This has been an eventful week.  First, we sent our daughter off to China.  Thank you so much for all of your comments.  I loved hearing about others who have kids overseas and those who have gone overseas themselves.  It’s hard to let our kids grow up, but that’s the goal, right?

We got a surprise phone call from Meredith yesterday morning when she arrived in Shanghai.  She was able to make a Skype call from her phone.  I love technology!

Our family had another hard goodbye this week.  Our wonderful next-door neighbors had to move to Kansas.  We are going to miss them so much.  Our kids played together all the time.  They homeschooled too, so they didn’t think we were weird for homeschooling.  We borrowed ingredients from each other when we needed to.  Someone in Kansas is going to get fantastic neighbors.

Luckily, I still have quite a few neighbors that I borrow from (and they borrow from me too).  I think it’s rare these days to be blessed with so many friendly and helpful neighbors.   What do you think?  Do you have “borrowing” neighbors?

Ingredient Spotlight Highlights

There were so many good recipes shared in I.S. this week – 79 so far and there’s still time to link up yours.  Here are a few that caught my eye:

Italian Sliders from Pocket Change Gourmet look great.  That’s the photo of them at the top of this post.

Amish Cheeseburger Soup from The Better Baker sounds like a winner.

One of my sister’s favorite casseroles when she was young was Chowmein Casserole.  This version from Lisa’s Dinnertime Dish looks great.

This homemade taco meat from Many Makings looks easy and good.

Compassion in Tanzania

I’ve been following along with The Nester on her trip with Compassion in Tanzania.  I loved this post about how she met the young man she sponsors.  

And this one, where she talks about visiting another home of a Compassion child.  This really makes me want to write to my sponsored children more often.

I love how Nester makes a whole lot of friends using a bottle of blue nail polish.

There are more posts and links to the other bloggers who are also on the Compassion trip, but those are enough to get you started.  Go read them.  You’ll be glad you did.

99.9% of all the posts on my site are about food.  I hope you’ll forgive me for taking this post to write about family instead.

My oldest daughter boarded a plane for China this morning.

This is the same child who used to decorate the house for Chinese New Year and couldn’t understand why the rest of us weren’t as excited about the holiday as she was.

This same girl requested Chinese food for every birthday.

She started trying to learn Chinese when she was 10 years old.  She checked out the Chinese/English dictionary and wrote down all the “important” words after we sent her to bed each night.  Then she started studying with a friend from church who speaks Chinese.  Shu Mei taught her for several years and she’s taken other Chinese language classes.  [Read more...]