{using ideas from favorite blogs}

If you've been here a while, you may know that I'm a big fan of Google Reader.  If you'd like to know more about why I love it, see the bottom of this post.  I save a lot of great ideas from blogs that I read, but only get around to doing a small portion of the things I'd like to. 

My brilliant, yet unoriginal suggestion to you is to utilize this wonderful information to the betterment of your family and home.

Here are some things that I've done recently that I learned about from favorite blogs:

I made these cute ghost pancakes for our family to eat for dinner one night.  Around here we love eating breakfast for dinner...maybe even once a week!  Along with the pancakes, I tried cooking our bacon in the oven.  Way less mess and it didn't shrink!  We loved it.

(didn't my ghosts turn out cute?)

Yesterday, we made CrockPot Pizza Soup.  It was the perfect chilly fall day and it was so yummy!  My 9 year old daughter made the whole thing.  The only thing I did was cut the pepperoni.  She loved it so much that she wanted me to pack it in her thermos for lunch today.  It is definitely a keeper recipe!  By the way...if you haven't been to that wonderful CrockPot recipe blog, you need to go.  Now.  It is amazing.

(this picture is from A Year of Crockpotting)

For more kitchen tips, go see Tammy.

More about Google Reader: I love that it virtually delivers new posts directly to me from all of my favorite blogs.  P.S. - I have a lot of favorite blogs.  Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the vast amount of wonderful ideas flooding into my reader.  I liberally use the star function in reader to flag posts that I'll want to refer to later.  I also love the fact that I can search by keywords from all of the blogs that I subscribe to.  That way, if I've forgotten where that brilliant idea is to be found, I simply search for it.  Another great thing is that I can view the posts (either in regular delivery or search mode) by the expanded view or the list view.  The list view makes it easy to scan through posts to find the specific one I'm looking for.