February is starting cold this year, and so I piled the soups high in my lunches.  I think I will be keeping those for myself, so I don’t have to worry about the kids bringing them home and telling me it was yucky.   I am also trying to restock my freezer a smidge this week.  So I bought extra sirloin, and will be freezing a loaf of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  I have already stocked it with 14 cups of chicken stock this morning, and will be cooking a pot of beans and a loaf of bread tomorrow for freezing.  This was a tricky week for menu planning, since my daughter and I are going to a camp out this weekend.  I want to make sure I don’t have to worry about dinner the night before so I can pack and double check the packing.  So my dear husband is on his own, cooking for himself and maybe my son. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, for this week, it is definitely a week of winners.  We had several, in fact.  On Sunday, we had a major win for the adults, Sweet Potato Enchiladas, although the kids thought it was too spicy (???? They’re crazy!).  I had leftover filling, and it was good with crackers for lunch!  For convenience and flavor, this Brat recipe is awesome.  I liked not having to have my husband grill them, and then wait for his “perfect” brats, which take hours and hours, and are really best the next day.  Although I think next time, I might sear them in a pan first, as these turned out slightly . . .pasty looking.    I like my brats a nice caramel color.  My last winner for the week is Breakfast Sausage.  But it is super!  I like that it is made from turkey, but tastes like regular breakfast sausage, can be done in patties or crumbles, and freezes wonderfully.  It is even great as sausage on a pizza!

Hopefully this week will bring a return to normalcy around the craftscout household.  But I kinda doubt it.   I am done with the Girl Scout troop’s backyard Campout last weekend, but am in the midst of planning for the big campout in two weeks.  Along with the normal day to day stuff!  I had to restock a bunch of stuff this week: detergent, softener, soy sauce, garbanzos, frozen fruit for smoothies, salt, batteries, and other stuff.  Also Boogie is supposed to bring snack for his preschool class this week, and I actually remembered before the night before!  Of course, I forgot the kids’ toothpastes, but I can go grab those tomorrow when Boogie is at school.  Or ask DH to bring some home.  Needless to say, since I had very little stash left, and all these extras, $130 is perfectly respectable.  But thankfully, I will be able to drop some stuff from this week’s shopping trip into the freezer. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, this week, we definitely had a winner.  This chicken pasta recipe is well worth saving for an OAMC session!  Of course, at our house, we will love just about anything with pesto.  In fact, my mother had a huge jar of pesto she had out to spread on bread, and she had to frisk my husband and I down before we left to make sure we didn’t run off with it!  I think we will need to devote my new Aerogarden to basil for pesto in the next go around.  Mmmmm, fresh pesto.

This week, we had a real loser – Broccoli Chicken Lasagna.  I mean, I’m sure that if successful, it would have tasted fine, but my biggest pet peeve is badly written recipes.  And this one was.  I figured that, since it is a lasagna recipe, it would all fit in the same baking dish I always use for lasagna, a 9×13″.  And with nothing in the recipe to go by, I went forward with this assumption.  The only substitution I made in the recipe was using this instead of canned cream of chicken soup, a standard sub for me.  I used the shorter cooking method.  It overflowed, it poured out onto the bottom of my stove.  There is nothing I hate more than recipes which cause me to need to clean my oven. >:(

At the end of each week, I would  like to post any recipes that were real winners or losers at our house and why.  For the first week, I have two winners:

Sunshine Toast – DD loved this recipe.  She loved the idea of cool shapes in her breakfast.  Boogie liked them when he found out they could be in any shape I have cookie cutters!  But the timing is tricky, because I like my eggs a little runny in the yolk.  The first time I made these, they tasted more like hard boiled!

Lemon Vinaigrette – I was given a bunch of fresh lemons plucked right before a freeze happened, and this was one of the recipes I decided to try to use them up.  I LOVED IT!  This is one of the best salad dressings I have had.  But it is the kind of recipe that makes me hum a song from The Sound of Music: “These are a Few of My Favorite Things”!

For the first full week of 2010, we are still recovering from financial emergencies at the end of 2009, so our menu is concentrating on frugality and using what we have.  The grocery bill for the week was $80, but only $68 when you remove the cat food and kitty litter.  Last week had an excess of pork products, and this week is more chicken based.

Sunday

• Breakfast – cereal from pantry
• Lunch – still going through leftovers, gumbo is finally gone, as is the BBQ pork, but the coleslaw is still there and the last of roast beef went into the freezer for another day.
• Dinner $2.60 – Chicken salad pita, using up chicken, lettuce, and some sour cream dip from last week, some pita bread from the freezer, and whatever else I think it needs.  Plus some veggie mash I had planned for last week but didn’t get around to.

Monday

• Breakfast – Baked Oatmeal, and I already had everything, although I might break into the orange juice I bought for later in the week.  This is the last day of break, so I want to do something special.  The rest of the breakfasts focus on speed, without resorting to cereal everyday.
• Lunch – prolly leftovers again.  Gah, I am getting so sick of eating leftovers, but I cook for all 6 people who live here, although all 6 don’t always eat what I cook . . .
• Dinner $9 – Broccoli and Cheese stuffed shells It took me a while to realize that cheese, especially GOOD cheese is just as expensive as meat, so going vegetarian (and therefore eating more cheese and eggs for protein variety) for frugality’s sake is silly, as is pouring on the cheese as my children would like me to do.  But I like to go veg at least one dinner a week for health reasons and lifestyle reasons, so instead of filling the shells I found in my pantry with cheese I am adding a whole bunch of broccoli to the dish, too, and my homemade pasta sauce.

Tuesday

• Breakfast – Cookies! I love serving the kids cookies for breakfast.  :) And I already have everything on hand, with the dry mix made up in the pantry, and homemade applesauce.
• Dinner $7.75- Roast Chicken, with roasted veggies, and Yorkshire pudding Mmmm, comfort food . . .

Wednesday

• Breakfast $5.29 – Instant baked apples This is a new one for us, but it sounded yummy (I love greek yoghurt, and got more than was needed, hence the high price) and was full of seasonal yumminess!
• Dinner $2.87 – One of our faves:  cabbage and noodles.  Since I had a pound of polish sausage in the freezer, that will be added which makes this even yummier.

Thursday

• Breakfast $4.45- Eggs and Toast, done special.  This is so expensive because I am including a whole loaf of bread and a dozen eggs.  Since I am not going to be baking my own bread, I chose to spend a little extra on non-HFCS bread.  I really need to bake up a bunch of loaves to stick in the freezer . . .
• Dinner $11.27- Crock pot Oriental chicken, plain rice from the rice cooker, and cabbage with snow peas.  I needed a crockpot dinner, because this is Girl Scout meeting day, and this will give me a couple of pounds of frozen chicken breasts as leftovers.

Friday

• Breakfast – Applesauce sandwiches, using leftovers from the week
• Dinner $5 – Brown rice and lentil casserole Another vegetarian night, with probably a salad and homemade dressing added.

Saturday

• Dinner – Meatball soup made from meatballs from the freezer and an assortment of canned and frozen veggies, and homemade stock, of course!

I haven’t posted many lunches, because those are mostly creative recreations of leftovers, with added fruit and veggies.  I have planned to make cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, hummus, and peanut butter and jelly “sushi” for the kids this week.

Yup, for Thursday, I ended up making some really yummy quesadillas for my parents and my family, with some excellent rice and chips and guacamole.  Oh, and Happy New Year’s margaritas!  I think this rice recipe, made in the rice cooker (I LOVE my rice cooker!), is my new favorite Mexican rice recipe.  There are not onions that I love, but both kids pick out; there is lots of garlic flavor, but garlic for the kids to pick out, and it has about a half serving of veggies in each serving, which is a half serving more than usual!  And it tastes great.

Friday

• Cereal for breakfast
• Leftovers for lunch
• Dinner $1.43 – Black Eyed Peas, the absolute best cabbage recipe I have ever had, and corny hushpuppies from the freezer.  Cheap eating, but good, and it will bring a world of luck, theoretically . . .

Today

• Cereal for breakfast – seriously, my kids would eat it every morning if they could
• McD’s for lunch, we decided at the last minute to see a movie at 12:30 and had no time to grab anything from home
• Dinner $3.56 – Green Chile Stew with cheese and tortillas.  This smelled sooooooo delicious when it was simmering.  The flavor was a slight letdown compared to the smell, but it was still delicious.  I made a full batch, so I now have a 2c. portion to go to my dad who will love it, a 4c. portion in the fridge in case someone wants it for lunch or dinner, and three 2c. portions in the freezer to thaw and smother burritos with at a later date.

Which brings up an interesting point.  I have now 6 and a half quarts of turkey stock, 1 and a half quarts of chicken stock, and  this quart and a half of green chile stew in my freezer.  By the end of this week, I will probably have another 5 quarts of chicken stock in the freezer.  This kind of thing usually makes me feel like I have a well stocked freezer, but in reality, my freezer stock is rapidly dwindling.  Maybe, though, I will have a nice period of rebuilding and I can try a different method of keeping myself organized.