February Home Store Challenge: February 8th

And here's the post for today!  I did a lot of stuff in the kitchen today.  Some days are like that, I guess.  I had to get a lot of stuff done so it's done for later on :).

Breakfast was granola in milk.  This granola is so good.  My husband had it for breakfast too, and he usually has his sandwich, so that should tell you something!  He opted for the granola!  And little mister had cereal and applesauce.

 Then I needed to make some French bread for part of dinner tonight.  So these are the ingredients for that.

 Looks yummy, huh?  Fresh-baked bread.  Yum!  And I have loaves frozen for other meals!

Then there was lunch.  Grilled cheese, tomato soup, pea crisps, and fruit crisps!  Milk for my girl and water for me!

 And squash and cauliflower for the baby.

 Our lunch done :).

I needed to make more baby food, so I got that done today.  This was my first time trying out the sweet potatoes for baby food.  We'll see how he likes it, but it doesn't look particularly appetizing.  I've used the THRIVE Sweet Potatoes in a recipe before (muffins) and they turned out good.  But like this I'm a bit leery ;).

Then I decided to make these power ball bites that I've been meaning to make for the last 2 months.  They are so stinkin' good.  If only I didn't want to eat them all at once!

 Then it was time to work on dinner!  These are the ingredients for dinner (and the reason I needed to make French bread today!)

 The dinner recipe called for a garlic-herb cheese spread or cream cheese.  Neither of which I had.  So I improvised with my THRIVE Sour Cream Powder!  Not a bad substitute, if you ask me! 

 My 'spread' on the bread ;).

 While dinner was cooking, I worked on Family Night Treat.

 it was supposed to be white chocolate popcorn with pink sprinkles (for Valentine's Day!).  It didn't turn out as good as I'd hoped.  Sigh.  Oh well.  They can't all be wins!

 Then I worked on a veggie for dinner.  This is where I am finding my biggest struggle in eating out of our home store.  I like my food to be yummy and I tend to rely heavily on salads.  Salads don't store for long-term.  If it was summer, and if I had a place for a garden, we'd be set!  But it's not... And I don't.  So I'm having to learn how to make yummy side dishes with THRIVE!  This one was okay.

 Here was the main dish:  Meatball sub casserole.  Not a fan of the brand of meatballs I used (which I didn't buy, but got from a neighbor who was moving last month).  I'll keep the recipe, though, and just make home-made meatballs next time!

 The baby ate mashed potatoes, peas, and corn.

 And here's my plate!

February Home Store Challenge: February 7th

Home Store Challenge Day 7! This was actually yesterday's, and tonight I will post today's... Just a little explanation on why there isn't much food depicted for the day (at least breakfast and lunch...). In our faith, we set aside one Sunday a month as "fast Sunday." It is a time members of the congregation are invited to fast for a particular purpose (that purpose is up to each individual) and abstain from food for two consecutive meals. Then we donate the money we would have spent on those meals as fast offerings to help people who may need assistance with some things.  It is not required, but when I am not nursing or pregnant, I choose to participate. So what you will see for breakfast and lunch is what our little girl ate (the baby ate food too, of course!). And then dinner was leftovers, so I just took a picture of our food sitting on the counter as we started prepping our individual meal choices ;).

For breakfast, Lynnaea wanted a yogurt parfait with blueberries again :).

 Little man had multi-grain cereal.

 She requested pb&j for lunch, plus I threw some peas on her plate for some veggies.  Plus she had milk. Baby boy had squash and peas, a bottle, and a cracker.

 After church, we all had dinner.  Leftovers again -- but this time we managed to clean out the fridge (well, except we still have one more slice of pizza!).  I also made fried okra to go with the meal.

February Home Store Challenge: February 6th

Have I ever mentioned how much I dislike graveyard shift!?!  Ugh.  And since we've had some sick kids the last couple weeks, we've spent a lot of days at home.  Eventually my 2 year old (who is very adventurous and energetic) gets stir crazy.  And so do I.  So I decided we need to go find something to do today.  The solution?  The in-laws' house!  They have two cows, 10 chickens, a dog, and a cat; so my little girl loves going there. 

I share this, because it means we were fed lunch at my in-laws' house.  But my mother-in-law is a home store queen indeed.  She taught my husband how to have a home store (and she has lived off her own home store in the past when my father-in-law had been out of work for a time), so she totally understands the ins and outs of it.  So there we had ritz crackers (my baby tried them for the first time there and LOVED them), cheddar cheese, and vegetable beef soup (the baby had carrots and peas from the soup).  My girl also had a peach slice, milk, and a snickerdoodle.

The rest of our meals, though, were from home. 

Breakfast:  Pancakes.  My husband ate breakfast with us when he got home, and he loves his pancakes in a bowl with butter on them and lots of milk in addition to the syrup.  That's why those items are pictured, whereas they weren't before (on Monday, the 1st ;)).

 The baby had applesauce and multi-grain cereal.

 And for dinner we had leftovers.  We have a lot of leftovers from all our good eats this past week ;).  I didn't take a picture of everyone's plate, but this was mine.  Plus the baby's food.

Tomorrow is Sunday, so I won't be posting.  I will post two on Monday, though :).

February Home Store Challenge: February 5th

I totally skipped posting yesterday because I was tired and tired of looking at the computer (after I posted it to my facebook business page).  But I'll rectify that and post two for today.  Here's February 5th's!

Breakfast:  yogurt parfaits with the home-made granola from the 4th!  After mentioning parfaits, they just sounded too good not to have for breakfast!  I chose raspberries for my fruit while my little girl chose blueberries.

 Lunch:  Ramen with THRIVE Peas thrown in.  I had water and my girl had milk.  And a little lemon-zucchini cupcake for a sweet treat at the end ;).

 Dinner was a new recipe:  cheddar broccoli soup.  It came together easily, but it wasn't my favorite.  Nor was it my daughter's favorite.  My husband did say it was filling, though!

 I served it with a loaf of French Bread I'd made last month and froze.  I have an awesome recipe for home-made French Bread, and it makes 3 loaves, so I always freeze two to have for later!  Score!

 Baby boy's dinner.

 And we have this margarine I bought for an event in December that we are trying to use up.  We don't usually buy margarine, but it was requested for the event.  Thinking there would be a lot of people there, I bought the big one...  And came home with a lot leftover.  So, we're working through it ;).

February Home Store Challenge: February 4th

When your kids shock you and sleep in, it's kind of a blessing and a punishment at the same time.  Haha.  I thoroughly enjoyed my extra hour of sleep.  However, it also threw off the plans I had with my mom.  So it was a rush to get ready, once we were all awake!  I chose one of the easier and quicker things for breakfast:  cream of wheat.  I flavored it with brown sugar and maple syrup (that's my favorite flavor in the instant packets!).  Except for the baby...  He got cream of wheat mixed with apple sauce.  I don't think he's ready for too much sugar ;). 

 

My girl requested Peanut butter and jelly for lunch (which isn't surprising).  We both had that and chocolate milk.  Plus THRIVE Carrot Fruit Crisps, and she had fishy crackers.

The baby just had squash and peas ;).  And a couple of the fruit crisps!

I'd thawed some zucchini from our 2014 garden a couple days ago, so I had to make something with it.  I was tired of zucchini brownies and zucchini bread, not because they aren't good, but because those are what I always make when I thaw zucchini!  So I hit up pinterest for a new idea and found Lemon-Zucchini Cupcakes.  Oh man... These are awesome.  I'll be making them in the future.  It's not like we don't have plenty of 2014 zucchini to use up!

Seriously so good.  And packed with zucchini!

I also decided to make some home-made granola.  It was something I'd been meaning to do for a while now.  And since I want to do yogurt parfaits for breakfast one day shortly (I have yogurt in the fridge to use!), this was a good time to get it done!

Seriously good granola!  And I even messed up the recipe a little bit! 

We ate leftovers for dinner (we had lots in the fridge from the last 3 days... and frankly, we still do!).  But I did add one thing (sort of a way to get vegetables -- even if they aren't the healthiest ones ;))...  Fried Okra!

The baby ate squash and mashed potatoes, but I got lazy and didn't take a picture.  Sorry!

February Home Store Challenge: Day 3

Well, today didn't go entirely as planned.  That happens a lot.  But since my husband actually went to Costco with me (for a good cause!  Read on!), we called it a date and bought a pizza for dinner.  I feel a little bit guilty for already buying a meal when I actually didn't plan to go out to eat at all this month, because we usually don't.  But life happens, and sometimes a good deal presents itself and is too good to pass up.  I'll tell you all about it.

Breakfast was delicious.  Blueberries and Cream oatmeal!  And, it even fed my husband today.  He usually eats his sandwich, as I stated before.  But right now he is on graveyard shift (yuck, yuck, yuck!) and he actually got home early this morning (he's usually walking in the door around 9, but today was home around 7:30!).  So he joined us for breakfast :).

 So yum.  My little miss asked for seconds and thirds.  She chose to do blueberries today.

 The baby ate plain cereal today.  And though it's not pictured, he also had squash with dinner.  He is finally really started to have an appetite again.  This bug really threw him for a loop.

 Lunch was cheese quesadillas and green beans.  Milk for my girl and water for me, as usual.  Those are the best tortillas ever, by the way.

Which brings us to dinner.  Okay, so yesterday I finally went and upgraded my phone to a Smartphone.  Yeah, yeah...  About time, right?  I wasn't originally going to do it yesterday, but my husband lost his phone Monday.  And for all we know it's in the Atlanta airport.  So we aren't hoping to find it.  It was another dinosaur phone anyway, so no big loss.  So we were going to just have him keep my old phone (he never uses his phone and can't take it to work anyway, because he can't take any phone with a camera on it to his job).  And I was going to upgrade, since I was going to anyway.  I need a GPS app ;).  So anyway, the losing the phone thing just pushed me into doing it.  Well, while there upgrading, I learned that, by getting the particular phone I got (and because it took me forever to upgrade, so my cell phone company wanted to entice me to upgrade by offering some awesome rebates that were only good for 2 days....), I stood to get $125 in rebates.  And I only paid a total of $37 after taxes and cost of phone.  Seriously!?!  I was going to get paid $90-something bucks for upgrading my phone!?!  I like those numbers!  So when I got home and told my husband about it, he got all excited and decided he wanted to upgrade his phone too.  So we went back today and did just that.  And he got the same sweet deal. 

But because he is on graveyard shift, and because he had only gotten about 3 hours of sleep, and because we have young children who nap well into the afternoon...  Well, we finally got to Costco at 4:30.  Left around 5:30.  Decided a Costco pizza would be a great end to our phone buying (and money-saving!) date.  And plus he needed to get home and eat fast so he could go back to sleep to squeeze in a few more zzz's.  Which is where he is right now ;).

So that's why I spent money (date night fund money) on a pizza on only day 3.  It seems like a cheat in some ways, but oh well.  I still haven't bought any new groceries for our home :).