My new favorite book

I found this book at the library last week and since then have decided I need to get a copy for myself! Now, I love cooking and sometimes I like getting creative and exotic. But on our budget, we can't afford to buy fancy food most of the time. Not to mention, I'm always looking for cheap, healthy recipes that use ingredients I already have in my pantry and freezer. I've already made two recipes from this cookbook and I'm impressed with how simple and yummy they turned out to be! I highly recommend at least checking this cookbook out from the library.

Wrapping up January

It's nearly February! Ben has decided that he wants to celebrate Valentine's Day on February 12th (our 7-month anniversary) instead of February 14th. I'm not so convinced. Stay tuned.

I went to the doctor on Monday and he gave me a steroid pack to try and help my feet. I must say, so far it's helping! Staying off my feet has also been helping. I haven't really been working since before Christmas and that's helped a lot. I'm currently on the hunt for a new DESK job and I have a few leads so maybe I'll have some good news soon.

I'm also pleased to announce that my clothes are feeling looser! Hooray for working out! Even Ben is enjoying working out. Last week he said to me, "if I'd known working out was so easy, I would have done it a lot sooner!" He's losing weight too. We're thrilled to have made exercise a habit in our lives. We're working on eating more healthily--one itty bitty baby step at a time!

Happy Inauseation Day!

It's all going down in Washington today. I'm just waiting for Congress to change our national motto to: "In Government We Trust". The libs have done a great job of eradicating personal responsibility (unless you're rich), and destroying our faith in God. Oh what a great nation we've become ...

Boring boring boring ... did I mention that I'm bored?

My life is very boring lately. My plantar fascitis has gotten the better of me for the time being and so I have not been able to substitute teach. I'm actually in the process of searching for a new job, but I gotta say, there's not a whole lot out there right now. This I'm actually subbing for the school nurse. The pay is less, but it's a sit-down job and it will keep me busy.

Last night we went over to another couple's house for dinner and some games. They have a little 3-month old baby, so it was fun to play with him and chat with them. She called me around lunchtime to say they had decided to fire up the grill so we could bring whatever we wanted for that. Initially I was going to try and do spiedes (the grand Triple-cities tradition), but I didn't have any thawed chicken and they were out of chicken breasts at Sam's Club (go figure!) so I did shish-kabobs instead. I bought some low-fat kielbasa and skewered that with green peppers, tomato chunks, onions and fresh pineapple. If it's been a while since you've barbecued then you have probably forgotten how much better everything tastes when it's barbecued. Maybe our cave-men ancestors knew what they were doing when they cooked everything outside on the fire. Man those kabobs were tasty!! And pretty inexpensive too. I'm going to be using our landlord's grill a lot more--I can tell you. After dinner we played "Pirate's Cove" which I had never won in my life. I actually won last night, but it was purely because my husband chose me as the winner. When it came down to the final play, it was going to be me or the other gal, and my husband, smart man that he is, picked me. I don't know if I would have forgiven him otherwise!

New haircut!

I got my hair cut today and it looks fantastic! I'm so happy with the way it turned out. I have had so many bad haircuts in the last two years. I actually did a little research before making this appointment. It's so hard to find someone to cut hair that you can trust, so I went online and found this girl who had been given a really good review. I called and she had an appointment available for today so I said, "sign me up!" Here's a pic of my hot new do. You can see how layered the back of it is. I LOVE that because my hair is naturally so thick and layering took off a lot of that bulk. Now I will actually be able to style it.

Happy 6 Months!

Ben and I celebrated our 6-month anniversary yesterday. I can hardly believe it's been six months! I'm so grateful that I married the man that I did. He is so wonderful! AND, yesterday for dinner he made me chicken cordon bleu. I told him he's allowed to cook any time he likes!

How NOT to make a chimichanga

Step 1: Make your own special blend of meat and spices to go inside the chimichanga

Step 2: Warm a tortilla in the microwave for 20 seconds

Step 3: Place a generous portion of seasoned meat in tortilla and wrap securely

Step 4: Ignore husband's idea to secure chimichanga with toothpicks (as per Emeril, he says). Tell him, definitively, that you do not like to mess with toothpicks.

Step 5: Gently and lovingly place chimichanga on basket in deep fryer, seam-side down

Step 6: Carefully lower basket into 375 degree oil

Step 7: Watch in horror as the chimichanga floats to the surface of the boiling hot oil, flips over, and unravels with a flourish, exposing your once protected and very tasty meat blend to a fryer full of hot oil.

Step 8: Lift basket from oil

Step 9: Sadly discard the very greasy remains of a once-promising chimichanga


(And the moral of the story is ... listen to your husband when he's making sense!!)

Who needs a personal trainer?

I've come to the conclusion that personal trainers are overrated. Last Friday night at the gym we got cornered by the sales manager for the personal training program at LA Fitness and he signed us up for a free "consultation" on Saturday morning. After going through all the questions, "what is your fitness goal," "what is your biggest obstacle," he ran us through a couple of straining arm exercises. Ouch!! Then we sat down again and got the sales pitch. My favorite part of the conversation was:

Manager: (drawing two numbers on a piece of paper, 149 and 160) So, which price would you choose? (referring to the initial fee for getting started with a personal trainer)

Tabitha: Well, really neither. It doesn't fit into our budget.

Manager: Are you telling me that there's a price on your fitness?

Ben: I majored in economics in college. EVERYTHING has a price.

Manager: (Dumfounded) Okay, don't think about budget right now. Let's say you're going to buy clothes ...

Tabitha: (laughing) Yeah, clothes aren't in the budget right now.

Manger: Okay okay, so let's say you're going to buy gas. Which price would you choose, the lower one, right? You don't have a budget for gas, right? You need it!

Tabitha: Actually, we do have a limit for gas in our budget.

Manager: Ok food. You gotta buy food.

Ben: We have a budget for that too.

The guy just could not get over the fact that we couldn't pay $150 initiation fee and THEN $40 per session on top of that. Go figure!! Who DOES pay that is what I want to know. If you go 3 times a week, that's nearly $500 a month! However, we decided that we definitely needed to hit the weight machines, me to tone muscle and Ben to build muscle, so we started doing research on training and muscle groups. Then we figured, hey, we can do this ourselves! Both of us have come up with a schedule for training that we thing is going to work pretty well for us. So, who needs a personal trainer when I can do it myself?

More info on food storage

So just a couple of hours after blogging about food storage, I realized that my best friend out in Washington had been spending a lot of time recently researching food storage. She has found a brand new website that launched today, which is a collaboration between several food storage gurus. They are having some really neat givaways this week, and in general it looks to be a fantastic resource no matter what stage you are at with your food storage. At the very least, you should enter the drawing for the cool prizes!

Food Storage For Thought

Lately I've been thinking a lot about food storage and making sure our house is in order. Getting started with food storage is very intimidating, especially when you have next to no space to keep anything. When I first moved in, about 2 weeks before we got married, I managed to keep all the food in the kitchen, along with all of my pots, pans, bowls and other kitchen gadgets. If you know me, you know that's no small feat considering I used to sell Pampered Chef and I just LOVE to cook. So, I have a lot of kitchen "stuff".



Then when we got married we got more kitchen stuff of course, and I had to struggle to find places to put the new kitchen stuff and still have room for the food. At this point I decided to start keeping some of the extra cans of food in the 3x4 closet in our second bedroom/TV room. There were a few very small shelves in there, but with the other regular storage stuff it soon got too crowded in there. Finally we found a black steel shelving unit at Aldi for $60. Woohoo!! We got that set up in our kitchen/main room and BAM! Food storage became so much easier.



A couple of weeks later we noticed the same shelving unit at Aldi had gone on clearance for $30 so we bought another one and with permission, put it in our landlord's food storage room which happens to be just off our apartment.



I have 2 food storage goals for this new year:
1. Get our 3-month supply of everyday food in order
2. Implement a plan for water storage

In order to accomplish the 3-month supply, I've been compiling recipes with only a few "problematic" ingredients. Normally I like to cook with a lot of fresh ingredients, but in an emergency situation, there is the possibility of no fresh food available, so I've decided that I'll build the pantry ingredients into my pantry supply, and then find freeze-dried versions of the "problematic" ingredients. I've found that my most common problematic ingredients tend to be: celery, onions, eggs, and butter. All of those can be purchased freeze-dried. My mother-in-law gave us a bunch of wheat and other food storage for Christmas. Now it's just a matter of testing these recipes I've compiled to make sure that we can palate them once a week for 3 months.

Water storage is not proving as difficult as I thought it might. I'm planning on purchasing six to eight 5-gallon stackable containers for a start. These cost $8-$12 a piece, depending on the kind you get. I think 30 gallons of water would last the two of us 15-20 days, with minimal water for washing. A 55-gallon drum would be ideal, but we have nowhere to put one so we're sticking with the stackable 5-gallon.

I'd love to hear what your ideas are about food storage and any recipes you have found or creative ways to implement both short and long-term food storage!

What do you do on New Year's Day?

If you're me, you teach your husband how to change the brakes on your car. It's times like this that I realize I'm not your typical girl! For some reason something always goes wrong when I change the brakes. This time, after changing the front brake pads we pulled the rear tire off only to realize that they had given us the wrong brake pads. We went back to the store and exchanged the wrong ones for the right ones, only to end up putting the driver's side pads on the passenger side. I didn't realize they were side-specific! Actually, we put them on and took them off again about 3 times before finally figuring out how they went. All's well that ends well, I suppose.

Other than new brake pads, New Year's was pretty quiet this year. We spend a little time with some friends on New Year's Eve and that was fun.

Yesterday I bought some orthotics to put on my shoes. After trimming the edge I threw the sliver of foam at my cat and she went nuts with it. What a crazy cat!

Christmas 2008

Christmas this year was really busy, but very wonderful. For the first time in nearly 2 1/2 years, all my siblings were together. We didn't have a lot of plain down-time, but we did get to spend time together and that was the important thing. My sister Samantha and her husband Kris brought their new baby and stayed for the entire week leading up to Christmas. We went to the park, we hung out at my house, we played Rock Band, we ate good food ... does it get much better than that? My parents arrived 4 days after my sister's family, so we had 3 very busy days all together as a family. We decided that taking a family portrait was a priority, and after much discussion and disagreement over how, when and where to do it, we all met at the Target photo studio. Considering there are only 13 people total with all my brothers and sisters and their children, our family is not as big as some families. But trying to fit 10 big people and 3 wiggly children into that small studio space was a challenge! Nevertheless, I think the picture we chose was pretty good. I'm not sure we'll ever be able to take another family portrait and that it kind of saddening to me. It's an end, I guess, but it's also a beginning. New lives, new families.

The other main activity that we did while everyone was together was a pizza "throwdown" (cookoff). I wouldn't mind if the pizza throwdown becomes a Christmas tradition! We ended up with 6 different pizzas which were all very good in their own right, except mine which was a veggie pizza and was cold by the time everyone got there! (Oh well!) Everyone got three votes, 5 points, 3 points, and 1 point and the pizza with the most votes won. Bet you can't guess who won ... well it wasn't me, I already said my pizza was cold. My sister-in-law gave me 1 point out of pity I think. Actually, my dear husband Ben won the pizza throwdown this year! He made a "Bodocious Barbecue Pie" the secret to which is our own exclusive technique of mixing regular tomato spaghetti sauce with a little bit of barbecue sauce. So it's neither plain tomato sauce nor plain barbecue sauce. If you like barbecue pizza and you've never tried it, you really should try the mixture! Of course he put bacon and chicken on it and who doesn't like a little bacon? I think a lot of times bacon on pizza is like having a trump card. Jim Gaffigan would agree with me. "Bibbity, bobbety, BACON!"

After Samantha, Kris, and Marin left on Christmas Eve, we made gingerbread houses which was so much fun to do with the kids. Actually we made one gingerbread house, and one gingerbread train. Austin and Jacob worked on the house, Scott and I worked on the train. Emily went back and forth between the two, picking off the candy we had just carefully placed. It was so funny!

Christmas day we went to visit my late grandmother's cousin David, who lives with his wife Phyllis up near Canton, GA. It was a long drive but I had not been up there before, even though they have been down here several times! It was good to see them and to see where the live. We ate Christmas dinner there and hung out for a bit before heading home.

Altogether, Christmas this year was wonderful. I'm so grateful for the family that I have living close to me and I'm sad that the rest of my family lives so far away. At this time of year you truly realize that it's not the gifts or the decorations that make Christmas so special, it's savoring precious moments with beloved family members.