ICE ICE BABY

I feel pretty joyous right now. I actually did it. That thing that I've been trying to do for years and even attempted a couple of months ago and kinda failed. I cooked a ton of food and stuck it in the freezer in the goal that each day around 5pm isn't a nutso event of trying to figure out what to make for dinner. It probably doesn't seem like much of an achievement. To me it is. Our family of four eats food daily and on the weekend what seems like hourly and my husband and I have a strong aversion to processed and prepared foods. This aversion keeps us healthy, but must take us longer to figure out what to eat and longer to make our meals.

I've spent (wasted) hours (days I'm sure) of my life pouring over recipes online and mommy blogs and menu planning websites looking for great ideas to help me get this food on the table with minimal stress. Don't get me wrong we both cook a lot and feed our family pretty well even without meal planning, but it gets stressful and I want more harmony in that already stressful time of picking up the kids, getting home, feeding the hungry dogs and in that moment where I really need to unwind I just wind up. Back to the meal planning websites, typically as soon as I get excited about the site's meal planning theory I then read a recipe for tuna casserole or beefy mexican cheesy dip and they lose me. The Once a Month Mom (OAMM) site offers options other than their Traditional menu (read pizza rollups and tuna taco pie). I made their Whole Foods menu in August and made a number of items from their Diet menu yesterday. The recipes are pretty good, some winners and some acceptable but it does take a lot of thinking out of preparing a whole lot of food at once.

When diving into the food prep yesterday in an attempt to stock our freezer for the month I realized a couple of things. I don't need to pre-make fancy breakfast items - we eat a lot of greek yogurt, frozen pancakes (we make a double batch on the weekend and the kids eat them throughout the week) and kind of an absurd amount of oatmeal. As long as I have a dark cup of coffee in the morning I don't really care what accompanies it. For lunch the kids are fed very well at their schools and we're fine with bringing leftovers from dinner to work and/or some simple soups with a roll. Dinner on the other hand in our house needs to be kind of exciting. Not always fancy, but prepared well with good ingredients and we like to talk about it a bit. So, we don't really require all of the breakfast and lunch items that the OAMM site includes in their monthly menus. A nutritionist friend introduced me to Pepperplate and I'm now thinking that this site is the current answer to my freezer cooking woes. You can hunt online for recipes (EatingWell, Food and Wine, Real Simple and Gojee are good places to start) and even use the recipes on OAMM as a guide for what will freeze well and add them to your Pepperplate account. You can then modify the number of servings, add the recipe to your shopping list and even create a meal plan for the week. Very cool. I like being in control and this site allows me to plan my meals and makes the hard stuff (grocery list and calculations) easy. The Pepperplate meal plan is my next experiment.

Oh and I finally bought a crock pot. It's so easy use, but I do feel older now. I balanced out the crock pot purchase by going to a rock show last night until 2am. Ok where was I? In case you're curious here is what I made and froze yesterday:

1. Pork Carnitas
2. Lentil Soup
3. Lime Coconut Chicken (used thighs instead of breast - cheaper)
4. Chipotle Shrimp
5. Spinach Turkey Burgers
6. Vegetarian Cassoulet
7. Broccoli Lasagna (I omitted the cream and the greens are for a side salad, not the lasagna, oh and Prince brand lasagne noodles are the bomb)
8. Chicken Taquitos (I left out the cream cheese, it's not an item that I like cooking with, I also boiled a whole organic chicken instead of using just breasts it's cheaper and then I end up with free chicken broth for other meals)
9. Orange Ricotta Pancakes this was a blend of the recipe from the OAMM site and a recipe we use all the time from another book. 2 cups milk mixed with a tbs of vinegar for a few minutes (set aside), 2 cups WW flour, 2 cups unbleached white flour, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp baking soda (Mix above) .zest of an orange, 4 eggs, .5 cup canola oil,  2 cups ricotta (mix all and cook).

DIY TOYS

I checked out a great book from our library recently called "Made to Play" - it's chock full of ideas for making toys for your kids or yourself or for other people's kids.

I know - I've never made a toy myself either. I only just learned to use a sewing machine and I felt like a super person afterwards and made lots of plans to make things then I didn't but I totally will. One day. The first thing I'll make is a play cape for the kids (there is an even cooler one in the book, but the pattern isn't online, so this is a different cape) -  or maybe a fabric instrument.

Paper Road Trip  - Made by Joel

An easier way to get started on making your own toys is to print some of these paper cities and cut and color with your kids. I'm really impressed by the creations on this guy's site and in his book. Not only do the toys look fun and tactile, but the design is modern and nice to look at. Cats are the new black - so here's a cat for you.
 

IS THAT GAS?

If you live in Burlington it probably is. Most of the homes in Burlington use natural gas to heat their homes and we're lucky enough to have it for cooking too. Seriously - we wouldn't look at a home that couldn't run a gas stove. We both worked in restaurants and have a hard time cooking with anything else.

We don't have a choice of who we can buy our gas from, it's all Vermont Gas but it's all good since their rates are low and they have this sick program that I love to tell people about. If your home uses too much gas - from the Vermont Gas site, "at least 0.5 Ccf per square foot of natural gas over the past year" then you'll qualify for an energy retrofit. Our bill is pretty low considering the winters we have in Vermont, the scalding hot showers I take and that we cook with gas - it runs about $125/month on their budget plan (we pay the same amount each month all year, which saves us from the $500 bill that you can end up with in February). All the same we live in a 55+ year old house and I'm not one to pass up free things so I called and was surprised to find out that we qualified. The program pays for an energy audit and for 1/3 of any recommended construction costs to retrofit the house, the remaining 2/3 of the bill is eligible for a 0% three year loan from a local credit union.

An auditor (Brian Fisher) came out from Vermont Gas really quickly after I called. He spent a couple of hours examining the full house and did a blower door test to see how much air we're losing from the house and more importantly to have a baseline against the test that runs after the work is complete. About a week later I received a report of the audit which included the recommendation to have about $3k in insulation work - foam boards in the basement, blown insulation on the full first floor and some other odds and ends around the house. He said our gas bill should go down 30-40% - we'll save money and help fight climate change. Awesome!

Brian recommended that before we start on the insulation work that I change my bathroom fans to high efficiency fans to ensure that air can get out of the house after it's all tightened up. He let me know that Burlington Electric Department will pay $110 towards a new one. I bought the Panasonic Whisper Green FX-08VKM3 - it's about $18 less now than it was a few months ago! I guess this is a good model at a great price, because the guy at Burlington Electric (John Lincoln 802-865-7362) said he was going to buy some for his house when I sent him the link. After the $110 rebate, we spent about $60 on the new fan. It's very quiet and goes on automatically. Our close friend came over and installed it with my husband in less than an hour since it replaced an existing fan.

Brian included a list of contractors that Vermont Gas works with. On a recommendation I chose Patriot Insulation in Colchester. I'm so happy that I did - they started work in a couple of weeks, explained everything they were going to do and showed up on time each morning and were very professional. The whole project took 3.5 days. They did a blower door test when they completed their planned work and decided the numbers weren't as low as they would like for them to be - meaning the house wasn't as tight as they would like. They spent another half day doing more insulation work, ran the test and got it to where they and Vermont Gas were happy. An immediate cosmetic improvement are the foam boards in the basement, they covered exposed concrete block that looked a bit scary. The foam boards are white so instead of running down to the basement and running back up as quickly as I can, I'm now more leisurely in my trips to the basement - our laundry room is down there, so the trips are often. It's hard to feel a physical difference since it's still the summer, but I'm hoping that in the winter we'll be much cozier. 

Even if you don't live in an area serviced by Vermont Gas - you can call your local provider or government and see if they offer incentives to reduce your home's energy usage.

KILL YOUR TELEVISION

OK, nothing as dramatic as beating your TV with a bat, however you can modify the way you consume your TV entertainment to save money and take commercials out of the equation. I'm really not sure why my husband and I ever subscribed to cable, we rarely watched it. When we had a cable subscription we also paid for a Netflix account and we typically just watched the Netflix movies. A few years ago we bought a Roku box for about $90, now you can get one for as low as $50. We have the Roku hooked up to our Netflix and Amazon Prime accounts and between those two Roku channels we have more than enough entertainment for our family. After the initial $90 layout for the hardware, we pay a bit over $8 per month for Netflix and the Amazon Prime video is included with the Amazon Prime account. There are also TONS of other awesome Roku channels - Pandora, TED, Vimeo, and CHOW to name very few. Some are paid, but the ones that we use other than Netflix are free. They have a channel for HBO GO, but you need an HBO subscription - so I don't understand that one at all since most people with a ROKU are not going to also have cable but I may be mistaken.

As far as Ned's Atomic Dustbin goes (musicians from the video above), they may have softened their stance on TV if they have kids. Watching Netflix on the Roku is so awesome for kids since they can watch the same.thing.over.and.over.and.over. There is always content for little kids and they're not assaulted with commercials. For us there is always something to watch and if I can't find it on Netflix, usually it's on Amazon either free or paid for just a couple of dollars. About once a month we spring for a $3 movie on Amazon to see a newish release.

I'm pretty sure there are now live sports channels on Roku, but if you watch a lot of sports then you may find that cable is easier and cheaper. If you're really into the prime time TV shows you can subscribe to the HULU plus channel for about $8/month - we prefer Netflix, but we're more into movies and kid programming than TV shows (the exception is Mad Men). The first month of my son's life I did subscribe to Hulu Plus and I watched A LOT of Parks & Recreation, then his nursing habits were further spaced and I watched mainly movies while I nursed. How do some mother's read books while nursing - I'm so curious? We used to spend about $80 each month on cable and now we spend about $11 on our TV entertainment. That is a savings of about $828 each year!

LESS OF A MONEY PIT

This is going to be a very short and simple post. I've been out enjoying the amazing weather all day with my kids who will soon not be available to me during the week since one is starting kindergarten and the other preschool. Now I need to clean the kitchen and put together dinner which will be super simple since I prepared it last week and I just need to cook it.

To finally get to the point - interest rates are sick low right now - lowest in history! The mortgage we got on our place three years ago was pretty low at 4.75%, but we're refinancing the loan for 3.5%. Even though we've paid three years into the 4.75% loan, the 3.5% one is over $20k cheaper for the life of the loan (both 30 year fixed). That works out to a savings of $165/month. Sweet! Free money - I love being rewarded for having good credit. We have most of our financial things with USAA, because they're awesome however our mortgage broker has beat their rates the last two times we checked (the last mortgage and this one).

If you're in Vermont - give Reeni Murphy a call, she's great to work with - (802) 658-5599 Ext. 3118 or email her at RMurphy@mfsinc.com. I'm not sure which states she services, but she beat out the rates from all of the large discount mortgage companies that I found online. You don't want to give your SSN to any of them until you're positive you want to work with them on your refi, since every time your credit report is pulled it's a ding on your score. So f'in stupid. If you have over a 720 credit score, then you'll qualify for the lowest available rates - so don't freak out if your credit score isn't an 800. 

It's the same nearly 60 year old house with the same old house issues, but at least it costs less. Maybe we'll put away that money for some renovations. What would you do with some extra flow?

PUT A BIRD ON IT

Portlandia is great - watch it. Another great original is Envelop.eu! We have this very boring, very utilitarian espresso brown couch that I bought sight unseen, online purely because it was made from Crypton fabric and seemingly waterproof. The cats that "ran away" (as we tell our daughter, but really they're in great homes) were really into pissing all over my sofa and I was hoping this new couch would not get nasty. The last couch was very soft, smelled very gross and according to my husband, "was the best couch he ever had" (I bought it before we lived together so I take offense that he thinks he "had" that couch even if it was nasty). I guess after marriage my stuff becomes his stuff and vice versa. Sweet! Now I have a huge record collection. Back to the real story - the brown sofa is pretty boring and I just went back to the Crypton site after years away and it looks like they currently also carry only one sofa option, but it's pretty cool and much cheaper than the one that I bought. Dang! They also making a pretty nice modern nursery glider.

I put a bird on it.

When we moved to our current home we toyed with getting a new sofa that was a bit more stylish, but decided to just spruce it up with some throw pillows and save money for big stuff, like renovating our kitchen. After a lot of online and in-person shopping and seeing only boring or ridiculously expensive pillows that would totally break us I happened upon Envelop. It's a Belgium based site that allows designers to upload their designs which are then printed onto various housewares like aprons, pillow covers, placemats, and the like and the designers make some money and you can end up with a very original design for something that tends to be really boring. For the pillow cases, the USD/Euro exchange rate was almost one to one a couple of years ago so I got them for about $20 each and bought the pillow inserts at Michael's Arts and Crafts for about $6. I got six of them and I love looking at them. Other than our original art in the house, they're one of my favorite buys.

FAIL

Okra Cornmeal Cakes topped with tomatoes, muenster, red onion and jalapenos. This is one of the OAMM recipes and also starred as tonight's dinner. 

I was pretty confident when I was writing a bit ago about the Once a Month Mom meal planning that I could spend a whole day cooking and have food for the month. I failed. Big time. After making a couple of dishes on Sunday big plans were made to cook all night on Monday while my husband hung with the kids. He rarely gets home after 6:30, but that night it was more like 9, so I made a couple more items from the OAMM menu and crashed. Again I planned to cook a ton on Tuesday night, then I got really tired so I made one more recipe and went to bed. Tonight I just said f that and didn't make any plans to do anything other than prep dinner and hang out with the family.

This would have gone much smoother had I just set aside a weekend day and just banged all of these recipes out. Instead I'm stressing about it daily. Also, I'm not that physically productive at night these days. I can do desk work, but I'm not into being on my feet late night. When I worked at a desk job that wasn't an issue, but now that I run around after two kids all day it's an issue.

This week's CSA share!

The fridge is full of produce, not only from shopping for a few needed items for the OAMM recipes but also from my amazing CSA. Having all of this fresh produce is wonderful and we're really lucky to have it, but I don't want to fail it. This produce deserves to be eaten by our family with none of it going to rot and that is a bit of pressure. The next two afternoons when my son is napping and my daughter is at camp I'll finish up the recipes. That's the plan.

I'M TRYING

Yup - we live here and when it's nice out, we're out!

So, I'm trying to do the menu planning that I talked about here. The plan was to do any remaining grocery shopping on Saturday - I bought most of the stuff at Costco on Friday, but they don't have a great organic/free range selection and often times for the non-frozen stuff the amounts are way too big for us so I need to hit other stores. It was also my MIL's 60th birthday this weekend and the weather was gorgeous, so I didn't shop and I didn't spend all day cooking. We ate, drank, walked, played with the kids and enjoyed ourselves. Oh well, the summers are very short in Vermont and I try to not feel guilty if we spend time enjoying the outdoors while letting other chores go undone.

I did set aside a couple of hourse between outdoor activities and birthday festivities to make some of the OAMM meals and take a shower. I settled on the whole foods menu for august. I was able to make the quinoa salad, tilapia and the flank steak and set that aside - it claims to be 6 meals but the quinoa salad is more of a side dish for our family. I brought half of the salad to the birthday party last night and froze the rest to serve probably with the tilapia another night. It was very easy and it's nice to know that I have the main part of 4 meals in the freezer. I'll just prepare some veggies or salad to serve along side and done.

My plan is to make the rest of the meals over the next couple of evenings and let my husband take care of the kids after dinner while I cook. The quinoa salad called for red peppers, but we have a TON of cherry tomatoes from our CSA so I used those instead and there is a chicken salad that I'm making today that calls for strawberries and I'll use grapes instead since the kids ate all of the strawberries that I bought this morning. What I'm trying to say is - you can swap out ingredients if you need to, don't stress about it.  Also, there isn't a snowballs chance in hell that I'm making tortillas or whole wheat buns. Whatevs.

NASTY LITTLE CREATURES

Nasty little creature - lice

Lice is disgusting. I spent two weeks this spring doing little else than washing and drying everything in our house and picking nits out of our daughter's hair. I got it too. Nasty! It is more than unsettling to feel like little bugs are living on you and sucking your blood for it's nourishment. She got it from our neighbor who is a year older and in kindergarten. From what I have gathered our school district is riddled with lice. Lice is an equal opportunity blood sucker, however I think you can do some things to prevent it. Oh and here is the money saving part - we spent an extra $50 during the lice episode from additional water and electricity used when I was washing, drying and vacuuming constantly for two weeks. Some how I also managed (barely) to take care of the kids and dogs.

1. You can spray a mixture of tea tree oil and water onto your kid's hair every morning before school - I mix 20-30 drops of 100% tea tree oil into a 2oz spray bottle with water. The lice don't like tea tree oil and it may help. Who knows. Even if it doesn't work tea tree oil is good for the scalp.  
2. Buy a good nit comb and take it to your kid's hair once a week just to check. It doesn't hurt and if you catch it early it is way easier to get rid off. We used the Nit Free Terminator, it claims to remove all nits - it doesn't, but it does help. To get rid of all nits you need a lot of light, something to entertain your kid (I used my ipod touch) and a ton of patience.  
3. Buy a Garment bag for your child's coat/hat/gloves/sweaters/scarf (we live in Vermont) to keep at school. Lice have a tendency to walk from head to head and from coats and hats to other coats and hats. If your child has theirs in a garment bag, then it'll reduce that a bit. They still get it from hugging and you don't want to tell your kids not to hug other kids and turn them into anti-social misanthropes.
4. If your kid does get lice - get NIX and get rid of it quickly. I talked to our pediatrician about some of the natural remedies and she guffawed. She's into natural remedies, but for these nasty little creatures you have to unfortunately fight with insecticide. 

My head has been itching the entire time I've been writing this post. I can not talk or as I've just learned write about lice without my whole body getting the heebie geebies. Ugh.
GOOD LUCK!

NOT SO SEXY SPREADSHEET

This is that breakdown of our pet costs that I promised you here. We spend roughly $2,825 annually. Spreadsheets are not very sexy, regardless you can click here to get to the Google Doc.

If you want to make it your own, just log in to Google Docs and make a copy of it. While making this I realized how sad it must look that we have no line item for toys for our dogs. We've ended up at the emergency vet (~$500) with both of them trying to get toys out of their stomach and/or anal cavity. They don't get to play with dog toys - boo hoo.