Wordless Wednesday- Cruise part 2
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Monthly Archives: August 2025
Monday Menu Plan
I have been menu planning for a long long time. I just looked back and the answer is since 2010. I actually love menu planning but it does become somewhat mandate but after 15 years most things do. Over the years I have changed up my menu planning and a week at a time works well for our purposes. Now moving forward, I have less than two weeks until I return to work full time. My goal for this school year is to use up as much as possible from our pantries and freezers. This should allow me to cut our grocery budget by half, less than $450 a month. I am also looking ahead to needing to purchase another cow by next summer as well so I would like to start saving for this expense so that it does not hit so hard. But I have to be able to plan and make meal quickly due to our busy schedule. I recently saw on line where a person had a list of thirty meals and then they rotated through them. I am going to adapt that just a bit. I am in the process of making a list of all the possible meals that we have in the house. From that list I am going to pick a list of thirty at the beginning of each month. Then I will look at each week and rotate to make things not so boring. But before that I also have a huge collection of different recipes that I want to try. So for the next two weeks, I am not using any familiar and favorite recipes, all these will be new recipes that I can decide to include in the rotation or simply leave out. I will likely also plan to include at least one new to us recipe a month just to keep things interesting. This is going to take a little planning but I hope that it will make meal prepping less stress and expensive in the near future.
Breakfast- Saturday-Pancakes and sausage Sunday- Dutch/German pancakes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday Friday– find it (oatmeal, omelets, cereal and milk ,sausage, pop-tarts, grits and eggs. I am planning to make a baked oatmeal for one breakfast this week.
Lunch- Saturday-Chinese from yard sale profits Sunday-Christo’s Monday and Tuesday, I am having a salad from Sunday lunch Wednesday -Friday Left-overs or what ever you find most days.
Dinner- Saturday-Left-over Chinese Sunday- More Left-overs Monday-BBQ ribs, squash casserole and cream corn. Tuesday-Beef enchilada casserole . Wednesday- Pork Chops Thursday-Chicken Parmesan casserole Friday-Sloppy joe cheeseburger pasta.
Here is to a new adventure!
Every Bit Counts Challenge/Goals left
The end of Summer break if fast approaching, in fact I have 8 days left. I have mention multiple times before that I begin working on the Every Bit Counts Challenge as soon as school ends because I ended up back at work several weeks before the challenge ends. I am very pleased with the amount of food that I have been able to prepare for the school year. One of the goals of the next year is to use as much of the food that we have as possible and also to spend as little as possible at the grocery store as well. I do not have a source of diary so this will continue to be a huge expense.
We made a planned stop at a roadside farm stand on the way home from the beach. We purchased a half a bushel of peaches. These are some of the best peaches that I have eaten in a long time. I have made a peach cobbler and everyone has eaten peaches this week as a snack. I was also able to can 26 half pints of peaches that will be used in lunches this year.
Before leaving for the beach, I harvested all the ripe tomatoes and threw a couple of quarts in the freezer. We came home to an explosion of volunteer tomatoes as well. With this bounty, I canned up 22 half pints of pizza sauce. I also made a big batch of spaghetti sauce which we used for meals during the week.
Finally, our pears have started to come in. One branch actually became so heavy and broke off. We have been able to can 12 half pints of pears for lunches as well. The goal for this next week is to can another 12 pints of pears for eating and then use the rest to make pear sauce which can be used in place of apple sauce and makes an excellent fruit bread.
The last thing I was able to preserve this week was Waxman peppers. These peppers are growing beyond belief. I am actually thinking that we will freeze as many as we need to use for salsa next year!
One finally way that I am making Every Bit counts was our dinner meal of Friday. I did not feel like pizza so I decided to use some chicken sausage and a couple of boxes of Rice A Ron. The box called for a 14.5 can of diced tomatoes. I did not want to open two cans so I decided to try and use cherry tomatoes instead. I went out to the the volunteer bed and was able to use all cherry tomatoes for dinner. This turned into a very well received and need to be repeated meal. I doubt I will be using cherry tomatoes so the taste may be a little bit different.