jennifer patel

pioneer woman's tortellini soup I worked my first church potluck soup dinner this past Friday. The different groups of the church take a Friday of Lent and this week was the garden group...which we have belonged to going on three years. I made The Pioneer Woman's tortellini soup and a peanut butter pie. I only have a few rules for making food for other people: 1) Is it easy with relatively few ingredients that can be found at a common grocery store? 2) Do the ingredients sound good? 3) Have I made it at least once, succeeded and enjoyed it? That's all it really takes. My kids like this tortellini soup, therefore it's gold in my book. When I got to the hall, they had long tables set up with power strips and extension cords. There were about 20 crock pots of soups lined up and ready to go. I was assigned to serve my own soup and was put next to a woman I knew from many Saturdays in the garden together. Let's call her Denise (as in " You were at m...

I am all about letting children believe in magical characters like Santa and the Easter Bunny. The one that I was excited about playing but turned out to be a real bummer, was the Tooth Fairy. There are so many obstacles the Tooth Fairy must overcome in order to do her job...light sleeping children, finding the tooth in the dark after your kid has thrown off every cover and pillow on his bed in violent sleep, having cash on hand, where to put collected teeth and really...remembering to do your job...especially when you cozy into bed and are about to fall into a well deserved slumber and right at the last second realize you forgot to get the fu-king tooth. Alex just recently lost tooth #6. I was over it with the Tooth Fairy business by tooth #3 and consciously decided to fall into slumber and figure it out in the morning for #6. Since Alex has been sleeping in like a champ over the break, I woke up and left a note on his white board before he came down for breakfast. He found ...