Freezer Meal Dont's

Thursday night I reminded myself once again how much I hate cooking on week nights, I work 8-5 so to come home and prepare a meal, by the time it is prepared, enjoyed, and cleaned up, I am left with litttle me or husband/pup time as I always try to be in my bed by 9:30.

So on that night I found 6 meals (I would make 2 of each) that could easily be frozen and served later, several were recipes I use often with a few newbies, I planned to do my shopping at Aldi, and say screw "antibiotic free, nitrate free, or organic" for one shopping trip to save the money. Around 3 on Friday I realized I didn't have a quarter and worse I didn't have my canvas bags! Around 4 I got a headache that made me feel dizzy and nauseous  So I went home and crawled in bed... those pre-made meals would have been really handy that night! We ate a cheap frozen pizza. :P

When I woke up Saturday I realized I did not want to spend my entire weekend grocery shopping and cooking, so my "don't" was I tried to make myself not only do too much but also do something I really didn't want to do to begin with!

I salvaged my idea to cook ahead slightly. Thursday at lunch I bought crescent rolls in a tube on my lunch break and hot dogs. It worked out perfectly that the hot dogs come in a pack of 8 and the HyVee rolls come with 8! 2 tubes of rolls and 1 pack of hot dogs made 2 super easy and way better than frozen pigs in a blanket (I even got my nitrate free hot dogs!) We will eat 1 batch tonight and am freezing the second batch individually and will toss them in a bag together once they are frozen. 

Pigs in a blanket! Yes in a bowl... don't ask.

My second meal, is one of out favorites. I almost always have most of the ingredients for tuna casserole, I usually don't have the cheese but I made mac and cheese the other night so I lucked out. My tuna casserole recipe is:

1/2 box pasta (bowtie or rotini)

1 can cream of mushroom soup + 1/2 can milk (even my rice milk works)

1 big can tuna or 2 little cans

about 2 cups of cheese (any kind, I used monterray jack/colby and some cheddar)

It fits perfectly in a 11/2 quart casserole dish, feeds both of us with left overs!

I usually like to freeze my casseroles in casserole dishes, but the throw away kind are going against my efforts to be green since you can only use them once, maybe twice if you are careful. So I opted to freeze it in a gallon ziplock, though this still doesn't solve my "green" issue it is cheaper and saves room in my freezer... and to be quite honest I will wash the ziplock and use it again because I am THAT weird. I went ahead and froze an extra cup of cheese in a baggie as well for topping since I don't always have shredded cheese on hand and taped it to the casserole.

I will take it out the night before then stir it up before putting in a casserole dish, topping with cheese and then cook! TA DA! Would love to hear what other wives do for meals to help them keep their sanity!

A Very Merry Christmas

Our Christmas this year was spent in St. Louis with my family... it was absolutely amazing but I will break it down into key things I think people might actually care about, or pretend to care about for my sake!

Saturday was the Moore Christmas, which is my mom, Grandma and aunts and their families, and we all got together at my sister's casa. I am cheap and therefore chose to make gifts instead of purchasing gifts.

I thought of cork coasters, not an original idea but I had seen them somewhere and hit up Pinterest for a tutorial. To be quite honest I didn't really follow the tutorial... glue cork halves to cork board...duh, and I opted for Gorilla glue instead of hot glue and was very safe about cutting the corks because Simon kept scolding me with "you're going to cut your finger off!"

How to safely cut the cork (I bought mine in bulk on ebay.)

This is the cork board I used, it's from Michael's.

For the party everyone was  asked to bring 2 dishes to share, I brought povatica, well I tried, I let it get too warm and so it fell apart when I was cutting it however I have only been married to a Croatian for a year and a half  so I get a little slack I think. My second dish turned out much better, crab rangoons, another pinterest find of course. I served them with soy sauce and they were all gone!

Christmas Eve the Rents and Grandma took the fam to a Japanese Hibachi and it was delicious, we even ordered a sushi roll as an app, at the request of my niece. She of course didn't actually want any sushi which was alright with the adults because we devoured that thing!

 My lovely sister and her mister.

Myself with my mister, yes my bangs are too short however I am letting the fact that the haircut was free soothe my ego.

All the kids take turns being the "star." Jack was the star that night, he almost fell off the table when he went to do his "sexy"pose. 

We went back to Mom's for Christmas jammies and played a Wii bowling tournament, which I of course won, despite my own mother making fun of me the entire game!

 My kiddos!

I am almost embarrassed to post this because we are such dorks! We had a blast though!

Christmas day was the usual! Good food, fun gifts and the best part was just being with the family. Really made me miss living 20 minutes away from my parents and 5 from my sister and grandma.

Thanksgiving!

This year we decided to skip St. Louis all together and stay in KC for Thanksgiving. However the last 2 years we were with my family for both Thanksgiving and Christmas there so it evens out. On Thanksgiving day we went to Simon's step brother's house and his Dad and step mom joined us. His step brother's wife had prepared a wonderful meal and I contributed a pie.

Not just any pie, the most stressful pie I have ever made. You see I have been making pies since I was 8, not only do I just love pie but my Great Grandma Viv was the best cook/baker/you name it in the world and I loved everything she made and did, I would make pies then take pictures and send them to her! She always told me how beautiful my pies were and whether it was the truth or her just being a good grandma it always made me feel so special.

This pie though was just difficult. Last fall we went to Eckert's Orchard in Illinois and picked apples, I made a huge batch of pie filling and froze it, so that was easy. However I like to use the Betty Crocker pie crust recipe from my mom's Betty Crocker book, however I am not driving 4 hours for a book and I knew my mom was super busy preparing for the feast at her house so I didn't want to take up her time having her find it and email it. So I Googled a recipe. 

-It took atleast 5 times of rolling the dough out then wadding it back up and trying again to even get it into the pie pan! The dough just wasn't working with me. 

-For the top I rolled out another circle and cut stars out with a cookie cutter, that to was hard to get on and it was hard to seal the edges together.  

-My Grandma June told me to cut a hole in a cheap metal pie pan to use as a crust cover, great idea right? Except my pie was in a glass dish that was bigger than the metal dishes, so I had to wrap additional foil around that for a crust cover.

-I used an egg wash, but couldn't find a pastry brush so used my fingers and a spoon...

Luckily after it baked I was not displeased with the results, but I was not pleased wither. The very edges of my crust were darker than I wanted and apparently the wash was not even because some parts got that perfect gold while the majority stayed almost white... can't win em all!

The next day we got Chinese food with Simon's mom and went to see Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 2, AMAZING! 

Today we crafted (secret surprises for the Moore Christmas) and put out some Christmas decorations!

Tomorrow will be errands and cleaning, my favorite! NOT

Un-Solicited House Selling Tips

I know I promised home buying tips but we aren't there yet. Our house it set to close November 29th and it has been a bit stressful.

The couple is young, but we were young too... our guess is they have some parent's who are ignorant to home construction pressuring them to be ridiculous! However we are moving forward on the close so I thought I would point out some things I will be sure to do differently next time around.

• Go with an agent you know will give your home their all. Our first agent was the man who sold us our house, we really like him so it was the logical choice. Although we knew he had started a foreign car business we did not realize he was not actively "real-estating" and was only doing this because he knew us. After 4 months we parted ways and our new agent got us an offer after 4 days.
• Save all documentation. If you do any construction on the house save all receipts and the "lien waver" from the company, I recommend scanning them into your computer. You will also need copies of the backflow certifications for sprinkler systems and probably other stuff I don't know about.
• Pre-inspect your house. It does not have to be someone certified, maybe you know a friend who is a contractor or something. You can probably bribe them with dinner! It is much less stressful to fix things in advance than to receive an email saying "fix this or we walk." OK the email didn't quite say that, but you get it. What was so frustrating is that we got our home inspected a year and a half ago when we bought it!
• Use your resources. The closing is during the week so obviously we are not driving 4 hours for that, my HR person at work is a notary, DONE. My Dad met a great real estate agent and an electrician through work, though they don't come free we know and trust them, so DONE. My uncle is an engineer, the buyers where concerned about basement cracks and wanted them looked at... DONE! Since we moved 4 hours away it was very important to have someone who could supervise the house, the neighbors would have done it but I would have felt awful asking. My dad is handyman extraordinaire, DONE!

So take it or leave it, Happy selling and buying to all my dear friends!

A thought..

For quite some time I have gotten more into recycling and reducing waste. So I had a thought, maybe I could force myself to get into it more so I could share my findings.

Most people recycle but recycling is not as good as reducing, most plastics cannot be recreated at a decent quality without adding some new plastic to the mix, unlike paper and metals. In addition to that, plastic is created from a very limited resource and will take forever to decompose. Our recycling cart is always more full than the trash but I would really like to reduce both.

What I am best at is grocery shopping, while most people are delving into ingredients I am searching for the item with the least amount of packaging. Simon is very embarrassed to grocery shop with me, I bring my own canvas bags, and I don’t put my produce in plastic bags. I am going to wash it anyway so why waste the plastic? I am know he loves me shouting “you are killing my planet” across the store when I see him grab a plastic bag for something.

I really got inspired by an article in People several years ago about “The Zero Waste Family,” see her blog here. Bea's slogan is "Refuse, reduce, reuse, recylcle, rot, and only in that order" which I love! They have about a jar of waste a year, they buy used clothes, shop in bulk, compost and so on. Although I know there is no way in hell that will ever be me, I definitely get good tips. Everything they buy is of “real” material, wood, metal, paper/cloth, and glass… zero plastic. This has been our biggest struggle. I do buy my dish soap and laundry soap in boxes, I have yet to solve the personal product issue, they simply use castille soap for most everything but I am sorry I am not down.

Anyways what do people think? I am always reading blogs/facebook posts about eating healthy and organic, but very little about reducing/reusing and recycling. We all know how to eat healthy and could if we chose, I have found reducing waste a much bigger struggle, especially in this consumer driven materialistic world. I will continue to blog about random junk, but if I really take the effort and do some more research could others benefit?

House Hunting?

It is almost official… we sold our house in Wentzville Missouri. In the words of Mungundus Feltcher (a Harry Potter character) “bleedin’ give it away, din’t I?” which is exactly how I feel about selling our house. We are barely breaking even, we may even end up owing a few hundred dollars when all is said and done, of course a few hundred dollars now is much better than a monthly mortgage. I am so excited that our new agent Linda Arnold, with Coldwell Banker and Gundaker, sold our house on it’s 5^th day on the market! However, I will not scream for joy until all papers are signed the end of November.

We plan on saving what we have been paying in mortgage, utilities, etc and saving it for a down payment for a house in Kansas. We are still researching but Simon heard from a realtor’s daughter at his work that unless you can put down 20%, 5% is fine. I do know when we bought our first house the difference between a $15 k down payment and a $20k down payment was less than $20 a month difference.

Obviously we still have much researching to do and I will gladly post all I have learned in hopes that my experience can help others on the brink of home ownership, or re-home ownership. Who knew borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars could be stressful?

As for house hunting we are seriously considering Olathe Kansas, a city just South West of Overland Park, or OP. We do enjoy OP however it is a very pricey place to live and all of the homes we can afford have wood paneling and horrendous carpet, if we have to buy a house that is not so aesthetically pleasing we need to know that we can afford to alter the home. Olathe homes in our budget are much more up to date and like OP Olathe also has a very good public school system. I am not looking forward to a 5 minute longer commute (I hate driving, Simon drives us everywhere) but for a nicer home that is still minutes from all the amenities we have become so accustomed to I think it will be worth it.

Today we got in the car and drove to Olathe, we found the trip was pretty pointless as we really don’t know Olathe and having quick access to the highway is very important to us. However I enjoyed seeing the shops and restaurants and we did drive through a few neighborhoods. Our favorite was the neighborhood with lots of 3 car garages… which is a bummer because we can NOT afford a home with 3 garages!

We are lucky to know a couple that is also looking in Olathe and plan on buying before us, so we can definitely mooch off of their experiences! Our lease is up the end of May so we do have a while to get our act together!

If anyone has any home buying questions let me know, we have done this once and if I don’t know the answer I will find out for you!

Wedding Vows

On October 6th we attended my lovely cousin Amanda's wedding (catch her at http://adultcontentment.blogspot.com/) in Kirksville Missouri. She and her husband chose to write their own vows, when they started I poked Simon "why didn't we do that?" but near the end when there wasn't a dry eye in the audience I poked him again and said "I'm glad we didn't do that." I say this because it was one of my personal goals for maintain my self composure at my wedding, those of you who know me well know I am a crier. However I was still very inspired by their ceremony, and told Simon I would like to write our own "vows," you know as if we were doing it again and recite them to each other in private.

After some persistent nudging he agreed, and we roughly set a deadline and agreed we would have a date night and share the vows. I cried while writing mine, I finished several weeks ago, pretty sure Simon finished his... today for all I know.

Date night was a fail because we somehow agreed that a 6:30 movie would work, even though we both work until 5. So we decided to hit up Panda Express and watch Harry Potter, the movie has been moved to Sunday afternoon.

So anyway.... the vows:

Me
I had a theme of "we can't live without each other" and poked fun at both of our flaws and noted how the other person balances the crazy out. For example if Simon had to pay the bills we would be homeless and if he did manage to pay them it would be by a mailed check! For myself I lose everything and I really don't know how I found anything when living in the dorms and my townhouse (Mom helped me as a kid.)

Simon
His very subtle theme was that we are a "perfect fit." He also poked fun at both of us, I loved how he mentioned his calm water personality and my fiery personality. Simon is laid back to the point it pains me and I am a bit high strung, so we really do balance one another out. He ended with 2 Shakespeare quotes and even though he mentioned afterward that one was from my favorite play The Tempest which is actually NOT my favorite, I couldn't even be annoyed because it was just so darn cute!

I am really glad we did this little exercise and truly believe all marriages are works in progress. Just because we don't have children to distract us doesn't mean we spend every waking minute in wedded bliss. We are constantly working on ways to keep things fresh and interesting.

If you didn't write your own vows, I really suggest this little exercise, it is cheesy and I almost couldn't stop laughing in order to read my vows but it was a lot of fun and definitely made me feel very special.