Me in Place

I did it! I did it! We have food for the rest of the days of the month and we came in just under budget. The $500 paid for meals, pet food and toiletry items.This is the awesome spreadsheet information I kept during the month. The link to download the spreadsheet is HERE. It’s a great spreadsheet – easy to fill in the amount on your receipts and it fills in the rest for you. I’m in love! My best deal was the day I went to Walgreens and saved 84%. My overall month savings rate was 34.21%. Can always improve that! I have $1.20 in my pocket. Woot woot.

We’re halfway through January, and guess what? I’m halfway through my grocery budget. I decided I would give myself $500 to work with for January – but this had to also include pet food and toiletries, etc. So, $100 a week groceries, and an added $25 a week for the rest.

Our meals are going well and I don’t feel we’re sacrificing on health for frugality. Turns out January has tons of deals on oatmeal, did ya know? So, a couple of us are eating oatmeal every morning – oatmeal I got for 14 cents a box once my coupons were dealt. Cheerios are for the others.

Lunches are cans of chicken noodle soup, yakisoba noodles (49 cents!) or sandwiches and fruit/veggies for the kids. For me, it’s a mix – usually tuna with wheat thins. An egg over wheat toast or a salad.

Dinners have been good and cheap and included lots of free meatballs from deals over the past two weeks. Tacos, spaghetti, chicken over salad, Swedish meatballs and hot dogs made up our meals this week.

Yesterday I met with Trainer D again and made a stop on the way home with a list of additional foods I needed – $48 went toward a stock of green tea, quinoa and tilapia filets (which is what I ate while everyone else ate hot dogs), and fresh broccoli. Yum!

My tips for produce (because, yes, coupons are out there, but are rare for fresh produce) are to look in the grocery ad and buy whatever’s 99 cents a pound or less. I always buy bananas, no matter the price, but otherwise, I just mix and match with what’s on sale.

Just so you know, we eat out once a week, usually on Sunday. All other meals – most weeks – are eaten at home. Also helps keep the cost down.

Kids and I are doing a No Fries January Challenge. So far, so good!

We had a laugh when we looked at Mr MIP’s spaghetti and realized we were all picturing the same thing! The pigs on Angry Birds:

Here’s installment three, from our reporter from Ireland, Carey!

We like macaroni and cheese as much as the next person. Actually, we discovered we loved it when we moved to Ireland and couldn’t get it.

We are not even picky about the brand – however, I personally think the shapes, for some reason, have a richer, cheesier taste. But the kids don’t care at all.

Over here, they do not have the boxed mac and cheese – it only comes in cans. And, as you can see, they call it “macaroni cheese” (but, hey, it’s made by a reputable company…shouldn’t they know better than to serve it in a can?)

But what is inside is not macaroni and cheese as we know it.

My Superhero son was brave enough to try and -while it is not the greatest shot- his face says it all ~YUCK!

I have even tried my hand at homemade mac n cheese and while we really do love it, nothing compares to that yellowy-orange powder! So when you are feeling low, be thankful you live in the land of readily available macaroni and cheese! Make a box and enjoy for me!

My friend, Carey, lives in Ireland and has kindly agreed to do some posts about things you might not know about her beautiful country!

Me?? Guest Blogger?? Ok, well let me think about it? Um yes! I’d love too! What to talk about?  How about things people don’t know about Ireland?

I’ve discovered lots that I didn’t know about Ireland and feel that others just need to know… Actually, we have been very blessed to have traveled to a few different countries besides Ireland. Just this morning my son says “Hey Mom, can you make the kind of eggs we loved in Switzerland?” Well of course I can…Translation – hardboiled eggs! Has this child been absent for the past few years of Easter?? We always color and eat eggs but nope, he associates hardboiled eggs with Switzerland. Well, that led me to thinking that many people may not be aware of how many foods are imported to Ireland and the interesting places that they are imported from! Ireland became part of the European Union in 1973 but in recent years the EU has tightened things up and has required the countries to import and export with each other. This has had good and bad effects but we will focus on the positive. In Ireland we get grapes from Greece, pears from Belgium (not pictured),  red chilies and yellow peppers from Holland, apples from France, garlic from Spain, and bananas from the Ivory Coast. It is amazing! We are eating so internationally!

I stuck some green onions in the picture that were grown right here in Ireland and notice that the tag has the picture of the grower! The Irish are so proud of their products and are able to almost trace anything back to the farm it came from.

My little garden experiment went okay. I learned lessons, such as: too many cucumber plants spoil the “plot”. And that we are definitely going to add on next year so my tomato plants can have room.

But, the plants treated me nicely, and even though they were too crammed in there, the tomatoes and cucumbers have grown like crazy and we’ve enjoyed our little backyard harvest.

Hmmm…Maybe next year I’ll add a couple chickens and a goat….

Hmmm…I don’t remember writing this on the grocery list…

Father-in-law put in a heater in their pool this summer. You might want to be nicer to me ‘cuz yeah, pretty much best pool ever now. And you don’t have to swim with 150,003 other people’s kids.

But there’s only so much pool awesomeness a girl can take before she must demand a Blog Adventure!

So we piled in the car and drove to a diner I’ve wanted to try.

Food was A-
Gross Floor under our table was F
So – overall, a C experience! If you’re ever in the Portage area, give it a try. Maybe they’ve cleaned the floor by now.

All in all, a perfect blog adventure.

I also checked off two other things downtown:

One from the 30 Things to Do in Chicagoland created by Roger: Get your picture taken by the Monument to Standing Beast.

It’s a rather strange looking monument, but here’s to Standing Beast! I even made sure to walk around inside the monument to get the full effect. The full effect included obvious signs of someone relieving himself in the monument, which just goes to show you, there’s more than one standing beast.

We also stopped in for coffee at Intelligentsia – a shop I’ve passed many times and always wanted to stop, but for one reason or another, we never did. This time? This time we walked about 400 miles out of our way to get there. But it was worth it when I ordered my medium mocha and the angst-ridden barista looked at me out of his horn-rimmed glasses and said, “Sarah?” (Not my real name. But I don’t give my real name at places where they yell out your name. It, for some reason, creeps me out that random people would know my name.) “Sarah? Here’s your mocha.” And, with a final flourish, he handed me one of the best mochas I’ve had. (Besides mine. Which I’m sipping right now. Which is perfect. But doesn’t have that extra dollop of angst-y intellect, so I’ve got to give it to Intelligentsia on that one!) If you want to visit – there’s one east of the train station on Jackson. And there’s one about a block west of the exit from the South Shore Line on Randolph.

Look what showed up in our mail on Monday! The word “Chocolate” on a customs label?

Thanks to our friends in Ireland, we enjoyed some delicious chocolate:

Guess which one was for me? Yep – the Cadbury Creme Egg Twisted – a delicious chocolate bar filled with that ooey gooey orange/white stuff.

And guess which one was for SuperBoy?

Yes, of course… The Yorkie bar! It’s not for girls! (We couldn’t exactly figure out why it wasn’t for girls. It was just pure chocolate. And you can bet he enjoyed keeping it from his sisters.)

Here it is – the recipe for One Pot Chicken Tetrazzini. This is a great way to use up leftover cooked chicken from the cute little chickens you roasted one night when you were all inspired to save money. SuperBoy was shocked the first time he saw me getting a chicken ready to roast. “Why are you cooking a PUPPY?” He asked incredulously with tears welling in his eyes.

Once we got over that, he was fine with this recipe.

One Pot Chicken Tetrazzini From My Friend Clare

6 servings (and easily doubled)

3 Tbsp melted margarine/butter
1/4 tsp onion powder
2 cups chopped cooked chicken
6 oz spaghetti, broken and uncooked
1 can cream of chicken soup
dash nutmeg
2 and 1/2 cups chicken broth
1 tsp lemon juice
1/4 tsp pepper
Salt to taste
1 cup mushrooms

Blend margarine and onion powder in pan. Stir in chicken and uncooked pasta. Combine soup, broth, lemon juice, pepper, salt and nutmeg in a bowl; mix well. Pour over pasta. Cover and bring to boil. Reduce heat. Simmer for 15 minutes or until spaghetti is tender; stirring occasionally.. Add mushrooms. Sprinkle parmesan cheese on top.

My Tips:

- Don’t get all twisted about the cream of chicken soup – if all you have is cream of mushroom, by all means, use it.
- Even the onion powder can be substituted. Use minced onion from the spice jar you have that has to be from 1946. Or leftover chopped onions.
- We don’t even ever use the mushrooms. Don’t know why. I think out of solidarity with Clare – whose recipe this is, but who can’t stand mushrooms.
- I usually don’t have Parmesan cheese on hand, so I just dump a handful of whatever shredded cheese is in my fridge at the time.
- Usually I double this, since a box of spaghetti is 12 oz (usually), I just dump it all in and double the rest of the ingredients. Freeze a batch and you have another meal made! Just don’t cook the spaghetti tooooo much if you’re going to freeze this. It gets weird mushy.