My personal assistant, who is great at making her smile!
How cute are those feet and perfect for Valentine Day, don't ya think?!?
Baby L and her Mommy
After
Cleaning out
I think everyone, even the tidiest of people we know, have messy messes. For the most part my messes are small piles of magazines, coupons and weekly ad. I love to coupon and it doesn't always get filed away every week so the piles start growing. My husband, very lovingly, calls them 'Gypsy piles' because quite frankly they migrate around our home until they are gone through and filed away.
Another organizing task is the stock pantry. I didn't really see the benefit of 'stockpiling' large amounts of food items until about a year ago. I try and stock atleast a years worth of certain foods especially if they will be free after coupons or almost free. For example: dried pasta, rice, cake mixes, cereal, and juice. All of these items have a long shelf life, sometimes two years and can easy be stored and used for in your stock pantry.
Back to organizing, this weekend I started organizing my pantry/kitchen stock. I have very good intentions of organizing the pantry at the end of every month so older items don't get pushed to the back and forgotten about until after they have expired. I have a pretty good system to organize my food items. I keep a count right on the boxes or cans. I label them with 1/10 (which means that is 1 of 10 cans I have in my stock) I also date my items and pull the earliest expiring items up front so I use them first.
Here is an example of how I date and number my pantry stock:
I know we are all tired when we get home from a hard days work but pick a small drawer or cupboard in your kitchen and follow this simple plan:
1. Empty the drawer or cupboard completely
2. Check dates on everything and through out expired food, also make a donate bag of unexpired items you would like to bring to your local food pantry.
3. Wipe the drawer or cupboard and scrub any dirty spots
4. I organize items by likes:
a. Canned vegs. and canned fruits
b. Quick canned meals for my husband: Soup, canned pastas (I sure don't want him 'rearranging' looking for something after I take the time to organize it my way~)
c. Canned tomatoes, cooking soups, broth
d. Baking supplies
5. Wipe all cans and boxes (you would be surprised how may dirty things are on the outside of your canned green beans) I use Clorox anywhere spray, before I ever put a can or box in my stock pantry I wipe it down so it is clean going in. You will be shocked at how dirty your kitchen towel will be after you wipe everything down.
Note: I also wipe every container that goes into my refrigerator. You will see a huge improvement on how clean your shelves and frig. are if you just make that little extra step and wipe everything clean before you put it away.
6. Now place everything back in. Place the items you use the most at the easiest place in your drawer or cupboard. I place my canned vegs./fruit on the bottom shelf and my husband's 'quick meals' next to it. Next I work my way up to my cooking soups, canned tomatoes and broths, next I replace all the baking items and the top shelf is for the overflow of whatever I have stocked lately.
Every one's needs are different so it may take a few unpacks and reloading of the shelves to decided what arrangement works for you.
NOTE: You can cook dried beans in a crock pot the day before to save some money. I already had the canned beans in my stock pantry from a sale this past Fall. Canned beans are a great staple for your stock pantry. You can find them on sale for as low as .50 cents a can certain times of the year. Fall is a great time because many stores run winter food items on sale.
2 Cans Kidney Bean (rinsed)
2 Cans Pinto Beans (rinsed)
3 to 4 lbs of Ground Beef (no need for anything pricey, the cheap stuff works great)
1 medium yellow onion minced
Tbls spoon olive oil
1 large can 16oz diced tomatoes (I use Muir Glen Organic tomatoes)
4 8oz cans Hunt Tomato sauce
1 can tomato paste
2 packages of Chili seasoning
1 tsp fresh cracked pepper
Brown ground beef and break up any large chucks. Meanwhile, sweat the onions down in the olive oil but do not brown just cook until translucent. Add in all the canned tomatoes and one to two cans of water. Add the two packages of seasoning and pepper. Get that simmering while the ground beef finishes cooking in the other pan. Rinse & drain ground beef and add to tomato/chili mixture. Let simmer for an hour. Serves 12-15
Top with grated sharp cheddar cheese and a dollop of sour cream. We like to serve this with corn chips or homemade croutons. Cost per serving: .66 cents (includes cost of corn chips)
Also Classico my very favorite premade tomato sauce is marked down to $1.84 a jar at Target this week. Folks this is as close as you can get to homemade in my book. There are coupons $1.00 of two jars here: http://www.classico.com/ . BUT wait there are coupons stuck to the side of the jars that say: "Buy two jars of Classico Tomato Sauce get FREE pasta ($1.99 or less)" Be still my heart! Cheap sauce and free pasta to go with it, what a beautiful marriage of coupons to combine in one transaction.
The Healthy Harvest Ronzoni Whole Wheat Pasta was on price cut to $1.30, PERFECT. Grabbed two of those and the light bulb went off, that is the pasta I needed to complete a movie rebate for Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs I just bought the week before.
Her Gammie Anne got her an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas and she loves being able to create taste treats. We went to price the EBO mixes at Target and about died when we saw they were $5.44 each! I mean really, are you kidding me, that is more than a regular Betty Crocker cake mix. I was not going to be defeated by this pricey obstacle so I decided we could (1) make our own recipe for mixes or (2) just use a Jiffy cake mix, Martha White muffin mix or a Betty Crocker cookie mix. And guess what the Betty Crocker pouch mixes work great! You get exactly 8 cookies out of the mix using the EBO cake pan.
My daughter served them last night with warm Carmel sauce drizzled over them and they were Yummo!!!!!
We also found a few recipes on line for making our own mixes and some that make a batch for 12 mixes and will keep of 6 months. Just do a google search for Easy Bake Oven Homemade recipes and you will find the.
Bon Appetit
Anyway my husband has always been a coffee drinker and his influence has finally won me over, for the most part. I don't drink coffee ever day, maybe 3 days a week but it does help when my son decides to be a night owl like last night. We put him in bed at 8:00pm, only after five potty breaks, some water and finding a hot wheel under his bed did he settle down at 11:30pm. And he was up like clockwork at 6:15am.
Who wants a cup of coffee with me?
I was at Kroger this morning and my last stop is the clearance aisle and there they were Starbucks coffee, and I am thinking to myself, how much can they really discount that stuff? It sales for $8.99 a bag, way to steep for me to fork out.
