Trial and Error Home Ec

Announcing...

2012-01-27T21:09:00.002+02:00

Baby #3!!!

I got the BFP today, and I'm not hiding it!

I'm 5 1/2 weeks along.

Little one, Daddy and I are eager to meet you at the end of September.

Love,
Mama

KTT: Avoiding Splatters

2012-01-23T03:45:00.004+02:00

Here's a super-easy tip that I use every time I make soup:

I hate how putting ingredients into boiling water or stock or into a pan with hot oil can give me splatter burns on my hands. I hate it even more when the splatter turns into a full-fledged slosh onto the stovetop.

I've seen a lot of people slide ingredients into the pot or pan from the cutting board with a knife, but this technique has never worked well for me.

Instead, I load the lid of the pot or pan with the ingredients and, holding the lid by its handle underneath, dump or slide those ingredients into the pot.

No more burns, and for some reason, very few sloshes.

For more tips and tricks, check out Good Cheap Eats for Kitchen Tip Tuesday, and for other weeks at Tammy's Recipes.

WFMW: My Faith (a confession)

2012-01-22T09:22:00.005+02:00

This post represents a distinct break from the usual content you will find here at Trial and Error Home Ec. Over the last year, I have put together notes and ideas for homeschooling. DS E (hereafter known as “The Bat”) has just turned three, and he is eager to learn “grown up stuff,” like counting, the letters, and about animals. We are quickly approaching the “preschool” phase of our homeschool.

As we embark on that journey, homeschooling will become part of this blog’s regular content, and with it, information about our lifestyle. However, many aspects of our lifestyle are not mainstream, especially our religious convictions. After much discussion with my husband—which mostly consisted of my being hesitant and his being enthusiastically supportive—we’ve decided that this blog needs to be about our lives, rather than just about isolated tips-and-tricks or cute things the kids did. Trial and Error will still have those components, and I’m not much for journaling, so those components will still dominate, but there is going to be a new level of transparency into our lives. That transparency starts with this post.

My family’s biggest divergence from mainstream America, “conservatism,” or even “religious conservatism” is our faith. To put it bluntly, we’re Jewish. You will never find a pork or shellfish recipe on this blog, and I don’t put milk in my meatloaf.

By the same token, though, we are pretty different from most Jews, too. We belong to a small, Jewish minority called Karaism. Most Jews have rabbis who lead their services and function in much the same way as a Protestant pastor or priest. Karaites do not have rabbis. Most Jews (called Rabbinic, because they have rabbis) follow a set of laws and doctrine developed from commentaries on the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament in a different order) called the “Oral Torah.” Karaites do not believe in an Oral Torah. We draw all of our law and doctrine from the Hebrew Bible, and, for the most part, are hesitant to draw law from anywhere other than the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). We use the other books of the Hebrew Bible as sources for explanation, inspiration, precedent, and tradition. To bring that back to common parlance, we do not have Rosh Hashanah or Hanukkah; we do not separate meat and dairy other than that we do not boil red meat and milk together; and we do not dress like Orthodox Jews. If you are curious for more information, please follow the link to my husband’s blog, Benei Mikra (Sons of the Scripture), where I am also a contributor.

While that is a significant difference from most of the blogs I frequent, the fact is that my values, social beliefs, and political convictions are pretty similar to those of many conservative Christian mommy bloggers. Having been raised in a very liberal family and region, Christian blogs are one of the few places I can go for encouragement in my convictions, even though we have different belief systems informing those shared convictions.

Neither my husband nor I were raised in religious households—we were secular, liberal Americans. We both came from broken homes, and wanted better for our children. We also have goals that were distinctly unwelcome in liberal circles. As is the case with so many of the Christian bloggers I read, a conservative, religious lifestyle is something that happened after marriage through experience, trial and error, and most importantly, God’s Grace.

I welcome any questions and comments that are respectful and sincere. Between now and April, I will be sharing parts of my story a little at a time. I know from very personal experience (some of it quite painful) that my faith Works for Me.

MPM & Pantry Challenge

2012-01-22T08:26:00.004+02:00

I know. I know. I missed last week. For the sake of transparency, I did have a menu plan last week, and I mostly followed it (I always plan too much food). I also did some replacement of pantry staples last week, and spent about $40 on it. I also discovered a new outlet grocery store, where I can buy five-pound bags of flour for $1.50 and canned goods for $0.39 each.

On to this week. I've spent about $20 on groceries for this week, including a few prepared snack foods. I've bought a bag each of apples and bananas on clearance, three bunches of bananas (the boys eat tons of bananas!), a port wine flavored cheese ball on sale, cookies and tortilla chips on clearance, and a quart of goat milk for the boys. After I finish the quart of cow milk I have in the fridge, I don't plan on buying milk again until I use up my stash of soy and rice milk in the pantry that I've bought here and there on clearance.

Here's the menu for this week:

Sunday: Apple cake, Biscuits and gravy with carrots
Monday: Eggs and toast, Cabbage roll casserole with spinach bake
Tuesday: Oatmeal pudding, Lamb pot pie with carrots
Wednesday: Rice, Biscuits and gravy with spinach bake
Thursday: Eggs and homefries, Cabbage roll casserole with carrots
Friday: Pancakes, Lamb pot pie with spinach bake
Saturday: Pumpkin coffee cake, Cabbage casserole with roast onions

The apple cake is leftover from Friday a week ago. I still haven't gotten around to making the pumpkin coffee cake from the pumpkin in the freezer. The gravy (which will also feature in the pot pie this week) is from the freezer, as is the spinach (on sale a few weeks ago for $0.78/box), most of the vegetables in the pot pie, and the lamb. The Cabbage casserole is leftover from last week, and currently resting in the freezer as well.

Last week, I turned all of my stored pumpkin/winter squash seeds into garlic roasted seeds (yum!), and I made freezer burritos for the first time. It worked well, but when I make them again (tomorrow), I think I will boil the rice a second time and add cheese to the rice (rather than just on top of the beans, because the rice was too dry last time. I also have a whole bunch of orange rinds in the freezer, so I will be making apple cider tomorrow with the half gallon of apple juice I have waiting in the fridge. If I get to feeling ambitious, I may also try making candied orange peels.

Lunches this week will be udon (Japanese noodle soup) and tomato soup. Alongside lunches and as snacks, I'm planning to serve pickled watermelon rind that I have waiting in the fridge, along with pickled cantaloupe (also waiting in the fridge for me to be brave enough to try it). I have about six jars total from canning them last summer, and I need to finish those off in the next few months.

My primary goal this week is to start eating smaller portion sizes again. It's so easy for me to fall into the habit of eating the same portion sizes as my husband, who weighs about 70 pounds more than I do and is 6-7 inches taller than I am as well! It's not a healthy or a frugal habit, and lately it's left me feeling a bit ill.

But overall, my pantry challenge is going well. My grocery shopping is significantly decreased, I'm starting to have space in my freezer again despite stocking up on good deals here and there, and I'm getting around to all those "projects" I've stashed in the freezer but never got around to.

This post will be linked to Menu Plan Monday at Org Junkie and the January Pantry Challenge at Good Cheap Eats.

WFMW: Vermiculture

2012-01-11T05:57:00.007+02:00

A while back, Jen at Frugal Upstate had a great post giving a general overview of different composting techniques. Since my husband and I have never lived in a place with a real back yard (or any worth while patch of ground, for that matter), my ability to compost is pretty limited. However, I still wanted good, rich compost for my potted plants. Enter vermiculture!

Since the presence of worms speeds up the process, vermiculture is perfect for container-composting. Here's what I do:

I start with a 5 gallon bucket, preferably lidded. Then I punch holes in the lid for air circulation.

My first layer is shredded paper or dry leaves. This provides something absorbent on the bottom.

Next, I put in a healthy layer of potting soil, along with my worms (purchased at the local bait & tackle shop--in my case a gas station).

Then, I add a layer of kitchen scraps, followed by some more potting soil.
I stir it all up, trying not to harm the worms in the process or get the paper layer mixed into the compost layers.

Finally, I add a little water (about a drinking-glass full) and another layer of shredded paper.

My routine is to open it up every day to say hi to the worms and let in fresh air. Banana skins notwithstanding, I also am choosy about what I feed my worms. I need a pretty quick turn-around from craps to soil, so I try to include things that are easy for the worms to eat (rotten tomatoes, vegetable parings that I've already boiled for stock, egg shells, etc.). Whenever I add new material, I stir it in. As for proportions, I eyeball it: if it looks wet, I add more paper; if it looks dry, I add more scraps and more water; if I have a lot of finished compost, I add more scraps. Since space is limited, I sometimes keep compost-bound scraps in the freezer, only defrosting them when I am ready to put them in the bin--at least that's what I did before we moved to Israel. Right now, my bin is still in its infancy, so we'll have to see how things shape up.

My only caution with this method of composting, is that there simply isn't enough volume for the bin to create the heat necessary to avoid frost. One of the advantages of a lidded bucket is that our worms can live in the kitchen during the cold months.

For more tips and tricks, check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family!

My Pantry Challenge, continued...

2012-01-10T08:47:00.003+02:00

Well, better late than never, eh? It's been a crazy weekend, but we've had a good time. We had an impromptu trip to my father's to celebrate the boys' birthdays (the actual events are on the 12th and 19th, but my father will be out of town during that time). Needless to say, by menu plan came to a screeching halt when we left home Saturday morning!

So without further ado, here are the results of my pantry challenge for last week :)

We did do some shopping this week. Frozen spinach was on sale for $0.79/box, so I bought five. I also bought milk, cream and a huge yam for baby food, pears, and materials for making burritos (tortillas and cheese, since I already have beans). I'm going to try making and freezing burritos for a snack food. I also picked up hot dogs for dh and crackers, chutney, and a bag of flour from the sale rack.

Here's my menu plan for this week:

Monday: Unexpected travel had us out most of the day, dinner was black bean beef with green onions
Tuesday: French toast, PB&J, Egg Foo Young and Bamboo shoots with water chestnuts and baby corn
Wednesday: Eggs and toast, Potato carrot soup, Green curry eggplant
Thursday: Rice, PB&J, Tuna casserole and Beets
Friday: Pancakes, Potato carrot soup, Egg Foo Young and Bamboo shoots with water chestnuts and baby corn
Saturday: Pumpkin coffee cake, PB&J, Tuna casserole and Beets

The tuna casserole ingredients, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, and baby corn all come from the pantry. The eggplant is in the freezer, and the curry will also involve a rather sad looking bell pepper from the fridge. The pumpkin for the coffee cake is also in the freezer.

The freezer is still pretty full, largely because of this week's shopping, but the fridge is definitely getting emptier. I don't anticipate any further grocery shopping this week.

This post has been linked to the Pantry Challenge at Good Cheap Eats and Menu Plan Monday at Org Junkie.

The Cost of Clutter

2012-01-09T01:00:00.000+02:00

This is a re-post, somewhat edited, of a piece I wrote while we lived in Israel. During this early part of the year, when so many of us are trying to get a better grip on organization, I thought this might be of use to someone. This post has been linked with Welcome Home at Raising Arrows.

It's very popular in frugality blogs to talk about how clutter is not frugal. Disorganization keeps us from knowing what we have, so we buy more. And you need more space if you have a lot of stuff, too. But generally, we don't put that awareness into real numeric terms.

Although I did not participate (no pantry), I followed the progress of Money Saving Mom's Eat From the Pantry Challenge last month. In the final installment, participants were invited to post about what they learned. What I really got from those posts was that excess food in the pantry--food you can't or don't keep track of--is just edible clutter. And hoarding is not a frugal trait.

So here's a breakdown of the actual cost of clutter, given in US dollars, that can be applied to food and stuff alike.

Stuff takes up space. That's space you pay for either in mortgage or rent (and if you own your home outright, you still pay taxes and insurance on it). You are paying for the space your stuff occupies. Think of it like paying for storage. Our last home was about 1500 square feet, and we rented it for $1175 per month. That works out to about $0.78 per square foot, per month. Over twelve months, that's $9.36 per square foot. That may sound small, but something that takes up eight square feet costs about $74.88 per year to store at that rate of rent. If I own something, I should ask myself whether it's worth the cost of housing it. Is it more valuable for me to store that item or more valuable for me to have the living space?

Now for our next factor: maintenance.

I'm not talking about repairs or that kind of maintenance (although those are costs), I'm talking about the value of the time that you spend taking care of your stuff. Cleaning, anyone? Let's use a modest estimate and say that your labor is worth $10 per hour. If you spend 36 seconds dusting something, you just spent 10 cents of your time. If you dust it weekly, that's $5.20 per year. In the kitchen, it's easy to spend 6 minutes searching for something--that's $1 worth of time. Do that on a weekly basis, and you've lost $52 worth of time per annum.

Now let's apply all of that to a scenario.

Suppose you bought 6 cans of green beans on sale for $0.50 each ($3 total--this scenario is not going to account for sales tax). You didn't actually need the cans, but they were a good deal, so you stored them above the fridge, behind the popcorn, for future use. They take up about 1 square foot (ETA: Yes, those cans are three-dimensional, and so take up cubic feet, but I'm using terms that are easy to work with and common to think about. Not to mention that I'm not about to figure my rent per cubic foot). A month later, you're running low on produce, or time, or inspiration and decide to warm some green beans to go with dinner. You search high and low for those cans for 10 minutes, can't find them, and call your husband to ask him to pick up a can on the way home from work. He does, but buys the name brand at the regular price: $1.29.

A couple weeks later, green beans are on sale again, this time for $0.75 each. You buy 3 ($2.25). In using up your new green beans (which you do quickly, for ease of my later calculation ;P), you completely forget about the ones you couldn't find before. Four and a half months later, six months after the original purchase, you find those six cans while doing a deep clean of the kitchen. You then spend three minutes cleaning dust off of them and another three minutes finding a more visible place to put them.

How much did those six cans of green beans ultimately cost?

Original cost: $3.00

Time searching: $1.67

Replacement can: $1.29

Restocking: $2.25

6 months storage: $4.68 (assuming $0.78/sq ft)

Time cleaning and organizing: $1.00

Total cost: $13.89

You would have been better off buying ten cans of name brand green beans at the standard price.

As homemakers, a big part of our job is stretching our husband's pay check as far as it can go. And, let's face it, most of us enjoy the thrill of finding a really good deal. But there's an element of follow-through that's easy to forget. Our job is one that is all about the long term. Through an infinite number of events, we take on the tasks that feed and clothe our families, allow us to provide for the future, and teach our children the tools they will need for life. We tackle the continuing challenge of making a house into a home. When we focus on each minuscule event, it's easy to be bogged down with repetition and seeming pointlessness. Instead, we need to remember that each of those events is actually part of a process--the process of maintaining a home, educating a child, feeding a family.

When we lose sight of the ongoing nature of our work, we not only become frustrated and dissatisfied, but we defeat ourselves as well! When we enjoy the thrill of finding an excellent deal on canned goods, we can savor that single event, but we must also place it on the continuum of housekeeping. We must follow through and put those green beans someplace easy to find, inventory them (whether mentally or in a physical kitchen inventory), and make a point of placing them in the menu plan.

Life consists of punctuated equilibrium--long periods of reasonable predictability interrupted by highly unexpected, "game changing" events. It is the job of the wife to create the equilibrium her husband's vocation enables. Once we have used those resources to build a framework, our husbands are better able to lead the household through the interruptions. Fostering in ourselves a mindset of long term planning is probably one of the most important things a housewife can do.

Happy New Year!

WFMW: Trash in the Freezer

2012-01-04T05:14:00.007+02:00

As I'm working on cleaning out the freezer, I'm reminded that my freezer doesn't look like other people's freezers. Sure, I've got leftovers and frozen foods bought at a good price, but there's a lot of other stuff, too. Stuff most people wouldn't even keep.

Here's my top ten tips for freezer frugality (follow the links for more information!):

About 1/2 cup of heavy cream that went sour. I'm learning how to use sour milk and cream in baking, but I only need a little of the cream at a time for any given recipe. To keep the rest from growing blue fuzzies, I wrote "sour" on the carton and stuck it in the freezer.
Vegetable parings and apple cores. I keep all my vegetable parings (that are clean and not rotten) in a bag in the freezer. About once a week, it all goes in the stock pot with a bay leaf and a garlic clove to make delicious vegetable stock!
Bones. For meat stock.
Fat and drippings. I keep those around for gravy.
Giblets. For dressing or meatloaf.
Orange peels. I use two oranges worth of rinds per quart of apple juice, along with cinnamon and cloves to make hot cider whenever apple juice goes on sale. I'm also thinking about making candied orange rind one of these days.
Butter wrappers. These are usually good for greasing pans.
Crumbs and stale breads. I keep these in two bags in my freezer door. One is for sweet the other for savory. Whenever I cut bread, the crumbs on the cutting board go into the freezer, so does the residue from my baking pans. Perfect for dressing, bread pudding, and crumb toppings!
Plastic produce bags. I cut produce bags open into large rectangles to use as a muffin tin liner. I make baby food and freeze in a muffin tin. By lining the tin, the portions pop out easily, and I don't have to clean the tin. By leaving the liners in the freezer, I can reuse them several times before I have to throw them out. I also keep the produce bags I use to store the baby food in the freezer, even when they are empty.
Leftover french toast batter. I always have a little batter leftover, and sometimes I make extra on purpose. Rather than waste any of it down the drain, I scrape it into a container and freeze it. When I have enough leftover batter, I enjoy a truly easy-to-make breakfast!

For more tips and tricks, check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family!

KTT: Baking Tip

2012-01-03T09:30:00.004+02:00

Here's an easy baking tip for today:

If you are out or short of butter, oil, and other kinds of fat while baking, you can use heavy cream instead. We use heavy cream in baby food, so we frequently have it on hand.

The flavor in the finished product is a little different (sweeter) from that in other fats. And the texture is smoother.

If all you have handy is sour cream or cream that has gone sour, you can use that too with a little baking soda (one recipe I've used called for 1/4 tsp soda and 1/4 c cream).

For more tips and tricks, check out Kitchen Tip Tuesday at Tammy's Recipes.

MPM: Challenge Update and a New Year!

2012-01-02T08:49:00.003+02:00

Well, this is my first menu plan for the New Year. As usual, I drafted this plan week before last, but only finalized it after seeing how last week's plan happened in reality. We've had a flu going around, so not much cooking has been happening.

On the bright side, we haven't been too wasteful either. I know I tossed something this week, but I honestly can't remember what. I bought milk, bananas, mayo, and ingredients for baby food. Here's my menu plan:

Sunday: Omochi for breakfast and lunch/dinner at the local food court (we had a computer emergency take us to the Apple store two hours away, before we had a chance to eat lunch)
Monday: Eggs and toast, Turkey Pot Pie and Braised Celery (didn't happen last week)
Tuesday: French Toast, Pumpkin Pasta (leftover from last week)
Wednesday: Rice, Turkey Pot Pie and Beets
Thursday: Eggs and Homefries, Turkey and Green Onions in Black Bean Sauce
Friday: Puff Pancakes (didn't get around to this recipe last week), Turkey Pot Pie and Braised Celery
Saturday: Pumpkin Coffee Cake, Turkey and Tomato Curry

Lunches are Black beans and rice and PB&J.

I have all ingredients on hand, but I anticipate buying more milk and more bananas this week.

Since this is the first week of the January Pantry Challenge at Good Cheap Eats, here's a reiteration of my goals in my current challenge:

Use up what I have in the freezer and pantry, especially the former.
Get a better feel for how much we consume in a month. We don't have a lot of food storage space, but I would like to stretch out time between shopping trips once this challenge is over. Is Once-A-Month-Shopping an option for us?
Avoid food waste. I often don't get leftovers eaten or in the freezer soon enough. That's a habit I'm trying to change.`

This post has been linked to Menu Plan Monday at Org Junky and the January Pantry Challenge at Good Cheap Eats.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T20:37:00.007+02:00

...To Everyone!

New Year's has always been a special time for me, so I thought I'd share a picture of our New Year's breakfast table.

My mother, although American, was raised in Japan, so we keep the tradition of eating Omochi for good luck at the start of the year. Granted, we use January 1 rather than the start of the Japanese lunar calendar. I don't think of it so much as good luck as I do getting the new year off to the right start.

Omochi are cakes made out of rice flour. When you bake them, they puff up, making a crunchy, gooey breakfast treat. They are served with a syrup made from sugar and soy sauce, nori (sea weed), and oranges or clementines. We also enjoy the annual treat of different Japanese snack crackers and a special Oolong tea that we were given as a wedding gift (or hot chocolate for the short people).

New Year's is a time of fresh starts. I don't make resolutions, but I do like to set some general goals for myself. Here's what I'm looking forward to this coming year:

I want to get back into the habit of being more active. In Israel, we walked everywhere; but we didn't really have that option when we returned to the States. It's time to start walking again and exercising.
Likewise, I need to stop overeating. I was in a good routine with food for a while, but I lost it.
In a few months, we will start doing some "preschool" stuff with DS E. He has the desire and the smarts, he just needs a little more maturity to be ready.
I would also like to get into a habit of staying on top of filing this year.
Most important, though, I'm setting the goal of being less cross.

What are your goals for the new year?

WFMW: Letting the Toddler Decorate

2011-12-28T07:33:00.003+02:00

When we moved into our new place, I had DS E help me put up pictures. He followed me around, holding the hammer and nails while I placed each picture. Then he would hold the smaller pictures while I put a nail in the wall. It was really great to have an extra pair of hands around!

But the best part was after I was done.

DS E started wandering around the house finding different things he liked (the stand for his kaleidoscope, a pizza coupon, junk mail, and a business card). Then he asked me to get out the tape. He stood on the sofa, placing each item carefully on the wall in turn. Then he'd turn to me, and say, "Tape here, peese!"

As soon as we were done, he started rearranging everything until he had it "right." The next day, he had me add a dry maple leaf from the playground.

So that is his contribution to our house decorating.

We kept it (well, as much as he's kept up--it's changed a lot!).

That's my tip for helping little ones adjust to a new home. Make them a part of the process. Then share pictures with your whole family.

This post is linked up to Works For Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

MPM: Cleaning out, wk 3

2011-12-27T06:11:00.004+02:00

This last week, I've done pretty well about not shopping for food. We ran out of fruit, so I bought three pounds of pears ($0.79/lb), a bag of apples on clearance for $1.50 (I see applesauce in my future), and about two pounds of yellow squash on clearance for $1 (impulse buy!). As treats, we also bought hotdogs, frozen burritos (both primarily for dh), a bag of prepared garlic bread marked down to $0.98 (used to supplement two dinners), and a quart of prune juice at Dollar Tree for me to share with DS E.

As far as food waste is concerned, we did not do very well at all. I had a bunch of lettuce in the fridge from the last time my mother visited (she usually brings a bag of groceries. We just weren't able to get through all eight heads that she bought before they turned. I think we only managed two. Oh well, at least I didn't spend money on them :(

The remaining half of a stuffed pepper from week before last also went bad, alone and forgotten in the depths of the fridge. And the pasta leftover from last week's spaghetti fiasco went bad as well, along with two limes (dh's favorite fruit). I guess the good news is that my fridge is much emptier than it was. Let's see if I can do better this week.

Here's this week's menu:

Sunday: Last of the oatmeal pudding, Last of the cabbage casserole with stuffed chicken and leftover garlic bread.
Monday: Egg and toast, Turkey pizza
Tuesday: Puff Pancakes, Turkey and pumpkin pasta with cabbage on the side
Wednesday: Rice, Turkey pot pie with Braised celery
Thursday: Eggs and homefries, Turkey and pumpkin pasta with braised celery
Friday: Pancakes, Turkey pot pie with steamed squash
Saturday: Monkey bread, Dinner out with family!

The puff pancakes are a new recipe to me, so we'll see how it goes. The turkey, pumpkin, cabbage, and zucchini and gravy for pot pie are all in the freezer. The squash and celery are in the fridge.

For lunch this week, we'll be finishing off the leftover turkey soup from the freezer and having These black beans on the remaining days (probably with hot dogs, ahem!).

I anticipate needing to buy milk this week, as well as bananas, winter squash, and cream for making baby food.

This has been linked to Menu Plan Monday at Org Junky.

KTT and WFMW: Using Sour Milk

2011-12-20T09:23:00.006+02:00

As indicated in my last post, I recently had a little kitchen excitement learning to use sour milk. I'm trying really hard not to waste anything edible these days, and sour milk (contrary to popular opinion) falls into that category. So, when I found that half a gallon of milk had not only soured, but curdled (!), I dragged out one of my go-to antique cookbooks, and went to the page dedicated to sour milk recipes.

Here's my first kitchen tip: When working with sour milk, don't think of it as spoiled--think of it as fermented. And don't worry, the smell goes away as soon as the batter is mixed. The flavor of spoiled milk goes away, too.

I started my baking marathon with two batches of sour milk biscuits and a double batch of sour milk spice cake. Both recipes turned out excellently. However, the introduction to the page included this advice:

Thick sour milk, sour cream and buttermilk...can each be used in place of sweet milk if these instructions are carefully followed. Use one-third teaspoon soda to each cup of thick sour milk and add [baking powder] as directed in the recipe for sweet milk.

Because sour cream contains so much fat, the butter or other shortening in the recipe will have to be reduced when sour cream is used.

Soda can be sifted with the dry ingredients or added to the sour milk. Either method is satisfactory with perhaps a little advantage in the former.

Where other acid-reacting materials such as molasses, raisins, bran and brown sugar are also included in a sour milk recipe, the amount of soda will, of course, have to be increased slightly.

Interesting! Well, I was out of sandwich bread, so the next day, I made a batch of my favorite bread using sour milk in place of buttermilk. I also made a batch of buttermilk biscuits also using sour milk in place of buttermilk.

Since the cookbook said sour milk and buttermilk could be used interchangeably, I planned to make no other alteration to the recipe. However, because the milk was so curdled (a better word might be separated!), the batter for the bread came out more like soft yeast bread dough, and the dough for the biscuits was too dry to absorb all the flour. The bread dough I simply put in a loaf pan and in the oven. However, I added a little extra milk to the biscuits.

Once baked, the biscuits were light, fluffy, and about a third taller than my regular buttermilk or baking powder biscuits. They were also taller and fluffier than the sour milk biscuits made following the recipe in my cookbook.

The bread also rose more than usual. More intriguing, though, is that its crust, smell, and taste are all very reminiscent of yeast bread.

As for the spice bread from the previous day, it is sweet, moist, soft, and rose beautifully. Here's what I did:

1/4c oil
1c sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
2c flour
1.5 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp each allspice and cloves
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1c sour milk
1 small apple, cored and chopped small

Combine first four ingredients thoroughly, and set aside. In a separate bowl, combine all the dry ingredients. Fold in sugar mixture and sour milk in stages. Finally, stir in the apple pieces. Pour into a greased loaf pan, and bake at 350 for 45-50 minutes.

We've been enjoying this bread for breakfast since.

Next, I'm going to try a sour cream recipe, since I have some of that lying around too.

The moral of the story is NOT to throw out that sour milk. Embrace it! Enjoy it! Just don't drink it...

This post has been linked to Kitchen Tip Tuesday at Tammy's Recipes and Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

MPM: Cleaning out, wk 2

2011-12-19T10:02:00.004+02:00

I survived my first week of my little challenge. Just to catch anyone up, I'm going as long as I can before I do any major shopping. At the same time, I'm trying not to waste food.

Here's my progress:

You can do a LOT of baking with half a gallon of milk that has turned. Ahem. Not that I would know from experience or anything, but I'll be posting about this on Tuesday.
I need to stop buying full gallons of milk. We're past that phase. I don't care how good the per-oz price is. I'm all about the half gallon jug, now.
My family, including my toddler, loves cooked radishes.
The soup you cook for lunch needs to be in an airtight container, especially if it uses some kind of meat broth. Half the turkey soup from last week turned into vinegar. The other half was in a jar with a twist top. It's resting comfortably in the freezer.
I need to make less soup every week.
On Tuesday, I discovered as I was boiling pasta for spaghetti, that I had completely forgotten to defrost the spaghetti sauce. Oops. Instead I opened a can of stewed tomatoes, steamed some spinach, and mixed that into the pasta along with cheese, olive oil, and appropriate herbs. I felt like a hero :D
The carton of cream I bought at the beginning of the week went bad by the middle. Don't know what that's about, but I do need cream to make baby food.

Which leads me to the next issue: Grocery shopping! What did I buy this week:

1/2 gallon of milk. When the remainder of that gallon went bad, I still needed sweet milk around, otherwise I would have waited
1 c cream. Like I said, the last carton went bad much faster than it ought to have.
Bananas. Three large bunches. Did I mention that we are actually a family of siamangs?
Goat milk and molasses. Baby G is starting to head in the direction of weening, which means he'll need a beverage other than breast milk. These are the primary ingredients in ye-olde-family-formula-recipe-also-recommended-by-a-whole-food-cookbook-I-have.
Cheese. It was 2 for $4, and I knew I would be using cheese this week. How could I pass it up?

Menu for next week:

Sunday: Oatmeal pudding (from the freezer), Lamb ribs (from the freezer) and cabbage casserole
Monday: Eggs and toast, Biscuits (from last week) and gravy (from the freezer) and salad with leftover ranch dressing (homemade)
Tuesday: Leftover bread pudding from Friday (made from cake crumbs and a strawberry bread heel), Spaghetti (from the freezer!) and salad
Wednesday: Rice, Lamb leg (from the freezer) and cabbage casserole
Thursday: Eggs and homefries (using some of the excess potatoes from the cabbage casserole), Biscuits and gravy and salad
Friday: Pancakes, Turkey Pizza (turkey, sauce, and vegetable toppings are all in the freezer)
Saturday: Spice Bread, Ethiopian vegetables (includes leftover cabbage from cabbage casserole and some ancient carrots) and lamb leg

Please come back on Tuesday to find out exactly what I did with all that sour milk. In the mean time, head on over to Org Junkie for Menu Plan Monday.

There's Another One...

2011-12-13T09:31:00.003+02:00

...Another vegetable I can take off my "don't like list" and start cooking with it! As I've posted before, I'm trying to purge the words "don't like" from my vocabulary when it comes to food. I've also posted about my love of vintage and antique cookbooks. Both have come together in my new cooking adventure: radishes.

My current challenge is to avoid grocery shopping until I've made every balanced meal I can with what I have.

I had only encountered radishes before in salads, and I never could stand them. Then my mother came to visit last week. Her fiance always generously sends along a bag of groceries. I never know what he'll send, be he generally includes lots of produce, some bread, and some dessert. It's lovely, but it generally makes me stretch myself with my cooking, as he often sends produce I've never used before. This time, it was a bag of radishes--about two bunches worth, no greens.

Enter The Art of Chinese Cooking (1972), a cookbook my mother gave to me when I started keeping house. I chose to try Beef with Radishes, a sweet-and-sour dish. We had it for dinner tonight, served over rice, and it was a huge hit! Even DS E asked for seconds!

Here's the recipe:

Dredge 1/2 lb beef sliced very thin and cut in small pieces with mixture of 2 T soy sauce and 2T corn starch. Prepare sweet-sour sauce by combining 2T oil, 3T vinegar, 6T water, 1/2c sugar, and 1T corn starch; cook for a few seconds. Add the dredged meat and cook until meat is done (a few minutes [covering the pan helps the meat cook without the sauce getting too thick]).
[Once the meat is done] add 8 sliced radishes. Do not cook the radishes but heat them thoroughly. Serve hot. Serves 4.

I'm so glad I tried this recipe! I had enough radishes that I doubled the recipe and used more radishes than straight doubling would have called for. Having added so many radishes to the dish relative to the meat, Beef with Radishes made an excellent single dish meal.

The real perk of all this, though, is that radishes are so inexpensive. The stores near me usually put them on sale alongside cilantro and green onions. I never buy cilantro or green onions for more than $0.50 per bunch, and sometimes they go on sale for a quarter a bunch! Since one bunch of radishes or green onions is enough for dinner for the four of us, that's a really good deal!

I'm definitely going to make this recipe again, and I'm going to start playing with other recipes for radishes.

For more recipes and ideas, check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family!

MPM: A New Challenge

2011-12-12T00:56:00.005+02:00

I'm going to avoid grocery shopping for a while. My fridge and freezer are full, so I want to see how long I can go without buying more. That doesn't mean I'll wait 'til the cupboards are bare, just until I can't make another nutritious meal without shopping. I used to do this sort of thing before we lived in Israel, but I haven't done it since. It's about time.

As I was reading other blogs this past week, several posts stood out to me encouraging me in this direction. Jamerrill at Holy Spirit-Led Homeschooling had a post about once-a-month grocery shopping. On the one hand, I don't think we have the space for that in our home--we live in an apartment, have just one fridge and small freezer (no deep freeze), and have very little pantry space. On the other hand, I don't know how much we eat in the course of a month--a week, yes, but a month, no. I should know these things. Moreover, I bet we could go two weeks between shopping trips if I were careful. Since the stores with the best prices are about thirty minutes away, we only shop at them once or twice a month and do most of our grocery shopping at the more expensive local stores. If I could avoid shopping at the local stores, it really would save us money.

The other issue is food waste. Spendwise Moms recently had a post on the topic of avoiding food waste. I do try to get the most out of our groceries, but sometimes things do go bad. I want to see if I can avoid wasting any food for the next few weeks to help me go longer before I need to shop.

That said, I know I'll need to do some shopping over the course of this month. I'll need milk in a week or so, eggs in about two weeks, and I will run out of produce at some point. I will also need more cream for making baby food. Next week, I will post how I've done in terms of avoiding food waste and whether I need to buy anything.

DH and I are also trying to get back into healthy eating habits and lose a little weight. To that end we are trying to avoid eating between meals. I allow one snack between lunch and dinner, because that is the most difficult part of the day for us. Snacks consist of crackers and sardines, fruit, or the baked goods I make on Fridays.

Here's this week's menu. As always, I have a regular breakfast menu, try to have one new recipe in the week, have one vegetarian meal for the week, and alternate between two homemade soups for lunch.

Sunday: Oatmeal pudding with apples and raisins, Prepackaged burritos and fruit, Turkey enchiladas with stuffed poblano peppers
Monday: Eggs and toast, Turkey and vegetable soup, Beef with radishes on rice
Tuesday: French toast, Broccoli potato soup, Spaghetti
Wednesday: Rice, Turkey and vegetable, Enchiladas and stuffed peppers
Thursday: Eggs and homefries, Broccoli potato, Beef with radishes on rice
Friday: Pancakes, Turkey and vegetable, Tuna casserole and braised celery
Saturday: Pumpkin coffeecake, Broccoli potato, Beef with radishes on rice

Menu notes:

The new recipes for this week are the enchiladas and beef with radishes (from one of my cookbooks).
Both soups are made with the stock from our Thanksgiving turkey carcass, and the enchiladas use leftover meat from the turkey.
Spaghetti is my vegetarian meal for the week.
The enchiladas, potato broccoli soup, beef with radishes, and coffeecake will all contribute to clearing out my freezer

And of course, all this is in the name of better home management and menu planning, which you can read more about at Org Junkie.

WFMW: Medicine Cabinet Organization II

2011-12-07T08:52:00.003+02:00

A LONG time ago (as in, before our most recent move...okay, not that long ago), I posted about organizing the medicine cabinet.

We had a teeny, tiny, little master bathroom in our last apartment. The under-sink cabinet was about a foot wide and about a foot deep. The medicine cabinet was about a foot wide and about four inches deep. And in that little master bathroom, we had to keep all our medicine cabinet, spare soap and shampoo, and anything else we wanted to keep out of the grubby little hands of our smalls. Just to make things more fun, the medicine cabinet only had one shelf, which was originally hidden in the under-sink cabinet because it was too deep for the medicine cabinet by about a quarter inch. Storage was a serious problem.

Then it hit me: Vertical Storage (insert angel choir music here)!

Here's what you're looking at:

The alcohol swab box on the top left was only half-full, so I consolidated all our gauze into it as well.
The instant coffee box (bought on clearance, I normally don't indulge in that kind of thing) contains bandages, ace bandages, thermometers, and medicine dispensers. I put the plastic lid on the bottom of that box, so that the metal could not leave rust marks on the shelf.
Next to the coffee box is a roll of surgical tape. When space is limited, storing tape dispensers on their backs can be helpful.
The deodorant is a spare tube; the ones that were in use at that time were stored on top of the medicine cabinet, where we can see them and small people can't reach them.
On the bottom shelf, toward the left, is a Republic of Tea tin. It contains new razors, my hairbrush and clips, new toothbrushes and nail clippers clipped to the side. My compact mirror is leaning against the tin.
On the right hand side of the bottom shelf are two Crystal Lite containers stripped of their labels--one for toothpaste (both child and adult) and tweezers and one for various and sundry tubed ointments.

Before organizing the medicine cabinet this way, all the ointments were stored under the sink, and we had to keep the bathroom locked in order to keep certain small people away from those tubes. The tape, gauze, bandages, thermometers, dispensers, and razors also had to stay under the sink. Meanwhile, one had to brave and avalanche of toothpaste and hair clips from the medicine cabinet in order to manage any daily personal hygiene.

Our new apartment does not have a medicine cabinet. Instead, it has a long counter with much storage underneath in the form of drawers and cabinets, so the system pictured above is now defunct. I do still have the alcohol swabs and gauze together and bandages in the coffee box in a drawer. The toothpaste now resides in the Republic of Tea tin, with the clippers and tweezers clipped to the side. My hair clips are in the clear Crystal Lite container, and lay sideways in an old wipe tub that now contains the ointment tubes.

While it might not work for me now, it sure worked for me then! And using what I have on hand ALWAYS works for me. Check out more ideas on Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

Beets for Everyone!

2011-11-30T07:07:00.004+02:00

I never thought I liked beets. Neither did my father. Or my mother. Or my husband.

Beets taste like dirt, right? Except purple. Is it just me, or can you taste the purple in canned beets?!

Then we lived in Israel for a year, and I discovered that Middle Eastern beet salad is delicious. Then I tried roasting beets when we got home, and I discovered I like those as well. For Thanksgiving, beet salad was one of my vegetable dishes, and everyone loved it! Even my father. And my father-in-law. And both my little boys. Here's the recipe:

Moroccan Beet Salad

2-4 beets
2-3 tsp sugar(at home I make this with Splenda)
1/4 c lemon juice or white vinegar
1 T olive oil
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp cumin
1/8 tsp paprika
3-4 T parsley
1 carrot, grated (optional)

Boil or roast the beets until soft, cool completely, and rub off the skins.
Chop the beets into bite sized pieces--matchsticks are attractive. Place in your serving bowl, and set aside.
Combine all ingredients, EXCEPT the carrot, in a measuring cup or bowl, and mix thoroughly. Pour the dressing over the beets, and toss. Toss in grated carrot.
Chill 1/2 hour, and serve.

This recipe is a variation on the one found here.

Not only are beets nutritious (especially when bought fresh), but they're in season right now. Better yet, they're not very popular in general, so they are relatively inexpensive. And if you buy them with the tops still attached, those tops are (literally) red chard, which is also very nutritious, and can be used in lieu of spinach or collard greens. That means you get two vegetables for the price of one!

Remember, there is no "don't like," only "don't know how to cook." If you think you don't like a vegetable, give it a try in a new recipe that has other things you do like in it. That vegetable may never be your favorite, but chances are there's a way to cook it that you don't mind. Flexibility is a frugal trait!

For more great ideas, check out We Are THAT Family for Works For Me Wednesday!

WFMW: How I Do Thanksgiving

2011-11-23T08:58:00.002+02:00

Keep it simple!

That's how I do Thanksgiving. Doubt me? Here's the menu for Thursday:

Turkey
Stuffing (what's the difference between stuffing and dressing, anyway?)
Beet Salad
Spinach and egg bake
Gravy

My dad will be providing dessert, otherwise I was going to do apple dumplings.

It's not a big gathering--just my father, fil, bil, dh, and the boys--but it would be an easy matter to increase quantities for a larger gathering.

Quick tip: I don't like giblet gravy, so I only make gravy out of drippings. Instead, I've taken a cue from vintage cooking and chop the giblets up fine to put in the stuffing.

For more tips and tricks, visit Works For Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

WFMW: Loafpan cleaning tip

2011-11-16T06:46:00.002+02:00

Whenever I make baked goods, I dread cleaning the pan that I use for baking--especially loaf pans and muffin tins--they're so hard to clean! A while back, though (I'm not sure how long), I started a system that gets the pans almost clean before water ever touches them.

Of course I grease my pans before filling them with batter or dough. The most effective technique I've found for this part is to do the greasing with a basting brush and a little vegetable oil. Once the baked goods come out of the pan, though, there's always residue.

What do I do?

Leave it out overnight, of course!

First, I use a table knife to scrape all the residue off of the pan. Then I let those crumbs sit in the pan overnight to dry out. In the morning, I pour the now-dry crumbs into my crumb bag in the freezer (I keep crumbs for crumb toppings, stuffing, and bread pudding). Once the crumbs are safely tucked away for future use, the pan is a breeze to clean!

For more tips and tricks, check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

Menu Plan

2011-11-14T20:14:00.003+02:00

Last week's menu just didn't happen, and the remainder of the chicken carcass spoiled because of it. Oh well. Last night, I roasted up another chicken (bought at $0.79/lb, for $4.18), and we're going to have chicken pretty much every night this week. Here's my menu:

Sunday: Oatmeal Pudding, Roast Chicken and Vegetables
Monday: Egg and Toast, Chicken Pot Pie and Pasta Salad
Tuesday: Bread Pudding, Chicken Curry and Rice
Wednesday: Rice, Succotash and Creamed Spinach
Thursday: Eggs and Homefries, Chicken Pot Pie and Biscuits
Friday: Pancakes, Chicken Curry and Rice
Saturday: Strawberry Bread, Chicken Fried Rice and Bamboo Shoots and Mushrooms

The pasta Salad is because I got yellow cherry tomatoes on clearance recently (under a dollar for two containers!). I used the first container up last week, but now I need to use the second container before they go bad. The chicken pot pie will use the leftover roasted vegetables from Sunday's dinner, leftover gravy from last week, and various veggies in the fridge and freezer. The chicken curry will feature some of the sauteed eggplant I have in the freezer. Strawberry bread is just banana bread with strawberries instead of bananas. I bought a 12 oz package of frozen strawberries at Dollar Tree not long ago. And Bamboo Shoots and Mushrooms is a recipe I have in a Chinese cookbook I have. I'm doing that with a can of shoots I have in the cupboard and some mushrooms that are drying out in the fridge. I'll throw in a can of water chestnuts, too, for good measure.

This has been linked up with Menu Plan Monday at Org Junkie.

Menu Plan and Chicken Progress

2011-11-05T22:58:00.006+02:00

Here's my menu plan for next week:

Sunday: Oatmeal pudding, Quiche with Beet Salad and Garlic Bread
Monday: Eggs and toast, Tandoori Chicken and Rice
Tuesday: Bread Pudding, Chicken Pot Pie with Pasta Salad
Wednesday: Rice, Spaghetti and Garlic Bread
Thursday: Eggs and homefries, Tandoori Chicken and Rice
Friday: Pancakes, Quiche with Pasta Salad
Saturday: Pumpkin muffins, Chicken Pot Pie with Beet Salad

Lunches: Tomato soup, Chicken soup

The beet salad is in the menu because it did not happen last week. I discovered a very sad head of cauliflower in the back of the crisper, so we've been eating that instead. The tandoori chicken will use a jar of tandoori paste I bought on clearance on a whim a couple months ago. It will also feature some of the eggplant I sauteed and froze during the summer, along with an onion and a bell pepper.

The quiche is what I like to call "white quiche." It uses jack cheese and cauliflower as the filling. I have a bunch of cauliflower I didn't freeze properly, so the texture is a little off. Chopping it small and putting it in quiche seems to help. I season it with thyme and oregano and a squirt of mustard. And, of course, this will feature my favorite mashed potato crust.

The bread pudding will be made from the crusts of the cornbread I made for cornbread stuffing last week. I accidentally left the cornbread in the oven too long, so the crusts were a bit tough for use in the stuffing. Instead, I've been letting them dry out in the fridge all week, and now they're ready to become bread pudding!

Chicken update:

As you can see, that one roast chicken is still going strong. Last week, I used the giblets and a little breast meat all chopped fine in cornbread stuffing. I also scraped all the fat and drippings out of the roasting pan and used them to make gravy. Both the stuffing and gravy lasted us for two meals. I also stretched the gravy a little by adding in about a quarter cup of leftover soup from a couple weeks ago (carrot potato with a little mushroom). By stretching the gravy, I've been able to reserve enough of it to use in this week's pot pie.

Once I had made the gravy, the remains of the chicken went in the freezer. The problem with making a chicken last this long is that you have to be careful not to let it spoil before you are done with it!

Last week saw four dinners using the roasted chicken, which brings the running total up to 10 family meals with three leftover tamales (not enough for a dinner, so I'm saving those for dh's brown bag lunches). This week will see another four dinners from the same chicken, along with three chicken soup lunches, hopefully bringing the total to 17 family meals! from just one chicken.

This post is linked up with Org Junkie's Menu Plan Monday.

Simplicity

2011-11-05T10:33:00.000+02:00

ETA: This is a repost that I originally wrote in late July. Since then, we've moved to a new apartment with a more efficient floor plan. All that decluttering has paid off with an easy move and more than enough room for our stuff. Our move included getting rid of a few more boxes, my mother taking our old outdoor bench, and the acquisition of a sofa bed for our living room (we had been using a twin sized bed for a couch for the last year).

Kimberley at Raising Olives recently posted about the consequences of simplifying her family's living space. My household has been on a similar journey over the last couple of years.

When Dh and I were first married, we lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Silicon Valley. It was stuffed to the gills. We had all the stuff we each brought from our childhood homes, everything I had bought in order to run a household (dishes, linens, etc.), and all kinds of stuff my fil had given us as he sorted through his own and his father's stuff in selling two houses and moving out of state. And we kept on accumulating.

Then we moved to the Sierras. Moving from our 800-square foot apartment to a 1500-square foot townhouse, our living space was still full of stuff. We had ditched a lot of trash when we moved (mostly papers that did not need to be kept), but we had not decluttered. Dh gets attached to things pretty easily, so there was a lot of stuff he wasn't ready to part with. There was a lot of stuff I wasn't ready to part with either, mostly in the "What if I need it someday?" kind of way. I did, however, go through and get rid of a lot of stuff my mother was still storing for me. And it felt. So. Good.

Once we moved in, I got rid of more of my stuff, realizing that I was not going to use it after all. I think I ditched about half of my stuff. Dh got rid of a few things too. While we had combined our stuff to form a household, there were still a lot of things that fell into "his" and "hers" categories, and not many things that fell into the "ours" category.

Then we went to Israel. We packed four suitcases, the pac-n-play, and I brought my smallest harp. Everything else had to fit in a small storage container. I think we got rid of about a third of everything we owned just to keep within the bounds of that container--including a lot of stuff we really wanted to keep, but just wouldn't fit. Once in Israel, we bought just enough dishes to get by, an electric skillet, a counter-top fridge, towels, and a sofa bed. We did buy a few other things as needed, like clothes as ours wore out or DS E outgrew his, and a couple souvenirs. Once there, we got a better feel for the things we had brought that were or were not useful. About half of a small suitcase's worth of stuff never even left the hotel with us. Then we lived out of those four suitcases. For a year. Yet we survived! In some ways, we even thrived with so little. Cleaning was a breeze, and for everything we didn't bring with us, in terms of entertainment, we still had internet access to make up for most of it. We returned home with the pac-n-play, the harp, and three suitcases instead of the original four.

When we returned home, we wound up in an apartment that I think is about 700-square feet. It's definitely smaller than our first place in Silicon Valley, but I'm not sure by how much. Even before we returned to the States, we had made lists of things we could think of that we did not want to keep. We knew we needed to purge our lives of junk and we finally had the energy to do it. As my husband said, "Everything needs to justify its existence in our house." And let's not even get started on the real cost of all that clutter.

Once we got stuff out of storage (and a small carload of stuff went straight from the container to Good Will), I felt claustrophobic with all our things, and unpacking and making it pretty didn't help that much. I had to ditch half my kitchen stuff just to fit into our current kitchen--and it felt good. We got rid of half our clothes. Whereas we had filled a walk-in closet and two chests of drawers in our townhouse, we now keep my one formal dress and DH's shirts and pants in our minuscule closet and everything else in the one chest of drawers that we kept. All of our books fit on the shelves, even though we have two fewer shelves than we used to. DH has ended his love affair with packaging and allowed me to move all our dvds and cds into disc binders, trashing their cases. The list goes on and on.

We still have a ways to go. We have fourteen boxes under DS E's bed of stuff we're not ready to part with, but don't have room for elsewhere. Nonetheless, we're enjoying things that never saw the light of day in our previous abodes--things I didn't even know we had! I'm motivated to read my books that I haven't read yet, in part so I'll know whether to keep them. We have enough space now, that I can dedicate energy to figuring out how I want to live rather than constantly trying to figure out how to live around our stuff.

Most importantly, though, I've developed a very low tolerance for toys dumped on the floor. If DS E isn't playing much with a toy, out it goes (although I am saving a couple for Baby G when he gets older). I grew up cluttered with toys I didn't enjoy, and I don't want that for my children. I want them to enjoy making their own toys, exploring "real" stuff, and creating their own fun. DS E has far fewer toys than most American children his age, but it's still too much. And the only reason he has as many books as he does is that I want to use a lot of them when we start homeschooling.

Our purchasing habits have changed too. We no longer buy things that look interesting or useful. Instead, as I keep house, I think about problem solving: the cabinet under the sink is a pain to keep organized; what would make it better? I sort, and I experiment. When I've done all I can with what we have, I make a mental note of what kind of thing would fix the problem and pick that thing up the next time I go shopping and can afford it. We take a similar approach with books, clothes, and other purchases. And for the most part, the physical space of having less stuff allows me the time and energy to plan these purchases, shop around, see if it will show up for free somewhere, and read reviews or ideas posted online. When we had more stuff, these kinds of problems were larger and took on the feel of an "emergency".

What Kimberley said, though, is true:

Simplifying is not a one time thing, as you live with less, you see more surplus.

Every time one area is organized, simplified, and reduced, areas that still need improvement stand out in stronger relief. Projects that having been waiting on me for years are getting done. The house is staying clean and easier to straighten. Life is good.

ETA" This post has been linked up to Org Junkie's 52 Weeks of Organizing.

WFMW: Quick Baking Tip

2011-11-01T22:14:00.005+02:00

Here's a really quick tip for this week:

I like keeping two 1-pint measures around. When I do a large baking session (like I do every Friday), I dedicate one measure to dry ingredients and the other to wet ingredients. Then I bake the plainest items first, and gradually work my way over to the sweetest. This way the amount of cleanup I have to do between baked goods is minimized (I just rinse out the wets measure).

For more tips and tricks, check out Kitchen Tip Tuesday at Tammy's Recipes or Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

P.S. To keep your garbage disposal from getting stinky, run an orange, lemon, or lime rind through it every so often.

WFMW: Getting the Most from a Whole Pumpkin

2011-11-01T21:36:00.006+02:00

This year, I'm buying pumpkins as I find them at good prices, baking them, and freezing the pulp. I'm using large pumpkins (not the small sugar pumpkins used for pies) so that I really get my money's worth. I can use the pulp in all kinds of dishes, both sweet and savory, and it's very nutritious.

Of course, I also save the seeds to make a healthy snack. Here's my favorite recipe for roasted pumpkin seeds:

Boil the seeds in water for about 20 minutes. I've read that e. coli can live on the surface of the seeds, so better safe than sorry!
Strain the boiled seeds, and put them in a boil (or return them to the now empty pot).
Using a large spoon, combine them with about a tablespoon each of olive oil, garlic powder, and dried basil.
Spread the mixture out on a cookie sheet, and put in the oven. Bake at 350 for about 10 to 15 minutes.

When I baked the first one (I'm doing one at a time, since my freezer space is sadly limited). As anyone who's made their own pumpkin puree knows, pumpkins have a lot of water in them. And most recipes for pumpkin advise you to strain the pumpkin pulp before using it to make sure the recipe achieves the right consistency. But what to do with all that juice?

The pumpkin I baked the other day produced a quart or so of liquid! And I was just squeezing the liquid out of the pulp by hand as I put the pulp in containers for the freezer. If I had taken my time and strained it properly, I probably would have wound up with more. Not to mention the liquid that sloshed on the floor...ahem...

I made pumpkin syrup! It was an entirely improvisational affair, but here's the rough recipe:

1 quart pumpkin juice
2 cups sugar
2 T molasses (If you have some kind of fancy molasses, even better! I used date molasses--yum!)
1 tsp cinnamon

Bring the pumpkin juice to a slow boil in a large saucepan. Watch it carefully at first, because it will boil over. Adjust the temperature so that it continues to boil, but does not foam. Allow it to boil down to about a third of its original volume. As it cooks, a film will form over the top, skim off and discard that film as you notice it.
Once the juice has boiled down to about a third of what you originally had, stir in the molasses. Then add in the sugar about a quarter cup at a time. Make sure it dissolves completely and does not scorch. This is the part where you taste frequently to decide for yourself how sweet you want this syrup to be. Two cups of sugar is totally an estimate of what I did, since I didn't measure anything!
As soon as the syrup is the desired thickness, turn off the burner! Syrups reduce and thicken very quickly!
Once the syrup is a thickness and sweetness that you like, add in the cinnamon--that will cut the bitterness of the pumpkin and really bring out the pumpkin flavor we all love. I wound up with a yield of about a pint.
When the syrup has cooled completely, pour it into a bottle and put it in the the fridge. The syrup will have some pumpkin pulp in it, so it is not shelf stable and looks a little grainy. I had an empty squeeze bottle hanging around that had previously held maple syrup, so I washed it out and put the pumpkin syrup in that.

Now I have about 8 cups of pumpkin puree in the freezer, a pint of pumpkin seeds on the table, and a pint of pumpkin syrup in the fridge. All that from one $2 pumpkin. I think that's frugal!

For more great ideas, check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family!

KTT: Bread Tips

2011-11-01T21:06:00.004+02:00

Tammy at Tammy's Recipes posted today some tips on slicing bread, so I thought I would contribute my two cents. For more kitchen tips, head on over to her blog for Kitchen Tip Tuesday!

I make my own bread, but I don't make yeast bread. My everyday sandwich bread is a quick bread recipe from Bob's Red Mill. I love that it's so easy to make and takes so little time. I'm not good at follow-up, so yeast breads just aren't a good idea for me at this season in life.

One of the things I like about this bread recipe is that the product is dense. Sandwiches don't get soggy quite as quickly with this bread. When I slice it, it crumbles a bit, but it never just falls apart like so many yeast breads do. And I rarely have problems with tunneling in the loaf, making it perfect for sandwiches. I use a bread knife to cut it, and can cut it very thin, but my husband has even used a table knife on it successfully.

However, crumbs aren't entirely a problem. I keep a plastic bag in my freezer for bread crumbs. Whenever I slice bread, part of my clean up afterward is scraping the crumbs off the cutting board and putting them in the bag in the freezer for future use (stuffings, bread pudding, crumb toppings on tuna casserole and such, meatloaf, etc.)

Whatever kind of bread you make or buy, though, using a hot knife to cut through a cold loaf usually helps it cut more cleanly--just like our grandmothers did.

Meny Plan Monday and Making the Most of a Chicken

2011-10-31T06:30:00.003+02:00

Last week's menu did not go as planned. My father visited in the early part of the week and generously took us to dinner not once, but three times! So while my menu from last week did get followed, I didn't really start following it until Wednesday! As a result, neither of the curries happened, and we just ate Saturday's dinner tonight (Sunday).

With the roasted chicken, we had that for dinner along with roasted vegetables for one night--that polished off both legs, one thigh, and a wing. Since then, we have had chicken twice, both times in a recipe I tried last week for the first time: Ersatz Chicken Tamales. They were delicious! I was able to make eleven tamales with the recipe. Dh and I each polished off 1.5 at dinner, and DS E at one himself. So we ate 8 of them over the course of two nights. The remaining three are in the freezer to send with dh to work for lunch one at a time. The recipe calls for 2.5 cups of chopped chicken and some chicken broth. I only used 2 cups of chopped chicken, and I was out of broth. Instead of chicken broth, I used water, but subbed in chicken fat for half the fat the recipe called for.

All in all, the tamales will have stretched this chicken over two family dinners and three individual lunches. Tomorrow, I will clean the rest of the meat off the carcass. The remaining meat will go in the freezer for later, and the carcass will be boiled for broth (also going in the freezer). The giblets and remaining fat, on the other hand, will feature prominently in this week's menu.

Here it is:

Sunday: we slept in--no breakfast, Carrot and Potato Soup, Tamales and Cucumber Tomato Salad
Monday: Eggs and Toast, Navy Bean and Cauliflower Soup, Giblet Stuffing with Boiled Cabbage
Tuesday: French Toast, Pea and Corn Soup, Meatloaf with Yams and Carrots au Gratin
Wednesday: Rice, Bean and Cauliflower Soup, Biscuits and Gravy with Beet Salad
Thursday: Eggs and Homefries, Pea and Corn Soup, Meatloaf with Corn Fritters and Carrots au Gratin
Friday: Pancakes, Bean and Cauliflower Soup, Giblet Stuffing with Beet Salad
Saturday: Apple Muffins, Pea and Corn Soup, Biscuits and Gravy with Boiled Cabbage

The meatloaf and corn fritters are leftovers from the freezer. The giblet stuffing and the gravy will both be from the chicken, so that's four more meals from this one bird. By the end of this week, the chicken will have fed us a total of six dinners with leftovers for three individual lunches, and we'll still have a ways to go with it!

As always, I try to include a new recipe in my dinner menu each week. This week, the giblet stuffing and carrots au gratin will be new. Usually, I also try to have a vegetarian meal as well, but I think the biscuits and gravy are close enough.

The last time I went to the store, I also bought two pumpkins. I've roasted one, and will be putting the resulting pulp in the freezer tonight, so expect to see a lot of pumpkin on the menu over the next few weeks!

This post has been linked with Menu Plan Monday over at Org Junky.

WFMW: Bay Leaves

2011-10-26T06:40:00.002+02:00

The good news: We've moved into a new place, and we love it!

The bad news: The ants love it too.

The worse news: I don't generally keep bug spray around.

My solution? Bay leaves. They grow wild where my dad lives, so I can get them for free.

When I find an ant line, I follow it to where they are clustering, crumple up one leaf, and drop it in the middle of the cluster. Then I just watch the ants panic. After about an hour (or less), there are no more ants in the area, and the line has disappeared.

Granted, it does make a bit of a mess. So, when I have a few moments, I'm going to pull out my collection of torn pantyhose, and make bay leaf sachets out of the toes. Perhaps I'll include a few cloves as well.

For more tips and tricks, check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

P.S. I do have bug spray now, and we're using it on the ant lines on the exterior of the house.

I'm Back (and Menu Plan)

2011-10-24T20:36:00.002+02:00

Now that we're approximately moved in to our new digs, I have Internet again! Better yet, we have dsl now, rather than just permission to piggy-back on the neighbor's internet line. YAY!

For the next couple weeks my menu plan is going to revolve around making the most of a whole chicken--along the lines of a post I did on the topic not all that long ago. Just to remind y'all, mine is a family of four--me, dh, ds E (2.5), and baby G (9 months). The chicken weighs 5.21 pounds and cost me $5.11, so it's not huge by any means. Chicken meals will be interspersed with meals that involve other kinds of protein, and I'm always working on rotating leftovers out of the freezer.

Here's the menu plan for the first week:

S: breakfast out (my mother was visiting), leftover Chinese, broiled yellowtail with pasta and white sauce and broccoli
M: eggs and toast, cream of broccoli soup, Roast chicken with roast vegetables and cornbread (serving five--my dad's visiting)
T: French toast, carrot and potato soup, Boston black-eyed peas and collards over rice
W: Rice, cream of broccoli, Quick Chicken-and-Cheese Tamales and salad
Th: Eggs and homefries, carrot and potato soup, Boston black-eyed peas and collards over rice
F: Pancakes, cream of broccoli soup, Tandoori chicken with cilantro rice and salad
S: Muffins, carrot and potato soup, Chicken Tamales and salad

It's entirely possible that my father will want to eat out tonight. If so, all the dinners will get bumped down by one night.

In order to make this work, I will be buying:
tomatoes
cucumbers
potatoes (possibly yams)

This post has been linked to Menu Plan Monday at Org Junky.

We interupt this blog...

2011-10-17T08:48:00.001+02:00

I'm afraid posting has been more than a little sparse lately. Why?

We're moving.

I'll be back soon...

Grocery Challenge: Sigh...

2011-09-28T05:06:00.003+03:00

So much for this month. Between stocking up on some end-of-summer sales, two bags of groceries from my mother, the bounty of a friend's garden, and visiting with relatives, I not only broke my budget but have been stocked with food I never had to price. It's absolutely wonderful to have so much to work with, but it's not so good for this kind of blogging. I'll pick up writing about my grocery shopping in October.

In the meantime, here's whats on the menu:

Sunday: Homemade Granola, Salad, and Cauliflower and Water Chestnut Stirfry with Chicken over Rice

Monday: Egg and Toast, PB+J, dinner out (a rare treat! and we had a fabulous time!)

Tuesday: French Toast, PB+J, Chicken and Vegetable Stirfry with Teriyaki Sauce over Rice

Wednesday: Rice, Asian-style Salad, and off for a long weekend with family!

And a note about traveling with a baby:

I make my own baby food. It's cheaper and more nutritious than commercial brands, but hard to travel with. Here's what I've purchased to feed the baby while we're out of town.

Whole fat vanilla yoghurt--if I could afford it, I would have bought yoghurt made from goat's milk, but this will do for my 9 month old.
A jar of apple sauce. If we were going on a plane, I would buy the kind that's prepackaged into 4-oz cups (that's 0.25 oz over the liquids limit for airlines, but security has been nice to me about that in the past)
A can of pumpkin (NOT pumpkin pie filling)--my local grocery stores only stock this in November and December, so I'll see if I can find some closer to our destination.
Once we get to our destination, I will probably pick up some bananas and cream, which I like to mash together (bonus points if our host has some oatmeal to mix into it!)
Hot cereal is always an option. We'll do that if our host has it around. In the past, I've bought a box of instant oatmeal packets.
For a slightly older baby, I would also consider canned fruit in light syrup. Mandarin slices are always a favorite!

And that's how I feed a baby on vacation when baby has no teeth.

Strategic Cooking: Efficiency and Frugality

2011-09-22T08:31:00.004+03:00

As Jenn's Frugal Food Series at Frugal Upstate has progressed, I've found that contributed frugal recipes to her link-up has been a real stretch for me, as it requires me to think differently about food. I rarely think of individual recipes in terms of frugality--I think of them strategically.

Any food has the potential not to be frugal. My recent post about what to do with a whole chicken is a perfect example. If I were to buy a whole chicken, roast it, and eat roast chicken with a couple side dishes for dinner for three nights in a week, that would not make the most of that chicken. Of course, my family and I enjoy roast chicken, so that might be one meal in a week, but efficiency demands that I work more creatively with the rest of the meat and carcass. It's a causal chain: If I roast a chicken, then we will have these other things in the near future as well (casserole, stir fry, gravy, soup, stuffing...)

Something being inexpensive does not make it frugal. Making the most of something inexpensive makes it frugal. Here's another example:

Potatoes. Tonight for dinner, I was not very frugal with potatoes. I made mashed potatoes, but only enough for what we would eat tonight. Normally, I would make a couple potatoes extra of mashed potatoes. In this way, we would have mashed potatoes with dinner a couple nights this week. However, the menu would also include quiche, using mashed potato crust, and next week's menu would include shepherd's pie. And I try to keep a few dollops of mashed potatoes around to thicken vegetable or chicken soup. I would also make extra to keep around for baby food. That would make the most of my time and ingredients. In this case I did use only ingredients I had on hand, but my cooking was not forward-looking. The non-frugal thing to do would be to buy milk and a few potatoes specifically to make mashed potatoes.

Tomato sauce is another example. When I make tomato sauce, whether from a can of tomato paste, a can of stewed tomatoes, or from scratch, I make a lot. I don't make tomato sauce just for us to have spaghetti. Instead, I plan on us having spaghetti one or two nights and pizza on another night or two. The following week, I'll use some of the tomato sauce in lasagna, meatloaf, or eggplant and zucchini bake.

This kind of thinking is why I try to plan meals two weeks in advance. Cooking isn't just about making a meal, it's about a chain of events, and thinking that way saves me a lot of time in the kitchen and a lot of money in the grocery store.

Speaking of the grocery store, strategic cooking applies to raw ingredients too. I try not to buy things unless I can use them multiple ways. When I notice that there is something I buy only for one purpose, I deliberately look for other alternatives. Here's an example:

I was using black beans only in chili (I make chili using equal parts kidney and black beans). Since I really like chili, and I use it to make tamale pie, I bought a ten-pound bag of black beans. But chili really isn't worth taking up that kind of space in my kitchen, so I spent some time looking at recipes that call for black beans and have started incorporating them into my cooking. Now that ten-pound bag is pulling its weight.

When I stopped looking at meals as isolated events and starting thinking of them as points on a continuum, we started eating better, spending a whole lot less money, and wasting a lot less food.

This post has been linked with Works For Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

My Grocery Challenge: Month 2

2011-09-05T07:39:00.005+03:00

This month, my challenge continues. My goal is to keep the month's groceries under $100. I'm taking a slightly different tack this time, though. I just did some major shopping using the majority of my budget.

Here's my grocery list:

Watermelon--$0.15/lb
Montery Jack cheese--$3.00/lb
Cheddar cheese--$3.00/lb
Balsamic vinegar--$4.98
10# bag of chicken leg quarters--$7.90
Corn Tortillas, 80 ct--$2.28
Bartlett pears--$0.38/lb
Fuji apples--$1.18/lb
Limes--6 for $0.98
1 dozen eggs--$1.98
Vienna sausages--$0.78 ea
Beets--$0.78/lb
Green cabbage--$0.38
Zucchini--$0.78/lb
Cucumber--$0.44 ea
Pineapple upside down cake--$5.98
5# bag of potatoes--$1.58
Eggplant--$0.98 ea
Ground beef--$2.36
Brown sugar--$0.98
Sweet potato--$0.58/lb
Chicken hotdogs--$1.38 ea
Avocados--$0.68 ea
Cantaloupe--$0.68 ea
Onions--$0.28/lb
Bananas--$0.55/lb

Total: 69.98

We'll see how long I can make that last. I also have plenty of food in the freezer still. Here's this week's menu:

Sunday: Cornmeal mush, Watermelon and quesadillas, Salmon pasta and green salad
Monday: Eggs and toast, Salad, Tajin Naboul and baked sweet potato
Tuesday: Rice, Salad, Chili pie and Waldorf salad
Wednesday: Bread pudding, PB+J, Fried rice and trout
Thursday: Eggs and homefries, Salad, Spaghetti and meat sauce
Friday: Pancakes, Salad, Tajin Naboul and baked sweet potato
Saturday: Blueberry muffins. Salad, Rice and beans with Waldorf salad

The salmon pasta, chili pie trout, meat sauce, and beans are all leftovers; and the bread pudding will be made from the blueberry muffins leftover from last week. Tajin Naboul is an egg and vegetable dish I made to put in the freezer when I had an excess of zucchini. I'll post the recipe later in the week.

This post has been linked to Menu Plan Monday at Org Junkie and the $50 Grocery Challenge at Spendwise Moms.

Chicken Nugget Hack: Chicago Chicken Legs

2011-09-01T01:24:00.003+03:00

Turns out chicken nuggets are a modern take on an older recipe called Chicago Chicken Legs. Here's the recipe:

1 c milk
4 T flour
2 c chicken meat, finely chopped
Cayenne pepper, black pepper, salt, curry powder, or any other seasonings added to taste.
1 egg
Cornmeal
Oil

Pour milk in a pan and stir in the flour a little at a time, with a fork, to create a smooth mixture. Heat until it thickens, and add salt and pepper to taste. Scrape the sauce into a bowl. Combine the chicken meat and the sauce along with any seasonings.

In a clean pan, heat about 1/2 inch of oil. While that is heating, break the egg into a small bowl and beat it thoroughly. In another bowl, put about 1/4 c of cornmeal.

Using a tablespoon, make patties out of the chicken mixture. Coat each patty in cornmeal, dip in egg, and coat in cornmeal again. Then put the patty in the hot oil. Cook on each side until lightly browned. Drain on a clean towel.

We like cornmeal breading, but you can also use beer batter for something more akin to nuggets.

This recipe is a variation on a recipe taken from The Prudence Penny Regional Cookbook (1957).

This recipe has been linked with Frugal Upstate's Frugal Food Series and Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

Making the Most of a Whole Chicken

2011-08-31T22:34:00.010+03:00

Chicken is the frugal cook's friend, especially if she's determined to make the most of it. In general, meat gets a lot less expensive, a lot more enjoyable, and a lot healthier if it is approached as a condiment in a meal rather than as a main dish. Using that mindset goes a long way to making the most of a whole chicken.

Meal 1: Roast the chicken. To add some flavor, you can slide some halved garlic cloves under the skin. Put some chunked up potatoes, carrots, onion, and celery in the pan around the chicken. Once the chicken is cooked, dinner is ready to go. Assuming a family of four, serve the potatoes and vegetables along with a drumstick or thigh for each person.

Meal 2: Cut off the breast meat, remove the skin, and make Chicago Chicken Legs or your favorite chicken salad recipe. Since breast meat can be pretty dry if your not careful, it's the perfect meat for a fatty recipe. I like to serve chicken salad with green beans and garlic bread. Chicago Chicken Legs are lovely with a fresh, green salad and roasted yams. Depending on the size of the chicken and portion sizes, you might be able to get two meals out of this one.

Meal 3: Use the meat from the back and wings in pasta, fried rice, or casserole. Again, this should be good for multiple meals, depending on how they are served. They all work well with some kind of salad or hot vegetable.

Meal 4: Discard any remaining skin, and put the whole carcass (which should now be down to the bones) in a large pot (some people use a crock pot). Cover with water, and boil for at least an hour. I usually forget about it for a few hours. The resulting broth is a highly nutritious soup stock. And soup served with biscuits, garlic bread, or corn bread is an excellent meal. You should wind up with enough broth for at least two meals worth of soup.

Meal 5: Use the drippings to make gravy--essentially white sauce with chicken fat in it. Season the gravy as desired and serve on top of rice or biscuits. I usually make enough gravy to have rice and gravy for breakfast one morning and biscuits and gravy for dinner on another day. Sometimes there's even enough gravy leftover to put over potatoes on another meal.

Meal 6: Chop up the giblets small and put them in cornbread stuffing. Serve with green beans or some other hot vegetable. Again, there will be enough for a couple meals.

That's one chicken turned into six types of dishes, and at least eleven meals for a family of four. When I cook a whole chicken, I usually end up having to freeze at least part of what I make with it just to keep it from spoiling before we eat it.

For some great, frugal chicken recipes, visit the Frugal Upstate Frugal Food Series.

Quick update...And a couple thoughts

2011-08-31T22:34:00.003+03:00

Blogging is light this week, because we have company! The son of one of my friends is staying with us for the week. The boy is about a year older than DS E, so it works well. However, watching our guest's behavior has given me some thoughts about modern parenting.

Unfortunately, his parents split up a few months ago, and the fact that he hasn't been able to see has father for two (!) months really shows. The boy is with us this week because his mother is a seamstress, and she has a major deadline to meet (think twelve hours of sewing every day!). Normally, he's in daycare during the week, supplemented with babysitting. And the fact that he's in daycare really shows in how he handles being around other kids.

He assumes that any child who approaches him or whatever toy he's playing with is attacking him. He hoards toys, sometimes hiding them behind a door. And it's no wonder. Daycare is a free-for-all when it comes to toys. Whatever you are not immediately holding is up for grabs. It's a system that lends itself to hoarding. And to the panic of being helpless when something is taken from you.

Perhaps the modern sense of entitlement owes something also to a neurotic desire to control one's own belongings?

Also, the first day this child was with us, and every day I've seen him before, he has been really hyper, almost unruly. But as he's settled in here, he has become pretty mellow, with about the same energy level as my own son. Why? He's sleep deprived. The boy has been trying to keep himself awake through exhaustion. While I insist on a bedtime, I don't force my boys to get up at a particular time in the morning, and we do naps as needed for as long as they are needed. It works out to a fairly regular routine anyway, but we're generally pretty well rested around here (at least if your not the mama!).

When you are in daycare, however, you have to get up at a particular time every morning, and naps are regimented both to a particular time and a particular length. If you can stay awake through nap time, you don't get a nap. This is a recipe for one tired boy, especially when he's worried that someone might take his stuff while he sleeps. Of course, none of this is helped by the recent upheaval in his life.

My conclusion is that daycare is probably pretty bad for the development of social and communication skills. At least, it is if it results in a child who hoards toys and the shrieks and bursts into tears the moment another child wants to play interactively with him. Moreover, if a child is consistently hyper and unruly, an extra nap or earlier bedtime may be in order.

This is another way that an institutional environment can never replace the home environment. If my friend and her estranged husband could figure out a way to share their lives, daycare would be unnecessary. And an occasional babysitter would be far less disruptive than the daycare environment. I truly wish my friend had a better alternative.

My Grocery Challenge: Week IV, Part 2

2011-08-25T04:14:00.004+03:00

Here's my shopping for the week. I will not be shopping again next week, as I decided to do the rest of my shopping for the month today. Because it's quite a distance, and we need to preserve the gas, we did not go to the usual discount grocer, and my pocket book suffered for it. Next month, I'm going to try to plan all my shopping around trips into the city so I won't need to go to the local, more expensive stores.

Pancake Syrrup (Dollar Tree)--$1
3# bag of Chicken Hot Dogs--$3.88
2 heads lettuce--$0.98 each
2 quarts vegetable oil--$5.38
1 Gallon whole milk--$3.29
1 dozen kosher eggs--$3.28
1 pint whipping cream--$2.48
1 package tostadas (clearance rack)--$0.50
3 bunches bananas--$0.68/lb
1 watermelon--$0.38/lb

Total: $31.92

Here are the numbers for the month:

Week 1: $20.73
Week 2: $21.50
Week 3: $22.21
Week 4: $31.92
Week 5 (next week): $0

Total: 96.36

Average per week: $19.27

Average cost per day for August: $3.11 to feed our family of two children 2yo and under and two adults.

Well, I think I've done pretty well all things considered. However, I am over the $80 budget I set for myself for the month by over $16. Part of that, though, is that I failed to account for the fact that this month has the better part of five weeks, not four. Unfortunately, since this was an in-the-trenches test, not a thought experiment, I'm overdrawn on the account I use for groceries. Sigh. Luckily, the bank only charges me interest for the overdrawn amount, not an overdraft fee.

Still, I think we've eaten well this month despite very limited resources. I'm going to call it a win!

Join me next week to see my menu plan for the end of August, and the week after as I continue my challenge in September! To see my menu plan for this week, go here.

This post has been linked with Spendwise Moms' $50 Grocery Challenge.

Preventing Dishwater Hands

2011-08-23T21:30:00.003+03:00

I'm really susceptible to dishwater hands, and I have to work hard to prevent them. Between music, needlework, and everyday life, it's important to me to keep my hands (especially my fingertips) in good shape. Here's how I combat the problem:

I wear dish gloves. I know that sounds obvious, but it is my first line of defense. However, it does not do the job by itself.
I keep two dishcloths. Every time I run a bleach load through the wash, I rotate dishcloths and bleach the dirty one. This has really helped! Dishwater hands are largely caused by a fungus that takes up residence in your skin. Keeping my dishcloth clean is important to keeping that fungus from spreading.
Likewise, I wring out the dishcloth as much as I can when I'm done with it. The dryer it is, the fewer critters can live in it.
I wash my hands and put on lotion after I wash dishes. My hands might seem clean after doing dishes, but those rubber gloves really dry out my skin, making my hands more susceptible to problems! Keeping my hands moisturized helps.
I keep my fingernails pared and clean. All kinds of nasty stuff can hide under fingernails. Keeping my nails clean keeps my hands clean.
Whenever possible I limit how many times a day I wash dishes. With my small family (thus far), I can get away with only doing dishes once a day on most days.
When I do start getting dishwater hands, I rub some triple antibiotic ointment into my hands in lieu of lotion after washing my hands.

What do you do to keep your hands nice when you do dishes when you don't have a dishwasher?

I'd love to hear more ideas!

For more tips and tricks, check out Kitchen Tip Tuesday at Tammy's Recipes!

Removing Permanent Ink from the Fridge

2011-08-22T21:53:00.001+03:00

It's a rite of passage, isn't it? At some point in his life, every toddler is required by the laws of nature to draw on the refrigerator door. And every mom is required to chide said toddler and figure out how the heck she's going to remove all. that. ink.

You can find a plethora of methods on the internet. Here's the website I went to. I tried using a dry-erase marker over the marks, and it worked a little. However, it left a nasty smear where the ink had been. The website says that means I didn't let the dry-erase marker dry sufficiently, but when I played with the drying time I had the same result.

Another idea shared at that website is to spray anything aerosol onto the stains, let sit for a minute, and wipe off. That worked better, but still left a lot of ink. I used my can of air freshener, by the way.

Then I tried the rubbing alcohol method. This worked better than the air freshener. For jobs like this, I recommend using rubbing alcohol in the form of hand sanitizer. Since hand sanitizer is a gel, it's much easier to control where it goes (as I learned in the Great Acrylic Paint Incident). I put a glob of sanitizer on a lint-free cloth (read: old t-shirt) and rubbed all over the stain. I didn't have to rub very hard, and the ink came out well. Unfortunately, I could still see where the ink had been. So I brought out the big guns.

Oven Cleaner. This is heavy duty stuff, so I set another rag under the fridge door to catch any drips, opened doors and windows for ventilation, and put on rubber gloves to protect my hands. According to the can, oven cleaner contains lye, so it's not a good idea to mess around with the stuff. If you have one, put on a face mask before spraying it. Otherwise, try to be quick and hold your breath until you can put a little distance between you and where you sprayed. Keep the kids away.

Spray the oven cleaner generously at the top of the stain. Let it sit for a few minutes so the cleaner can drip down over the stain. Once it's slid down, wipe it off. Using a different cloth, clean the surface with some water to remove any residue of the oven cleaner. Your fridge will look like new.

I've linked this post up over at We Are THAT Family for Works for Me Wednesday.

My Grocery Challenge: Week IV

2011-08-22T08:07:00.005+03:00

This week, DH is away until the middle of the week, so I won't be able to do my grocery shopping until then (single car family!). That's good for my budget, but complicates menu planning, especially since DH will be bringing four (!) guests back with him when he returns. Here's my menu:

Sunday: Oatmeal, PB+J, Black Beans with Collard Greens on Rice (with cheese!)
Monday: Eggs and Toast, Salad, Carrot and Zucchini Kugel with Tuna Casserole
Tuesday: Bread Pudding, Sandwiches, Black Beans with Collard Greens on Rice
Wednesday: Rice, Sandwiches, Succotash and Green Beans
Thursday: Eggs and Homefries, Salad, Tamale Pie and Roasted Carrots
Friday: Pancakes, Salad, Black Beans and Collard Greens on Rice
Saturday: Muffins, Salad, Carrot and Zucchini Kugel with Tuna Casserole

The collard greens are my impulse buy from last week. I just sauteed them and then stirred them into this recipe (which I tripled). The Carrot and Zucchini Kugel is leftover from Week One, and the bread pudding is leftover from last week. The succotash will be from the excess lima beans I cooked and froze the last time I made succotash. The tamale pie will use the leftover chili from two weeks ago.

Dh will return home with company in tow sometime on Wednesday, and the company will leave on Friday. During their stay, they will spend a lot of time seeing the sites, so I don't know which meals they will eat with us. To be on the safe side, I have scheduled things I know I can make enough of to serve six adults.

When I do go grocery shopping, I will definitely need more eggs, cream for the baby's food, salad fixings, and fruit. At some point, I'll also need more cooking oil, but I think that will have to wait until next week. Because of the dietary constraints of our guests, I will also be buying more expensive eggs than I normally do.

I'll post my shopping in a separate post when I get that far.

This post is linked to Menu Plan Monday at Org Junkie.

Worse Than Riots

2011-08-19T02:15:00.003+03:00

While the western world has been shocked out of complacency by the infamous "London" riots (although there have been similar events across the UK), a silent travesty sweeps the homes of Americans and English alike. However, I do use the term "home" loosely. That's the point. Our homes have fallen apart.

My husband and I are relatively young; we were both born in the first half of the 1980's. We both came from less-than-intact homes. In fact, his never was intact. DH was raised by his grandfather. My upper-middle class parents split when I was nine, and my father is now divorcing for the second time. Almost of our friends, both from school and later, both older and younger come from similar circumstances. One friend (who's pushing 40) recently told DH that we are the only married people he knows.

As we and our various friends have paired off, married, and (in most cases) started families of their own, we have all sworn that we'd learn from the mistakes of our parents. We'd stay married. We'd work together to raise our children. We'd be attentive to our married and family life.

Then the first pair had a nasty break-up. There was adultery involved. Fraud. Gambling. Violence. The children were sent to their dysfunctional grandmother, who drugged one and stood by while the other was abused in unspeakable ways during the year that the unhappy couple tried to reconcile. Mother and children are reunited now, but lives were ruined.

I wish we lived closer.

That was certainly the most dramatic, but it was the start of a trend. Since then, all our married friends except one pair have split up, and dramatically so. The ones who are still together came from intact families. My husband and I are the only ones who have stayed together whose parents did not.

The most recent couple to split did so over financial troubles. After the husband was laid off (which was after the last three companies he worked for tanked), he went for a swim in the nearest bottle and has yet to come up for air, despite a trip to the hospital for it. His wife moved in with her mother almost three months ago, and the three-year-old son still wants to know why Daddy hasn't called or come to visit.

I bleed for that boy.

And through it all, I wonder how on earth my boys are going to find mates for themselves when their time comes.

It's little wonder, really. Our parents all wanted better for us than what they managed for themselves. But they also wanted us to follow their hedonistic path that led them to their own disastrous personal affairs. My own parents don't understand how I could marry the only man I ever dated. My generation has all the intentions, but none of the skills. For too many of us, we've never actually seen a functional marriage in action. At best, we've seen reruns of Dennis the Menace or Leave it to Beaver. We don't understand that in order to form a happy marriage, we need goals that neither spouse can accomplish independently of the other.

How do you raise your own children to honor and obey their parents when your own parents are disappointed you reproduced in the first place? How do you learn to make do on a small income, in a small apartment, with one vehicle, and no cable when you were raised by people who spent their adult lives keeping up with the Joneses? How do you teach faithfulness (or practice it, for that matter) when your parents were permiscuous on principle. As we have found faith, how do we honor our own parents, when those parents are licentious atheists? These are not pleasant musings, but consider them far too many of us must.

This is not to place the blame for my generation's behavior entirely on our parents. Each individual is responsible for his own actions. All I'm saying is that the deck is not stacked in our favor.

The good news is that people who remember the intact family as a cultural norm are still around. The bad news is that those people aren't getting any younger. Once they have past on the opportunity to turn things around will be lost. Every time a young family falls apart, western civilization dies a little bit more. Every time one in my generation passes up the chance to learn from those who remember how things ought to be, we kill our society a little bit more.

The travesty is that the will is there to turn things around, but the know-how isn't.

My Favorite Middle Eastern Food!

2011-08-18T08:49:00.002+03:00

A traditional breakfast food throughout the Mideast is a hearty bean dish called Fool. How it's seasoned varies regionally, but here's the basic idea:

Cook a bag of beans according to the directions. Traditionally, fool is made with fava beans, but navy beans work well too. Some Egyptian friends even use pintos, since that is the most readily available in the US, but I don't like the flavor nearly as much.

Toward the end of the cooking time (that is, when the beans are just about to the point that you can mash them), add several whole eggs to the pot and allow them to hard boil. When the beans are done, remove the eggs. By cooking the eggs in the fool, you have just infused the beans with extra calcium! Mash the beans with a potato masher.

Scoop some of the bean goop into a bowl, leaving plenty of room for toppings. The toppings that seem to be universal are

Olive oil
Lemon juice
Sliced hard-boiled egg
Minced, raw onion

Iraqi Fool also includes:

Parsley
Hummus
Tahini (if you have it on hand)

Egyptian Fool includes:

Raw, diced tomato
Fresh, diced cucumber
Anything pickled
Cold, roasted bell pepper (like you get in a jar)

In our house, we prefer:

Olive oil
Lemon juice
Hard-boiled egg
Tomato
Cucumber
Hummus
Dry basil
Garlic Powder

All of the toppings should be cold, while the beans are hot. Traditionally, this is what laborers ate for breakfast. As they say in Israel, it is like cement in your stomach. For American tastes, however, it is a nutritious, hearty, and frugal lunch or dinner dish.

This post has been linked up to Frugal Upstate's Frugal Food Series. Other great bean dishes include chili, tamale pie (from leftover chili), and dahl (bean curry, in essence) made from lentils or chickpeas. However, those are all varied enough and easy enough to find, that I will not include a recipe.

Grocery Challenge: Week III

2011-08-15T11:12:00.004+03:00

I'm not doing well at this. My total this week is $22.21. For the third week in a row now, I'm over budget. Let's see if I can get it all to average out next week. Sigh...

Here's what we bought in our two grocery trips this week.

First Trip:

1 Gallon Whole Milk--$3.15
2 packages Chicken Hotdogs--$0.75 each
1 package Mini Doughnuts for dh--$0.75
1 Eggplant for freezer cooking--$0.68

Total: $6.08

Second Trip:

2 Cantaloupes--$0.48 each
Pears--$0.38 per lb
2 bunches Bananas--$0.55 per lb
Tomatoes--$0.58 per lb
Collard Greens--$0.98 each
Green Onions--2 for $0.88
2 Cucumbers--$0.38 each
Sunflower Seeds--$1.68
Baking Powder--$1.78
Raisins--$3.78

Total: $16.13

The sunflower seeds and raisins I put on our salads that we eat for lunch. Since I buy large packages, these should last a while. Likewise, baking powder is not something I buy every week. The collard greens were an impulse buy due to the good price. I'm not even sure exactly what I am going to do with them yet, other than chop and freeze them.

Menu Plan:

Sunday: Oatmeal Pudding (leftover from last week), Salad, Vegetable Upside-Down Cake and Chicken
Monday: Eggs and Toast, Salad, Unagi Donburi and Cucumber Salad
Tuesday: French Toast, Salad, Fool--a favorite dish of ours from the Mideast, served with green onion, cucumber, boiled egg, humus, and fresh tomato
Wednesday: Rice, Cucumber Sandwiches, Eggplant Salad and Idiot Tuna
Thursday: Eggs and Homefries, Salad, Fool
Friday: Bread Pudding (leftover from last week), Salad, Unagi Donburi and Cucumber Salad
Saturday: Muffins, Salad, Fool (served as described above)

Dh will be heading out for a week on Wednesday, so we won't be consuming nearly as much food as usual this week. He has already bought his food to take with out of his own pocket money.

This post has been linked with Menu Plan Monday at Organizing Junkie and Spendwise Mom's $50 Grocery Challenge.

Favorite Frugal Fish Dishes

2011-08-10T22:14:00.007+03:00

This week on the Frugal Food Series at Frugal Upstate, Jenn is collecting frugal recipes that use canned fish. Here are my favorites:

Cheater Tuna Casserole--While this uses boxed macaroni and cheese, it can easily be made from scratch. This is dish, though, that lends itself to using up whatever's in the cupboard, and boxes of macaroni and cheese bought on sale ($0.50 each) are often in my cupboard.
Idiot Tuna--This is a dish I improvised back in Israel. It was literally made with what little I had on hand. It's been a staple for us ever since.
Arroz Catum--In my book, most things that call for canned goods are not frugal dishes. However, as with the other dishes in this post, Arroz C'atum is great for eating from the pantry. It lends itself to variation, and the recipe makes a LOT. If you don't have canned tomatoes on hand or found a really good deal on fresh ones, use three or four good-sized tomatoes in place of the canned and add more water.
Tuna (or salmon, sardine, herring, etc.) Salad. Tuna salad is a great way to use up little bits and pieces hanging around the fridge. Down to one egg? Boil it and add it in. Have one small carrot you don't know what to do with? Grate it, and mix it into your tuna. Same goes for that quarter onion or stray green onion or celery heart, the end of a cucumber, a small tomato, or one remaining pickle. Personally, I prefer water-packed tuna for salad, but if you use oil-packed tuna, you can skip the mayonnaise and make the salad even more frugal.

Fish Croquettes (an improvisational recipe and fond memory of my grandmother)

1 can of fish. I've done this with canned salmon and canned mackerel. I'm sure it would work with tuna or sardines as well or even leftover tuna salad.
Something wet. I've used egg, mayonnaise, yoghurt, and even the tomato sauce that comes in the can with mackerel.
Something dry. Bread crumbs, corn meal, wheat germ, etc.

Drain the can of fish (reserving liquid for other cooking), and pick out any bones, if necessary. Add the dry ingredient a little at a time. You'll need enough to make the mixture just the slightest bit crumbly. I use about 2 tablespoons of cornmeal for one small can of salmon. Add in the wet ingredient a little at a time. You'll need enough to make the mixture into a texture that can be shaped into patties. If you are using an egg as your wet ingredient, add that to the fish first and then start adding your dry ingredient.

Season the mixture to taste. I usually include garlic powder, a squirt of mustard, and some oregano or thyme.

Shape the mixture into patties that are two or three inches across. Then heat some oil in a frying pan. You'll need enough oil to coat the bottom of the pan. If you used tuna packed in oil, the oil from the can may be used for cooking. You'll also need to put more oil in the pan between batches of croquettes, since the oil gets absorbed as the fish cooks. Fry the patties for a few minutes on each side until they are visibly cooked (you'll see them change color on the cooked side. Once they are cooked, move them to a plate covered in a paper towel to drain.

KTT: No-Mess Biscuits and Gravy

2011-08-09T06:26:00.007+03:00

Whenever I cook a chicken, I save the drippings to make gravy. One of the ways we enjoy that gravy is in biscuits and gravy for breakfast. As much as I love the dish, it's awfully messy to serve to a small child. Here's how to control the mess:

Make sure the gravy is thick
Cut the biscuits in half, lengthwise
Spread the gravy on each biscuit half with a knife (like butter)

Today, I used corn muffins and toast instead of biscuits, and spread the gravy (white sauce, actually, for Biltmore Goldenrod Eggs) on them for all of us. It made the breakfast dishes much easier to clean up!

For more tips and tricks, check out Kitchen Tip Tuesday at Tammy's Recipes. And please join me at the top of each week to share food budgeting tips and see how I progress with my $20 Grocery Challenge! You can read about my first two weeks here and here.

This post has also been linked up at Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family!

My Grocery Challenge, Part II

2011-08-08T10:26:00.005+03:00

I just did my grocery shopping for this week. Our schedule is a bit weird this month, so it looks like shopping is going to happen on Sundays rather than Thursdays.

I've misplaced my receipt (it's probably in the car), but here's approximately what I bought:

2 Bunches of Bananas--$0.67/lb
Poblano Peppers--$0.97/lb
White Onions--$0.69/lb
2 bags Chicken Hotdogs--$0.79 ea (Yes, I know they're bad, but DH needs his snack food!)
1 Wild Cherry Pepsi--$1.69 ea (see above)
1 pint Cream--$2.59 ea~
1 head Romaine Lettuce--$1.99 ea~
1 bag Baby Spinach--$2.99 ea
1 bag Provolone Slices--$2.99 ea (this is for a specific recipe for freezer cooking)

My grand total was $21.50. Still a bit over my goal, but my freezer is full enough now that I hope I'll be able to minimize our shopping for the rest of the month. I also need to note, for the sake of full disclosure, that we have bought other junk food items in the last week, but that money did not come out of the grocery budget. It came out of dh's budgeted pocket money for the month, meaning he just has a bit less to spend on the two road trips he has to take this month.

This week is a leftovers week. Here's my menu:

Sunday: Oatmeal Pudding, Salad, Gobhi Aloo with Dahl and Rice
Monday: Biltmore Goldenrod Eggs, Salad, Chili and Cornbread
Tuesday: Bread Pudding, Salad, Gobhi Aloo with Dahl and Rice
Wednesday: Breakfast Rice, Egg Salad Sandwiches, Chili and Cornbread
Thursday: Eggs and Homefries, Salad, Cincinnati Chili (made minus the Worcestershire Sauce) with Green Beans
Friday: Pancakes, Salad, Chili with Cornbread
Saturday: Muffins, Egg Salad Sandwiches, Vegetable Upside-Down Cake with Grilled Chicken

Breakfast and lunch this week (as with most weeks) are made fresh, although the bread for the bread pudding on Tuesday is leftover bread crusts from the freezer. For dinner, I'm making the chili and dahl from scratch. I made the cornbread this past Friday. I'll also have to cook the pasta for the Cincinnati chili, rice, and the green beans (from a bag in the freezer). The Aloo Gobhi, some of the rice, Cincinnati chili, vegetable upside-down cake, and roast chicken are all leftovers.

I also have some produce in the fridge that I'm not planning on eating right away, so I'm doing some freezer cooking for the end of the month when we'll have company over.

This has been linked with Organizing Junkie's Menu Plan Monday. And for the report on week one, click over here.

Favorite Frugal Eggs Dishes

2011-08-04T01:12:00.004+03:00

Eggs are an excellent, frugal source of protein. I love to keep hard boiled eggs around either as a snack, as a salad topping, or for Biltmore Goldenrod Eggs.

As an ingredient, eggs lend themselves to a variety of frugal dishes.

Breakfast:

French Toast
Veggie Scramble
Bread Pudding (I leave out the nutmeg and coconut)
Biltmore Goldenrod Eggs (see link above, you can also substitute gravy for the white sauce)
Oatmeal Pudding

Lunch:

Egg Salad Sandwiches (Experiment with adding different vegetables to the salad. I find that one egg makes enough salad for two or three sandwiches).

Dinner:

Quiche made with mashed potato crust--Spread mashed potatoes over your greased pie tin and bake until the potatoes start to turn golden. Remove from the oven and assemble your quiche as usual. This is why I always try to make more mashed potatoes than I need!

Egg and Spinach Bake

Beat together 2 eggs, 1 cup milk, and 2 tablespoons of flour. Combine this mixture in a casserole dish with a 1-pound bag of frozen spinach. Cover, and bake at 350 for about an hour

Kugels--Kugel is a kind of casserole. Some are sweet, as when they are made with sweet potatoes or pasta , and make an excellent breakfast dish. Others are savory, as when they are made with potatoes or other vegetables. Eggs act as a binding agent in kugels. Usually the ingredients are simple and inexpensive. Here's the recipe for Carrot and Zucchini Kugel from Molly Katsen's Enchanted Broccoli Forest (also my source for mashed potato quiche crust):

Saute 1 large, finely chopped onion in butter until translucent. Combine onion with 4 grated zucchini and 4 grated carrots in a greased, 9x13 baking dish. Mix in 3 beaten eggs, salt and pepper to taste, 3/4 cup wheat germ (or matzo meal or fine breadcrumbs), 6 tablespoons flour, and 1 teaspoon baking powder. Spread the mixture across the pan until smooth, and dot with butter (if desired). Bake at 375 for about an hour.
My favorite, though, is a popular street food in Israel. Boil and mash two sweet potatoes. Allow them to cool. In a buttered 9x13 pan, combine the sweet potatoes with two beaten eggs, 1 drained can of corn (or a generous helping of frozen corn), a sauteed onion, and about a cup of cheddar cheese. For an American twist, you can also add leftover cooked meat that's been cut small. Bake at 350 for half an hour to an hour.

Fried Rice--This is a great left-over dish.

I usually saute an onion (any meal that starts with a sauteed onion is promising!), and then add zucchini, frozen peas, a carrot, broccoli, and/or anything else inexpensive. When those are almost cooked, I scoot them to the side and add a beaten egg to the empty half of the pan. When the egg is cooked underneath, I use a spoon to break up the egg and mix it in with the vegetables. Then I add cooked rice (preferably leftover from another meal) and any leftover, cut up, cooked meat I have on hand. Season with soy sauce to taste, and you have yourself a meal in a bowl.

Head on over to Frugal Upstate's Frugal Food Series for more frugal egg recipes!

My Grocery Challenge

2011-08-03T10:32:00.005+03:00

This month's budget is really tight, so I'm taking the opportunity to get my grocery spending back under control. I'm spending an average of $20/week on groceries this month...and no more. Now, mind, that $20 does not include toilet paper or any other non-food items, so it's not quite as stringent as it sounds. Of course, we also have only two adults, one toddler, and one infant to feed, so that helps too. Still, because of the kids, I have to keep milk and other relatively expensive items around on a regular basis.

I do have a pretty well-stocked pantry and freezer, given the space I have, so we'll be doing a lot of pantry eating to stretch things out. Grocery shopping will be to keep us in salads for our lunches and to fill in any gaps in pantry. Here's what I bought for this week:

2 bunches Bananas @ $0.55/lb
3 dozen Eggs @ $0.98/doz
10 Limes @ $0.11 ea
1 Eggplant @ $0.88 ea
2 lb Colby Jack Cheese @ $5.98
Roma Tomatoes @ $0.68/lb
Milk @ $3.15/gal
1 Acorn Squash @ $0.68/lb
2 Cucumbers @ $0.38 ea

Total: $20.73
Remaining Grocery Money: $59.27

Menu:

S: Oatmeal, Salad, Egg and Spinach Bake with Chicken and Roasted Yams
M: Biltmore Goldenrod Eggs, Salad, Carrot and Zucchini Kugel with Buttermilk Biscuits
T: Biltmore Goldenrod Eggs (leftover), Ramen (I was lazy. Bad Mama.), Carrot and Zucchini Kugel with Salmon Pasta
W: Rice, Salad, Idiot Tuna
Th: Veggie Scramble and Homefries, Egg Salad Sandwiches, Carrot and Zucchini Kugel with Salmon Pasta
F: Pancakes, Salad, Egg and Spinach Bake with Baked Potatoes and Chicken
S: Corn Muffins, Salad, Carrot and Zucchini Kugel with Yellow Tail and Buttermilk Biscuits

Recipe Notes:

Biltmore Goldenrod Eggs is a (super easy) recipe from The Prudence Penny Regional Cookbook (1957)
Carrot and Zucchini Kugel is a recipe (also easy) from Mollie Katsen's Enchanted Broccoli Forest.
Both are excellent, frugal, flavorful dishes made from very few ingredients.

We might be going out on Saturday, so lunch may be a potluck instead of salad, but otherwise, the menu is pretty set at this point. Luckily, next week is leftover's week, so groceries should be pretty easy then.

This post has been linked with Spendwise Mom's $50 Grocery Challenge and Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

WFMW: Keeping myself on the ball with dinner

2011-08-03T03:57:00.005+03:00

Last week, I wrote about how having a regular breakfast schedule helps me make sure that breakfast happens. This week, I'll talk about how I plan my menus.

I generally have two weeks planned out at any given time.
About mid-week I write the plan for the week after next.
Here's why: By the middle of the week, I have a pretty good feel for how this week's plan is going and what kinds of leftovers I have. At that point I do any tweaking to the following week's menu that I need to and rough out the menu for the week after. Around here, the sales fliers come out on Thursdays, too, so Thursday is a good time for me to do menu planning.
Any given week, I plan on two main dishes. Usually those dishes include the protein in the meal, but not always. I then alternate those two dishes throughout the week.
When possible my main dish starts out plain at the beginning of the week and varies as the week progresses. In other words, if we have roast chicken on Sunday, it will be reincarnated as stir-fry or a pasta dish on Tuesday. If tuna is my other main meat, it may be tuna casserole on Monday and Idiot Tuna on Thursday.
I also plan one vegetarian dinner during the week, usually on Wednesday.
If the main dishes do not lend themselves to variation, I make a point of having different vegetables or starches with the main dish on different days. If we're having lasagna and green beans on Sunday, for example, we'll have lasagna and carrots on Tuesday. Often the green beans will reappear as the vegetable with the other main dish on another day. Likewise with the carrots.
I also try to arrange the meals so that easier dishes fall on busier days.
By only having a couple main dishes through the week, the bulk of the cooking is front-loaded on the week. By the time the week is over, I'm not spending a lot of time in the kitchen. This way, I get more family time, and I don't feel burdened on baking day (Friday).
I also try to do at least one new recipe every week. By planning it ahead, there are no surprise grocery store trips.

Planned/Managed Leftovers:

When preparing dishes I try to prepare more than I'll need. Often, even if I don't plan, I'll end up with an one more large serving of a main dish than I need. About once a month, I plan the menu around leftovers. By planning a leftovers week, that extra serving turns into a side dish for one night--enough for all of us. When I stash leftovers in the freezer, and planning them into their own menu, they feel fresh again. Leftovers week is a breeze for me in the kitchen and feels to everyone else like a week full of variety.

Having a detailed menu planned a couple weeks out really works for me. It may seem rigid, but it goes through many permutations as I account for reality, and sometimes we drop it altogether for a night or two or switch meals around.

This is linked up with Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

KTT: White Sauce Tip

2011-08-02T09:01:00.002+03:00

White sauce is a common recipe component, but the butter in it makes it a less-than-frugal food. Instead of using butter (or if you are out of butter), use cooking oil. The texture is different on the stove when you mix in the flour, but the end result is the same.

For more tips and tricks, check out Kitchen Tip Tuesday at Tammy's Recipes.

KTT: The Dishes

2011-07-25T20:46:00.003+03:00

My tip today is really easy: Do dishes after breakfast.

I used to do dishes after dinner every night, but with two little ones, I just don't have the time or energy anymore. I do have the time and energy after breakfast.

Right now, my little family has enough dishes that I only need to wash them once a day. While my switch to morning from evening was just a matter of convenience at first, it's really been helpful in other ways as well.

First, there are often pots or pans from dinner that need to soak overnight. If I washed dishes after dinner, those things would still need to wait to be cleaned the next day, meaning I'd either have to do dishes twice the following day or do without those pots/pans/baking dishes/what-have-you for the following night. By doing the dishes after breakfast, all the dinner dishes from the previous night get clean.

Second, my DS E is at the age that he wants to help. While there are many ways he can help that are actually useful, him helping with dishes does slow me down. But he has a fabulous time playing with the running water, and it's been an opportunity for me to start teaching him about patience and ending an activity peaceably.

For more tips and tricks, check out Kitchen Tip Tuesday at Tammy's Recipes.

The Times that Matter

2011-07-25T11:04:00.007+03:00

Baby G catching some rays

Now that Baby G is heading towards seven months, we've reached a very special time in our relationship--one that was equally special to me with DS E when he was that age.

We've reached the age when a baby grabs your glasses the moment you lean within his reach.

I'm nearsighted.

Just as it did when DS E grabbed my glasses, I am reminded of a very important fact when it comes to being close to my children:

If I need my glasses to enjoy talking to, playing with, or cuddling up to my boys, I'm not close enough. When the things we use to aide our interactions with the world become barriers to a relationship, that relationship has achieved intimacy. Just as Elijah knew the earthquake and the wind were just distractions from the intimacy listening for the voice of God, I'm learning that my glasses are barriers to my intimacy with my sons--and through them, my glasses become a barrier to the full appreciation of the blessings God has bestowed on my life in the form of family.

DS E in no-glasses range

If you are nearsighted like I am, when you tuck in your children tonight, or the next time you wrestle them to the floor in a tickle fight, take off your glasses and see.

WFMW: The Breakfast Schedule

2011-07-25T10:12:00.007+03:00

I am a creature of habit. I'll do the same thing, ad nauseum, until I can stand it no longer. Once I tire of my habit, I stop altogether, and usually slip into problematic habits. Breakfast is an excellent example. I used to have a bagel for breakfast every. single. morning. Once I was tired of it, I stopped eating breakfast for the most part, and I punctuated that habit with a trip to the local bakery. Not healthy. Then I resolved to be better. So I had yoghurt for breakfast...every. single. morning. When I tired of that routine, guess what happened.

Worse still, if I fail to make breakfast, my husband (who is desperately trying to form better eating habits) turns to the preferred breakfast of his childhood: Ramen and hot dogs (ugh). Not exactly the example I want to set for my sons.

I need to make breakfast every morning. It needs to be something I can stick to and something I can (and will) do while half-asleep. And it needs to be varied enough that DH and DS E don't get bored.

When I started menu planning (click on the link for an explanation of how my menu plan works), therefore, I decided to map out all three meals every week to head off relapses into bad habits. Starting with breakfast, I made a list of all the breakfast foods I like that I can prepare with relative ease. Turns out there are seven of them that both my husband and I enjoy. I arranged them throughout the week so as not to feel repetitive. I also like to vary the menu to try out recipes and such. Here's what I came up with:

Sunday: Oatmeal or other cereal (sometimes it's granola, oatmeal pudding, or cornmeal mush)
Monday: Eggs (usually over hard) and toast
Tuesday: French toast or bread pudding
Wednesday: Rice (either sweet or with gravy)
Thursday: Eggs (usually scrambled with vegetables) and home-fries
Friday: Pancakes (or occasionally crepes)
Saturday: Muffins or other baked good

I arranged them in the week also to accord with the household tasks for the day. Monday, for example, is housecleaning day, so eggs and toast is a very quick and simple meal that doesn't detract from the time allotted to getting the house straightened up. Friday is my baking day. I put pancakes for that day since I have most of the ingredients out already for bread and anything else I may be baking for the following week. Baking day is on Friday, because we often travel in the morning on Saturdays. It's the perfect way for me to make sure we have a wholesome, portable breakfast ready to go the following morning.

Of course, the schedule is flexible. For example, if Monday's dinner is supposed to include quiche, then I will switch Monday's breakfast of eggs and toast with Tuesdays (French toast).

Having a breakfast menu plan has really helped us establish a good morning routine as a family. It makes sure that we actually eat breakfast, and that breakfast is actually a time for us to come together around the table, rather than a free-for-all around the television. It's helped me find ways to cook breakfasts that the whole family likes, and it keeps my son from becoming bored with what I serve. Best of all, it helps me to combine frugality with good food.

Join me next week for more on how I keep myself on the ball with meals.

In the meantime, check out Works For Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

WFMW: Removing Acrylic Paint Stains

2011-07-20T00:11:00.003+03:00

My toddler got into a bottle of gold acrylic paint about a month ago. Scratch that. He dumped the bottle out all over himself. At least it was paint, and not what I originally thought it was :)

By the time I was able to get his clothes in the wash, the paint had dried. Well, I let them sit about a month. Let's face it, getting paint off of his pajamas wasn't exactly a huge priority for me. But what was really disappointing was that he had smeared some on one of his best shirts.

Finally, I looked up "how to remove acrylic paint from clothes" on the web. The advice I found most frequently was to saturate the stain with rubbing alcohol and then scrape at it with a popsicle stick or some such. I tried it out on my son's pajamas, scraping with a table knife, and it worked fine. The stain wasn't completely removed, but it was mostly gone--good enough for jazz.

Next, I tried it on the shirt. That's when I found the fly in the ointment: The technique works well, but because alcohol evaporates quickly, it needed to be re-saturated frequently, and the alcohol would spread out across the fabric very quickly.

Finally, I had an idea: I put a dollop of alcohol-based hand sanitizer over the remaining stain. It was the perfect solution! The alcohol still loosened the stain, but the fact that it's in a gel kept it from evaporating to quickly or spreading out across the fabric. Best of all, I could direct some of the gel exactly where I needed it.

Now, the shirt isn't perfect, but it's imperfect in the "owned by a two-year-old" sort of way--plenty good enough to be put back into service!

For more tips, check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family!

KTT: French Toast Tip

2011-07-19T23:53:00.002+03:00

Quick tip today:

I make French toast for breakfast once a week. While it's any easy and delicious breakfast dish, I don't always want to be bothered with mixing up the batter.

Instead, when I make the batter, I make enough for two weeks, use what I need for that day, and freeze the rest. The following week, I just take the frozen batter out of the freezer the night before.

I also like that this tip helps me cut down on the dishes!

For more tips and tricks, check out Kitchen Tip Tuesday at Tammy's Recipes!

WFMW: How to serve lima beans

2011-07-13T10:12:00.007+03:00

As I've been purging the words "don't like" from my culinary vocabulary, I've found that, for most foods, tastiness depends on preparation. I didn't think I was fond of peas or cooked spinach, but different Indian preparations I find delectable. Mushrooms? Not so much. Mushrooms with bamboo shoots in teriyaki sauce? Seconds, please. And now that I've found flavorful ways to enjoy these foods, I'm also finding that I'm growing accustomed to them, so that I don't mind them so much in their traditional, plain form.

Next on my list? Lima beans. Historically, I have difficulty with frozen lima beans. Lima beans that I've cooked from a dry form aren't bad, but definitely aren't my favorite. Thanks to a succotash recipe from a 1940's cookbook, though, this frugal food will be a pantry staple.

Succotash

2 c corn
2 c cooked lima beans
salt and pepper to taste
paprika to taste
1T butter
1/2 c milk
cooked meat (optional)

Combine all ingredients except the meat in a pot, and simmer until the milk is absorbed but the mixture is still moist. Add meat, and heat through.

When I made this, I used about a cup of cooked ground beef that I had in the freezer.

Fast. Easy. Healthy. Tasty.

Next time, I might add cheese.

For more tips and tricks, check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

WFMW: Medicine Cabinet Organization

2011-06-29T09:16:00.004+03:00

The medicine cabinet in our master bath has no shelves. For obvious reasons, that became very inconvenient pretty quickly. But I found a solution. The cylindrical containers that Crystal Light comes in are the perfect diameter for fitting in the medicine cabinet--I just remove the plastic label, and they are ready to go.

I have one for hair accessories and fresh razors (I also hook nail clippers on the side of it), and I have another for ointments. Now I need one for tooth paste and one for tubes of lotion. And I still keep a few items directly on the shelf. I've quintupled my space!

I'm still thinking of finding a shelf to put in the cabinet, but the containers would stay even then. I'd just put the shelf above them. Best of all, this solution uses what I already have--something that would normally go in the recycling bin--and the containers all match. I also like that I don't have to face an avalanche when I open the cabinet anymore.

Once I have a couple more to finish the project, I'll post photos.

Free, good-looking, efficient, and easy definitely work for me! For more tips and tricks, check out Works For Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

Note: I received no compensation for this post.

Potty Training: To wait, or not to wait?

2011-06-27T11:07:00.002+03:00

Modern accepted wisdom promotes waiting to potty train until the child is ready, but this is a recent trend. I have heard (although I do not know if it is true) that the idea was proposed by disposable diaper companies to promote delayed potty training, and therefore sales. Since the idea coincided with a more permissive standard of parenting than used by previous generations, it resonated with young parents and held. However, I don't think that approach is working with DS E.

DS E was "ready" a year ago. He really, really wanted to use the potty. But he didn't have the coordination or capacity to understand what was involved and follow through. Heck, he couldn't even take off his pants! More importantly, we couldn't afford the extra laundry created by the learning curve (we had to hire out laundry in Israel); and I wasn't ready. So we waited.

Then we started giving DS E naked time. He had great control of his bladder, but getting him to go in a particular place just wasn't going to happen. Then we put the breaks on when we moved. Once we settled in to our new home, we started again and got him using the potty chair. Things were looking up! Then Baby G was born, and DS E backslid. We've been in a holding pattern ever since.

Well, I'm tired of spending money on diapers when I know DS E has the wherewithal for underwear! I'm tired of DS E just trying to hold it in until I put a diaper back on him. So I've been rethinking our approach. One of the arguments in favor of waiting until the child is "ready" is that anything else trains the parent more than it trains the child. The more I think about that idea, the less I think it's a bad one. Parents are responsible for the bodily functions of their infants. We are also responsible for their waking up, going to sleep, eating times, and diet. It seems to me that a more logical and gentle approach to the issue of potty training is for the parent to transition the method by which they take responsibility from diapering to periodic and regular bathroom visits (followed by positive reinforcement for the child's success and cooperation). Gradually, the child becomes accustomed to visiting the facilities and is able to do so on his own out of habit. Then the habit becomes identified with the physical need. Granted, the actions associated with this may look the same as "typical" potty training, but the mindset is different.

Over the past few days, DS E, DH, and I have been working together from this mindset, and it has been working beautifully. We've had outings with DS E wearing underwear; DS E has even taken the initiative in using his potty on occasion; and, of the three accidents we've had, two were my fault (one was my not understanding my son's communicating his need, and the other was my not being sufficiently regular in sending him to the bathroom).

I guess my new approach is that he is not ready. He is not ready to shoulder the responsibility. As a child, he needs me to impose context, structure, purpose, and routine on his life. That said, it is inconsistent (and sabotage) for me to expect him to be able to do those things for himself in this one area. I don't think I have this figured out, but I think I'm on the right track. We'll see how it goes.

WFMW: Best Frugal Buy this Week!

2011-06-22T06:27:00.003+03:00

Last week, Rachel at Small Steps posted about her discovery that spray guns are a wonderful, frugal alternative to cheap water pistols. Now it's my turn!

I had actually just bought a spray bottle at the dollar store a few days before Rachel put up that post. I had bought it because I'm learning how to cut DS E's hair, and misting the hair first really helps. Better still, I kept DS E amused and relatively still during his haircut by letting him play with the spray bottle during the trim.

And now that the snow has stopped (it SNOWED on MEMORIAL DAY here!!!), I've gotten some seedlings started. They're not ready for a real watering can yet, so the spray bottle has been a real boon for watering.

Then, with Rachel's post, I let DS E start playing with the spray bottle on a regular basis. We've had a blast with it!

Best yet, it's a great way for DS E to help me with cleaning. He's happy to spray some water on the tables, chairs, tv screen, and anything else that needs a quick wipe down!

One spray bottle for $1 plus tax, five really helpful uses for it!...and counting...

That works for me! Find more tips and tricks on Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family!

KTT: New toppings for pizza

2011-06-21T21:25:00.004+03:00

Tammy, of Tammy's Recipes, recently posted that she is coming to the conclusion that just about anything tastes good on pizza. I had a similar insight when we lived in Israel. Israeli pizza is very different from American pizza. First, it is always thin crust. Second, the tomato sauce is much lighter, along the lines of what happens when you stew your own tomatoes. Third, it's usually vegetarian, since rabbinic Judaism forbids combining meat and dairy. Fourth, it never contains pork, since neither of the major religious groups of the country (Jewish and Muslim) eat it.

My favorite Israeli pizza toppings are corn, eggplant, and sweet potato. With the latter two, just scatter the raw, sliced vegetables on the pizza before you put them in the oven, and let them roast. With corn, I like to put frozen corn on my pizza before it goes in the oven.

I also enjoy a Middle Eastern spice blend, called Za'atar, on pizza. It goes well on just about anything, and every Middle Eastern culture has a slightly different version of it. In America, the Halal company Sadaf sells bags of Za'atar in ethnic markets. Recipes to make it yourself are also available online. My favorite use for it is on top of buttered, warm pita bread or dinner rolls. But I digress...

While rabbinic Jews do not put meat on pizza, they do permit egg and, sometimes, fish (depending on what kind of kosher certification the pizza parlor has). One popular Israeli pizza topping that I couldn't quite bring myself to try was fried egg. Another popular one that is more appetizing to me, but I still haven't tried, is canned tuna.

Of course, I always use my tortilla pizza crust when we have pizza at home!

So next time you make pizza, try some new toppings! Eggplant is a wonderful, delicious way to add some nutrition to pizza. And by all means, make your own tomato sauce for your pizza, it makes all the difference in the world!

For more ideas, please check out Tammy's Recipes for more kitchen tips!

WFMW: Keeping Car Toys Corralled

2011-06-15T06:36:00.003+03:00

Like many parents, we try to keep some small toys in the car to amuse the boys when we are on the road. The drawback is that those toys have a tendency to wind up all over the car out of sight and out of reach!

Gradually, we found ourselves bringing more and more toys from home to the car, until all the favorite toys were lost in the depths of the car! We needed a good way to keep the car toys corralled, easy to find, and easily accessible to DS.

It just so happened that I had a medium sized cosmetics bag lying around. Cosmetics bags are designed to hold a lot; they zip closed (a technology the two-year-old can handle); and they are compact (no pun intended). It's been a great solution for us--totally works for me!

For more tips, please visit We Are THAT Family for more Works for Me Wednesday!

And please keep Kristen of We Are THAT Family in your prayers as she recovers from her illness :)

WFMW: Baby Stuff!

2011-06-08T08:02:00.004+03:00

Well, this is a frugality/mommy blog, so here is my obligatory post on things that I think are "must haves" for babies. When we just had one, I wasn't sure what things were actual necessities for babies and which things were just necessary for my baby. Now that I have Number 2, I'm noticing some themes. So here's my list:

Diapers: I prefer traditional, flat-fold diapers--yes, I use pins. I like flat-folds, because they are so easy to wash and dry (I line dry everything). They're also really easy to make. Just hem or serge a 28-inch square of flannel, fold it in quarters and you're ready to go.
I also like to use disposable diapers while the umbilical chord is still healing, and to keep a pack of them in the car. I'm really bad at remembering to bring dirty cloth diapers in from the car (sigh).
Carseat: I got mine for a $20 donation to the local fire department. They collect ones that are still good but outgrown by their original owners and give them to people who are willing to learn how to install them.
Clothing: I like wool diaper covers. I pair them in warm weather with shirts that I have made from onesies. During cold weather, I put footed pajamas over a wool diaper cover. Since I cloth diaper, we do laundry every few days, and I only need a few sets of clothing to get me that far--I'd say four shirts, six or so diaper covers, and four sets of footed pajamas.
Outer wear: Socks, preferably wool. No shoes. I also like to use baby bonnets. Hats don't stay on.
A place to sleep. We co-sleep with our younger son right now, but our first had to sleep in his swing due to reflux. More importantly, I love the swing for naptimes. During naps, the baby can't be in the bed, but I don't want him to be under foot either.
Which brings us to blankets. I like to have at least four around. One for the bed, one for the floor, one for the car, and one for the swing. However, I'm happy I have more than four, so I can have some in the wash without any inconvenience.
It's good to have a breast pump and the relevant accoutrements around just in case. It hasn't been particularly useful this time, but it was a life-saver last time. And I love that thing when I need to nurse the baby, but the baby doesn't feel like waking up.
Demitasse spoons. I use these instead of baby spoons. They are durable and often very inexpensive at antique shops, thrift stores, and garage sales.
Bibs. These aren't immediately necessary, but they are eventually useful. I crocheted some, based on a pattern from the 1950's, that tie behind the neck and also around the waist. I find this design, which is much larger than most commercially available bibs, is much better able to prevent clothing stains. You could easily sew something similar from a wash cloth.
Optional: A portable crib. This has been such a blessing to us, both for use as a playpen and as a crib. However, they are difficult to clean. My goal is not to use one for Baby G except when we are traveling.

I don't count toys as a necessity, since babies are perfectly happy to play with anything. Baby G is equally happy with a "baby toy," one of his brother's toys, a piece of paper, my finger, or his own feet.

Most of the things in my list can easily be acquired used or free. We received two used swings and a used portable crib for free from a friend when DS E was born. Clothing is easily found very cheap, and one can make many diapers from a set of flannel sheets bought at the thrift store. All in all, it would be fairly easy to acquire everything on this list for under $30, especially if you are up to making things from scratch.

For more tips, check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

Sitting Still

2011-06-02T05:43:00.004+03:00

We have no cable at our house. We have instead a television, a collection of dvd's, a library card, and a subscription to Netflix. And the dvd's we watch most are television series and miniseries we especially like. Recently, the series we queued up was a cartoon series we wanted DS E to enjoy. And enjoy it he did. He asked for it constantly. He taught himself how to use the dvd player so he could try to watch without our help (forgetting that he can't reach the cord to plug in the television). He could sit through multiple half-hour episodes at a time.

Meanwhile, discipline deteriorated. My son no longer loved to play outside on the deck. And with his new-found indolence, my son was left full of nervous energy when his mind was exhausted. Not surprisingly, I found myself scolding and disciplining far more than I wanted, and bedtime turned into a three-hour long nightmare every. single. night. Forget about nap time. I was exhausted; DS G was neglected; and DH was at wits end. The housework was not getting done. And worst of all, DS E was miserable more than he was happy.

Not one day after DH and I agreed that the watching had to stop, bedtime was a much less trying affair. My son and I had fun, and my younger son actually had his needs met.

I have been firmly reminded of the importance of play and physical activity to growing minds and bodies. Imagine my surprise, then, to read the next day the DHM's post about Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' views on the importance of small children being able to sit still for extended periods of time. Ms Sebelius practically connects the inability of kindergartners to sit quietly in a classroom to developmental problems!

I'll grant that the three years between DS E's two years and the five years of the average kindergarten student are a significant three years. And a five-year-old can sit still and focus longer than the average toddler. However, a small child's purpose in life is to learn. By learning, I do not mean the "three R's." Rather, I am referring to the grand exploration of the world, the acquisition of culture and conversational language, and the general absorption of the functioning of their environment. In short, it is unnatural for small children to sit still for long, not the reverse. Moreover, sitting still for a great length of time runs counter to the aim of functional child development, since focusing on whatever is happening in the classroom distracts children from the things their minds want to absorb. It's no different from television.

Now, I should note that I am not, repeat not, advocating "unschooling" or allowing small children to set their own agenda. What I am advocating is moderation. We parents should teach our small children how to sit still for progressively longer periods of time, but we also need to allow our children the time to explore and expend their God-given energy. When a parent doesn't, her entire household (as I was reminded) pays the price. Expecting the way of things to change in the classroom is, at best, foolhardy.

More importantly, though, when the body is idle, the mind (and better yet, hands as well) must be kept busy. At home, we have a foam floor puzzle of numbers, and DS E has had a wonderful time learning both his numbers and how to think about puzzles with it. But in the car, where active play with numbers is impossible, we make a game of calling and repeating numbers and letters. For the time that kindergartner's must be confined to their chairs, their minds must be engaged. And I have yet to hear of a public school kindergarten curriculum that does that.

In short, Ms Sebelius is dead wrong. A small child who can't sit still in class is not dysfunctional. The woman who is shocked by the behavior is the one who needs help.

WFMW: The Perfect Healthy Cracker

2011-05-11T09:30:00.004+03:00

This cracker recipe is ridiculously easy, fairly healthy, versatile, and a wonderful texture--just the right amount of crunch!

3 c flour (any kind, including whole wheat, will do. I prefer unbleached white flour for this recipe)

3/4 c water

1/4 c oil

Combine all ingredients into a large bowl to form a soft dough. Turn out onto a lightly oiled surface, and oil your hands and rolling pin. Pat out the dough and cut it in half. Move each piece to a large cookie sheet. Roll each piece out until it is thin like pie crust and fills the cookie sheet. Cut the dough into squares with a pizza cutter, and finish cutting the edges with a paring knife.

Preheat oven to 425, and put cookie sheets in immediately. Crackers should be almost done when the oven finishes preheating. Allow to cool slightly and turn into a tin or other air-tight container to store.

Optional: For a little flavor, you can add some coriander to the flour when you make the dough. I also want to try sprinkling Parmesan cheese on the dough before putting it in the oven.

These crackers are wonderful by themselves or with hummus, horseradish, sardines, cheese, or jam--you name it!

And they work for me. For more tips and tricks, check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

Furnishings on an Almost Non-Existent Budget, and Other Frugalities

2011-05-10T08:33:00.004+03:00

One of my favorite things about being a SAHM (or housewife, as my anachronistic self likes to call it) is the ability and challenge to make something out of essentially nothing. I love stretching my grocery budget to the limit, finding great deals on kids stuff, and generally making every penny pull its weight. And I've found that it's one of the talents with which God has blessed me. I'm far better at stretching money than making it. So I decided to put together a list of my recent successes.

I've been in the market for a dining set. And my budget is limited, to say the least. A couple weeks ago, I lucked out and found someone near me offering a table for free on Craigslist. It's nice and solid, oval with two leaves, and not in bad shape. Someday, I think I'll paint it, but I'll have to find the time first :).

Since the previous owner was replacing the dining table with one that had a finish she loved, she also included her collection of tablecloths--a small box of various sizes and shapes suitable for any occasion.

Next, I turned my attention to chairs. With gas prices the way they are, it wasn't reasonable for me to try to find chairs for free in the nearest big city (where people actually give away sets of dining chairs), so I set myself a low budget and started hunting. Finally, I found someone who was selling a set of four classic kitchen chairs in the style for which I was looking for $20. One needs a small repair, but they are quite sturdy and will go perfectly with the table once painted. Better yet, the style is common enough that I will be able to find more that match whenever the time comes that I need more than four (I'll post before and after pics once I've painted the set).

In my pantry (read small kitchen cabinet in which I store dry goods), I had several plastic bags of beans and lentils. Unfortunately, my two-year-old son started playing with the bags, and I narrowly rescued them from his tearing them open. I needed containers.

Since we don't have cable, and our Internet is painfully slow, my husband likes to watch baseball games over a soda at the restaurant across the street, which also has a bar. A few days ago, I joined him for a game and asked if I could have a few of their empty Patron tequila bottles. I don't drink particularly, but those bottles are lovely and have relatively wide mouths.

The waitress gave me three of them, which smelled terribly of booze. I washed them out with hot, soapy water, peeled off the labels, and boiled the corks. Thus removed of scent and branding, I dried them and proceeded to fill one with fava beans, one with black beans, and one with lentils. They are beautiful storage containers, and it took almost no effort to make them that way! I have since appropriated two more which will hold kidney and pinto beans once cleaned.

When I was pregnant with our older son, my sister-in-law and her three children were staying with us. The youngest of her three was an infant at the time, but the other two needed a place to sleep, so my husband and I bought a cheap bunk bed set at Walmart and a pair of mattress pads at Ikea. We figured that, once our guests moved out, we'd keep the beds for our own children to use someday, and that they'd serve (disassembled into two twin sized beds) as guest beds in the mean time.

Now, we live in a much smaller place, and our older son is using one of the beds. We no longer have a spare bedroom, and we had to get rid of our couch when we moved overseas for a year (no room in the storage container). Today, the other half of the bunk bed is assembled in our living room, complete with sheets and a blanket. We use it with plenty of pillows as a couch. Since it is wider and flatter than a real sofa, it lends itself to allowing the baby to lie on it with one. There is much more room for the baby to scoot around without falling off. Once the baby needs his own bed, I will look for a suitable used sofa on Craigslist, since it's not difficult at all to find free sofas in our area. But our current arrangement is the best use of our space.

Our older son loves matchbox cars. Luckily, dh saved his childhood collection and is slowly passing it along--one car at a time--supplemented by the occasional new addition. I love that my son's favorite toys are small and don't have multiple parts. They travel well, don't take up much space, and are easy to store. Currently we are still using the ice chest I blogged about a while back as his toy box, but I have recently set aside an empty oatmeal container for future use in containing matchbox cars, since my son has some bigger toys in his future that will fill the ice chest. Eventually, he may even be interested in decorating the oatmeal container to make it his own.

One man's trash is another man's treasure. And that works for me!

WFMW: Erik Satie

2011-05-09T09:46:00.005+03:00

This isn't quite how to keep the kids amused, but it sure helps if the baby's asleep while you figure out what to do with the others!

I have an album of some of Erik Satie's Gymnopodies. It's lovely, but I don't often listen to piano music. But I was in the mood for it a couple weeks ago. And we've been listening to that album a lot ever since.

Why?

The baby loves it.

I had put it on to help calm down my toddler. It did help him key down, but it really did a number on the little guy! Each time I've played this album for the baby he has seriously relaxed. It can end a crying fit. It can cause a nap. It can make my little guy happy!

Does this mean my baby is a future piano prodigy? I don't know. But it does mean taking care of him just got a whole lot easier, especially when the toddler needs my undivided attention.

Thank you, Mr. Satie. At this rate, we'll be on a first name basis soon.

For more tips and tricks, check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

The Information Age

2011-04-16T23:17:00.004+03:00

In these tough times I have taken up a few odd jobs to help our household budget limp along. One such job involves my tutoring English and social studies on tutor.com. I work with k-12 and college students on their homework assignments.

Unfortunately, I've noticed some common themes that have made me even more painfully aware of the dismal state of our public schools. Most disturbing among these trends is the general lack of knowledge among high school students of how to look up...well...anything. The problem is there for elementary students as well, but I deem that a little more acceptable (especially if their Internet access has been limited and their parents have neglected the library). And with college students, the problem continues, except for older students who have returned to school later in life. However, the bulk of my students are in high school, so that is where I feel confident enough to say that this is a true trend.

I regularly help students with vocabulary assignments in which, not only had the student never thought of looking in a dictionary (online or otherwise), but when I make the suggestion, THEY DON'T KNOW HOW! I am a frequent visitor during work hours at both dictionary.com and thesaurus.com. Sometimes, after demonstrating one of these sites a few times to a student, the student still doesn't understand how to navigate it (tutor.com provides its tutors and customers with a shared web browser, in which one party may share with the other a web page).

Likewise, I have many students stuck on research projects because they need help finding the necessary information. Again, these are high schoolstudents. Usually, I can find the relevant information after about five minutes of Internetresearch--sometimes less. When that happens, the student usually reacts as though I have performed some kind of minor miracle.

How is it possible that in this age of ubiquitous Internet connectivity, filled with high school students who spend the majority of their waking hours attached to some form of electronic device, that those same high school students would be unaware of how to conduct a productive Google search? Or unable to understand how to navigate a simple website? Our future is behind the times!

Why? I say it is the education system's reliance on busy work. Public school curricula rely too heavily on students regurgitating information that was handed to them. By relying on that kind of "education", we have failed to teach the next generation how to think on a very basic level. We have robbed them of the innate human talents for improvisation and experimentation--if one search term doesn't work try another; if you don't know something, look it up.

It is natural and an incredible gift that all God's children have an instinctive desire to learn. What parent has not been driven mad by a young child asking "Why?" incessantly? We thrive on the answers to Who, What, When, Why, and How. Yet, I find myself at work bombarded by children and young adults who seem to have lost the awareness that these questions exist. If Americans want to pride ourselves on being a nation of innovators, we need to change this trend soon. For the current generation reaching the end of its high school years, however, my hopes rest with the homeschooling community.

WFMW: Poblano Peppers

2011-04-13T11:10:00.006+03:00

Has anyone else noticed how expensive bell peppers are these days?!

Thanks to overall rising food costs and an unexpectedly harsh winter in Mexico, my local store calls it a "sale" when it sells bell peppers for $2.50 EACH!

I needed an alternative. So we tried poblano peppers (or pasilla peppers as one local store calls them). They're not as sweet as bell peppers, and their flavor is a bit on the smokey side, but they aren't spicy and make an excellent substitute for bell peppers in Mexican, Italian, and Chinese dishes. Since I find them in the "ethnic" section of my produce department, they are far cheaper than their more popular cousins at $1.99/lb--still not as cheap as I would like, but far more doable than $2.50 a piece.

And that works for me! Check out more tips and tricks on Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

WFMW: Homemade Catsup

2011-03-09T06:15:00.003+02:00

A couple weeks ago, I made my own catsup. I hate spending money on condiments, since they are so expensive relative to everything else we eat. And, in the case of catsup, I dislike that the relatively affordable brands contain excessive amounts of sugar and artificial chemicals. So I turned to food.com.

The recipe was simple and inexpensive with good reviews, but I happened to be out of tomato paste. When we went to the store, though, I wasn't careful about labels, and came home to discover I had bought tomato sauce instead of paste. No matter--I left out the salt, onion powder, and water, and boiled the sauce down to the correct consistency. I then discovered that the recipe is a bit sweeter than I like, so I added some garlic powder to counter the sweetness. Basically, I played with it until it tasted like catsup.

AND IT WORKED! Making catsup is THAT forgiving! We love it, and we are never going back to store bought.

The only drawback is that it has no preservatives to make it shelf stable (or refrigerator stable), so it's best to store it in containers small enough to match your family's consumption. According to the recipe, it will last about a month in the fridge. I'm using extra baby bottles, and the extra lives in the freezer.

Next time, I'll use tomato paste, like the recipe calls for; and I'm going to see if it will work with stevia instead of sugar to try to make it even healthier. Considering how cheap tomato paste is (especially on sale), I can afford to experiment! And if an experiment fails, I'll just add it to my next batch of spaghetti sauce or tomato soup.

That works for me! For more tips, visit We Are THAT Family for Works for Me Wednesday!

KTT: Keeping Track of Online Recipes

2011-03-08T09:52:00.003+02:00

Whenever I have an abundance of an ingredient and less than an abundance of things to do with that ingredient (say, asparagus, for example) I turn to the Internet for solutions. Originally, I would just email myself the URL for the recipe and then store the email in a special folder in my email account, but that quickly became a mess. Here's my solution:

I started an Excel chart. In one box I put the name of the recipe, and then I copy the URL into the box next to the name. I have enough recipes in the file that they are sorted into a variety of two-box-wide columns according to course (breakfast, salad, soup, vegetarian main dish, meat main dish, etc.). I also have each column sorted alphabetically to make hunting a little easier. Whenever I try a recipe off of the chart, I change the color of the boxes for that recipe: green if we liked it, red if we didn't. I'm currently trying at least one new recipe every week (although many are from cookbooks I have), so the chart is getting filled in.

This system really works for me. It saves me the time of hunting down recipes I know I have or looking for new recipes when I forget what I have. It also saves me the trouble of trying recipes I forgot we don't like.

For more tips and trick, visit Tammy's Recipes for Kitchen Tip Tuesday.

WFMW: Having a Toddler and a Baby

2011-03-02T07:46:00.002+02:00

My little Baby G is almost two months old. My not-so-little Ds E is two years old. And while taking care of a baby is always hard work, having my toddler makes it easier.

At two, he has hit that stage of early childhood in which he wants to help and do things that big people do. And while I was still pregnant, dh and I talked to Ds E about how fun it would be to be a big brother. Now he's my little helper. A lot of parents talk about how letting a toddler help makes things take more time, but I find that assertion is only true for some tasks. Here's how Ds E really helps me:

He can bring me wipes and diapers for the baby
He can put disposable diapers in the trash (both his own and his brother's, although his brother usually wears cloth)
He can comfort his brother during a diaper change and hand me the pins
He can put his clean laundry in his room
He can put dirty laundry in the hamper in my room (or near it :P)
He can put things in the trash
He can bring me groceries to put in the fridge
He can put groceries in the fridge himself if I've made the space for them
He can hand me clothes when I fold the laundry
He can put away the drying rack
He can push his brother's swing while I'm busy
He can hold his brother while I wash my hands after a diaper change
He can get the broom and dust pan for me on cleaning day
He can get me a kitchen towel to clean up messes
He can wipe his own hands on a kitchen towel to clean them
He can put the kitchen towel back on the oven door
He can help clear the dinner table
At the store, he can put things in the cart for me

Other things he can help me with do, admittedly take longer, but I enjoy the chance to "multitask" by spending time with him while I do housework:

We put his toys away together
He can pour pre-measured dry ingredients or beans into a mixing bowl
He can help me clean the floors
He can help me make the beds
He can help me clean the coffee and side tables if I give him a wipe (along with anything else he can think of)
He can dress himself
At the store he can put things on the conveyor belt for me

The best part is that he is at his best when I give him something specific to do. And it doesn't hurt that we often enjoy a treat afterward, whether it's a cookie, a candy, or watching part of a movie together. Moreover, having him help me out helps keep him from feeling left out as I dedicate so much time to his brother.

Having a toddler to help me with the baby and chores works for me.

For more Works for Me Wednesday check out We Are THAT Family.

Menu Plan Monday

2011-02-21T21:25:00.003+02:00

Sunday: Oatmeal, Broccoli Cheddar Soup, Pumpkin Pasta and Steamed Artichokes
Monday: Eggs and Homefries, Broccoli Cheddar Soup, Teriyaki Salmon with Dahl (lentils cooked with onion, garlic, ginger, and curry powder) and Aloo Palak
Tuesday: French Toast, Broccoli Cheddar Soup, Pumpkin Pasta and Steamed Artichokes
Wednesday: Rice, Broccoli Cheddar Soup, Teriyaki Salmon with Dahl and Aloo Palak

The rest of the week we are visiting my family, so meals are a bit up in the air :D

Pea and Corn Soup worked really well last week. Here's the recipe:

1 can corn
2 c frozen peas
6 c vegetable stock
1 onion
3T butter

Saute onion in 1T butter until translucent. Add remaining ingredients, bring to a boil, and simmer for 30 minutes. Season to taste (I used thyme, oregano, and ground pepper).

This post has been linked up at Org Junkie for Menu Plan Monday.

KTT: Lo-Tech Cream Soups

2011-02-15T21:39:00.002+02:00

I don't have room in my kitchen for small appliances, and I hate cleaning the few that I have, so I cook almost entirely without gadget help. One problem that reality poses is how to make creamy soups.

Last week, I learned a trick: Grate the ingredients with a cheese grater. After cooking for a while, they will mostly fall apart, leaving you with a creamy-but-textured soup that is very satisfying. It works especially well if one of the ingredients is potato.

For more kitchen tips, check out Kitchen Tip Tuesday at Tammy's Recipes.

Menu Plan Monday

2011-02-14T12:48:00.007+02:00

Sunday: Oatmeal, Pizza, Steak with mac & cheese and Moroccan beet salad
Monday: Eggs and toast, out with my sil!, Fajita rice and Moroccan beet salad
Tuesday: Bread pudding, Pea and corn soup, Aloo Gobhi (man, this stuff just keeps hanging around!)
Wednesday: Rice, Chicken Soup (made too much last week), Roast beef with potatoes and candied carrots
Thursday: Eggs with homefries, Pea and corn soup, Aloo Gobhi
Friday: Pancakes, Chicken soup, Shepherd's pie with candied carrots and garlic bread
Saturday: Muffins, Pea soup, Aroz C'atum with creamed bok choy

You may have noticed by now that I have a different breakfast scheduled for every day, and that those items repeat every week. When I started menu-planning, breakfast was a big impetus for the decision. You see, I'm one of those people who can easily skip breakfast. In order to make it more likely to happen, I need it to be scheduled--less thinking on my feet. It just so happens, though, that there are about seven things that I both like for breakfast and am willing to make. Having so many options also gives me the flexibility to shuffle things around to suit our schedule and dinner plans (I wouldn't schedule eggs for breakfast if we were having quiche for dinner, for example).

Lunch works on the premise that I make two soups at the beginning of the week that last us for lunch throughout the week. When the weather warms I will switch to making sandwiches every day. This week, the Pea and corn soup is another selection from Auguste Gay's New Presentation of Cooking.

With dinner, I plan for two main courses every week: primary and secondary. The primary main course we have on Sunday, and I reincarnate on Monday. In this case, Monday's dinner will be what I call Fajita Rice--sauteed bell pepper and onion with sliced beef, seasoned with pepper flakes and cumin, served over rice with guacamole and sour cream. After Monday, I alternate the primary and secondary through the week. This week, I anticipate running out of both by the end of the week, so I will defrost some leftover Aroz C'atum to round things out.

My plans also take into account various other leftovers hanging around my fridge, since my goal is not to go shopping this week. For example, when we have eggs and homefries for breakfast, the eggs will be scrambled and include some sauteed mushrooms and onions we have leftover from dinner with my mother last night, along with some green onions and one of the bell peppers I bought on clearance last week. The shepherd's pie, while using beef from this week's roast, will also feature some leftover chicken gravy I have hanging around the fridge. The bread pudding, which has taken the place of French toast this week, will use some of the banana muffins I made for this past Friday's breakfast and for snacking this week. Waste not, want not! :D

For more menu planning, check out Org Junkie for Menu Plan Monday.

A Simple Recipe

2011-02-14T06:51:00.007+02:00

This is the recipe I promised to share in last week's Menu Plan Monday. I got it from Auguste Gay's New Presentation of Cooking, which was published in 1924 and is long out of print. One advantage of such vintage cookbooks is that the ingredients and preparation are simple, making it perfect for those days when time is scarce or the cupboards are relatively bare.

Potato and Carrot Soup

2 potatoes passed through a meat chopper (I used a cheese grater, but you could use a food processor too)

2 carrots passed through a meat chopper (I used three carrots)

6 c water (I used 4c water and 2c chicken stock)

1 c milk

2T butter

Combine all ingredients in a pot and boil until the potato pieces fall apart--it should be almost like a cream soup, but a little more textured. Season to taste. I seasoned with coriander, thyme, rosemary, and ground black pepper.

Turns out that using a cheese grater works really well for making creamy, potato soups!

Making my groceries go the distance and saving time simultaneously seriously works for me! For more tips and tricks, check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

WFMW: A Jug of Punch

2011-02-09T21:34:00.003+02:00

When I pared down my kitchen supplies I decided to keep my punch bowl and cups. We entertain a couple times a year, and at those times I like to have a punch bowl. However, the set is bulky and doesn't make itself useful the rest of the time. Here's how I make that set pull its weight for the remainder of the year:

The bowl is on standby for potlucks. Since we live pretty far from our religious community and most of our friends, my potluck contributions tend to take the form of baked goods, salads, and other things that don't need to be warm.
I keep some of the cups in different containers to use as scoops. Right now I have one in a large jar of dry beans, one in my bag of rice, and another in my bag of flour.
I have another cup I use to hold bullion cubes (they came wrapped in cellophane)--pretty, organized, and easy to find.

For the times that I want my set for entertaining, it's very easy to clean out the cups and do without them in their "normal" capacities for a day or two.

For more Works for Me Wednesday tips, please visit We Are THAT Family.

KTT-Onion Tip

2011-02-08T07:30:00.002+02:00

The onions I bought most recently have been very juicy, so chopping them has been a trying experience. Then I had an "aha" moment that almost seemed idiotic in its simplicity:

Keep a handkerchief near the cutting board specifically for onion tears.

This one simple little thing has saved me a lot of trouble trying to find the Kleenex by feel :)

For more tips, check out Kitchen Tip Tuesday at Tammy's Recipes.

Menu Plan Monday

2011-02-08T04:40:00.005+02:00

Sunday: Oatmeal, missed lunch, Golden Spiced Squash with Chicken and Rice
Monday: missed breakfast, Carl's Junior--with coupon (out for errands!), Chicken Soup, Aloo Gobhi with Chicken and Rice
Tuesday: French Toast, Carrot and Potato Soup, Golden Spiced Squash with Rice and Beef Sausage
Wednesday: Rice with Gravy, Chicken Soup, Aloo Gobhi with Chicken and Rice
Thursday: Eggs and Toast, Carrot and Potato Soup, Golden Spiced Squash with Rice and Beef Sausage
Friday: Pancakes, Chicken Soup, Aloo Gobhi with Chicken and Rice

Notes: Carrot and Potato Soup is a recipe from a vintage cookbook of mine. If I like it, I'll post the recipe (the book itself is out of print).

While I listed Aloo Gobhi as one of the dinner meals last week, it turned out I had planned for too much food. Ultimately, the shepherd's pie did us quite nicely in the Aloo Gobhi's place, so I pushed the latter off to this week.

The chicken I'm using this week is leftover from the chicken I roasted last week. All told, I've made it stretch for Eleven (11!) meals: 7 dinners, 3 lunches, and 1 breakfast. The lunches make use of the stock I made from the carcass, and the breakfast uses gravy from the fat and drippings. Granted, there are only two adults and one toddler taking part right now, but I'm pretty proud of my accomplishment!

For more menu inspiration, please check out Menu Plan Monday at Org Junkie!

WFMW: Cloth Diapering Tip for Newborns

2011-02-02T23:31:00.002+02:00

After my first son was born, I was very careful of his umbilical cord stub. The last thing I wanted was for it to become infected, so I followed the midwife's instructions about it and tried to keep everything clean. Still, it became infected, and the pediatrician ultimately dried it up with a little colloidal silver.

When I was in the hospital after my second son was born, I asked one of the nurses for some advice. She told me that it simply happens sometimes when nothing has been done wrong. Still, I figured while that chance could claim responsibility for it happening once, twice would indicate some fault of my own.

Again, I was careful with my son's stub, and again, it started showing signs of infection. But this time I paid very close attention as the infection began, searching for a cause. This time I found it.

I cloth diaper. Not only that, but I prefer old-fashioned flat fold diapers. I found that the top of the diaper, being thick, would not stay folded down on the baby--especially on a newborn who still preferred the fetal position to any other. Moreover, urine would wick up to the top of the diaper. The combination of friction from the diaper and urine around the stub seemed a likely cause. To test my theory, I switched to the disposable diapers sent home with me from the hospital to see if the budding infection would subside.

It did.

Now that the cord is gone, we have switched back to cloth diapers, but using disposables for a few days seems to have saved us a trip to the doctor. In the future, I'll use disposables from birth until the umbilical stub falls off and then switch to my beloved cloth diapers.

For more ideas, please visit We Are THAT Family for Works for Me Wednesday.

Menu Plan Monday

2011-02-01T03:32:00.005+02:00

I'm implementing my new menu-planning strategy this week. My plan involves a preset, different breakfast every day; two lunches to be alternated throughout the week; and dinners based on two proteins alternated throughout the week in different manifestations.

Sunday: Oatmeal, Tomato soup (from The New Enchanted Broccoli Forest), Roast chicken with sweet potatoes and braised celery (from Julia Child's Kitchen Wisdom)

Monday: Yoghurt with honey, Boston black-eyed peas (from New Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant), Chicken shepherd's pie and salad

Tuesday: French toast, Tomato soup, Spicy tuna rice with salad

Wednesday: Breakfast rice, Boston black-eyed peas, Aloo Gobhi with chicken

Thursday: Eggs and toast, Tomato soup, Spicy tuna rice with salad

Friday: Pancakes, Black-eyed peas, Aloo Gobhi with chicken

Of course, my plan is subject to change. For example, dh asked if he could fix burgers tonight instead of the shepherd's pie, so the latter will be held off for another occasion.

I've linked this up with Org Junkie, where you can go to find lots of other menu inspiration :)

Announcing...

2011-01-27T23:01:00.002+02:00

...A BABY BOY!

Baby G was born on January 12, weighing in at 9 lb, 5 oz, after 4 hours of labor.

We're all well and having a blast with the new member of the family. But of course that means I have better things to do than blog. I expect to get back into the swing of things shortly, so bear with me. I assure y'all, I have lots to write about.

On Marriage and Divorce

2011-01-11T06:21:00.003+02:00

As the specter of divorce darkens the door of a close family member's house for the second time, I've stumbled across multiple articles oddly relevant to the issue. And, more importantly, I've found myself examining my own views on the covenant of marriage--trying to learn from the mistakes of my unfortunate relative and his estranged wife.

While I no longer claim the faith as my own, I have a special place in my heart for the liturgy of the Anglican marriage rite as it was in older editions of the Book of Common Prayer. This passage, especially, speaks to me:

"...therefore [it] is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men's carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God; duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained." (emphasis mine)

The rite goes on to say that matrimony was created for three causes: procreation, to protect people from falling into improper behaviors (such as fornication), and to provide people with the companionship they need in life. It's not for fun or even for emotional satisfaction, although the implication is that a good marriage will have that as a bi-product. It exists because it is a basic social unit, and the basic unit of society, by it's nature as a primary social underpinning, is sacred. Which leads me to the topic of divorce.

My personal view of divorce is biblical in nature. And while I adhere to the divorce laws set out in the Old Testament (a woman my file for divorce on grounds of neglect and a man if he finds something abhorrent in his wife--adultery, etc.), I do strongly agree with Jesus' assertion that divorce is the sundering of one flesh, akin to the amputation of an arm or leg, based on the passage in Genesis 2:24, "[he] shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." However, I also believe the remarriage is permissible, so long as both parties involved (especially the divorcee) have thoroughly examined themselves and their intentions, and have made a serious commitment not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

But in this day and age, regardless of the cause of a marriage or a divorce, the biblical consequences of divorce are up in the air, especially since the Bible is largely silent on the topic. This source of speculation was well articulated in a recent LAF article by Tiana Krenz, in which she posited the question of what obligation (if any) a divorced woman owes her ex-husband. My response is based on the unequivocal finality of divorce described in the Bible and the consequences of divorce exhibited throughout western history until the act became socially acceptable in the late 20th century. And herein lies, I think, one of the biggest problems in our society, when it comes to marriage and its dissolution.

Historically, a divorce was the repudiation of a marriage, as opposed to "breaking up." When one spouse divorces another, they are not simply ending a relationship. They are making a legal and public statement that the marriage was never valid in the first place, and so did not exist. By making such a statement, the filing party also relinquishes their claim to goods acquired in the marriage and to any children produced by it. While they may still have an active relationship with their children, they have made a legal statement that the children should be considered as conceived out of wedlock. I would, however, make the accession to modernity that in cases where the spouse who files for divorce has been or has witnessed abuse from the other spouse, then the abuser actually initiated the divorce through their misconduct--a view easily supported through interpretation of the Old Testament standards.

To address the LAF article directly from this standpoint, Mrs. Krenz addressed a case to be presented to the NH Supreme Court by a man who wishes to force his ex-wife to send their daughter to public school, due to their theological differences. The man in question was the one who repudiated the marriage to his daughter's mother. As such, I believe he also relinquished his right to make such demands on his ex-wife. From a secular standpoint, I further believe that, if he is so determined that his daughter attend public school, that he should not sue his ex-wife, but rather petition the court for primary custody of their daughter.

What is my point in all this? Marriage, as the basic building block of our society, has far-reaching consequences, not only for the spouses involved, but for their offspring and all the people involved in the lives of the spouses. By removing the equal and opposite consequences from divorce--by making it a legalized form of "splitting up"--we have made the choice to cheapen marriage to the level of socially sanctioned dating. When initiating a divorce has no real consequence to the individual other than the change in their relationship to their former spouse (and the legal arrangements made around community property, etc.), marriage ceases to be something to be approached only in the "fear of God." And when divorce has no legal or social bearing on the nature of the parent-child relationship, it can hardly come as a surprise that marriage ceases to deter improper behavior--making it a breeding ground for the satisfaction of "men's carnal lusts and appetites" rather than a cure for them.

As a society, we need to answer a series of important questions:

What is the purpose of marriage?
What are the obligations of the marital relationship?
What is the purpose of the parental relationship?
What does it mean when those relationships are declared null?

A little on personal finance...

2011-01-05T12:33:00.006+02:00

Normally, when it comes to taking care of one's money, my thoughts tend to frugal living. However, after several problems over the past year with the local bank I had been using for most of my life, I decided to change banks.

After hearing good things about them, I decided to try ING Direct, and have been very pleased with the results thus far. Here's why:

Their basic checking account has no fees.
Their basic checking account bears interest.
Overdrafts (although I hope I never have to deal with that) are treated as a line of credit. They approve you for overdrafts up to a certain limit, and charge interest on your negative balance rather than a set fee.
Their sign-up gimmick at the moment is $50 if you make three transactions in the first 45 days of opening the account.
You can link to other accounts at other banks, making transfers to and from those accounts really easy.
You have two PINs: one 8-digit PIN for accessing your online account and one 4-digit PIN for your ATM/debit card
Perhaps most importantly: Their customer service personnel are prompt, friendly, and knowledgeable

While I've only had the account for a few months now, I've been more than satisfied with my experience thus far, and I hope that satisfaction continues in the future :D

Right now, ING really works for me. For more tips and tricks, check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

**For the record, I have not and will not receive any payment, goods, or services for this endorsement. It is solely my personal opinion. Moreover, it should not be construed as financial advice, as I have no qualifications in that area. **

Rapunzel and "Tangled"

2010-12-30T11:17:00.002+02:00

Wanting to know how Disney adapted the story for a modern children's film, I recently looked up a synopsis of "Tangled" and later read the featured review on the LAF website. While I generally agree with the criticisms of the LAF contributor, I found her critique somewhat lacking.

Clearly, neither she nor Disney's film writers had ever read Rapunzel in its original Grimm glory. In it's older form, it reads not as a fairy tale, but as a cautionary tale--one grounded in reality, oddly enough (do follow the link and read the story, but be aware that it contains themes not necessarily suitable for children). Rapunzel is supposed to tell the story of a series of characters who give in to temptations and half-baked ideas. Just like in real life, living licentiously or bucking authority (regardless of the legitimacy of that authority in the bigger picture) can ultimately turn out well, but usually have difficult or painful consequences in the short term.

To start with, Rapunzel does not start out life as a princes, but rather as a poor farmer's daughter. During pregnancy, Rapunzel's mother has a craving for a specific kind of lettuce (rapunzel lettuce), and Rapunzel's father obligingly steals said lettuce from the garden of the witch next door. Eventually, he is caught in the act and forfeits his as-yet unborn daughter as punishment for his trespassing and thievery. While the witch's adoption of Rapunzel ultimately leads Rapunzel to make a supremely advantageous marriage (to a prince)--meaning that it is in her family's best interest as well as her own--she and her family suffer the terrible trauma of separation first. And so the story continues, from the witch's unreasonable restrictions on Rapunzel's movements to Rapunzel's illicit affair with the prince (involving some rather non-child-friendly behaviors and consequences).

The moral of the story is not, as it could easily be, "Always follow the rules," but rather, "Buck the system at your own risk. If your cause is just, it will turn out well in the end, but the road there will be long and hard." Sometimes duty and doing the right thing can be at odds with each other. It's a good lesson, and one very much in line with reality. However, the way the story teaches that lesson is not one that is appropriate for modern children's entertainment.

Moreover, adults watch movies as a form of escapism. We want either easily identified good guys and bad guys (who all get their just deserts) or to immerse ourselves in an alternate reality in which the above moral does not apply. We all know that moral very well from personal experience and don't want to be reminded of it in the movie theater. However, it is a difficult and important lesson for children to learn, lest they learn it painfully as adults. All too often, modern children's films try to appeal to parents but disguise that appeal in the whimsy and schmaltz that children love. "Tangled" is no exception. As we parents review films and decide whether to expose our children to them, we need to ask ourselves whether the film is designed to appeal to children or whether it caters to the baser desires of adults.

In today's world, it is rarely safe to assume that children's movies are actually for children. The longer we ignore that fact, the longer we and our society will bear the consequences of ignoring Rapunzel's real moral.

Quick Cooking Tip

2010-12-06T01:34:00.002+02:00

I hate putting soup ingredients into a pot of hot stock. I always seem to find a way to make the stock splash up onto my hand.

Instead, when I cut up ingredients for the soup, I scoop each ingredient onto the underside of the pot lid and then slide the ingredient off of the lid into the pot. Usually, it's gentle enough that no splashing occurs. When the stock does splash, though, my hand is protected by the lid.

When The "Better Deal" Isn't

2010-11-27T08:10:00.002+02:00

Now that I've found and gone through the "bathroom" boxes, I have an idea of what medicine and first aid items we have around. A lot of what we had was expired, and many other things simply weren't worth storing in the first place, so our medicine cabinet is pretty sparse right now.

In order to start the restocking process for our first aid kit, I wanted to pick up some latex gloves. I went to that section of CVS, but they only sold latex gloves in boxes of 40 or 50 gloves--far more than I can use before they become brittle (aka useless). I just wanted four or five pair so that I'd have some in case of emergency. I asked the pharmacist about it, but he told me that these gloves are only sold in those boxes. I wasn't willing to spend almost $10 on something that was mostly going to "go bad."

As I was about to leave the store empty-handed and disappointed, I had an idea. I remembered seeing something that looked an awful lot like latex gloves in the household section the last time I bought dish-washing gloves, so I headed in that direction. Sure enough, one can buy packs of ten latex gloves for washing dishes. They are thicker than the kind used for medical purposes, but not that different. While those five pair that I bought were $3.29, far more expensive per pair than the larger boxes, that $3.29 is far less likely to go to waste, so the higher unit price actually translates into savings when you think in terms of real usage. And I won't feel nearly as wasteful if I have to throw out one or two pair of the gloves as I would feel about throwing away 15 pair.

Another bright side is the aspect of sanitization. The dish gloves I bought came in a factory-sealed plastic bag, whereas the box is a cardboard box with no bag. Nothing keeps what's in the air or the moisture of the bathroom away from the medical gloves, but the dish gloves will be protected from all that until I open the bag or the bag otherwise gets torn.

Repurposing

2010-11-21T21:56:00.003+02:00

When we moved into our new place, it soon became apparent that our son would need a toy chest. We had been using a small suitcase in Israel, but I wanted him to be able to get to his toys on his own and the suitcase wasn't tall enough for some of his bigger toys (his fireman's hat, for example). I also didn't want to buy anything new.

To the rescue? Our ice chest. It's easy for him to open and move around, making it a toy in itself, but, for the most part, toys that are in it stay in it (out of sight out of mind). It's small enough for him to be able to find things in it and large enough to hold his bigger toys.

Ours is very much like this one, but with one handle going over the top.

And if you ask ds, the most important part is that it's RED. :D

Stocking a Pantry

2010-10-25T06:21:00.005+02:00

Here's what I've bought to stock my pantry:

5 lbs apples
5 lbs yellow onions
10 lbs russet potatoes (Oh, how I have missed you this last year!)
10 lbs dry black beans
20 lbs white rice (I prefer brown rice or barley, but I can't get those in big bags and saving money was the name of the game)
1 gallon whole milk
1 loaf of squaw bread (No baking until I get my kitchen stuff out of storage :( )
olive oil
soy sauce
cumin
chili powder

Total: $40.27

I already have a bottle of mustard from having bought sandwich supplies a couple weeks ago, but I have no idea what I spent on it at this point. Later, I spent another $40 (ish) on produce, meat, and the like (more milk, cheese, a chicken, tilapia, lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, etc.). So it officially costs me less than $85 to stock my pantry from scratch.

Another Update

2010-10-25T06:13:00.002+02:00

We have finally found a new place to live and we're moving in tomorrow! I'm so happy we're going back to the mountains where we were before. It's a different town, but the same area that we lived in before we went to Israel.

The only trick? We can't get our stuff out of storage quite yet. So inflatable mattresses and no furniture it is for a little while. At least that makes cleaning easier, right?

But it also means I had to buy some redundant cooking equipment to get us through until then. I picked up a pan and some plates at a thrift store today, and then went to a local box store to deal with a measuring cup, wooden spoons, spatula, and chopping knife (I already bought a paring knife). Initially I was going to buy a pot as well, but then I decided to get a crock pot instead. I have a confession to make: I have never used (let alone owned) a crock pot before. Shocking, I know. And the model I bought was about the same price as a decent pot. At least this way it's not just a temporary purchase, like the pan, which feels really wasteful, albeit unavoidable.

We then went over to a discount grocery store near our current abode and I purchased some pantry staples (rice, beans, potatoes, etc.). Tomorrow, we'll purchase perishables (produce, meat, cheese) on the way up to the place. I'll post the total list here in a few days, as I want to record for myself how much I'm spending to stock a basic pantry from scratch.

An Open Complaint to Continental Airplanes

2010-10-06T08:15:00.002+02:00

About a month ago, my family and I flew from Israel to Las Vegas on two connecting Continental flights. The first (trans-Atlantic) flight was lovely, the transcontinental flight was less so. For it's cross-country flights Continental Airlines uses older, smaller airplanes, and while the flight included in-flight entertainment (a movie), the screens were distributed throughout the cabin for all to see rather than in the back of each individual seat. Normally I ignore the in-flight entertainment, so this would not be an issue, but this case was different.

The preselected movie was The Back-up Plan (Jennifer Lopez's most recent offering). While I'm as much a sucker for a silly romantic comedy as the next girl, I took issue with this one. In The Back-up Plan, Jennifer Lopez's character is a middle-aged, single woman who is tired of waiting for "Mr. Right" to come along and make her a mommy. Instead, she takes matters into her own hands and undergoes artificial insemination. On her way home, she meets Mr. Right, and their relationship blooms over the course of her pregnancy.

On the bright side, our heroine's pregnancy is far easier than usually portrayed in film, despite her carrying twins, but it still was not the sort of film I wanted my son to see...even though he's only a toddler, and even though he couldn't hear the dialogue.

First of all, single motherhood is difficult. I've know single moms who wound up in that position through many routes and who lived in many different socioeconomic situations. Not one of them was happy about being a mom whose kid(s) lacked a dad (either most of the time or all the time). And I've never met a child of a "broken home" who was happy about it. Moreover, common sense and research agree pretty conclusively that children of single parents do not have the same advantages that children of married parents do. Any single parent can tell you that it involves a lot of sacrifice and compromise for parent and children alike. I don't want my son seeing a film that promotes single motherhood as a viable, desirable lifestyle choice, even if the mom in question winds up in a committed relationship in the end.

Second, I think most men would have more difficulty dating a woman pregnant with someone else's child than Mr. Right has in The Back-up Plan. The way the relationship dynamics are portrayed in the movie, I think encourages a very unrealistic view of relationships--a problem that already runs rampant in modern entertainment.

Third, our heroine conceives with her first go-round of artificial insemination. While that is entirely possible, it is unlikely (less likely than with natural conception). Artificially induced conception of any kind carries with it certain risks, both to mother and baby, that are less likely when things are done the natural way. As with anything, artificial and natural are intrinsically different, and that difference needs to be acknowledged.

In all, there must have been better options for the in-flight movie that everyone (who was awake) had to see.

WFMW: Tips for Traveling with a Toddler

2010-10-06T07:22:00.003+02:00

Almost a month ago now, I made the seventeen-hour trek with my husband from Ben Gurion Airport outside of Tel Aviv to the Las Vegas Airport...with and 18-month-old. Oh, and he's a boy, a very active boy. To say the least, I had looked forward to the trip with some trepidation. However, we survived! And our various neighboring passengers didn't seem to mind DS at the end of the flights anymore than at they had at the beginning. How did we do it? Here are my tips:

If you ever have a domestic flight with Continental, remember to bring something in your carry-on that can work as a pillow. They don't stock them (or blankets) on the plane anymore. I happened to have a sweater with me, but that was luck. Flying from Newark to Las Vegas (five hours), we really needed to make sure our son could take a nap.

Try to keep the child up as long as possible before the flight. In our case, we did the ten-hour time zone change the week before we traveled, so he was ready for bed when we got on the plane anyway. For domestic travel, I'd just get him up earlier in the morning than he's used to, put him to bed later, or skip a nap.

Find a place in the airport to use as a race track, and try to have enough lead time to use it. Ben Gurion has a big mezzanine with three flights of stairs going up from the lobby to their corporate offices. DS and I spent a LOT of time climbing those stairs before heading to our terminal. While American airports don't usually have that kind of architecture, we did manage to have him walk some at Newark as well. Most airports have relatively open areas, so if possible, get a flight during a time that the airport will have less traffic or schedule a flight plan with unorthodox stops so you will be waiting in unpopulated parts of the terminal.

Bring soft granola bars in your carry-on. They're tasty, relatively healthy, filling, and not difficult to chew (my little guy is still learning that he has to chew before swallowing). Best of all, they can't spill and aren't subject to the security limits that liquids (apple sauce, yoghurt) are. For international flights, granola bars are a non-issue with customs.

Bring toys that are puzzles. I don't mean jig-saw puzzles (unless that's what your kid loves), I mean toys that are challenging. By the time we left Israel, our umbrella stroller was literally held together with duct tape and had to be trashed. However, DS had figured out how to close the buckle. I cut the lap belt off of the stroller the night before we left, taped together the cut ends of the straps, and gave it to him to play with (it's lost in the trunk of the car right now, but I promise to do a post on it in the future). That plastic buckle could keep him occupied for a good half hour or so at a time, provided I made myself available to unbuckle it. An empty drink bottle with a wide mouth bought once we were past security also chewed up a lot of time, since he knows how to unscrew the lid. Again, I had to be available to put the lid back on for him. The drink bottle was also good for imaginative play, since he likes to pretend to feed his stuffed animals.

Bring a favorite stuffed animal and blanket (I know this is obvious). It minimizes the disruption of routine, and makes getting to sleep easier.

If possible, bring a board book or two. I didn't have any when we flew, but I've bought a couple since then and he loves them. It's one of the few ways I can actually keep him still for five minutes at a time. I really wish I had them a month ago!

And that's how we survived (along with tapping out the flight crew's milk stash!). While seventeen hours of travel definitely does not work for me, keeping my toddler content for the torture does.

For more tips and tricks, check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family!

A little post to catch up...

2010-09-27T08:38:00.002+02:00

I'm just dropping by to note that we got back Stateside safely. DS did a great job on both flights and in the airports (tips on good toddler toys and travel with toddlers to follow). Now we just have to put our lives back together! Until we get settled in our new place I won't be able to post as frequently as I would like.

The big news however (now that I've had the opportunity to tell family!) is that we are excitedly anticipating Child Number Two in January! Which you probably figured out by the ticker in my sidebar. It's a little scary being pregnant in our current situation, but the expectation is actually one of my greatest sources of confidence. God is very good to us, and has answered my prayer that DS have a sibling close to his age (this one will be almost exactly two years younger than DS).

I'm hoping to post about once a week, so hopefully I'll be writing soon!

KTT- Egg whites

2010-09-21T18:13:00.002+02:00

When a recipe calls for beaten egg whites, it often instructs you to put a little cream of tartar in with them. This is because an acid, like cream of tartar, has a chemical reaction with the whites so that the resulting fluff is less likely to go flat. I've also read that some cooks beat egg whites in a copper bowl because the copper that leaches into the whites from the bowl has the same effect.

Most interestingly though, was this tip I heard on America's Test Kitchen recently. When a dessert calls for sweetened egg white fluff you might want to use light brown sugar instead of regular white sugar. Why? Well, the flavor is more complex, for one. But more importantly, the molasses that makes the sugar brown happens to be acidic and so will have the same effect as adding cream of tartar.

For more kitchen tips and tricks, check out Tammy's Recipes for Kitchen Tip Tuesday.

Less Waste with Breading

2010-08-29T21:10:00.001+03:00

I recently ran across this tip through Kitchen Tip Tuesday at Tammy's Recipes (hop over there for more ideas!). It's a good one about how to minimize the mess when breading food, and it reminded me of a tip I haven't had a reason to think about for a long time.

When I bread food (usually fish or chicken), I often have a fair amount of the flour mixture left over and sometimes some of the liquid too. Since I hate waste, I pour the leftover breading material into a ziplock bag or plastic container and pop it into the freezer (the little bits of meat, fat, and meat juices in the mixture cut down on its shelf life). The next time I make savory cornbread or tamale pie, I start my batter with the leftover breading. It adds really wonderful flavor to the bread! Usually I use seasoned corn meal for breading, but this would work with wheat as well.

If I have leftover liquid, that can also go in place of some of the milk in the cornbread. I don't feel comfortable freezing it, though, so when I have some of the liquid hanging around I usually make cornbread the next day.

Glamour of a SAHMer

2010-08-27T03:26:00.002+03:00

Normally I don't write about this aspect of life, but sometimes it just takes you by surprise and then there is no choice but to blog about it.

We're coming to the end of our sojourn, and blood pressures are mounting. And my little boy, just like his daddy, holds stress in his intestines. If life isn't running smoothly, well, certain waste products are.

In Israel, landlords like to overlap leases if they possibly can. So first, we had two months of people coming by to see our apartment with little to no notice and the landlord complaining that it wasn't staged when he showed up unannounced. Then we found out that half the problem was a serious culture conflict: Israelis use their a/c's to circulate air--not to cool--meaning that they run the a/c with all the windows open all the time. They also have all the lights in the house on when they are at home. Prospective tenants saw our energy conservation and reliance on a/c cooling as an attempt to hide an apartment flaw (the a/c really can't compete with temperatures here and, frankly, the "fresh" air smells like a sewer). So we agreed that, in exchange for 15 minutes notice, we'd "Israelize" the apartment for showings. The first time we did that, though, my poor son was showing early signs of heat stroke after a 20 minute showing--and that's standing in front of the a/c!

In any case, the apartment got rented. But the new tenant had no place to store her stuff until we move out. So we told her she could use our spare room. Last week, the movers were scheduled to come by at 9am. They showed up at 7:30am. Then they stored stuff in ALL our rooms--even the bathroom.

DS hasn't been quite right since. It's quite an adjustment. New restrictions. Less space to play. For a cabin fevered toddler that's a lot of stress, especially when mom and dad are gearing up for an intercontinental flight, finals week, and the great unknown back in the US! His tummy has given him no peace.

He puked yesterday and today. Today it was on the couch (also known as our bed) and I'm pretty sure contained more substance than he's consumed over the last three days combined. His diapers have been a mess--one he likes to play with and that's hard to control during changes. And while he was naked in the bathroom and I was cleaning puke off the couch, he peed. Twice.

Better yet? He's also responded to the stress by bucking the system. We've been letting him hang out in the bathroom naked from time to time to introduce the concept of "potty" to him. It's been pretty smooth sailing thus far, all things considered, and he knows the rules. Yesterday, though, he chose to ignore the rules by playing with the toilet brush. In the toilet. And then "drawing" with the toilet water on the floor.

So that's been my week. How was yours?

Read up on more Glamour at Mama Says. I promise I'll have nicer things to say next time.

To keep for the future...

2010-08-23T17:47:00.005+03:00

Someday, should I ever be blessed with a daughter, and should that daughter ever need to build a doll house, I think I've found a good house frame.

DS has been playing with this box we received several months ago. It's about a foot square and 7 inches deep.

It finally broke. And when relocating the ruins to a different room (he still likes to play with it), I discovered that the way it broke has some very house-ish qualities:

Imagine this shape, but made out of a much less "loved" box. Painted outside, papered with scrap book paper or wrapping paper inside. With a couple painted pieces of cardboard attached to make multiple floors (I'm thinking 2 with an attic for this size). A rectangular box disassembled in the same way could make a bungalow with vaulted ceilings in the living room. Likewise, a deeper box without added floors could be made into a firehouse or some other kind of garage for ds. Having watched ds play with it as is, I can also see turning this shape into some kind of space ship.

For more fun ideas check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.

KTT-New Way to Serve Potatoes

2010-08-22T02:54:00.007+03:00

A couple weeks ago, my husband and I went to a bistro near us. It's part of a large chain here that makes a point of being accessible to American tourists (the menu is available in translation and most of the waitstaff speak English, regardless of the location you visit). In general we go for dessert (we split their Belgian waffle: fresh waffle topped with a scoop each of vanilla and chocolate ice cream, whipped cream, chocolate sauce, and fresh fruit salad!), and while we did split that treat this time, we decided to start by splitting one of their appetizers.

Initially, we asked for their "nachos" (which is what they call chips and salsa here), but they were out. Instead, we opted for their "home fries," figuring that would be safe and relatively familiar. Were we wrong! And glad of it. The waitress brought us a steaming bowl filled with pan-fried potato cubes (much like home fries), but the seasoning smelled and looked very different from anything we expected. Imagine looking at a plate of potatoes, but smelling Thai barbecue!

The topping? Sweet chili sauce (link to a brand I've seen in American grocery stores) with sesame seeds for garnish. It was delicious! Although I NEVER would have thought of this combination on my own, I will definitely be trying it in my own kitchen in the future.

And for those of us who like to do it ourselves, here's an (untried) recipe for Thai sweet chili sauce, too, that looks good, easy, and frugal to prepare.

For more tips and tricks, visit Kitchen Tip Tuesday at Tammy's Recipes and We Are THAT Family for Works for Me Wednesday!

KTT and WFMW: New way to serve ice cream!

2010-08-17T17:13:00.003+03:00

A friend of a friend recently invited us to dessert at her apartment on the spur of the moment. That really is very gracious, since she has a large family AND works full time outside the home. Her time and evenings are precious.

Her cooking is good but nothing fancy, but she puts real effort into presentation, making the simplest dishes into something special. She even has our mutual friend convinced she's a 5-star chef ;), and I'm not about to argue the point. The dessert she served us (and her family) the other night was a perfect example--one I must remember for my own use.

In short, she served vanilla ice cream. Nice, but not interesting, right? Wrong! At some point in the past, the ice cream had been softened and spread into a (plain) bundt pan, so she was able to serve it in slices instead of scoops. While she popped the ice cream out of the pan in order to cut it, she did so quickly enough that she was able to pop the remainder back in the pan when she was done.

The presentation made it seem kinda special by itself, but there's more. Before she spread the ice cream into the pan, she filled the bottom of the pan with streusel. I never would have thought of putting streusel on ice cream, but it was really good and very attractive. It really felt like we were having a slice of one of those expensive ice cream cakes that you buy at the grocery store.

For more things to do with a bundt pan, visit this link. For more tips and tricks, visit Tammy's Recipes for Kitchen Tip Tuesday and We Are THAT Family for Works for Me Wednesday!

WFMW: Getting the Most Out of Lotion Tubes

2010-08-10T21:37:00.000+03:00

Every so often I get these tubes of lotion, usually as gifts, but sometimes I buy them too. You can't beat the convenience, and they are usually very inexpensive.

Eventually, though, I've squeezed all I can out of them.

But I really want to get my money's worth, and I don't like being wasteful. Just like with scraping the last dribs and drabs out of the mayonaise jar, there's a lot of lotion to be missed if you just toss the tube when you can't squeeze out any more.

You need a plate, a pair of scissors, and a small rubber spatula (I didn't have one handy, so I used a spoon instead).

First you cut the end off the tube, cut down the middle, and then cut the tube off of the lid:

Then you scrape the remaining lotion off of the plastic and out of the lid. Most of it will be caught in the lid and the folds of the plastic. With this step, having a spoon with a narrow handle actually comes in handy so you can get the lotion out of the inside of the nozzle too (you'd be surprised how much winds up in there!).

You'll wind up with a little mound of the stuff on your plate (in this case, enough for 3 or 4 more uses), like so:

Use the spatula to scrape that into a new container. I've used a lotion bottle with a hand pump in the past, but you can also keep it in an old baby food jar or other wide-mouthed container.

This particular tube had about an extra tablespoon of lotion in it. And the whole process took me less than ten minutes including taking photos.

And that's what works for me. For more tips and tricks check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family!