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.