Well it's Thursday again and I had a lot to do. Had to find Eva a costume for Halloween, since her school's Fall Festival is tomorrow, and I had to find sweat suits for the boys to match the knight accessories I found at the Dollar Tree. I was hungry for tortellini, but couldn't find it anyware, so I did bow tie pasta with ham and peas in an alfredo sauce.  The sauce I make is easy peasy!!

Philadelphia Cream Cheese Alfredo Sauce

Ingredients
1/2 cup butter
1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese   ( I used light)
2 teaspoons garlic powder
2 cups milk   (I used 1 3/4 cups to make it thicker faster)
6 ounces grated Parmesan cheese
1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper

DIRECTIONS
1.  Melt butter in a medium, non-stick saucepan over medium heat. Add cream cheese and garlic powder, stirring with wire whisk until smooth.
2.  Add milk, a little at a time, whisking to smooth out lumps. Stir in Parmesan and pepper. Remove from heat when sauce reaches desired consistency. Sauce will thicken rapidly, thin with milk if cooked too long. Toss with hot pasta to serve.
3,  I had ham steaks from my S.H.A.R.E. order, so I took one out, thawed it out, cut it into bite size squares and put it with the pasta.
4.  I took a bag of frozen peas and threw them into the pasta pot after the noodles were done. I turned off the heat and let them sit in the water for a couple of minutes while I was doing the ham.  Then I drained the peas well and added them to the pasta.  Then I gently folded everything together until the sauce had coated everything.



BREAKFAST:  I didn't feel like cooking this morning, so I cheated and served the trips Pigs in a Blanket from Schwans. Eva won't eat them because of the sausage inside, but it's perfect for the trips (and me!)

AFTER SCHOOL SNACK: I learned my lesson from last week. They obviously didn't have enough to eat at 3, so by the time we left swimming, I had 4 whining kids the whole long 30 minute ride home!!! This week, I took sandwhich containers for each child and put in them:
            1 Bean and cheese burrito (cut in 1/2" sections for the trips)
            2 Oatmeal cookies (from scratch, so they had whole wheat and less sugar)
            1 apple, cut into pieces (only for the trips. Eva has a tooth loose, so she won't eat apples!)
               a reg muffin paper cup of mini carrots
            1 candy corn pumpkin
And it was a success! The trips made it through the swimming lesson in fine spirits and still ate dinner.  So I'll be looking into my saved bento recipes to come up with more ideas!!

As if I wasn't busy enough, I baked a Pumpkin Spice Bundt Cake for the Cake Walk at Eva's school's Fall Festival on Friday.  And I'm finishing some Pinkalicious Cupcakes (strawberry cake, pink strawberry icing, pink sprinkles) for the Bake Sale at the Fall Festival. If you're not familiar with the story of Pinkalicious, you don't have a 6 yr old girl in the house, lol!!