How's it going?

For the last two weeks we've been inundated with activities and two or more members of our household sick. So- I've been very thankful for the extra mixes we had made up. This week alone, I quickly prepared pancakes, waffles, and drop biscuits all from mixes we had pre-made earlier.

I'm not spending any extra time in preparation. When I'm making the dish from scratch, I'm also measuring out the dry ingredients into two additional freezer bags for future use. Then I write the wet indgredients on the freezer bag and store them in the refrigerator. So far it's been a huge time saver (and budget saver 'cuz we aren't eating out as much)

Make your own mixes recipes

Found this site today - what fun! It has a plethora of make-your-own mixes, including copy cats and convenience mixes.

Freezing Pizza Dough

When I was pregnant with Kate, our favorite Friday night meal was homemade pizza. I'd start the dough in late afternoon and we'd spend the evening designing our own pizzas. Because dough takes a few hours to rise, coordinating kneading time with rising time and baby fussing time became a challenge once Kate was born, so we stopped making pizza every Friday.

But - now that the kids are older, we'd like to reinstate the tradition, but don't always have time to start from scratch on Friday afternoons. So today I've been researching how to freeze pizza dough. The idea is to make multiple batches on the days we have time and freeze the extra dough. That way, we can still have fresh pizza on days we are time crunched.

It appears the trick to success is to freeze the balls after the first rise, because the defrosting time acts as the second rise. I found this that explains more. Do you know of any other tricks or techniques to make this successful?

Grated cheese

Cheese is consumed in large volume in our house. Grilled cheese, cheese rollups (melted cheese inside a tortilla), cheese biscuits, cheese chips (cheese melted over corn tortilla chips) - any way to get cheese into our kids' diet. Kate doesn't drink milk or eat meat so we have to be creative in getting calcium and protein into her diet. Unfortunately I don't always have to grate cheese, so we've been buying grated cheese from the store. But no more!

This week, block cheese was on sale so I bought an extra block and grated up the entire thing. Saved us a few dollars on groceries and we still have grated cheese in the refrigerator. Now if I could only find a way to buy larger chunks of cheese at good prices....

Mixes in NO extra time!

This week the kids and I experimented with making up extra mixes at the same time we were preparing food. We started on Tuesday with Waffles. While we were mixing up the waffles for our breakfast, we grapped two baggies and measured the dry ingredients into the baggies. So now, not only do I have left over waffles in my freezer, I also have two baggies of pre-mixed dry waffle mix in the refrigerator. All I have to do is add the wet ingredients (which I wrote on the outside of the bag) and cook them up.

Today, Josh and I did the same thing with our favorite play dough recipe. Except, I only have one bag left. After making orange play dough, Josh decided we needed purple. So we used one of the bags right then.

Both times - it add absolutely no extra time to the entire cooking process. I even wrote the wet ingredients on the outside of the bags while the meals were cooking.

Later I'll post our experiences, complete with pictures and recipes!

A day out without eating out!

We did it! - A whole day of driving from one end of the county to the other (and back again) without eating out.

We started the day by chopping up a half block of cheese into strips, stuffing them into baggies along with a package of crackers, some yogurt, and ham (for Z). Juice boxes and water were already in the car. Kate (7) helped cut the cheese, Joshua (5) held the bags, I zipped them; and Zachary (2) put everything into a larger bag.

The snacks held us over until we could stop off at home in between things, during which time I heated up some pre-cooked chicken nuggets from the freezer and gave everyone a bowl to eat in the car on the way to the next activity.

While this is not the nirvana I'd like to get to (we did use some store-bought convenience foods), it is a HUGE milestone for us. Avoiding eating out while we are out and about really makes a difference in our budget.

This evening we celebrated by trimming and bagging up two large packages of boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Two breasts per bag. Zachary's job was to put all the bags into the freezer. We'll use these later for dinners.

Cultivating Awareness

For the last two days, I've been much more attuned to what we already have been doing, what we used to do and for whatever reason are not now, and what we could be doing to make our own convenience foods. Everytime I pick up a store-bought item, I'm wondering - "How hard would it be to make this?" "I wonder how this would freeze."

On Tuesday as we drove all over the county to the various kid activities, I remembered all the little things we used to do to avoid eating out:
- Buying a big bag of pretzels and/or gold fish crackers and measuring 1 Cup increments into baggies.
- carrying a box of juice boxes and bottled water in the back of the car (when we lived in the heat and cold this worked better if they were in a cooler)
- buying boneless skinless chicken breasts in large packages, trimming them and putting just enough for a meal into freezer bags.
- buy bulk ground turkey and bagging and freezing meal size portions (generally 1/2 to 1 lbs)

Today, Greg asked me to buy more Hot Pockets - wonder if I can find a recipe for those...