Why I Love Wednesday!

The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying and Start Making
“This is my kitchen. Come on in, but be prepared—it might not be quite what you expect. There is flour on the counter, oats that overflowed onto the floor, chocolate-encrusted spoons in the sink. There is Joey, the husband, exhausted by the thirty-five preschoolers who were hanging on him all day, and he is stuffing granola into his mouth to ease his five o’clock starvation. There are two little girls trying to show me cartwheels in that miniscule space between the refrigerator and the counter where I really need to be.”In her debut cookbook, Alana Chernila inspires you to step inside your kitchen, take a look around, and change the way you relate to food. The Homemade Pantry was born of a tight budget, Alana’s love for sharing recipes with her farmers’ market customers, and a desire to enjoy a happy cooking and eating life with her young family. On a mission to kick their packaged-food habit, she learned that with a little determination, anything she could buy at the store could be made in her kitchen, and her homemade versions were more satisfying, easier to make than she expected, and tastier.Here are her very approachable recipes for 101 everyday staples, organized by supermarket aisle—from crackers to cheese, pesto to sauerkraut, and mayonnaise to toaster pastries. The Homemade Pantry is a celebration of food made by hand—warm mozzarella that is stretched, thick lasagna noodles rolled from flour and egg, fresh tomato sauce that bubbles on the stove. Whether you are trying a recipe for butter, potato chips, spice mixes, or ketchup, you will discover the magic and thrill that comes with the homemade pantry.Alana captures the humor and messiness of everyday family life, too. A true friend to the home cook, she shares her “tense moments” to help you get through your own. With stories offering patient, humble advice, tips for storing the homemade foods, and rich four-color photography throughout, The Homemade Pantry will quickly become the go-to source for how to make delicious staples in your home kitchen.

For the Crafty mom

Artist’s Journal Workshop: Creating Your Life in Words and Pictures An artist’s journal is a powerful creative tool, offering you a safe place to experiment, explore, consider and improve. Artist’s Journal Workshop provides all the guidance, structure and inspiration you need to create a meaningful art-journaling practice. Starting with the question, “What do you want from your journal?” you’ll build a sound journaling concept that will serve your unique creative needs and give you the freedom to practice, play and develop as an artist. Featuring rich visual examples on every page, you’ll receive continual guidance and inspiration from:

• 27 international artists who share pages and advice from their own art journals
• More than 25 hands-on exercises to help you personalize your journal while developing new ideas and techniques
• Journal pages featuring travel sketching, nature studies and celebrations of daily life
• Prompts for visually commemorating life events and milestones
• Support for working through creative doubts and blocks
• A range of artistic styles and perspectives to study and admire
• Instruction for trying your hand at new methods and materials

This is the perfect opportunity for you to begin realizing your artistic potential–one page at a time. Begin the journey today!

For the Romantic mom

Lady Maggie’s Secret Scandal  “Burrowes is an unconventional storyteller who knows exactly how to touch a reader’s heart and reach deep into the soul.”—RT Book Reviews
Lady Maggie Windham Has Secrets  And she’s been perfectly capable of keeping them…until now. When she’s threatened with exposure, she turns to investigator Benjamin Hazlit to keep catastrophe at bay. But Maggie herself intrigues Benjamin more than the riddle she’s set him to solve. As he uncovers more and more of her past, Maggie struggles to keep him at a distance, until they both begin to discover the truth in their hearts…

For the spiritual mom

Let It Go: Forgive So You Can Be Forgiven  T.D. Jakes, New York Times bestselling author of Reposition Yourself, Making Great Decisions, and more than a dozen other titles, now presents this book on forgiveness, demonstrating once again why he is called “a spiritual genius,” a “master of meeting mankind eye to eye,” and one of America’s best preachers.
He understands that he and fellow Christians share spiritual truths “that transcend time and culture and reflect a universal understanding of human nature.” The spiritual truth he explores in Let It Go concerns forgiveness and why it is important for those on the receiving end of wrongful behavior as well as those who commit acts of wrongdoing.

“Forgiveness is a big idea and it works best when it is invested into people who have the courage to grasp the seven-foot-high idea of what’s best for their future rather than the four-foot-high idea of recompense for what has happened in their past,” Jakes writes in Let It Go. This book explores forgiveness as an idea and at the same time offers specific and clear actions for readers who seek to apply the idea in their daily lives. Offenses are a part of life, he says. But conflicts can be resolved and relationships do have a future, if we learn how to forgive. No matter how great or small the injustice, Jakes shows how the matter can be put behind you for the sake of a better tomorrow if you can Let It Go.

What are some of your favorite book gifts for mom?