Thursday, March 26, 2009

Crock Pot Roast Tips and Tricks for a Perfect Roast Every Time!

Pot roast #7Image by shanta via Flickr

It doesn't matter if you are getting ready to cook a pork, beef or even venison roast. There are some basic tricks that will make the end result absolutely delicious. Roast is a great crock pot meal because not only is it delicious the first time around it can be repurposed in so many different ways, so the leftovers never go to waste.

You can make a well balanced meal out of roast with veggies you probably already have sitting in the kitchen. Potatoes, carrots, onions and green beans go great with roast. Make sure you cut your potatoes in equal size pieces, so they will cook evenly. You can add some potatoes to the bottom of the crock pot, since they take the longest to cook. You can even make up a packet of gravy and add it to the potatoes at the bottom. Add your carrots around the edges of your roast. Top your roast with the onions to keep them from turning to mush. If you want to add a splash of color add your green beans about 30 minutes before your cooking time is up. This will keep them from getting mushy.

How to season a roast is completely up to your personal taste. It can be as simple as adding a packet of onion soup mix. Another easy option is adding some cream of mushroom soup. If you prefer a more Italian flavored roast simply grab your Italian seasoning mix and sprinkle your roast liberally with it.

No matter what spices you choose to season your roast you can add dry seasoning in at the beginning of cooking time. It will work just fine. If you are going the fresh route for your seasoning and are using fresh herbs I suggest you wait until the last hour of cooking to add them. Fresh herbs quickly flavor the roast and are best left to the end.

So how long are you going to cook this roast? Generally you can count on at least 6 to 10 hours for your roast to cook. If you look at the cooking directions on your roast packaging you can easily convert the cooking time in the oven to the crock pot. If it recommends cooking it in the oven for 50 minutes to 3 hours you are looking at 4 to 6 hours on high in the crock pot or 8 to 18 hours on low in the crock pot.

Because the roast has to cook so long makes it a perfect meal to cook while you are gone at work. Yes, you can cook a roast in the middle of the week. In fact, you can do it quite easily. Starting with a frozen roast will minimize the chances of overcooking your roast while you are gone. You can even put it all together in the crock the night before. Just cover the crock with plastic wrap and set it in the fridge. You can easily uncover the crock and set it in the crock pot in the morning. Then all you have to do is set it and forget it.

Eating at home is a great way to connect with your family, as well as keep them healthy. You know exactly what goes into the food you eat. You may think of roast as a Sunday meal, but with a crock pot it is now so easy you can have it any day of the week.

Pot roast is not the only new weekday food for your rival slow cooker. You can find more tasty crock pot roast recipes as well as other crock pot recipes at http://best7quartcrockpot.itsawahmlife.com Get your own completely unique content version of this article.
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

New Product Launch

I never really imagined myself, when I started this whole internet marketing thing, as a product owner, but here I am with 3 products to my name and more on the way.

I have to say it's way more fun than I thought it would be. It's such a rush to have an idea and then create something out of nothing. After my first product launched I would think back and be like dang, 2 weeks ago this was just a conversation in instant messenger, and now here it is. Real and live. That was LearnItStepbyStep.com a membership site where we give squidoo marketing help. It's based on One Week Marketing by PotPieGirl.

Well actually that was my second product. My first was Keyword Research Revealed. That one took longer to put together and get the courage to launch. I did it on my own and so it was a little scarier, and it was my first product. It was certainly a confidence booster when I started getting rave reviews though. :)

Over the weekend we (my partner at LearnItStepbyStep.com, Andrea) launched a new product. It's basically a niche in a box. You get niche keywords, content to go with the keywords and even products to promote in your niche. It's a really great way to find niche ideas and get your niche websites done quickly.

It's so crazy how once you do one product more and more product ideas just come rushing forth. I'm loving my work from home business. It's taken me longer than I thought but I have finally reached a monthly income that beats what I was making at my J-O-B. The thing is it's pretty much residual too, so whether I take the day off to take Hanna to the zoo or if I sit and work all day I still get paid.

This is one vision that is coming to fruition. :) I love that.
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Friday, March 13, 2009

Make Your Own Recipe Book!

You might wonder why you need to make your own recipe book when there are already tons and tons of cookbooks available, both in the stores and online. You probably already have tons of recipe books on your bookshelves I bet. How many recipes do you use out of each of those books? What if every recipe in a cookbook was something you wanted to make, a recipe your family would really eat?

A Grandma's Recipe Cookbook

Many families have handed down recipes through the generations. Usually though prized possessions they are not all that well cared for. The ink may be fading, the recipe may have food on the card, especially if you use them a lot. You may find some family members have recipes others don't. What an amazing gift to your family, to gather up all the family recipes and put them together in a beautiful hard bound book.

My Picky Family Favorites

Each week it gets a little harder to create a menu for my family. My husband is a picky eater. I can't always remember if he liked or didn't like a particular recipe I have tried. I usually go through the computer in search of something good, and end up losing the recipe or the ink gets smeared and I can't read it when I finally find something he will eat. I would love to make my own recipe book of recipes I know he will actually eat.

Chicken Favorites

Trying to stay fit and healthy includes eating more chicken in our house. My husband is not a huge fan of chicken so I'm always on the lookout for new chicken recipes. Some fair well, and some fall flat. It would be great to make your own recipe book filled with chicken dishes I know we are going to eat. It's such a waste to buy a cookbook and find three quarters of the recipes are nothing we would ever eat.

Seasonal Favorites

I definitely cook differently depending on the seasons. In summer it's lighter fare, and non cooked things when I can get away with it. Winter brings out the crockpot and warm hearty meals. Problem is I can never find my favorite winter recipes after 3 seasons of non use. A cookbook combining all my seasonal favorites would be fantastic.

As you can see creating your own cookbook has a lot of advantages. Recipes are so plentiful, and for those of us who love to cook, like me can have tons and tons of them around. Cookbooks made specifically for my tastes and recipes I know my family is going to like would be fantastic.

Do you want to make recipe book? It's a simple 3 step process. Using this simple system you can make your own recipe book and have it sitting on your bookshelf in no time flat.
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

4 Ideas to Make Your Own Recipe Book

Why go to the time and effort to make your own recipe book? You probably have plenty of recipe books on your bookshelf already. Let me ask you, how many recipes do you use out of each of those cookbooks? Can you find the recipe you need when the time comes to use it? What if you had a book of recipes and you knew your family would eat every recipe in there? Would that make life easier?

Generational Cookbook

Many families have handed down recipes through the generations. Usually though prized possessions they are not all that well cared for. The ink may be fading, the recipe may have food on the card, especially if you use them a lot. You may find some family members have recipes others don't. What an amazing gift to your family, to gather up all the family recipes and put them together in a beautiful hard bound book.

My Picky Family Favorites

Every week I try to make a menu for our family, we're trying to eat at home more. The problem is my husband is a picky eater. I usually look online for new recipes and try a couple new things each week, with our family favorites mixed in. Sometimes my new recipes are a hit, sometimes he doesn't like them at all. It would be great to have a cookbook of his favorite recipes. It would be even better to add the new "hits" in as the year goes on. After a years time I could have a whole book of recipes I know he's going to eat. What a time saver that would be.

Chicken Favorites

We eat a lot of chicken in my house. My husband is not a huge fan of chicken so I have to keep coming up with new and interesting (and tasty) ways to keep him eating chicken. It would be great to have a solely chicken cookbook, of recipes that our family likes and will eat. You could do this with any type of food, it certainly wouldn't have to be chicken. We also eat a lot of venision, it would be nice to have a wider range of recipes for that, and not have to look through a bunch of different books to find the one recipe I really like but can't remember which book it's in.

Seasonal Favorites

I definitely cook differently depending on the seasons. In summer it's lighter fare, and non cooked things when I can get away with it. Winter brings out the crockpot and warm hearty meals. Problem is I can never find my favorite winter recipes after 3 seasons of non use. A cookbook combining all my seasonal favorites would be fantastic.

As you can see creating your own cookbook has a lot of advantages. Recipes are so plentiful, and for those of us who love to cook, like me can have tons and tons of them around. Cookbooks made specifically for my tastes and recipes I know my family is going to like would be fantastic.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

An Epiphany Leads to Subliminal Software

Cover of "The Answer: Grow Any Business, ...Cover via Amazon

A few weeks ago I had a parenting epiphany. If you want to read all about it you can check out my post on my other wahm blog. I don't want to rehash the whole thing here, but I do want to say this epiphany has really had me looking at my thoughts and beliefs and how they affect my day to day being and parenting.

It's getting pretty heavy here lol.

I have been a long time believer in the law of attraction, long before The Secret came out in fact. I have been able to manifest many things in my life, including cars (3 as a matter of fact), money and even my daughter was a manifestation.

I have had some things that have troubled me, and I have come to believe it is completely because of underlying beliefs I have. I have used affirmations most of my life, and have not always found that they work as well as I would like them to.

I think that is because when I just say affirmations I'm using the conscious half of my brain, and it's the part that keeps saying "uh uh, that's not gonna happen, no way you can have that", and that's keeping those messages from getting to the nonconscious part of my brain where all my beliefs and habits are held.

If you think I'm crazy I'm not. I just finished reading John Assaraf's new book called The Answer, and answer it did. It is such a cool book. It's about the law of attraction, yes, but it is soo much more. He goes into a lot of detail about the "Vision board story". Here's a quick video about it if you don't know what I'm talking about.



It is completely science based, it talks about the brain and the way the brain works, it brings in recent scientific studies on how the brain works, and how beliefs and habits work. It's wicked cool (yes, I'm a child of the 80's and someday I'm sure I'll embaress Hanna with wicked cool).

It is written in terms of creating your dream business but all the information it contains can easily be generalized to any area of your life. It also gives a step by step system to changing your thoughts and beliefs, which I thought was super cool.

One of the suggestions it made was using subliminal affirmations, which are given directly to the nonconscious part of the brain where your beliefs are held and where they need to be changed. I picked up MindZoom subliminal software after checking out a bunch of different options. It had everything I wanted in a subliminal software program and so far, I am seeing some differences.

These are not over the top drastic differences, and I haven't won the lottery but I can feel changes occuring. I am much more patient, and I seem to not get bothered so much by the little things. This started happening after my epiphany, but I'm seeing it much more since I started using my software and it seems to be coming from a much deeper place now. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's kinda how it's feeling.

I will keep you up to date on how this whole thing is going. If you want to see my tips for choosing the right subliminal software take a look, my MindZoom subliminal software review is there too.
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]