6 Random Kitchen Tips for the Busy Mom

I haven’t had a whole lot of time to blog lately.  But I thought I would quickly share a few tips that have been helpful for me in the kitchen that may or may not be new to you.

Tip #1

We eat muffins a lot around here and I have found this to be  a great tool: my ice cream scooper.  Use an ice cream scooper to fill your muffin cups.  It’s the perfect size.

Tip #2

If you don’t like your hands smelling after you’ve worked with garlic, wash them and rub them on your metal faucet while washing.  It takes away the garlic smell.  I have no idea why, but it works.  Something about the metal neutralizes the garlic.

Tip #3

When baking or cooking, double or triple your batch and put the extra in the freezer.  Same effort yields more meals/snacks, and it  uses less power, too.  Plus you have instant meals ready to go.

Tip #4

Keep items in your pantry at all times that will make at least three meals.  I like to make meals in a basket, which I wrote about here.  However you do it, be sure that anyone in your family is able to make meals out of what you have on hand in an emergency/time crunch/what have you.

Tip #5

Train your kids to cook.  Our eldest two are coming along, although I would like to see them cooking full dinners for us very soon.  In my opinion, I’m a bit behind on this with them at 11 and 13 years old.  We’re working on it.

Tip #6

Prepare salads on the weekend that will keep in the frig through Tuesday or Wednesday.  Make them part of your meal plan.  Pasta salad, fruit salad and coleslaw are a few that keep pretty well.  You can then prepare more salads on Wednesday, rely on frozen veggies the rest of the week, or, if Wednesday is your shopping day (when the new ads start), you can change up your plan, buy fresh veggies, etc.

Food Storage, To Be Continued

For those of you waiting to hear more about food storage from my perspective, hang on.  I did not forget about it.  I got seriously distracted from my series by actually doing food storage.  And I just didn’t have a lot of time to put into organizing my thoughts, so the series remains unfinished.  Don’t worry, I will continue it this winter, though.  Don’t give up on me!

What I Got for Christmas?

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!  My Beloved got me something I’ve been wanting for a while, and the kids have been wanting it, too.

Isn’t it lovely?  Mine isn’t red, though.  It’s stainless steel.

My eldest son and I got it set up to make ravioli tonight.  We should have started earlier, I think.  I finally got the dough right and proceeded to do the ravioli.  It was a disaster.  I think my filling was too wet.  It’s also possible I did not understand the directions very well.  They were not very comprehensive; it’s one of those instruction books that is in several languages.

So, after wasting about half of the dough, I put the rest through and made fettucine, instead.  I then cooked up my filling and tossed it with the cooked Fettucine as a sauce.  It made a decent appetizer.  I cut the fettucine too thick, but I know exactly what to do next time.  Beloved called in pizza for dinner.

As for the ravioli, I think I will be hitting youtube this week to see where I went wrong.  We’ll keep playing with it and let you know how it goes.  If we find success, we will definitely share recipes.

Until then, buon appetito!

Meal Planning Update

Except for getting off track some around Thanksgiving, the new meal planning system is going well.  It’s is so easy to choose what to make each night and so much less stress when I know ahead of time what it is!

I find when I actually have a meal planning system, we eat better.  The lack of stress has helped me put more love into our meals.  This equals more interesting dishes and even better nutrition.

Here’s what we’re eating this week:

Monday: Addictive Sweet Potato & Bean Burritos (oh. my. goodness.  SO GOOD.  I’m not sure Pumpkin agreed, though, EEK!), Spanish Rice, Refried Beans, Chips & Salsa

Tuesday: Scalloped Potatoes with Smoked Sausage (usually with Beeler’s Ham, though)

Wednesday: Ravioli, Bread & Salad

Thursday: Baked Eggs, Toast & Smoothies or Leftovers if we have them.

Friday: Crockpot Lasagna (because we are pizza’d out, I think) Check out Jessica’s site, complete with video instructions.  Great info!

No plans yet for the weekend meals.  But my little guy is turning three this Sunday, so he gets to choose what we’re having that night.

Hope your week is going well.

Blessings today, Kris

 

 

A Streamlined Meal Plan (with links)

Do you ever get discouraged about what to serve at meal times or lack inspiration in your meal planning?  I do. 

Recently, I’ve been in kind of a meal planning slump.  I stopped planning my meals ahead about a year or so ago (probably about the time the morning sickness hit, lol) and it hasn’t been pretty. 

I mean, for the most part, I can throw together a pretty good meal without thinking ahead about it.  But it’s pretty stressful on me and a meal like that doesn’t have much of the best ingredient of all in it, LOVE.  When you’re in a rush, it’s hard to do the extras that make cooking for your family a joy.  Not planning ahead and making a meal out of panic steals the joy out of it for me.  So I am pulling myself up from the gooey mud and trying to right the situation.

A friend of mine shared with me years ago how she does her meals and I am taking my inspiration from her.  She made the same thing the same night of each week, as her family was extremely picky and that was the only way to please everyone.  She just served what they like only: spaghetti, tacos, etc.  It made it easy for her to shop every week, as she always had to buy the same exact things, etc.  And that worked really well for her.

Okay.  For someone like me, that is a bit too simplified.  For one thing, I really do like to cook.  I also enjoy trying new recipes and my family is really not that picky, either.  But I find a lot of merit in this idea.  So I have streamlined how I am going to do things and here is my plan:

Mexican Mondays

Crockpot Tuesdays

Pasta Wednesdays

Egg Thursdays

Pizza Fridays

Okay, so this gives me a guideline and makes it easier to plan.  But this gives me a lot of wiggle rooms and we can keep a variety going, too.  Obviously, there are a lot of Mexican dishes to choose from, as well as pasta, egg, and crockpot dishes.  Fridays have pretty much always been a pizza night for us, or stromboli as an alternative.  Have I ever mentioned that Friday nights are my favorite?  That’s because pizza is my favorite food.  Oh. Yum. Me.

I will be keeping you posted about how this works out for us, and I may even have to do something like this on the weekends, too.  We’ll see how it goes.  So this streamlines weeknight dinners for me, which is only one meal of the day.  But it’s a start!

UPDATE: Some have asked what I cook on the weekends.  Currently, on Saturdays we eat leftovers, unless I crockpot something.  Sundays I usually make a grilled sandwich.  I want to get back to making a big Sunday dinner.  But since we started going to church on Saturday nights, I haven’t been planning a big dinner on the weekends.  I’m not sure why.

What’s for dinner at your house? 

Monday: It’s bean tacos for us tonight.

Tuesday: Crockpot Cassoulet, Spinach Salad

Wednesday: Homemade Macaroni & Cheese, Hamburger Patties, Broccoli

Thursday: Migas

Friday: Vegie Pizza

Blessings, Kris

WOW

This is the longest I have been away from my personal blog.  I didn’t really mean to take this much time off, I have just been so busy and my energy has been going to doing things rather than writing about them.  But hopefully I am back.

What on earth have a I been up to?

Well, you mean besides having a baby, right?

I’ve been planting a garden, planning our homeschool year, cleaning my house and getting it ready for my first homebirth (which went awesome, by the way), having a baby, enjoying my baby, trying to keep a garden alive, ordering homeschool books, getting organized for school, canning….and on and on. 

Then, in August, my father in law passed away suddenly.  So that has taken up some time and energy, too.  We all traveled to California for the funeral.  But mostly it has taken time for my Beloved, as he has traveled to California several times since.  But it looks like he is home for the winter (we hope).  And, although we are saddened by his Dad’s passing, some good things have come of it.  The Lord really does work in mysterious ways!

Now we are into full on school and all of the normal things that go with it.  We are actually supposed to be living on a schedule; still working on that one!  We are enjoying fall field trips and crisp mornings, hot cocoa and learning together.  And I am looking forward to sharing it all with you once again.

So, keep reading.  And please don’t forget that I heart comments.  Happy fall!

My Garden Plan 2011

I have purposely decided not to be as ambitious in my garden this year.  For one, my ambitions never seem to pan out.  For another, I am 30 weeks pregnant.  I want to be careful not to plant too much that has to be canned, etc., as I’m pretty sure canning is out for me this year.

So I planted what I have had success with in the past, and what I know I can deal with when it’s ready.  Here’s what I planted this year:

Tomatoes, of course!  I like to plant a lot of sauce tomatoes and then dehydrate them.  I can handle dehydrating this year.

Sweet Peppers.  I haven’t had a lot of luck with these, but I’m going to keep trying.  I like red peppers okay.  I just don’t like the store price, and forget about organic!  Whoa.

Jalapeno Peppers.  These can be frozen, no problem.  Can also be dried, but I prefer freezing.

Broccoli.  We’ll freeze whatever we don’t use fresh.  It’s a popular vegie at our house.

Pickling Cucumbers.  They will probably be the most time consuming.  Whatever I don’t pickle, we’ll eat fresh.

Zucchini.  Enough said.  So versatile and what we don’t use fresh can be made into relish, pickled and or shredded and frozen for zucchini bread.

Shelling Peas.  We eat these all w inter.  I plan to freeze them, but may try dehydrating some, too.

Green Beans.  We also eat these all winter.  Will freeze them like last year.

And some melons.  Never had good success with these here, as our season seems to be a bit too short.  But I keep trying.  I got cantaloupe on my own.  Two of my boys wanted to plant a watermelon each and my Mom was accidentally sent some honeydew, which she passed on to me.  We’ll see what happens with those.

Don’t mistake me for a green thumb.  My thumb is closer to brown in color.  Honestly, I am not a great gardener.  I just keep trying every single year and I learn my lessons the hard (and sometimes costly) way.  But I think it’s important to try to grow what we can and it’s great for the kids to see that we can raise some of our own food.  It helps the food budget, too.  I like organic produce, and this is a good way to get it. 

I will keep you updated on how my garden grows this summer.  I would love to hear how yours gets along, too, and I love comments.

Blessings today, Kris