Food Waste Friday – December 11, 2009

This was it!  Only my second week of really trying and all that there was to throw out was some old garlic that had sprouted.  Oh, and some mac ‘n cheese that I forgot to take a picture of.  That was it though.

I tried very hard to use things up this week.  It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.  I think that had a lot to do with how I have really started to also pay attention to the things that I am buying at the grocery store.  I’m really trying to stick to my list and that is made completely from my meal plan.  No extras! 

I definitely learned that I don’t need to cook up an entire package of spaghetti when I make it.  I ended up having it for lunch for 3 days in a row to make sure it got used up!  Then we had six smallish sized apples that no one was eating.  So I took it upon myself to make an apple crisp.  It’s sure not to go to waste now!

Visit Frugal Girl’s Food Waste Friday to see how others did managing their food waste.

Spinach Black Bean Lasagna

Spinach-Black Bean Lasagna
From Southern Living Home for The Holidays Magazine, Fall 2006
Makes 6 servings (for those of us eating healthy, this is at least 8 servings)

2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 (15-oz) container ricotta cheese
1 (10-oz) package frozen chopped spinach, thawed and well drained
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro ( I omit this)
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 cups (16 oz) shredded Monterey Jack cheese with peppers, divided (I use pepper jack cheese OR 1/2 pepper jack and 1/2 monteray jack)
2 (16-oz) cans black beans, rinsed and drained
1 (2-lb, 13-oz) jar pasta sauce (I use spaghetti sauce)
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
9 dried precooked lasagna noodles (found w/ dry pasta and these are dry)
Garnish: chopped fresh cilantro ( I omit this)

1. Stir together first 5 ingredients and 1 cup Monterey Jack cheese; set aside.

2. Mash beans with a potato masher or fork in a large bowl; stir in pasta sauce and cumin. Spread one-third of bean mixture on bottom of a lightly greased 13×9-inch baking dish.

3. Layer with 3 noodles, half of spinach mixture, and 1 cup Monterey Jack cheese; repeat layers. Top with remaining 3 noodles and remaining bean mixture.

4. Bake, covered, at 350 degrees for 1 hour; uncover and top with remaining 1 cup Monterey Jack cheese.

5. Bake 5 more minutes or until cheese melts. Garnish if desired.

Wordless Wednesday – The Christmas tree farm

See more wordless posts at 5 minutes for mom’s Wordless Wednesday.

What is my motivation?

This is a question that has baffled me for years.  Truth be told since becoming a work at home mom 5 1/2 years ago, I don’t seem to have much motivation at all. 

Sure there are the normal things that everyone gathers motivation from like taking care of my kids and house, being a successful business person, making money to help support our family.  Unfortunately these very important things don’t feel like enough.  Maybe that’s not the right word.  I am surely grateful for these things and feel extremely lucky to have and do them, but none of these things feel like the “one”. 

I know a big problem of mine is that I am a heavy duty procrastinator.  I put everything off until the last minute.  I do laundry at 7pm when the kids have come out of the bath to no clean underwear.  I put off work until the due date instead of working on projects over time.  Every year presents are wrapped in the hours before they are needed, usually purchased the day before (at the earliest).  I have thought about ordering our photo Christmas cards for the past month and just finally actually ordered them yesterday. 

I am going to try something new.  There is only one thing that I really want, badly enough to maybe do the trick.  Right now we rent our home.  I really want to buy a house so that we can decorate the way we want, plant what plants we want and really make it ours.  I know it might sound materialistic, but really it’s not.  I want to make a home for our family that is reflective of us, that we can truly make our own.  That we can feel safe that will always be there (especially when it is paid off) and D and I can retire in and our kids can visit with their kids.  So I am going to find pictures of houses that I like, and of rooms that I like and post them everywhere.  Next to my computer, on the refrigerator, on the front of my Household Organizer, in the car, even over the dirty laundry.  I want our goal of buying a house to be the first thing on my mind in the morning, the last thing I think of at night and every moment in between.  It’s not that I want to be obsessed with the house itself, but the idea of making it our own.  I want to figure out how everything I do ties in to that goal.  Some of those things might be hard, like how does doing laundry fit?, but I will find it!

Do you know what your motivation is?  How did you find it?

Meal Plan Monday – December 7, 2009

This week I was feeling very uninspired and our meal plan definitely reflects that.  The silver lining is that we have D’s work Christmas party on Friday night, which should be fun.  It’s potluck though, so I will still have to cook. 

• Monday – Pancakes and hash browns
• Tuesday – Spaghetti and salad
• Wednesday – Black Bean Quesadillas
• Thursday – Chili and Cornbread
• Friday – Christmas party – Black Bean and Spinach Lasagna to take with us – the boys will have pizza
• Saturday – Clean out the fridge night
• Sunday – Chicken Enchiladas and salad

I’m hoping that next week I can come up with something a little more exciting next week. 

For more menu plans visit OrgJunkie’s Menu Plan Monday.

Food waste Friday, December 4, 2009

One of my goals is to reduce our food waste.  When I think about all the time and effort we go to with our budget, how every little penny counts, to think that we are throwing food away, it just makes me cringe.  Money straight in the garbage.  So every week I am going to join The Frugal Girl and post pictures of our food waste.  The hope is to end up not posting any pictures, which would mean that we didn’t waste anything.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen this week.

We had a tomato go bad.  I was going to use it our salad on Monday night, but I was too late.  The top container was some leftover salsa from a local Mexican restaurant that we just couldn’t eat in time.  The bottom container was some leftover tomato sauce.  I just didn’t know what to do with such a small amount.  All in all, for my first week, I guess it’s not too bad. 

On the postive side, there were some peas that I was thinking were going to need to be included in the picture.  Then I remembered an idea I read somewhere to save all your scraps in a bag in the freezer to make a hodge-podge soup, so I started that.  I added some torn up pasta shells and some leftover turkey.  There was enough turkey, ham and stuffing leftover on Monday for one lunch for D, so I put that in a bag in the freezer too.  It’s so fun to be successful!

Check out The Frugal Girl’s Food Waste Friday for more posts on food waste.

Let them hear from you!

Have you ever purchased something from the grocery store and not been satisfied with it?  Especially food items that really can’t be returned?  Have you ever tried to contact the distributor of the product to let them know?  Or maybe you have a product that you love, have you every called and told the distributor that?  I highly recommend that you do; it can turn out very beneficial to you and your pocketbook.

For our Thanksgiving potluck at my Mom’s house I was in charge of bringing the sweet potatoes and the brussels sprouts.  The brussels sprouts were great, no problem.  The sweet potatoes on the other hand…well let’s just say I hit a snag. 

I make sweet potatoes that are the candied version with pecans.  (My mouth waters just thinking about it!)  Anyway, I use canned potatoes.  This year I thought I would just need 2 cans, but then later thought better and ended up buying another can, but from a different store.  Thanksgiving morning I started to make my dishes and opened one of the first two cans.  The potatoes and the light syrup they were in did not look like I remembered then from the previous year.  They were brown and the syrup was really thick.  So I opened the next can and it was a little better but still not right.  I thought something was up so I opened the third can.  It was like angels came out and sang when I saw how beautiful the potatoes were.  They were bright orange and the syrup was really the light syrup it was supposed to be.  I ended up high tailing it to the store I got it from and bought 3 more cans (I think the fright of not having sweet potatoes on Thanksgiving was a bit much for me so I ended up buying more than I needed!)  Thanksgiving was saved!

I saved the cans and decided to call the distributor.  They were so nice!  They apologized up and down for the two cans and were determined to make it right for me.  Pretty soon, via FedEx, I should be receiving a check to reimburse me for the two cans, an assortment of their other canned products, and several coupons to use in the future.  I am so excited, and so glad I took the 5 minutes to contact them.

I have done this before with a cereal that we really like, but could never find any coupons for.  I called them and told them how much we loved the cereal and asked if they ever printed coupons for it.  They were so happy to hear from me that they sent out 4 coupons for free cereal!

So it really does pay to contact these people.  All of the packages have a phone number and usually a website that you can visit.  Take a few minutes soon to contact one of your favorite distributors.  You may end up being glad you did!

Goal #78 – The food journal

Goal #78 is to come up with my own food journal.  I say “my own” because I have tried a few in the past, most recently the Weight Watchers version.  I didn’t like any of them.  Aside from the problem with any food journal (that you have to actually write down all you eat, lol), for some reason they just didn’t keep me motivated.  I had purchased the WW 3 month journal and I think it was a little overwhelming.  It’s small in size but thick.  The thought of filling the whole thing up was a bit much.  Also, because it is small, there is not room to write much besides the name of the food and the points value.  I think I might want to write a little more, like my mood at the time of eating and what I am doing at that time too. 

Every time I go to the library I stop at the featured books and just do a little browse.  The last time I was there I found a book called The Daily Fix by Alexa Fishback, MS, RD.  It’s mainly geared toward the working out of the home woman, but I found a bit that I could apply a lot of the information to myself.  The biggest thing was her ideas for a food journal.  I am going to try it, it seems to incorporate everything that I want.  She suggests a five column format with a column each for time, food/drink, portion, calories, and notes.  Everyday you journal what you ate, when, how much, and what you were doing/feeling at the time. 

Then she takes it one step further.  Apparently there is a common dietary assessment tool called the Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ).  I had never heard of it before.  The point is to analyze your eating over the week for any food types that you might not get enough of or getting too much of.  It’s basically a recap of the food you ate so you can see on one page what you ate too much of or not enough of.  With all of my other journals I always looked at each day individually.  I like the idea of looking over a longer period of time for trends.  To me it seems better to analyze a total behavior rather than a behavior for a day.

I have found a new composition notebook (I love those things!) and will be starting my journal today.  My refined goal for #78 will now be to keep a food journal for 1 complete week.  Somehow I think now is when the real work on this goal starts, lol.

December 2009 Financial goals

Every month I am going to post the family financial goals.  Ideally they will line up with my 101 goals, but this is the first month and I’m still retraining my brain to think that way.

• Cash flow D’s smog check on the Tahoe.  We are really unsure if it will pass or not, so this could be a really easy goal to attain, or could end up requiring a lot more thought.
• Keep within our Christmas budget.  This should be easy enough as we are totally on cash envelopes.  Which leads me to our next goal…
• Keep detailed track of where and how much we spend from our envelopes.  We have been doing a lot of stealing from one envelope to pay for something from another category because that envelope is empty.  It makes it very hard to review the budget.  So this month we are writing down everything.
• Eat at home all month.  This is always very hard for me.  I tend to get a little princess-y and not want to cook in the evenings.  I am trying out some new-to-me tricks that I will post about later.
• Put something (anything) into the Emergency Fund.  I have tweaked the budget a little and so far it looks like we will be able to deposit $39.  Not good.  Which again, leads me to the next goal…
• Try to come up with $100 of random, extra money.  We have cans that need to be recycled and change that needs to be rolled, as well as I’m expecting a couple of $15 rebates. 

 I will come back weekly and update on my progress.  Wish me luck!!

Tacos in Pasta Shells

This is a recipe that I got from Allrecipes.  I tried it once earlier this month and it got raves!  It will be a definite regular in our menu plan.  I have altered it a smidge to (I think) make it easier.

Tacos in Pasta Shells

1 lb ground beef

1 pkg taco seasonings

3oz cream cheese

18 jumbo pasta shells

1 cup taco sauce

2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese

1 ½ cups crushed tortilla chips

Directions:

1. In a large skillet, brown beef over medium heat until no longer pink, drain.  Add taco seasonings and simmer according to directions.  Add cream cheese and mix in, about 5 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of water to a boil.  Add pasta and cook for 8 to 10 minutes or until al dente; drain. 
3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
4. Fill shells with beef mixture and arrange in a 9×13 inch baking dish then pour taco sauce over shells.  (I don’t measure the sauce, I just pour it on.)   Cover with foil and bake in preheated oven for 15 minutes. 
5. Remove dish from oven and top with Cheddar cheese and tortilla chips.  Return dish to oven and cook for 15 minutes more.
6. Top with your favorite toppings and enjoy!