What's For Dinner: This Week's Menu

So, you can either consider this really late or really early.  Depends if you are the "glass if half full or half empty" type of person I suppose *laugh*.

I didn't get to working on the menu plan last week due to just being busy and stressed out of my mind, so I just kind of punted on the whole "feeding those pesky family members" thing.  No one starved, so I suppose I succeeded ;).

The highlight of the week when it came to trying new recipes was trying the 18th Century Fried Chicken (I linked to their "Savoring the Past" blog post on it so you can check out the recipe without going directly to YouTube).  The final results are seen up top.  I even managed to get enough parsley from the Aerogarden to give the fried parsley a try and I do have to say that the fried parsley does add something to the recipe.  I used malt vinegar instead of the white vinegar to give it a more authentic flavor.  Overall I was impressed with the flavor.  You couldn't taste the wine in the batter, but it did lend a bit of tang to the crust and the marinade lent a subtle, but deep flavor to the chicken and the crust came out nice and crisp.  I bookmarked the recipe and will definitely make it again sometime.  I made potato salad to go along with it and I have to say it went as well with the 18th Century recipe as it would have with a modern recipe. 

In other news the son and I are now sick with dad's cold (wonderbar) and the daughter is home today with her stomach cycling.  Last night I could tell I was starting to get sick, so I grabbed all the odds and ends from the garden, the "bits and pieces" freezer bag of beef pieces I had from past trimming of beef roasts, a freezer bag of au jus I had saved from when I roasted beef roasts, threw it all together with some water and I made a HUGE pot of beef stew for dinner.  This way I'll have lunch all week without worrying about what to make, or how I'm going to have the energy to make it, and I will also have enough to morph the stew into pot pie here within the next couple of days as well.  It turned out really good and I served it with cornbread, so it filled everyone up really well.

Since this menu is kind of in a weird locale due to the way last week went I'm going to just do a week and a half of menus to get everything back on track.  My plans for grocery shopping are absolutely minimal this week to hopefully help recoup some of the masses of money we've had to spend the last bit, so I'm not going to worry about waiting for the Carrs ad to come out to do the menu for next week.

So, here we go!  The menu for the remainder of this week and the coming week as well!

Monday:  Spaghetti with sausage in the sauce (husband knocked a small packet of Italian sausages out of the freezer and broke the seal on them, so I'm considering it a sign), garlic toast, salad

Tuesday:  Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, green beans

Wednesday:  Crock pot chicken, leftover mashed potatoes, corn, salad

Thursday:  Beef pot pie (use leftover stew for base)

Friday:  Crock pot pork roast, green beans, rice

Saturday:  Leftovers

Sunday:  Salmon pudding sandwiches (this is a rationing recipe from WWII Britain, which calls for canned salmon, mashed potatoes and white sauce to be steamed in a pudding type of format and then you eat it in whole grained sandwiches.  I got some home canned salmon from my sister-in-law in with the food she gifted me, so I thought it would be an interesting recipe to try :).

Monday:  Chicken Alfredo, peas, salad

Tuesday:  Waffles (or pancakes, depending how I'm feeling), sausages, fruit cocktail

Desserts:  Home made ice cream, Popsicles, Blueberry Clafoutis (use blueberries in freezer)

Snacks:  Apples, grapes, strawberries, granola and yogurt (note:  make yogurt), cheese and crackers

And there you are folks.  Our menu for the next little bit.  How about you?  Making anything good this week?

Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap and Garden Update

Man, blogging is so late this week.  It's just been one looooonnnnggg week this week and I think blogging kind of illustrated that.

I nearly posted this as "Frugal Friday Fails:  Money Spending Weekly Recap" but it seemed kind of dark and self defeating sounding so I decided against it.  If you can't look at the bright side of things, life gets a lot more depressing.

But, I do have to go through the week, because trust me, this week was an interesting one.

So, let us first start out with *does the dramatic sounding "Dum, dum, duummmmm" sound of doom* The Saga of the Phone!

So, the cell phone I ordered from Amazon that I mentioned last time came in, me spending 18.00 to expedite ship it and the new phone case for it.  And it did come within 48 hours, so kudos to Amazon for that.

So, I went online to Tracfone and went to change over my old number and my existing minutes onto the new cell phone.  Now in the past (mind you my old phone is like four years old now) I would just have to walk through a process where you put in codes on one phone and on the other and looked a few things up via the directions online and voila!  The phone number and minutes would be switched over in like less than a half an hour.  This time you were supposed to put in your number you wanted to transfer, so I did, and got an error message telling me to call Tracfone.   Not knowing what was going on, I call Tracfone.  TWO HOURS LATER after numerous times being put on hold as the guy with the heavy Indian accent who mumbled really bad kept telling me he was "finding a solution to the problem", I find out that the bloody Tracfone doesn't work in Alaska!  Now mind you this phone is available in brick and mortar stores up here, including Target and Wal-Mart.  Turns out the new spiffy smartphone cells from Tracfone run off of Verizon and Verizon is up here but doesn't run THAT system up here.  Tracfone did 100% nothing for me as I angrily asked how in the heck I was supposed to get my money back for a phone that was a glorified brick because they had the GALL to ship this phone to states that didn't support them. 

I then called Amazon, who, once I explained the situation were kind enough to at least refund me my money on the phone once I ship it back to them (which means I had to go and pick up packaging tape to tape up the box and then I have to somehow find time this weekend to print off a bunch of labels in color to adhere to said box and THEN find a UPS Store on Monday and ship the phone back).  The gal from Amazon apologized for them selling a phone that didn't work in my state and that they had shipped it to Alaska...she was actually baffled, but I then explained it was 100% Tracfone's fault as Amazon wouldn't KNOW the phone didn't work up her, meanwhile Tracfone bloody well did.  Oh and I couldn't return the case on Amazon's dime because the case wasn't defective.  The gal tried, but the computer kept telling her no.

So, let's keep score shall we?  So far trying to get a new cell that would actually, you know, work, I was already in the red 25.00.

I then ran to Target the same day, because I NEED a phone that would work, and the guy at Target was, in all honesty, wonderful and awesome to deal with.  He walked me through all the pay as you go phones and tried to convince me to switch from Tracfone.  And I would have in a heartbeat I was so ticked of, except all of the other plans were a set monthly amount you'd get charged for a phone.  Now mind you they weren't bad and I actually found a good plan that would allow my husband and I to both get phones and share minutes, text minutes and data and only pay 50.00 a month for both of the phones for a decent plan (once we actually get ahead, I'm hoping to go and do that).  The only reason Tracfone got my business this time around was because I could still do the non-monthly pay as you go thing.  I even bought a smart phone minute card just in case with everything else that had gone wrong with Tracfone thus far.  And he also pointed out all of the Tracfones that wouldn't work in Alaska and said that they kept asking that they not be sent those phones, but they kept getting sent them anyway.  Figures.

I get home and walk through the online process and it states that my number should transfer to my new phone from anywhere from a few hours to a few days, but they stated it should only be a few days if you have something like a land line you want transferred to a cell phone.  Considering I was going from a Tracfone to a Tracfone, I figured a few hours tops.  I get a text on my old phone, which is BARELY working at this point, that the phone was going to be shut off at midnight and my new phone would be working at that point.  So, I go to bed with both phones plugged in and figure all will be well in the morning.

No such luck.

I wake up in the morning and my old phone is sure enough now shut off.  I find this out before the screen freezes up and it turns into a real life brick.  And my new phone still doesn't work!!!  Furious doesn't even begin to express the levels of anger I was feeling at that moment.  Thank goodness I couldn't set a corporation on fire with my mind.

I called Tracfone, went off on a rant and told them that if they didn't get the new phone turned on NOW that I was going to shove it back into it's package, return it to Target for whatever I could get and get a new phone through ANY other company.  And all I get after going on that rant is a gal with a heavy Indian accent saying, "I'm sorry you are disappointed with your new phone, allow me to connect you to the right person."  Get the guy in technical support, go on the same rant, and get another canned response from him.

Another hour on the phone with tech support and the minutes and texting were finally working.  The data took another three hours before it would work.  I even got a phone call to confirm the phone was working from Tracfone and the phone dropped the call.  Twice.  I found that ironic as Heck. 

But, yeah, I am NEVER buying a Tracfone again after this.  I'm done.  Totally done.  This was one of the most ridiculous experience I've ever run into in my life.

But yeah, after nearly a week of heartburn I finally have a phone that works. 

Then there was the husband.  He just wasn't getting any better and after missing three days of work this last week and him complaining about Urgent Care charging him and not giving him antibiotics, I took him back to the doctors yesterday.  He's now on antibiotics, nice strong cough medicine and nasal spray.  I pulled out the health insurance binder and found that our deductible was 250.00 per person and 500.00 for the family, so since the Urgent Care visit had been so much our deductible was met, so I went in with that knowledge and told them we only owed 20% of the doctor's visit.  Turns out that doctor's visits at mine and my husband's doctors office are up to nearly 400.00 per office visit (I couldn't BELIEVE it would be cheaper to go to Urgent Care than the actual doctor) and the 20% of the visit, after a credit we had on our account from overpaying, was still 72.00.  MAN!!!  So, yeah, there went another 100.00 (which at least my husband is STARTING to slowly feel better, poor guy!).   The only thing that was kind of scary about the visit was that his blood pressure was really high.  I kept telling the doctor that my husband had been taking WAY too much albueterol to try and breathe this week and I figured that was part of it, but the doctor was convinced it was probably due to the Sudafed that my husband insists on taking when sick.  So, we've got to go and get his blood pressure checked somewhere on Monday and see how it's doing (I'm going to try and convince him to stop by a pharmacy and have someone check it for him) and if it's not down he's got to go to a doctor and figure out what in the Heck is going on.  I just hope he's okay :(.

But, yeah, between all that, the kids starting school this week and the school district's "new and shiny, state-of-the-art online everything system" screwing up EVERYTHING, it's been a full week.  They had to retrieve my daughter from the bus one day and we had to get the kids pick up and drop off options straight (even though I fill in that on the registration forms EVERY year).  Then the medicine consent forms got way more complex so we had to fax things to doctors and get all kinds of stuff straightened out.  Top it off with my daughter getting the same teacher team she had in second grade which made the second grade year miserable (two hours of homework per night in second grade at least...I WAS burned out about 3/4 of the way through the year with that and them holding my daughter in from recess to finish work that they thought she should have had done, which led to a meeting, etc...it was not a fun year), so I'm nervous to how things are going to go this year.  So far she's assured the kids that they will only have  homework if they don't finish things in class, so we'll see how it shapes up in the next couple of weeks.  I'm praying it's not as bad as second grade anyway as with everything else I'm juggling anymore if there's like four hours of homework every night...to Heck with it she'll be homeschooled by the end of the school year.

The son had an appointment with his psychologist this week.  We talked about options for his OCD type of behaviors (he's been turning the inside of his bottom lip into hamburger for a long time now...the Stritera helped with that, but just didn't agree with him so we're looking at a different option), so we started him on a low dose of essentially Prozac.  Bright side is that she's had really good luck with the med helping with those things, but the downside is that we're looking at  six weeks about until the meds build up into his system and we start seeing results.  So, I'm praying we're on the right track and everything works and we're not wasting six weeks of our time.  Fingers and toes crossed.

To top everything off this week the local news station that did the work up on the drug treatment center going in next door called and asked me for a follow up interview.  I told them no.  I explained that there was no point in doing a follow up interview.  My concerns were definitely still there (actually by the way my concerns on their Facebook page were completely blown off, I'm even more concerned than I was), but at this point the community council thought it was a good idea for it to go in, the borough thought it was a good idea for it to go in and we'd exhausted all avenues we knew of to relocate the thing, so there was no point in doing an interview as it would just give the ruddy thing free publicity and I didn't want to do that.  So, yeah, they interviewed me anyway it turns out.  They did a big story on the treatment center that night and they just used the whole of the original interview I did months ago.  So, the next day I ended up getting some dirty looks from a few people as I was out and about and a lot of people coming up to me and saying, "I saw you on the news!" and a LOT of them were furious that the treatment center was going in where it was and that the local news stations didn't do a big story on it ages ago so they could protest the center going in equal distance (and easy distance at that) from three schools.  So, yeah, I wasn't pleased that the news gave the center yet more coverage at this point and used me to help, but not a lot I can do about it at this point since they reused old footage.

So, anyway, in the middle of the stress and panic of the week, I did manage to actually get some things accomplished. 

1.  A pregnant lady who was a friend of a friend of mine asked for help harvesting potatoes as she is nine months pregnant and on pretty strict rest due to a kind of hard pregnancy.  My friend called me and asked if I could help her dig the potatoes as she had twisted her ankle the night before and she could use the help.  Since I had an hour window in between other things I was doing, I gladly gave her an hour.  The ground was so wet I was worried it would be hard to dig the potatoes (not ideal and both my friend and her friend both knew it, but the potato plants were getting blight so she wanted to dig the potatoes before they were affected), but it actually went rather well.  The gal we dug the potatoes for cured them in her garage for a few days under a fan (or something...my friend wowed me with the details, but for the life of me I was so worried about getting Armina off the bus I didn't hear half of what she was telling me) and my friend handed me a bag of potatoes as the gal had given her a big bunch of potatoes as a thank you for doing the work and she wanted to make sure I got some.  I was happy to accept them as I was going to need potatoes here soon, so that worked out (the potatoes are seem up top there).

2.  My mother-in-law called me and said that some freeze dried snack packs I'd asked her to add onto her next order had come in in the hopes the kids would eat things like freeze dried yogurt and things for a snack (still trying to get them to try them, but we're getting there).  I managed to stop by to pick them up and she told me to not worry about paying her back for them (thanks, Stacey) and I got to sit and visit with her for quite a while, which was a fun time.  She even let me pick over her raspberry bushes again.  Between what I got from her bushes and mine I'm up to two freezer bags full of raspberries now (woohoo!!!).

3.  The son grew again suddenly in the torso and his fall jacket was riding a bit high.  I looked over the jacket and figured out I could let out the bottom seam and add onto the jacket by a few inches while I looked for a new jacket for him, so I picked out the seam and did a quick extend on the jacket with some blue nylon that I had (that actually was so close in color you could only tell it was there if you really looked at it).

I found a replacement jacket on Land's End in their clearance and found a code for 30% off your order while I was on their site, so I used the code on the jacket, which actually paid for the shipping plus a dollar or so.  All totaled I spent 27.00 on a new jacket for him and it should be in the mail in the next couple of days.

4.  With my husband's new job he's shaving every day and had finally blown through all of the razors I had accumulated in my couponing hay day.  I went and explored all the options and finally signed him up for the Dollar Shave Club.  He, so far, likes the razor and every month he'll get four refill blades shipped to him, so that should take care of his razor needs.  And it's a LOT cheaper than going through the stores for razor refills, for sure!

5.  I made a recipe that called for green onions.  I subbed out chives as my chive plant has definitely recovered from when I harvested on it earlier in the year.  It worked great and I was out no money for doing it :).

6.  Grocery shopping went well this week, especially since we were waiting on three of my son's meds to get delivered so I was at the pharmacy at LOT this week between my husband and my son's meds, so I could have gone over shopping pretty easy if I'd slacked off thinking about it.  I managed to get a good deal on beef roasts as Carrs has them on sale this week for 2.99 lb, so I got three.  The more broke we've gotten the more I've gotten to liking beef roasts vs. steaks as the beef roasts go so much further and can be turned into a lot more dishes.

7.  I used some clear nail polish to fix a small tear in my daughter's umbrella caused by an overly enthusiastic cat who thought it would be fun to crawl into it until it started opening and panicked.  It actually worked rather well.  I was nervous about it as I was worried the chemicals in the nail polish might melt the material in the umbrella (because who KNOWS what's in nail polish really).  So far it's holding up well and it cost me nothing to do the repair.

8.  I took some bolted lettuce one day for lunch that was really bitter tasting and instead of eating it cold, I actually took it and prepared it like you would a really bitter dark green (boiled it briefly in some chicken broth and then sauteed it in some garlic and olive oil).  It actually worked and I ate the "lettuce saute" for lunch one day :).

So, yeah, I'm sure there is more there, but I'm really shot energy-wise right now and I'm praying I'm not fighting off my husband's cold, so let's get to the garden update!

I went out today when we had a bit of sunlight to do the part of gardening I hate the most.  Basically I'm not an expert so I end up having to pull up a few veggies with the root vegetables to see where they are growth-wise, so I get a better idea of when I'll need to harvest them.  I always hold my breath and pray before I pull them out, hoping that everything is going okay below ground where I can't see.

The turnip I pulled was depressing.  There's definitely bug damage on the root where things have munched on the turnip while it was growing and for the size of the greens the root was still awfully small...I'm hoping that now that the weather has gotten cooler maybe I'll see better progress on root growth.  But, yeah, I'm not sure how well the turnips are actually doing overall.  At least I know if they don't do well I can go to the you pick farm and pick some, but I'm really hoping to avoid that expense. 

The carrots though I went to just thin some out and figured if I had some baby carrots I could throw them into stew and they'd be yummy.  I was REALLY surprised at the size of the carrots that were coming off of even the little greens I was pulling!  So, I'm hopeful that the carrots are jetting right along, anyway :).  I did pull the volunteer carrots from the beets and the corn patch as the carrot in the beet row was right up against a beet and I had so few beets actually germinate that I want to give the beets every opportunity to grow and the one in the corn patch was getting run over by the cat as he was going to eat grass every day so I just wanted to pull it up and give the poor thing a break *laugh*.

I also harvested a few green beans and a few peas from the garden this week as well.  And I harvested the few remaining chard plants as they were going to bolt...and they were tiny...disappointing!  All of them went into a bag in the fridge and my plan for them is to go into a beef pie next week.

So, there you are folks.  My week in a nutshell.  How did you do?

Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap and Garden Update (the REALLY Late Edition)

MAN what a weekend!  I'm counting Monday as part of the weekend.  Trust me I'll get to that.

This was just a week where I felt like "frugal fail" was a vast understatement.  Thank goodness we have money in the bank to cover everything, but I've felt under siege here.

Let's start off with Friday night.  The husband started feeling like he was coming down with a cold.  By Sunday you'd swear he was dying.  He decided he needed to go to the doctors and they told him what I suspected, although I was kind of hoping they'd say "sinus infection" just to get him some antibiotics and let him feel better quicker.  Nope.  He found out that he had a cold.  Which since he went to Urgent Care to find this out, they asked if we had met our deductible for the year, he said no (which is obviously the truth) they just charged him full price for the visit.  So, there went 300.00 out the door.  We'll see how it goes after everything goes through insurance as I'm kind of hoping that we get a refund check, but I even warned my husband that it being Urgent Care that it might just go toward the deductible first no matter what and we'd probably get stuck paying for the full amount.  And so off to the pharmacy to get him some prescription cough medicine and other cold medicines like NyQuil to take at night since we were out of all of that stuff (at least with the insurance the cough medicine cost me a whopping .98 as the rest of the bill HURT).

Then there was Alvah.  We have been waiting over a week for his new "lesser dose" med to come from out of state and get delivered to the pharmacy, but nothing so far.  So, he's been cranky on and off, although getting the okay to do away with the Stritera sure seemed to help him out with mood regulation, go figure, although we still have some issues at least they were less than they were before.  One of the side effects of the meds not being as high as they need to be, though, is that the sound of the microwave?  Drives the son NUTS right now and I mean bad, but only when he's in an "over sensory" mood.  It's to a point where I can't defrost meat unless it's on the sly and after he popped open the microwave about 18 times when I was trying to heat up some water for a cup of coffee, I had enough and tried to heat it on the stove top.  Unfortunately my son also loves steam and he saw the powerful jet of steam coming out of the kettle and kept reaching out to play with it, which made it a non-stop fun fest trying to stop him from burning himself and then when the kettle whistle blew he freaked out, so that didn't work.  So, another expense this week was ordering an electric kettle (since I've been unable to find one worth buying at the used stores).  This way I can heat up water without whistles or microwaves humming, I can put it up out of his reach so he can't play with the steam and I can get boiling water when I need it.  But there went 20.00 I wasn't planning on spending.

Then there was my cell phone. I HAD gone on Amazon and thought of ordering myself a new cell phone since Amazon had some Tracfones that were decent prices (the one I was looking at was 50.00 about) and came prepackaged with a bunch of minutes and stuff on them which made them essentially free after the minutes and stuff were taken into account.  I'd actually placed the order and then thought better of it and cancelled it when the nearly 300.00 bill for the doctor came out of the bank.  I've been having problems with my phone.  It's on the old 3G network and would lose service in pretty much any building anymore and text messages would come in an hour late sometimes, but I just figured I'd make it work for a while until we recovered financially a bit.

And THEN yesterday hit.  I got up with my phone working fine and then suddenly I hear beeping when I'm picking the kids up from school.  My battery was dead.  "Oh well," I figured, "it's not a big deal.  I must have charged it a bit earlier than I remembered charging it."  So, I went home and plugged it in.  Went back and unplugged it later to find it wouldn't hold a charge.  AT ALL.  Worse, the darn phone constantly shuts down and restarts, so not only does it not hold a charge it doesn't even work for any practical purpose.  I pulled the battery and everything and nothing works to fix it.  People don't get that when I say, "I NEED my cell phone" they think I'm addicted to an I-Phone or something.  Not even close.  Heck my phone doesn't even do the internet with any degree of success (and I wouldn't waste my minutes doing that anyway).  The watch band to my watch died about two years ago and I haven't really had the time or the money to find a new watch band for it, so my cell phone is first my watch.  Next it's my alarm clock.  I have about five alarms programmed into my phone to remind me of certain events during the day (like it goes off in the afternoon to make sure to remind me that picking up the kids in imminent, I have an alarm set to remind me of speech therapy days, I have another alarm to remind me to make sure the kids are up by this certain time in the morning, etc) and so I use it for that.  Now this is on top of me using my cell phone for people like the school to be able to get in contact with me at a moment's notice with the kids and things.  And then, finally, my phone is my calendar and my personal planner.  You would not believe the amount of appointment reminders and important memos (even things I have to pick up at the store the next day) I'll program to go off on my phone.  So, the last few days I have LITERALLY felt like I'm missing a limb here.  I ended up ordering the phone I'd been contemplating from Amazon, express shipped it (which luckily it had reduced 15.00 in price when I ordered it which paid for the express shipping in the equation) and it SHOULD be here tomorrow (I pray). 

But, yeah, between all of that and the husband calling in two days sick to work (which luckily he does have some leave saved up which I'm praying they take the time he took out of that?), it's been a weekend.  I'm exhausted from too little sleep (sick husband more than the kids this time...totally not his fault, but still, the results are the same), too much stuff to do and just too much everything going on.

Right, anyway, bright points!

1.  My mother-in-law texted me and told me she did, in fact, have some raspberries this year and that I was welcome to come and pick them but first come first served (with having six kids living within driving distance with their spouses and kids...that seems like a wise way to do things to me *laugh*).  I ran over in between doing tons of errands yesterday and picked over the bushes she had pretty hard.  Between that and what I've gotten slowly but surely from the wild bushes in my yard I have managed to get a full freezer bag full of raspberries (the bag seen above was before I went over to my mother-in-laws and is just what I've harvested from my wild raspberry bushes in my yard so far this year).  Yayyyyyy!!!  I'm still getting small harvests every day from my bushes and hopefully my mother-in-law will be willing to let me come over and grab some more raspberries from her bushes later as they ripen.  I'm hoping to get enough to make some jelly, some jam and maybe have some left for the freezer for cakes and muffins this winter.  That would be totally awesome!

2.  I knew I needed pectin to make jelly as my home made pectin was gone from the peach jelly I made earlier this year and I don't have any powdered pectin.  I went on Amazon and had added about four different things of bulk pectin to my cart so I could monitor the price on it (I have like 500 things in my cart saved for later and watch prices constantly on things...I'm weird like that) and one type of pectin went down to a little over 10.00 for two pounds of pectin one day this last week.  I immediately ordered it as that will be more than enough pectin to last me for a while (which is a relief to have this material in the house, honestly) and it cost me the same as two little jars of the Ball flexible batch pectin. 

3.  I was getting low on coffee, but my sister-in-law when I got the food when they were moving there was a bunch of coffee in with the food, so I ground up the whole bean coffees, mixed them in with the bit of ground coffee she gave me and threw it into my coffee container.  This will last me for coffee for a bit and it tastes pretty good (I know I just made coffee aficionados give me the look of death through the screen, but I'm okay with that).

4.  I made home made noodles to go in chicken noodle soup this week.  Not only does the family love them, but they are pretty frugal to make and are decently filling.  It helped to make my husband feel a little bit better anyway (the finished soup in the form of leftovers that I ate for lunch today way up top there).  Now a lot of people think that you need a pasta maker to make noodles.  Not true.  I just roll mine out thin on my counter top and use a pizza cutter to cut them into thin strips and pieces (seen above there in the once I started adding them to the soup).  So give it a try sometime.  You might really like it :).

5.  I have been having a blast watching the 18th Century Cooking series on YouTube and actually bookmarked a few recipes that I want to try.   I even tried one tonight, but I'll wait until the menu plan for the week to talk about that one.

6.  I mended a shirt and darned two socks this week (not my best work, but it worked in a pinch.  I definitely got to go back and darn the socks better).

7.  I took a nap today.  It was definitely needed and definitely free.  Although all of the things that I needed to get done were constantly running through my head so I'm not sure how much good sleep I actually got.

8.   I realized my dishwasher could use a good cleaning.  Normally I put it through the sanitizing cycle empty to do this, but instead I loaded up every glass item that I had that I knew would take high temperatures okay and just ran the dishwasher through the high temp cycle instead (I normally do a normal wash with drip dry function activated to save energy and not worry about melting anything plastic in the dishwasher).  It worked fabulously and I got a load of dishes cleaned at the same time.  Win-win!

I'm sure there were other things I did this week to save money, but I'll work on writing them down and save them for this Friday since this is so late anyway.

Onto a garden update!

Well, I have to save out of everything that I have grown in the garden this year the only thing that has been a true failure so far has been the chard.  That never grew BEYOND baby spinach size even though the packet says that it'll grow to full sized.  We've eaten the chard in salads and it doesn't even really have a "chard" type of taste to it.  Disappointing.

The corn is actually growing pretty well now, although I'm pretty sure it's not going to make it to corn stage before winter hits.  I'm planning on covering the garden as the freezes come and try to keep everything alive as long as possible before snow falls just to see if I can get the corn to actually make...you know...corn before it dies.  Here's hoping :).

The lettuce seeds that I planted are growing, although the poor stuff looks ill from all of the rain we've been hammered with this year (those little yellow plants at the bottom of the corn).  The spinach that I planted is actually holding in there a lot better than the lettuce and is growing right along.  I think I might actually get a second crop of spinach before we get a full freeze.  I'd be happy with that the way this summer has gone.

The peas I've been disappointed in.  The plants are growing great, but the amount of peas I've gotten out of the plants has been sub-par at best.  So far I've gotten enough to have in a few dishes and I have one sandwich bag that's about 3/4 of the way full in the freezer.  That's it.   I didn't notice these suckers growing any quicker in my climate (they are supposed to be ready to harvest in 30 days) and next year I'm definitely going back to my cold and heat hardy varieties of peas I planted last year.  The rat tailed radishes didn't go gang busters this year, but nor were they in the full sun location (where the cabbages and beans are now) and I think that might have made a big difference in their performance.  I'm definitely making a note of that for future reference.

I have BEANS!!!  I am so thrilled with this as I've never grown beans before :).  So far the few green beans that were of a good size on the bush beans I just ended up eating for a snack (they were SO good!), but there are more and more popping up on the little plants every day!  I'm hoping to grow some of them out to full sized as they are supposed to change color and actually make beans that you can dry and eat as actual beans during the winter.  I'd like to freeze some fresh, but I'm not sure if you can do that with bigger beans.  Anyone got an answer to that question out there?

The pole beans were supposed to grow up the corn, but laughed at that idea since they are now as tall or taller than the corn.  Instead they felt around and started growing up the peas that are already in the ground and growing up the trellis, so they found the trellis and are happily growing intertwined with the peas.  It works.  I'm just hoping that I'll be able to spot the beans as they grow out in with all of the pea plants *laugh*.

I went through and thinned a few of the carrots this week and happily got to chow down on some teeny tiny little baby carrots.  I'm hoping this means that the bigger carrot greens have bigger carrots on the end of them.  They are still pretty thin as feeling around the base of the carrots has yet to yield any carrots with a decent collar on them, but I have faith that they're growing and making some nice sweet carrots (least if the baby carrots were any indication).

The beats are finally starting to grow once the lettuce was out of the bed (to the left of the carrots there) and I see little beets developing on the ends of the greens.  I hope that they get to a decent size anyway before the freezes hit.  Fingers crossed.

The turnips are doing really well despite the slug onslaught.  I even have a few that are developing decent sized turnips and are coming out of the soil.  I need to check my seed packet and figure out at what size to pull them as I don't want them to overgrow and become woody.  I'm really looking forward to having my own turnips this year :).

I was sent some all natural slug repellent from a friend to try out (thank you, Ellen!) and that came in the mail today, so I sprinkled that around the garden in the hopes it would help to rid me of those troublesome pests!  I also got sneaky (Jeannie's comment on last Friday's post about duck tape and salt sparked an idea) and went and overturned anything that slugs could be hiding under in the general vicinity including the cinder blocks over by the cabbages and found a slugtopia under there.  I squished the slugs that were hiding there and then sprinkled a liberal amount of salt under the cinder blocks and then replaced them nice and close to the garden.  This will help to protect the salt from rain, keeps it out of the garden (they are on pavement and are downhill a bit so the water won't run in that direction) AND will hopefully pick off any slugs that hide there that the slug repellent doesn't get.  I am certainly hoping this helps to kill the little buggers and save my plants.  The cabbages are definitely starting to show some damage (luckily they are hearty suckers) and the turnips I've had a constant fight keeping the slugs picked off and squished underfoot this year to let the turnips keep enough of their greens to remain healthy.

So, yeah, there's my, very late, weekly update.  Hopefully my husband makes it through work okay tonight *fingers crossed* as he's still really tired.  Here's hoping for a good week and that my new cell phone comes in tomorrow!  How about you?  How was your week?

What's for Dinner: This Week's Menu

Right, so last week's menu plan?  Well, I did OKAY I guess, although Saturday is when things started going funky.  My husband was up late helping my brother-in-law getting ready to move out on Sunday, so my daughter and I had waffles and sausage for dinner (from the freezer on both counts) and then Sunday I made the sausage gravy and biscuits for dinner.  I used evaporated milk in the sausage gravy because we were getting low on regular milk and I had the evaporated milk to use up and BOY did that make the meal filling.  Sunday we just had left over steak and my husband had the last baked potato, I had a salad (I didn't feel like potatoes or bread) and my daughter had bread and butter and a small salad with dinner.  It worked okay.  Monday we had BBQ ribs as when I was going down to get the spare ribs out of the freezer a rack of actual ribs landed on my foot and I took that as a sign that the darned things wanted to be cooked when I couldn't get them to fit in the freezer right without falling out (yup, some nights that is how I roll with the "what's for dinner" question).  Tuesday I cooked some chicken in the crock pot in some cream of chicken soup and once it was cooked and the rice cooked in the rice cooker I made cheesy chicken casserole for dinner.  It's one of my husband's favorite comfort type foods and he happily took the casserole to work for lunch for the next few nights (win win as far as I'm concerned :).

Last night we had beef roast in the crock pot with potatoes and carrots and tonight I made corned beef, cabbage and neeps and tatties (turnips and potatoes...it sounds fancier the other way *laugh*).  I was out of carrots, so I just added more potatoes in to pad out the meal.  Funny.  Just a little bit ago I would have balked at the idea of doing something like that.  I would have been like, "No, you need carrots for this meal as that is the way it is done.  Period.  I'm going to go and buy some carrots."  Now I'm like, "Yeah, that'll be fine" and just add what I have on hand *laugh*.

I've been depending on my crock pot more here.  I'm finding with speech therapy and other appointments going on, I quickly run out of time to make dinner in the afternoon as my husband is working a mid-shift type of shift right now (he's learning some programming skills and things and that's the shift where the guys who know that stuff are on) and he has to be out the door by six in the evening, so we're eating dinner around four thirty ideally right now, so he gets some time to get ready to go to work and spend a little bit of time with the kids.  So, I'm either going to have to get good at making dinner ahead of time and reheating it, get good at quick cooking meals OR use the crock pot and things more once the kids start back to school here as that's the only way he's going to get a chance to eat while I'm juggling kids and homework and things.  Fun times!

So, yeah, onto this week's menu (or the rest of it ;).

Wednesday:  Crock pot beef roast with potatoes, carrots (last of garden carrots from the freezer *sniff*), turnips (from freezer) and peas (from freezer)

Thursday:  Corned beef with cabbage, neeps and tatties (turnips and potatoes)

Friday:  Crock pot spare ribs in honey mustard sauce, salad, baked potatoes

Saturday:  Turkey enchiladas (use ground turkey in freezer), Spanish rice, salad

Sunday:  Home made pizza night (last night before school starts) with home made bread sticks (for son).  Make meatloaf for husband to take to work for lunch (too much pizza with his acid reflux is a BAD idea) with mashed potatoes and green beans (make a frozen dinner type of lunch for him).

Monday:  Lamb roast with balsamic reduction, garlic toast, salad.

Tuesday:  Left over meatloaf night.

Desserts:  Vanilla pudding, 2 layer cake with chocolate frosting and strawberries, home made chocolate chip ice cream (I made it using the rest of a chopped up chocolate Easter bunny as the chips in the ice cream), cookies (note:  Make cookies).

Snacks:  Apples, cheese and crackers, animal crackers (we have a HUGE thing of them we were gifted.  Alvah can't have them but the daughter and husband will like them :), home made graham crackers and milk.

And there you are folks.  Our menu plan (even later than I wanted because my computer crashed last night before I could post this) for the week.  How about you?  Eating anything good this week?

And there you are folks.  Our menu plan for this week.  How about you?  Tried anything tasty lately?

Monthly Goals: August 2017

I've had this list compiling for weeks now.  And yet, I never got an opportunity to actually tweak it so it was where I wanted it to be until a couple of days ago.  Man, I'm busy!

It's been kind of hard here the last few days.  Alvah's mood went South starting Monday, where it was just a gradual decline and then yesterday he woke up and was just NOT happy with anything all day long.  I ended up giving him his Risperidone at 5:00 out of desperation to try and help calm him down as the self abuse was back.  He's been on and off today on the fits.  I called the psychologist's office as she was talking about putting him on a morning dose of Risperidone on top of the low dose he's on in the evening and asked for them to okay that addition, so I'm still waiting to hear back from them on that one.  Hopefully we can get everything regulated and working well before school next week.  Fingers crossed here.

The list for this month gets longer and longer the more days pass.  I've got lots of projects to do in the sewing department and unfortunately I don't see some of them happening (like the daughter's undergarments) until school starts next week.  Alvah has just been too much of a handful of late to do anything really labor intensive.

On top of the sewing, at some point we're going to have to process the chickens as cold weather is coming up very soon and that means no more eggs period.  The two non-broody hens are actually laying again despite all of the feathers in the coop, so I'm thinking that the rooster (who is DEFINITELY thin in the feather department right now) is actually the one molting the hardest and the broody hen is, of course, plucking her feathers out, so I'm not sure if she's molting or not yet.  The other two are starting to lose their feathers, I saw today, so I'm not sure how long I'll be getting eggs.  I'm up to four over the last four days, so they still aren't laying dependably yet (considering that they are both three years old, I can't really say it's a surprise).  I'm not sure if the processing is happening this month or next.  I'm leaving that up to my husband as he's the one who is going to be the one doing the work (since one of us has to stay in and watch the son) and has the number of the friend who would have real world experience on processing birds and things and could help us get the job done.  Depending on how things go we might be trying to quickly doing the deed while the kids are at school or getting a babysitter while we take care of it.  We'll see how that goes.  At least there are only four birds to worry about.

Humorous side story on the chickens.  The broody hen has been REALLY determinedly broody this time around, but even after the other two started laying eggs again in their favorite nesting box, the broody hen refused to move from her spot that she was sitting on in the coop.  I couldn't figure it out as even the one time that someone laid an egg near her she let it grow cold and sat in that one spot.  I took her off of her spot one day and shooed her out to go and get food and water down her neck and noticed something under the straw in the nesting boxes, so I moved the straw, expecting to find an egg that had escaped my notice.  Nope.  Determined broody hen is determinedly sitting on a chunk of bread that had been thrown in for a treat at some point.   I was baffled, but amused, I have to admit.

The weather was actually nice and sunny for like three days straight this week, which made the garden VERY happy for those few days, so I might actually see some real production from the garden this month yet!  We'll have to wait and see, but I'm hopeful anyway.

Anyway, let's get to the long and varied list for this month, shall we?

Sewing Goals *probably worked on once school starts*:

• Make sleep pants for the son (turns out one of the side effects of Risperidone, which was seen immediately, was a want to wear clothes ALL the time, so I am in desperate need of pajamas for him as he hasn't wanted to wear pajamas to bed like ever)
• Make night gowns for the daughter (as she will get jealous if the son gets something cool sewed for him).  Make pillow case nightgowns or dresses (depending how they turn out *laugh*).
• Finish up second roll of unpaper towels
• Embroider and sew apron for daughter for Christmas
• Work on embroidery on pillow cases for family back East for Christmas
• Try to finish first tote bag
• Make reusable feminine care pads (this is a project to use up some scraps and things while also ending up with a "just in case" product at the end)
• Work on new comforter/puff quilt for Alvah out of various scraps of cloth 
• Work on flannel blanket for son for Christmas
• Make more handkerchiefs 
• Work on mending

Organizing goals *to be done once school starts*:

• Get den cleaned up (it's a huge disorganized mess right now)
• Work on master bedroom closet
• Gut and reorganize pantry 
• Detail clean car
• Detail clean children's rooms

General goals:

• Make cookies with daughter (this is to be done BEFORE school starts)
• Do final check list of school supplies
• Pull out back packs and start packing them with things like gym shoes so they aren't forgotten later on.
• Get lock installed on new-to-us mini freezer and park it in its new spot.
• Continue to harvest raspberries from bushes in yard and add them to freezer bag in freezer.
• Keep eye out for good sales on apples and other produce and process if it works out.
• Process what few peas there are in fridge, slice cabbage leaves into tiny pieces and make into freezer slaw, harvest and freeze fireweed blossoms, harvest more rose hips.

Garden goals:

• Continue to fertilize the garden at least once a week (weather permitting or not)
• Harvest from the garden often, especially the peas, and watch for mold or blight issues (due to all of the moisture we've gotten this year)

So, there you are folks.  Some of my monthly goals for this month.  Hopefully the list will stop expanding here sometime soon.  How about you?  Up to anything this month?

Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap and Garden Update

Geez it's hot!  It's not bad outside, I think it's like in the mid-seventies, but the way our upstairs bakes in the house due to the exposure to the full sun, the last time I checked it was 80 down in our stairway, which is about five degrees cooler than my upstairs is.  I nearly ate ice cream for dinner.  Bright side, at least the kids rooms with their two fans running each (ceiling fan and window fan) their rooms aren't terrible.  The living room and kitchen, though, is, especially after I did some baking earlier this evening.

Anyway, money saving went so very very well this week.  I'm still overwhelmed by the kindness of others that was bestowed upon my family this week and then other stuff happened too!

1.  First up there was grocery shopping.  I had hoped to get meat this month, but wasn't sure how it was all going to work with the sales and things, but then I saw that Carrs had value packs of chicken on sale for 5.00 each as part of 5.00 Friday this week, so I knew I wanted to stop by yesterday and get chicken.   I finally saw that the Care Credit payments had cleared the bank, so I went online to see how much I was going to have to shell out to pay off the one chunk we had to pay by the 23rd of this month.  When I went online and checked Care Credit had actually applied our regular monthly payment onto that amount FIRST so it was already paid off!!!  I was thrilled as I had 75.00 budgeted out of the insurance check to pay that bill off, so I now had money in our regular budget for meat!

We ended up getting to Carrs kind of late last night due to a full day and I ran in to grab what I thought was just going to be chicken, but I found some great stuff!  For one, I had planned on having to run to Eagle River to get hamburger because it's the cheapest place to buy hamburger around here normally, but as I was perusing the hamburger seeing if there was any marked down packages, I found they had hamburger on markdown for 3.49 lb just on regular sale!  That beat the price I would have paid going to Eagle River, so I grabbed two value packs of hamburger.  Then I stumbled on some mismarked  packages of steaks that had been marked bone-in thin cut pork chops and they were cheap.  I flagged down a meat guy, my conscious nagging me, and showed him the packages, but the guy told me to keep them and said it was their fault for not marking them correctly.  I had grabbed the last three that were there, so I really wondered how many people had taken advantage of the not properly marked packages during the day.   I also got a couple of packages of pork steaks on reduced and even got my daughter Ball Park hot dogs on 50% off (I even had coupons for those!).  Overall, I spent 80.00 on meat and managed to pretty much fill the freezer up again.  It feels GOOD to have meat staring back at me when I open the freezer instead of lots of empty holes :).

I do find it pretty funny that one of the few lamb roasts I have left that I got for like 1.49 stares back at me when I open the door with the original price tag showing *laugh*.

2.  When I was digging in the recesses of the pantry to see what I had and what I needed to use up, I ran across a bunch of evaporated milk that I had.  I had thought I was out a couple of times and would go and buy another flat and yeah...I wasn't out.  So, I moved one flat upstairs onto the counter to remind myself to use it (since it has a use by date for this year and I like to keep close to those when I can).  I had some baking and things to do today so I made up some dehydrated milk and then added evaporated milk to the jar as well so help the taste of the dehydrated milk along (in the jar up above there).  It worked out really well and I honestly think it made everything just taste a little bit richer.  Neat trick!

3.  My husband went over to help my brother-in-law get the last of his stuff together to move tomorrow.  He came away with a bunch of different items, including more canned food stuffs and (honestly I'm kind of excited about this one) a small freezer!  I'm so looking forward to having the extra storage room in the freezer especially when it comes to vegetables and things :).  Thank you Clinton and Nicole!!!

4.  I have been harvesting raspberries from the yard obsessively to save them from the hornets, birds and slugs and so far I'm getting small harvests, but they are adding up slowly but surely.  I'm hoping to have about a freezer bag full by the end of the month as they are finally starting to ripen in decent numbers.  Here's hoping!  I also harvested what I could out of the rhubarb plants as the slugs were just decimating the one that sits down in the underbrush.  Out of two plants, one of which has been bolted since pretty much the beginning of summer, I got a big freezer bag full of rhubarb to use later on.  I'm happy as I think with what I still have in the pantry and now what I have in the freezer, rhubarb harvesting should be good for the year :).

I also got a few rose hips harvested, but I'm going to wait to harvest those in earnest until the kids are back in school because that way I won't be hurried about it.

5.  The daughter managed to outgrow all of her jackets, so I went onto Land's End to see what I could find for clearance sales for last year's jackets.  I also found a code for back to school for 30% off your order.  I managed to get a winter jacket for less than 30.00 after shipping.  Not too shabby!

6.   I ran into a good deal on cabbage during the week, so I picked up two heads of green cabbage and two heads of red cabbage to shred and start on the journey to sauerkraut (did it as part of my normal shopping this week).  We eat it enough that if my cabbages get to a good size I might still process the cabbages from the garden into sauerkraut as well, but we'll see how it goes later on.  For now, I can at least get sauerkraut going in the pantry to can up in a couple of months!

7.  My mom is sending me some sulfate free goat's milk soap to try on Alvah.  My younger sister is VERY allergic to sulfates (sulfa) so she can't do the sulfates in regular soap, but she found this stuff really helps her out, so they want me to try it with Alvah.  Here's hoping it works well on him.  I've found that switching to more and more sulfate free products does seem to help him a bunch, so I'm hopeful this will help him as well.

8.  I used up some free samples this week, including ones for toothpaste as I am waiting for a sale on toothpaste before I buy it (MAN toothpaste is expensive!!!).

9.  I realized that I had to make some clothes for the son and went and quickly found some nice fabric to make what I needed out of materials I had on hand.  This is going on my monthly goals this month, so I'll fill you in more about that one later.

And now onto a garden update!

This was "thin the garden" week it seemed.  I went out and tried to clip the larger leaves off of the bottom of the cabbages to one, use them to make freezer slaw before they got really tough, and for two to give slugs ONE less thing to crawl up into the cabbages with.  I have been having to weasel my small fingers down into the cabbages where they are forming heads and snatch slugs out with my fingers to then squish on the ground.  So far it seems to be helping (that and the hot weather we've had the last couple of days) and the mold and mushrooms the garden was growing are much less as well.

I took the rooster and tried to get him to hunt slugs, but instead he hunted my lettuce plants and tried his best to eat one whole before I went to grab him and he flew into a tree (NOT my happiest morning last week I have to say), but the one thing that came out of that was I really looked at the green lettuces I had planted in the root vegetable bed and found that since they were "head lettuce" (which I normally don't grow) that they had REALLY deep roots and the roots were actually pretty darned big!  So big that they were impeding the growth of other plants, like my beets.  So, I took my trowel and cut three of the out of the ground this week and we'll use them happily in salads for the next couple of weeks.  I left one which doesn't really have anything around it that it would hurt by being there for now, but once the other lettuces and spinach come up better here I'll cut that one too to give everything else more room to grow.

The turnips were seeming to be growing great, but as I was battling slugs this week I looked close at them.  One half of the bed are growing well, but the other half were just too densely packed together so the turnip roots were really small and not really growing well.  So, I thinned out a bunch of the turnips this week too to help them grow better.  By doing that, a side benefit, the rat tailed radishes seem happier and are producing more, so yay!

I also found, quite by accident, that by not adding onto the trellis for the peas that the peas just went "ah well" and bent over and just started wrapping back down over the trellis I have instead of bending and snapping (which was my fear).  Turned out to be quite the blessing in disguise as I found accessing the peas through all of the other things I have planted requires me to basically do the splits over the bed to get to the middle peas as there's really no where to stand, so another layer of trellis might have gotten pretty hairy for me to pick from.

The pole beans are FINALLY vining out in a few places.  The bush beans I'm worried might be developing a blight as a few of the plants aren't looking good, but we'll see how it goes.  This has NOT been a good year for a garden...well with the exception of carrots and cabbage...those seem decently happy, although they are still behind where they would normally be this time of year.  I'll fight it to the finish, but I'm thinking I might just have to resolve myself to the fact that I'm going to have to go to the U-Pick farms to get more produce in this year.  We shall see how it goes!

And there you go folks.  My week in a nutshell.  How about you?  Did you have a good week?

What's for Dinner: This Week's Menu

First be prepared for a lot of posting today.  I am hoping to get the "Frugal Friday" post up today, as well as the monthly goals for this month and I still need to write up stuff I did last month (I kind of like the monthly recap as it hammers home to me that while the goals might not have been completely accomplished I did manage to get other things done :).

Since a lot of people have been asking, I wanted to start off with an Alvah update :).  He's still sleeping at night (yes!!!!), but my dear daughter decided as soon as he started sleeping at night she was going to be a complete pain in the tushie and not go to bed, no matter what I did, until about one am.  I finally told her last night that she had better go to bed at the actual "bed time" that the parents are always going on about or there would be consequences.  One, she was going to be completely thrashed when school starts in a couple of weeks.  And two, if she didn't go to bed, on time, keep her lights off, her TV off, her books closed, her voice quiet and you know...go to BED, that she wasn't going to live to see her next birthday.  It was either that or the whole, "If you don't go to bed RIGHT NOW and go to bed when I tell you to, you are going to lose your TV out of your room, your favorite toys and your lamp!".  Since she already lost the ability to watch her kindle after 8pm (it gets plugged in out in the living room now as she proved herself untrustworthy to have it in her room at night), I think that MIGHT have gotten through to her a bit more.  I'm still fighting to get her to bed before eleven, but at least I made progress.   She's always been TERRIBLE about sleeping from day one of her life, but now that Alvah is actually going to sleep at night, she better get used to an earlier bedtime because mom is going to get sleep.  Period!

As for everything else with Alvah, now that the meds are regulating a bit he's had a few temper tantrums, some of them bad, but the hitting and self harm is WAY more under control than it used to be, so that's definitely a good thing.  We went to the psychologist this week and we talked about tweaking meds to get something for anxiety on board (because he does have that going on for sure), but we're just going to let everything just regulate and settle before we try anything else for now.  Here's hoping everything remains good.

When it came to the menu last week we ended up being so busy that a couple of nights the menu plan went out the window and I had to punt, but overall I did pretty good with it.

This week, now that back to school running around is over with (I hope) I'm hoping to get back to a more consistent menu instead of rushing to throw something on the table because we ended up spending hours out of the house running errands and everyone is starving to death when we get home.  Here's hoping!

The highlight of the week was definitely the biscuits. I finally got light biscuits!  They turned out so good!  Not the cheapest with all the butter in them, but I think I might try halving them with some beef fat I have in the fridge when I make them for dinner tonight (since it's also cold fat). 
 

So, onto this week's menu!

Wednesday:  Tacos (used up some leftover taco meat I had in the freezer)

Thursday:  Pork chops in creamy BBQ sauce (I found some ANCIENT pork chops buried in the bowels of the freezer as I was getting close to the bottom of everything.  They were badly freezer burned so I was hoping that the BBQ sauce mix would help to mask the nasty freezer burned flavor...it didn't really work that well, but we got through the meal), apple sauce (the last bag I had frozen, mashed potatoes, salad.

Friday:   Fried chicken, oven fries.

Saturday:  Sausage gravy and biscuits.  Fruit cocktail.

Sunday:  Steak salad (use leftover steak from dinner Tuesday that is in fridge)

Monday:  Crock pot spare ribs in honey mustard sauce, baked potatoes, salad

Tuesday:  Blueberry waffles (use blueberries from freezer), sausage links.

Desserts:  Beignets with lemon curd (leftovers from fridge), vanilla pudding, home made ice cream (use some of the cream in fridge) with strawberries (we are seeing an uptick in temperatures this weekend with the wonderful glorious SUN shining, so I'm figuring on cold things for dessert are definitely appropriate!).

Snacks:  Grapes, apples, home made crackers and cheese (note:  Make crackers...didn't get to this last week), bread and butter or bread and butter with jam (note:  Make bread).

Breakfasts:  Leftover waffles and sausage, scrambled (or fried) eggs, English muffins, granola, yogurt with jam (or granola...whatever the preference), oatmeal.

Notable mention:  My daughter made individual pizzas for lunch Wednesday (seen up top).  We'd gotten a kit that made four pizzas super cheap at Fred Meyer a while back.  I pulled them out of the freezer, defrosted them and we tweaked them a bit.  I used my own tomato sauce (since the stuff that came with the kit looked old in the package) and we used some pepperoni for my husband's pizza from a little baggie we had in the freezer (once again their pepperoni looked kind of old).  Overall they turned out well and the daughter had a lot of fun "making lunch" :).

And there you are folks.  Our menu plan for the week.  How about you?  Eating anything good this week?