For a reminder of what I am doing this month, read this post.
Psalm 18:1
I love you, Lord; you are my strength.
For some reason, VOTD has not posted a new verse of the day for today, so I searched “March 31, 2009 verse of the day” and this one came up, from www.air1.com. Not where I would have searched for a verse of the day, but it will do.
This is simplicity in a verse. I do love my Saviour, and He is my strength. The key here is acknowledging day in, day out, that He is my strength and He alone. Without Him I am nothing, and I can accomplish nothing. I have tried this path in the past, and it leads to destruction and disappointment. If I hold onto my love for Him, and continue to get to know Him each day, this strength can truly be felt in my life. It is similar (although far greater) to my relationship with Mike. I love him, and he is a great help to me. He can help lift me up when I fall down and is always a shoulder I can cry on. When I work towards better knowing and understanding my husband, I love him more and am more accepting of the strength he offers to me. Take this earthly relationship and multiply it by thousands upon thousands, and this is what God offers us – unconditional love, a constant listening ear, forgiveness from all our sins, eternal life with Him.
Today, I felt God’s strength in tangible ways – patience with my children (not at each moment, but better than most days), motivation to work in my home. I made caramelized onions and vegetable soup, using all the produce I spent so much money on to make nourishing and tasty things for my family to eat. The vegetable soup is my effort to feed the kids veggies without them balking at the plate. I pureed it and they haven’t had it like that yet, so we’ll see if it works. Erik did have some that I put through the hand mill and he seemed to enjoy it.
Tomorrow I have the day off, or mostly, from my oldest children. I’m running errands in the morning while they all stay with my friend, and then I’ll have lunch with them and take Erik home with me to get some house work done. I’m trying to do some work now so that I can get more accomplished tomorrow, but it’s hard to know where to start. At the very least, I need to get laundry done today, even if I have to do it after Mike gets home.
Anyway, I know that all this will get done and it will be easier to do if I don’t think of it as too trivial to ask God to help me. He cares about my home life and my family and can help me even in this thing that I hate doing – cleaning. 
Filed under: Food Blogs | Tags: better homes and gardens, bread recipes, cookbooks
- The book…it is MINE!!
I went to the library on Saturday on an simple mission – return books, pay fines, possibly get a few new movies and books. I turned in my books on CD, picked out two books and four movies and paid my eight dollars in fines (oops..four movies two days late adds up really fast). As I was leaving, I looked at the area near the door where they have free books – either donated books that can’t be put on the shelf or withdrawn books that are somewhat damaged. The first thing that caught my eye was this book. I grabbed it on a whim, thinking that at the very least, it would give me a few good bread recipes in one place, rather than using the Internet or looking in three different cook books that I already own. When I got into the van and started looking at it (don’t worry, I wasn’t driving), I was blown away. This is seriously an awesome cook book! Not only are there basic white and whole wheat bread recipes, but a whole section on sourdough starter and its uses – bread – obviously – but also pancakes, coffee cake, rolls, biscuits, muffins and English muffins. And then it got even better – pretzel, bagel and donut recipes. And not just one recipe for each, but many variations. There is also a whole section on quick breads – coffee cakes, sweet rolls, muffins, biscuits, corn bread, pancakes, waffles, popovers….it’s an aspiring bakers dream book! Anyway, I thought I would share my find with you. It is an older book – published in 1979 – but not so old that it has outdated recipes with lots of lard or other weird ingredients (or perhaps more importantly, ingredients that are unfriendly to vegetarians). And it is readily available on amazon: here - and not even expensive, but the point is, I didn’t know about it before and I got it for FREE. Free is good.
Filed under: Food Blogs, Kiddos, Money, The H Word | Tags: books on CD, cleaning, eating out, free writing, kids, potlucks, pregnancy test
This is going to become an exercise in free writing, because while I had something very witty to write earlier today, I have forgotten it entirely. However, I will start out with a point. This is what I’ve been up to:
I have learned, in the last few weeks, that listening to books on CD helps me to get laundry and housework done without realizing that I’m working. Really, I can do an hour of work and at the end of it, I only really remember the story line on the book. I have done something like this in the past, but it has never been quite this successful. I was using the strategy of listening to music and sometimes talk radio on my MP3 player while doing laundry and other things, but I really do think this works better. Also, I think my library has eBooks that can be downloaded for free, so I may try this and then I can put on some headphones and work all over the house rather than being stuck in one place. Because of this strategy, I have been keeping up on my laundry and on Friday, I managed to clean out one whole corner of my living room – this is progress, even if it seems like only a small step.
I spent nearly a week thinking I was pregnant – being more or less convinced that I was – until I took a test and it was negative. Don’t tell Mike that, though. He requested that if I take a test and it comes back negative, I not tell him, because he just cannot bear the thought of wasting money on negative pregnancy tests. I have a history of negative results at various times, and we had previously agreed that I wouldn’t take a test until I talked to him about it, but I decided that I might like to surprise him next time and I had to find out if that was okay. He said he didn’t mind if I didn’t tell him I was taking a test, but to please not tell him if it was negative. He blames it on being Mennonite, my Grandpa would say it’s because he’s Scottish. It has one explanation unrelated to ethnicity – he’s cheap. It’s okay – he knows this. It’s not offensive to him to be accused of thrift. For the record, I bought the cheapest test at Wal Mart. It was five dollars. My mom said that my peace of mind is worth five bucks, and I agree.
There is more, but now I’ll talk about what’s going on right now.
I gave the kids a choice tonight. Once Erik was in bed, they could either keep watching their movie or they could go to bed. Elias picked bed (seriously! what a great kid!) and Jenny is finishing the movie. It is past her bedtime, but this just means that she may sleep in later than eight o’clock tomorrow morning. Please, oh please.
And as usual when I write, I have been interuppted. Jenny is in bed now, but I imagine I’ll have to go in there at least once before they actually go to sleep. It’s usually something amazingly important that they need – Jenny tosses her blankets off and needs “covered up”, as she puts it; Elias needs a kiss – we don’t mind this one so much, it is awfully cute; Jenny needs to blow her nose and has misplaced the handkerchief that is usually under her pillow. It is usually found the next day under her pillow, but I guess in the dark she just can’t figure that out.
Mike is playing two back to back hockey games tonight. In different towns. Ah, the life of a hockey wife. His first game was at 8:20, which means that it’s over by now and he’s probably gathering his things, taking off half of his equipment and driving ten minutes to get to his next game, which starts at 9:45. I am so glad I stayed at home. Not that I wouldn’t love to watch his games – I just really don’t want to do it with three kids tagging along.
Tomorrow is our English Corner potluck. With any luck (haha), there will be lots of Asian food carefully made by all those wonderful Asian students we have in English Corner right now. And if I did my job right, I will have convinced Vivianna, our Colombian student, to bring something authentically Colombian. I was all prepared to make Vietnamese salad rolls - a time consuming venture, but well worth it – but when I went grocery shopping, I couldn’t find any mint. If I had more time, this would not have been a real problem – I would have just gone to another grocery store – but I had one shot at getting my ingredients and that was tonight, before Mike had to go to his game. So, after some hemming and hawing, I decided on potato soup. Not exotic, but incredibly delicious and very fattening (the way I make it anyway..it’s not something we eat often). I also bought two boxes of couscous and two bags of Edamame, thinking I may make a few side dishes to bring along as well. The invitations say to bring a main dish, appetizer or dessert, but I generally bring one or more of each. After all, I make the invitations, and I am also aware that many of those attending are poor college students and, strapped for time, will just pick something up from Price Smart on the way to the potluck. So I try to make enough to feed a good deal of them in case there isn’t much to choose from. It doesn’t hurt that I LOVE to cook.
Oh, yeah, here’s another thing I’ve learned recently. If I keep in mind that I will always be able to go out to eat on Sundays after church, it makes it easy to skip going out during the week. We nearly got pizza twice this week, but me being Scottish and all (heehee), I held on and made supper at home. And then, lo and behold, Mike’s parents bought our lunch today so we didn’t spend any money on going out the whole week! Wow! This is amazing! But seriously, it is a step in the right direction as we were eating out more than is healthy for our bodies or our bank account. I decided one Sunday afternoon, after a shared meal at A&W with the whole family, that I enjoyed eating out after church, even felt that it was something of a tradition I wanted to keep – for now, anyway, and that it was worth skipping meals out the rest of the week for that one treat on Sundays.
Well, I’m starting to get dizzy watching the words appear on the screen (I know – I could never do this for a living ). I think I’d better stop while I’m ahead, or I might stop making any sense at all and just start talking about how strange it is that I get dizzy when I write and feel as though my hands are miles away from my body….oops, there I go.
Time to go do something productive. Like build houses on the Sims. 
I came home hungry tonight and against my better judgement began preparing something to eat. We stopped for chili at Wendy’s for Mike on the way home, so I thought it was only fair that my poor belly get something as well. My first thought was toad in the hole (fried piece of bread + egg in the middle with slightly runny yoke + lots of butter), but then I realized that the avacado on my counter really needed to be eaten today if I wanted to avoid brown spots and mushiness. So I decided to have an avacado sandwich on fried bread. Buttered both sides of two pieces of bread, fried until crisp, slapped on the avacado, added a squeeze of fresh lemon juice and some sea salt and dug in. It’s good, but suddenly a better idea popped into my head – something I vow to make sometime in the near future (or at least when I happen to have avacado in my house). I have a love of biscuits and gravy. Well, homemade by me, anyway, since I’m a vegetarian. I just use a veggie sausage and make a basic white gravy and season it well. I also love fried eggs. So, here’s the plan. Two pieces of fried bread, one avacado, one fried egg over medium, one good helping of vegetarian sausage gravy poured over the top of it all. Oh, artery clogging goodness, how I wish you were mine right now.
I’ll let you know when I get around to making this one.
Okay, I’ve thought it over and I think it’s a very good idea to take a break from blog reading. So, for one month (yipes!), I won’t read craft or food blogs. Taking a whole month off from the internet is a bit extreme for me (after all, I wouldn’t be able to blog if I did that), but I can at least use the time I’ve been spending reading blogs to finish some projects and do some cleaning and organizing. I’ll try to keep you up to date on my progress. My other goal is to finish at least some of the on the go projects before I start new ones. I broke that rule last night when I started knitting something, but I needed something to do with my hands that didn’t require much attention because we were watching a movie. Also, I have a plan for this knitting and it’s not a huge project.
Oh, another update – friend three didn’t make it to Monday’s secret Mom’s Meeting, so I can’t investigate what they’re doing yet. 
Maybe next week. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that post is here.
This is actually a borrowed recipe from allrecipes.com that I tweaked enough to call it my own (that’s my opinion anyway).
This is a basic muffin, so you can do berries, chocolate chips, raisins, etc. for the filling and you’ll turn out a good batch of muffins (as long as you don’t do anything silly, like over-mixing or over-baking).
1 cup whole wheat flour (I used bread flour) 1 egg
1 cup unbleached all purpose flour 1/2 cup milk
3 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 cup yogurt (plain or flavoured)
1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup unsweetened applesauce
3/4 cup white sugar
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (205 degrees C).
Stir together flours, baking powder, salt and sugar in a large bowl. Make a well in the center of the dry mix. In a small bowl, beat egg and stir in milk, yogurt and applesauce. Pour wet ingredients into well in dry mixture and mix quickly with a fork until moistened – do not beat and do not overmix – the batter will still be lumpy. Fold in filling of your choice – 1 to 1 1/2 cup berries, chocolate chips, raisins, nuts, etc. and pour into paper lined muffin pan. For small muffins, fill halfway, for larger, fill two-thirds.
For an added bit of sweetness, sprinkle topping over muffins:
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
2 tablespoons cold butter
Mix brown sugar and cinnamon, cut in butter with pastry cutter or fork and knife until crumbly.
Bake in preheated oven for 20 minutes or until golden (my oven actually did them just right in 18 minutes, but every oven is different, so my advice is to keep an eye on them until they are dry in the center and golden on the edges).
Try these and enjoy!!
Filed under: Food Blogs, Home Sweet Home, Kiddos, Mi familia, The H Word | Tags: Food Blogs, housecleaning
One project is officially half finished. I am daring to say that even though I know that a good deal of the work I just did may be undone soon enough. Jenny helped me clean her room today. Jenny helped, Elias did the opposite and I tried to give directions that made sense to them. Giving Jenny a specific task seemed to help – first I had her bring me all the books. This saved me from walking around bent over for five minutes gathering them up. It took her about ten to do it, but I got to sit in one place and keep Elias from tearing them off the bookcase. Then I had her bring me other small toys and all the blocks…just one thing at a time until it was cleaned up. I put a lot of the small things up too high for them to reach because it gets ridiculous with those things floating around the house. I kept a small number of stuffed animals in a container on the floor, but otherwise, all of those are up or packed away. Blocks, little people and other toy sets I left where they can get to them.
I still have actual cleaning to do – sweeping up and such – and the closet and top of the bunk bed to finish, but those things can’t be done while I’m alone with the kids (unless I put them both in the playpen and tried to do it while they were still happy). I’m now going to try to talk Mike into taking them somewhere in the next few weeks – just a few hours away so that I can take care of a few things before exhaustion sets in. It seems that by the time they go down for their nap, I’m too tired to do much of anything. I am getting pretty pregnant, I guess, so at least I have a good excuse.
As for the food obsession…nothing has gotten any better there. I’m not surprised. I think it’s in my blood.
Filed under: Food Blogs, The H Word, The Interweb | Tags: cleaning, Food Blogs
While I have been devoting myself to weekly updates on my third pregnancy, today I felt the need to write and for once, it had nothing to do with being pregnant. So I thought that this would be a better place for it to land.
I have two subjects: food and housecleaning. For a messy housewife, these things are often connected by need, but lately, they have just set themselves against each other in a bitter feud. Okay, I’m getting a little overly dramatic now – moving on.
I’ll start by saying that my food obsession (yes, I know, you know about that already) is interfering with my need to clean. And when I say “need to clean” I don’t mean that I crave cleaning…I mean that my house needs to be cleaned, no matter how reluctant I am to do it. My food obsession has found its satisfaction in reading restaurant reviews on various blogs. Some of these are restaurants that I may actually get to eat at someday (i.e. those in Seattle), but most are places that are not on my list of desired destinations (Delaware, Philadelphia, etc). If anything, these blogs just make me want to eat better food than I’m eating already, and unfortunately, prove to me yet again that the restaurants in this town suck. If I wanted to write restaurant reviews for Fort St. John, I’d have something to do for a few months – until the ten or so restaurants worth eating at ran out. Then I could pretend to be “cool” by writing reviews on the breakfast at A&W or the late night service at Humpty’s (for you Americans..Humpty’s is like Denny’s..but sort of cheaper and with a better menu).
Alas, I’m confined to my little town (that I happen to love, actually) and have to be content with living vicariously through a number of foodies who don’t know or care who I am.
The latest gem in my collection of food blogs is Mac & Cheese – the girl who is writing from Delaware and Philadelphia. She’s a vegetarian, which is why this makes it so great reading her reviews. She also has recipes, but I haven’t gotten to them yet. I was previously in the habit of randomly selecting entries to read when one looked good, but then I found that I was forgetting which ones I had read – so now I do it by date or restaurant/recipe name, depending on the blog.
Some of the blogs I’ve been reading are interesting, but I would never try the things they are eating or making. For instance, over at The GastroGnome, Naomi recently made duck prosciutto. That just doesn’t appeal to me at all. My dirty little secret (shh) is that occasionally poultry of some kind sounds okay, but the truth of the matter is that every time I’ve attempted to re-introduce it to my diet, I just haven’t been impressed enough. I’d rather eat fish any day. However, duck, rabbit, veal, beef, pork, etc. don’t appeal to me at all, and I don’t expect them to anytime soon. Even with the raving reviews that some of these dishes get, I can’t imagine sinking my teeth into Ethiopian raw ground beef (kitfo) or bone marrow. Bleck.
Anyway, finding a vegetarian foodie is terrific…but it won’t be long and my obsession will have lead me to reading all of her entries, at which time I will, with a great deal of hope, check back each day to see if there is anything new, only to waste more time because often, there are no new entries on food blogs for a week or so.
So, as for the rest of it, I have three projects – no wait, four – in my house that need to be completed, preferably before the baby is born. One: the living room. This isn’t even such a huge task, although the entry way is going to need some serious sweeping up and mopping to look like actual floor surface again. The living room has been slowly getting better, but only because I got rid of a few things and finally moved some bins to the shed (or rather, had Mike move them for me). At this point, there are some various things that need to be picked up and put away – kids clothes, winter clothes, shoes that don’t fit anymore, blankets, books, etc – and a whole lot of sweeping or vacuuming. I tend to enjoy sweeping better, but it is a bit back breaking when you have a whole room to do and it’s as bad as mine is. The reason it doesn’t get done more often is because my children have decided that things look better on the floor than where they belong. Pillows, blankets, toys, books, mail, clothes, etc. all end up there, where they collect dust and dirt and crumbs. One of the goals I have in cleaning my house is organizing it as well and making it less likely that the kids things will be left all over the place every day. So far, my kitchen cleaning is sticking. All I have to do is keep up on sweeping the floor when it needs it and making sure to wipe up spills when they happen. Keeping toys out of the kitchen is another part of it, but at least Jenny can be told to take things back out as soon as she brings them in. Elias may understand, but it doesn’t mean that he learns from it.
Okay, so I went off track a little bit there. My second project is my laundry room. It’s ridiculous. It’s gotten to the point where I can barely walk into it, and the kicker it is also the furnace/hot water tank room and the hallway to the back door. We have a baby gate between the hallway and laundry room because there is no way I would want my children going in there. Who knows what they might eat or step on. At the moment, my mental image of this room includes at least a dozen pop bottles that Mike has so graciously thrown into it, various items of clothing that are either dirty or need to be repacked in the shed somewhere, a diaper pail that is currently not being used, my tool box, with contents spilling out, various bags and boxes and loose items for recycling and some shelving on the floor that hasn’t been put up yet (well, obviously). All that in a room with floor space measuring approximately four feet wide by eleven feet long. My dad put up a shelf, but it serves now to hold paint that we haven’t used yet, rather than it’s original purpose of holding some of the cleaning supplies and tools stored in this room. It needs serious work and is possibly the most daunting of the projects I have set out. Unfortunately, you also can’t avoid seeing it if you’re walking down the hall, so it should be the second room on my list.
As for three and four – I’m not yet sure which I ought to tackle first, although our bedroom is certainly in greater need of cleaning than the kids’ room. The thing is, if I have people over with kids, they will inevitably play in the kids’ room, which means that it gets seen and used more often and should be safe and clean for that reason. Our bedroom is really bad – hasn’t been vacuumed in who knows how long, because I haven’t been able to see the floor for that long. Again, lots of things that need to be washed or taken to the shed.
It is at times quite daunting to think about the remaining work to be done, but then I can be thankful for the size of my house that I don’t have more to do. This is one time when having a small home pays off. The downside is that we have no where to put so much of the junk that’s making a mess, and if we had a little more room (a basement, perhaps), we would have that available. I can also look forward to getting these projects done because I have managed to clean my kitchen and bathroom quite thoroughly (okay, except for my desk) and am proud of them. I still don’t want people coming over because the first thing they see is the living room, but at least if they glance in, they might notice the clean kitchen counters and the lack of dirty dishes scattered around. If they had to use the bathroom, they would be using a much cleaner bathroom than the one that existed a few weeks ago.
Well, I’ve carried on long enough to waste a good deal of time that could have been used to clean my living room. I’ve also satisfied my need to write, so I think I can end it there. Until the next time I fool you into reading something I wrote - good day.
Filed under: Art, Food Blogs, Life, in general, The H Word | Tags: crafts, Food Blogs, organizing, random facts, seven things
I wasn’t tagged (I wanted to be, but it just didn’t happen) so I took the advice of the author of The Rotund and decided to do it just because I felt like doing it.
Seven Random Facts about me
1. I may have a messy house, but my closet is organized by type of article of clothing and by colour in rainbow order. Sleeveless first, short sleeve t-shirts, short sleeve dressy t-shirts, long sleeve shirts, long sleeve button ups, sweaters, shorts skirts, long skirts.
2. I have an awful habit of starting craft projects and not finishing them. I started a scarf and it took me over a year to finish it because I put it away for six months or something. I started a blanket for someone last spring (maybe as early as February) and quit around May. I’m just now taking it up again to finish it (hopefully).
3. My crafting habits come and go in regular rhythm. For instance, in the fall, I am usually in the mood to knit, but that only lasts until just after Christmas most years. Spring is sewing, summer is painting, with a number of smaller projects interspersed amongst those. Card making and cross stitching are two things I would like to do better, but feel I don’t have the time for.
4. I hate the word blog and I hate when people on the internet do not use proper grammar and spelling (luv u 2, for instance YUCK).
5. I would like to write a book, but I get so fixated on what the topic or theme would be that I never get any further than the first chapter (if I get that far).
6. I have a major food fixation. When people talk about their vacations, all I really want to hear about is what they ate. When I talk about going to exotic places, it usually has a lot to do with the food. I am put off by the idea of going to certain places (Germany, England, Russia) because the food doesn’t appeal to me (or is too meat based). I don’t think of myself as an overeater (generally, I’m not) but good food lures me in and makes me feel so utterly satisfied. Maybe this means I could have been a chef (that’s the positive take on it, anyway….staying away from gluttony and the like).
7. I genuinely like Wal Mart. Some nights when I need a break from my kids, I go to Wal Mart and take my time. I look at the fish, check out the women’s and kid’s clothing sections, see if there is anything cheap in the fabric and craft department, browse the food aisles to see if there is anything we could have for supper. I’m not so happy when the aisles are blocked off because of stock sitting all over the store, but aside from that, I find it relaxing.
So if you read this and you haven’t done it and you feel like doing it, go do it. It’s fun (and sort of a challenge, as it’s best to use things that most people wouldn’t know about you).
Happy Pondering!
Filed under: Food Blogs, Happiness, Home Sweet Home, Life, in general, Money
Today I made tropical coconut black bean soup. It is a soup that has to be put together and then pureed in a blender, which I generally do not have a problem doing. However, something to do with the heat of the liquid, or just having too much liquid caused the hot soup to spew forth from the blender just as I turned it on. Twice. You’d think I would have learned the first time to come up with another way of doing it so that I wouldn’t have to clean up coconut milk and black bean skins again. But the second batch (all that wouldn’t fit in the first time) did the same thing. I had just cleaned up the mess from the first burst when I had to do it all over again. The soup was good, though.
We did really well for quite some time..not going out to eat and only eating things at home that were made (mostly) from scratch. We had a week or two of reverting back to the old ways, but we’re committed again to sticking it out and not spending so much money on restaurants. Think about it: the average meal at a sit-down restaurant costs us $30, since we now have to get Jenny a kids meal if we want to keep her happy. Considering that I’ve had far better food made at home than in restaurants, the meals we eat often could be worth (in taste value) more than what our average eat-out meal costs us. And yet we spend so little on the things to make the best of these meals. Veggie ground round (a very often used staple food in our house) runs a little under $2 per pound at the Wholesale store - each package actually has the equivalent of 1 1/3 lbs of ground beef. Good for tacos, black beans, hamburger and rice, chili, meatloaf…almost anything you can make with gound beef can be made with Yves Veggie Ground Round. Rice: I bought a bag of brown rice yesterday that will last us for three to five meals for under $2. I used to buy canned beans at about $1.79 a can, which was enough for one meal. Now I can spend $3 and get enough black beans or lentils to last me for a month. Produce can run up the bill if I get things out of season, but I try to be in a habit of buying things when they’re cheap. Tomatoes on the vine, cauliflower, broccoli, lettuce, spinach, and onions are common fresh produce picks for us, and for a reasonable amount of them, I might spend $10-$20 and use them for a total of six different meals. Frozen vegetables run a little more per bag, but I really only buy peas now, to be used in fried rice and as the ocassional side dish. Pasta: by buying at Wal Mart, I save money. I can get a box of whole wheat pasta (which is enough for part of one meal) for under $1.50. For baked spaghetti, a family favorite, I need one package of ground round ($2), one and a half boxes of whole wheat spaghetti ($2.25) and around a quarter of a bag of shredded Italian mix cheese (which I buy in two packs for about $13, making the amount needed for this dish worth about $1.75). Throw some peas, broccoli, cauliflower or a salad onto the plate and you have a complete meal for under $10. Food for the ENTIRE family for a third of what we spend in a restaurant. Not too shabby.
When the math is done like that, it makes me wonder why we ever bother going out. And then I remember that sometimes I just don’t feel like cooking or can’t think ahead enough to decide what to make. I don’t think there is anything wrong with going out, but I would like to cut down again on how often we do it. I’d rather take the time and money to get a babysitter for the kids and use our out-to-eat-nights as date-nights instead. Not only do we get some alone time, but the meal is often cheaper without worrying over kids meals.
The real trick is planning. Plan before you shop by paying attention to which stores are the cheapest for which items, who is having a sale, whether you need what’s on sale or not and what you’re close to running out of. Plan while you shop by sticking to your list but also paying attention to deals you didn’t know about before (canned soup for emergencies on sale for 50 cents a can is hard to pass up). Plan whole meals by deciding what you’ll need for just one meal – vegetable, rice/pasta/etc., protein. If you’re having people over, remember this in advance instead of going super shopping the day before and paying more than you ought to (I’m just learning this one). Plan when you get home by making lists of what you have and what can be made from it. Plan by doing some amount of food prep when you buy things. I have started buying onions and mincing them in the food processor, then freezing them so that I don’t have to chop onions when I want them. Quite often I’m reluctant to use onions even if I have them because I HATE chopping them. But right now, I have three or so small bags of minced onions that I can throw into a meal effortlessly. I also do things like cutting apart the bags of ground round in the fridge so I can just reach in and grab instead of having to cut them when I need them. Little things like that make it so much easier for me to feel like cooking. The quicker I can throw things together and the more it appeals to me, the less I mind doing it.
The other part of meal preparation is mentality. One mentality to avoid is that it’s just food, it doesn’t matter what we eat as long as we eat something (which leads to lots of trips to McDonalds YUCK). Make each meal satisfying by putting thought into it. This will sound strange, but connecting with the food emotionally will help you to enjoy the prep more. Lentil soup has become a comfort food for me, through and through, and when I say that connecting emotionally will help, it is lentil soup that I think about. When I saute onions and garlic and measure lentils out, I think ahead to how comforting this meal is: I’m making an emotional connection with the food. Not as weird as it sounds, I promise. Another mentality to avoid is that it’s another form of slavery we housewives/domestic engineers/stay at home moms/etc. have to endure. I have learned that what I’m thinking while I cook greatly effects how I enjoy the meal. If I think about it as a valuable, important service to my husband and children, I can smile and imagine their satisfaction with it, and that it is nourishing both body and spirit to share a meal together.
I know a few things I’ve said have been a little new-agey sounding, but I think they’re quite legitimate and that God smiles down at me when I’m thinking this way about making a meal. It has been a long and somewhat hard transition to make, but it is saving us time, money and emotional hardship in the long run. We sit down together each night for supper and enjoy each other’s company. The kids may be too young to understand it now, but I’m positive that they will appreciate it later.
That was fun. This may become a regular feature. Stay tuned….
