Baking Day 3/26 Recipes and Photos and a Word on Balance

It is Monday night.

I have cleaned up the dinner dishes. I am, as usual, resisting the urge to eat a dessert, while attempting to enter into the delusion that the fruit I am consuming is as delicious as the aforementioned dessert. I am, as usual, not convinced.

The thing I struggle with on Monday nights is this: Monday is baking day. Therefore, I do school with the boys, I bake, I make dinner.... I don't do a lot of cleaning. That's Tuesday. Tuesday I mop, I catch up on laundry, Christopher vacuums. Tuesday night, the house is clean. I like when the house is clean.

But there's a balance to things, you know? I am (Slowly....s-l-o-w-l-y) learning. There are days for cleaning. There are days for baking. There are days when you need to be loving on your kids and your husband, and not baking OR cleaning. Every single thing can't be done every single day.

Balance is good. Tricky, when you like to have order all around you. But healthy, and right. Balance allows you to enjoy the fruits of your labor, instead of just checking items off your "to do" list and filling it up again.

There you have it. My Monday night musings.

Now, for the food!

First thing in the morning (Well, ok, second thing, I had to have my coffee first....) I threw a batch of Eating Well's Southwest Three Bean and Barley Soup into the crock pot. I love having this soup on hand for lunch during the week! 

I like it all packaged up individually, so I can just heat a bowl for a quick meal or snack!

I made a loaf of Easy, No-Knead, 100% Whole Wheat Bread. Well, to be quite honest, I made TWO loaves. The first loaf, I accidentally put into a too-small loaf pan, and it oozed over the sides of the pan into the oven and made a horrible mess!! 

So I cleaned that up, burned my knuckle, and moved on to loaf #2, which thankfully went off without a hitch, like it normally does! Whew!

I bagged up some edamame for snacks and luches:

Baked a batch of Better Than Lofthouse Sugar Cookies- of course, they are supposed to be for lunches, but quite a few were consumed as the day wore on....

Oh YUM.... I made two jars of peanut butter. One plain, and one coconut. I promise I am going to blog the "how to" on these this week- but if you have a health food store near you that sells peanuts in the bulk bins, it is SUPER cost-effective to make your own peanut butter! And awesome, because you can add what you like to it!

The jar on the left is the coconut pb, it costs about $2 to make! The one on the right is plain, it was about $1.50 or so..... both are delish!

Lastly, and I am SO excited about this- I narrowed down my experiments and perfected the Pecan Pie LARABAR!! Oh my.... these are REALLY good!! Recipe to come soon!!! 

Happy baking! (And happy balance!)