How I Organize My Kitchen

Organization to me  means to organize things in an effective way  that enables you to find and use things more conveniently.

This applies especially to the kitchen!

To that end I have organized my cupboards  in a method that makes sense with the area it is in. I have all my coffee and tea supplies in the cabinet above the coffeemaker. Baskets help corral any small bags of unopened coffee- once open they get poured into a glass decanter-and single teabags that I get from freebie sites.

I have all my baking supplies in the cabinet above the baking counter which holds the mixer. Canned goods, whether I canned them myself or bought them, have 1 cabinet and and bags of beans and rice share a cabinet with daily snacks.

My blender and toaster oven share  counterspace since these are the 2 items the kids use the most for their snacking. Mmmmmm, smoothies!

I also have a set of shelves in my kitchen  that hold  Tupperware containers or large jars of flour, sugar and the like. Next to this I have several 5 gallon buckets  of wheat stacked up. Another set of shelves holds items that I use often but not often enough to put on the counter, like  a dehydrator, prepping food storage and the like.

Dishes, Tupperware and pots each have their own  cabinet too.They make terrific lid holders you can buy at Walmart or Target to organize your pan lids, making it easier to find what you want quickly. There are small shelves you can stack your dishes on to , to make more room in a small cabinet.

I keep all paper items and wrapping in a large drawer and cleaners- all homemade of course!- in a cabinet above the wash machine.

Yes I have been abundantly blessed with cabinets in this home and I plan to copy the idea once I build my own home!

How do YOU organize your kitchen? Share in the comments below. ~smile

Frugal Beans, Rice and Chicken Crock-Pot Dinner

Graphic by Grace Felt

We eat a lot of bean meals around out house.  Not just because they are frugal, but also because my family really loves them.  You should see how excited Riley gets when he knows beans and cornbread are on the menu.  Beans are so nutritious and frugal and they can really help lower your grocery bill, yet ensuring your family still has healthy meals.  Richy or poor, we’ll probably always be bean eaters, it’s just a meal that my family really loves.

2 cups dried beans (I use a combo of small red beans and pinto beans)
1 cup Uncooked brown rice
1 onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, diced
1 can stewed tomatoes
2 cups shredded cooked chicken (usually left overs from a baked whole chicken)
2 tbsp. taco seasoning (I use homemade)

I usually start this around 12 p.m. and it’s ready to serve at 6 p.m. In a crock pot, place the beans, rice, onion and garlic. Cover with water. Turn crock-pot on high and let cook. About 1 hour before dinner time, add the stewed tomatoes, shredded chicken and taco seasoning. We usually eat this with cornbread.

Cheap Eats for the Family

Cheap Eats

In light of today’s economy I have learned a few recipes that help me to feed my large family on a budget.  Here are some of our favorite cheap eats!

Bean and Bacon Soup

Bean and bacon soup is fantastic! I soak bags of pinto beans(bags of beans are half the price of cans because they double their amount when cooking) overnight and the next day keep them on low all day, adding a slab of bacon to it. Not the little strips but the large slab. This gives the beans great flavor and it’s easy on the pocketbook.

Navy Bean Soup

Navy bean soup is another favorite. You can add the bacon to this also or do what we do-add sausage. I wait for the meat to go on sale- in the meat department not the hot dog section, we aren’t talking little links here- and prepare the same way as above.

Red Beans and Rice

Red beans and rice is a favorite here too. I buy a bag of red beans – works better than pintos I think- and soak overnight. Then I heat them on the stove til boiling and prepare as above. I then refry them in a skillet with olive oil and stir them into yellow rice. Put on a hard tostada shell and add cheese.

3 Bean Chili

3 bean chili is one of my husband’s favorites. I soak black beans,pintos, and red beans all together overnight and the next day I change the water out out, add onion, garlic (powder or fresh works) tomato sauce and chili powder and simmer all day. If we have hamburger meat I add that to it too.

Noodle Veggie Soup

Noodle veggie soup is my son’s fav. (It’s even better with chicken!) Egg noodles, any veggies I have on hand and broth. Not much to it but boy is it good! You can add potatoes too if you want.

Lentil Soup

Lentil soup is my favorite! Just add lentils, tomato sauce, garlic powder and sausage if ya have it. (same type of sausage as above) Simmer for about 1 hour all together.

Fried Egg Sandwiches and Omelets

Fried egg sandwiches and omelets have all made their way onto my menu too.

There, not fancy by any means but filling and inexpensive.  Certainly cheap eats!

Coming Soon :: A Week of Kitchen Organization!

Be sure to keep your eyes open and come back the week of September 2, 2012 through September 8, 2012 for or very first theme week!!  Our theme for September is Kitchen Organization. So stop by and visit us each day that week to get some really great kitchen organization tips!

Lasagna for the Summer Time

Lasagna is one of my all time favorite dishes but not usually in the summer time. It is too hot to get the oven going for that length of time. Enter the slow cooker, or crock pot if that’s what you’re used to.

Today I’d like to share with you a rather simple recipe to make lasagna in the summer time  without the oven heat!

Summer Time Lasagna

You will need:
3+ quart slow cooker (this recipe was for a 7 quart cooker)
Medium/large pan (to brown the meat and sauce)
Medium bowl (to mix the cheeses)
9 ounces lasagna noodles, broken to fit the slow cooker (or 12 ounces other type noodle)
1 pound ground meat of your choice
30 ounces of spaghetti sauce (depending on the noodles you use, you may need to add up to 1 cup of water as well)
16 ounces shredded mozzarella cheese
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
15 ounces small curd cottage cheese (or Ricotta)

Cheese, cheese, more cheese. And some herbs.

I used farfalle (bow tie) noodles instead of traditional lasagna noodles.

What you do:

Brown the ground meat and drain. Add the sauce (and water) to the meat and allow to simmer as you prepare the next step.

I used pork sausage and actually repurposed some sauce that I’d used for chicken cacciatore. And some Manwich sauce. We didn’t have any spaghetti sauce.

Mix 1 1/2 cups of the mozzarella cheese, the Parmesan cheese, and the cottage cheese together. You may add spices if you like.

This is what it looked like after mixed and almost all gone. I added basil and oregano.

Add a thin layer of meat sauce to the bottom of the slow cooker.

Layer noodles, cheese mix, meat sauce, noodles, cheese mix, etc., until there is no more. It really does not matter if you end with the meat sauce or cheese but not a good idea to end with noodles. They would not be adequately cooked.

Layering. I have a 7-quart slow cooker. You may need to use less than I listed in the ingredients.

Cook on LOW for 4-6 hours. It will depend on how your slow cooker works.

A few minutes before serving –up to 10– cover with cheese and allow to melt.

My lasagna isn’t done yet or I’d include an after photo as well. But it sure does smell yummy! I did get the idea for this from allrecipes.com –this recipe and this one. Rarely do I follow a recipe as it’s written.

It’s been cooking for almost 2 hours- looking good!

Breakfast?

As a teenager, I didn’t eat breakfast. I drank a glass of milk – and it had to be a glass glass, you understand – and was out the door in record time. As an adult, and especially as a nursing mother of twin toddlers, I simply cannot go without eating within the first hour of waking up. And an hour would be pushing it.

So, I eat a lot of cereal. Especially during the summer time, my family consumes crazy amounts of cereal. It’s fast, it’s light, it serves as breakfast meal, in-between meal, snacks, and even dessert. Not all in one day, of course. Well, not most days, anyway.

Here’s the problem:

As a frugality maven who is always looking for a better, more economical, money-saving way to do things, (balanced, of course, with how much time I actually have to put in to doing them,) buying cereal really pricks at my brain.

It is NOT a frugal option. It’s not cheap. And, most of the time, it’s not even very healthy. Even the whole wheat, iron-packed type versions aren’t exactly the most nutritious items on the shelf.

But really, what are my options?

I could get up a little earlier (or start our day a little later) and actually cook every day. Yeah, right. I could whip out the frozen waffles, which at least my 9 year old son does quite often and the rest of us do on occasion. In fact, if I had the extra time one Saturday, I could whip up a whole month’s worth of homemade waffles for the freezer and do double duty on the whole frugality mission. Or going with that theme, I could whip up some breakfast burritos or sausage biscuits and freeze them. The problem here is that I’m barely getting the bare home keeping minimum done every week, let alone having the chance to get ahead like that.

I’m telling you, though, that eating cereal twice daily every day for three or four months (yes, it’s hot that long in Texas, sometimes – often – longer) just really gets on my frugality nerve, not to mention it gets old really, really quickly.

I’ve even pondered the possibility of trying to learn to make my own cereal. I’m sure pinterest or your friendly search engine would turn up something. Wouldn’t it? But would it be practical, and most importantly would it still be frugal? I mean the nutritional value is important, but around here, right now, bottom dollar is the bottom line. I guess I won’t know until I search it, but it just seems like such a pointless exercise, spending hours and hours preparing something that the whole point of continuing to consume it is convenience and saving of time. I could spend the time I’d use making cereal simply doing one of those other options and freezing ahead of time.

It’s overwhelming me this week!

What do you eat for breakfast? What do you do when you’re in a hurry? What do you do when convenience AND money are applied to the decision? And, just for fun, what’s your very favorite breakfast item to cook or serve?

Dinner on the Ground

I love old cookbooks, especially old church ones. You know, the ones the church ladies put out every year to add funds to their church income.

Anyway I have a new favorite that I found at an antique store called “Shiloah Dinner on the  Ground.”
Do you know what dinner on the ground means? I didn’t until I asked my pastor. He said that church ladies would set dinner on the ground to eat picnic style while the menfolk would patrol the area to make sure that there were no enemies about. Then they would sit down to eat.

Even tho I love many of the recipes in this small book here is one of my favorites.

Hot Chicken Salad
3 cups cut up cooked chicken
1 cup chopped celery
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/4 cup grated cheddar cheese
1 cup mayo
1 cup evaporated milk
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 cup fresh sliced mushrooms

put all ingredients together and bake for 1 hour at 350. add breadcrumbs on top before baking.
Enjoy!

Teriyaki Chicken Noodles

I honestly think that your food storage should be stocked full of items that you and your family will honestly eat. Too many times, people simply use whatever list they find online, in a book or from a food calculator and purchase a ton of stuff that in actuality their families would never eat or are just so limiting that they quickly get bored with the food (lots of beans and rice!). So I think it’s important to take recipes that you already know your family loves and make them over using items that can be stored. Most of the time this simply means substituting fresh and hard to store ingredients with food storage items.  Hopefully this will help others like myself find useful recipes using food storage and help us all learn how to substitute items to make normal, everyday recipes into ones using food storage items!

Today’s recipe is a newish lunch favorite of my boys. They just love it and it can easily be made over into a food storage recipe! Substitutions and notes are in orange.

Teriyaki Chicken Noodles

• 1 lb. whole wheat spaghetti, broken into smallish pieces (you can use any kind of pasta that you’ve stored, even Ramen noodles)
• 1 lb. chicken breasts, diced (1 approx. 12 oz. can of chicken or 1 lb. home canned chicken may be used. You can also substitute any available meat, such as tuna, ham or beef)
• 1/4 cup green onion, chopped (include tops) (1/4 cup reconstituted dried onions may be used)
• 1/4 cup carrots, diced (1/4 cup reconstituted dried carrots or 1/4 cup canned carrots, diced may be used

For Teriyaki Sauce (can substitute bottled teriyaki sauce for the homemade version below):

• 1/2 tbsp. cornstarch (can substitute flour if cornstarch is not available)
• 1/2 tbsp. butter (can substitute coconut oil or other vegetable oil for the butter)
• 1/2 tbsp. cold water
• 1/4 cup brown sugar (can substitute white sugar)
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 2 tbsp. cider vinegar
• 1 clove garlic, minced (can substitute with equivalent amount of garlic powder or reconstituted minced garlic)
• dash powdered ginger

 

In a sauce pan mix together the butter and cornstarch to make a simple roux. Add the remaining sauce ingredients. Bring to a boil, stirring often, until sauce is thick. Set aside. (If making the sauce from scratch instead of using a bottled teriyaki sauce)

In a large pot, cook the spaghetti until tender. Drain using a strainer. Meanwhile, in a skillet with a little oil, stir fry the chicken, green onions and carrots until chicken is cooked through and carrots have started to soften. Mix in the spaghetti and stir fry until extra water is evaporated and the spaghetti, chicken and vegetables are mixed well. Pour teriyaki sauce over the mixture and stir well. Serve hot.

In addition, you can also add fresh broccoli florets and other favorite vegetables when available.

Oatmeal Raisin Spice Cookies & C@HW Link-Up Party!

This was one of those recipes where I was REALLY hungry for something sweet, so I dug around and created this recipe using what I had on hand. These turned out really good. Very cake like and VERY filling. I think these would make great breakfast cookies, as they really stick with you! My fellas loved them and my husband requested I make a batch or two for him to take to work.

Oatmeal Raisin Spice Cookies

1 cup raisins
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 cup butter, melted
2 eggs
6 tbsp. water
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ground cloves
1/2 tsp. ginger
2-1/2 cups quick cooking oatmeal

Preheat oven to 350°. In a large bowl, mix together the melted butter and sugar. Add the eggs and water; mix until fluffy. Add the remaining ingredients, except for the raisins and oatmeal and mix well. Stir in the raisins and oatmeal until just combined. Drop rounded tablespoons onto a cookie sheet. Bake for 12-15 minutes until edges are golden brown.

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Vanilla Star Homemade Vanilla: Review & Giveaway!

I’ve been using Vanilla Star Homemade Vanilla now for quite some time. I’m lucky enough to be related to the creator, Suz Godfrey and usually receive a bottle at Christmas (lucky me!). I love it’s deep, rich vanilla aroma and flavor. Compared to the vanilla extract you get at the grocery store, Vanilla Star Homemade Vanillawins hands down! I love to use it in all my baking and it makes absolutely the BEST vanilla ice cream.

So what makes Vanilla Star Homemade Vanilla so special? First of all, it is made with the finest organic vanilla beans. Suz uses a blend of prime organic Tahitian and Madagascar beans which create a really aromatic vanilla extract with a really deep, rich flavor. Vanilla Star Homemade Vanilla is steeped for 5-6 months for a strong vanilla extract with a really rich, delicious flavor.  Vanilla Star Homemade Vanilla is honestly the best vanilla extract I have ever used.

Vanilla Star Homemade Vanilla is very economical, at only $6 for a 2 ounce bottle and $10 for a 4 ounce bottle.  Because it is so strong and rich, you don’t have to use as much per recipe which saves you money.  It generally takes me a year to use my 4 oz bottle up.  I only bake with it 1-2 times per month so it really does last a long time.  It is also so much healthier  than many of the “Mexican” vanillas I use to use.  I found this FDA warning about Mexican Vanilla.  It seems that some Mexican Vanilla is made from a plant material named coumarin. Coumarin can have ‘toxic’ side effects and has been banned from our food by the USDA. Not something I want to feed to my family!  Yet another reason why I love Vanilla Star Homemade Vanilla, because I know who made it, how it was made and every ingredient it’s made with.

Suz has been so generous and has offered up this 4 ounce bottle of Vanilla Star Homemade Vanilla as a giveaway to one lucky reader of my blog!

Along with the Vanilla Star Homemade Vanilla, the winner will receive 2 hand crocheted dish cloths

and 2 handmade quilted hot pot rags!

The value of this giveaway is $20!

The giveaway starts today (June 3)  and will end on Friday, June 8th. I will announce the winner on Saturday, June 9th.  You can earn up to 9 entries for this giveaway!

So enter today! You just might be the winner!!

Get entered to win the giveaway:

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this item free from the creator. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”