The Eyes Have It

Well, it’s Monday and there is no menu plan!!!  Why?  Well, The Roadie has an install to do in our hometown, so the family will be heading there at intervals this week.  The Roadie and Pearlie today, Tank and myself on Wednesday afternoon.  So, not much cooking going on at our house.  I had contemplated giving you some great ideas for fast and/or freezer meals, but it’s unlikely that I’ll do much beyond spaghetti and grilled cheese.

However, I did make something this morning that you might be interested in (assuming you have no Y chromosome or, if you do, a hobby I’d rather not know about :-)).  Last night, as I was getting ready for bed, I realized I was out of eye make-up remover.  Being too tired and lazy to do anything about it, I just washed my face and left the mascara to create smudges under my eyes overnight.  This morning I had to deal with the consequences.  Enter a Google search for eye make-up remover recipes.

Here’s the one I tried.  I used what I had on hand:  Parent’s Choice baby wash and olive oil.  It works as well as any other liquid eye make-up remover I’ve ever used–not as well as a lotion or cream type, but it does the job.  So I guess I just saved myself $2-3.

As I was pinning this concoction, I decided it was time for a pin board to keep all the frugal/greener/healthier recipes for consumables together.  So, go check out my “Thrifting” pinboard on Pinterest.  And, if you need an invite, let me know!

Have a lovely week!!!

Make Ahead Strawberry Breakfast Bake Recipe

What’s for breakfast at your house tomorrow morning?? It could be this.  🙂  Last week I made this adaptation of a recipe for a blueberry breakfast bake from a cookbook on my shelf. The original was okay, but didn’t have a lot of depth of flavor. So, I decided to tweak and play around with it some. The strawberries were a choice made more because they’re in season and WAY cheaper than blueberries. I’ve never baked fresh strawberries before, so I was a bit surprised that they lost a fair amount of their color. It wasn’t the prettiest thing I’ve ever made, but it was pretty yummy.  (AND, if you want to make it this week, I know Aldi has strawberries pretty inexpensively through 5/8!)

Make Ahead Strawberry Breakfast Bake

• 8 slices white bread, cut into 1-inch pieces
• 1 package (8 oz) cream cheese, chilled and cut into 1/2-inch pieces
• 3 Tbl sugar
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1 cup fresh strawberries, cut into 1/2-inch dice
• 8 eggs
• 1-1/2 cups milk
• 1 tsp vanilla

1. Grease a 2 quart baking dish. Spread half of the bread pieces evenly in the baking dish.
2. Mix sugar and cinnamon in a small bowl. Toss cream cheese cubes in the cinnamon-sugar mixture. Top bread pieces with cream cheese. Sprinkle any remaining cinnamon-sugar over the top.
3. Evenly scatter strawberry pieces over the top. Then spread remaining bread over strawberries.
4. Whisk together the eggs, milk, and vanilla until well blended. Pour over bread as evenly as possible.
5. Cover and refrigerate 8-24 hours.
6. A little more than an hour before breakfast time, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake, covered, for 30 minutes. Uncover and continue to bake an additional 25-30 minutes, until center is set.
7. Serve with confectioners’ sugar or syrup… preferably strawberry. 🙂

If you make this, please let me know what you think.  Also, please tell me if you try it with any other fruits and how it turns out.  Have a super week!!

It’s Hip to be Square

Way back when we were living at our old house, I came across a book called All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew and thought the overall plan it lays out looked like a great idea.  We were living in a rental property, so tilling up a chunk of the yard and spending lots of time and money amending the soil to grow veggies wasn’t a good option.  Raised beds were brilliant!!  But, they never happened.  Now we’re in our own house, but we have a tiny backyard, in comparison to our previous homes, and so raised beds were still the plan.

A few months ago, we had a fence panel come down and so, a few weeks ago The Roadie repurposed the planks to make our very first raised veggie bed.  However, even though the kids and I had purchased a few seed packets a while back and I had worked on a written plan for plant placement, we hadn’t made the time to finish the project.  Today, we finally got it filled with soil and planted.  It was a whole family affair, from Tank helping his daddy mix the soil with compost and to Pearlie getting a chance to help water-in the plants and seeds.

Our box is 5 feet by 4 feet, so we had a total of 20 squares to fill.  Here’s the plan:

There are a few squares that we didn’t have the stuff to fill yet.  Today, we put the following in the ground:

• 2 cucumbers–1 square–from seed
• 1 acorn squash–2 squares–from seed
• 1 tomato–1 square–seedling
• 1 giant marconi pepper–1 square–seedling
• 4 bell peppers–4 squares–seedlings (more than I originally planned, but that’s what the boys came home from the store with; good thing they’ll freeze)
• 1 zucchini–2 squares–from seed (I’m not necessarily following the rules laid out in the book for this, instead I’m banking on some info I found here, so that I can use fewer squares for zucchini and have enough room for all those peppers 🙂 )
• 8 lettuce–2 squares–from seed
• 16 carrots–1 square–from seed
• 16 radishes–1 square–from seed
• 9 green beans–1 square–from seed
• 1-3 cilantro–1 square–seedling (again, this is what the boys brought home from the store and without tearing apart the special decomposable pot, it’s hard to say if there are three separate plants in there or one plant with three stems; oh well!)

We still need to get these in the ground:

• 1 cherry or grape tomato–1 square–I need to go buy one more seedling
• 8 sugar snap peas–1 square–these will be from seed, that I need to go buy
• 4 parsley–1 square–these are soaking for 24 hours, so they’ll go in the ground tomorrow
• 9 green or purple beans–1 square–these will go in when the radishes are harvested, so I’ll grab another seed packet when I get the rest

And, Tank made a great seed packet holder at the Home Depot Kids Workshop this morning, if he’ll let me keep it… 🙂

Menu plan–April Week 4

Still working on getting back in the groove of menu planning.  I got a new cookbook over the weekend that has inspired me–Gooseberry Patch–Ready, Set, Eat.  The best part is, if I get lazy one week, there are several menu plans with shopping lists ready to go!!  🙂  But, I didn’t cheat this week:

• Sunday–Scrambled Eggs with sausage and Razzle Dazzle Raspberry Muffins (the first recipe I’ve ever posted!!)
• Monday–Sweet-and-Sour Hot Dogs (new to us, from my new cookbook)
• Tuesday—Chicken and Corn Chilaquiles Casserole (new to us, found last week browsing through other Menu Plan Monday blogs)
• Wednesday–Grilled Cheese Sandwiches
• Thursday–Sloppy Joes
• Friday—Homemade Frozen Pizzas (I’m going to try to start stocking my freezer a bit at a time)
• Saturday–Leftovers

Have a great and tasty week!

Linked up to Menu Plan Monday at I’m an Organizing Junkie.

Soapy Success…Sort of

Have you, like me, noticed an increase in the number of available recipes for homemade laundry, cleaning, and hygiene products online over the last few years?  Maybe it’s just me and how my interests have changed; maybe it’s a move toward “greener” living; or maybe it’s the economy (I don’t want to go there).  It’s even noticeable in the stores, as washing soda and laundry bars are regularly stocked on grocery shelves now.

I have dabbled with homemade cleaners a bit, making all-purpose spray cleaner for a while (until we were blessed with a couple of bottles of a natural cleaner concentrate, but I will go back to making my own once we use them up).  I have also been trying to get my timing right to make laundry detergent–every time we got close to the end of a bottle from the store, our budget would be super short and I wouldn’t be able to go and get a lidded bucket and all the ingredients or I would need to do laundry THAT day and didn’t have time to let it sit the necessary 24 hours.  So, I finally just bought the stuff last month and made the detergent, which is now sitting ready to be used, once we finish up what will hopefully be our LAST EVER bottle of store-bought detergent.  Once I get to try it, I’ll let you know how it turns out.  🙂

In the mean time, I continue to see intriguing projects that could save us some money with just a little bit of effort on my part.  When I came across this one for body wash on Pinterest, I knew I wanted to try it.  The procedure for making the bar soap a liquid is not terribly different from making the liquid laundry detergent–grate the soap, combine with water in a large stainless steel pot, and heat to combine.  The additives are different, however.  I don’t think I know anybody who gets dirty enough to necessitate borax-laced body wash. 🙂

I did successfully make a liquid soap from the bars.  Which, my reading around on other blogs has informed me, is not always a guarantee, depending on the ingredients in the bar soap used.  However, that is only the first part of the assessment.  There are more things to consider.

To fully determine the success of this project, I need to decide if my end product is a viable replacement for the store-bought body wash and if it’s going to save us any money.  There are a couple of things about me that play heavily into figuring this out:  #1–I am cheap.  #2–I am a fast showerer (spell check is telling me that’s not a word, but I don’t care).  These two traits make the body wash aisle a pretty quick trip because so many of the options are immediately ruled out.  Up to this point I almost always have bought store-brand body wash–I have tried higher priced options and am convinced that a *carefully* chosen store-brand soap is just as good, and, even when I was couponing (which I really didn’t enjoy), was less money per ounce.  But, not every cheap body wash worked for me.  As a frugal girl who showers quickly, my body wash has to work well when I shave my legs too, because I am not going to spend time or additional money on shaving cream!

Here’s how this exact combination of bar soap and recipe resulted:

• The texture was a little bit slippery and kind of mucus-like.  This made it a bit challenging to use and I probably wasted more than I normally do with a more lotion-like body wash. (-)
• The lather wasn’t too great for shaving.  I read here that extra ingredients are added to all soaps to create more lather, and the body wash formulas have more than the bars.  Once you dilute the bars by melting them in the water, you’ve pretty much killed your lather. (-)
• Even without the super-sudsy lather, I didn’t get any razor burn–maybe because of the protective properties of the glycerin?? (+)
• It smells really good!! (+)
• It is very cost effective, even using extra because of the lather and dropping some down the drain! (+)

Cost breakdown:

• 4 bars of Softsoap brand “coconut scrub” $2.97; only used 2 for a 1 gallon batch=$1.49
• 6 oz bottle of glycerin $3.88; only used 2 Tbl (1 oz)=$0.65
• Total=$2.14 per gallon or $0.016 per oz

Compared to:

• 18 oz bottle of Softsoap brand body wash (any scent at WalMart)=$3.48 or $0.193 per oz
• 24 oz bottle of Equate Deep Moisture body wash (from WalMart; this is what is currently about to run out in our shower)=$3.47 or $0.145 per oz

Am I going to try again?  Yes.  I will not, however, use this exact combination of ingredients in these proportions.  There are several other recipes and tutorials out there.  I believe I will use one of them when I go to use the 2 remaining bars of soap and I will look in depth for reasons behind the mucus-like texture to see if I can avoid it next time.

So, how about a couple of questions?  (Please share your answers in the comment section.)

• Do you consider yourself to be frugal?
• Which method(s) of saving money do you use, or aspire to use? (ie. couponing; thrifting; stockpiling; buying in bulk; avoiding convenience products–food, hygiene, or cleaning; etc.)

I wrote this last Thursday with the intent of including it in the Thursday Two Question link-up, in a timely manner.  Better late than never…