Good Meals and Home Reno Feels

How about a few good eats?  Here are some things we've been cooking lately...

The best Copycat Panera Broccoli Cheese Soup recipe we've tried so far.  Oh man, it's like a creamy chowder filled with veggies.  Delish!  When in doubt for a side, make beer bread (but please don't use more than 1/4 cup of butter - it's sinfully buttery with 1/4 cup).

The Feast of the Immaculate Conception called for blue jello and whipped cream.  Easy peasy liturgical living, just add anything blue for a Marian Feast Day.

On the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, we eat choco tacos.  It's a favorite tradition, and again, so easy!  When we were checking out, the cashier said "I didn't even know we sold those, but somebody was buying them earlier, and now I need them too!"  It made me so happy to hear somebody else was buying them for the feast day, even if it was just a coincidence :)

We had Butter Chicken for dinner over the weekend (not the Indian variation...this is chicken coated with ritz crackers and baked in butter).  We also made risotto in the Instant Pot for the first time, and it turned out so yummy!  My younger kids didn't like the sophisticated wine taste over their preferable plain white rice, but the adults enjoyed it.  We will be eating and tweaking this Instant Pot Risotto recipe for years to come.  Yum! We finished off the meal with roasted cauliflower and broccoli (might as well roast the veggies while the chicken is baking in the oven anyway!)

We are waiting for our Christmas cards to be delivered so we can send them out, but here's one of the photos I did NOT pick for the card, though I think I may have made the wrong choice.  Ugh.  I don't know, it looked to me like a person was missing on the top right, but now I see it looks like a Christmas tree and everybody's face is pretty cute.  The pressure is just too much, and nobody cares as much as I do, so I need to relax.  Ha!  

We have been working on moving and painting and installing cabinets in the dining room, knocking down a closet to create a bigger mudroom, building a wall, and trying to organize and purge all of the closets and shelves in the house, because ya know, we need MORE to do during these last days before Christmas.  Hehehe, no we just want to get everything done to have a relaxing Christmas break (it's 2 full weeks this year!) so our weekends and evenings have been tiring but productive.  It will all be worth it, and preparing our home reminds us to prepare our hearts for Christ's upcoming birth, so it is fitting during Advent :)  I hope you all are prepping and wrapping and still finding some peace amidst the chaos.