Taco Tuesday: Tortilla soup

This is one of my favorite soup recipies, Joey and I love it so much that we served it at our rehersal dinner.  It is hearty and has the perfect amount of kick to warm your soul on a cold day. This recipie is addapted from Joey's good friend's mom, the original recipe was very good but I'm not a recipe follower so after making hers once or twice I addapted to the things I commonly had in my house and just threw some other things things in, the result- deliciousness.  

You will need:
1 large onion
1 Jalapeno
2 cloves minced garlic
2  drained cans of Black Beans
1 frozen bag of corn
4 cups of chicken
1 packet of Taco seasoning
1 large can of V8
Stock in a Box (chicken or veg)
4 cans of Rotel
1 T of dried cilantro
1 T ground Cumin
1 T chili powder

Step 1- Chop onion, garlic and jalapeno, saute in a large stock pot on med high heat. (5 Min)
Step 2- Add corn and saute a few more minutes, then add the remaining ingredients
Step 3- Let simmer for 15 minutes or more
Step 4- Serve with chips, cheese,  and sour cream, some times I also add green onions and black olives.

this soup is hearty enough to omit the chicken and have a vegetarian meal.

Kid friendly Christmas Craft

I attempted three times to post this yesterday and each time something screwed up.  I had to stop attempting or I was sure to lose the Christmas spirit. It seemed only appropriate that on the first day of December I post a Christmas craft, but with Joey out of town I had no one to couteract my lack of computer competency.   For all my DIY friends and momma's looking for something to do with your children this one is easy.  I have discoverd that when making this with my class we did it "wrong".  We still ended up with an Ornament, but it would of been smaller and easier to fit on a tree if we had done it correctly.

You will need: about 4 toilet paper rolls or 2 paper towel rolls to make one ornament. In addition you will need two pipe cleaners and optional would be paint and or gitter and we covered ours in Mod Podge to seel in the glitter. 

Step 1- Flatten then decorate your cardboard roll, cover in Mod Podge and let dry.
Step 2- Cut the roll into one inch sections, they should look like little circles.. (this is the step we messed up, we used ten whole rolls for our first set, on our second set we cut them correctly and the look is much more delicate.)
Step 3- Use a hole punch and put a hole about 3/4 of an inch in on each side of the cut roll.
Step 4- Cut about 3 inches off one pipe cleaner and twist it to the other.  Thread the smaller pipe cleaner through the bottom set of holes, thread the larger through the top set of holes.
 Step 5- Bring the small pipe cleaner together and twist creating a circle, then repeat with the longer pipe cleaner.

Now hang your pretty star on the Tree.   I wish I had taken photos of the small stars too, but we did this at school and I only got ones of the large.