Jenny Rae Armstrong

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]