It’s Birthday Week again in these here parts, and I find myself in the familiar mix of sentimentality and kitchen overdrive exhaustion.  It happens this time every year for the last several years...

A little more than 5 years ago I was pregnant with our second son.  He was due in the first half of February, and with son #1’s birthday being in the last week of January, I remember thinking “maybe I’ll deliver late, you know, so their birthdays aren’t too close together.”  Plus, for some romantic-vision reason, I loved the idea of having a Valentine’s Day baby.  I am sure it is one of the only times in the history of the world that a pregnant mom actually hoped to deliver late.

Well, our little man G would have no part of my plan.  Without going into all the minutia, G came 4 days before R’s 3rd birthday.  That’s right, he came several weeks early, not late, and that’s how we end up with two birthdays to celebrate in one week.

I love easy recipes, I just don’t always love the ingredients easy recipes use.  Case in point:  using canned soup or seasoning mix, both of which usually contain some pretty funky ingredients that I try to avoid in my cooking.

I’ve shared my homemade taco mix with you before which we use all the time in our home cooking.  But recently I came up with another version of healthy mix that has come in handy:  Ranch Dressing Mix.

This quick mix can be doubled or tripled and stored as needed, or just made in a single batch for a recipe flavor boost.  All the ingredients are natural and the flavors are just as yummy as the kind you can buy in the store, with the bonus of being much less expensive than store bought Ranch Dressing Mix.

Sweet Pea’s Ranch Dressing Mix

Ever since the spring, when our family decided to eat vegetarian for Lent, our meat consumption has decreased significantly. In fact, there are entire weeks when we go without meat, and even my master-meat-smoking-and-grilling husband has loved the way we have transformed our diet.

Really.

R and G love pizza. When I am making out the weekly grocery list and ask them what they would like for dinner during the week, invariably one of them responds, “pizza!” While we love to make homemade dough, I also like to keep it simple on busy nights.

Want pizza in a flash but have no dough? No problem. Just use pita bread as your base. We love Trader Joe’s whole wheat pita bread (we use the large size), as it cooks up crispy and is substantial enough to hold lots of good toppings.

I love Trader Joe’s. Don’t know Joe? My condolences, since I think Trader Joe’s is about the best thing to happen to grocery shopping since the advent of bakery samples.

My cousin, who at the time didn’t live anywhere near a Trader Joe’s store, would from time to time pack his car full of coolers and ice and drive to the nearest Trader Joe’s, which was hours away. He would stock up on all his TJ foods and drive home with his horde. True story.

How was your weekend? Ours was flat out busy. My wonderful parents came last Thursday to help us tackle our many home projects and spring chores before our Easter horde arrived Sunday morning.

The boys were thrilled because our list of things to do included the spreading of bulk mulch:

Well, if Punxsutawney Phil is right, we're in for six more weeks of winter.

If you have caught any of my recent posts, you know that Ohio has been feeling anything but tropical these past few weeks. As February rolls closer to March, my impatience for spring generally hastens and I find myself actually watching the Weather Channel to see if perhaps, just maybe, the seven-day forecast shows a gradual uptick in the temperatures coming on the horizon.