Last week, I was browsing through a food magazine and saw a recipe for coffee-flavored muffins.  Although I’m not a big fan of coffee, I love coffee-flavored food (especially if chocolate chips are thrown into the mix!).  I used to be hesitant to even tweak recipes for baked goods, and I never would have thought I could come up with a recipe of my own.  I think I was convinced that there was some sort of baking magic that went on in the oven and that any deviation from the recipe would have very bad results.  Now that I’ve been cooking and baking for several years, I’m much more confident in the kitchen.  So I sat down and came up with my own recipe.  I was thrilled with how they turned out, especially given that this was really my first attempt at creating a baking recipe on my own.  I used an egg, since my parents have been providing us with amazing eggs from their backyard chickens lately.  But you could just as easily make a flax egg, so I included that option in the recipe.  I used coffee extract because I like coffee-flavored things.  If you prefer another flavor, you could probably substitute something else instead of the coffee extract.

These are relatively dense muffins.  I’ve found that most of the stuff I bake using almond flour and coconut flour is usually a bit more dense than stuff made with wheat flour.  But that’s just fine, because that’s how I like my muffins.  If you prefer light fluffy muffins though, these might not be your favorites.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Grease a muffin pan (this recipe makes 12 muffins) or line with muffin papers.

Dry Ingredients:

• 1 cup almonds, ground in food processor
• 1/2 cup coconut flour
• 1/2 cup oats ground in the food processor (use gluten-free oats if you’re sensitive to gluten)
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 Tbsp powdered stevia (I just buy the loose ground herb from the bulk section)
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1.5 Tbsp ground flax seed
• pinch of salt

Wet Ingredients:

• 1 cup almond milk (or whatever milk you like)
• 1 egg or a flax egg (I make flax eggs without heating them – works just as well as far as I’m concerned)
• 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce (I made my own in the food processor)
• 1 Tbsp coconut oil
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 Tbsp coffee extract

Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl and the wet ingredients in another.  Then mix them together and fold in:

• 1/3 cup miniature dark chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

The batter will be relatively thick and on the dry-ish side.  Spoon into 12 muffin cups and bake for about 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Enjoy!  These freeze quite well too.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how I had finally caved in an visited Pinterest, and wasn’t sure if it was going to be awesome or a total time sink.  I’ve since found that it cuts way down on the number of tabs I have open in my browser at any one time.  Instead of just leaving tabs open, I’ve been pinning them onto boards on my Pinterest page so that I can come back to them when I need them.  Whenever I come across ideas I like (anywhere on the web, not just on Pinterest), I add them to my Pinterest page in the appropriate category.  It’s like a visual to-do list and idea page.  I’m definitely liking that aspect of it. 

I’ve found that I don’t spend too much time browsing Pinterest, but when I do, it’s nice.  I can sit here and nurse our little guy while I scroll through ideas for bathroom tile (since we’re going to be putting a bathroom in our basement soon).  And I can easily save the ones I want to show my husband later on – without leaving eight new tabs open in my browser.  Good all around.

A few days ago, I was browsing around Pinterest and came upon this genius idea:  Freezer-to-crockpot meals.  Yes!  I can do this.  I love my crockpot and use it several times a week.  I also love the idea of just dumping a bag into the crock pot, adding some water, and letting it do its thing.  She’s got a ton of other freezer cooking recipes on her site too. 

I wasn’t sure about the idea of just putting the veggies into the freezer raw, since I know a lot of stuff needs to be blanched first.  Plenty of comments on the site indicated that people had no problems with it, but I decided to blanch some stuff first.  I read that potatoes can turn black if you freeze them raw, and I wasn’t sure about carrots.  So I chopped up a ton of potatoes and carrots and blanched them for a couple minutes before I prepped the freezer bags.  It only added a few minutes to the total prep time, and I was doing several meals at once – not a big deal.  If you try this and don’t blanch anything, let me know how it goes!

Here are my first two meals:

The recipe came from the Costco magazine (bottom left corner), and everyone I’ve ever made it for has raved about it.  I make it at least twice a month, and always make a double batch (which fills my crock pot right to the brim).  Instead of broth, I use water and veggie bullion cubes, so I added the bullion to the bag along with the lentils (rinsed), brown rice, raw onions, garlic and celery, and blanched carrots and potatoes.  A double batch fits nicely in a one-gallon ziplock bag.  All I have to do when I cook it is add 12 cups of water plus one bag to the crockpot.  And it was pretty easy to make a second double batch at the same time. 

This would make a great gift for a family with a new baby or anything else that makes cooking more of a chore than usual.  It would also be a good idea for a get-together with friends.  Each person could bring some ingredients and you could all chop stuff up, blanch whatever needs it, and then stuff a bunch of bags.  Everybody goes home with lots of different ready-for-the-crockpot meals.  Sounds like a winner to me.

I also roasted a bunch of onions and garlic so that I could prep this amazing tomato soup (I cook that one at least twice a month too).  I already have lots of roasted tomatoes in the freezer from last summer’s garden.  So I just combined the spices with some bullion (in place of broth) and the roasted onion and garlic and stashed that in jars in the freezer.  Now all I have to do when I want to make that soup is dump the onion/garlic/spice jar into a pot with a jar of tomatoes and a can of coconut milk and some water.  Couldn’t be much easier than that.  Roasting onions and garlic is easy, but it’s time consuming.  This way I don’t have to think as far in advance about dinner, since everything is already roasted and in the freezer. 

I also prepped the Healthy Mama BBQ Chicken recipe from the original site that I found on Pinterest (link is at the start of this post).  I left out the chicken though, so mine will be BBQ veggies.  I might add tofu or something like that after I cook it, but I’m sure it will be good either way.

I really love this idea.  It makes batch cooking for the freezer seem a lot more do-able.  I spent about 90 minutes putting together enough food to fill the crock pot six times (a full crock pot lasts us at least two meals), and I had a three-year-old helper the whole time.  Definitely not as challenging as spending the entire day in the kitchen for once-a-month cooking, but it will make my crockpot days a lot easier!

If you have links to other sites that have recipes and ideas for prepping crockpot meals ahead of time, please share them in the comments. 

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I’ve done a lot of decluttering over the past couple years.  I’ve taken numerous carloads of stuff to Goodwill, and have (except for last month when I was on a mission to find stuff for our son’s play kitchen) mostly stopped going in to shop when I drop stuff off.  I got rid of about half of my craft supplies, and I’ve cleared out closets and cupboards all through the house, tossing or recycling or donating stuff that we didn’t need anymore. 

I had already made one pass through the kitchen a year or so ago, getting rid of stuff that we weren’t using.  But I mostly focused on gadgets and excess glassware rather than food.  Last night, I was browsing around online and I came across this awesome blog written by a lady who has managed to get rid of 10,000 things by purging 100 items at a time!  Pretty inspiring if you’re thinking about getting rid of clutter.  Christine’s writing had me laughing out loud, and then it got me up off my butt and into the kitchen to do something about our too-full cupboards. 

I love to cook.  And to shop for groceries.  We eat all of our meals at home (and I do mean all… we took a friend out for his 90th birthday last month and he chose Olive Garden.  But before that, we hadn’t eaten out since September).  That’s how I justify our full pantry, freezer, and cupboards.  But I had noticed lately that there was stuff at the back of the cupboards that I was never using, and it was just serving to make the cupboards a little less useful than they would otherwise be.

So at about 11pm, I was standing in the kitchen surrounded by boxes and jars and bags of stuff that I didn’t need.  Some of it was a wee tad bit expired and went in the trash:

Yes, we moved to a new house in 2009.  I vaguely remember being in a big hurry to clean out the old house and I think I tossed everything from the fridge and pantry into a cooler and boxes without paying much attention.  But you would think that I would have noticed this when I unpacked.  Or at any time during the past 2.5 years.  Anyway.  Moving on. 

In addition to a couple of seriously expired things, I also found a few duplicates.  Two bags of dill seed (that’s going to take a while to use up…), three containers of cardamom, two bags of ground ginger.  Good thing I like to cook from scratch and use a lot of spices. 

By the time I finished consolidating, purging and cleaning, I had quite a pile on the kitchen table.  All of this stuff will either be donated to family or friends who will use it, or trashed if it’s expired, or recycled if it’s an empty container (I was able to consolidate a lot of stuff so that it takes up less cabinet space.  Three honey jars are now combined into one, for example):

I also found a few more gadgets and dishes that I didn’t need.  Three baby food grinders?  I think we’re fine with one. 

I came across a few nearly empty jars of cocoa butter and coconut oil that I had used a while back to make lotion.  So I dumped them into a saucepan, melted them down, and filled a container with my newly-minted lotion.  That meant I was able to recycle three containers that had been taking up space in my pantry.

I ended up getting rid of everything in that picture plus about half that much again by the time I was finished.  So much better.  I don’t have to root around in the cupboard to find what I’m looking for.  And everything in the cupboards is stuff that I use on a regular basis.  And none of it expired when I was in my 20s. 

Anyway, I hope Christine’s blog inspires you and makes you laugh.  And if you have anything in your kitchen that expired in 2004, please tell me about it to make me feel better!

Good morning!  I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas.  We had a great day surrounded by family, and our son loved his kitchen and felt food.  We set it up in our dining room, and as I’m typing this he’s got an entire meal prepared and served at the dining room table.  And as predicted, our baby had all sorts of fun with the boxes and wrapping paper.  My parents brought over my new walker, and it works perfectly for dips, reverse push ups, and all sorts of leg/knee raises.  I love it!

Now that Christmas is over, a lot of us start thinking about the new year and what we hope to accomplish or change during it.  We don’t do resolutions per se, but we do set goals for ourselves and make plans for what we want to do in the coming year.  For us, 2012 will be all about our basement – we’re hoping to finish it entirely by the end of the year.  And of course we have our standard financial goals of maxxing out our IRAs, contributing to our SEP IRAs, and putting aside money to eventually pay off our mortgage.  One of the best things about automatic contributions to savings accounts, retirement accounts, college savings plans, etc., is that you don’t really have to think about them.  If you’ve been meaning to set up an automatic savings contribution, do it now so that you’ll be off to a great start in the new year.

If any of you have plans to eat better in 2012, you might want to take advantage of a special sale coupon valid until the end of the year at The Raw Food World.  This awesome online store is owned by Matt Monarch and Angela Stokes-Monarch.  They recently had a baby who was born at home in their tub – of course I loved that story!  I’ve been ordering stuff from their store for a while now, and it always arrives with samples of things like chia seeds or Supergreen powder, along with a photocopy of a handwritten note from Matt.

From now until the end of December, you can use the code HOLIDAY18 when you checkout at The Raw Food World online store, and you’ll get 17.5% off any size order (the coupon code works for everything in the store except appliances and exercise equipment, so they’re also offering another coupon – HOLIDAY12 – that you can use on some exercise equipment and some appliances.  Check out their store for more details).  It’s a pretty awesome deal, and I’m definitely going to be stocking up on some stuff this week.

In addition to the coupon, they have some awesome at-cost specials going on at the moment – I got an amazing deal on a bag of 1000 chlorella tablets last week.  And the best part?  Our three-year-old chomps on a chlorella tablet every morning with his breakfast and says he likes the taste!

I buy our chia seeds from them too, and we go through a lot of chia seeds around here.  Our Christmas morning breakfast was overnight oats/quinoa/chia in a mixture of almond milk and coconut milk eggnog (an amazing seasonal treat from the folks at So Delicious).  I had leftover quinoa in the fridge so I dumped it into a bowl with raw oats and a bunch of chia seeds.  Then I added the almond milk and a bit of the eggnog, stirred it around, and let it sit overnight in the fridge.  We had a great breakfast the next morning without any effort at all.  I make all sorts of chia puddings – they’re like magic!  I usually start with 1 part chia to 2 parts liquid and go from there, adding more liquid if it seems too thick.  I blend up nuts and fruit (cranberry chia pudding is a favorite around here) to change the flavor, and we always love a bowl of chocolate chip mint chia pudding during the summer when our mint plants are bursting with leaves.  Chia seeds are a great source of calcium, so if you’re looking for alternatives to dairy, these might be a perfect solution.

One of our new favorite foods – which we also found at The Raw Food World – is kelp noodles.  For about six months now, we’ve been eating very little wheat (or grains at all, other than oats and seeds like buckwheat and quinoa), and I’ve been searching for substitutes for pasta.  We used to eat a lot of whole wheat spaghetti, and I had replaced it with zucchini noodles (made with a spiralizer) in the summer when our zukes were in season, and spaghetti squash in the fall.  I thoroughly enjoy both of those options, but while my guys didn’t mind them, I don’t think they loved them either.  Then I found kelp noodles and my husband and son are coming back for seconds.  They are more expensive than spaghetti, but I’m able to stretch a single package into two meals for our family by adding tons of veggies.  That makes the cost of the noodles much more reasonable (and I love leftovers, since it means I get to skip cooking a meal).  Kelp noodles have almost no calories (6 calories per serving), but they provide calcium and a little iron too.  Their flavor is neutral, so they absorb the flavor of whatever you put on them.  Our favorite thing to do with them is sautee a ton of veggies (broccoli, onions, garlic, carrots, bell peppers) and some tempeh, and then make a variation on Gena’s awesome Asian sauce (I use less oil and more water, but you can tweak it however you like).  Then we mix the sauce, noodles, tempeh and veggies and have a fantastic dinner that comes together quickly and leaves us feeling satisfied but not overly full the way pasta sometimes does.

Anyway, if you’re looking for some inspiration and excellent deals on super-duper food to start off the new year, I highly recommend The Raw Food World.  Everything I’ve bought from them has been great, and they have a huge selection of products.  There’s a link at the top of their left sidebar for “at-cost specials” and they have all sorts of great deals there (like 1000 chlorella tabs or 1000 chlorella/spirulina tabs for $15.95, and those amazing kelp noodles are also in the at-cost specials list right now).  Or you can just browse around the site and know that you can save 17.5% on whatever you buy this week.  They really do have an amazing selection of stuff, which is especially helpful for people who don’t live near a health food supermarket.  In addition, they sell products in all sorts of sizes, so you can try a little of something new or purchase a bulk size if you already know it’s something you love (that would be an especially good idea this week, with the HOLIDAY18 coupon code).  Have fun, and here’s to a happy and healthy 2012!

This morning has been all about preserving garden goodies.  I started out with tomatoes.  I’ve been roasting and freezing them lately so that I can make roasted tomato soup this winter.  I harvested a huge tub of beautiful tomatoes.

Then I washed them, sliced them in half lengthwise, and laid them in glass baking dishes.  I’ve found that it’s best to coat the inside of the baking dishes with coconut oil first (or some other oil that works well at high temps).  Otherwise, cleaning the pan afterwards is a two hour job.  Trust me on that one.

My counter runneth over.

And you can see a big bowl of whole tomatoes in the upper left corner.  I used all of my baking dishes (and all my oven space) but only had room for about half the tomatoes.  So I’ll be starting another tomato roasting session this afternoon. 

I put all of those dishes into the oven – preheated to 375 degrees – and let them roast for about 90 minutes.  The kitchen smelled nice.

While the tomatoes were roasting, I bagged up some peppers that I had frozen last night.  Peppers are pretty easy to preserve.  I chop them up, spread them on a cookie sheet, and put them in the freezer.  Once they’re frozen, I use a spatula to get them off the cookie sheet and dump them into a bag.  It starts as this:

Then they get chopped and frozen:

And ends up as this, perfect for sauces and stir fries this winter:

Once I finished with the peppers, I moved on to chard.  I made another trip out the garden and filled that giant bowl with chard:

Apparently I also harvested a lady bug and a wasp, both of which were returned to the outdoors, since I doubted they wanted to be blanched or frozen.

I washed, chopped, and blanched the chard in four batches, and now it looks like this:

I haven’t counted lately, but I would guess that I have about 60 of those bags full of greens in the freezer.  My hope is that between the cold frame over one bed of greens and the bags of frozen greens, we won’t have to buy greens at all this winter.  Right now it seems do-able, but winter lasts a long time, so we’ll see.

Once I had finished the peppers and greens, the first batch of tomatoes was nicely roasted.

Once they cool a bit, I’ll put them in jars and freeze them.  I prefer to use glass for food storage whenever I can, and roasted tomatoes work pretty well in glass jars.  You just have to make sure they’re not too tightly packed, and leave them room to expand as they freeze.  But it would work just as well to store them in ziplock bags in the freezer.

Now it’s time to get cracking on the second batch of tomatoes.  I love seeing our freezer and pantry shelves fill up with food from our backyard.  Fall is definitely in the air these days.  We’re starting to see nighttime temperatures in the 30s, so I’ve got a fire under me to get the garden harvested as much as possible before it freezes.

Hope you’re all having a wonderful Friday!

For the last several weeks, I’ve been spending some time every few days preserving our garden harvest.  I’ve canned a few batches of tomato sauce, and this afternoon I’ll be roasting tomatoes to store in the freezer so that I can make this amazing soup during the winter when fresh tomatoes are scarce.  I’ve also frozen lots and lots of chard and turnip greens – I’m hoping that between the frozen greens and our cold frame, we won’t have to buy greens this winter at all.  We’ll see.

One of my favorite preserving projects so far this fall has been pumpkins.  We grew a pie pumpkin plant this year, and our son helped me harvest these four beautiful little pumpkins a few weeks ago:

I put them in the oven (I think I set it to 350 and cooked them for about 40 minutes?) until they were soft enough to stick a fork into them.  Then I peeled them, removed the seeds (which ended up in that day’s green smoothie), and blended up the pumpkin flesh.  Then I added a few apples and a pear, along with lots of ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg.  I didn’t measure any of the ingredients, but I used quite a bit – I love fall spices!  I blended it all up into a wonderful pumpkin spice mixture, and added just a touch of maple syrup (maybe 1/4 cup, and I had a 64 ounce blender full of pumpkin puree). 

From there, I spooned the puree into ice cube trays and made little frozen cubes of pumpkin spice deliciousness.

I saved quite a bit of it and used it fresh that week in smoothies and in my oats.  But ever since, I’ve been loving the frozen pumpkin cubes that I have stashed away in the freezer.  Something tells me they aren’t going to last long.  I may have to buy a wagon load of pie pumpkins at the pumpkin patch when we take our boys over there next month for the hayrides.

Most mornings, I melt one of these into my oatmeal, and I’ve also been on a banana/pumpkin smoothie kick lately.  A banana, some almond milk, two cubes of spiced pumpkin and a few seconds of blender time = instant fall goodness.

For all of you with gardens, what have you preserved this year?  I’m wishing I had frozen our spinach before it went to seed.  We had a ton of spinach in the early summer, and we were using it every day.  But then it all went to seed and we replaced it with other greens.  If I had frozen it instead of letting it go to seed, I could make lots of amazing spinach artichoke dip this winter without having to buy spinach.  Definitely on my list of things to do next year!

I’m thrilled to announce that I have found the perfect veggie burger!  I’ve probably tried about 20 different recipes over the years (plus several kinds of packaged veggie burgers, which are way too expensive to have on a regular basis).  Earlier this week, I wrote about the excellent burger buns that I made, and how they needed to be paired with excellent veggie burgers.  I don’t know why I hadn’t already seen Angela’s fantastic veggie burgers, because I make something from her site about once a week.  But thanks to your recommendations, I whipped up a batch of burgers yesterday.  The recipe made enough for two meals for the three of us (huge bonus – I love having something in the fridge ready to go when it’s dinner time).  And it got two thumbs up from both of my guys.  I think it’s the first time in my life that I’ve actually wanted to go light on the condiments so that I can really taste the burger.  If you have a food processor, this recipe comes together pretty fast.  A lot of the ingredients need to be chopped or ground up (oats, bread, almonds, carrots), and I just did them each separately in the food processor before dumping them all together into my mixing bowl.  The flax egg did a great job of holding everything together.  I tasted the “dough” before I baked them, and could tell it was a winner.  Then I was especially thrilled halfway through baking when I flipped them over and they didn’t crack or fall apart – they held their shape perfectly.  If you’ve been looking for a great homemade veggie burger, I highly recommend them!

On to other things… I often get emails from readers asking me questions, or asking how I’ve handled various situations.  Usually I just respond directly to the reader, but I think some of those questions might be things that other readers are interested in too.  So I’m opening this up for reader questions and ideas.  Is there something you’d like to see me cover that I haven’t?  Any questions you’d like me to answer?  You can leave comments or send me an email (babe at frugalbabe dot com) and I’ll try to incorporate your thoughts into some of my future posts.

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

A while ago, I wrote about getting on board with the idea of a menu rotation in order to simplify life in the kitchen.  I doubt I’ll ever be able to really stick to a set rotation of meals, because I just enjoy experimenting in the kitchen way too much.  But I have found ways to simplify cooking a bit, and that has left me with more time and energy to experiment and have fun in the kitchen.

Several weeks ago, a friend came to stay with us for the weekend, and she cooked dinner while she was here.  She cooked some whole grain pasta, sauteed some veggies (asparagus, tomatoes, garlic, and peppers), and tossed them all together.  It was simple and delicious, and has become the inspiration for my go-to meal when I’m in a hurry.  About once a week I cook a package of whole grain pasta and a big pot of brown rice.  Then throughout the week it’s easy to whip up a one-dish meal that only takes about 15 minutes.  I chop up a whole bunch of veggies – whatever I have on hand – and usually add one Field Roast “sausage” that I dice up (Field Roast is the one meat-substitute that I buy.  It’s relatively expensive ($5 for a package of four “sausage” links) but I always dice up the sausage and only use one link per meal, so a little goes a long way).  I sometimes add Daiya vegan cheese (I buy it in bulk from the co-op and keep it in the freezer), depending on what flavor I’m going for.  Then I mix in some of the rice or pasta from the fridge.  By altering the veggies and spices I can make this meal taste like anything I want:  curry, Italian, Asian, Mexican, etc.   And since all the veggies get cooked in one pot and then precooked rice or pasta is added in at the end, it makes for easy clean up too.

Cooking rice and pasta is easy, although brown rice (the only kind we use) takes a while, and even pasta requires an extra pot on the stove.  So I’ve found that it’s helpful to cook an entire package of pasta at once and store the leftovers in the fridge.  Same with rice:  I usually cook two or three cups of dried rice at once, and have leftovers all week.  A package of pasta and a pot of rice last us for quite a few meals, because I try to make sure that the pasta or rice is not the primary ingredient in any meal.  The meals I’m describing end up being about 2/3 veggies and 1/3 grain, which makes them a lot better for us than a big pot of pasta/rice with a few veggies thrown on top would be.

I’ve also started cooking at least one pot full of dried beans at the start of each week.  I can either use our sun oven or the crock pot, and with very little effort have several cups of cooked beans in the fridge ready to go in whatever recipes I need them for.  I have the pantry stocked with several varieties of bulk dried beans (garbanzo, pinto, kidney, black), but they’re not much use to me if I remember at 4pm that I want to make a meal that would go nicely with beans in it, if the beans are still dry.  By cooking up a pot or two of them once a week, I have beans on hand all week, ready to go in whatever I’m cooking.

I’m just about out of the tomato sauce I canned last fall.  I’ve been adding tomato sauce to some of my pasta/veggie creations, although I’ve found that I can make a really tasty meal without the sauce – good thing, since I only have one jar of sauce left.  Canning season will be here again before we know it, and we’ll have fresh tomatoes from our garden in another couple months.

I’ve also been making good use of my crock pot lately, for one-dish meals that end up being very inexpensive and easy to make.  Our two favorites are split pea soup (I run at least part of it through the blender before serving, to get a creamy texture) and French lentil soup (bottom left corner of the page that pulls up).  I always double the lentil soup recipe and add another 50% to the pea soup (all that will fit in my crock pot).  By doing that, I get two or three meals out of each soup.

Between those two crock pot soups and my rice/beans/pasta in the fridge, along with lots of veggies that I always have on hand (both frozen and fresh), I’m not having to think about meals too much anymore.  I still experiment at least once a week, and I love trying new recipes (which is how we come across winners like this amazing potato and asparagus salad!)  But my fridge always has either leftover soup or a partially-finished meal that just needs some chopped up veggies and a few minutes of cooking time.  Just what this mama needs to make sure that we’re eating high-quality homemade meals everyday, without me spending all day in the kitchen or worrying about what I’m going to make.

In addition to all the cooked food, we also have lots of raw fruits and veggies (no work at all other than washing them and chopping them up), and tons of greens from our garden (we eat green smoothies every day, plus lots of greens in salads and sandwiches).  I almost always have a jar of sprouts growing, and we also have lots of nuts and seeds in the fridge and freezer for snacks.  And every once in a while I whip up a treat, like these fantastic fig bars or chocolate chip cookie dough balls that take about six minutes to make (I made the whole blizzard concoction once, and we really liked them.  But I find myself making the dough balls by themselves too, as they’re really fast and easy and I can whip them up in a jiffy if people stop over or if my boys want a sweet treat.  I’ve also found that I can reduce the sugar and syrup a bit – even though there’s not much to begin with – and they’re still just as yummy).

So that’s where I am with food these days.  I hope you enjoy the recipes I’ve linked to – happy cooking!

We’ve spent all of our free time over the last week working in our garden, and we’ve got nearly everything planted.  We had a dumptruck full of compost delivered, so we spent last weekend with our shovels and wheelbarrow, mixing compost into all of our beds.  We did the same thing last year, and I think our alkaline clay soil is finally looking pretty good.  From now on, we shouldn’t have to have compost delivered – the compost we create ourselves should be enough in future years.

Last year, instead of tomato cages ,we installed metal stakes in a single row down the middle of each tomato bed, and attached chicken wire fencing (six feet high) to the stakes.  The beds are only four feet wide, so we had a row of tomato plants on each side of the fencing, and they all climbed up the fence together.  In order to rotate our crops, we had to pull out the fencing and move them to other beds last weekend, which was actually a pretty easy process.  We got all of our tomato plants – that had been growing in our hydroponic garden for the last several weeks – transplanted out to the new tomato beds a few days ago.  We also had peppers that we transplanted outside earlier this week.

Other than the tomatoes and peppers, we’re starting everything outside, from seeds this year.  Our potatoes, spinach, and onions have all been in the ground for several weeks now, and are looking good.  Most of the potatoes have sprouted and will be ready to be hilled up in another week or two, and the onions are several inches tall.  Everything else got planted over the last week, so most of our garden beds still just look like bare dirt – but soon there will be little sprouts everywhere.  (I love this time of year – it’s like magic!)  We gave one bed to our three-year-old, and we’ve got six more beds (out of 27 total) that still need seeds (those will be getting planted this evening).  I had wondered how our garden process would go this spring, since we knew we’d have a brand new baby right at the start of garden season, but so far we’ve managed to stay on track.  I’ve done quite a bit of gardening while wearing the baby in the Moby Wrap, and my husband and I have also taken turns working in the garden and taking care of the baby.  It’s a bit more of a juggling act, but so far, so good.

All of our fruit trees are looking good, and we’ve had lots of blossoms this spring, so we might even get some fruit this year.  The berry bushes are also looking great, and some of the raspberry bushes have already spread out with new growth in a three-foot circle.  Last year we planted three beds with asparagus, and those have all come back nicely, as did our rhubarb, and mint plants.  Wouldn’t it be nice if all veggies were perennials?

In early March, I planted seeds for various greens into our cold frames, and we’ve been harvesting lettuce, kale, and all sorts of other greens from those beds for several weeks now.  Given that we go through at least one large bunch of organic kale/collards/swiss chard, etc. each day, having the growing season for greens extended by a few months each year is definitely a money saver when it comes to our grocery bill.

We’re going to experiment with straw mulch this year, hoping that it will cut down on the amount of weeding and watering that we have to do.  I tried hay mulch in one of our beds last year, and practically turned the bed into a sod farm – the grass seeds that were lurking in the bale of hay sprouted like crazy when they got into the nice moist garden bed!  We’ve read that straw doesn’t do that, so we’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, I hope all my northern hemisphere readers are having a good spring so far!  Have you got your gardens or container gardens going yet?

Anyway

After many years of resisting, I think I’m ready to get on board with the idea of a rotating menu plan.  I enjoy cooking, and I love finding new recipes to try.  Sticking to a schedule of meals always sounded boring, and like a good way to stifle kitchen creativity.  But with our second child due to arrive in a month, a busy business, a huge garden that will soon be requiring a lot of attention, and a basement remodel – I think it’s time to streamline our food preparation – or at least take the mental work out of it, so that I don’t have to spend time wondering what I should make for dinner.

I like the idea of a schedule that would repeat every two weeks, so that we don’t feel like we’re eating just a few meals over and over.  I can think of a few meals off the top of my head that will definitely be included – our favorite rice and beans dish, a crock pot soup that we love, spaghetti with homemade sauce (we still have jars of sauce that I canned last fall, and they should last for another couple months)… and I know that my husband and son will have some ideas that they will want to throw in the mix too.  I think I’ll shoot for 12 meals on the list, which will give me a little wiggle room for creativity and trying new recipes the other two days.

Breakfast is easy – we buy oats in 50 pound bags, and my husband cooks oatmeal every morning for us.  Lunch is usually leftovers, sandwiches, salad, or something along those lines.  I’ll make sure that most of the meals I put in our dinner schedule are big enough to provide us with leftovers for lunch the next day, which makes lunch a breeze.

Once garden season gets here, I’ll be able to go back to grocery shopping no more than twice a month (during the winter I shop more than that in order to get fresh produce, but in the summer and fall our garden produces enough to allow me to space out the shopping trips a lot more).  With a two week meal plan, our shopping list should look pretty much the same every two weeks, and the process should be pretty simple.

I know that a lot of other bloggers have been using menu plans for ages.  I remember my father proposing an idea for simplified cooking about 25 years ago.  This is not a new idea, I’ve just never been interested in it before.  But now I’m ready, so please share your favorite tips for menu planning, recipes that your family doesn’t get tired of, and whatever other ideas you have for simplifying the process of “what’s for dinner” while sticking with homemade and nutritious.