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Deviant Devil’s Food

I’m a big fan of cake mixes. Not that I enjoy making them–that does, after all, involve turning on the oven–but if you’ve gotta bake a cake, it might as well be easy. Besides, my kids are quite capable of whipping up a batch of brownies whenever the mood strikes them (or me!). The cool […]

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Chicken Santa Fe

Chicken Santa Fe is probably my second-most requested recipe–just because it’s a simple, flexible meal that is ridiculously healthy. It’s a great way to use up left-over chicken (or turkey!), but if you want to use raw chicken you can just pop everything in the crock-pot in the morning and come home to a finished […]

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Five Minute Meals (or, everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn’t I?)

Anyone who knows me very well knows that cooking is NOT my thing. In fact, I’m not that fond of food in general–I mean, I appreciate it, and I ADORE anything chocolaty, but I if went though the rest of my life eating nothing but Pop Tarts, frozen pizza, Ramen, Honey Smacks, and the occasional box […]

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Living Intentionally

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to live intentionally, to be a good steward of all the things we’ve been blessed with. It’s just so easy to drift through life reacting to circumstances, responding to emotions, and wearing deeper and deeper ruts down the path of least resistance. But God has really been convicting me […]

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It cannot be an ill fortune to have loved a unicorn…

It was a long, busy week followed by a long, busy weekend. And not just normal busyness–it was the sort of busyness that consumes not just your time, but your mind, your heart, your sleep, your…well…pretty much everything. For me, there’s only one sure-fire method for recovering from that sort of busyness: a very long, very […]

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Curses and Cries

Over the last several weeks, my church has been going through the book of Revelations. (Nice light subject matter, right? :-P) A couple weeks ago, we were studying Revelations 16, where angels are pouring out “the bowls of God’s wrath” upon mankind. Now, we don’t necessarily like to think of God’s judgement, or the suffering […]

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Swiftly Sailing Away…

When I first met my friend Margaret, I was about 12 weeks pregnant with my oldest child, and she was about 12 weeks away from becoming pregnant with her oldest child. 🙂 Twelve years and three concurrent pregnancies later (I outdid her with #4!), we are both entering a very different phase of life. She wrote a beautiful […]

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Adventures in the Utility Room, or, How to Make Homemade Laundry Detergent that Doesn’t Leave Pajamas Smelling Like Pee.

A couple days ago on FaceBook I promised a friend my recipe for dirt-cheap, clean-green laundry detergent. (You can view the whole recipe here.) Then another friend inquired about how well it worked, and I was stymied. See, I know how to make homemade laundry detergent. I think it’s a good idea. But I have four boys. […]

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Clean up Your Act

Over the last year or so, I’ve been trying to make restitution for the truckloads of disposable diapers I’ve contributed to local landfills (well, technically, my kids did most of that work) by becoming more environmentally conscious. (Notice I didn’t say “environmentally responsible”–I’ve got a long way to go before I achieve the green seal of approval. But yay […]

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Attention: No Anacondas Allowed!

The cupboard is getting bare, so we stopped by the Poplar Market after church today to grab a few pizzas. It’s a dark little grocery store with the same cramped aisles and pumpkin-orange counter I remember from my childhood, when my grandma would take me there to buy ingredients for her cakes. (It was one […]

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Heard at my House

Clay: *frantic knocking* “Jamie! Jamie! You’ve gotta come help Grant!” My ears perk up as Jamie growls at his annoying little brothers to go away. Grant “Red alert! Red alert!” I run to the great room to find out who’s in life-threatening danger, only to discover it’s Mario, of Mario Brothers fame. Clay dashes to […]

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Remodeling…

I’ll be making some changes around here over the next couple weeks. Hold tight, dear readers, and don’t be freaked out if you log on and find something that looks completely different. Thanks! Read more at http://jennyraearmstrong.blogspot.com.

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Bread, Take 1

So, Chef Clay and I attempted to make bread last night. We used the “basic” recipe from “Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day,” which is a great book. I think. The recipe was super simple–water, yeast, salt, and flour, no kneading involved. But as we mixed it up, I became dubious. It looked…crumbly. My […]

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Balloon Logic

So, when I started this blog about a year ago, it just seemed like “the thing to do.” I was launching my career as a freelance writer, and writers blog, right? I mean, I had been scribbling down random bits and pieces of my thoughts in my LJ account for years, but it wasn’t the […]

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Katie Davis Throws Down the Gauntlet

Well, I was going to write a blog post today, but I stumbled across one that was FAR better than anything I was going to write, and decided to share that with you instead. It has nothing to do with what I was going to blog about, but these challenging words from a twenty-something American […]

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