When pregnant, call in the maid(s)

I am 36 weeks pregnant today! Yep, I've officially hit the ready-to-be-done stage. Can't sleep well, can't move well and am starting to get that ever so pretty pregnancy edema in my hands and feet. But luckily its mild and my BP is still officially in normal/high limits.

So what works for me when 36 weeks pregnant? To call in the maid(s) of course. Somebody has got to do the dishes, sweeping and laundry, right? Here are my trusty maid(s) hard at work while I sip iced tea and put my feet up.





And here's what we do after all that hard work....

Take a nap:)

A REAL tip from me is to involve your little ones in your chores. It may be messy and time consuming at times but it 1) keeps them out of bigger trouble 2) keeps them from whining to do something else and 3) eventually teaches them how to really do the chore! Works for me:)

Best way to start seedlings for a garden?

This week's Works for Me Wednesday is a backwards edition! That means I get to ask you to help me out! Previously I posted some burning pregnancy questions here (I'm 33 weeks today...whooohooo!), which I would love continued input on.

But on a different topic, I would love to know the best way to start seedlings. Online resources you've used, what containers are best, etc. I would like to start a garden this year, but we may be moving and if not, it will have to be a large container garden in our current rental yard which has no garden space. Any thoughts for me?

Popcorn...the best snack

Popcorn is about the best snack ever. Cheap, healthy (if prepared that way) and easy. Plus, all three of us like it. We discovered my 17 month old's affinity for popcorn on accident when we had company over the week before last. I swear she ate her weight in the stuff! After getting over my initial freak out about it being a choking hazard, I decided it was a good thing.


In our opinion, the best way to make it is on the stove-top with our turn crank popcorn popper with canola or olive oil sprayed on lightly and lots of kosher salt. Yum...it works for me!

WFMW is here!

27 Week Pregnancy Update and Sinus Tip

A sinus infection/pain relief tip that works for me when you can't take medicine (like during pregnancy or you just don't have access to meds!) is to utilize a homemade steam tent and to tap your sinus area.

After an almost sleepless night I found those two tricks that offered enough relief to get some sleep. First is the steam bath. Boil water on the stove and remove from heat. Hang your head over the steamy water and cover your head with a towel. Breath deeply for several minutes. The congestion will ease up quite a bit if you are lucky! I did this every couple hours when my sinues were at their worst. I also have TMJ disorder so the pain was compounded--this was a lifesaver. I did this in combination with tapping my sinus area rapidly for 2 minutes at a time (first the temples, then over and under eye area and the sides of your nose). The combo of these two worked for me! I've heard that irrigating the sinus area with 8 oz of water and a tsp. or baking soda/salt works well too.

Picture from Planning Family
Baby girl is at week 27 now! I'm heading into the dreaded third trimester now. Its hard to believe that in 3 or so months I will be holding my new baby! She's about 15 inches long now and over 2 pounds. Lungs can function now and the eyelids start opening at this point. She is kicking all the time!

My midwife apt. yesterday went well. So far, I have just loved the level of care you get from a midwife (even one that's part of an HMO) vs. an OB. She is so reassuring and helpful--and is super encouraging about my prospects of a successful VBAC. I am actually looking forward to this labor, whereas I was scared to death last time (unfortunately with good reason, but I didn't know that at the time:). HB was 150, and I am measuring right at 27 cm, which is the right size for 27 weeks. My blood pressure is still within normal range 120/70 and I've experienced no signs of PIH yet...praise God! Unfortunately it can sneak up at any time, so its just a waiting game to see at this point. My glucose test (to look for gest. diabetes) results come back today.

Jars and Lids: another frugal toy

M discovered my stash of old glass jars the other day. I hate to throw them out but haven't found a way to recycle or reuse them yet since our 4-plex doesn't have recycling. She has spent long periods of time trying on the various lids and putting things in the jar. Its almost an educational toy! :)

Please excuse our pantry area...its the scariest part of the house with daddy's old bike, all our non-perishable food and the laundry:)





More Works for Me Wednesday Here.

Really Good Beans & Rice

Usually when we have beans and rice, I think of it as our "po folks" meal. But last night our humble beans and rice were so good Daniel decided these tasted like "gourmet" beans and rice!

After cooking the pinto beans (doing the pre-soak and all that), I sauteed 1/2 an onion and 2 cloves of garlic in 1 TBS. of canola oil. Here's where the measurements cease, but I am sure you can replicate this to your own taste--I added the beans 3-4 cups I think, a tsp. or more of salt, several "shakes" each of paprika, chili powder, pepper, garlic and onion powder. Continue to stir and heat until well combined. We ate these yummy beans over baked brown rice (using the More with less recipe) and topped it with a little sharp cheddar, sour cream and salsa. We served it with broccoli and not-so attractive whole wheat buttermilk corn bread that was very tasty, just hastily cut:).


M is enjoying her beans and rice and getting better at using a fork!


For more kitchen tips visit Tammy! This post is also part of WFMW at Rocks in my Dryer!

Using up leftover mashed potatoes

Potatoes are coming out of our ears right now-both fresh and instant. They've been so cheap I really couldn't resist:) When making mashed potatoes, especially fresh, I often overestimate the amount we need. In a final act of desperation (and after eating leftover potatoes for 3 or 4 meals in a row) I looked up a quick way to make the mashers taste different. I had some leftover ground beef I wanted to use up as well and this is what some recipe searches along with my mixing magic came up with:

Cheesburger-Mashed Potato Soup

(serve with a light veggie such as a green salad)

2 or so cups of leftover mashed potatoes
1/4 of an onion, chopped
1/2-1 cup ground beef (depending on what you have)
1/2 cup shredded cheddar
2 - 2 1/2 cups milk
1/2 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. pepper
1 TBS parsley or celery salt
1 TBS butter


Directions: In saucepan, sautee onions in the butter. Once starting to get slightly tender, add ground beef. (if ground beef is raw, add at beginning and cook until done) Add rest of ingredients and cook until heated through. *Optional: top with additional shredded cheese.

This is a very thick, chowder-like soup but is so fast and easy! I added a whole onion, which I would not do again because it was too strong.

Other great ways to use up leftover mashed potatoes:

Shepherd's Pie

Mashed potato rolls

10 ways to use up mashed potatoes (some other great ideas!)

Visit Tammy's recipes for more ideas for your kitchen and works for me wednesday for loads of other great ideas!

Orange you glad...

One of my favorite recipes from my favorite cookbook, More with Less is the Whole Wheat Orange Bread. I made a few changes to the recipe when making it yesterday and it turned out wonderfully! This is a dense, slightly sweet healthier quick-bread. This time of year is perfect for making this since you need grated orange peel and oranges and other citrus fruits are generally cheap!

Whole Wheat Orange Bread

(adapted from More with Less)

Makes 1 loaf

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Mix in large bowl:

3 cups whole wheat pastry flour (or combo of other flours)

1/2 cup sugar or honey

1/3 cup apple juice

1-2 TBS. grated citrus fruit peel

2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

Add:

3/4 cup orange juice

1/2 c. milk

1/2 cup oil (I used half applesauce)

1 egg, beaten

Stir until well combined. Pour into greased bread pan. Sprinkle top with 1 tsp sugar and 1/2 tsp cinnamon. Bake 1 hour or until toothpick comes out clean (at 350 degrees).

Another awesome idea for using otherwise useless orange peels comes from the smart and talented AllyJo! She shows how to make your home smell oh-so-good by making potporri or a stovetop fragrance with your orange peels!

Tammy's kitchen tip from a few weeks ago demonstrated a great idea for using orange peels to turn a stinky garbage disposal into sweet smelling citrusy goodness!

Un-Sticking Labels from Jars and Baby Soup

I love homemade gifts and I love to make them. Unfortunately my talent and craftiness levels are quite low. But jar mix gifts I can do. The decorating of the the jars is still a work in progress, but that's coming along. The only problem is that jar mixes cease to be economical if you have to buy containers to put them in.

For a few months I have been saving jars from pasta sauce etc. but now I have jars with gooey labels on them...none too pretty for gift-giving. After much googling I have found a few tips that get some stubborn label goo off jars.

1. Soak overnight in HOT soapy water. I think this one is best to do right off the bat. Washing the jars and getting part of the label off and then trying this offers less stellar results.

2. Peanut butter and a scrubby pad (like steel wool or the like). and SCRUB!!

3. Hair dryer and a knife. But word to the wise...these are both weapons in the wrong hands:)

4. Goo Gone (from D!)

These work for me! Did I forget some?

Oh and since you are all looking for my recipe for baby soup, here she...um it, is:

Free Benefiber at Walgreen's this week!

If you want a free (or almost free if you don't have coupons) way to sneak more fiber into your diet, go to your local Walgreen's this week to stock up on drinkable Benefiber through Saturday!

Here's how it works:


Buy three(3) 16-count Kiwi Strawberry Benefiber drink mix ($7.99 each), find the Easy Saver coupon for $5 off in your EasySaver book (you only need one, just hand it over after all three Benefiber have scanned), then if you have them, use three $2 off manufacturer coupons. This will make your purchase $2.97 out of pocket, BUT you will receive an $8 Register Reward (good on your next purchase of anything at Walgreen's)! Just don't use it to buy more Benefiber...it won't give you another RR.

*The best order to give the clerk your coupons so the register doesn't get all confused:) is: Register rewards (if you have them), manu coupons, then Walgreen's coupons. Remember to always have the same number of coupons as items (and the above all count towards your total!) so if you need to add a pencil or something, have that handy.*

I have done this without the manufacturer coupons (using up some RR I already had) and it worked great! Even without the manufacturer coupons this ends up being less than $1 out of pocket after Register Rewards.

I am drinking some right now and it tastes a little like Crystal Light...make sure to put it in a bottle and shake so that there aren't any unmixed bits:) This is a great way to get more fiber in your diet for free!

Making Casseroles Cheaper and Healthier

Since the weather has turned chilly and I've turned, well, pregnant...I've been craving comfort food, especially casseroles. The only problem (well 2 to be exact) is that casseroles can often be more expensive than some of our regular meals and way less healthy! Both problems typically stem from several cans of expensive, none-too-healthy cream soup called for in most casserole recipes.

My solution: make my own recipe for white sauce to use in place of each can of white sauce! For the most part, it works wonderfully.

Here are the directions, super simple.

Melt 2 TBS Butter/Margarine in hot fry pan or griddle.
When fully melted, mix in 2 TBS flour (I use whole wheat or ww pastry and it works fine, just changes the color of the finished product) until smooth.
Immediately add 2 or so cups milk and continue to stir (with wisk if possible) until mixture thickens. Add salt/pepper to taste. This makes the equivalent of 1 can of cream of _____soup.

If you really need the flavor of the particular can of soup (cream of chicken for example) you can do one of two things: either use one can and one subs. of white sauce or add some bouillon in with the milk.

I use the white sauce with some of our favorite recipes such as (with mods of course):

Chicken Tortilla Casserole (recipe to come)
Tetrazinni
Tuna Noodle Casserole

Another couple tricks I use for increasing the health and financial value of the casserole are making my own bread crumbs from stale/leftover bread for the topping and adding vegetable puree or shreds to the binder. Since we have so much pumpkin right now, I have been adding that to recipes like Shepherd's pie.

Does your family enjoy casseroles? What are your favorites?

Pantry Storage: Using What You Have

When I started to incorporate coupons in my bargain shopping strategy (maybe a year ago????) I started creating a stockpile. Because of my eclectic brand of menu planning, I like to have extra on hand to work with when choosing meals for the week. Plus I have a husband who has the dream metabolism, so I like to have snack foods and such on hand (if they are dirt cheap).

Since as many of you also know, I am cheap. I would almost never run out and buy some storage solution if I could avoid it. Enter handy husband and an under-utilized shelf that was sitting outside. Daniel put the metal shelf on top of our existing shelving in the pantry and used some heavy duty string attached to screws he secured into the wall to keep the shelving from tipping.
Pantry storage using what I already have works for me!

And, especially for the gramies and grampas that read this, here is the cheesy grin:)

Sourdough Pancakes with Fruity Topping

Today's breakfast was great on two levels: 1) most of the prep was done in 5 minutes the night before, and 2) it was delicious and healthy! I got this recipe from Kimi at the Nourishing Gourmet


These pictures do not do these pancakes justice. They are light but filling and are topped with fresh peaches and a little sugar. So good! Daniel and M gave them two thumbs up as well:)

Camera Questions

Since Works for Me Wednesday is BackWards Edition, I thought I would take advantage of the opportunity to get some advice on our camera quandry. My first question is: can this camera be saved?! It is an Olympus Camedia digital C-5050 ZOOM and has had a continually increasing problem with thinking its card cover is open. It beeps and won't allow us to take pictures after each picture taken(for a few seconds). It started out doing that every so often, but now does it every picture. It helps a little when we hold down the card cover (which is not in fact open!) but even doing that doesn't fix it. Often the camera will go through the motion of taking a picture (often several in a row) and even show the pic on the screen, but when you go back and look, it is gone. Any ideas what can be done for this confused camera? Also, it has these problems even with different memory cards.


Image from Olympus Archives

My second question is for if the camera is beyond saving: what camera do you recommend? We would be looking in the under $200 range, and are looking for something that is straightforward to use (don't need lots of bells and whistles), good quality and where to find great deals! Any ideas?!?

Thanks in advance!

Week In Beans: Day 4 (Beans on...Pizza???)

On Friday I ran out of time in the quest to have beans every day for a week. Or so I thought. Our normal Friday night tradition of homemade pizza is quick and easy, so I decided to scrap the beans and just do the pizza.

But all hope was not lost! A tupperware container of black beans and corn from a previous meal provided an unusual but good topping for our pizza! I used BBQ sauce for the base and it turned into a southwestern type pizza that we both enjoyed. It provided good leftovers for our lunch while hiking the next day!

Day 3 can be found here

Day 2 is here

Day 1 here:)

And because Chickpeas are the rockstar of all legumes (Isa said that in Vegan with a Vengeance and I agree!), here is her Chickpea Broccoli Casserole..yum!

What a starchy meal. We don't typically eat this many high-carb foods together, but I ran out of time and the potatoes were a leftover than needed to be used up.

Cute hair, me?

For a long time I have wanted to try this hairstyle, but I shower in the morning so I didn't want to take the trouble to change my routine. Recently baby girl's routine needed some changing (2 months of no sleeping through the night will do that to a person!) so we both started bathing at night. Although this tutorial has you use a different kind of roller, I thought I would try it with what I had rather than wait for the perfect set of circumstances.

Here I am first thing in the morning after sleeping with damp hair rolled up in foam rollers. Isn't my husband a lucky man;)? Heeeeeeeheee.

Anyway, what happens is after you take your hair out of the rollers, you shake your hair out a bit and spray with hairspray. Then (here's another part I wasn't totally prepared for) pin up with large bobby pins. Start with a large anchor piece in the back and then pin everything else toward the back piece by piece.
I used small bobby pins, hence the clip you see in the back (below).

Please excuse the papers on the floor in the background. My daughter's (9 1/2 months) current favorite activity is finding books/papers on shelves and pulling them all off as fast as she possibly can.

Isn't that cute? I don't usually have cute hair (maybe it has something to do with the fact that I can only stand to spend 30 seconds on my hair every morning??)

All told this took about 10 minutes while reading at night to roll, then 10 more minutes to pin in the morning. Not too bad, but probably not an everyday do for me;)

Keeping My Kitchen Helper Occupied

Now that baby M is pulling herself up onto anything and everything I have to make sure she is very close by when I work in the kitchen. The easist way is to involve her in playing with something that is not a regular toy, such as these bowls. It works for me! Yesterday she crawled all the way into a cupboard where we keep all the small appliances. I wish I had taken a picture of her--sitting in the cupboard, all pleased with herself;)




I have also learned to utilize the good ole pack n' play. I so want to be a whole-hearted attachment-parenting type mama (wearing my baby around all day etc) but it just hasn't worked for this kiddo! She craves independence (should I be worried?;) but I have found that the pack n' play solves this dilemma. It will give her enough of a boundary while allowing her plenty of fun things to do that she will be content for 20-30 minutes at a stretch sometimes! If she has the full run of the downstairs all the time I think she gets overwhelmed with what to do. Or worse she will get into things she is not allowed to.

Makeup Mix-Up and Microwave Brownies

What works for me this week doesn't always work the next, but here's what is working this week:

Mixing foundation (make-up) together to get the right shade. I got a bunch of free make-up from Jane earlier this year, but the colors aren't quite right all the time. Right now I put a little of the regular lighter colored foundation and mix with a little of the slightly darker "almost foundation" that has a higher SPF and the color is almost perfect!

The Microwave Brownies we made two days ago were still great last night! They definitely work for a chocolate craving in a pinch, when you don't want to blow your whole diet:)

Reusable Muffin Cups

Muffins are a breakast favorite around our home. They are quick to mix up and are a versatile (especially if you follow the Tightwad Gazette formula!) way to use up leftover bits and pieces of fruits, nuts, grains and more. My only problem is that I am always running out of muffin cups! I haven't found a source that is cheaper than $1.00/package around here, except for those after holiday sales when I can occasionally find some marked down. A few weeks ago I made it to a local rummage sale and found reusable Crate & Barrel muffin cups for $3! I was a little skeptical about how they might work, but they are great! I haven't had to grease them and they are fairly easy to clean. They are made of silicone and don't even need to go into a muffin tin if you don't have one. I'll post a pic later after I get some batteries in my camera. Tammy's Recipes has some great kitchen tips this week along with excellent muffin recipes!

Reusing Disposable Cups

Don't get me wrong, I love to go out for coffee (or pretty much anything). But due to budget constraints that is not usually an option. Besides-have you noticed that when you go out frequently it takes some of the fun out of it? It becomes such a treat when I go out once every so often instead.

One of the things that I enjoy particularly about going out to my favorite coffee place is the cup. I don't know what it is, but I love using their disposable cups way more than I like using my regular ones at home. So when I am craving the "going out" experience it helps me to put a smoothie (even a green one...pictured above) into a recycled disposable coffee cup. And for some reason, it just tastes better! I know, a little weird. But it works for me!

I am hoping that no one tells me these cups are the kind that leach chemicals out, then what will I do?;)