Weekend Wrap-Up, Recipes, Groceries

Man, this has been one of those weekends that just FLEW by!!! The best part about being super busy is we never had time to make a mess in the house, which is always a good thing. Of course this kiddo was still going strong both days and absolutely never tires of energy. These couple of pictures are from after church today, running around outside in the "snow". It did snow pretty hard during church and right after, but it was way too warm to stick to anything but the big flakes were very pretty and I'm sure contributed to Lilli's teachers saying "they were all wild this morning". Which I think is code for "I'm glad Sunday is but once a week."She had a blast celebrating both Ella and Brayden's birthdays yesterday. Any time she can celebrate with some icing and running wild with friends is a good, good time. We'll have lots of pics of those to come, eventually.
Groceries - The last two weeks I haven't been quite as good, but still much improved over the good old days. Last week I just needed a lot of things, plus we made a nice Valentines dinner at home with choice cut steaks and so on. Our Valentines menu was probably about $20 in cost, but way cheaper than a steak meal out. My total bill last week was $135 before taxes, so $55 over budget. This week my stuff just seemed to add up, but I didn't get a thing that wasn't on the list. We noticed her juice went up $1 in price, which is annoying considering that's suddenly a 20% increase. We need to check into juice at Costco, I'm just picky about that stuff and will only buy certain brands not made in China. It's ridiculous that juice is even made in China. So my total bill today was right around $99. So, about $24 over from just needing a few extra things today (particularly I was running low on chicken and we only buy organic.) Still not bad considering I used to somehow manage to spend $250 a week and still not see anything work cooking in the pantry, or have a plan. I did do some cleaning of the pantry this week and threw away a seasoning packet that expired in April 2000. That is not a typo. Almost TWELVE years ago this packet of ranch dressing mix expired. Most likely I bought it not long after we got married in 1999, and that thing moved with us to our house in Smyrna, our house here, made it through our major kitchen demo when we cleaned out a lot of stuff and was STILL in the pantry. Gross.

Recipes - Here's some of our recent meals:

We made this steak and fries recipe for Valentines. Super easy and very flavorful. Brent does a great job with cooking the steaks to the correct temp and then we pull them off. Totally the key to a great steak. The fries were good, but I'd rather have a baked potatoes or mashed potatoes with steak. We made those for Lilli and with the seasoning and lemon on it she wouldn't even eat them. We also made this "love potion" drink I had seen on Pinterest and it was just ok. It was pretty and pink and Lilli had a good time with it since an older lady at church had given her a big heart shaped straw, but it was pretty tart and just not something we were crazy about.

We made this baked potato soup on one of the colder nights. It takes awhile to do everything, so not a great weeknight meal but it had good flavors. It's from my fave healthy eating site, so not as good as a restaurant version, but way better for you with the cauliflower snuck in. It was a bit thick and could have used more broth to it. The bacon totally made the dish though!

This Tuscan Pasta dish was a big winner for all of us. It wasn't a really cheap meal to make though, the raviolis are about $6 and the nicer jar of pasta sauce was $3-something, but it tastes restaurant quality and made enough for all of our dinner and lunch the next day, so again much cheaper than eating out. It was also very fast and perfect for a weeknight! This one will def be made again.

We made our Greek Chicken Pitas again this week. It's one of our fave all time recipes. For Lilli we wrap it in a tortilla like a burrito. For us we put the grilled chicken in a whole wheat pita pocket with saffron rice, feta, and a little ranch on top. Delicious!!!

Other than that, we've stuck with our meal plans the last two weeks and had chicken sausage and rice one night, a tortilla soup mix from World Market one day, a Southwest chicken skillet mix from an old pantry seasoning packet I had on hand, Baked Ziti from my 5 ingredient 5:30 cookbook I really like and then other little sandwiches and soups as needed. We're really starting to trim down our pantry backlog of "stuff".

This week looks like:
Chicken Enchilada Crockpot Soup
Jambalaya for Fat Tuesday
Indian Chicken (helps clean out pantry)
Stir Fry Chicken (helps clean out pantry)
Banana Snowmen Pancakes with Fresh Berry Smoothies
Southwest Tuna Bake
And for the Wednesday night meal at church we'll be having "Breakfast with all the trimmings"!!

Time to relax before it's back to work and school tomorrow!

Meal Plans And Groceries

We've been doing great since Christmas on our meal plans and grocery budgets. I'm looking for some sort of program to keep my recipes more organized and easier to re-use. I'm leaning towards either ZipList or using Pinterest. Or I may stumble on something better than either of those for food planning. Most weeks we've been very close to or right on our $75 budget, even with birthday ingredients to buy. One week I knew I was right on plan (I add everything up as I shop on my IPhone) but it rang up higher than I expected. When we got to the car I noticed the girl had rung up Lil's nighttime Pull-ups twice - that was an extra $9.99. So of course I went right back in and had them pull that off the bill. In the past I probably would have never noticed since I rarely look back over the bill.

Lilli enjoys playing with my old Bananas in Pajamas toys....

Some recent recipes-

I made these cupcakes for Lilli's class and half of her big party. They were SO good and super easy to make. I used strawberry cake mix for the top half, and for her class I made homemade buttercream icing (the best), and for the big party I made my absolute favorite Martha Stewart strawberry icing. There is really not a better icing in the world. Homemade icing makes all the difference. And it only takes about 10 minutes to make.
Lilli has the biggest crush on Johnathon, a 3rd grader at church - also the preacher's son. Anytime he goes up to read scripture, etc we have to pretty much muffle her. It's a pretty fatal attraction.

We've also gotten the crockpot out quite a bit lately -

This crockpot chicken was fantastic. We aren't big fans of olives so we skipped that, and then used a can of diced tomatoes instead of plum since tomatoes aren't in season. It was great - the chicken was so tender it fell right off the bone and everything was still fantastic for lunch leftovers the next day. Lilli likes shredded chicken so it was an easy sell for her if you scraped off the other "stuff".

On the other hand, this crockpot spaghetti sauce did not do it for us. It was a lot of work the night before, and it really just didn't have a lot of flavor. It was ok, but not worth it. We have lots of other homemade spaghetti sauces that taste a lot better.

Painted nails Lilli (above and below).
One Saturday we made these Thai Chicken Flatbreads. Lilli loves to help make pizza, and she made hers with chicken, pepperoni, carrots and just a host of ingredients. All of that doesn't sound tasty to me, but she ended up with a great mix of veggie and healthy chicken protein, so who cares! Brent and I followed the recipe, minus the bean sprouts since that's not something I keep on hand. It was SO good. I'll definitely be making that one again.
Are those pants not the cutest thing ever? You may have to click in to see - but it has an embroidered Pippin on the rear end.
And the real Pippin, hidden under a Memphis pom pom.

Other than that we've had just the normal staple foods - Indian chicken, Turkey Tacos, Birthday Spaghetti dinner, soups, and just the normal non-new dishes. This week's meal plan is for:

Baked Potato Soup
Chicken Enchilada Soup (Crock Pot)
Southwest Chicken Skillet (uses up older pantry ingredients)
Chicken Sausage and Rice
Baked Ziti

We've got a Super Bowl church party tomorrow night and I've got some really cute things I'll share that we're doing for that!

Holiday Recipes

It's really time to get back on track with everything this year. We managed to still cook a lot over the holidays, but we're really just now getting back in the swing of things. We've spent a lot of time the last week or so organizing upstairs to move my new gym equipment up there, and also reorganizing the attic. Next week we'll get back on our FlyLady zone house cleaning, because that has really helped us get the house more clean and organized before the Holidays.

We also stayed in our Grocery Challenge Budget for most of the holidays. The week before Christmas we spent $113 and the week of $130 (or that might be backwards). Considering all the places we had to take food plus cooking our own meal that's really good. Before we really starting watching it in a normal week we'd spend $150 easily. The week right after Christmas we were back to $74 and last week we were a few dollars over and spent $80 (and saved 20% with coupons - organic chicken was on a good sale so I stocked up a little). Still great improvements! The pictures in with recipes this time are from Brent and I making homemade bread for Lilli's teachers. About $5 in groceries has made us 4 loaves of bread so far, and we can probably make about 2 more with the ingredients I had to buy. We're backing away from grocery store breads - there's way too many unidentifiable things in there.

Recent good dinners:

Rotel Chicken Spaghetti - easy and good!

Grilled Lemon Chicken - simple, healthy delicious!

Marshmallow Fudge - I had to convert the squares into choc chips, I added some nuts and used red and green Christmas Marshmallows to Christmas it up. Very good and it looked so cute in our Christmas goodie boxes!
Always have to make sausage balls for Christmas. I add an egg into the mix and use hot sausage. I still thought they were missing something this year though.


We love cookie dough ice cream, so I thought this recipe for cookie dough bites would be good. It was incredibly easy and they were ok yummy. Not my fave, but they would be great to even mix in with ice cream in the summer.

The recipe for the delicious Herb Bread. We gave that to her teachers along with seasonal pasta and sauce. It was SO good - it tasted like the oil and herbs we love to dip bread in.

Cajun Chicken Pasta - We've been making this for years and it's always a fave. We use penne pasta, typically.

Chicken Marinade - sometimes you just want to soak it, forget it, then grill it. It was super easy for a weeknight and pretty tasty.

Groceries and Meals

We've been doing pretty good with our meal planning and groceries lately. The holidays have meant more parties and dinners and such to go to, but we just build that in at the beginning of the week. My freezer is looking MUCH better as we've been planning more things specifically out of it. Thankfully it's at a point where you can a) open it without things falling on you and b)in a pinch if someone brought us a freezer pie we'd have a spot for it. Major improvement!
The last two weeks I've ended up spending $85 pre-tax, which is $10 over my goal. Both weeks I've gotten caught up in dog food, which is $16/bag (he eats organic). The first week I needed dog food, last week it was a good deal with a coupon, so we'll have dog food for quite a while. It will realistically be about 6-8 weeks before I need to buy more, so that should work out well. I've noticed our other big spend each week is on dairy. With Lilli's being "special" (lactose free), plus my milk, we end up easily spending $15 a week on milk, which is a pretty big chunk of a $75 budget.
Overall it's been a great exercise for us in not buying frivolously and keeping more $$ in our pocket this holiday season!
Some recent recipes -

Modenese Pork Chops - We had a nice thick cut from our CSA left in the freezer. We were careful not to overcook and it turned out really nice. Nothing superb, but good. I just don't love a pork chop. We had a salad, mac n cheese and some delicious homemade bread a friend brought me as a Christmas gift with it. Yum-o.

We did another crock pot chicken using this brine recipe. It was extremely tender but not super flavorful. I think we're down to just one more whole chicken in the freezer. I do have a new appreciation for the value and versatility of the whole chicken now, plus some great ways to cook it.

These chicken crescent squares were delicious and super easy. We made 2 cans of crescents with it, I think otherwise they would be way too stuffed. We also some Oscar Mayer carving board meats (in the lunch meat section) as the meat in it, and that turned out great.
Aren't those two so precious? She's into telling us everything she loves right now (big kids, Rudolph, Santa, milk, various food items, shoes, etc) and she'll tell us she just LOVES her Pippin. HA!

Groceries, Meals and Crafts

A few more of the Thanksgiving crafts we did this year...

Any project involving glue is a home run...The finished turkey family - can you guess which one is Lilli's??
We also did the hand-print turkeys, you trace your hand and then decorate with googly eyes, feathers, etc and then we glued a Popsicle stick on it to make puppets. I had seen a few various variations on it, but came up with that method on my own. This is Lilli's tracing of my hand. Not bad considering her age!
We forgot to get a close up of her turkey. Lots of feathers and creative licensing. And of course she's wearing that awful Jasmine dress.
Pippin is not impressed by arts and crafts.
As far as the grocery challenge goes, I didn't hit my goal this week, I ended up spending $85 pre-tax which is still a huge improvement from where we had been at and just $10 over budget. I did save 18% or just over $19 between my coupons and Kroger plus savings. With it being the end of the month there were a few more coupons expiring that I wanted to use on things we always use. The kicker was $13 for Tide, but it is the best at keeping colors bright.

A few new recipes from over the last week, I did a lot of my menu planning from Plain Chicken this past week.

Chicken Chalupas Casserole was to DIE for. I had some Perdue grilled chicken strips in the fridge I needed to use, so I used that for the chicken in the chalupas. My casserole dish only held half as many chalupas, so I halved the half and half it called for and it turned out perfectly, with enough for our dinner and lunch leftovers. And since all the work is done the night before it was great for a week night meal for us. I'm sure I also snuck in some extra hot sauce because we like it spicy.

Rosemary Ranch Chicken was also delicious. We were out of ranch salad dressing (bizarre) but I did have a new bottle of spicy ranch that we used that turned out just fine. We grilled indoor on the George Foreman due to weather. It was such a pretty piece of chicken that this one would be great to serve when hosting people or taking food to others!

Due to the holidays our other meals were either at relatives' homes or simple soups and other freezer stuff!

Grocery Challenge Week 2

We had another great Grocery week today, I ended up spending $80, which was $74 before tax so I'll count that as hitting my $75 goal. With coupons/Kroger plus I saved 16% which is right around the norm for me. The big one this week was milk, I needed lots of Lillis and mine and that was $15 right there.

We ate some good things last week, here's a few of the recipes:

Napa Cabbage Salad - this dressing is SO good and makes the recipe. Now that our CSA is over (thank goodness) other than the ton of fall squash we have this was about the last thing left in the fridge from it.

Garlic Lime Pork Chops - I'm not a huge pork chop person, but these were pretty good. The pork chops were also from our CSA. We marinated overnight and it was pouring rain so we grilled indoors on the George Foreman. We did get Lilli to eat some and she liked it so that was a win.

Chicken Taco Cornbread Pie - This was also super easy and really good. The leftovers for lunch the following days were also really good.

We also did some other simple things like Breakfast for Dinner, Hamburger Helper (not really great but does help clean out my pantry) and one night we had dinner out at Chuck E Cheese with some friends.

So far so good with the Grocery Challenge and I'm sure Lilli and I can find some ways to spend all the money we're saving around town, especially at the new Nordstroms!

Groceries and Randoms

Silly birds....

I think she picks this idea up from Brent. And I hope you like this awful Jasmine dress because it's her favorite thing in the world and as soon as it's clean it's the next outfit she wears. When she wears it to school she makes her teachers rub it all day. No lie.At school. Wearing jeans. That only happened because the day before her BFF wore jeans (she also on wears dresses/skirts/tights) and I made a huge deal about it, so she did actually wear them once. But as soon as we got home they came off "because they hurt her body". It's going to be a long and cold winter....
The back door neighbors promptly got their turkey out the day after Halloween.
This caused much rejoicing!
I did great with my grocery challenge for this week. My goal was $75, which is $25 per person. I ended up with $82 for the week, which does include $6 of tax. Back that off and I was just $1 over which isn't bad considering $10 was for a pack of Lilli's overnight Pullups which will last a couple of weeks. And I needed a ton of produce this week (all organic) which really adds up. So I was really pleased and very impressed, that's the lowest our bill has been in some time. I stuck to the list, and the only things I bought that weren't on the list were strawberries and bananas, which were on a good sale.

A couple of new, good recipes of late:

Asian Peanut Beef & Noodles - this one was really easy and something we all three enjoyed. I think it's the first time I've ever had Catalina dressing and it was really good!

Chicken Spaghetti - Anything Recipegirl makes is going to be good and this was no exception. Nice and creamy (we always sub Brent and Lil's special milk in these recipes) and was also enjoyed by all three of us. I had cooked a whole chicken in the crockpot earlier in the week so I used the leftover chicken in this recipe, which worked out perfectly. Lots of leftovers for all our lunches, too!

Pumpkin Cupcakes - I used some leftover pumpkin puree from another recipe in this baking recipe. They were really moist and soft, and of course the plus with recipes from this website is that they are reduced fat and better for you! I wasn't super crazy about the icing, I think when it comes to icing I enjoy a high fat, high sugar icing, but for being healthier it was good and the pumpkin flavoring went well with it! I baked them during Lilli's naptime today, but let her help me ice and decorate some of them so I think Brent got some cute pictures of that. She loves to help in the kitchen, with dishing, cooking, etc so she had a lot of fun icing and decorating them with candy corns and candy corn pumpkins.