Meal Plan Monday...on Tuesday

So I've been using Plan to Eat the last few months for the task that ranks way up at the top of my dreaded household responsibilities: planning meals, shopping and cooking. Ugh! It's been a bit of work getting it all set up. Actually they even list my stats on my account page:

Since I signed up on September 15 (here's how I decided to try it out) I have:

• Spent 6.8 hours using Plan to Eat
• Added 102 recipes to my recipe book
• Meal planned 256 recipes and items

Most of that 6.8 hours was spent adding recipes and figuring out efficient ways to group items for meals. Today was the first day I feel like it really is getting to be a great tool at our house. I had a 20 minute window to get a grocery list ready for the next 7 days. In 15 minutes I had planned out--meaning put recipes on a calendar, printed a grocery list with every item (less those already in my kitchen) and printed a dated menu to post--breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack for the whole week~including a couple special items for a family Christmas dinner. Fabulous! Do you know how long that used to take?? Seriously, like 2-3 hours between interruptions!


Elena really loves the posted menu! She no longer whines around wondering what she should have for snack...just looks at the menu and pulls it out. No more *hard* decisions, phew!

The recipes not already in my PTE cookbook I imported from a website, taking about 30 seconds each (in this case from Taste of Home), including the picture. Each ingredient on the recipes I add to my planner go straight to my shopping list. The grocery list was sorted by aisle with little check boxes next to each item~love~! So after my lunch date I spent about an hour at Price Chopper breezing through the isles (well, kind of...I didn't have any children with me so it's all relative) and spent a measly $150 and some change. I'm not buying "just in case" items or guessing at what I need for snacks anymore, saving the moo-lah. Nice.

I've started a binder with all my PTE recipes, each in it's own page protector, that I'm planning on making my main cookbook. No more digging through multiple books and magazines every night--whoo-hoo! I added some tabbed dividers so I can file the recipes in the same manner as I keep them online, in ABC order of course. Right now I have to print them as I'm ready to use them...I probably just need to print as I add them...hmmm. Anyway, it's then simple to look at the posted menu, flip to the right section of the binder and pull the desired recipes out. The page protector keeps them clean and I set them up in my kitchen window while I cook.

Once I get really in the groove, I'm going to go back and add the approximate cost of each recipe. This, in turn, will give me an estimate for my grocery shopping as I add items to the list. Wow. That may actually be too much control-freak for even me!

So if you're still running around like a chicken with her head cut off every night for supper (or maybe breakfast and snack time too, like me), you might click over and give Plan to Eat a try with their free 30-day trial. It is a bit of time and work to get it going just your way, but way worth it in my opinion! Happy Homemaking!

Gingerbread Days!

We're baking gingerbread today! The Raymore Breakfast with Santa is Saturday, December 4 and we always make a couple houses for their Gingerbread House Silent Auction. The proceeds go towards our parks department and we love supporting their endeavors. This year I'm using a pattern for Row Houses and the kids are each making a house too!

Here is my entry from last year. The gal who won it kept it for displaying again this year. It was much fun to make...even had working lights inside!

I used the pattern for the Phantom House (a Halloween house, obviously) at the Haunted Dimensions website and just left off the porch and made it Christmas-y. They use cookie dough for their main house, but gingerbread works great (better in my opinion).

Then two years ago (gasp!...that seems like forever ago...I was 6 mos. pregnant with Zane) we each made a house. I was experimenting with recipes that year so poor Kai's caved in!

This one was done using the Farmhouse Pattern from Ultimate Gingerbread. I LOVE their site...navigating it can be a bit tricky, but it is packed with great ideas, patterns and recipes. Here is a link to their gingerbread construction-grade recipes: CLICK HERE and the one I use is called "My Favorite Gingerbread Dough" found if you scroll down to the bottom of that page.

I hope you take some time this Christmas to try out some gingerbread making fun! We started out a few years ago with the easy kits they sell all over the place...perfect for kids and less-ambitious grown-ups...and believe me, much less mess!

Meal Planning Simplified

In the spirit of occasional overwhelment (hmmm, I've used that word a lot...but I still claim it to be occasional), I starting thinking about what I spend the most time doing. Laundry? School? Cooking? Playing? Shopping? The winner?...It's all about the food. Planning, purchasing, preparing, experimenting and cleaning up.

So my next step was to figure out how to do all of the above in a more efficient manner, short of hiring a cook, which of course would be my preference! For some reason meal planning and execution is one of my most dreaded tasks of homemaking. Maybe because it is so constant...three meals and two, sometimes three snacks a day for the five of us plus Eric doesn't like to go out (what is wrong with that man?).

Over the years I have tried different methods like once-a-month-cooking, online planning services like e-mealz (Dave Ramsey recommends that one), my own two-week or monthly plans, and various other ideas from other bloggers or mommas. A few weeks ago I got hooked on Erica's blog over at Confessions of a Homeschooler and she makes a fantastic monthly plan with many of her recipes linked to a printable menu. I had never considered planning for more than just dinner and side dishes and really feel like a dunce for never writing down different meals to try for breakfast, lunch and snacks.

So here's my wish list:

• Customizable & printable menu for 1 week up to 1 month or more
• Aisle-ordered grocery list auto generated from menu
• Ability to add/import recipes from the web or text files
• Mac-compatible program/service, an OLD Mac at that.
• Pleasing user interface...I'm going to be doing this a lot and don't want to feel like I'm working on the guts of my computer sorting files or something!

That doesn't sound too hard does it? I was going to do it myself by creating some sort of calendar/database/worksheet system but I knew there had to be something out there right up my alley. Enter the obsessive researching side of my personality...even dreamed about it for a couple nights. Here are the results:

Shop'NCook Menu
All good except the interface...too plain jane for me and the demo I downloaded seemed a little bogged down...dragging and dropping recipes to the correct menu was confusing and sometimes took multiple tries.
MacGourmet Meal Plan
This I really like! But being on my old Mac (for just a few more months...we're upgrading soon) I could only download an older version that didn't allow demo-ing of the meal plan add-on. Looks good on all other accounts from the site description though it might be too nuts and bolts for me.
Kitchen Monki
Hot dog, this one is free! And is everything I was looking for! Ahhh...but again the older puter is going to bite me in the butt...scripts on the pages keep me from using it seamlessly. Pages taking a while to load. Maybe a little too recipe-sharing focused. Can even sign-in through Facebook. I think this would be a good fit for a lot of people.
Plan To Eat
And the best is saved for last. The user interface is the first thing that grabbed me...clean, neat and pretty! I started my free 30-day trial, uploaded a couple recipes and used some of their samples to make a pretend 2-week menu and printed out a custom grocery list all in a few minutes. You can even make multiple lists for separate stores!!! The list also combined same ingreds from recipes A & B (i.e. 11 chicken breasts [A][B]) with a separate printed list with a recipe key. I can drag and drop the recipes onto the calendar which has 4 meal slots per day...multiple recipes can go in each slot. Oh, and when I finally catch up with the times and get a smart phone, I can send my list to my phone. To be fair, I believe all of the above programs will do that.

So Plan To Eat it is! I'm really excited to utilize it and hoping after the initial loading of my recipes it's going to save loads of time. My idea is to plan at least a month in advance, but to break up the shopping into weekly short trips. Their program allows you to print the grocery lists for just a day up to whatever. Combining all this with the planning of ALL our food may make me the best kitchen manager I've ever been! Oh, and a year subscription is only $39 or you can pay $4.95/month...the time saving capabilities should make it pay for itself. If I convince enough of my friends to use it I can get my subscription free...that'd be sweet...so link to them through my blog peeps! And Happy Homemaking to ya...

And just like that....it's over.

I'm done. Done saying, "I can't have that" or "none of this today", done checking my little cards to see if certain foods are on my list of the day.

Last week I went to see a different doctor, and I am thoroughly convinced that if you go to enough doctors, you will eventually find the answer that you want to hear. At least in "food intolerance" cases like my own (obviously some medical problems are clear cut and diagnosis is diagnosis). I don't think this gal actually told me what I wanted to hear, but she did disagree with the allergist about the food problems causing all my skin & rash craziness. After much discussion between Eric and I (and Jodi since she was in town), I decided to scrap the elimination and rotation diet.

Ya know what the first thing I did was? Went to Culver's of course! Chocolate Heath Bar was the flavor of the day. Woot, woot! And as soon as I make it back to Wichita...a Squeak's cinnamon roll is on the menu! (Thanks for having one in my honor Jo).

Five days later now, and I really feel like a new woman. At least mentally. Every moment of the four weeks I was following that regimen my brain was constantly reeling, trying to figure out how to keep my body going on a limited range of foods...frequently failing as I stood in the kitchen at 7 p.m. starving and saying bleary-eyed to my family that I was going to the store to buy something, anything, to eat before I passed out. Unfairly, I know, I'm sorry gals...I was also continuing to lose weight...not such a good thing to be 15-20 pounds off the "healthy" range for my height.

So now I must say thank you to all of you who encouraged me in that adventure! So many people helped me find recipes, asked questions, brought me cookbooks, referred me to websites and just listened to my attempts at following that path. I genuinely felt so loved and cared for and I truly thank you for taking the time to help me try to figure it all out. I'm not sure what the "right" answer is for my total health...but for now having one less thing to worry my little head about is the right answer for me and my family. I need to focus on them, on getting ready for school, and getting our lives back in order. Hopefully I will be staying well and won't be wearing turtlenecks through a warm October like I did through April!

The Overzealous Patient

Back to the allergist's office I went today for my first round of shots. The nurse inquired about how I was feeling with the diet changes.
I talked for minute and then she exclaimed "You didn't cut out everything that came back positive at once did you?!"

Me: "Uhhh, yeah...I thought it was a 'don't eat any of this'/'only eat this' situation so I've been cold turkey on the whole deal."

Nurse: "Oh, no! Drop ONE food at a time for 7-10 days and then add the next highest offender."

Me (to myself): "Now how in the world did I miss this little tidbit of information?"

Me (outloud): "Oh, okay, that makes life a little better."

Now, I'm still a little befuddled at how the rotary diet works into this...I need to call them tomorrow for clarification. I think I can eat everything on my daily list, plus some of my offenders but minus the ones I have eliminated? That doesn't make much sense. Ugh! This is so confusing. However, I quickly determined that since cheese and milk were my #1's, I'd keep those at bay and went ahead and drove through Wendy's for a burger. Ahhhhh. Yum. I just should have had them add bacon (pork is on my no-no list too). The adventure continues.

Day 15...And DYING for one bite...

One bite of ANY kind of baked good, that is. After an agonizing evening at a seminar where I calmly sat munching on raw pistachios watching a roomful of comrades devour towers of gourmet, filled and frosted cupcakes, I woke up this morning desperate to create some kind of goodie to enjoy.

This is the 15 day mark of my new venture into life lived with a dairy-free, gluten-free, egg-free, soy-free, yeast-free, sugar-free diet. Aaack! On top of that, I must rotate the foods I CAN eat on a 4 day schedule.

So my grains for today seemed promising: millet, rice, corn and teff. I searched through some of my newly-checked-out cookbooks and found it! A recipe of Millet or Teff Apple Cookies. I can have apples today too...so all I was missing was the correct flour. After a quick trip to two stores, I was still missing the correct flour so I had to get resourceful. I had a bit of millet, so I ground it up with my blender, but was still short 1 cup...dang! In the back of my freezer I found some (old) brown rice flour so I tried adding it...and...drum roll....I just consumed at least a dozen little, golden-brown num-nums!!!!

They are certainly not "sweet"...applesauce and apple juice concentrate are the only sweeteners, but I cannot describe how heavenly it was to bite into that soft but crisp little goodie laced with chopped pecans.

I guess that's all I have to say for now...my business of trying to feed myself and the rest of my family without going crazy in the meantime is certainly reducing my blog-flow....which is typically my outlet for fun ;) . Ah, oh well. Enjoy the summertime friends and blessings to you!

The Frozen Assets Experiment

I'm always on the lookout for a way to do things better when it comes to homemaking. This weekend it was "how to be in the kitchen less often", though I spent the whole weekend IN said kitchen to make it work.

During my quest to either
a. convince Eric to expand our grocery budget
OR
b. figure out how to spend less on groceries
I once again ran across the once-a-month-cooking phenom and decided to give it another whirl. It's been about 4 years since the last time I did it...and that time was with a friend so I didn't have as much flexibility for recipe selection etc. Frozen Assets Lite and Easy by Deborah Taylor-Hough was available at the library so that's the cookbook I used.

The book is broke down into mini-sessions with 4-6 recipes each. I chose one chicken, the ground beef and a pasta mini-session to make up a total of fourteen main dishes. I combined the grocery lists into one master and hit the stores this week...once on Tuesday to catch some sales and again on Friday to get the weekend specials and produce.

Now, because I don't keep my kitchen in "ready-to-cook" mode at all times, I ended up spending over an hour Saturday morning just rearranging the table & island, washing pots and pans and unloading the dishwasher. Once I had a clean slate though, bam! there was some major cooking going on. Not really. It was more like lots of chopping, grating, running to a quick garage sale, more chopping, boiling chickens, thawing meat etc. Not to mention keeping three little ones occupied. I grated my thumb, which was special too!

By late Saturday night I had finished the pasta and all but one of the beef recipes and had the kitchen cleaned and ready to go again today. I got another meal in the freezer before church and now, at 7:23 p.m., just need to bag some soup that is cooling and mix up the last recipe which is pretty easy.

My piggies are tired, I'm a little grouchy and I have a deep slice on one finger from some heavy-duty foil. Ouch! BUT--I have (okay, almost have) 14 meals ready to thaw, heat and eat in my freezer!!! Some of the meals are so large that I'm sure they'll stretch to two full meals while others should yield some leftovers. Woot! Woot!

I think from now on I'll just do one mini-session at a time. Or else adapt some of my own recipes and do the cook more than one at a time deal. One thing I really liked about using the recipes from Frozen Assets was that they all contained a lot of veggies...something I know I need to use more of in my cooking. The kids will probably balk at some of the meals (beans! aaack! zucchini ugh!) but it will do them good! And guess who isn't going to be cooking for the next several weeks....me!!!!!!!

Oh the joy of cooking!

I LOVE homemade chicken noodle soup! I cannot seem to make it like Mom. Believe it or not, this is one dish that she has a knack for cooking up...it's even usual fare along with more traditional Thanksgiving or Christmas goodies.

Also, I HATE chopping veggies, cooking & deboning chicken, making noodles (ya, right)...all that stuff. So years ago I started using Reames frozen noodles....mmmmmm. Today I hit the jackpot as I was craving chicken noodle soup so bad I was planning on doing all the above mentioned hated tasks...and then, there it was, calling out to me from the HyVee freezer...Reames Chicken Noodle Soup Kit!!!!! (That's it in the box below)

Oh, I am soooo excited! It is simmering on the stove right now...it took a whole 45 seconds to add the three packages (noodles, chicken & veggies, seasonings) to the boiling water (I CAN do that!). Oh, and there goes the buzzer. I may have to add a can of cream of chicken soup to ATTEMPT the creaminess of Mom's...but I have a feeling this is gonna be good.

UPDATE: Weelll, not as good as I had hoped, but certainly comforting. If you go for trying it, #1 DON'T ADD ANY SALT (I didn't and was sure glad) #2 maybe skip the cream of chicken addition too. It was a souper salty...when I checked the sodium levels on the labels...the chicken noodle kit had over 1000mgs and the cream of chicken, 800+mgs PER SERVING. Holy Cow, or Holy Salt Mine...whatever.