What do you cook with? What types of storage containers do you use for food?

Today I picked up a cast iron skillet (have wanted one for years - what took me so long? They are very affordable!), a stainless steel sauce pan and two glass storage containers. I'm really beginning to be very concerned about plastic storage containers and teflon coatings leaching chemicals into my family's food. Since most of our storage containers are plastic and all of our skillets/ frying pans and sauce pans are teflon coated, it may take a while to replace all of it, but that is my goal. What do you use? Any recommendations?

Frugal Friday - First Time

This is my first time participating in Frugal Fridays. My tip is one I just recently read, and you may already know, but it was new to me and I'm sharing it in case it is also new to you. If you have a large surplus of free shampoo or body wash, you can use it to fill up you liquid hand soap dispenser. We tried it with the free Suave shampoo from Wags a few weeks back and it works beautifully. For more Frugal Friday tips, visit Biblical Womanhood.

WFMW - Keeping Salad/ Greens Fresh

For years, I bought bagged salad mix for our family. I guess I had convinced myself that I was being smart and saving money because when I bought lettuce, it usually went bad before we could use it all. There were several flaws in my thinking. First, this approach assumes that we would use all of the bagged salad before it could go bad. This almost never happened, even though we eat salads almost every day. Our bagged salad usually only stayed fresh for at most 2 days. This thinking also assumed that when I bought a $2.50 bag of salad that it was worth paying someone else to prep our salad, because doing it myself was so much work (ha!).

In an effort to get our grocery spending under control, about a year ago, I started buying romaine when it was on sale for $1.00 each (we have at least one store each week with lettuce on sale for $1.00), and washing and drying it myself (I saw a tip on Good Eats about spinning your lettuce in a pillow case in your clothes washer on the spin cycle if you don't have a salad spinner - pretty unusual, but it does work, lol). Washed and dried well, this lettuce will keep for about a week, and conveniently, provides about what our family can consume in a weeks time. Instead of spending $2.50 every other day (or about $7.50 a week) for lettuce, I was paying $1.00 a week (we are paying $0.00 a week right now because we are growing it in our garden from seeds - free salad is delicious!).

What works for me to keep our lettuce fresh for a whole week is to put a paper towel in the container with the salad. This helps to absorb the excess moisture that causes the lettuce to brown. So, our lettuce stays fresh and crisp for at least 7 days (and sometimes even longer, if we haven't finished it off by then.).

For more ideas check out Works for Me Wednesday at Rocks in My Dryer.

Menu Plan Monday

We had family in to visit, so I'm a few days late with our menu plan.

Monday - Chicken Enchilladas, green salad (from garden)

Tuesday - Left over roast (from freezer) with BBQ sauce on buns - yummy

Wednesday - Chicken and Beef Fajitas with red and yellow peppers (looks like we're having lots of Mexican inspired foods this week)

Thursday - Shrimp alfredo florentine over pasta, salad, bread

Friday - leftovers - clean the fridge :o)

Saturday we have a wedding and a graduation to attend. Sunday, we are eating with family.

For great menu ideas, visit I'm an Organizing Junkie!

Menu Plan Monday

Here is our menu for this week. You can find more menus at The Organizing Junkie.

We have been stocking up lately on some really amazing grocery deals (especially at our Kroger), so we will only need to pick up about $15 worth of groceries (including sandwich bread and milk!). What a blessing :o)

So, here's our menu for this week.

Monday: Fiesta Chicken quesadillas, queso and guacamole with chips and mangos for desert

Tuesday: Baked chicken, green salad (from garden), asparagus bundles, homemade bread

Wednesday: Baked stuffed shells with maranara and alfredo sauces, green salad, broccoli, breadsticks

Thursday: Clean the fridge night (leftovers)

Friday: Pan fried tilapia, green salad, carrots, black beans and brown rice.

Saturday: Pizza (2 of them: BBQ Chicken and Cheese with black olives)

Sunday: Clean the fridge again

One of my goals this week is to start a coupon binder. Currently, I am organizing my coupons by insert, which works okay, but I am chronically disorganized, so the inserts sometimes are misplaced (until after a sale, of course). How do you orgainze your coupons?

Home made "Hot Pocket" style calzone

I had a few minutes this morning to catch up on some blog reading and I loved this idea over at Thrifty Florida Mama. She makes homemade Hot Pockets. I remember when I used to do that, too. Somehow, we got out of the habit. It was really nice to have something quick and easy ready to heat up and eat. So, inspired by her post, we made up a batch of biscuit dough, rolled and cut with biscuit cutter, then rolled them out flat (the boys really had fun with this part), chopped up some hot dogs, mixed in chili and a handful of shredded co-jack. We put a tablespoon of filling into each circle, folded over, sealed and baked. We made 20 of these for $2.20 or .11 cents each. Quick, easy and better for you than the store bought stuff, plus much more tasty. I think we'll try to make some with pizza sauce, cheese and black olives (oldest ds's favorite kind of pizza) either later this week or next week.

There are lots of great ideas like this over at Thrifty Florida Mama for Make it Yourself Monday. Check it out!

Menu Plan Monday

I've been MIA for a few weeks as we've taken turns being sick - several times. We are finally back to normal - I think. Here's the plan for suppers for this week. I'm so excited about this menu because it is using things we already have in our pantry or freezer. We've been building our pantry stockpile for a while now (maybe 6 months) and finally, our shopping seems to be replenishing our pantry and not so much for items needed to make specific meals. Its so comforting to me to know that we could avoid shopping all together (if we needed or wanted to) and still have varied and healthful meals.

Monday - baked chicken (freezer), pan roasted zucchini and summer squash with peppers (freezer), salad (garden!), rolls (homemade).
Tuesday - Baked stuffed shells (freezer) with white sauce (homemade) and red sauce (canned), green beans (freezer), bread sticks (homemade)
Wednesday - Roast (freezer), rice (pantry), broccoli (garden) and salad (garden)
Thursday - BBQ roast sandwiches (hamburger buns are in the freezer), carrot sticks (refrigerator)
Friday - leftovers

Also I'm going to make broccoli cheese soup (garden broccoli, homemade white sauce, cheese in freezer) and try to replicate fire roasted tortilla soup from Jason's Deli. I'll post the recipe if I figure it out. We love soup here and the boys will often have it as a snack, so its nice to have some around.

Check out more menus at I'm an Organizing Junkie.