This is also why he fell asleep mid-chew on Sunday night in the middle of a blaring restaurant.

I was pleased on Day 5 because I fought my baser “run to the store” instincts in the face of impending company and after a day at the beach that went about two hours longer than I’d intended. In addition, I suddenly realized I’d be feeding more than I’d planned on when shopping and going through my stores of supplies earlier in the week. My menu for 3 adults and 1 child was now being faced with 7 adults and 1 child in a growth spurt.

“I’ll just have to run to the store and get more pork butt…!” I told myself frantically. This is what I love about this challenge, though: The thought of spending more money before even a week was up just killed me. I took a deep breath and took stock. On the menu was carnitas and salad. But that wasn’t going to feed 8. What to do?

(You know, I’m suddenly feeling a bit better about my $300.00 spending choice. While we’re only 3, my husband sweetly allows me to have guests over quite often. I’d say at least once a week we feed at least one extra adult, usually one of our many single friends, and send them home with some leftovers. More often it’s more people and more frequent than that. I am so very, very thankful that Ryan enjoys this, too, and let’s me give little gifts to our friends this way! And this is perhaps one of the bigger side effects of having started to work on my food budget — as we steward our gifts better we are able to be so much more generous with our resources and it is a source of real fun and glee in our home.)

So, our Day 5 menu was:
Carnitas (from FF$75, truly delicious recipe and stunningly easy)
Grilled chicken tacos
Spanish rice (ill-fated, it didn’t cook through that night)
Tomatillo salsa
Chips
Fresh guacamole
Sweet corn casserole (brought by a friend)
My one accrued cost for today was $4.50 for a pitcher with a lid that will hold a gallon of liquid. We have one for tea. This one is for lemonade. We can make a gallon of each and it lasts us for days at only about $1.25 (based on price of mix and tea bags purchased in bulk) as opposed to the cost of soda, which my husband loves. He’s finding homemade iced coffee and iced sweet tea (sometimes mixed with the lemonade) to be his preferred alternatives, though! Hooray!

Sent a hungry seminarian friend home with leftovers, to boot. I love that.

Day 6:
My failed spanish rice was re-cooked as a crock-pot casserole with corn and beans added. This was taken to church for community meal and every last bit was gone when I picked it up after the meal!
That night we made one exception to our eating at home and had tacos with friend who were leaving town the next day. After 6 hours at the beach and and having worked our way through all the snacks (fruit, my spiced nuts, boiled eggs for protein after surfing, etc). we succumbed to the siren call of cheap mexican food with friends, who all had decided to go as well.

$18 for the family with leftovers that my son ate the next day. He literally fell asleep chewing a bite of quesadilla, poor guy! “Furfin’” four days in a row will do that to you! We had 5 tacos, beans and rice, a UFO-sized quesadilla, and a California burrito the size of my husband’s head.

I’m not sure what to do with my $18 expense. We normally have an eating out budget. This is the ONLY eating out we’ve done and we’re way under. So I guess I’ll keep those pots separate and figure out how much lower my eating out budget will be this month. I guess I’ll just list that expense in a separate category for accountability purposes for now.

Day 7:
For lunch we had chicken quesadillas while my E finished off his food from the night before. We shared the leftover rice and beans that came with his meal. I sliced up a cantaloupe to go with them. We added leftover salsa and guac to the quesadillas and all of us were loving lunch!

Dinner was my new recipe for “California Tacos”. If you’ve never had a California Burrito this name might not make much sense to you. But it’s a carne asada burrito with added fried potatoes (sometimes french fries). My husband LOVES California burritos possibly more than any food save sushi. So I was curious to know how he’d take to the tacos. If we weren’t already married, I think he would’ve proposed after eating those. So here’s my easy-peasy recipe for California tacos. They took about 20 minutes.

California Tacos:

Pre-heat oven to 450 F

4 or 5 potatoes (any kind, honest!)

• Dice and boil until just cooked through in salted water
• Drain and toss with vegetable or olive oil, pepper and seasoning salt
• Bake in oven until outsides crisp and brown slightly while you make the other filling.

While potatoes cook, in a small pot combine and heat:
1 14 oz. can black beans, with juice
2 C cooked chicken, chopped or shredded
2 Tbsp. bacon crumbles (optional, for flavoring. this time i used the very last of our carnitas meat.)
1 tsp cumin, coriander and oregano each
1 Tbsp chili powder
salt and pepper to taste

Combine chicken and potatoes in corn tortillas with salsa, sour cream and fresh cilantro.

We ended up eating this two nights in a row because it was so good and very filling, so they lasted well!

There you have Days 5-7.

We’re at 149.08.

I’ve run out of a lot of my more expensive things all of a sudden.  The end of this month is going to be interesting to say the least.  Especially because my in-laws are coming for 10 days.

I’ll up date with Days 8-10 tonight, Lord willing. What a busy week this has been!

Some pictures and recipes (approximate — that’s just the way i roll)

Chili, Garlic and Lime Peanuts:

These peanuts (3.5 C) got mixed with:

2 T melted butter
juice of 1 lime
1 tsp garlic, minced finely
zest of 1 lime
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
2 tsp chili powder
garlic salt
sea salt

then they got roasted in a 300 degree oven for 20 minutes (could have gone another 10 minutes, I think). they tasted better the more they rested and dried out. i’d like to figure out how to up the lime taste as it’s not very strong. maybe some granulated citric acid? i don’t know, i’m going to have to research this.

Hot Spiced Cashews:

these cashews (3 C) got mixed with:

2 T melted butter
1 Tbsp Worcester sauce
garlic salt
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
2 tsp chili powder
a couple of really good shots of Tapatio sauce

then they got roasted in a 300 degree oven for 30 minutes. any longer and they would’ve burned. we hit that perfect balance right before over-roasting where they go tender and melt in your mouth, though. sooo good!

Thanks, Mary, for the snack idea!

And now for the new bread recipe I tried, Honey Whole Wheat:

The crust is crunchy but not hard, so it’s very edible:

The crumb is so, so tender and tasty. For breakfast this morning it was heaven as toast with butter and apricot preserves.

I’ll definitely be making this in double batches from now on.

Here I am at the end of day 3 of the challenge and it’s only my first post on progress.  But what a busy few days I’ve had.  And spendy!  However, I’m thrilled about some of the deals I’ve gotten this month so far.  I’m hoping that some of the spending I’ve done up front will pay off at the end of the month.

The numbers:

Budget for the month: $300.00

Money spent so far:  $127.43

Remainder:  $172.57

I mentioned in a previous post that I was heading out for an opening of a new farmer’s market store in my neighborhood (I’m really excited because previously the closest one was a whole town over).  They were giving out a bag of free groceries to the first 200 families to shop at the store.  This is a post for another day but, needless to say, I don’t think I’ll ever try the first morning of a store opening again!  However, I did score some great deals there and a few other places.  Here are my best bargains:

– Boneless Skinless Chix Breasts, frozen, $1.66 lb.  I got 8 lbs.

– Scented soy-based candle in lavender, Free! (sometimes cupons are great, just not always)

– Bananas, 4 lbs. for $1.00.  I got about just over 2 lbs.

– Dozen eggs, $.99. I got 4 dozen.

– 5 lbs. bag of russet potatoes for $.97

– 4 lbs of tomatillos for $.99 (this is just…like..unheard of!)

There are other good deals on my list but those are my shining finds.  We’re in chicken (with another purchase of fresh breasts for $1.88/lb.) for the rest of the month, easily.  I have some frozen in pollo asada marinade, some grilled after being marinated in teriyaki sauce and then frozen for later, some frozen in family-sized portions, and will shred more for freezing this week.

Day 1 Dinner:  Leftover zupa toscana and salad with viniagrette

Day 2 Dinner:  Teriyaki chicken, gingered teriyaki rice wtih pineapple, green salad

Day 3

Breakfast: Cheese and bananas and Kix cereal — too hot already in the morning to cook.

Lunch: Teriyaki leftovers for the hub, PB&J with grapes and a cookie for the E.

Dinner:  $.35 for all three of us!  I love it when stuff like that happens.  I had a gift card for a smoothie place that just started selling sandwiches and wraps.  For $.35  beyond my card, E and I got three smoothies (took one to my dad who was in 100+ degree weather with no A/C), a chicken chipotle and lime wrap, and a bag of the oh-so-beloved-and-rare-for-us Pirate’s Bootie.  We topped it off with a watermelon snack before bed.  The hubby had dinner on his work, which kindly treated all the employees to an after-hours happy hour with food.

I’m not counting the money on the card as part of my budget.  My reasoning?  It was just for the smoothie place so I couldn’t have used it any other way if I’d tried.  Ah, sweet friends.  Sometimes they lead you to the lap of luxury!

In addition, I’m smelling a loaf of Honey Whole Wheat bread bake as I type this.  It’s a new recipe and if it tastes as good as it smells, I’ll be making a lot more of it soon.  I also made two batches of spiced nuts for my husband.  I’ll post the recipes for them once I get some of the kinks worked out but they are already pretty tasty.  We have a pound each of Chili, Lime and Garlic peanuts and Spicy Chili Cashews on the counter that cost us a grand total of $6.72.  I’m not sure how this compares to store-bought nuts but I think I came out ahead and I’ll do some research to find that out and post with the recipes.

Lastly, I’m really looking forward to making pizza this week with cheese I made with my friend Wilma.  We took a crack at making home-made mozarella and documented with pictures.  I’ll be posting a step-by-step for that this week as well.

Oh dear…and to think I have to let this bread cool before I eat it…when my mouth is watering NOW!

All right!  Here we go with my first big update for the Grocery Spending Challenge from Mary at Owlhaven.  If you haven’t come here because you’re a part of the challenge, too, then click on the image and join in!  Each participant is stating her goal and then we’re getting down to business.  I’m ashamed that my goal is almost the same as Mary’s given that she’s feeding ten kids and I’m only feeding one and a ravenous husband, but I’ve come to terms with it.  Honest.  Mostly.  Sort of…

Here are the terms of my challenge this month:

– Spend no more than $300.00 on all household items

– This includes personal care and cleaning supplies

– Rather than breaking up my costs over weeks, I’m just totalling for the whole 30-day period of September

–Not cut my husband’s snacking, but find ways to accommodate what he likes to eat within the means of the challenge

To put this into the terms of my usual budgeting, we’re cutting back by about $140 for the month and throwing in a few days and a few items I’d normally not total in my food bill.

Some considerations for me are:

– we do not have a garden that’s producing yet, so no produce from there until further notice (Lord willing, my new plot will start producing soon!)

– we have an apartment with almost no storage.  I have two small pantry cupboards of two shelves each and a standard sized fridge and freezer.  So I’m working on creative storage of things we use a lot and could buy more cheaply in bulk.

– did I mention my husband?  :)  (sorry ladies — in spite of his eating habits I’ve detrmined to keep him.  but MAN can he put away food!)

SO there you have me and my goals!  I’m so excited to see how everyone in the challenge does this month!

There is a new Henry’s opening in my neighborhood tomorrow and giving away free groceries to the first 200 families to come through the door. They open at 8:00. I’m just silly enough to go to this. I’ll let you know if I survive and, more importantly, whether it was worth it!

I once wept to my husband, “Could you PLEASE keep your cravings to something that DOESN’T cost us $11.00 a lb.??” when thwarted in the process of making pesto one night. I reached for my bag of pine nuts only to find 8 or 10 measly little kernels remaining in the bottom of what had been a huge, full Costco-sized bag the week before.

This is one of the biggest problems for me with frugal cooking and household budgeting: My husband is a rabid snacker. He willingly and appreciatively takes leftovers to work for his lunches (I only occassionally get them back uneaten and that’s usually when a hankering for rolled tacos just cannot be avoided…totally understandable!) But he is a big man, an extremely active surfer, and has a big appetite. When Ry comes home from work or surfing and when he’s up late doing freelance or 3-D modeling, he wants handy snacks that are easily accessible and he wants them in huge proportions. If I don’t have them around then things like this happen:

An entire box of granola bars disappears in one night
An entire 1.2 lbs bag of pine nuts goes missing
A large box of cereal disappears in one night
Half a bag of string cheese vaporizes when I’ve left the house for an hour

To put this in perspective, he’s about 6ft 3 or 4, wears a 3X wet suit to accommodate the breadth of his shoulders and chest, and will surf for 6 or 7 hours in the course of a day quite easily when the swell is good. He burns through calories like other people burn through….uh…well, I can’t come up with a good comparison — but something that burns quickly and people use a lot of! Anything else I can think of falls short when it comes to his appetite when it hits.

So, here are some things I already do:
Buy whatever fruit he likes that’s on sale and keep it handy as consistently as I can
To cut cost on cereal I use coupons and combine them with sales to keep cereal costs low
I also make homemade granola (TY to Mary at Owlhaven’s Granola Recipe in Family Feasts for $75 a Week) to lighten the cereal costs
Buy block cheese on sale and slice it myself so it’s easily accessible for snacks
Keep cookie dough on hand so I can easily bake up a batch of cookies on a whim

Two things that Ryan LOVES and I haven’t figured out are:
Spiced nuts
Popcorn

Microwave popcorn is expensive and not all that healthy. I make popcorn in a pot but sometimes I’m asleep when the craving hits or I’m just exhausted. Does anyone know of a way to keep popcorn fresh? Does anyone make seasoned popcorn? How does it keep?

Spiced nuts I’m going to look in to today at the store. I’d like to see about finding recipes for spiced nuts so that, when raw nuts are on sale in bulk I can buy them, season them and roast them myself, and then keep them handy to fulfill some of his needs for protein.

So what do you do for easy snacks? Do any of you have men/sons like mine with big appetites and for whom meals or leftovers won’t always do? I’d love to hear suggestions!

Is there honestly much tastier than a BLT?

Tonight Ryan and I feasted on BLTA’s (avocado being the addition to the mix) and they were just ridiculously good.  I felt bad about a slackerly dinner but after 3 hours in the garden with languishing tomato plants and soil needing to be turned and another 4 at the grocery store, it was all I had in me.  Ryan was gracious about it and so was the Lord because those things were delicious!  Have you ever added lemon pepper to a BLT with some avo?  I highly recommend it on a night when you’re fit for bed and not much else.

More to report on our exploints tomorrow.

I have been struggling with this blog for awhile because I’m not posting with the same focus I had when I first started to write here.  When I first started this blog I was in a period of immediate, deep grief over the illness and then loss of my mom to cancer.  Along with that came the wonderful gift of gardening — something she had loved and I had just found — to carry me through some very, very hard days.  All of this poured into and fed the growth of my faith and a period of discovery about both myself and, more importantly, my God.

Solomon (not the Beetles) had his heart set in solid truth when he wrote Ecclesiastes 3:1-8:

¹ There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:

² a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,

³ a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,

⁴ a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,

⁵ a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,

⁶ a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,

⁷ a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,

⁸ a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

I think that this is part of why I’ve felt very unfocused in my writing here recently.  I have entered a new season of life.

This is not to say that grief is gone — I can’t think of a day that goes by without some thought or longing to be with my mom in heaven, worshipping our Creator.  Time has a way, though, of softening sharp edges and the Spirit has a way of using Christ’s redeeming power to take every sorrow and draw from it joy.  As this process has happened I have slowly shifted my focus to other needful things:  my marriage, my son, my home…

As a result, the gardening posts will likely be fewer (though I do have a new plot to sink my hands into at this late part of the growing season), my posts about my mother likely farther in between (though my life with her informs every part of life after her going home).  You’ll hear me talking dollars more than any girl who hates even thinking about money ought, and struggling through the fast-paced adventures of raising my little boy.  You’ll likely hear about a lot of apologies made to my husbad, though I hope those become fewer, too (out of peace, clearly, rather than a hardening of heart).  Cooking?  Well, I’ll never stop talking about that.  And my Savior?  As the old hymn tells us, “Lord I need thee every hour.”  And I do.

But yes, my focus has changed.  And having said just that, I feel more free to post the things I’m dealing with now.  I hope it’s interesting and helpful to you — because it’s interesting and helpful to me.  Indeed, there is a time for everything.

Today I had a blast with Eamonn.  Do you know what we were doing?  We were cleaning.

We’re in week two of no channels on the TV and a lovely thing has happened — he’s started not to miss TV.  This morning he asked me, “Mom — would you play music on the TV?”  We don’t have a stereo and my iPod really only plays through headphones or in the car.  But we have a game console that will let me stream music from my computer or play off of a CD.  So we listened to worship music while he played with Legos and I put dinner into the crock pot.  Later in the day when we got home from running various errands around town neither of us even paused at the TV as we came through the door.  Rather, we lugged a toy cubby that I’d gotten from my sister-in-law in trade for a trike Eamonn never rode into Eamonn’s room and began sorting his toys into the various cubby holes.  He loved it.

“I have a ball!  This is an instrument, Mom!  Here is another train piece!”  We sorted through his toys which were in a big jumble in his wagon and gave them all homes.  As we rifled through his things we began to find monkey from a long-forgotten barrel of monkeys and started singing the “10 Little Monkeys Jumping on a Bed” song together.  When Eamonn sings it, it goes, “10 widdow mon-teys, yumpin’onna bed…”  My heart nearly exploded with love several times and I kept thinking, “How did I miss the nuances of how much fun all of this could be?”  I’d fallen into this bad habbit of rushing through every aspect of the day and using TV to babysit while I did things quickly that, given a little more time, we could have done slowly and joyfully together while we talked and laughed and played.

I am not looking for reassurances that I’m a good mom or that everyone makes mistakes like this and gets caught up in the hurry and bustle.  I do know those things are true.  But here’s the other thing that’s true:  My hustle and bustle was a sign of some grave sin that has needed to be dealt with for quite a while now, and the Lord has gently and graciously let me see this as He’s also gently and graciously shown me some ways I could change the pattern.  I know we don’t like that word, “sin”.  But let’s call it what it is in my case.  Waste is a woeful category into which I so often and so easily fall.

The overall message that’s been ringing loud and clear in both my heart and my ears the last few months is that I have much to learn about stewardship of my time, my monetary and material resources, and the gift of a child.  This has come in various ways: realizing how much food waste was going on in my own home at my own hands without my realizing it; the natural progression from that realization to a hard look at the rest of my money flow; struggling to find time to sort these things then causing me to realize how much time waste there is, as well.  I want to learn to use my time and resources more effectively so that I am able to accommodate Eamonn’s pace rather than setting him aside in order to accommodate mine.

There are several resources I’m considering that I’d like to go through over the next few months as I work on getting some of my life in better order:

C.J. Mahaney of Sovereign Grace Ministries did a series on time management earlier this year and I guess I should have raised the white flag immediately when I starred all of the posts in my Google Reader for reading later and then could never find the time to go through them.  However, in searching around and thinking about stewardship, I was reminded that he took the entire series and compiled it in a PDF for free download.  I’ve been praying for a study to do because I’m much more consistent with my quiet times when I’m working through something and I think this may be it.

In addition, my friend Beth and I have agreed to work together on our household budgets.  Amidst kicking, moaning, a few tears and some grumbling, I’m sure, we are going to be working through Budgeting for Dummies and Managing the Money Maze.  I think it will really help to have a friend with whom I’m totally honest about our finances and who will ask me how I’m doing with the budgets my husband and I agree on as I do the same for her.

Last, a natural categorizing of my son’s activities and interests began to emerge as we sorted toys today.  He has so many different kinds of activities that he’s interested in.  Previously when they were all jumbled together I think it was hard for him to figure out what to play with or what to do with his things.  But as we sorted things (I asked for his input on how he thought we should group some of his things and was delighted with some of his decisions) a post from Owlhaven that I read just yesterday on Homeschooling with Preschoolers came to mind.  In it, Mary shared an idea for play stations for kiddos my son’s age (3-and-a-half-but-almost-4-thankyouverymuch) and even younger.  In my jumbled mental store of notes I thought, “okay, must buy different kinds of things for him to play with…oh but the money…think about it later…”  But no.  We have everything we need already between puzzles, train tracks, building blocks, activity books, and art supplies.  I just didn’t know it because it was all jumbled together.  Already ideas for how we could play together and work together through our days at home has begun to emerge and I’m really excited at the time I’m anticipating spending with him.

This seems like a long laundry list and I think I’d easily panic if not for this thought that keeps threading itself through my mind and other considerations today, “You can’t do it.  But I can make it possible.”  And I trust Him, and He will.  I want to honor my Lord and I know He will help me to do it.

God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
²Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way,
though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea,
³though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble at its swelling.
Selah

⁴There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
⁵ God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.
⁶ The nations rage, the kingdoms totter;
he utters his voice, the earth melts.
⁷ The LORD of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
Selah

⁸ Come, behold the works of the LORD,
how he has brought desolations on the earth.
⁹ He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the chariots with fire.
¹⁰ “Be still, and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth!”
¹¹ The LORD of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
Selah