Last month, I decided to order this vegetable alphabet pasta from Azure Standard.  It was on sale and looked like something fun for lunch.  I decided to do a product review of it for you!

Not only is this pasta fun…it is also healthy and yummy!  (Hear the enthusiasm.  See the raised eyebrows and cheesy grin.)  They are not expensive (when you’re talking about organic vegetable pasta that is)…and they were VERY easy to make.  We got TWO meals out of this little box of Vegetable Alphabets.  I NEVER get two meals out of one box of pasta. 

Here’s how we enjoyed this Vegetable Alphabet Pasta:

Alphabet Soup

1 pound beef soup bones
1 small onion
3 carrots
10 cups water
sea salt
1 box vegetable alphabet pasta 

Boil beef soup bones, onions and carrots and water all morning (at least three hours) in a pot to make broth.  Remove bones from broth.  Pour in the pasta and sprinkled in quite a bit of sea salt.   Boil the pasta in the broth for about 10 minutes, then lunch is served!

The kids loved it!  Here’s one meal I actually allowed them to play with their food.  If you look real close at the picture below, you’ll see that Asa stuck his name on the edge of the bowl. 

The best part of this meal?   I decided to surprise the kids with my homemade pretzels made into letters too!!  It was one word filled lunch!

You’ve gotta love a personalized pretzel.

Elias was trying out my camera while I made the pretzels.  So here we have the Headless Homemaker…

We filled up on the Alphabet Soup at lunch…then I used the leftovers to make this Alphabet Casserole:

Alphabet Casserole

3 cups alphabet pasta cooked in beef broth (most of the broth should be absorbed in the pasta)
1 pound ground beef, browned with onion
1 cup sour cream
sea salt to taste
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

Stir together the pasta, meat and sour cream.  Salt generously. Spread into a casserole dish.  Sprinkle cheese on top.  Bake uncovered in a 350 degree oven for 20 minutes or until bubbly.

Both the soup and the casserole were very yummy!    (Um, if I do say so myself.)

And, I’m not totally sure about this…but I think we were all just a little smarter after we ate these meals.  At least our vocabulary was enhanced.  

Really. (Absolutely.) (Without a Doubt.) (Enormously.)

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Read more helpful kitchen tips at Tammy’s Recipes!

I have decided to begin doing product reviews here on my blog, since I keep thinking of cool things I want to brag about to you.  Have a product in your shop or on your site you’d like me to review here at Heavenly Homemakers?  Email me! 
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I recently broke down and got something I’ve been wanting for a long time: These very cool Pampered Chef bread baking crocks.

I love these crocks for several reasons. 

1.  I love baking in stones no matter what I’m baking.  Stoneware bakes breads and pizza and cookies wonderfully.  I have a round pizza stone, regular loaf pan stones and a big rectangular stone.   And now I have these cool round baking stone crocks!  I know my food is safe when I bake with stones.
2.  These crocks really produce a nice loaf of bread.  I think it’s something about the way the dough just has to rise upward instead of sideways and upward.  (You now know by that explanation that I’m not a scientist.) 
3.  You’ll find them inexpensively at the Pampered Chef Outlet (the regular catalog doesn’t carry them anymore).  I was so excited to only pay $7/crock.  That’s a great price for stones! 
My favorite reason to love these crocks…
4.  They make awesome round slices of bread.  Which are the perfect shape for sloppy joes or hamburgers.  I LOVE that about these crocks.  And, having round slices of bread…well…that’s just fun!

One or two draw backs to these lovely crocks…

1.  They aren’t the easiest to clean…which really just means that it takes 45 seconds to wash it instead of the 30 seconds it takes to wash a regular loaf pan.  Woe is me.
2.  You have to take the top rack out of your oven to bake the loaves…otherwise your bread hits the top of the oven and gets stuck and you feel like you may never get it out and when you finally do, it looks like this:

Or it’s dented like this:

And we all know that having dented bread is just tragic.

Ooh, and if you want to bake yourself some of this delicious whole wheat bread, you’ll find my recipe here.   I’ll try to do a tutorial for you soon about how I bake bread.  Because if you don’t know how, you really should learn…because it’s not hard and there’s NOTHING like freshly baked bread.  With butter.  Melted all over it.  On a cool fall day.  With a glass of milk.  Ahh….