Thursday, October 20, 2011

Miss me??

Ok so I've been MIA recently.  I have ZERO new recipes to share because frankly I haven't even been cooking.  I've been bad.  We've been eating out entirely too much and when we're home I just heat frozen things or boxed stuff.  :(  I hope it doesn't stay that way for long, but it is what it is.

It is however sewing season, at least for me.  Halloween costumes and Christmas presents are stacking up in the sewing "inbox" so I should have some stuff to share pretty soon.  I am not ready to unveil the costumes just yet, but I did find this super cute smiley skull material on sale at my local fabric store and for about $1.25 I whipped up these comfy pajama pants for my little man.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

School days!

Ah, pointy crayons and crisp folders.  When I was in school I loved new school supplies and it bugged me so badly that my mother *ruined* them by scrawling my name all over them.  Seriously.  Even if it was just neat little block letters in the corner it was no longer new.  :(  Which is why it is funny that I now find myself carefully penning my favorite little guy's name across all his brand new stuff!  I mean, I get it; I bought this stuff.  I don't want some other kid (who I am sure is a very nice, respectable, wonderful child) getting their stuff mixed up with his.  Which is also funny since he's only in pre-K and I think a main theme there is "Sharing."  :)  At any rate, it does help that I love my son's name and I like to see it on everything.  However!  Even sharpie on fabric such as backpacks and soft lunchboxes doesn't show up well, especially since I buy darker items so they don't show the 9 months of throwing it on the floor and sliding it around on every possible surface.  So my solution is Iron-on letters.  But when you're using only a few of the same letters over and over again, you wind up wasting a lot of random letters.

So!  In a pinch I decided to wing it.  

I used fusible backing, the same kind used for appliques and I ironed it onto a $0.25 piece of felt.  Then I drew some funky letters, cut them out and ironed them on my son's lunch box.  Since the lunchbox is a weird shape to iron, I ended up hanging it off the skinny end of my ironing board so only the surface I was ironing was actually on the board.  When I think my project is likely to come out crooked or otherwise awkward, I tend to embrace the crookedness and intentionally make it wonky.  If you're going to mess it up, do it on purpose!  :)  I like it; it's bright, it's obvious, and it is my favorite name.  :)

Friday, September 2, 2011

ZZZzzzzz......

So since I dropped my baby news I have been missing....mostly because you can't really blog about napping which is about all I have been doing recently.  The internet assures me that I am supposed to be nap-happy so I am choosing to believe it.  :D

However, I did get this month's Angel Food order so I have all sorts of new fun ingredients to play with.

Recently I've been doing a lot of easy stuff (in between naps) such as spaghetti with sauce from a jar.  But!  To make it slightly more interesting I make garlic bread in my bread machine.  This is one of those kitchen gadgets I never would have bought for myself; I received a digital electric bread machine in 2005 as a wedding gift.  I think I have used it more in the past 3 months than in the whole of 2005-2010.  So far my favorite recipe come from AllRecipes.com (surprise!).  You can find it here.  Even with only 2 tbs of butter in the whole loaf it has so much flavor that we don't even butter it at the table.   Try it!  It's delicious!  :D

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Feeling nostalgic :D

So now that it's really happening (Squeeeal!!!) I am happily sewing away in preparation for my impending tiny person.  :D  There are several things I intend to reuse or hand down from my son, but I believe there should be a few things kept specifically for each child.  One such item is my son's floor quilt from his infant days.
Isn't he a cutie???!
My mother and my sister worked together to make that quilt for him with bug and bee prints.  Very cute.  And I want him to be able to hold onto it.  Sooooo.......I made this. :D
A sweet, gender non-specific "Hoo" quilt.  The pattern is not the same as Monkey's but it is a fleece-backed floor quilt just the same.  Can't wait to see my sweet tiny person practicing holding up that sweet little noggin' on this cute quilt just from Mommy.  :)

In fact, I liked it so much I want to make another.  So I posted a custom quilt ad in my Etsy shop, anyone interested?  :D

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Success!!!

While I have known for a little bit, I waited to post until I told the folks, but we did it!  We're having a tiny person!!  And I told the fam with this cute shirt I made.
With a little secret flap he was all too happy to show off!  Look at that sweet grin! :D
Hooray!!!!  And now the money saving goes full force.  Starting with shirts just like this one soon to appear in my Etsy shop.  (hint, hint)

Squeeeeeaaal! :D

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

"Re-fashion"

This used to be my favorite shirt in high school.  Which is actually kind of funny because after much searching I could not produce a single photograph of me in this shirt, but believe me, I wore it a lot.  I like it so much that I have held onto it for 10 years, long after having a baby and eating about a million Oreos that guarantee I will never be able to wear it again.
But when I found this "refashion" tutorial for turning a t-shirt into a baby sleeper gown I finally saw the purpose of packing and repacking this comfy shirt through the years.


In the tutorial there are little flaps on the ends of the sleeves so you can fold the baby's hands inside them to prevent them from scratching at their face with tiny, dagger-like baby claws.  I left these off because my son was so long and skinny as a baby that those kinds of things never worked right for him.  So instead I turned the scraps into little mittens.  :D

So cute!  And really soft after my years of off-camera wear.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Sa-weeeeet!

Sometimes saving money means having a friend whose stash is taking over her house, and because she's AWESOME she sends you home with this:
I am simultaneous excited and slightly overwhelmed at all the possibilities!  I foresee some serious sewin'!  :D

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Ruined? Or Better-ized?

The basic plan of saving money on food and such has multiple facets and "re-purposing" leftovers is but one of them.  My family, specifically my son, loves roast.  Now, roast can be a little pricey for a single meal BUT! I decided to buy a slightly larger roast and try to get 2 meals out of it.  And that's exactly what I did.  

The first night I made our family's "regular" roast which is to stick it in the slow cooker with a packet of onion soup mix (I don't know why that works, but it's good), potatoes and carrots, and just let the thing cook until the meat starts to fall apart.  Yummo.  Then instead of dumping the "drippings" or "gravy" or whatever you want to call the soupy stuff that's left over, I put it in the fridge with the rest of the meat.

A couple of days later (because I wanted it to be far off enough that it didn't feel like we were eating the same thing) I took out the meat and the "drippings" and attempted to make this Yorkshire Pudding recipe that I found on Allrecipes.com.  I know that there are multitudes of actual Englishmen who would shudder at the idea of this being called Yorkshire Pudding, even before I completely screwed it up.  However, not only did my family clean their plates, they said it was good enough to make again.  Aha!  Success!

So the recipe says to put a 1/2 cup of the "drippings" in a casserole-type dish and bake it until it bubbles, then pour this batter on top and it kind of floats and boils and bakes this bread on top and then you eat it with the roast.  Well, I must admit, I did not do the math here.  Ah, why only a 1/2 cup of drippings?  I'll just use whatever I have left here (a lot), and I'll just throw the meat in there too so it will all be like some big casserole thing, right?  See, I envisioned the bread sitting on top of the meat and drippings, making a crust of sorts on the top, then when you cut into it to serve it there would be this meat pie/ pot pie thing happening inside.  WRONG!  What actually happened was that I mixed the batter according to the recipe, and even let it sit out for an hour as directed.  Then when I poured the batter onto the meat it just sort of sunk and spread like milk in your cup of coffee.  Not meat pie at all.  I had soup with uncooked bread in it. Well, I wasn't going to waste half a roast so I threw the thing in the oven and decided we were eating it no matter what.  So I baked it for about 35 minutes, but the bread never browned because it was submerged in roast juice but I took it out anyway and dished it out into bowls.  

Not exactly going to be on the cover of a magazine, is it?  But! It was very casserole-y.  In fact, when I scooped it out of the dish the bread had kind of baked around the meat so that it was all really mixed in together and the bread soaked up a lot of the "drippings."  If anything, this was roast and dumplings. :D  So that may be what I call it now.  Look at me!  I created a recipe!  


Friday, August 5, 2011

Cheap!

In my quest to save some money I have tried all kinds of different stores and recipes and various ways to crunch grocery cash.  This is one of the best ways to save money!  Angel Food Ministries.  This is a program that is available to everyone.  There are no qualifications whatsoever!  Click here for their website where you can view the "menu" for the month.  Each month you choose from different boxes or cases of food, place and pay for your order online and pick up at the end of the month from the location of your choice.  There are literally pick up locations all over the place.  Check it out! 

I got our first order in on the 30th; the guys even loaded the box in the trunk of my car, I didn't even have to get out much less shop.  (Score!)  

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

A New Venture

I told you guys last time that my poor sewing machine Matilda is acting crazy.  I simply cannot get rid of it though, it just means too much to me.  I will, however, allow it to sit in the closet with a dunce hat on and watch as I sew on a borrowed machine and hope that it feels awfully bad about what it's done.

With Matilda watching unhappily, I have managed to churn out some pretty neat stuff.  (Funny what you can do with functioning tools.)  This neat stuff is now in my braaand neeew Etsy shop!


Very exciting stuff, folks!  Take a look and pass it on to all your friends that are expecting or begrudgingly attending baby showers for other happy moms-to-be!  I promise this blog won't turn into a great big advertisement, but I'm just so excited!  :)

Wish me luck, guys! 

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

This is ridiculous!

Matilda has officially lost her mind.  Now I have put up with all kinds of nonsense from this crazy machine, but this is ridiculous.  It acts like it is sewing, but it is not actually sewing.  After hours, no, days of careful inspection and troubleshooting with my face perilously close to the inner moving parts of this goofy machine, my eyes are crossed, my shoulders are sore from slumping over, I am more frustrated than ever and Matilda is in time out.  The bobbin casing is turning as it should, but for some unknown reason the bobbin thread does not actually loop around the top thread meaning that no stitch is actually created so the thread just lays on top of the fabric while the needle pokes a neat little line of holes in the fabric as if it were sewing.  So my many sewing projects are backing up.  UGH!!!!

Meanwhile, in an attempt to save a little extra cash each month, we switched internet providers and (just to pitch a fit) the old company cut us off 3 days early.  (Jerks.)  So I was without internet access all weekend which means no recipe shopping, no idea shopping, no blog hopping, no creative outlet.  UGH!!!!

Then yesterday in our friendly neighborhood mega store I lost it.  Everything was either moved or discontinued, or just plain out of stock and everyone was in my way and I was starving and my family was eating without me because the trip to the store was taking so long.  By the time I got home I was basically barking and growling.  

I would like to say that all my emotional chaos has been the result of surging hormones of some yet unperceived pregnancy, but in reality I think the universe is just pissing me off!   

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Full Bellies. :)

I ran out of dishwasher packets the other day.  Now I could have hand washed the dishes but seriously, can you really picture me standing at the sink, apron-clad, scrubbing away?  Nope!  They sure did sit there for a day and a half until I made it to the store to pick up more little packets.  My first official backslide since I started this quest to do better.  Didn't take long, did it.  :(  But now the kitchen is put back together and I'm determined to be less terrible, so I look to my friend the slow cooker for another easy dinner.  This time I made Sweet Pepper Chicken from the Slow Cooker book by Taste of Home.  And yes, that's the same book as last time, and a few of the same ingredients as well.  For instance, I only bought one red and one green pepper and split them between this recipe and the last one.  Just chop them up and freeze them until you need them.  :)

Sweet Pepper Chicken


This has got to be my favorite recipe so far, and considering this is 3 good ones in a row, I'm a little nervous about trying another one.  How long can such good fortune hold out?  It was thick and creamy, definitely comfort food, but nice enough to serve if you have someone over for dinner. I didn't change anything about this one, just made it straight out of the book.  Then I found their website!  Oh, how I love technology.  You can find the recipe here.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Super Yum!!

My son is soon to be 5 years old and is pretty much perfect.  Ok, so that may be a stretch, but darn it, he's awesome!  One thing he has always excelled at is eating, which I think only I know because he is tall and bony leaving everyone else to think that I leave him to starve.  But this boy can eat.  I don't know where he puts it, but he can put it away.  And he's not a very picky eater either.  Sometimes I have to word things to sound more appetizing, but his pallet is pretty accepting.  However, and this is a big however, he has to be the slowest eater on the planet.  He enjoys food, there are just billions of other things he'd rather be doing than sitting still and chewing.  So generally mealtime consists of a whole lot of bite counting and bribery.

For lunch today I made another one of the recipes I mentioned before, Chicken Puffs from the All Recipes website.  FANTASTIC!  It's like a hand-held chicken pot pie.  Chicken, garlic, onions, cream cheese, croissants, count me in!  Or as my cousin Robin once said, "You had me at cream cheese."  :D  I think it's technically an appetizer but stick a side of veggies on a plate with 3 or 4 of these and you have a meal, or just throw some in a bowl, which is what we did.  Tada!

Ok, so they didn't all look so pretty.   The recipe simply says "roll into a ball."  Thanks, how helpful.  Except rolling a goop-filled triangle of croissant dough into a ball is not all that simple.  Most of them looked more like this:

I gave my son the prettier ones so he could eat them with his hands and I ate the leaky ones with a fork.  He poked the top with his finger and asked if it was bread.  When I told him it was bread with chicken in it he dove right in.  He downed 3 of them in record time.  And I didn't have to say anything; I was still finishing my tea!!  This is a big deal folks!  Needless to say this is going to be on the menu again very soon.

You can find the recipe here, the only tweaks I made were that I used canned chicken because we seem to have amassed back-stock of the stuff and I used 2 cans of croissants instead of 1, I just used them whole instead of cutting them.  You can use cubed chicken breasts if you like, but I would think it would be lumpy.  Since this is still a financially-driven exercise, lets see what this cost; $2 for a big can of chicken, $3 for 2 packages of crescent roll dough, $1.50 for cream cheese, $0.75 onion (I chop and freeze them so I can use small amounts at a time).  So for $7.25 I fed the 3 of us.  Add a can of green beans or other veggie for under a buck and we're still way under our typical $18 fast food meal for 3.  And think of all the small tweaks you could make to change this entirely.  Instead of garlic and onions, how about Rotel and cheese?  Or red peppers and jalapenos?  Or swiss cheese and ranch dip?  MMMmmmm.....   What tweaks do you want to try?

Friday, July 22, 2011

Yum!

I've tried to branch out in my cooking in the past with disastrous results.  I've tried braving new ingredients and unfamiliar techniques, and I just feel awkward and unhappy with the end product.  I've since decided that what I really want is food I already like, with familiar ingredients, tweaked slightly to taste different than my usual stuff.  This is one of the reasons I've stopped buying cook books.  If there's only 3 or 4 doable recipes in the whole thing then I'm wasting space and money.  Instead I turn to the library and the ever-expanding internet for inspiration.  Right now my two favorite online sources are All Recipes and Cooking Light, both of which have massive lists of available recipes.  Create an account with All Recipes and there's an online recipe box you can save recipes from the site so you can find them when you need them, and a grocery list maker so you can organize the ingredients you need.

Today I finally got to go grocery shopping, after carefully planning out my menu to still use up some of the ingredients I have at home.  And now I get to cook!  For dinner I made Pepper Jack Chicken from the Slow Cooker recipe book I mentioned in an earlier post.  Cheese, chicken, peppers, rice....all things my family likes, just arranged in a new manner, and made in a slow cooker.  That's only one dish to wash!  Bonus!  I did make a couple of edits, nothing drastic.  I was excited to try this one, and thankful that my first posted recipe wasn't a dud!  I chopped and mixed in about 10 minutes, then it cooked in the slow cooker for 5 hours.  I love not having to fuss with a meal as it cooks; just turn on the slow cooker and walk away.  And tada!!
It looks and sounds much cheesier than it actually was.  This is more like eating a mexican gumbo in that the sauce is really more of a broth.  However, it was very easy, and very tasty.  My husband salted his, but I didn't think it was necessary.  Try it out for yourself!







Pepper Jack Chicken

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Dry Bums

When I was pregnant with my son I mentioned cloth diapers only in passing and was shot down immediately.  My mother told me how horrible cloth diapers were.  They were inconvenient, they were messy, they were impossible to clean......30 years ago when she used them on my sister!!!  In the last 30 years there have been massive strides in the diapering community.  Gone are the days of giant diaper pins stabbing perilously close to your poor baby's squishy bits!  We now have elastic and Velcro and snaps and all manner of things to make life easier.  Furthermore we have fantastic waterproof materials so no more rubber pants!  Unless you want those things, because they are still available should you choose to rough it.

There are tons of different types of cloth diapers, everything from flat folding diapers similar to those of yore to diapers with removable, snap in liners and layers of absorbers.  There are some that even adjust with your baby as she grows.  I've listed a few sites at the bottom of this post if you're interested in checking some out.  Now, the real question....Why?

There are thousands of websites that quote figures of how much waste one baby creates with their own little landfill's worth of disposable diapers before they become potty trained. This does not concern me.  Again, this is not about the environment, this is about my bank account!  I want to know how much all those diapers cost.  The Walmart website has cases of diapers listed with their respective per case prices and the total of diapers in the case.  Do a little math and the Pampers diapers at Walmart at the time of this writing are between 20 and 25 cents each.  That's not too bad except that you will go through 10 a day (if you're lucky) for at least the first few weeks before things start to settle down.  So that 124 pack won't make it 2 weeks. Cloth diapers are much more expensive....to start.  Cloth diapers can range from $1 to more than $30 a piece!  Ouch!  But, once you've bought them you're done.  No more rushing to the store at midnight because you're out.  If you have 6 or 8 of the size your baby is in then you can get through a whole day.  Well, I guess that depends on how you do laundry in your household.  The more often you wash, the less individual diapers you need. 

I, for one, want a cloth diaper that is as much like a disposable diaper as it can be.  I want to remove the whole thing (no messing with liners for me) and place a new one on; the only difference of course is that I will be tossing it into the washing machine instead of the diaper bin.  And because I am the Homemade Mommy, I consider myself a rather crafty person, and if I can I'd rather make it and save as much as possible.

After playing with several cloth diaper tutorials online I discovered a couple that fit some of my needs.  I then combined them and edited them into this!


(The diaper, silly.  Not the cute monkey model.)

This cloth diaper has an elastic waistband, Velcro fasteners and an internal soaker pad that you don't remove before washing, and a waterproof lining between the soaker and the cute outer fabric to keep the yuck from seeping through.

Other sites on cloth diapering:
www.gdiapers.com
www.cottonbabies.com
www.econobum.com
www.bumkins.com

Monday, July 18, 2011

Now what?

So we've decided to try for another baby!  How exciting!!  Now what?
First off we took a long hard look at our bank account.  We don't operate on a standard budget per se, but it is not difficult to see where we can cut back.  In our family it's food.  We buy junky groceries and then end up eating fast food all week.  Oh look, double spending.

So step one is to cook more, eat out less. That should be easy enough, right?  I like to cook, I just don't like to clean up afterwards. Ok, step 1A is get better about doing the dishes more.  (Ugh!) Then I looked in our pantry.  (Double ugh!)  Remember all those stupid grocery purchases?  Well, they're still here.  Payday is coming up on Friday, so no real grocery shopping until then.  That means step 1B is to use up all these weird mismatched pantry and frozen foods.  So for lunch it was off-brand Hamburger Helper and last night we fired up the grill.  Three tiny chicken breasts, some hotdogs (without buns), hush puppies, and a handful of steak fries.  Ok, not a terrible start.   If we had headed to our favorite fast food place to blow food money, we'd have spent around $18.00 on dinner for the 3 of us.  Our grill fest, while not very healthful, was closer to $8.00 for the 3 of us.  Look!  We already saved 10 bucks!

Lucky for us, I am an avid researcher.  Once I get onto an idea I slurp up as much info as I can.  That means step 1C now includes internet searches and library books for easy, relatively inexpensive recipes with as little clean up as possible.  :D  I found a recipe book called Slow Cooker by Taste of Home at our local library; the slow cooker, or crock pot as my mom would call it, is only one dish to wash so I foresee lots of slow cooker action in our future.  Furthermore, I really like chicken so there will be a lot of that.  Pork seems to be rather inexpensive also so I intend to try some pork recipes even though I'm not really a fan of that other white meat.

So far I have found several recipes that look promising:
From the Slow Cooker book:
-Pepper Jack Chicken
-Asian Chicken
-Sweet Pepper Chicken
-Italian Pork Chops
-Slow-cooked Southwest Chicken

From Allrecipes.com
-Slow cooker Adobo Chicken
-Chicken Parmesan Bundles

Any recipes you want to share?  I'll let you know how these turn out!

How We Got Here.....

When my husband and I married six years ago, at  21 and 23, we wanted to have two children together.  Our son came within a year and a half and though completely overjoyed we were incredibly naive about the expenses we would soon encounter.  We knew babies were expensive but we seriously underestimated the figures.  Family and friends offered gifts and hand-me-downs and we accepted all of them in an attempt to offset some of the "start up" expenses.   We were given a car seat, crib, changing table....all those pricey must-haves along with some that we thought we were supposed to have. We both worked at pizza delivery places for close to minimum wage and had terrible medical insurance.  The delivery expenses were compounded by my son sitting breach and requiring a c-section; our pitiful insurance policy covered very little of it.   Then after our son was born came the real, everyday expenses of feeding and diapering a newborn.  This we had not calculated at all.

Enter postpartum depression, changing jobs a million times, struggling, injuries, more medical bills, a house in disrepair, more injuries, even more medical bills, money arguments, working weird shifts, missing important milestones as our son grew, missing each other.  You name it we were there.  In our six years of marriage (and 3 years of dating prior) we have been sufficiently tried and tested.  Though there were times we thought our little family would collapse we have stuck together.  Call it true love or tenacity or downright stubbornness, we just aren't willing to give up.

Now our son is about to turn 5 and there is a new found urgency to have a second baby before the difference in their ages widens any further.  We are now trying to conceive but it is not without all the worries that accompany a baby and several new worries attributed to our experiences with our last trip through this process. When thinking about a second baby, it is hard not to remember how hard it all was, but it is also not difficult to see where we went wrong.  I am determined to not make the same mistakes twice and do whatever it takes to have a second baby.  For me that means making and cooking as many things at home as I can instead of buying more stuff and spending more money.  As a stay-at-home mom I have much more time this go 'round and plan to spend every moment, even these pre-pregnancy ones, working on these homemade meals and projects.  Keep in mind that what was wrong for us may not be wrong for you and your family.  And for the record, use all the disposable and store-bought products you like; this is not an environmental awareness page.  I am strictly looking for ways to save my family money on our journey to a second baby.