of blankets, I would want my son’s family to use them rather than keep them in perpetual storage.
So, I pulled one out, washed it, and laid it across the back of my couch.
Now anyone lying on the couch who wants a blanket grabs that one. The boys are constantly lying under it, fighting over it, running through the house with it. We tell them Ma-Maw Ryta Gail made it. Then we tell them how much she would love them.
Somehow, they know it’s special.
I’m trying not to panic now that the one I pulled out has a hole in it. I still want us to use it, after I get it fixed, but there’s a part of me that wants to hide it back in safety in its box, where it’s survived, hole-free, for the last nearly 40 years. I just really think, that if it were me, I’d want my kids and grandkids to use it. So we’ll get it fixed and put it back out and hopefully, another little foot won’t go through it again.
Hallee
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Creation: Question Evolution Campaign — 3 of 15

Our 9th Anniversary
A Sunday guest post by my brilliant husband, Gregg.
Every Sunday, my clever husband offers me a “day of rest” by taking over the homemaker duties here. His primary topic, the Biblical Truth of Creation vs. Darwinism, is a subject that has broad reaching scientific, social, and metaphysical implications and is gaining more and more attention in our modern culture. For believers and non-believers alike, the primary purpose is to present scientific, historical, logical, and/or sociological data in an empirical and defensible fashion, as much as possible written in layman’s terms, and in a format suitable for supplementing any homeschool curriculum whether you choose to believe the Biblical account — or secular guesses — about the origins of human life on earth.
How did mutations create information?
How could copying errors (mutations) create 3 billion letters of DNA instructions to change a microbe into a microbiologist?
It is nearly impossible to conceive of the raw amount of specific information stored in the DNA of any living thing. If you could record all the information for how to build proteins, cells, entire biological systems such as respiratory and circulatory, and organs, how to reproduce, how to follow instinctive patterns — and then incorporate those plans into a body type complete with instructions for maintenance and expansion (growth) and ensure that the information cannot be easily lost or overwritten as well as instructions for every molecular machine in the entire human body — that is DNA. The density and complexity of the information is not reduced between a fern to a flamingo or a man to a moth.

Space Shuttle Endeavor
It isn’t like a cookbook that contains both a list of ingredients and instructions for their use. It is more like an entire 80 story library the size of a warehouse that contains ALL POSSIBLE information and instructions for running all of NASA. The library would have to cover all elements of the organization from HR and policies to floor plans for factories and blueprints for any tools required to manufacture and operate a fleet of space shuttles — and maintain them. That would be a good metaphor, except that the DNA for any living creature on planet earth actually contains far more data even than that.
Writing out the information in human DNA in standard sized books would mean you could fill a box the size of the grand canyon — twice. Conversely, if all information generated by the human race in the last 5000 years — from smoke signals and cave paintings to every single daily newspaper ever published on every continent to the entire internet — could be translated into the language of DNA, it would not fill a tablespoon. That is how efficient and how information rich DNA is.
Darwinists claim that mutations, or copying errors — essentially accidents — in the DNA code are the primary engine for growing living things from an amoeba into an aviator. Mutations rank equally with fossils and natural selection as the three most important aspects of biological evolution. Fossil evidence in the sedimentary rock strata is supposed to provide evidence that species evolution has occurred in the past, and natural selection and mutations are the only reasonable means (mechanisms or engines) by which this could possibly occur.
A genetic mutation is damage to a single DNA unit (a gene). Mutations can occur spontaneously or be induced. In general, mutations can potentially affect structure, function, or fitness of the individual or inheritance of abilities in offspring.
Some definitions, first. Normal body cells are called somatic cells. In eukaryotic cells, the nucleus of somatic cells will contain a diploid number of chromosomes. Gametic cells (gametes such as sperm and ova) contain half the diploid number of chromosomes, called the haploid number. In humans, the diploid number is 46 (found in such cells as muscles, bone, skin etc.) and the haploid number is 23 (found in gametic cells such as sperm and ova). On fertilization, two haploid cells (sperm + ovum) unite to form a zygote (an unborn baby) with the diploid number of 46 chromosomes.
One can put genes into two categories; somatic (body) and gametic (reproductive). If a mutation occurs in a somatic gene, it only affects the individual. If a mutation occurs to a gametic gene, it could possibly be passed on to descendants. Neither creates new, useful, tremendously specific, exceptionally accurate, highly complex information in DNA. They are, after all, errors and errors have largely deleterious effects.

“An accident, a random change, in any delicate mechanism can hardly be expected to improve it. Poking a stick into the machinery of one’s watch or one’s radio set will seldom make it work better.” Theodosius Dobzhansky, Heredity and the Nature of Man, p. 105
In sexual reproduction, the odds are slim that mutations will be passed on to subsequent generations and the odds are just about one in four that the mutation could express if it is passed on. The overwhelming majority of mutations that occur in gametic genes that ARE passed on AND expressed are neutral — the remainder are either fully harmful or even lethal. Mutations are known for their destructive effects, including over 1,000 human diseases such as hemophilia. Absolutely no known mutations create any new useful information in genes.
This leads to the second question posed by the folks at Creation.Com in their Question Evolution Campaign: How could mutations—accidental copying mistakes (DNA ‘letters’ exchanged, deleted or added, genes duplicated, chromosome inversions, etc.)—create the huge volumes of information in the DNA of living things?
Seriously? Even given billions of years and only the most favorable possible conditions and outcomes at every turn, how could reproductive (gametic) gene errors create over 300 lines of letters of tremendously specific, exceptionally accurate, highly complex DNA coded information to change a microbe into a microbiologist?
About 3% of human DNA contains information for how to make proteins. The remaining 97% of human DNA (formerly thought by Darwinists to be “Junk DNA” and “vestigial” evidence of our evolutionary past) contains what is now known to be meta-information, or regulatory information which is mostly instructions for controlling the use and functions of the proteins. In a nearly perfect definition of irreducible complexity, both had to exist fully intact and all at once because — one without the other is utterly useless.
Even assuming information packed DNA somehow magically appeared fully provisioned complete with specificity and zero errors in the mythical primordial soup, how then can scrambling existing DNA information at random from generation to generation create a new biochemical pathway or nano-machines with many very specific components, to make ‘goo-to-you’ Darwinian evolution possible?
For example, How did a 32-component rotary motor like ATP synthase (which produces the energy currency, adenosine triphosphate, for all life on this planet), or robots like kinesin (a ‘postman’ delivering parcels inside living cells) originate?
To Coyne a Phrase

His words, not mine. Nice guy, no?
Allow me to introduce died in the wool Darwinist apologist and evolutionary biologist Dr Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago. Dr. Coyne once famously stated, upon learning that the peppered moth photos were fraudulent, that finding out this “prize horse in our [Darwinists'] stable” had to be thrown out gave him the same feeling as when he found out that Santa Claus was not real.
Coyne says that believers in the Biblical account of creation are irrational. Coyne has a lot of rather thought provoking things to say about believers in the Biblical account of creation.
After trotting out the same old tired arguments (minus the peppered moth, of course) and examples of rapid human-induced biological changes (antibiotic resistance in bacteria, pesticide resistance in insects, changes in growth rate of fish from overfishing) to get people to “consent” to the bigger idea of microbes-to-mankind evolution, Coyne then asserts that anyone who doesn’t believe evolution is made possible on this basis is “irrational.”
The truth is that Coyne deplores the fact that these tired and very familiar examples will probably not change the minds of believers in the Biblical account of creation, who have already accepted such changes as ‘variation within a kind’ because this is exactly what Genesis states happens in God’s created order. Coyne thinks believers argue that “such small changes cannot explain the evolution of new groups of plants and animals”, and concludes: ‘This argument defies common sense. When, after a Christmas visit, we watch grandma leave on the train to Miami, we assume that the rest of her journey will be an extrapolation of that [first] quarter-mile.”
Thus, says Coyne, a “creationist unwilling to extrapolate from micro- to macro-evolution” is being “irrational”.
Coyne has a problem and it is this: his analogy is dead wrong.
The “train” for the antibiotic resistant bacteria, the pesticide resistant insects, or the overfished sea life never leaves the station headed north. It goes the opposite direction. The real issue in biological change is all about what happens at the DNA level, which concerns information. The information carried on the heredity DNA is a set of instructions for the manufacture of certain items along with meta-information pertaining to that set of items.
Not one single example cited by Coyne, nor any example in any modern biology textbook, is an example of adding information to the DNA. All of Coyne’s examples actually greatly reduce the amount of information in the DNA of the organism. Just like with a train pulling out from Miami and heading south to Chicago, that train will certainly end up on the ocean floor and nowhere near the Sears tower. Likewise, when the types of changes we observe today are extrapolated over time, they lead to extinction and deformation, not onward and upward to a more perfected and highly “evolved” species.
For more information about question number 3 posed by the folks at Creation.Com, visit creation.com/train.
The Truth
The truth is that Darwinists have no actual “engine” that could drive evolutionary change on the scale the Darwinian myth describes. A belief in such a thing amounts to pure faith, and faith, beloved, is religion. It requires a great deal of faith to believe the fairy tale told by modern day Darwinists in the face of such a complete absence of evidence.
The truth is that a much more cogent, logical, valid, and sound explanation is that life was created by a Creator. The truth is that all the created kinds brought forth within their own kinds and science actually supports this in case after case after case.
I commit to you that I will publish every single comment that meets this blog’s commenting criteria. You may want to review that criteria before adding your opinion here.
God Bless you and yours.
Gregg
Resources:
Additional Posts dealing with Creation and Darwinism
Seeds of Faith: Lies Women Believe About Children
I enjoyed chapter seven of Nancy Leigh DeMoss’ Lies Women Believe: And the Truth that Sets them Free. Gregg and I are raising our children to be conformed to the Word rather than to the world, and we get a lot of confused reactions to that.
“You don’t watch Glee!?”
“What could possibly be wrong with letting your preschooler see the movie Rio?”
“Mothers who have problems with the Monster High dolls are seriously too judgmental for their own good.”
“What do you mean, your boys don’t have video games?”
Our children are going to be involved in a spiritual battle their entire lives. The only way to arm them is to prepare them, and one of the ways to prepare them is to keep from filling their minds with worldly thoughts and ideas and concepts. The more young minds are exposed to the condonement of sinful behavior, the more young minds will accept sinful behavior as “normal” and “acceptable.”
Beyond the lie of the “need” to expose our children to the world in order for them to fit into the world, Nancy talked about not trusting God with the timing and size of our families, accepting teenager rebellion as “normal”, children who are saved as young children still being covered for their sins as adults when they are not living a Godly life, and parents either accepting the “blame” or deflecting the “blame” of how their children turn out.
One thing that I found missing in this chapter, and one that I see all the time, is mothers making their children their entire world. I can only guess that because Miss DeMoss is not married with children, she must not have it on her radar the way I do. But, I see it constantly in parenting message boards and in social media – children are number one in their mothers’ lives, and their husbands are just this entity who is either unimportant or simply doesn’t do enough to help. As the children age, mothers’ lives revolve around the children who are in the center with their schools, schedules, and activities. I believe this is very dangerous to marriages, though it seems largely “normal” and acceptable in the world. As important as our children are, as amazing and thrilling and wonderful as it is to be a mom, as much as I adore and love my children, they aren’t number one in my life, and they never will be. And while I might be number one to my preschool-aged boys, I know I’ve fallen well below those ranks to my teenaged daughter and will likely never regain that number one position again. One day she’ll have a husband, and he’ll be second only to God to her as well.
I have the companion guide for this book, and out of the dozens of study questions for chapter 7, I have chosen just a few of the questions. However, these are meaty, deep thinking questions. This guide is designed for you to work a chapter a week, and work through several self-searching questions every day. You may find it beneficial in our study of this book to have your own guide and be able to go through every question. But, for our purposes here, following are just a few questions:
1. The issue of trusting God with the timing and size of our families is probably the most controversial issue in the Lies Women Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free. Why do you think the subject evokes such a strong reaction from so many women?
2. Read Psalm 101. In your own words, summarize what it says about the environment parents should seek to create in their homes.
3. In what ways can you give each of your children a vision of the purpose and plans God has for his or her life?
4. The Bible makes it clear that those who call upon the Lord are saved — and that applies to small children as well (Luke 18:16, Romans 10:13). How can parents encourage their children to place their trust in Christ without pushing them into a “decision” apart from the true conviction of sin and the drawing of the Spirit?
5. One study indicated that eight out of ten young people who grow up in the church leave the church after high school, never to return. Why do you think so many children grow up in Christian homes, schools, and churches without ever developing a real heart for God?
I’m blogging at Seeds of Faith today. Click here to read this post there.
Hallee
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Dear Hallee: Eating Dairy & Meat

Hallee the Homemaker Helps
What are your thoughts on dairy and meat? I am so confused about it all, there is so much conflicting info out there.
As much as I wish otherwise, there isn’t a simple answer to this question.
In the beginning of the 20th century, Americans consumed, on average, 120 pounds of meat annually. In 2007, the average American ate 222 pounds of meat in a year.
In 1913, the average American consumed 40 pounds of processed sugar, on average, annually. In 1999, the average American consumed 147 pounds of refined sweeteners.
In 1909, Americans consumed, on average, 294 pounds of dairy per year. In 2006, the average American consumed 605 pounds of dairy.
That’s a significant increase in the span of just a few generations!
What changed?

Meat Goes to War
Post World War II brought us burger joints and supermarkets. Supermarkets were stocked with “convenience foods” – processed delicacies designed to make life easier. Cheeseburgers, tacos, deep fried butter on a stick – food became starchy, fatty, salty, and processed. By the 1960′s heart disease was on the rise.
More than 40% of Americans are obese, and over 50% take some form of prescription drug for a chronic disease every day. There are unprecedented amounts of Type II diabetes in children, and we are now seeing hypertension in children in grammar school. Lipitor, a cholesterol medicine, is the most prescribed drug in the world. The generation growing up today will be the first generation of children in the United States to live less time than their parents. 500,000 Americans a year have bypass surgery. Every minute, a person in the United States is killed by heart disease. Three hundred people a day die from cancer. Combined, over one million Americans die every year from either cardiovascular disease (heart attacks, strokes) or from cancer.
We spend $2.2 trillion dollars a year on healthcare – over five times that of the defense budget.
First do no harm … Let your food be your medicine and medicine be your food. ~Hipocrates
During WWII, Nazis invaded Norway. When they did this, they confiscated all of the livestock to feed their own troops. The Norwegians, in turn, were under strict rationing with their sugars and fats. They had to turn to fruits, vegetables, and fish for sustenance.

Heart disease plummeted during the war. When the war was over, it rose back to pre-war levels.

In 1974, China did a massive cancer study – the biggest study ever of its kind (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted And the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, And Long-term Health). 600,000 scientists tracked mortality rates due to different kinds of cancer all over China. Using this study as a guide, in 1980, scientists did a more focused study on 65 rural areas of China and discovered 94,000 correlations between diet and cancer.
The doctor of the future will no longer treat the human frame with drugs, but rather will cure and prevent disease with nutrition. Thomas Edison
What scientists are discovering is that a whole-foods, plant based diet can not only stop the course of many chronic diseases, but can actually reverse them.
One of the benefits is, obviously, weight loss and weight maintenance. 500 calories of natural plant food (cereal grains, vegetables, fruit) will fill your stomach, triggering density receptors (which help your brain determine caloric density) and the stretch receptors (which help your brain measure the volume of food in your stomach), thus allowing you to feel full. But, 500 calories of unnaturally rich or processed foods (think Krispy Creme donuts or Chef Boy Ardee) does not fill our stomach and tricks our bodies into thinking we need to eat more. We almost have to over eat in order to feel satisfied.
Overeating will cause weight gain. Weight gain leads to obesity. Obesity causes blood pressure problems, cholesterol problems, diabetes, stroke, heart attacks, cancers…the list can go on.
But, it’s a balancing act, like everything. Let’s take just cholesterol. Too low of cholesterol, and you are at risk for cancer, mental illness, infections, etc. Too high of cholesterol, and you’re at risk of cancer, heart disease, etc. Cholesterol is found in animal fats. (Some plants have cholesterol, but their numbers are minuscule.)

Is it really "Farm Fresh" if it's homogenized?
Part of my study on this topic included the Bible. What does God say about it? Adam and Eve and their following generations all the way to Noah did not eat meat.
God gave Noah and his family meats to eat — that is the first time eating meat is mentioned in the Bible. With Moses, God specified which meats were clean for consumption. When the Israelites were wandering in the desert, God said to them, “At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall be filled with bread.” God sent quails in the evening and manna in the morning. The father of the prodigal son killed the fatted calf for the celebration of his son’s return. When Jesus appeared to seven of his disciples after his death, they’d been fishing all night, having caught nothing. Jesus told them to throw their nets over one side, and they caught so much fish that they could not even pull the nets up. Jesus met them on the shore and cooked fish for breakfast.
Best I can tell, God approves the eating of “clean” meats.
Milk is used throughout the Bible as a positive substance. Cheese is mentioned. Never is it forbidden. ”He nourished them…with curds and milk from herd and flock…” Deuteronomy 32:13-14. However, the dairy that we have today in our culture is a bastardized version of the kind of dairy my mother had growing up.
Today, cows producing the milk on mega factory farms are not healthy – they don’t wander free in the fields eating grass and making their way to the barn at milking time. They stand in a milking barn their entire lives and eat corn and grain pumped full of industrial grade chemicals (euphemistically called vitamins), steroids, and other hormones. Milk today is pasteurized and homogenized, processes that destroy the vitamins and denature the proteins in the milk.
Raw milk is neither pasteurized nor homogenized; however, in the last 40 years it has become illegal to purchase raw milk in many states. I cannot purchase raw milk here in Kentucky. I can, however, find non-homogenized, low-temperature pasteurized milk. When I cannot get that, I use organic cream and organic fat-free milk and “make” my own whole milk – which is the best I can do with what I have.
Good dairy, raw dairy, free-range dairy, goat dairy — those are good, God given, healthy foods.
What is my take? To what conclusions have Gregg and I come?
As impressive as the study in China was, the standard diet for China is full of pork and shellfish. The same thing goes for the Scandinavian countries – a massive consumption of pork. I’d love to see a study in the same sphere with an area that largely follows a Levitical diet – Israel for instance. Or even a diet that just removes pork – like areas in the Middle East.
According to the studies, plant based, whole food diets prove to be healthier to entire populations. I think another thing to also point out is that there weren’t processed soy products in the Scandinavian countries at the time. So, when the animals were gone, the population was left with sustaining themselves with plant based whole foods. No artificial products, no soy based products, no processed and refined to the point of obscenity foods. And, I think importantly, they increased their fish intake by 200%

Fresh Salmon is a Favorite
I believe that a vegan diet – and that is a diet that is all vegetarian – all plant based with no animal products at all is only a healthy choice when there are no processed and artificial foods, no processed soy-based proteins introduced regularly into the diet. When the consumer is knowledgeable about what to eat to attain maximum protein and nutritional consumption, then it can be a moderately healthy diet. However, we believe that at least dairy is necessary for all around health.
As a society, we consume entirely too much meat and meat products. This became apparent to Gregg and I when we were finishing our Daniel Fast in October and November. I had no real desire to return to eating meat. It occurred to me that I could very happily continue on as a vegetarian if I also ate dairy products.
Gregg and I have spent many hours researching this topic and have concluded that we are going to drastically cut back on our meat consumption. We’ve made a big change and are only eating meat twice a week for breakfast and no more than three times a week for dinner – with at least one of those meals being fish. We feel that this is an incredibly healthy change for our family.

Beef, Lamb, Bison, Chicken, Duck
That said, we only eat good meats – and those meats that are approved in God’s dietary laws. When we purchase those meats, we purchase good meat – grass fed beef, free range poultry, local organic lamb, wild caught seafood. Complimenting the meat are good, whole foods – non-processed, non-refined, whole grains, good-for-you foods.
When we purchase dairy, we purchase good dairy — no raw milk can be sold in our state, but I buy local non-homogenized, low-temperature pasteurized milk. I make my own yogurt. We purchase organic cheeses and local cream.
We do our best to make sure that our dairy products are as good as we can get without making our own (and that will come one day.) When we eat out, we try to stick to vegetarian menus, because we don’t know the sources of the meat and the dairy.
So, the question: Is it okay to eat meat and dairy?
It really depends. Are you buying “Value Chicken” label from Mega-Lo-Mart and serving it with a side of boxed (processed) mac & cheese and frozen cauliflower drowning in processed cheese sauce? Then, no, it’s not really okay to eat that. It’s actually bad for you to eat that.
Are you, one or two nights a week, eating locally raised grass-fed lamb, homemade hummus, homemade whole wheat pita bread, with a side of Greek salad and some organic Feta cheese crumbled on top?
Then, yes, that is very good for you.
Hallee
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Peanut Butter & Jelly Cake
Peanut Butter & Jelly Cake
I made this cake for Gregg’s birthday this year. I’d made his traditional Red Velvet Cake in the form of a cake roll for him to take to work with him that day, so I thought I’d change things up a bit. This was an amazing flavor – it tasted just like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but in the form of a cake! I did not not take pictures of the process, but it’s very simple.
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FOR THE CAKE:
2 cups plus 2 TBS whole wheat flour (I used fresh ground soft white wheat)
1½ cups sugar
1 TBS baking powder
1 tsp salt
⅓ cup coconut oil
⅓ cup natural peanut butter*
1 cup milk
2 eggs
FOR THE FILLING:
1 cup natural or homemade jam* – flavor of your choice (I used strawberry)
1 3-ounce package of flavored gelatin (preferably Kosher) (I used strawberry)
FOR THE ICING:
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
½ cup butter
¼ cup milk
1 cup sifted powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
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Large bowl/mixer
measuring cups/spoons
spatula
small saucepan
2-quart saucepan
whisk
2 8″ round cake pans
wire cooling rack
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Preheat oven to 350° degrees F (120° degrees C)
Grease and flour cake pans.
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Sift together flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Put in large mixer bowl.
Add the coconut oil, peanut butter, and milk. Beat for two minutes on medium speed.
Add the eggs one at a time. Beat for an additional two minutes.
Pour into prepared pans and bake for 25-30 minutes at 350° degrees F, or until toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.
FOR THE FILLING:
While the cake is baking, prepare the filling so that it is cooled and ready to spread.
In a small saucepan, combine the jam and the gelatin. Cook over low heat until the jam is melted and the gelatin is dissolved. Remove from heat and let cool.
When the cake is cooled, place one cake round on the serving plate. Spread the filling on the top, almost to the edge. You likely won’t use all of the filling.
Place the other round on top of the filling.
FOR THE ICING:
Don’t make the icing until the cake is ready to be iced. You need to work fast because it hardens as it cools.
In the 2-quart saucepan, bring brown sugar, butter, and milk to a boil over medium heat, whisking constantly. Boil for one minute.
Remove from heat. Whisk in powdered sugar and vanilla until smooth. Stir gently for three to five minutes or until smooth.
Immediately ice the cake.

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8 servings
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~*~ | |
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*It’s best to use natural peanut butter and jam. Check the ingredient label and make sure that there is no high fructose corn syrup in your ingredients.
I would love to hear any feedback about this recipe. Did you make it? Did you enjoy it? Did you make any adjustments to it?
Hallee
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The Tomato
In December, I had a vine-ripe tomato sitting on my window sill. When I picked it up, the outside felt very bumpy, which was kind of strange. I know this picture is blurry, but maybe you can see the little off-colored bumps along the skin.

When I sliced it open, I was surprised to find that the seeds were growing.

Dozens of seeds had sprouted and were growing inside the tomato.
It was quite odd – I’d never seen anything like that before.
If it hadn’t been December, I would have planted the tomato just to see what ended up happening with it.
Hallee
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When I began blogging, Gregg had recently left and was working in Afghanistan. For almost two-and-a-half years we lived that way — 8,000 miles apart, a few stolen weeks together a year. What that did was open up a whole chunk of time for me – time spent on the computer while I chatted with him instant messages, time spent in video conference with him, or just time with no husband around.
The fact is, blogging is sucking my time away. Instead of waking up early to study my Bible and spend quiet time with God, I’m waking up early and busting myself to get a blog post up for the day. Instead of relaxing in a quiet time with my kids, I’m sitting down with a cup of caffeine and trying to get to my blogging correspondence. Instead of working, I find myself getting involved in social media online.














