Homemaking Organized Blog

Archive for the ‘Food Stuff’ Category

Do you have those days where you forgot to meal plan or just didn’t have anything planned for dinner? You know you’ll be out doing errands or what have you all day but it doesn’t matter, you just don’t FEEL like planning dinner?

 

 

I felt like that today.

So I did come home. Tired. Worn out. Hungry.

What’s for dinner.

I had 3 options.

1. Pizza frozen from another meal.
2. Frozen Soup with chicken sandwiches BUT I was out of frozen chicken mix so I ixnayed this one.
3. Tacos with frozen beef mix.
4. Sloppy Joes with frozen beef mix

We also juice every night to be sure we’re getting a good amount of greens in our diet.

So #3 won. It was tacos by a family vote.

But then I realized that I was down a bit in the freezer dinners inventory.

So maybe it’s time to do a freezer fillup?

What foods do you make for your freezer dinners?

Here are my popular dishes…

• Beef Mix (makes tacos, sloppy joes, spaghetti)
• Chicken Mix (makes chicken salad sandwiches, chicken tacos, chicken pasta)
• Lasagna (this is so good I have to limit how many I put in the freezer)
• Soup (whenever I make soup I double the batch and freeze half)
• Ravioli (Since learning to make pasta Sweet Peanut can’t get enough ravioli. Deal is she has to help make it.)
• Meatloaf (I make a turkey meatloaf with parmesan and olives.)

Crystal over at MoneySavingMom is doing 4 weeks to fill her freezer. So far it’s been breakfast foods but I think I need to tackle those too…

 

So I’ve dropped our monthly grocery bill by a whopping $8 a week.

So are you wondering how I did this? Frankly I am too. Or maybe you’re just wondering what on earth we eat to have such a large grocery bill. Yea me too.

Well you know groceries have gone up considerably. We do eat admittedly well. Grocer’s have wised up to fish being healthy so they’ve raised the prices on that significantly in our area (catfish, basa, salmon, cod, you name it). I make pasta from scratch. Unfortunately I also just discovered heritage grains which are much more expensive than a nice $4 bag of flour (King Arthur) at the grocery store (which is also high). I have a food allergy so if we have convenience food anything it has to come from the health food section of the store which rarely has coupons or lower prices.  We juice which…my goodness takes a lot of fruits and veggies for the three of us. We only use butter. Again unfortunately I discovered the difference between Parmesan and Parmigiano Reggiano. And the list goes on.

So where on earth could I cut corners in an admittedly too high bill?

Well first off came necessity. My husband’s work is governed by the seasons. In the spring and fall are the leaner times around our home. We’ve learned to save up for times like this. But it only makes sense to revisit the grocery bill.

Second came the opportunity to review Crystal’s audio book The Money Saving Mom’s Budget. By many people’s standars we are frugal (except when it comes to food) and already do much of what Crystal talks about in her book but there were bits and pieces that I never thought about which have helped. It was time for a budget review. We’ve pretty much been on the same one since Peanut was small. Making a few small adjustments to the way I went about grocery shopping really have made a difference.

1.  I started taking a calculator. What?! Yes this one little thing made the biggest change. I go in with a set dollar amount and I add up as I shop along. This kept me from adding all manner of this and that EVEN THOUGH I had a shopping list.
2. Cook more from the freezer. During the lush times I purchased lots of meat when I could and it’s now sitting in the freezer. I’m big about filling the freezer but hesitant to use it. Since it’s a fairly new edition to our household I still had time to mend my ways. So I’ve been using up the goods in the freezer.  And now my grocery bill has very little meat in it until I land on a good deal.
3. Take advantage of great deals when I see them. I usually never land up these kinds of things but recently my grocery store had ground turkey for $.99 a pound. Normally it is $4.99 a pound and at the warehouse store (Costco) it is $2.99 a pound. Even with my new smaller dollar amount to work with I had enough cushion to fill up the freezer. It was great.
4. I still use coupons but I need to schedule time to do it more thoroughly. Mostly I focus on coupons for the food items which is great but I need to spend some more time on coupons for non-food items.
5. Since we started juicing I spend more time on the perimeter of the store than before. We juice organic so that’s not necessarily cheap but I put a lot more thought into the fruits and veggies we buy. Even with this this addition the grocery bill is cheaper. I’ve started the garden so that will help even more. Also when I see things like onions or apples for very cheap I buy a lot.
6. As a sort of updated envelope method we have a checking/debit account only used for shopping. On payday I put the amount I’ve allotted for groceries into this account for the next two weeks and that is what I have. Using this and the calculator keeps me on track.

Right now this is all I’ve done but it has made it possible to reduce our grocery bill significantly.

Wahoo!

 

 

 

Years ago, long before I was married, when I was just a very domestic college girl. I picked up a copy of Foods of the World Italy and proceeded to make pasta by hand. I had no pasta machine but it was still good.

Years later my husband bought me a KitchenAid pasta attachement. It was the kind that attaches to the nose on the KitchenAid. The past was good but it didn’t come out thin like it should. It was thick since all the machine did was shove the dough through the chute one time. I didn’t know any better until I started buying fresh homemade pasta in the store (shame). But it was so good.

So we saved up and purchased one of those hand crank pasta machines. Beautiful red and works wonderfully. You can buy motors to go with these things but it’s really nice to just crank it out and once you get the hang of it it doesn’t take that long.

So we went to find pasta recipes.

First we used the one that comes on the back of the Pasta Flour blend from King Arthur Flour. But then we ended up finding and sticking with the following one.

Fresh Semolina and Egg Pasta Recipe

Next we had to figure out how to use the pasta machine correctly.

We followed the directions in the video first. Big mistake for us. While she showed how to use it she didn’t really offer tips for beginners. First off we made the pasta in the Kitchen Aid. Just watching her I knew I would have problems with the kneading in all the flour.  All that sifting and so.  Second she says to start on setting 1 on that particular machine but it’s actually 5 and 1 is the smallest. Third she barely flours the dough before sticking it in the machine and as newbies we had to use a lot more flour because our dough kept sticking. (she also didn’t talk about seasoning the machine first). Thirdly she didn’t show that she had cut the dough in half at the end so it’s not so long to work with.

So then I read the directions (go ahead and laugh) and watched a few homemade videos on youtube. I practiced some more and got the hang of it. I can now do it by myself but Sweet Peanut is the designated crank turner so I can’t make it without her.

What I usually do is make the dough somewhere in the morning or earlier part of the day and refrigerate it. Then after school and whatnot she and I roll it all out. We probably eat about half of it in our family of three. We could eat more but we’re trying to be good. We freeze the rest for later in the week.

Homemade pasta is so much more tastier than store bought dried. It is hard to explain but we seem to eat less of it. Savour it more. Use less sauce and appreciate our hard work.

We’ve also tried spinach and handmade ravioli (I need to get a ravioli template thingy).

Here are some pics of the making of Spinach Fettucini

 

Today I was supposed to be posting pics of the inside of my Homekeeping Box but since that means I have to get the pictures off the camera (which I don’ feel like doing) I’m going to post about freezer labels instead.
Raise your hand if your freezer is organized….okay thank you. So you know how important it is to label what you put in the freezer or your are bound to have a lump of unknown several weeks down the line.

I am terrible when it comes to labeling items in the above the fridge freezer. I keep the chest freezer in the garage nice and organized but woowhee! The one above the fridge is in dire need of a makeover. Which I think I’ll put on a short to-do list.

Back to labels. So usually you want to know what you have there and when you put it in the freezer.

I saw the first set of freezer labels in my recent Martha Stewart magazine and knew there had to be more. So I’ve scoured the internet for you and found a few more.

You can find them on my pinboard Freezer Labels.

Did you know March is frozen food month? Well it is. So that makes it a good time to become reacquainted with your freezer.

I’ve been becoming reacquainted with mine lately.  Having made our way through the freezer meals I put by a few months ago I started refilling the meals department by making a few freezer meals each week. I’ve set aside Thursdays and Saturdays as freezer or baking days (depending upon which I need to replenish). This past week it was lasagna with homemade noodles (more about those later). I only make small batches at a time to keep the clean up low and I make an extra for dinner that night so I don’t have to cook extra.

The basic recipe I use is from the freezer cooking manual.

So in honor of Frozen Food Month whip out that foil, dust off the slow cooker, and find some great recipes to put by for that extra busy day.

• If you have a Facebook account ‘Like’ the Frozen Assets page to see freezer recipes and more all month long.

• Download a sample of 30 Day Gourmet’s Big Book of Freezer Cooking.

 

I’m a big fan of the Taste of Home recipes. In the past several years (about 20) I’ve subscribed to most of them including the other Reiman Publications. As far as the food issues go the Light and Tasty now Healthy Cooking has been my favorite.

But I digress. Tonight I made my family a dish from one of the Comfort Diet cookbooks. Even though the cookbook says ‘diet’. Most of the dishes come from some past issue of one of the magazines, Quick Cooking, Taste of Home, Healthy Cooking, or Cooking for Two (Did I miss one?).

Our latest family rave is from the Cooking for Two publication and can be found online here.

Crispy Cod with Veggies

This dish was excellent. Really. Cod is kind of a dry fish so the toppings on top worked well to give it a lot of flavor. The veggies on the bottom were cooked and had nice fish juices flowing through them. I used bread crumbs that I seasoned with onion, garlic, paprika, thyme and oregano. I also sprayed olive oil over the whole thing. My husband can get enough. It’s now a family favorite and we will also be serving it to company. You can find the recipe here.

Now why did they go and raise the price of cod at our favorite grocery store?

One of my best friends is newly pregnant and sent me an SOS. Feeling queasy and out of energy she wanted to know what she could make for hubby for dinner that required 30 minutes or less.

If we weren’t separated by close to 3000 miles I would cook dinner for her. It’s hard when friends move. My friend is a bit of a food and a very into organic and natural foods. She has two freezers stocked with the basics.  But how to turn them into quick meals? She probably has no canned food in her home.

So what’s a girl to do? Admittedly I survived on pizza and tacos when I was pregnant. I couldn’t stomach anything else and the spiciness seemed to settle my stomach.

Quick meals in my home (that don’t com out of the freezer) are…

• Spaghetti with meatballs
• Minestrone soup (I chop quick and go)
• Canned soup and sandwiches (usually on Saturdays)
• Stirfries
• Sauteed chicken with veggies over rice
• Bakes salmon (I find this incredibly easy and it is often our Monday meal)

I’ll be coming back to this topic of course but what does one cook when one can barely stomach food?

 

 

 

One of my goals this year has been to be a bit more organized about my cooking plans. I do love to cook on the fly but it does help to have a meal plan just in case. My meal plan works more as “just in case” than an everyday rule.  I’m figuring if I keep a list of how we ate for the month it will help with future meal planning. This is a no brainer really. My software does it already for me if I bother to open it. Which I do often because it houses all my favorite dishes. I’m just not the best about the menu planning option.

So beginning on January 9th I started inputting what we ate for breakfast and dinner. This doesn’t really include side dishes, just main dishes. But give me a hand! This took some effort!

If you’re curious we always have fruit with dinner and breakfast. Pears, apples, and/or bananas. Side dishes are usually broccoli, spinach, zucchini, cabbage (I love cabbage), carrots, peas, maybe a salad but not so much in winter, some form of potaoes, rice, pasta, or couscous.

 

Menus

Monday, January 9, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
Best Buckwheat Pancakes
DINNER
Sauteed Zuchinni
Lemon Shrimp with Parmesan Rice

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
Toast and Scrambled Eggs
DINNER
Stone Soup

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
Cream Scones
DINNER
Garlic Lime Chicken

Thursday, January 12, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
Cream Scones
DINNER
Apple Sausage with pasta, tomatoes, broccoli, onions

Friday, January 13, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
Leftover Scones
DINNER
Spinach Ravioli Bake

Saturday, January 14, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
7 grain cereal and fruit
DINNER
Leftover Stone Soup

Sunday, January 15, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
Best Buckwheat Pancakes
DINNER
Chuck Roast in Foil

Monday, January 16, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
Best Buckwheat Pancakes
DINNER
Chuck Roast in Foil
These were all leftovers

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
7 Grain Cereal
DINNER
Makeover Pork Chops with Gravy

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
Store bought bread, eggs
DINNER
Stovetop Roast Chicken with Lemon-Herb Sauce

Thursday, January 19, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
more store bought bread, eggs
DINNER
Skillet chili mac America’s Test Kitchen

Friday, January 20, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
DINNER
My Version 3 Bean Pasta Soup

Saturday, January 21, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
DINNER
Salmon Quiche

Sunday, January 22, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
Best Buckwheat Pancakes
DINNER
Franklins Salmon

Monday, January 23, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
Best Buckwheat Pancakes
DINNER
Leftover 3 Bean Soup

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
Scrambled Eggs and Toast
DINNER
Lazy Day Lasagne

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

MENU

BREAKFAST
Cranberry Cream Scones
DINNER
Garlic Lime Chicken

Exported from Shop’NCook Menu 4.0

p.s. – if you are interest in a recipe just comment

It’s Anti-Procrastination Tuesday time. Time to get a hold of whatever task you need to tackle and tackle it! Just fight through and get it done.

For me it’s making a big ol’ menu plan. Not weekly, but monthly. We don’t eat out anymore due to food allergies (And if you stop eating out you’ll notice that eating out just isn’t the same if you try and do it again. The food doesn’t taste as good as homemade. You become more sensitive to any additives, etc.) so we really vary our dinner menus.

I’m also not one to stick to one source for recipe ideas. These are my main go to sources for meal ideas and recipes.

• Taste of Home (number one right now) (link to last night’s dinner)
• Saving Dinner (number two right now)
• America’s Test Kitchen (to ge the cooking method down right)
• The Web  (for that recipe I just can’t find).

When I’m being smart I put it all in my recipe software, Shop’NCook (Which I’m opening now because I forgot to add tonight’s dinner to it) because I can make a nice menu plan and keep track of how my family is eating. Then at the end of a month I have a whole month of good menu ideas and I don’t have to start from scratch again each week. Although that is sometimes fun it’s nicer, more efficient, money savvy, and a just a good idea to have a month to look at.

This is where I fail.  I’m severely delinquent in adding recipes to the software. Breakfast and dinner. One of my lingering projects has been to keep an accurate account of what we are eating. There are certain recipes we really like to revisit and if I would just keep track it would be a lot easier.

So my anti-procrastination is to add last night’s’ dinner to my software, make a note in my-to-do list to to do this each night. Make a print out in february.

This includes breakfast.

 

By the way click the button on top and Visit Amy at New Nostalgia for some great Anti-procrastination link ups.

 

 

Gluten Freedom is having a Launch Party giveaway of a TON of gluten free foods  and such. From Bob’s Red Mill to Amy’s, to Bakery on Main and many more I have never of. My sister is very sensitive to gluten so I like to help out when I can.

Enter at Gluten Freedom here.