Getting Ready

I wrote this on Sunday, thought I hit post, but apparently saved it as a draft. I'll share it anyway. 

So many thing have happened since my last post.  The idea of putting them all down is overwhelming. And it would be quite a long post.  So I'll start with where we are now. 

Life has been going by at a dizzying pace. I have been caught unprepared more than once recently.  So today, I'm getting prepared for the upcoming week. Hopefully having spent a day doing some cleaning, laundry and prep cooking will keep us from scurrying around at the last minute trying to find something quick to make for supper or school lunches.

This morning I took a bit of time and made a big batch of meatballs and a couple meals worth of chicken strips to put in the freezer.  I also put fresh cut up pineapple in individual containers and froze a pan of brownies. Our bases are now covered for keeping meal prep the rest of the week quick and simple.

Fruit to go.  Cut up pineapple and some cinnamon applesauce for school snacks.

The meatballs are just my standard semi-recipe. Most of the measurements are estimations, sorry, I'm one who eyeballs most things.

1 lb. Ground beef
1.5 lb Ground pork
2 eggs (the one I picked was a double yolker)
1/4 cup milk
2 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
Dry minced onion
Garlic powder
Savory herb rub
Salt & pepper

Mix it all together with your hands.  Put golf ball size meatballs on a parchment lined baking sheet (with sides) and bake for about 30 minutes, turning halfway through.

The shape of the meatballs is almost as exact as the recipe ;)

The chicken strips are almost as complicated.

Boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into strips
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1 cup flour
Salt & pepper
Savory herb rub
Paprika
Oil for frying

Mix milk & egg in one pie plate.  Mix flour and seasonings in another.  Roll the chicken strips in flour, then dredge through the egg mixture, then back through the flour.

Place in a heated skillet (the oil should already be in there and hot).

Fry til golden brown.  They don't need to be cooked through, since you'll be reheating them and they will finish cooking then.

Drain on paper towels.

The chicken strips are as uniform as the meatballs.  I like to think of them as "rustic" and "home style".

After the chicken strips and meatballs were done, drained and cooled, I put them in Ziploc bags. I popped them in the freezer and when I'm in a pinch for supper on the fly, I can pull them out and whip up a couple quick sides. And done. Onto spelling words or whatever comes my way.

I took a pan of brownies I made a few days ago and cut them into squares to go in the freezer as well.  They weren't disappearing as quickly as I thought  and I didn't want them to go to waste. I'll pull those out later on too.

The whole gang all set and ready to go.  There were 2 brownies that didn't fit.  I had no choice but to eat them.

The last thing I did before I threw everything in the dishwasher was to go through my little bin in the fridge where I keep single serve stuff for school lunches and tidy it up a bit.  I threw the little containers of pineapple and some applesauce in there so it's ready for the quick morning snack grab.

The fridge "snack bin".  Yogurt, cut veggies & fruit and cheese sticks live in here.  And sometimes, juice boxes & pudding cups.

Like I said, lots going on here lately as winter is finally releasing it's grip.  Here's hoping for a smooth week.

Happy Springtime Sunday!

Winter Wrap-Up: Part Two

The next thing I crossed off my list, finally (!) was to get all my recipes in one place.  I started a recipe binder about 13 or 14 years ago and it has been an ongoing process ever since.

My original binder was pretty simple. A one-inch binder with the cover that you can customize, each recipe on it's own page, a title page for each category.  Well, then I got more recipes.  Pretty soon they didn't all fit in a one-inch binder anymore.  So I got a bigger binder.  Then Pinterest was invented.  Now, my recipes don't fit in that binder anymore either.  Suddenly, I had recipes stuck to the fridge, inside the cabinet doors, in a file folder and stuffed inside the covers of the binder. So I started a second volume.

In case this sounds like a lot of work and you wonder why on earth I would do this, there are two reasons.  First off, I screw up every single thing I make off a standard recipe card.  I blame the tiny print and all the flipping back and forth.  Secondly.  I'm really OCD about organization.  I like to know where my stuff is at all times.

Here's my original binder.  

And my original dividers.  Not much dividing happening at a glance, but it was the best I could come up with at the time.  (Pretend there aren't tabs peeking out from behind.  I'll get to that in a minute.)

The new dividers. (I totally stole this idea from I Heart Organizing, an awesome blog for compulsive organizers like myself.) I kept the old ones too because I still like them.  This gives me an at-a-glance way to head to the right section of the book.  And these dividers have these neat pockets in them for my loose paper recipes.  

Volume Two.  I had lots more recipes for goodies than I thought.  Clearly, there are no diabetics in my house and we are not on any sort of low carb or paleo diet.   Give me Bread!  Lots of Bread! 

 This is how I set up the second volume.

Some of my favorite pages. Just to give you an idea of what the inside of the books look like.

Natalie likes to make pages now too.  

She brings her own stickers and ideas to the table and creates away!  This is one of her pages.

 I mentioned the cool pockets in these tabbed dividers earlier.  I like these because I have lots of recipes cut out from magazines or printed off of blogs.  I don't automatically put all of them permanently in the book.  I make them for the family.  Then I ask if it's a make again meal or a not so good meal.  If it gets a make again rating, then I make it it's own little scrapbook page in my book.  If not, then I toss it and pretend it never happened.  

The tabbed dividers are made by Avery and I got mine at Wal-Mart.  The pages inside the book are all inside regular old clear plastic page protectors of various brands.  

It All Started With A SIMPLE Plan...

Today is my half day at work.  I have the morning at home all by myself.  

(It's not as glorious as I thought it would be to tell you the truth.)

I thought I'd give the house a quick once over since it is guaranteed to stay that way for at least 7 hours until everyone gets back home.  Shouldn't take me more than an hour. Tops.

I said to myself, "Self, where should I start?"  

"The kitchen" I said.  "It'll be quick" I said.  Just a few dishes.  And whip up some more ranch dressing mix to get the empty jar off the counter.  Easy peasy.

But then, I decided I wasn't super in love with the ranch dressing mix recipe I used the last time and maybe I should find a new one.  There are a million of them on Pinterest.  No problem.  I found one in a reasonable amount of time.  So, I'll just pull out the ingredients and whip this up.  Lickety split.  Over and done, right. 

 Wrong.  I found a few half containers of the same herb or spice and decided that would never do so I combined them.  Then I found odds and ends baggies of bulk spices I bought along the way and felt compelled to put them in nicely labeled glass jars.  Then I sorted everything back into its proper bins and went to put it away. 

 But the shelves were dirty.  Can't have that now.  So, I wiped off the shelves and rearranged everything.

OK, now it is an hour later and I still haven't completed my super easy ranch dressing mix.  Seriously.  I'm annoying myself right about now.

The recipe said to grind the spices together for a smoother dressing/dip.  So, out to the shed to pull out my newly acquired 1972 food processor so I can grind my ranch mix.  That part goes pretty quickly and without incident.  But then it looks like this recipe makes more than will fit in my original jar.  So, back to the shed for a bigger jar.  I pour the nice ground up herb packed ranch powder into the jar only to find out that it really wasn't that much after all and it will fit back into its original container.

Now, nearly two hours in, I have my little jar of ranch dressing powder complete, a nice clean spice cabinet and my second batch of dishes done for the day.  

I probably won't get the whole house done today.  Just a hunch...

The Great Spending Freeze

We are twenty-six days into our 31 day spending freeze.  I have been reading about it a lot and wanting to try it.  There is a handy dandy printable guide/worksheet/list (you know how I love a good list) at Living Well Spending Less.

I talked it over with Matt and he agreed to do it.  We went into it knowing that we had to plan for a wedding and a graduation.  We had just been to Sam's Club and stocked up on toilet paper and a few other things and figured we could totally do this. 

We knew that "spending zero" as in no dollars at all outside of bills was not going to happen.  We still have to buy feed for our critters, and a few basics like milk and bread.  I've been keeping every receipt for over 3 weeks to be able to tally up exactly how much we spent in the last month. 

The rules have been pretty straight forward.  No grabbing a pop/snack  at the gas station.  No Starbucks, no rummage sales, no visits to the greenhouse for great end of season deals on annuals.  I did barter for some new perennials this year from a local garden exchange group on Facebook, so that's cool.  We have stuck pretty close with not buying groceries other than perishables.  Funny thing is that we still have several meals worth of meat in our freezer and enough canned peaches to last until the Rapture.  Otherwise, side dishes are requiring more creativity.  I tried a brown rice/quinoa pilaf night before last.  (A friendly tip, brown rice takes far longer to cook than quinoa.  You might want to give the rice a head start.)

We have been pretty careful up until this past weekend. See, what we failed to plan ahead for was the 4th of July.  Independence Day is a pretty big deal in our hometown.  Everybody turns out for the festivities.  We didn't spend a lot (we usually don't anyway) but, we still bought some things.  Like $5 arm bands for the kids to go to the bouncy houses (unlimited jumping for 2 days).  And the kids each got a small item from the flea market.  We also went to a BBQ/birthday party at our friend's house. I don't know why I didn't set aside a little bit for this each week up until now.  It's not like July 4th is this brand new holiday or that I didn't know the kids' birthday party was going to be this weekend.

Some things I have learned from this experience:  I spend way more money than I thought on impulse purchases.  Random crap that I didn't need when I went to the store, but suddenly couldn't leave without.  We actually do make enough to be putting money into savings every month.  I truly didn't realize this before, even though I have always had a basic budget.  It seemed like something always "came up" and we'd just make it through the month.  This challenge comes with budgeting worksheets so you can write everything down and see exactly where your money is going.  Along with seeing that we have money for savings every month, I also regained hope that we'd be able to do some of the things we want to do to our house.  I also learned that I like iced coffee made at home, and it costs way less than buying it anywhere.

One of the other things that is part of this challenge is a full house clean/de-clutter/organize.  I printed the checklists, but did not do all of them.  I did do the bathroom one and threw away a bunch of old stuff out of there.  Otherwise, there isn't a whole lot of homeless stuff floating in our house.  We're both way too particular about keeping things put away and not keeping stuff that has no purpose. 

I did come up with a few things to sell as per the challenge.  Not a lot (see above), but some.  I also came up with some free things to do.  As it happens, our local library has free passes for several area attractions so I picked up some today when we made our weekly visit.

Now that our challenge is almost up, I'm really getting excited to go grocery shopping. I'm also wondering how long until we could feasibly do this again.  How often do people have "no spend" months?  I think I'd like to do this again sometime in the winter.  I wonder if my family would think I had really lost it if we made this a quarterly event.

While we didn't make a month without spending any money, we did do pretty well.  So, I'll call it a success.  Does anybody else out there do a spending freeze from time to time? 

Speed Cleaning and Mud Season

Well, its full on Mud Season here.  I don't know if other parts of the country experience this blissful time of year when the snow is melting but the ground is still frozen so the runoff gathers in every possible nook and cranny turning all unpaved ground into a big dirty sponge, but that is what its like here right now.  The moisture is great and I'll take this over howling wind and subzero temps any day (except maybe Christmas).

What Mud Season means for us is a lot of extra dirt tracked into the house and a ton of wet filthy laundry.  That said, I decided yesterday that I didn't want to spend my whole day off while the kids were at school cleaning house.  So I figured I'd try this whole speed cleaning thing that's all the rage on Pinterest.  So, I set a timer, started in one room and worked my way through the house.

I started in the kitchen.  Its the entry point of the house and gets the dirtiest on a daily basis.  I set the timer for 15 minutes, filled a sink full of hot soapy water and got started.  Here's the thing.  The dishwasher was full of clean dishes from the night before.  So, before I could start cleaning up the morning's mess, I had to put away all the clean dishes.  I also had just come in from the chicken coop and had a dozen fresh eggs to clean and box up.  By some miracle, I managed to get almost completely done when the timer went off.  Except the floor.  I was really praying nobody stopped by unannounced at this point because it looked like I could plant crops on that floor.

Next was the dining room.  Easy peasy.  In fact, I had extra time in there.  I went through all the rooms except the bathroom, because it needs a good deep clean.  Shoes and clothes aren't the only filthy things around here during the aforementioned Mud Season.  And we have hard water.  Great combo.

So, anyway, after going through all the rooms but one, allowing 15 minutes each for folding and putting and putting away laundry, I was sweaty and my house did look pretty good.

I enjoyed it for approximately 20 minutes until it was time to leave and pick up kids from school.

Now, a mere 24 hours later...

There are 3 loads of laundry to be folded, wet rugs in the bathroom, unmade beds, dirt tracks in the kitchen and more dirty dishes.

And I ask myself, what's the point?

The point is that I can't stand a mess.  And I like to have a plan.  This speed cleaning thing probably works better when you're not trying to catch up on a whole weekend's worth of housework and laundry.  It probably also works better when there's not 30 pounds of dried caked mud on things.  Overall, it was a success and I'd do it again.  It was nice to focus on one room at a time and not run around like I have the worst case of ADD in the world.

I could probably beat the pants off of my cleaning time today.  But, I'm not going through the whole house again.  I really need to get at the bathroom before people start to think they've mistakenly landed in a sketchy gas station.  Besides, the rest of the house is still much cleaner than it was yesterday.  Good enough for now.

If you'd like to read more about "the plan" here's a link to the blog I got it from.  She has lots of other great ideas by the way.  Living Well Spending Less Blog

Treasure Hunting

  It is full on rummage sale season around here.  The not so great part is that the big rummage sale days in my town are days that I work.  Fortunately, I wind up with a few hours to kill in town each week.  And sometimes when I'm really lucky, there is a sale close to my work that I can check out on my lunch break.  It has been a good couple of weeks of thrifting.

There are so many things I love about rummaging/thrifting.  I love to look for unique things.  Maybe they were very average household items in their day, maybe they're a one of a kind creation..  I like to take these things and give them another life in our home.

While overly theme-y canned decor isn't my thing, I think I have come to have a more defined style.  I know what I like and what I don't.  This is a huge help when trying to find an item for a certain function. I like certain styles of things, so I no longer buy the first cheap thing I find.  I wait until I find one that I'm going to want to look at every day. As you can see, I kind of have a thing for enamelware and vintage linens.

I've been wanting a vintage kitchen scale for quite a while.  Every so often, I need to measure produce by weight, and it would be nice to have a measurement when packaging meat, instead of just eyeballing what is a pound.  I found this snazzy one for $15.  This is the highest ticket item I've bought in a long time, but so worth it.  I got the cute little beehive that is sitting up on it for $1.25 at the same shop.  I just love that place. 

Sorry this isn't the best picture.  Oddly,
this was a hard thing to photograph.

The purchase of the scale led to a total revamp of my kitchen storage situation.  See, it didn't really fit on my counter like I had hoped it would, so I had to come up with plan B.  Plan B turned into clearing the top of our fridge, cleaning it (you know how they get that weird gunk on them), and putting out some of my other items that had been stored in a cabinet and moving the other stuff to the cabinet.  The top of the fridge has been a real eyesore forever.  I have no idea why I didn't do this about five years ago.  This concept isn't original.  Obviously I'm not the only person who decorates the top of their fridge with this kind of stuff, but it is actually very functional.  And, it looks a lot better than having our lunch pails and electric griddle up there.  This just makes me smile when I walk by it.  Best of all, I spent next to nothing to put this together.  All this stuff was either a gift or was purchased at rummage sales or thrift shops. Oh wait, I lied.  See that wooden jobbie the squirrel basket is sitting on, that's from The Pampered Chef.  It is a stand for mounting an apple peeler.  It was taking up space in the cabinet, so I decided it could be a stool for Matt's squirrel basket (yes it is my husband's basket.  It was a cheeky birthday gift from his sister).  Even though its all pretty up there, it is still the place where our bread goes and where we stash the candy away from little hands.

This nifty little dish is a piece of vintage Pyrex.  It originally had a ribbed glass top and was part of their refrigerator collection.   I found it at Goodwill.  No lid, but I liked the size and color of it so I got it anyway.  It is a great place to keep the plug for my sink and my scrubbies.

This apron was too cute to pass up.  It was 99 cents at Goodwill.  I bought it a while ago and wasn't sure what to do with it.  Lucky for me, Dion gave me a great idea to hang it on a vintage hanger.  We found this gem the on the same treasure hunt as the scale.  It has an advertisement on it for the E.R. Moore Company in Chicago and set me back a buck and a half.  They hang in the laundry room.  Don't they look cheerful?

It has been great to have all my little treasures find homes. Finding cool stuff is only part of the fun.  Figuring out just how its going to fit in the house is the real adventure.  Its even better when one item brings together a display of stuff that has otherwise gone unseen.

Have you found any treasures lately?

The Mystery of the Mushy Potatoes

So, I have this problem.  I can't seem to keep potatoes for more than a week.  Aren't these supposed to last and last in cool, dark conditions?  I buy small bags of potatoes, 3-5 lbs, so that they will get used up fairly quickly, but just the other day, I reached into the potato/onion bin for a few spuds and found a smelly, squishy, nasty rotten mess where my week-old red potatoes should have been.  This is not the first time this has happened to me. 

At first I thought it was because I was keeping them in the plastic bag they came in. So, I started putting them in a wicker basket on the bottom shelf of my pantry cupboard, next to the onions.  Its a dark cool place and the wicker basket should allow enough ventilation.  Nope, still had mushy potatoes. 

The last time I cleaned/organized the cupboard, I put the onions in this basket too.  Seems logical right?  Not only did this not help the mushy potato problem, it made it worse.  (Here's where it becomes apparent that I am a natural blonde.)  I thought I was buying defective potatoes. 

Then I was talking to my friend the other day, complaining about having to throw out half a bag of potatoes because they were  rotten.  I was ranting about the quality of the potatoes at the grocery store and how there's no reason in the world they should rot so quickly, you know since I keep them in a cool dark cupboard and my onions are right in the same basket and they keep just fine.  That's when she told me that you shouldn't store potatoes and onions together because onions give off gasses that make your potatoes spoil.  

Am I the only person who didn't know that you shouldn't store potatoes and onions in the same bin? I thought that was the whole point of that cute little wooden bin with "spuds & onions" burned into it that my Grandma had.  The aforementioned friend also has one of those nifty little bins, and she pointed out that the onions go in a separate drawer.  I felt like a complete idiot.  Good thing I have her around. :)  She told me that I can keep them in the same cabinet, but not the same bin, and maybe just to be safe put them on a different shelf.

This gave me an excuse to go buy some new bins for the pantry.  Fortunately, a new Dollar Tree store just opened up in town and I was able to swing in and pick up a few cheap plastic bins for the time being.  Eventually, I'll replace them with some cool vintage wire ones, but for now bright colored plastic ones will do.

Here's a look at my freshly organized pantry.  See, potatoes on the bottom left in the pretty little blue basket and onions on the middle right in the snazzy green basket.  

No, this is not a paid advertisement for Wal-Mart or Cub Foods.  Nor do I live with a maniacal husband with a canned goods fetish (name that movie).

Looking Ahead Update: Getting Started

What do a day planner,  a batch of mini muffins and a vintage bowl have in common?  They are all things related to my goal of being more on top of my family's budget in 2013. 

 In my last post, I wrote about hoping to get back on track with budgeting and clear up some debt.  My husband got a me a spiffy little day planner for Christmas that I absolutely love.  It is the perfect size and has plenty of room to write in work schedules and appointments, plus my dinner menu and my weekly bill pay plan.  So, starting the last week in December, I got my checkbook in order and organized all our bills into the day planner so that each week I can sit down and pay what needs paying.  I also write in a meal plan for each day's evening meal.  This helps with grocery shopping on a budget and is a huge time saver for me.  It saves time in that I don't sit and try to come up with a meal for supper on my way home from work and also then am not tempted to "swing by" the grocery store on my way home, for a "few" things which never fails to turn into a half hour and $30 because I always get sidetracked.

Love this planner!  Isn't it pretty?

Wednesday before work our mission was to fill up our stash of snacks for lunches.  I did not go to the store that day, but Joey and I were home in the morning and he helped me fill up little baggies with mini muffins (from an 89 cent just add water mix) graham crackers and a pan of granola bars.   I have never made granola bars before but thought it looked kind of cool on Pinterest, so I figured I'd give it a whirl. We also did celery sticks and baby carrots. Making lunches should be a breeze for the rest of the week.  I know that using little baggies seems wasteful and not as cost effective as small reusable containers.  Here's the thing.  I bought the little reusable bowls to put snacks in, but they don't fit very well in her Hello Kitty head-shaped lunch box.  So, I went back to snack baggies. I don't reuse them either. Sorry.

Our week's worth of  snacks: Pan of granola (waiting to be cut into bars), celery & baby carrots, mini muffins, mini graham crackers, mozzarella cheese sticks

There you have it.  My big plans to budget and get all our bills paid on time every month and eat too.  It's not overly complicated or scientific, but it gets the job done.  Besides, I like to make lists. ;)

My cute vintage bowl

Still wondering how the vintage bowl figures into this?  Well, its like this.  Everybody needs a little fun money.  I figure a small amount of play money into the budget for the sake of my own sanity.  Not as much as I'd like, but a little bit anyway.  And with that money this week, I went to Goodwill and bought a cute bowl that I probably didn't need, but liked enough to spend 99 cents on it.  Oh and some more jelly jars.  I always need jelly jars for something or other.  Man I love Goodwill.