Happy New Year!!!

I love the first day of a new year! It feels like such a fresh new start for . . . pretty much everything! I have a bunch of goals for this year in my head, but I haven't written them down yet. My plan for this week is to post several specific goals over the next few days so you can see what I'm hoping to work on this year. Then, I'm planning to post at the end of each month and let you know how I'm progressing on those goals. I'm hoping that by doing this, it will help keep me more accountable and focused than I was last year!

We had a really fun New Year's Eve. We had no special plans for the night, so earlier this week I decided to make Chinese food and have a fun family dinner. Of course the kids don't really like Chinese food, but I knew I could use the fried chicken "nuggets" that were going in the sauce for General Tso's chicken, and they would happily eat them with ketchup. So they were basically eating the same thing as us, but just not exactly the same. :) Anyway . . . as I was working on starting supper prep in the afternoon, my friend Gail called and asked if we would like to come over to their house for the evening for games, food, and fellowship. So after supper, we did! They had some of their extended family there too, and we had such a good time. In fact, we figured we would stay for a couple hours and then come home, but we were having SO much fun that we ended up seeing the New Year in with them. :) We played some new-to-us games--Fluxx and a Pictionary card game. We played round after round of that one, and it was a blast! We laughed so much. I love laughing with friends . . . something we need to do more often! Laughter really is the best medicine! :)

Back to the Chinese food . . . we have a good Chinese restaurant nearby, but we don't go there often. We get takeout maybe once a year at the most. And it's actually really cheap for lunch. But we really like Chinese food, so I decided to make our own for last night! I have a great recipe from my sister-in-law for General Tso's Chicken, so that was the main dish (along with plain rice). I also made Hot 'n Sour Soup (Jim's favorite from the restaurant) and egg rolls. I used this recipe for the soup and this one for the egg rolls. They were both delicious!!! It was a lot of work (and a lot of mess) to put together this dinner, but it was a lot of fun. And, it made a lot of leftovers, which we will be eating tonight, along with fried rice. :) Yum! I changed a couple of things in the recipes--I used Italian sausage instead of ground pork for the egg rolls, probably only about half a pound instead of a full pound, and I threw the rest of the cooked sausage in the soup instead of using shredded chicken or pork. I also left out the tofu and sesame oil--I was already buying enough unusual ingredients, and figured the soup would be just fine without those two things. Jim said it turned out very similar to the restaurant version (I'd never had it before) and it was definitely tasty! Easy, too. I'll be making it again, that's for sure.

Well, I need to go so we can get things organized for church tomorrow, and get everyone to bed early tonight! Hopefully you'll see several more posts here over the course of the week, and I'm hoping to schedule time this year to blog a lot more regularly, too. Happy New Year, everyone!