$20 Food Lion Trip

Posted on August 6, 2020 by Sheila

I am very very happy with my current stockpile. I estimate we have approximately 200 meals ready to use for the first half of the school year. I am very hopefully that I will have some time during Christmas break and a good couple of snow days to replenish our stock. I did make a trip to the local meat shop on Monday. I spent $129 and purchased chicken wings, pork butts and beef. The freezers are full! I did leave additional money in our grocery budget this month in order to purchase some items as we run out or if we find a awesome sale.

I was pleasantly surprised to receive a flyer from Food Lion with coupons to use on store brand items this weekend. A better surprise was the fact that 2L Diet Cokes were on sale for $0.99 each. I decided to challenge myself and see what I could purchase for $20 using the coupons that they sent.

I purchased: 10 2 L of Diet Coke, using the sell price plus the $3 off $10 coupons these were $0.69 each.
2 six packs of plastic bottles of peach flavored drink, the original price was $1.99 each, using $1 Food Lion coupon, each bottle is twenty-five cent each!
2 pack of sausage patties that had been reduced to $1.74 each
4 packs of Hazelnut M&Ms that were reduced to $0.48 each
Pack of Frozen broccoli- original price $1.20 with $0.35 off coupon making it ninety-four cent. I use this in several casserole recipes and it is one of the few vegetables everyone will eat.
Jar of Alfredo sauce originally $1.49 with coupon for $0.45 off making it $1.04
2 boxes of elbow macaroni, original price $0.79 each with coupon for $.50 off two makes each box fifty-four cent.

I spent a total of $19.46!!!!!

Recipe Challenge #46

Posted on August 4, 2020 by Sheila

This is a recipe that I have had printed for a long time. I found it in my recipe file and decided to give it a try. I am going to be really honest up front and say that I probably made enough changes to this recipe to just call it my own. First, of course I did not go out and buy horseradish cheddar or even white cheddar cheese for that matter. I used a cup of sharp cheddar and a cup of shredded colby jack. Another 1/2 cup of sharp cheddar was placed on top. Second change, I doubled the amount of onions the recipe called for and added a 1/2 cup of green peppers to give it more flavor. I also tripled the breadcrumbs that I used on top.

The results from this recipe are mixed as well. Gourmet mac and cheese describes the overall taste. Everyone ate the meal and some even had seconds and thirds. One suggestion was to cut the stew beef into smaller pieces, another was to add garlic and more green peppers. Personally, I actually think it tasted better after sitting for an hour. Another plus to this dish is that it stretched one pound of stew beef into a meal for 6 with enough left-overs for probably a lunch for three. A huge down side to this is the amount of effort and time it took to complete the process from start to finish. I spent over an hour in the preparation not counting any cook time and all the kids ended up helping me pull one part or another of the recipe together. Based on time (one hour for gourmet mac and cheese) I am placing this one in the no category.

The official count is
Repeating 23
Maybe 8
No 15

Now only 6 additional recipes to meet my goal!

Monday Menu Plan

Posted on August 3, 2020 by Sheila

I start back to work next Monday… one week from today…. I am not excited. This week our church is holding Vacation Bible school in the evenings. Everyone is involved in some fashion. I also planned on some extra down time in order to feel like I actually had a vacation. The theme of the week is quick and cool.

Breakfast– Saturday-Muffins from Costco Sunday- Bacon,biscuits and eggs Monday- , Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday-choice of breakfast muffins, eggs, sausage, oatmeal, cereal or grits, breakfast burritos, bagels or omelets or tomato sandwich

Lunch- Saturday- Sliders of your choice Sunday- Salad or wraps Monday- egg rolls from school Tuesday- corn dogs Wednesday- depends on where the kids chose . Thursday- wraps or sandwich , Friday- good question

Dinner- Saturday-left-overs Sunday- Pasta Salad Monday-Quesadillas Tuesday- Spaghetti and meatballs with homemade pasta sauce Wednesday- ??? not sure yet Thursday- chicken nuggets Friday- hamburgers and French Fries.

Budget Update

Posted on August 2, 2020 by Sheila

I have been monitoring and working on developing a budget the last couple of weeks. We have had several changes to our expenses and I wanted to start the school year with a solid foundation. I honestly don’t remember and could not find the last time I actually shared a budget. So I am going to do that today.

In the area of income, Matt continues to work full-time and I will start next week back at my school system. I am beginning today some additional work in Guam.

I do not budget my earnings from Guam. The first reason for that is that it can vary greatly from $40 to $1500 a month. After our tithe, we have been using the extra money for home improvements, fun money and travelling specifically Disney trips. This will continue for the remaining months of this year. I anticipate that even our April Disney trip should be completely paid off in December. This gives up a good six months to determine our next priority for the extra money.

Now for the actual budget :

Monthly Expenses	Total
Hair	100
Gas	500
Offering	520
Piano	120
Clothing	100
Credit Card payments	745
Chores/ House cleaning	350
Car Payment	436.42
Spending	180
AAA/Insurance	78
Groceries	550
Gifts	100
Summer	140
Saving	25
Mortgage	990.96
Water	34

Electric	260
Internet	147.46
Van Payment	344.03
Verizon	343.03
Adobe/Computer	32.09

Recipe Challenge #45

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Sheila

One of foods that I was having the most difficulty finding a good use for from the school supplied lunches was sweet potatoes. We enjoy maybe one baked sweet potato a month but I was struggling to find another use. It occurred to me yesterday to try and find a recipe for sweet potato fries. After some research, I ended up combining several of the recipes that I had read. I managed to get exactly what I did on this page. We tried a batch at lunch today and they were AWESOME! In fact they were so good that Matt helped me make 5 additional bags to freeze. We did not add the oil and will do this just prior to baking! This is a huge huge win for us!

The official count is
Repeating 23
Maybe 8
No 14

Now only 7 additional recipes to meet my goal!

July in Review

Posted on July 31, 2020 by Sheila

July was a different sort of month. We definitely enjoyed our week at the beach and I even decided to skip blogging the entire week. We ended our trip early and arrived home late Friday night because of weather. Zach really enjoyed baseball camp this past week but it also was very stress with all the driving involved. On the other hand, we have been making some tough decision about school placement for both Zach and Kendall. I had a HUGE issue with American Airlines regarding our December tickets. This consumed 10 hours of my time and energy. Finally we had $1150 stolen from Disney gift cards and I am still waiting on a response. August will be a month of change and excitement. I will be returning to work full time, all the kids will be in school of some form and we have our first Disney Trip scheduled for the last week.

Gardening- We have been able to enjoy a couple of cucumbers, squash and zucchini. Tomatoes are ripening. I have been able to make lots of different dishes and have frozen around 10 “jars’ of spaghetti sauce so far. The kids LOVE this fresh sauce and prefer would honestly eat several times a week if allowed. I also made one cup servings of tomato sauce for use in recipes. We harvest enough peppers to use in a double batch of sauce but now to eat. The pepper plants appear to be blooming so I am hopeful. I don’t expect that we will be harvesting much more besides our sweet potatoes but we have been blessed with enough to enough this summer.

Goal #1 Grocery Budget of $550- The total for the month is $584.33. This is a significant decrease from each of the other months. The freezers are full and I have even stockpiled toilet paper and filters for our heating and air system. My goal for the month of August is to limit groceries to $275 or more. Depending on how this goes will determine the grocery budget for the remainder of the year.

Goal #2 – Record and keep up with gas/ auto purchase- $512.02 the total for the month. Definitely the most expensive month this year but this total includes tags and taxes on the van and an oil change for both the Honda and van. We drove the van to the beach and I have been driving approximately 145 miles a day this past week to get Zach back and forth from camp. I am really not sure where this will land next month as I return to work.

Goal #3-Use a cash envelope system for everything possible. Limited success. During the month of July, I have been working on our budget and hope to share this in the next couple of days.

Goal #4- Blogging- 15 post per month. This is post number 12 for the month! I am very pleased with this number especially given all the problems and time consuming things that happened this month.

Goal # 5- Fitness- Goal is to walk 3 times a week. I managed to walk 8days this month! This is also a improvement over last month. In a even bigger gain, I managed 10,000 steps for three day which is the first time in 11 months I have been able to do this!

Goal #6 – Bible study- Goal- 3x a week –Yikes!

Goal #7-Attempt at least 52 new recipes this year.- We have tried 44 new recipes this year! I know I will not finish this goal before school starts but with 6 recipes remaining even one new recipe a month will make this achievable.

Earnings_ $60. This is a small improvement so we will continue to hope for the best. We will be enjoying free Starbucks at Disney!

August will be a month of change and uncertainty. I am planning to share our new budget. My overall goal for August is to maintain peace and calm through faith no matter what happens.

Recipe Challenge 44

Posted on July 29, 2020 by Sheila

This looks incredible! I was so excited to try this recipe for Tomato pie. The recipe itself was also very easy to follow. Spoiler alert……. not going to be making it again anytime soon. I just fell flat somewhere along the way. I did not use any onions in the pie because I knew my family would not like that aspect of it. This is probably the third recipe I have tried over the years so maybe we just don’t like Tomato pie?

The official count is
Repeating 22
Maybe 8
No 14

Eight more recipes to try this year, I will be very honest and say that I doubt this is accomplished before I go back to work in a couple of weeks.

Monday Menu Plan

Posted on July 27, 2020 by Sheila

The theme of the week is Tomato! We returned from the beach to find 12lbs of tomato with enough to last several more weeks. I am also doing easy as I will be driving alot and cool but tomato still rules!

Breakfast– Saturday-Biscuit King (since we returned early from the beach) Sunday- Bacon and eggs Monday- , Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday-choice of breakfast muffins, eggs, sausage, oatmeal, cereal or grits, breakfast burritos, bagels or omelets or tomato sandwich

Lunch- Saturday- nachos Sunday- hot dog lunch with friends . Monday- tomato pie Tuesday- McDonalds (while running errands) Wednesday- Chinese from Panda Panda . Thursday- School lunch food , Friday- sliders- tomato encouraged

Dinner- Saturday-Pasta Salad Sunday-Dominos Pizza Monday Stuffed green peppers (4 bags frozen for future use) Tuesday- Spaghetti and meatballs with homemade pasta sauce Wednesday- Pasta Salad with added pepperoni and tomato Thursday- Quesadillas Friday- Mexican.

Saving on Saturday

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Sheila

I really had not planned to take the entire week off while I was at the beach but it just so happened that way. We enjoyed lots of beach time, shopping time and pool time. I am glad to be home.

My square foot garden is producing but at a significantly slower rate than I anticipated. Our Tomatoes are starting to come in and we have lots! I used 12 pounds of tomatoes the last week we were home to make homemade pasta sauce. The kids LOVE this and request it! I have been using restaurant to go containers that we have been collect to place the sauce in and store. This makes it super easy to find and one container equals one jar of sauce. Today, we head to the garden and harvest around another 12 pounds of tomatoes. I used 8lbs along with a couple of green peppers I found to make another crockpot full of pasta sauce. We also went ahead and stewed the remaining 4 pounds. I packaged these in 1/2 cup containers. I used these for Mexican rice. Other plans this week include tomato basil biscuits, stuffed green peppers, tomato pie and tomato sandwiches. My goal will be to use as many fresh tomatoes as possible and attempted to hold off on another container of pasta sauce until next weekend.

I purchased Disney Gift cards from Target and combined to one card that we will be using on our first Disney Trip in August. I am able to save $5 for each hundred using my Target card so is an easy extra $50 just during this trip.

While reading several other blogs and in order to have a complete stockpile. I have begun to look at items other than food that we can store easily. I was able to find air filters for our heating and air system at $0.96 each at Home Depot. In order to get free shipping, I purchased 12 packs of 4.

In the area of food, I will be making a Costco trip this week and hope to be able to grab both paper towel and toilet paper at some point during the week. Zach is attending a baseball camp in Winston so I am not opposed to stopping at Costco several times this week. I also need to make a list and head to Aldi to grab so canned biscuits, pie crust and cream cheese that is significantly cheaper to purchase here.

My final area of saving my not appear to be one at first. One of the things we like to do is shop the outlets while we are at the beach. This year, Matt and I specifically talked about items we needed. We purchased new shoes for everyone and even an additional pair for both Matt and myself. We ended up spending around $30 for each pair of shoes so this is truly a huge savings. I also purchased Zach so shorts and Braxton several outfits to use my Old navy cash. The best find was probably 40oz metal water bottles for $10 each. We will definitely be using these at Disney!

Baseball Catcher

Posted on July 16, 2020 by Sheila

Zach has been the most excited this summer to get to play baseball. This is also his biggest fear for the fall that he will not get to play fall ball. A left handed catcher is extremely rare. In fact, only one left handed catcher played one game in the MLB. But Zach is enjoying the position and that is all that matters.

We have been working on getting some good pictures.