Preserving and Canning Chicken

I love being prepared... 

I love having yummy things on hand to throw together a dinner or lunch for my family!  

I have always been scared to pressure can because of all of the horror stories I have heard from my mom about pressure canners blowing up!  

HOWEVER, I am here to tell you, it's so easy to pressure can AND there is never going to be anything blowing up, if you follow the directions.  

For the past 2 years, 

I have been buying chicken, salmon, ham and strawberries from Zaycon Foods and have loved how quality the meat and fruit is AND how yummy as well.  

However, while I love pulling frozen chicken breasts from the freezer, there are many days when I haven't planned ahead and it's dinner time and so many recipes that have chicken in them don't get made up because I don't have time to defrost the chicken.

 However, thanks to a pressure cooker, 

I now have dozens of pint jars on my shelf, for those quick and easy dinners and soups AND I love having jars of chicken to grab and make Chicken Salad Sandwiches for lunch, or to add to a pasta salad.  

Canned chicken is delicious and is truly a staple at our house!   

ALBEIT, while it is yummy, 

it definitely looks like a "Science Project" 

when you look at the jars, 

OR, as my kids call it...
SICKEN! (wink)

I have canned chicken fresh out of the box after I have purchased it,  
OR, I'll individually package the chicken and put it in my freezer and then after the busyness of the holidays are over and we are in the long, cold month of January, I'll pull out my pressure cooker and defrost some bags of chicken breasts and can a bunch of chicken up then.

SO easy...

you just take your HOT pint jars

fill with sliced chicken chunks leaving 1 inch of head room

add in 1/4 tsp salt

put on sterlized lids and rings
(you do NOT add any water to the jars!!)

Put jars in pressure canner

(follow directions on your pressure canner, for how many jars you can put in it, for what water to add to the pot and for how long to let pressure build before you start timing your canning).

After canner builds to 12 pounds of pressure
let it cook for 75 minutes for PINT jars.

(watching so it stays at a consistent 12 pounds of pressure)

Let pressure canner drop pressure and cool,
Open the canner and pull out the jars and 

VOILA,  
you now have jars of yummyness to enjoy all throughout the year!  

Congratulations!  
Now you have one more skill in your life to be prepared AND knowing how to process and preserve your own foods is a great self-reliance skill, so you can take advantage of great sales on chicken when they come around!

Enjoy being thrifty and frugal!

20 Weeks...No Major Shopping...Wrap up!

 WOW...we made it and what's even better, 
is I'm finally getting this blogged about!  


For those not familiar with this challenge...
 our challenge allotted us $20.00 each week to spend on produce
and a gallon of milk every other week... 
the rest of the things we ate, came from our food storage.
 If you would like to see 
what meals we ate for 5 months and what produce we bought,
click HERE and scroll through the posts...
there are LINKS in each post to the recipes I used
and HELPFUL TIPS for what we did to make things stretch.

While I initially wanted to be done with this Challenge 
the first part of September, here 
  I still had another months worth of the staples such as butter, sugar, flour, yeast, cheese, etc... and so I decided to go until I ran out of butter.

This took us a little under 20 weeks from start to finish with no major shopping and you know what, we didn’t really feel deprived at all!
Other than the fact that I was down to the last cube of butter and roll of paper towels and I had ran out of BLEACH, raisins and gallon sized freezer bags, we survived going 20 weeks with no major shopping.

  (here are links to click on to to see 

what we ate/did week by week)
week 1  week 2   week 3

  week 4    week 5   week 6 

week 7   week 8    week 9

weeks 10-11   week 12   week 13

weeks 14-15    week 16  week 17 

weeks 18-19

Call me strange, but, I really do enjoying challenging and “stretching” myself…
it’s something that is in my blood and something that is SO enjoyable to me!
Preparedness truly does bring peace!

Here are the things I learned this year...

The CASES of canned beans, canned tomatoes and canned chilies we don't go through that much for how many cans we have in our food storage.
I will never again buy a case of 48 of anything, unless it is tomato sauce, OR, Tuna Fish.  We realistically can't go through them before the expiration date.

You go through A LOT of dish towels cooking every meal from scratch.  While I have a large supply of kitchen towels and dishcloths, 

I did laundry twice a week just for washing dish towels!! (usually go through 5-7 a day and sometimes more), depending upon what I'm cooking.

I realized that it would be REALLY nice to have a few cans of cooked chicken on hand, for those hectic afternoons when all of a sudden it's dinner-time and I am scrambling to throw something together!
(excited to pressure cook up some chicken breasts this week after I get my Zaycon Chicken order)

POWDERED MILK makes wonderful summer-time treats (here)
I used this to make homemade Fudge Pops, Chocolate peanut butter milk shakes and peanut butter energy balls. (here)

We also enjoyed a few batches of HOMEMADE yogurt made from powdered milk as well.  (here)
Love this recipe and LOVE that it uses things I always have on hand.

Artisan bread is one of our new favorite breads (here)
AND it is the perfect thing to make up if you don’t have any crackers on hand.
Bake it, toast it and it is perfect

 Homemade Hoagies are now officially a staple at our house!  (here)

We use them for everything and the versatile thing about my French Bread recipe, is you can make up a loaf of French Bread AND 6-8 Hoagie buns, so you can make the most use out of the dough, if you don’t wall all hoagies or all bread loaves.

Homemade Tortillas are also a staple at our house as well! (here) I haven’t bought store bought tortillas since the first of the year (when we purchased some for Tracy’s scout campout breakfast burritos).     
They were wonderful to make up and use our garden veggies and make wraps/roll ups.  They were perfect to line a bowl and fill with taco salad.  They were wonderful to fill with yummy things to take hiking and they were wonderful made into Enchiladas, Quesadillas or Breakfast Burritos.

 It truly is the best feeling in the world to be able to make 95% of the things your family eats from scratch all by yourself! 
Everyone is happy when the food they are eating, 
was made with love by YOU!!
 

We also realize the more we hike that my basic Oatmeal Cookie recipe (here) with LOTS of raisins, dried cherries and walnuts make PERFECT energy bars to take hiking and it is SO much cheaper than purchasing CLIF or ODWALLA bars.

Here is a list of the major things we went through 
in our 5 months of no shopping.
With cooking every meal from scratch, we went through A LOT of the staples...

(BTW...we have chickens that we get eggs from, so we didn't have to use egg powder)

(staples)
150 pounds unbleached flour
50 pounds sugar
18 pounds brown sugar
5 pounds powdered sugar
12 pounds RAW cane sugar
18 pounds honey
20 pounds raisins
4 pounds dried cherries
22 pounds wheat
2 pounds corn meal
2 pounds SAF yeast
1 pound baking powder
3 pounds baking soda
4 pounds salt
8 pounds rock salt
35 pounds steel cut oats (this is our mainstay for breakfast Mon-Fri…here )
12 pounds rolled oats
16 pounds powdered milk (4 #10 cans) (here's how I make our milk stretch here)
10 cans Evaporated Milk
5 cans Sweetened Condensed Milk
9 pounds dried beans/legumes
8 pounds rice
1/2 pound wild rice (made this yummy soup here)
12 pounds pasta
4 pounds popcorn kernels
7 pounds raw almonds
3 pounds walnuts
1/2 pound pecans
3 pounds Almond Cluster Nut Mix (here)
1 large bag of DARK Chocolate Peanut M&M's
1-1/2 pounds sunflower seeds
1/2 pound flax seeds
1/2 pound cashews
1 pound coconut
1 large jar lightly salted peanuts, 1 package of mini marshmallows and 1 pkg. peanut butter chips (these combined together to make Salted Nut Rolls here)
34 ounces unsweetened cocoa powder
4 pounds Stephen’s Hot Cocoa powder
25 boxes of STASH brand Peppermint Blend tea
48 oz. REAL maple syrup
½ bottle of Mapleiene Extract (made homemade syrup here)
12 ounces molasses
12 ounces corn syrup
3 packages marshmallows
1 pound coconut
3 quarts applesauce (this along with whole wheat flour turned into muffins here)
3 boxes of pectin (made homemade preserves)
1(4 pack) box of Gelatine (used to make homemade yogurt here)
1/2 pound Citric Acid
4 bottles Lemon Extract
(6) 8.2 ounce bottles REAL vanilla
3 liters Olive Oil
72 ounces Canola Oil
4 pounds cornstarch
72 ounces Nestle Semi-Sweet chocolate chips
3 pounds Ghiradelli Double Chocolate Bitter-Sweet chips
10 ounces white chocolate chips
(5) 40 ounce jars peanut butter (we went through so much of this as we made a few batches of granola bars (here) and peanut butter energy balls (here)
4 cans non-stick baking spray
5 pounds cottage cheese (we ran out the last 6 weeks…we need to try making HOMEMADE cottage cheese for times like this)
2 pounds sour cream
(5) 8 ounce packages Neufchatel Cream Cheese
.5 ounces of freeze dried mushrooms
(we also used quite a bit of Cajun seasoning, lemon pepper, taco seasoning, cumin, chili powder, granulated garlic, beef and chicken bouillon, buttered flavored salt, dried parsley oregano, basil, thyme, marjoram, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger and poppy seeds, sesame seeds)

(cheese/butter)
12 pounds Monterey Jack Cheese
5 pounds sharp cheese
1 pound Mozzarella Cheese
48 pieces of string cheese
32 pounds butter
2 pounds lard

(meat)
4 pounds chicken breasts
2 whole chickens
2 pounds chicken thighs
6 pounds hamburger
2 beef roasts
1 pound stew meat
2 pounds bacon
2 pounds sausage
(7) ½ cup packages of ham and one ham bone (that we had cut up in our freezer from our Easter ham here for how I do this)
1 pound Tilapia
6 pounds Salmon
1 pound crab meat
1 package Chicken/Spinach sausages (here for how we put them to use)
2 packages Nathans ALL beef hot dogs (had these in our freezer…we stock up on these in the spring to have on hand for summer barbeques...here for 2011 fun)
30 cans tuna
2 packages of Smoked Salmon and 2 large bottles of artichoke hearts
(we made 2 different batches of  Salmon and Artichoke dip here)

(misc.)
(many limes, citric acid and Lemon extract turned into this here)
6 packages Pink Lemonade Kool-Aid
1 box of Tangerine Emergen-C (Kids take this in their lunches to drink)
(3) 46 ounce jars pickles
(2) 24 ounce bottles ketchup
(3) 30 ounce jars Mayonnaise
(3) 30 ounce jars Miracle Whip
4 jars Ragu Spaghetti Sauce
10 cans stewed tomatoes/tomato sauce
1 pound frozen peas
2 bottles salsa
2 boxes Sunbelt brand Fruit & Nut Granola Cereal
2 boxes ZOOM cereal (this is what we used for breakfast when we went backpacking)
4 packages dry Ranch Dressing Mix (used to make Ranch Popcorn here)
31 packages Doublemint Gum
2 bags of 200 Menthol cough drops
4 bags Tortilla chips (we ran out the last 8 weeks…wish we had a way to make homemade tortilla chips
(1) 28 package individual chips
50 pounds of onions
25 pounds of potatoes
1/2 bag charcoal briquettes

(we also went through a few cans each of pineapple tidbits, olives, diced green chilies, canned beans, Tomato and Cream of Chicken Soup, bean sprouts, water chestnuts and chow mein noodles...ALSO, a few packages of Ramen for our backpacker meals).

(I lost track of how many pounds of frozen fruits/berries we used for our smoothies,)

(cleaning/toiletries)
(6) 56 ounce containers Soft Soap
(1) 56 ounce container Soft Soap for our bathroom dispenser in our shower (here)
66 ounces shampoo
66 ounces conditioner
52 ounces hair gel
99 ounces hair spray
1 box of hair highlighting kit (here how we use this)
6 bottles of deodorant
10 tubes of Chap stick
(2) 20 ounce bottles Curel lotion
40 rolls paper towels
76 rolls toilet paper
5 boxes PUFFS tissues
72 count box of tampons/(1) 18 count box maxi-pads
2 boxes of each sandwich and snack sized bags
4 boxes of each gallon and quart sized bags
(1) 100 count box of bread bags
(1) 75 ft. box aluminum foil
(1) 75 ft box waxed paper
½ box Plastic Wrap
1 box Q-tips
1 large bag cotton balls
1 package small Dixie Cups for the bathroom
32 oz. mouth wash
3 tubes toothpaste
(3) 100 ounce jugs laundry soap
1 gallon bleach
30 ounces Spray and Wash
2 boxes Borax
165 dishwasher soap drops
46 oz. Jet Dri
64 ounces Glass Plus
1 large can AJAX
18 ounces 409 cleaner
22 ounces hardwood floor cleaner
60 ounces Bathroom/Toilet cleaner
60 ounces Shower Cleaner
72 ounces Hydrogen Peroxide
10 gallons vinegar (we went through so much as I use it in my dishwasher since we have hard water)
1 box Bounce sheets
120 kitchen garbage bags
45 outside garbage bags
2 gallons CAR oil
Oil filters (for changing car oil)
2 gallons windshield washer cleaner

YES, you can eat REALLY well on your food storage...

YES, you can live on your food storage and LOVE it! 

So grateful to have had another opportunity to “Stretch” and to put this wonderful quote by Percy Cerutty to the test once again…

"You only ever grow as a human being

if you're outside your comfort zone”.

Kimmie in Real Life (weeks 13 & 14)

Three Months of no shopping...
$6,000 later...
after scraping every extra penny and putting it towards debt, our
HELOC
(Home Equity Life of Credit)
is gone Forever!! WOOT!!!

(Ethan was with us when we paid our last payment at the bank and closed our account...it made a BIG impact on him as we have had this debt since he was one year old.
Original debt May 2003 was $25,000
October 2008 debt was $19, 762
May 2010 debt was $6,043
August 2010...completely paid off)

It feels SO good to have that debt gone
and to be able to snowball the money we were putting towards that debt, into "kicking Fannie Mae" out of the house and having our Student Loans gone forever as well.
Hoping
to have those gone in 15 to 18 months and then it's on to paying off the Mortgage and being able to finally have the complete and utter
Freedom of being 100% debt free.

As Tracy and I were talking this past weekend,
we didn't feel like we were deprived one bit not going to the Grocery Store for three months and so we are going to
"regroup" this pay check and restock up on butter, cheese, flour, Salmon, chocolate chips, celery, onions, yeast, paper products and then we will be ready to go another few months of "no shopping as well".

(also, taking some money to put new Struts on my car...last month we had to replace the Fuel Pump in our family car...Mr. Smith is amazingly talented in being able to do almost every repair big OR small on our cars!)

It's actually SO much fun
and had I not taken on this challenge, I wouldn't be making the most awesome homemade tortillas in the world, wouldn't have a fridge of Granola Bars for my kids for snacks and probably wouldn't have ventured into making Homemade BUNS for Hot Dogs, Hamburgers/Sloppy Joes and Hoagie buns for sandwiches which are
more delicious than anything you can get at any bakery.

I am changed forever,
as three months of no shopping has become a habit...
always preparing for tomorrow today
and using what we have, no matter how simple or extravagant it may be.
(YES, "Accountability is a good thing"!)

Here are some food highlights from the past two weeks.

WEEK 13
(since Monday was spent unpacking from our backpacking trip and getting caught up on sleep and laundry, Wednesday was a Scout Dinner for Ethan's group and Tracy had a Scout Campout with his Scouts on Friday night, this week, was a pretty NON-typical week, without too much to share).

After three days of backpacking food the kids were happy to clean out the fridge and enjoy a Grape Smoothie and open faced tuna and veggie sandwich.

We were given some Plantains
from our neighbor and I didn't get anything done with them before we went on our backpacking trip and so I came home and they were completely black, however, when we opened them up they were perfectly fine and so we smashed them and turned them into Banana Bread.
(recipe...click here)

I took these random onions
and chopped them with the rest of the veggies and made up Lentil Stew.
This dish is truly one of of my favorite recipes!
(recipe...click here)

August 8th to 14th

Sunday
ZOOM with brown sugar, powdered milk and raisins
Finished off the rest of our trail snacks and enjoyed dinner at “Merry Piglets”
(Fajitas with all the fixins’….SO yummy!)

Monday
Steel Cut Oats
Leftover Fajitas
(Dinner was Beef Stroganoff that we experimented with making from scratch as a something yummy we could make and eat on our backpacking trips)

Tuesday
Steel Cut Oats
Open Faced Tuna Sandwiches with lettuce and tomatoes, Smoothie
Lentil Stew over Brown Rice
Banana Bread
(made Banana splits as we played BOGGLE as a family)

Wednesday
Steel Cut Oats
(Tracy) Banana Bread, apples, Lentil Stew/Brown Rice
(kids) Open Faced Tuna sandwiches, apples, Banana Bread
(dinner at Ethan’s Scout leader’s house)

Thursday
Steel Cut Oats
(Tracy) Apple, Tuna Sandwich, banana bread
(kids) Cantaloupe, Tomato soup (that I had bottled up last fall)
Banana bread
Lentil Stew/brown rice

Friday
Steel Cut Oats
Cantaloupe, grapes, bananas, lentil stew
(dinner Tracy) Tin Foil dinner at his scout campout
(kids and I) Homemade Chili (we have to bring Chili to our ward Humanitarian project so I made it up Friday night and we enjoyed a bowl ourselves over baked potatoes)
Caramello popcorn

Saturday
Took kids to town and enjoyed Nachos at Mi Casa

WEEK 14

My awesome neighbor and friend Lisa
told me to come and pick Cherries
off her tree as they weren't going to get them picked before they got too ripe.
SO, Monday morning I got ready and headed down and spent an hour picking Cherries.
I ended up with 25 cups of Cherries
and spent the week pitting them and freezing them in Ziploc bags (5 cups per bag). Can't wait to pull these 5 cup bags out of the freezer and enjoy making Cherry Pie for Thanksgiving and during the winter months, OR, for making cobbler for Tracy's Scout campouts.
Yummy!!
(pie recipe...click here)

The Kids favorite meals this week
were Baked Salmon and Spaghetti Pie.

We pulled out the Ice Cream freezer
and filled it up with ingredients, ice and Rock Salt and made up Homemade Ice Cream.
We pulled a bottle of Huckleberry Soda from our food storage and washed and cleaned Huckleberries we had picked the day before and made up Huckleberry Floats.

While we were eating our Huckleberry Floats
we glanced out our kitchen window and noticed that the sky was the same color as our Floats were.
What a coincidence and I hurried and grabbed the camera and snapped a photo.
Within five minutes, the beautiful pink color was gone.

For some reason, when I make up these cookies they are very much enjoyed and I had two people ask me for the recipe for these this week.
Who would have thunk,
that basic Oatmeal cookies with a
handful of dried Cherries,
a handful of Raisins
about 1/4 cup chopped walnuts
and about an 1/8 cup of white chocolate chips would be such a hit.
WOW, talk about a delicious cookie!
(cookie recipe...click here)

We had to bring a Fruit Salad to Ethan's Scout dinner last week and I forgot that we had leftovers of this in our fridge. So, I pulled it out and blended it together with blueberries and strawberries and I had Ethan begging for more!

To make Taco Meat stretch,
I add in cooked beans in with the Ground Beef. Since I didn't have time to un-thaw cooked beans from my freezer, I added in a can of Kidney Beans and Great Northern Beans and it about doubled my Taco filling.
(just cooked up the ground beef, added in 1/4 cup taco seasoning and 2/3 cup water, brought to boil and added in drained beans and let simmer for 30 minutes).
This is really kid friendly as it makes it not so spicy for little ones.

Can I just say that
I LOVE to make tortillas!!
I made up a batch of tortillas, lined them in soup bowls and filled them with lettuce, veggies and taco meat and they were absolutely delicious!
(recipe...click here)

For dinner
I made up a Dutch Apple Pie from pie filling I bottled up last year and we enjoyed it with our leftover ice cream that we made earlier in the week.
(recipe...click here)

I also made up a batch of Granola Bars,
so I can have snacks to pack in lunches or snacks for the kids to enjoy after school, as the first day of school is this week.
(recipe...click here)

I took an inventory of my freezer to see what I had left as we are going to be getting LOTS of zucchini and squash from our garden over the next few weeks.
I pulled out some squash puree and made a batch of pumpkin muffins.
(recipe...click here)

What a happy sight it is
to go out to your garden and see vegetables that are ripe and ready to pick.
We had a large head of cabbage from our garden
that we picked and it was the perfect accompaniment to our Dutch Oven dinner that Tracy cooked up for us for Sunday dinner.

August 15th to 22nd

Sunday
Breakfast in one
Southwestern Chicken and Rice that I pulled out of the freezer and we dipped tortillas chips in it with the rest of our salsa

Monday
Steel Cut Oats
Took kids school shopping and had Breakfast at Perkins
(Tracy had back to school lunch at his work)
Salmon, fried potatoes, sliced tomatoes
Huckleberry floats

Tuesday
Steel Cut Oats
(Tracy) Leftover Salmon, Fruit Cake and apple
(kids) Southwestern Chicken and Rice with tortilla chips
Multi Grain Rolls, Spaghetti Pie, Snickerdoodles

Wednesday
Steel Cut Oats
(Tracy) Leftover Spaghetti Pie, Multi Grain Rolls. Snickerdoodles, apple
(kids) Smoothie, Multi Grain Rolls, carrot sticks,
Chicken and Wild Rice Soup, Multi Grain Rolls, Fruit and Nut Cookies

Thursday
Steel Cut Oats
Leftover Wild Rice Soup, apples, Multi Grain Rolls,
Taco Salad with homemade tortillas, Dutch Apple Pie A’la Mode

Friday
Steel Cut Oats
(Tracy had Taco Salad,
I had to race home from work and get Jade to the High School to register before 1:00 and so we grabbed Tacos from Taco Time and the kids and I went and sat on a blanket at the park and ate lunch)
Kids had Taco Salad for dinner
Tracy and I went on a date and split a Pork Salad from Café Rio

Saturday
Pancake breakfast!
Smoothie and Chicken Casserole (Homemade Mac and Cheese)
Apple slices and Pumpkin muffins
(took the kids to dinner and enjoyed Western Lemon Chicken as celebration for paying off our debt!!)

Sunday
“Tendah Juicy” Dutch Oven Pork served over rice and with steamed cabbage from our garden
“Brinner”…pancakes and fried eggs for dinner

Stay tuned next week
as I share the amount of food we used during this three month adventure and what challenges I encountered as well.

Gotta run and spend the last day of summer vacation with my kiddos and get them all ready for the first day of school

(also need to whip up a batch of Multi-Grain rolls and Double chocolate cookies as my kids begged to have these for their first day of school lunches)

I treasure these moments greatly and I'm savoring the last of my One on One time of the summer enjoying a wonderful day with two of the world's greatest Kids...
Jade and Ethan

Talk to you soon!

Accountability is a good thing!

Accountability:
1. obliged to account for one's acts; responsible
2. capable of being accounted for; explainable

Our ward (local church congregation) has been having budget meetings for the past few months and it has been wonderful to hear how other families deal with their finances and budgets, etc....

Tracy and I had to participate in our last meeting and I made the following statement:
"Other than buying a Bountiful Basket every week and buying a gallon of milk every other week, we are not going to go to the store for three months and we are going to live off our food storage".

I HATE debt and I just want one of our debts gone and so by living off our food storage and putting the money we normally spend on food/toiletries towards debt for three months it will mean we can pay off the balance of our HELOC in three months instead of six months and then this debt will be gone forever!

(Of course we will be replenishing our food storage over time...but, this little trial run gives us a way to see what we are missing if we were to have to live on our food storage for an extended period of time AND we get to rotate our food storage as well. It is a WIN-WIN!!
BTW...I am not predicting any kind of cataclysmic event, but this is just one of the things that we do as part of our Provident Living and Frugal lifestyle.
(this is the same kind of thing we did in January when we did trial runs of what kind of lighting is best if we were without power for an extended period of time (to see the results of this test click here)

SO,
I had a good friend email me and ask me what we are going to eat for the next three months while we do our "plan of attack" I soon realized that I really needed to be accountable for my statement I made in that meeting.

SO, I am going to journal the meals/snacks we eat every week so that I can have this to remember when I look back on my life in future years.
It's my way of being accountable.
I am always fascinated when I read my past journals and see what meals we ate, how we made our money stretch, etc....

So, here goes now until Pay Day on August 25th
(here are photos of our freezer/food storage
showing what I have to work with the next three months

So, Mondays are going to be
"Kimmie in Real Life"
and a list of what we ate the week before and my thoughts/feelings on how the week went.
It will show that we eat simply, but we eat well and that some days are definitely better than others!

Just for fun...
Jade LOVES looking at our old photo albums of newlywed days and when he was a baby. This photo is awesome in showing that we have always ate frugally as Tracy and I were heading out on date and we had a thermos of peppermint tea and a thermos of Broccoli soup and homemade bread that we ate in the mall parking lot.
Those were the days
and I sometimes miss the simple life that we lived back then.

May 16th to 22nd

Sunday
Pancakes and Eggs
Spaghetti, Brussel Sprouts, Buttermilk Biscuits

Monday
Steel Cut Oats
(kids) Peanut butter and jelly biscuit sandwiches, carrot sticks, apples,
(Tracy)leftover spaghetti and Brussel Sprouts, apple, dried cherries
Corn on the cob, biscuits and gravy
(THIS was seriously a night I wanted so bad to call Tracy and have him pick up a $5.00 "Hot and Ready" pizza. HOWEVER, I opened my fridge and realized we had corn on the cob, opened my freezer and saw I had a baggie of roast beef drippings and so I made some homemade gravy, baked up a batch of Buttermilk Biscuits and we had this with corn on the cob...YUMMY!)

Tuesday
Steel cut oats
Yogurt with sliced mangos, pretzel mix, carrot sticks, string cheese, frosted grahams
Taco Salad

Wednesday
Steel Cut Oats
Leftover Taco Salad, yogurt with fresh mangoes, frosted grahams
(Ethan…boiled egg, huckleberry muffins, carrot sticks, sliced apples, string cheese, frosted grahams)
Sliced watermelon, Tacos

Thursday
Steel Cut Oats
Homemade rolls/roast beef sandwiches, gumdrop oatmeal cookies, banana, fresh peaches
Sweet and Sour Chicken Stir-fry
**(sandwiches were made out of a roast I cooked all day in the crock-pot and shredded)

Friday
Steel Cut Oats
Leftover Stir Fry (Tracy, Jade and Kimmie) Roast Beef sandwiches (Ethan), banana, fresh peaches, gumdrop oatmeal cookies,
Scrambled eggs, toasted rolls, fresh peaches

Saturday
Leftover fruit and muffins
Homemade fruit leather
Leftover Stir-Fry and Snickerdoodles
(for dinner we were in Idaho Falls and since it is close to pay day we split a "Large Nacho Mucho" between the four of us at our favorite Mexican restaurant and only spent $10.25)

(Sunday-Thursday we had a Fresh Lime drink for dinner from the limes we got in our Bountiful Basket)
(other snacks)
Gumdrop cookies
Snickerdoodles
Muffins
Fruit Leather
Bananas and apples
Hot chocolate

PS...note to self...remember to not start any laundry until after 7:00 pm so we don't have to listen to the washer and dryer while we're enjoying family dinner.
Happy Week!