LIly’s cheerleading squad made a trip to a local farm on Saturday. Matt helped herd the girls. 
They made t-shirts and of course practiced stunts…
Wordless or less wordy Wednesday
Reply
Author Archives: Sheila
Oh My Sweet Potato!
Just because I thought it would be neat for the kids, I picked up a small 6 pack of sweet potato plants this spring. Over the spring and summer, both Matt and I have commented on how beautiful the flowers were. In fact, I liked the appearance so much that following the principle of beauty of square foot gardening, I was going to add a small bed up front for next year to grow again. Matt was not all that impressed and wanted to wait to see how much we were able to produce.
This week, we have had several night of freezing temps and our beautiful sweet potato plants were dead, even black, from the cold so I knew I need to dig up and see what we have……
I am truly amazed, for $1.68 we grew almost enough for several meals! I actually have most of the small ones in the oven baking right now so we can enjoy for dinner! I am so excited as this is the most veggie with the least amount of work!
Zach and Kendall helped to dig up the potatoes. next we made an assembly line for washing and sorting them. It took almost an hour to complete the process but both of these guys LOVED it! Now sweet potatoes are a definite for our garden next year!
Homecoming Queen
Last night was Homecoming for a local high school. Our good friends, the ones that can tolerate ALL of us for extended times, daughter Andrea was nominated for Homecoming Queen. So the plan was to tailgate and enjoy the game. It is COLD! I am talking middle of winter cold but we still braved the cold and enjoy watching Andrea WIN! I am most proud to know that the student body nominated and elected her! If you want to know more about her check out her blog at Teens on wheels.
It was cold!
The Pierces
Amanda and Andrea
North Davidson’s Homecoming Queen
What to Do with 120# of Chicken?
Day Zero- This actually occurred several weeks ahead of time for me. I started searching for a variety of chicken recipes that could easily be frozen. I discovered that the internet is full of ideas but I eliminated first the ones that required ingredients that I don’t normally cook with or just sounded like the same basic idea and second ones that didn’t sound like they would freeze well or be easy to complete. I printed these recipes up and made a stack to be addressed in the next step.
Day One- I will admit that this step took 3-4 hours to complete. I took my recipes decided if I wanted to double triple or just try it out. Next, was a list of the quantity of dishes. Third was the list of ingredient divided into two parts, items on hand and items that needed to be purchased. Finally I made a list of items to be purchased, including which store to purchase at and searched for any coupons I could find.
Day Two- Shopping. I purchased most items on my regular trip to Costco and Target but did make another stop the week we received the chicken to purchase the fresh veggies that were still needed.
Day Two and half- I again spread this out over 3-4 days of the week of chicken arrival. I clean and made space for the chicken first in our large chest freeze, then in one of our kitchen freezers so initial freezing will be easier for some of the items. We also located several crates that will make transporting to the chest freezer easier. I also clean out space in the fridge to be able to place at least one of the boxes to take a break on Saturday night to get the kids feed and in bed.
Day Three- I spent about two and half hours chopping up all the fresh veggies and even beginning to label some of the bags.
Day Four- Chicken arrived, the pick up was smooth and the easiest I have ever experienced. In total we spent 4 hours processing the chicken into the recipes you can find here. I am only counting time that we (Matt and I) were working with the chicken. I did have around an hour that I stopped to get the kids to bed and another 30 minutes that I took a shower while waiting for the crockpots to finish with the chicken to be shredded. By far, the best tip I have is the Kitchen Aid mixer will shred chicken in 2 minutes!
Total of 48 set meals not counting left overs, so easily 50 meals totally prepared in 10 hours or less. Now to see how long it actually last!
Why did the Chicken Cross the Road?
To avoid our house!
Now to answer the other question that I heard several times. Below is the inventory of the items that we made from our 120# of chicken. I have linked most to recipe that I used. A lot of these are total new to us so my plan is to come back and make a quick comment regarding how we liked it. Then the next time we try this I will have a starting place as to what to fix and what to replace. I am a little disappointed as I did not have enough chicken to complete 2 of the meals I wanted to try so next time these may replace what is don’t like.
- 14 packs of shredded chicken
- 4 chicken and broccoli casserole (my recipe) this is a favorite around here and can be serve immediately or freeze for a quick easy meal.
- Welcome school chicken pie– Awesome good, homemade…
- 4 Chicken Fried Rice
- 4 Chicken Cacciatore– I should have made only 2 of these but I hope they are good
- 2 Garlic Ranch Chicken– good grilled chicken. Worth repeating
- 2 Chicken Fajitas– I can’t figure out where I got this recipe I copied it to this page.
- 2 Creamy Chicken Italian-O not bad, smells great, taste average, may repeat.
- 2 Café Rio Chicken-yummy, it did not taste as good as it smelled but still worth repeating!
- 2 Pineapple Chicken– a lot of work for something that taste like Chicken
- 2 Garlic Lime Chicken– Matt’s favorite!
- 4 World’s Best Chicken– it taste like chicken, very moist but not anything I would say was worth the effort that went it to it!
- 4 packs of chicken strips that we will add a bottle of Italian dressing to and marinate for 3 day before grilling. Each bag should equal 2 meals.
This makes a total of 47 meals. My thought is that in reality this will be 50 meals or more including leftovers at least one night. I will add another post with the details of how long it took to actually prepare these meals and how I complete the task on a very busy Saturday for us.
Do you have an easy freezer chicken recipe to share?
First Fieldtrip for Kendall
Matt, Zach and I were lucky enough to attend Kendall’s first fieldtrip with her. We went to the North Carolina Zoo! Picture heavy of course!
walking in!
Kendall’s Kindergarten Class
We all enjoyed the talk about nocturnal animals. Zach was able to sit through the entire presentation even better behaved than some of the other students.
The exhibiit with most of the noctural animals
The only bee I want to be near!
(Zach) Bear in a Bear
Do we look tired yet?
How about now do we need a nap?
How We Re-stock
For the past several months, I have been on a mission to clean out our freezers. I can finally say that I did succeed. So now what? This month’s grocery budget or should I save overspending will show just how much we can spend in a month. But more about that later.
The first stop we made to re-stock the freezers was a local meat market. We ended up spending around $200 but purchased what I am planning on being enough meat when combined with our chicken order that we will pick up this Saturday to last approximately six month. We purchased chicken wings for our super bowl party in January, several packs of steaks, a couple of London broils, flank steak for use in some fried rice meals, cube steak and a pork tenderloin which Matt split into 4 separate roast before freezing. I did purchase 20# of ground beef which I divided up and froze most of the following out of:
2 meatloaves (this are uncooked but can be easily thawed)
2 Cheeseburger pies. (We have eaten one of these this week)
7 meal packs of Salisbury steaks. ( Matt will combined with frozen mashed potatoes for a really quick but hearty meal).
8 packs of already browned ground beef.
4 meals of stuffing for green peppers. We enjoyed one of these for Amanda’s birthday and a second is a left over meal. The other 2 packs are in the freezer.
Next stop was at Costco where not only did we purchase food to re-supply us but also we need to purchase several vitamins and medicines that I have not been able to coupon for in a long time. We also had to renew our membership which only ended up costing me $14 so I will continue because that works out to around $1.25 a month and just the convenience of buying in bulk is well worth that cost!
Finally we headed out to Target to grab an awesome deal on Starbucks coffee and to gather some additional items we need to make meals out of our chicken.
In addition to cooking above I have also added a Baked Ziti to the freezer and will be placing some Taco soup in tomorrow as well.
I did take a look at our overall grocery budget for the year. Including all the additional spending this month, our monthly average is $650 which is less than last year. My plan is to make a couple of small trips over the next several months but I would imagine that by the end of the year our spending will be at less than $600 a month!
The plan is to let you in on how we end up processing 120# of chicken on Sunday or Monday after it is completed.
Amanda’s Birthday
Amanda decided that she would prefer a home cooked meal instead of going out to eat for her birthday! Because of our work schedules we did celebrate a day late but it still was nice! She chose stuffed green peppers for dinner.
Happy 22nd Birthday Amanda!
Blowing out the candles!
Guess they like having their picture taken!
The only decent picture I got of the 4 of them!
Wordless Wednesday- Zach in a Sack
Race that is…
On your mark
The race is on!
Sack malfunction
Savings!
A list of the things we have done or are currently doing to save money :
- No heat or air for the past month! The goal is another month or 6 weeks. The last several days have seen highs in the upper 80s but with low 60s or 50s at night, we have survived with ceiling fans. I can’t wait to see how much this has effected our power bill.
- By switching our cell phone bill to my name, we increased our discount by 2% and for some reason they applied the discount differently as well. As a result, our total cell phone bill is over $50 less starting in October!
- Matt has been researching our cable tv and its charges. We were both really surprised to find $10 charge for on demand items that we have been paying for over a year that simply we don’t use. In addition, we are planning on dropping our cable tv entirely in the month of November, when our contract is up. We should see this reduce our monthly bills by $100 a month. We know that the first 2 months will be sent on obtaining boxes but still $100 a month is HUGE!
- Matt cut his own hair yesterday. The current decision is that some things are just better left to the pros. Hair cuts being one of them!
- We are continuing to clean out our freezers. A major shopping trip is planned for next weekend but we are continuing to eat what we have. A good example is today, for lunch everyone chose a left over for lunch. At dinner, I used left over taco meat and made a taco bake which basically was a free meal!
- By combining discounts, I was able to purchase a new comforter set for our bed for less than half of the advertised price including shipping and tax. I will definitely be posting pictures of that after it arrives.
- I was able to purchase 3 Diet Cokes and 2 bottles of dish detergent at CVS today for $0.34 and left with $2.50 in ECB. I started with NONE! I did use a rain check
- As I was cleaning at work last week, I found a huge stack of papers that have been sitting in the same place for 9 months. My first thought was to toss them but then I realized wait they have only been printed on one side. So I brought the stack home, cut off the corners with the staples and not have an entire pack of paper to use for printing and the kids art work. I honestly have not bought paper in over two years. We print a lot but keep a scrap paper bin at church and then recycle all we get here. This saves us a bunch on paper. I do have some “clean” paper for use for official things but have found that no one care what the back of my coupons or list say and the kids are so used to coloring on paper that they use at least 10 sheets a day for art!
So it is important to see savings as a marathon not a sprint!