Turning Around

So it seems like it has been forever since I posted to this blog, and guess what? It has.

I have been trying to decide what the focus of this blog is going to be and how it will have relevance to my life lately. I had considered focusing on frugal stuff, but seriously, while important, it is not enough to get me excited about showing up to the page. I am going to change the focus to include my craft, art and all my creative pursuits. There will be frugal and cooking mixed in, but the main focus is going to be the creative act and the end result.

2010 is the year I will participate in the Craft or Bust 2010 challenge. Each week I will work on an ongoing project and record the progress with pictures, or I will do something that can be completed during the week and write a little about that. I intend to use this to help me jump start my creative process and keep me accountable for actually showing up to do the work.. Tomorrow will be the first post of the year, although for everyone else in the challenge it has been going on for a few weeks longer. My formal goal is to craft at least one new piece of jewelry or adornment each month whether in metal, fiber or any other medium, including painting and drawing.

Menu Plan Monday

Lately I have been writing out menu plans for two week periods in an effort to help my house run a little smoother at meal times. There are several bloggers out there that are part of Meal Plan Monday web ring and the idea has appealed to me for quite some time. I will post my meal plans on Monday, although I usually make out menus that run Sunday to Saturday. For some reason this cycle of days just works better for me. Plus I make up menus for two weeks at a time, which covers from pay period to pay period.

The advantages of meal planning are many:
1. The kids know what is going to be served by looking at the list on the bulletin board.
2. I know what is going to be served so there is no standing in front of the freezer and trying to put together combinations that sound good.
3. It helps immensely when grocery shopping. I have my list of meals and write the grocery list from there. It also allows me to shop the sales and plan menus based on what is on sale. Big $$$$ saver!
4. It saves money. Since I shop for the ingredients of each menu, I know I have them on hand and will not have to run to the store. Running to the store for one items usually ends with 20 in the cart when it is time to checkout.
5. I have time to think out the menu, find recipes and try new recipes as desired. For example, this month I am cooking from the Once A Month Cooking book and have found 3 recipes that sound good. I've had this book for a while but am finally getting around to making dinners from it. I will try one recipe and if it is a success with the men in the house, I will double it for freezing.

So what is on the menu this week?

Sunday October 18 Roast chicken, mashed potatoes (real potatoes! cheaper and better for you than instant), corn

Strawberry shortcake for dessert using a butter cake recipe that I made and froze to use instead of those weird preservative laden pucks you get at the store.

Monday October 19 Pork Spare ribs (on sale this week) salad and deviled eggs. The original menu was for butter/herb noodles and broccoli. We have a lot of salad that needs to be eaten plus deviled eggs sounded good. dessert is a really easy chocolate peanut butter chip pan cookie I pulled off the Hershey's website.

Even though I had other things planned, I am flexible to a point with the sides. If you have something that needs to be used up like salad greens, you should use them first. Wasted food is wasted money.

Tuesday October 20 Chicken burritos, refried beans, carrot sticks w/ salad dressing to dip.

Wednesday October 21 12 Boy curry (from Once a Month Cooking), rice, canned fruit

Thursday October 22 Baked Jambalya (from Once a Month Cooking), sliced apples

Friday October 23 Homemade Pizza

Saturday October 24 Breakfast : Homemade cinnamon rolls

Lunch: Soup and Sandwiches

Dinner: Leftovers with cookies or canned fruit

Sunday October 25 Breakfast: Scrambled eggs, bacon or sausage (whatever the boys decide they want)

Lunch: Hot dogs and chips

Dinner: Hamburgers and French Fries. Hubby makes killer homemade french fries using real potatoes. There is no comparison! Carrot sticks and apple pie round out the menu.

I have made a big effort to cook from scratch lately since I am able to plan out meals and decide how much time I have. On days there is a lot of activity, the meal is an easy one. I use the crockpot a lot and will be using it more in the future. The chicken that we cooked last night had a lot of meat left, so it will be picked clean and the meat will go into the chicken burritos we are having later. I did buy bagged chicken breasts since they were on sale for a really good price, and will add to the burrito meat, but the carcass will be frozen for bones to make chicken stock later down the line.

Theme for the week...

is saving money and getting a handle on a little impulse spending that has been a downfall of mine. That said, I have to confess right out of the gate that I blew it today when I got on Amazon.com and ordered 2 books that REALLY sounded good.

Do I already have a house full of books and many of them either unread or partially read? The answer to that would be a definite yes.

So my goal for the next two weeks is to stay off Amazon.com and read at least one book from the pile that is around my house. Is this going to be easy?

Probably not.

As a matter of fact, it is going to be damn hard! However given the fact the economy is in the tank, I feel it is really important to start getting my priorities in line and put money in savings. Experts say you should have 6 months pay in savings for a rainy day, However, lately I have seen experts changing that number to 10-12 months since the job market has tanked.

Here are some things I am working towards making a habit:

1. Staying off Amazon.com. It's just too tempting.

2. Actually planning --and sticking to--planned meals that are made at home from my MANY cookbooks.

3. Only grocery shopping once every two weeks from my meal plans. If I have to have an ingredient, I'll send hubby. He is much better at being able to leave the grocery store with only the items he came in for. If I "run in for one thing", I end up coming out with $50 extra junk minimum. We burn money with that foolishness! '

4. Trying to resist buying new yarn until I have made a sizable dent in my yarn stash. I tend to buy way to much yarn for future projects and should learn to use that up first. Considering I help out at 2 wonderful yarn shops, this is going to be really hard. However, I am going to really make an extra effort to make this work!

5. Be more consistent about the goals and the frequency of posting to this blog. I have been a little chaotic about posting to this blog and a little unclear of it's mission statement. I am going to work towards clarify the theme over the next couple months to reflect my interest in budgeting, cooking and book interests.

I have several really interesting cookbooks that I am going to utilize over the next couple weeks while I am doing all this home cooking. Two that are sitting next to me right now are Quick Fixes with Mixes by Lia Roessner Wilson -- and Make a Mix by Karine Eliason, Nevada Harward and Madeline Westover. I have had both of these for quite some time and figure it is time to use them. The first book uses mixes like cake mix, cookie mix etc. as the base for recipes. In the morning I am trying a cinnamon roll recipe from the book.

The Make A Mix book contains recipes that utilize base mixes that you make from scratch in bulk. For example, tomorrow I am going to make the brownie mix that is the base for brownies, cookies, Texas sheet cake and a Mississippi mud cake. This is a completely from scratch mix, which I find appealing.

However, using convenience products might prove to be useful too. I will let you know what I try and what I think of these recipes as I bake the goodies. As a matter of fact, as I read through the books on my bookshelf, I will be giving my reviews of them. There will be books from all genres since my reading is pretty eclectic.

So those are my goals for now. Check back tomorrow for the recipe reviews. I will not be printing the recipes since they are in the books and the authors need to be able to fairly profit from them if they are good--I will just be giving my opinion of the recipes that I actually make. I'll spend all of October and part of November on these two cookbooks, then move on to the others in my collection and review other types of books as I read them.

Stretching the budget calzones...

Since it is football season and both my boys play--time is precious here at Animalhaus. Both the boys are on the Junior Varsity and are backup for the Varsity, so that means we have two games a week. That can lead to both a schedule clusterbuff and a menu disaster. If I don't have something prepared when they walk in the door, we sometime opt for fast food. That is OK, but can really bust the budget if we aren't careful. So this month I am going back to the drawing board and trying to get meals prepared ahead of time or at least meals that don't require a lot of prep. For this, I have relied on using up what's in the fridge and cooking out of my community cookbooks. I have a huge collection of cookbooks, but cherish my community cookbooks because they are slices of life from real people across the nation. Tonight I am cooking "Nameless Sweet and Sour Chicken". It uses an 8 oz bottle of Russian dressing (I didn't have a full 8 oz, so I added some Catalina. They do taste slightly different, so I'll have to see), 10 oz jar of Apricot preserves and a packet of dried onion soup mix. I might see if adding half a packet would be better.I did add a squeeze of lime juice since I had lime slices I haven't used up, but that is my twist....the recipe says to pour this over 6 chicken breasts or one whole 2 pound chicken cut up. I used 2 pounds of frozen chicken thighs that I cooked until they thawed out. I them dumped the juices and covered them with the sauce, then cooked completely. I'll serve this with rice rolls and a salad mix that we found marked down at the supermarket.

This weekend I was looking for ways to use up some leftover baked chicken breast, pepperoni and mozzarella cheese that we needed to consume or lose. I figured a calzone would be an interesting twist. So I found my go to pizza dough recipe--you can find them online or I can email you mine if you leave me a comment--and rolled the dough into a circle. After laying out the ingredients on half the circle, I folded the other half over and crimped the edged. After baking, it was well received by the hungry males in my house. Bellies full and budget saved--GOOD STUFF!

I had enough to make 2 of these. They were really large-you just can't tell it in the picture. Four of us ate well, and there were leftovers for two lunches.
Tonight I am making cinnamon rolls for breakfast tomorrow morning. I'll bake them right before bed and icing them when they come out so the gooey icing melts a little...YUM.

Cleaning House

As you can see, our back patio has been severely ignored this year. We have a wonderful new deck and potential place to hang out, but nothing has been done with it. So for the next 2 weeks, the boys and I are going to do severe cleaning and I am going to work on making this an outdoor sanctuary. In the picture above, you see the result of dogs that refuse to remember that they are not supposed to use the old rock stairs to get in and out of the yard. The new deck has a much safer landing and solid stairs, but they continue to knock my potted plants down in their attempts to scale the rock steps. So, Wednesday I am going to look for fencing to block their attempts. JoAnn's Crafts store has several really pretty options.

More junk that is slated to be removed. I'll paint pots and put some decorative plants in there. Not sure what else I'll do to the landing, possibly paint a "carpet" on it. What do you think?

More mess. However, there you see the perfect components of a small seating area.

Again, seating and eating area waiting to be unearthed and decorated. Definitely a place for more painted pots and all kinds of goodies waiting to be staged.

This area is a major problem area for us. When it rains, the dirt washes out from between the rocks and end up on our patio, clogging the drains and flooding the whole patio. After it subsides, we end up with a couple inches of sludge on the patio. This is getting old quickly! Any suggestions? I am avoiding filling in the rocks since numerous really cute toads make their home there. We might end up having to make a cement shelf over the top rocks. I'll have to think about this.

Late Night Babbles

It is past 1 a.m and I am having problems sleeping. Hubby and one of the boys went to Florida for a couple days while I hang out with the other boy and take care of the house and animals. It just seemed easier than hiring someone to watch the house or boarding the animals. However, I am discovering I have a hard time sleeping without my husband. This surprises me because I am usually pretty independent. Not sure what this is about...

Last week a friend and I went to a shop in Wichita to make cold processed soap. I took a class a long time ago on soap making but wanted to refresh the basics since cold process soap uses lye and you definitely have no room for error there! It was a wonderful class (pics will be on my other blog) and I have a 2 pound loaf to show for it. I am going to start making soap again. The friend that went to Texas with me went in on getting the supplies for a soap making business, then we didn't go anywhere with it. I am going to make several batches this summer so that they can cure and be ready to sell in a month. I'll call my friend and let her know we are starting again. She works full time, so I'll make the starting products until she can get time. I am going to look into selling on etsy and local shops. From working crafts fairs, I know they are a lot of work, so I am trying alternate selling choices.

Wish me luck.

I'll post pics pf my first batch when the bars have cured.

Revisiting Frugal

These are tough economic times full of uncertainty. There used to be a time when a large number of years with a company meant that your job was reasonably safe, or at least you were safer than the guy who hired in at a later date than you.

There are no guarantees anymore in these times.

The news and information agencies have marked unemployment at over 9%--and the bad news is that it really doesn't show signs of getting better. Yesterday the company my hubby works for had another lay off. I was seriously freaking out since there was really no way to know who was going to get the notice. My hubby didn't get a notice, but some close friend of ours did. I was stunned and very sad. We've had bi-weekly dinners with this family for many years and I really didn't even know what to say. And then there was also the looming "there but the grace of God goes thee"--the full realization that this economy means that this may not be the end of layoffs and the realization that having to face a layoff in my house would be a severe blow. Our boys are in high school, we're firmly attached to our little city and house, and I have a comfort zone built up that apparently doesn't like being tinkered with (Hence the reason this is getting written at 4 a.m...can't sleep.).

While waiting for this round of layoffs, I reminded myself that I have fallen off the frugal wagon and need to get back on. I went gung ho for many months, then fell back into my old patterns of buying, storing and not using up what I already have. As a matter of fact, last week I bought $75 worth of yarn that will end up being stored until I actually finish 6 other projects on the needles.

Did I mention that I already have a yarn stash that could very possibly rival many small yarn shops?

What was I thinking?!

So, from here on out, until I finish all my pending projects and make a dent in yarn stash I currently have, yarn buying is getting curbed. Being a realist, I didn't say "completely stopped". That is like cold turkey dieting where you totally cut out something you crave, like chocolate, only to have a weak moment and fall face first into a pile of the stuff.

Another area I've fallen down lately is the meal planning arena. I have a ton of cookbooks, and many "Freezer Cookbooks" that would help me when I am faced with the "it's 5:00 and I really don't feel like cooking, let's do take out" scenario. I want to start cooking at least one meal a week from these books so I can get an idea on which recipes are going to work for my guys, then I'll make multiple servings to freeze. I'll build from there until I can do the once a month cooking. I think that would save our food budget. Months ago, I had "buy a freezer" on our list, we didn't. So it is back on the list of things to do withing the next 3 months. We're buying a small one, not one of the mega freezers. We really don't have the space for anything bigger than 8 cubic feet.

To help me regain and retain focus, I am planning to do is take a 3"x5" card, write on it exactly what I want to accomplish by being frugal such as "Save $500 this month", " Build up a 6-9 month income buffer in case of emergencies", "Save for a new couch for the family room" etc and keep it where I can refer to it whenever I get tempted.

I'll let you know how this works. I'm hoping that having these goals so close and written down will give me the proper push and ability to abstain from bad spending choices.