One Pan. Vegetarian. Healthy. Affordable.

Not to worry, we aren’t going vegan or anything. Ben and I have just been contemplating the amount of meat we consume. Questions along the lines of, yes, God gave us permission to eat steak, but still some cow has to die and shouldn’t we show respect by not eating beef every night of the week? That’s another tangent, but my point was, that we are cutting back on meat. We have been finding other places to gain protein through food (I’m not a big fan of vitamin supplements). Lots of legumes and cheeses. I’ve learned to soak the beans in salt water to add flavor and to slow cook lentils for 12 hours to make very filling and delicious soups. But sometimes life gets in the way of meal prep and I’m stranded at 6 o’clock with no dinner on the table and not an idea of what to do about it. Yesterday was one such night. I’ve been reading a lot of Alice Water’s The Art of Simple Food, in which she provides a list of food to keep on hand for such emergencies. It is because of that inspiration that I did have potatoes, olive oil, thyme and frozen asparagus on hand. I prefer red or little golden potatoes, which have so much flavor and are easy to quarter into bite sized pieces, but you could just as easily use russets. I washed and quartered my reds and spread them into a glass cake pan. I laid full sprigs of thyme (stripping them takes so much time and I didn’t have it!) on top, and poured a generous amount of olive oil on top of the whole she-bang. Fresh ground sea salt and pepper topped it, of course. I baked it at 375′ turning the potatoes occasionally, which allows for the cooking thyme leafs to fall off and mix in. Once the potatoes were soft, I turned up the heat to 425′ and placed some frozen asparagus spears on top of the potatoes. I kept it in there about 10 minutes until the asparagus had heated through. Ben and I like to dip our roast potatoes in prepared horseradish for an extra kick.

Approximate cost for serving 3 (1/2)

• red potatoes  =  $1.75
• fresh thyme = $2.00
• 1/8 c. olive oil = $1.00
• s & p = $0.25
• frozen asparagus = $1.00
  ____________________
  Total meal cost: $6.00
  Cost per serving: $2.00

Optional prepared horseradish will make each serving about 15 to 20 cents more.

PriceBook

We’re officially moved up to Spokane now and today is Andrew’s first day in school up here. I made the mistake earlier today of saying that today was his first day of school in 4 1/2 years, but then I remembered that 5 weeks ago he was in Seattle doing school. How could I forget that he was in Seattle? Probably the same way I could neglect to post anything here or on our family blog for the past month or so – we’ve been so busy! We moved 2 weeks ago and have been busy getting settled in and figuring out all the local places to go. B has been busy getting herself potty trained too, which has been fantastic. She’s late in getting it done, but it’s gone very quickly and very well and we’re pretty sure that the diapers can all be boxed up and put away for when Eva needs them now. Busy but exciting times in the Becker house!

Figuring out where to shop has been fun. There are many more shopping opportunities up here which calls for – and allows for – better management of our resources (especially when those resources are loaned to us by the government in the form of student loans…). I borrowed my mom’s copies of the Tightwad Gazette (books 1, 2, and 3) for some super money saving tips. One of Amy’s biggest tips for saving money on your groceries is to keep a price book that records the prices for all your staples at the different stores so that you can know when you’re getting a great deal. It’s especially useful when you go places like Costco and are wondering if that 10 lb bag of chocolate chips is a good deal or not.

But keeping a hand written price book organized can be a chore, and it’s just one extra thing to tote around. Andrew had to buy an iPod touch for school, so I got to thinking that there must be an application out there somewhere for the iPod that would work as a price book. After a few minutes of searching I found PriceBook, which is exactly what the name suggests. You put in the food item, the price, the quantity (lbs, oz, pints, each, etc), the store you found it at, and whether it was on sale or not. Then this handy dandy little app keeps track of what’s the best deal and where it is (and it turns out that the big bag of chocolate chips at Costco is cheaper than the bulk chocolate chips at WinCo, not to mention that they don’t turn the glaze on my chocolate pecan torte all grainy like the WinCo ones do). So if you love the thrill of hunting for the best deals around and happen to have an iPod or iPhone, I highly recommend spending the $1.99 on this schnazzy app. I’m betting it will pay for itself in your first shopping trip (probably even in the first 5 minutes!).

Free Tomato Seeds

Campbells is giving away tomato seed packs to anyone who has a can of their soup. I found a jar of chicken broth in my pantry and went online. In Theory, I’ll have my free seed packet in a couple weeks. Too bad they can’t send me a gardener to teach me how to not kill it, too!

If you’d like some seeds, simply go to

http://www.helpgrowyoursoup.com/

and enter in the codes on the bottom of your Campbells soup can.

My Hotsling

I also refuse to pay $50+ for what is basically stretch cotton sewn together at the ends. So again, I turn to my trusty Viking and make my own. Apparently I’m really into hot pink this time around, so a lot of baby things are coming out in that hue. I followed this tutorial which happens to be fantastic, mainly because of the pictures. It’s kind of hard to display without a baby tucked inside, so you’ll just have to wait a month or so for some modeling pictures.

Light Pt. 2

Remember this post? Well, as it turns out, the lights paid for themselves. Our bill was $50.00 lower this month! In addition, I signed us up for what BGE calls “Budget Billing” wherein they average out your yearly use and charge a flat rate all year round instead of paying less in the summer and more in the winter. For us, that means we pay $172 monthly, instead of $100 in the summer and upward of $300 in the colder months. Avista calls it Comfort Level Billing. All in all, between switching to efficient lighting and enrolling in averaged out billing, I saved about $165 this month.  Whoohoo! And, yes, I have adjusted to using fluorescent lighting, and aside from looking a bit paler in the bathroom mirror, we’ve learned to live in harmony. Thanks, Christine for the tip!

My Moby

I refuse to pay $50+ for what is basically a length of knit fabric. That just seems silly to me. I’d much rather go to JoAnn’s, pay $15 for 5 yards of knit and add in a fun bit of hot pink floral to the middle (left over from another project) to make my own sort of Moby D wrap. Here’s a pic.

The picture is kind of non-descript right now (they’re kinda hard to display without the wee little one inside), but you get the idea. I’ve tried it on and I’m a little concerned that it’ll be way too warm this summer, but we’ll see. If you’re not sure how the Moby wrap works, here’s my 3 year old big-sis-to-be modeling a Mini-Moby.

Handmade Natural Beauty

I don’t want to spam. I hate spam. But I’d like you to let me know if you’d like to be put on my mailing list for promotions and free samples. Just email me at abracarnahan<insertatsymbolhere>yahoo.com or comment here. Cheers!

reviving tights

Hmmm, that sounds a bit like a band name. Anyway. So a few weeks ago I realized that the red tights I’d planned to put on my little girl were hopelessly pilled and just kinda unattractive. This saddened me because I really wanted her to wear some cute outfit that required red tights and I did not want to take the time to find a new outfit (that would no doubt require its own pair of tights that would probably be pilly too…it’s been a while since we bought new tights). So I was looking at said pair of red tights and I realized that the inside of the tights was completely pill-free. They looked brand new on the inside. So I flipped them inside out. Voila! New tights! I don’t imagine that this will work on all pairs of tights as this pair was from the dollar store and had a strange sort of weave to them (not as thin as regular tights, but not a heavy knit either). All the same, I thought I’d pass on the trick in hopes that some other mom out there can benefit!

Light

After paying last months electric bill (over $340!), I surrendered my hate of cold colored lighting and bought energy saving CFLs. I found them online on clearance and managed to outfit the whole house for under $50.00. As I changed out the old bulbs, I discovered many of them were 65+ watts! No wonder! I’ll let you know what my next bill looks like using the nifty 14 watters.

Freecycle.org

It a network of yahoo groups, sorted by city and state. You post what you are giving away or what you need for free and people in your area respond. I’ve been able to clear out some of the clutter in my home  and when I put out a want ad for fabric, I got several responses. My favorite was an etsy-er who had a ton of “scrap” pieces left over. She invited me to come over and pick through and take what I wanted. This is what I ended up with.