Cooking/Baking day recap Dec. 1, 2009

Beans cooking:


Here's what I planned to do yesterday on my cooking baking day:
~pumpkin chocolate chip muffins
~pumpkin puree for soup/muffins for freezer
~knox blox (fruit juice jigglers)
~oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (if time)
~french bread in bread machine (for dinner)
~Paste Fagioli (for dinner plus leftovers for lunches)
~meat mixture-
#meatballs
#meatloaf
#Taco/Bean mixture for tacos, taco salad, beans & rice, etc.
#Turkey tetrazinni

And well- our phone/internet went out for the day (just came back on!) and I got all that done plus an additional meal(baked spagetti). Here is a photo of all the goodies minus most of the Pasta Fagioli which we ate for dinner last night with salad, homemade french bread and cookies. Yum!

My only major hurdles were lack of recipes (I rely on the internet way too much for recipes!) and cranky kiddos. Potty training goes great most days-but this was not one of them;)

Did you participate and if so, how'd t go?

To Do and then some more to do

Busy day. Daniel is actually going to work today! Never mind he's cleaning the hangar rather than repairing aircraft. And we will probably have company tonight. Company! Our house is to a place where I can actually think of having company over again!! Its one of our favorite things to do- and the one way I can still have some sort of a "ministry". So..here's the to-do list for today (oh and did I mention its cooking/baking day?!?!

Put away laundry
Take out garbage (usually hubby does it but ran out of time)
Bring in pumpkins and get ready for crockpot
Sort gifts tub
thank you notes
clear off and organize paper piles on kitchen table

Cook/Bake!
~pumpkin chocolate chip muffins
~pumpkin puree for soup/muffins for freezer
~knox blox (fruit juice jigglers)
~oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (if time)
~french bread in bread machine (for dinner)
~Paste Fagioli (for dinner plus leftovers for lunches)
~meat mixture-
#meatballs
#meatloaf
#Taco/Bean mixture for tacos, taco salad, beans & rice, etc.
#Turkey tetrazinni (if time)

We'll see how it goes!

My helper:)

Impromptu Cooking/Baking Night

We're heading out of dodge (well the girls anyway) today on the girls' first train ride. So naturally I decided to do some major cooking & baking the night before!

Probably a really bad idea, but after you thaw out a 20lb bird, you gotta do something with it! The results of my cooking &baking are as follows:
9 meal sized portions of turkey
1 crockpot of turkey soup (working on that still) for Daniel
1 loaf half wheat bread
20 pumpkin chocolate chip 1/2 whole wheat muffins

Not bad, eh?

Here is my lovely assistant:

Instead of Baking all day like the rest of the world...

We heated up leftovers and canned soup. And did some laundry.

I really wanted to participate in the cooking/baking day that Money Saving Mom was hosting.

But silly life gets in the way sometimes. Between the flu and potty training an almost 25 month old, I've got my hands full. Three days in a row I've talked about getting to the store to buy M some big girl undies, but it hasn't happened. But all in all, potty training is going well! We've had plenty of accidents (but there are blessings to no carpet in our house!;) but today we've had none so far.

Anyway, I am thinking of doing so freezer cooking next week so hopefully I can still join in the fun albeit a little late!

Friday To-Do List

This week has been a little crazy with finishing up our Wycliffe Equip online course (next week we go to Florida for 2 weeks to do the "onsite" portion!), spilling coffee on our keyboard, and the general chaos of life with 2 under two in an unfinished house!

In an effort to minimize side-tracked syndrome, I am going to post my to-do list for today:
#1: diapers in the wash (yes, I started counting calories and using cloth diapers again in the same week-not such a good idea;) (need to hang them up now)
#2: try to make zucchini bread in the crockpot (will be done cooking @ 2)
#3: hair color re-touch (done!)
#4: Sweep entire house (not such a big job when the house is so tiny:)
#5: start organizing and clipping this past weeks coupons (last in priority on list)
#6: take a walk with the girls!
#7: unpack another box

Guess I knew it was my last shot...

Yesterday I had the urge to cook in bulk and use my last catalina coupons at Safeway. Good thing I did since it looks like I get to hang out in bed until baby comes! Here are the fruits of yesterday's labor-my shopping trip and then my cooking/baking efforts!

Here is my shopping trip-I used a ton of coupons including several that got me some free stuff! I was planning on just using the $22 in catalina coupons from the living well promo and calling it good, but I realized the $10/$50 coupon I got in the mail said nothing about the $50 being after coupons! So I quickly dug out as many coupons as possible to use with my catalina and brought my total down to $7 after coupons and catalinas! Not only that but I got $5 in catalinas back-from the marked down brownie packages and the yoplait yogurts (suprise-didn't know that promo was still on!)


The cashier looked a little annoyed until the end when my total went from $113 to $7! He said good job/nice trip several times:) I was excited to get some things we needed and not just items that had a sale and we already had a ton of it. Such as: brown rice, whole wheat flour, applesauce, lunchmeat (for easy lunches when I can't do much!). The yogurt, hotdogs, tortillaz chips, glade thingy, cheerios were all pretty much free after coupons/discounts! I also now have a $0.10 gas reward to use:)

My baking/cooking efforts:

I made a huge pot of turkey/hamburger/bean chili, 3 pans of turkey/beef meatballs (to make teriyaki meatballs over rice or over pasta), 5 hamburger patties, 1 pan of cornbread and 1 cornbread mix for later and one pan of brownies from the markdowns above.