Southwestern Turkey Tacos

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 3 large garlic cloves, minced
• 3 tablespoons chili powder
• 2 teaspoons dried oregano
• 1 tablespoon ground cumin
• 3 pounds lean ground beef or turkey
• 1 (14.5 ounce) can petite diced tomatoes
• Salt and pepper, to taste
• 1/4 cup cornmeal

Directions

1. Heat oil in a 12-inch skillet until shimmering. Add onion; saute until soft, about 5 minutes. Add garlic, chili powder, oregano and cumin; saute until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add beef or turkey and cook, stirring often, until it loses its raw color. Stir in tomatoes; simmer to blend flavors, about 5 minutes. Add salt and pepper, to taste. Stir in cornmeal; cook, stirring constantly, until it thickens, almost instantly. Cool and refrigerate (or serve warm for dinner as tacos or taco salad).

**I got this recipe from www.allrecipes.com and it's been a hit at our small group!**

Finishing Strong…

As we get closer to the end of our first deployment (married), I had a hard time trying to remember what all of our goals were…that’s probably not a good sign if I can’t remember my goals ;)

So here they are:

     Reading as MUCH as possible

     Learn to sew—FAIL!

     Simplify our home

     Good quality girl time!

     Craft room 

Lifelong friendships…

I have to say the thing I loved the most about deployment (yes, I said it…love and deployment in the same sentence!), is the time I have been able to spend with the girls. It has been such a blessing to have so much quality time with my girlfriends here… and we have all gotten so very close through this, especially going through deployments TOGETHER! Our deployment started off with a good friend, Emily, living with me and that was a sweet 2 months that we were able to share living together and growing deeper in our friendship until her husband came home! We have done so many fun things throughout deployment! Each week most of us girls have a women’s bible study on Monday evenings, small group on Thursdays, and on Fridays we have dinner swap! At dinner swap we all bring a main dish and Tupperware to take leftovers home…genius right? I didn’t think of it ;) Friday nights are known be our crazy fun night! We have 5-7 girls, kiddos, and any of our 5 dogs that want to join! Here are a few pics!

We have also gone on multiple road trips to Austin, visited different churches on Sundays, went to a Women of Faith conference in San Antonio AND one in Dallas, and spent days playing in Salado together! It has been a blast and I am so very thankful for these ladies and the lifelong friendships we have been given.

Women of Faith in San Antonio! 

Thanksgiving 2011

Making our first turkey!  

St. Patrick's Day 2012! 

Women of Faith in Dallas-- February 2012! 

Learning to sew…

There’s not much to say about this…I had ONE sewing lesson with my friend Tori and that was the end of that :/ Epic fail on the sewing goal… Here’s a pic from my first and only sewing experience!

My Love for Reading

This one is sort of entertaining because my hubby has wanted an iPad pretty much since the day they came out…so 2 weeks before he left, he bought one and left it at home. Little did I know, this was just a trick to get my addicted to the thing so he could buy his own when he got home…sneaky hubby of mine ;) And smart…because it worked! I have fallen in love with my Kindle on the iPad and I have read more during the last 6 months than I have my entire life combined! I have even thought about writing a book because I’ve been doing so much reading…no worries though, I think I’ll stick to blogging for now!

Here are some of my favorite books I read:

What Women Fear- Angie Smith

I will carry you- Angie Smith

Holding onto Hope- Nancy Guthrie

Calm my Anxious Heart- Linda Dillow

What’s it like to be married to me? - Linda Dillow

Intimacy Issues- Linda Dillow (Are you noticing a pattern yet? ;))

Kisses from Katie- Katie Davis

Seven- Jen Hatmaker

The Meaning of Marriage-Tim Keller

Life in Spite of Me- Kristen Jane Anderson

Simplifying Our Home

This was a slow process over several months! I slowly went through each room, closet, under each bed, and box in our house and garage! Going through our garage was one of the most physically and emotionally draining project I worked on because it meant continuing to sift through all of my childhood memories with my mama. Over several weeks I went through each box from my childhood (almost!) and consolidated and as hard as it is to even type, threw things away. After it was all over, I had a garage sale and with the money raised, we took all the wives with deployed husbands to dinner at The Melting Pot, which was a blast!

This was a sweet picture I found in the garage of my mama and I...This made my day! :) 

Ladies night at The Melting Pot! 

Clothing Swap to benefit Amazima! 

In the Spring, once I had recovered from the garage sale (lol!) I had a clothing swap at our house where all of the ladies brought their clothes that they no longer needed and everyone “shopped” for new clothes at the swap! Each item bought was $2 and the money was donated to Amazima Ministries in Africa and we were able to raise $150 for their daily feeding program! Check them out: www.amazima.org

Storage Room into Craft Room

This has been a goal since we moved into our house in September 2010… and I am happy to finally say that it has been accomplished! Our master bedroom connects to another small room with another entrance from the hallway and unfortunately when we moved in, it quickly became a storage room because did I mention there is a curtain we can pull closed from our bedroom? Out of sight, out of mind…well, sort of. It still drove me absolutely crazy each time I would walk through the room from our bedroom into our hallway.

Phase 1—Storage Room (specifically ARMY gear storage room)

Phase 2—“Organized” Storage Room (Ha!)

Phase 3- CRAFT ROOM (Entire room not shown b/c I don’t want hubby to see the whole room until he’s home!)

And this is what I've been doing since Trevor left and I cannot wait to welcome my man HOME soon! 

Life verse.

Tonight at bible study we talked about our life verses. We've been reading "Calm My Anxious Heart" by Linda Dillow and one of the questions in the bible study was asking if we had a "life verse"....a verse in the bible that has really spoken to us or been a theme in our lives. Immediately I felt like God was reminding me Psalms 68:6 "God sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land." 

"God sets the lonely in families"...

This verse is special to me for a lot of reasons. Right after my mama went to be with the Lord, Audrey (who I now consider my sister) prayed this verse over me. After praying this verse over me, John and Audrey invited me to move into their home with them for 8 months. This was such a precious time in my life and it is truly what taught me what this verse meant. Growing up with a single mom, it was always just the two of us and as much as I LOVED our girl time, I always longed to have a large family. What God began to show me in my deepest loneliness after she died is that I did have a family, a family that he was beginning to knit together day by day. As a young child I say it was just my mom and I but it wasn't, it was my mom, Marty, and I. Marty and my mom dated for 9 years throughout my childhood and he became the father I never knew. After my mom got sick, he stepped up and truly became my father and even asked to call me his daughter.  In October 2009, I was contacted by my biological father's side of the family, a family I had never known who desperately wanted to get to know me. Although I was hesitant at first, mostly out of the fear of the unknown, I met an entire side of my family that I never knew existed. So not only did the Lord provide me with a father, sister, but now also a side of the family I never knew who loved me dearly. 

When I met my husband we quickly fell in love... literally met in November 2009 and were married by September 2010, I'm not exxagerating when I say quickly ;) I also fell in love with his family very soon after! Just as God had been sewing my story together and placing me in a family, He did the same for my husband as my in laws adopted him the day he was born. Trevor's parents brought home a new baby boy from the hospital and that day and placed him in the only family he's ever known and it is nothing short of a gift from Him. Trevor has incredible parents who know and love the Lord with everything in them and they have become parents to me as well. I am so thankful for you Scott and Kim, we love you! 

We also have countless friends in our lives who we do consider family. My best friend Chelsea and her husband Tanner are one of those couples. I cannot imagine how a friendship could be closer and I love her deeply.  We have gone through highs and lows...weddings and memorials and the Lord has always been the center of our friendship, whether we realized it at the time or not. At 16 years old, Chelsea and I decided to find a church home on our home and that is when I decided to make Jesus my Lord and Savior and was baptized. She is a huge part of my testimony and has been there at every milestone in my life since that day. 

Dale and Quinn were our very first friends at Fort Hood when we were dating, engaged, and married and they have become our best friends. Dale and Trevor have been stationed together in 3 different states, spent 6 months in Iraq with each other, and in 2011 we walked through the birth of their sweet baby girl Lily and all held one another and prayed together the next day when she went to see our Savior. Quinn and I have a friendship that is deeper than most people have in a lifetime and I am eternally grateful for that. We love them so very much.  

I wish I could talk about ALL the people I think of that God has put in my life that are a picture of this verse but there are too many. We have been blessed beyond belief with a small group of friends here at Fort Hood that we truly live life with every single day. Since Trevor has been deployed, I have gotten so close with a group of 4-5 girls who's husbands are also deployed and it is the most authentic community I could ask for...we laugh, cry, grieve, and celebrate together. It is absolutely beautiful. As soon as a I get the "itch" for change and get excited about the idea of moving somewhere new someday, I very quickly am reminded of how thankful I am for right here and right now. We love our life at Fort Hood and I never want to take that for granted because I know how much we will miss it when we do leave sometime in the near future. We are so very thankful to consider all of these people lifelong friends and family, I truly think we have made lifelong frienships who will be scattered all over the world someday.

So this is my life verse because God HAS set the lonely in families and He continues to do so.  The Lord created our family...Trevor and I together as one. He also created our families that we each came from and brought us all together as one family. He has also blessed us with friendships that we will forever consider family. I can honestly say that most of the people I consider family are not blood relatives and that I am thankful that God has placed each one of them in our lives. We even have a "family" wall in our house with pictures of these people I have written about and other than my mama, not a single person we hung on our wall is blood related but they are all what we call our FAMILY! Thank you Lord for setting the lonely in families!