Carrie, Uncle Michael and I decorated a whole gingerbread village yesterday. It’s a *lot* more work putting together and decorating five tiny houses than one big one!
Good thing Carrie has teeny-tiny fingers, because Michael and I couldn’t manage the teeny-tiny candies they included in the kit – they were practically sprinkles. I think “candy” is a very misleading name for those little bitty things. Tweezers might have helped!
Food
Coooookies!
Last night I piped some simple decorations on pre-baked (yes, I cheated) gingerbread men for the bus drivers:
And today Carrie and I baked a million (OK, only 16 dozen or so) G.G. cookies. She even stayed up really late to help us decorate them all tonight. This is the first time in years that I’m not going to up past midnight on the night before Christmas Eve finishing them by myself!
Bento Love
I’ve been packing Carrie’s lunch every day, for a few reasons. First, she’s a pretty slow eater, and would likely not have enough time to eat if she had to spend half her lunch period waiting in line. Second, she’s a somewhat picky eater – in that she doesn’t eat “normal” kid foods like pizza and fish sticks – so the “kid-friendly” lunch menu really only has PB&J as an option she’d regularly eat. Third, I’m not convinced that the school lunches are really all that healthy, or appetizing.
At one point I stumbled on a huge community of parents who post pictures of their kids’ bento lunches on flickr. At first I thought it was a very odd thing, putting food pictures on the internet. And then I became a bit intrigued, because they looked pretty tasty and fun. Plus I really liked the fact that using bento boxes avoids plastic baggies altogether – the only disposable thing I send in with Carrie is a single napkin a day.
So I’m trying to make bento lunches…though mine aren’t nearly as complex as a lot of the pictures I’ve seen. We have a few kid-friendly bento containers, and I’m learning how best to pack them so that they’re healthy, attractive and fun. So far they’ve gone over pretty well:
I have more pictures of pretty pink bento lunches on flickr… Yes, indeed, I’m now posting food pictures to the internet. Then again, I’ve always been a bit odd!
Creepiest Appetizer Ever…
Long-time readers know by now that I have a completely irrational fear regarding spiders. So why I thought I should make these for a party tonight is a mystery.
I think I’m going to have nightmares about these things. (They’re just standard deviled eggs with black olives for the spider parts, if for some reason you want to make them yourself. I found the idea *somewhere* on the internet, but I didn’t bookmark the page.)
Tasty Stuffed Squash Recipe
Since we’re done with the first group of freezer meals but just put the second batch in the freezer we’re winging dinners this week. For some reason I was craving squash, so Carrie and I went to the farmers’ market this afternoon and picked up some acorn squash and carrots, then headed to the grocery store for couscous and garbanzo beans.
If you like stuffed acorn squash, try this recipe. It was delicious! I added some finely chopped red onion and some diced apples to it just for fun, and I didn’t quite have enough cumin – I had no idea I was nearly out of it. The stuffing all on it’s own is quite good. Couscous isn’t one of my favorite foods, but mixed with all the veggies and raisins it was fabulous.
That probably concludes my creative cooking for the next few weeks. Except maybe some sort of zucchini something-or-other, since I have two largish zucchini that need something done to them soon. Hmmm….where are those muffin tins…?
Saving Dinner Update
Remember a while back, when I posted about the Mega Menu Mailer experiment? Well, we’ve used all but one of the meals we froze from volume 1, and we just finished putting together the meals from volume 2. (I spent an hour of prep time this afternoon, and Denis and I just spent 3 1/2 hours assembling the meals – so it was a bit faster this time around.)
I think it’s safe to say we like this type of meal planning. It saved us a little on groceries, but not a significant amount. Where it did save us a lot of money was on dining out. There was much less temptation to order a pizza or go out to eat because we didn’t have to think so much about what was for dinner. It was also flexible enough to be able to do spur of the moment types of things like go to someone’s house for dinner or invite people over, because anything we thawed was in the fridge and could be kept there until the next night if necessary.
The 24 meals lasted us 6 weeks; this time we put together 20 meals, so we should be set until the second week of November. Maybe we’ll try volume three then!
Dinner is Saved
I ordered and downloaded the Mega Menu Mailer from the Saving Dinner site on Friday. I’ve actually used one of their weekly menu mailers in the past, but because my parents live so close and we do spur-of-the-moment meals with them or just don’t feel like cooking sometimes a 6-meal-a-week shopping list and recipe plan just doesn’t work well for us. But this seems like it will work better: you prepare and freeze 20 meals, then defrost and use them when you feel like it.
So yesterday Carrie and I went shopping. We spent not quite twice what we’d normally spend in a week, so we’ll have to see with the next few grocery bills whether this is more or less expensive. (I’m going to guess it will be slightly less, but we’ll see.)
Denis and I spent a bit less than 6 hours while Carrie was napping and after she went to bed preparing the meals and cleaning up the kitchen. (We were pretty inefficient about it, but I seriously doubt anyone could possibly do it in the two hours the menu plan claims.) We had some extra meat and veggies, so we made a total of 24 meals. That works out to 15 minutes per meal of prep work and cleanup, which is less than you’d spend on each meal individually if you cooked every day. (Well, some of them were really super-easy, but others required a lot of chopping, measuring and dirtying of bowls.)
I think there will be two big benefits to doing this: first, we only messed up the kitchen (a lot, too!) once, and it’s all clean now; second, we’ll have creative, healthy meals even when we’re both tired from a whole day of work – and the temptation to go out will be much, much less.
We’re thinking we’ll go through three or four a week – they’re almost all meat-based, so we’ll throw in a batch of lentil soup or some pasta a couple of other days, and plan to eat out once a week – so I’ll know in about six weeks whether this was a good idea or not.