A Pinterest recipe: chicken breasts, cream cheese, salsa, corn, and black beans cooked all day in the crock pot. It looked kind of gross, but served with cheese, spinach, and more salsa on tortillas, it was pretty good! I made the leftovers of the meat concoction into a casserole with some rice and tortillas crunched up on top.
02.06.12 Dinner
This was an attempt to get Meg to eat with us. Peas, tiny shell pasta, bacon and a light cream-Parmesan sauce. She ate until she had a bite of bacon, then stopped and asked for a cookie.
01.31.12 Dinner
Mini breakfast pizzas on whammy biscuits and orange-berry smoothies.
Also, between this meal and the last one I posted, we had three chicken noodle soup meals (plus one more for lunch). It was so delicious, I forgot to take a picture, though! That’s five meals from one chicken. Pretty good investment of $5, I’d say!
01.25.12 Dinner
Pinterest to the rescue! More roasted chicken reheated (if you’re counting, that’s meal #2 for that chicken), green bean casserole, and potatoes with cheese, bacon, and green onions. Those Pinterest potatoes were really good. I sliced the potatoes into about half inch rounds, then baked them at 400 degrees for 15 minutes, turning once. Then, covered them with the cheese and bacon and broiled for just a minute more. If I had been thinking straight when I made my last gallon of yogurt, I would have not made the whole thing vanilla so we could have had a little dolloped on top of things like this in lieu of sour cream, but I’ve never been known for thinking ahead, so no dairy deliciousness for our potatoes. Oh well…
Homemade Presents for Christmas-Updated!
Now that we’re a full month out from Christmas, I thought I’d share our “homemade” Christmas gifts with you. Our house was a mess from the time we moved in in late October until… ummm, actually, there are still boxes that need to be unpacked. But, we managed to give some pretty cool and personalized gifts. In the end, I don’t think we saved very much money, but the gifts we gave were definitely worth far more than anything we would have been able to purchase for the same amount. I thrifted/repurposed/cleared out my stash for most of these projects, so not only did we end up with a fairly inexpensive gift list, but also with a very “green” holiday! Helped to offset our vapid consumerism the rest of the year, I suppose! We probably won’t go to this extreme in the future, but will definitely add homemade touches and do a few things here and there!
The list:
- Handkerchiefs, both two sided with flannel and unhemmed hand dyed knit
- Pocket squares
- Shaving cream
- Wool cooler cups/koozies (I learned how to do a blanket stitch for those!)
- Apple cider mustard
- Alcohol: black pepper vodka, ginger-orange rum, creamsicle rum, cranberry vodka, cherry bounce
- Vanilla extract
- Hot cocoa mix
- Pajama pants
- Spiced nuts
- About a million vanilla-peppermint soy candles
- Vanilla-peppermint lip balm
- Frosted votive candle holders
- Scarves, scarves, more scarves, and flower pins
- “Cream of everything” soup mix
- Star crayons for Meg’s school friends
- Cloth napkins
- Framed handprints
- Granola
- Coffee Beans (ok, not made by us, but by people we know!!)
For full-size version of these images, click on over to our Picasa album.
01.23.12 Dinner
Roast chicken, rice, and California blend vegetables. I don’t know why I don’t roast a chicken more often. Less than $5 for at least 4 meals and not a ton of effort.
01.19.12 Dinner
This meal looks pretty boring, but it was fried egg sandwiches, sweet potato fries, and applesauce. The sandwiches made me sad for not having fresh tomato, but soon enough!
01.11.12 Dinner
Ham and veggie frittata, toast with homemade grape jelly, and grapefruit. January’s meal plan called for several soups, but it’s been so warm that we’re improvising with some of the soup ingredients to have warmer weather meals, because who wants soup when it’s 70 degrees outside??
01.08.12 Dinner
Corn chowder and honey brown ale beer bread (don’t worry, the cheap beer wasn’t very good on its own). Word to the wise: don’t add a couple of grated potatoes to a big pot of soup if you don’t intend to let it cook for a good long while. The uncooked potato will turn what you had hoped to be two more nights’ dinner into stinky black mush.
01.06.12 Dinner
Homemade Pad Thai. I was pretty impressed with myself for getting it pretty close! Also, the internet taught me that if you put the white part of a green onion in a cup of water, the green part will grow back given some time. No more buying green onions for us!!
