January 8th

Breakfast: apple pumpkin muffins. These I got from Cindy Savoldi, and they're really delicious. The streusel topping really does it. The only problem is that it takes for-evah to make them. I got all the wet and dry ingredients all measured out and ready the night before and it was still 40 minutes until they were in the oven next morning. Here's the recipe:

2 1/2 c. flour
2 c. sugar
1 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
1 T. pumpkin pie spice
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 c. pumpkin
1/2 c. vegetable oil
2 c. finely chopped apples

In a large bowl, combine first 5 ingredients. In a medium bowl, combine eggs, pumpkin, and oil. Add liquid ingredients to dry ingredients and stir until just moistened. Stir in apple. Spoon batter into 18 paper-lined muffin cups; sprinkle streusel topping over batter. Bake at 350 for 35 to 40 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

Streusel topping: 2 T. flour
1/4 C. sugar
1/2 t. cinnamon
4 t. butter

knife or pastry-blender this until it looks like coarse crumbs.

Dinner: planned Burgundy Chicken which I'll have to try and give out the recipe for later, because instead of having dinner at home, we drove to Grandma and Grandpa's house for the weekend so we could buy our new van. It's about a four hour drive away. Instead of this dinner, we had Bagel-Meat sandwiches and cheese and crackers in the van on the way down, it being one of our goals not to spend money on eating out in January. But the bagel-meat sandwiches were delightful. Also we ate Grandpa's leftover San Luis Valley Pizza Company pizza when we arrived, and it was Fabulous!!

January 7th

Breakfast: Fruit and toast. Pretty easy. I just open a #10 can of peaches from Sam's, put a loaf of bread near the toaster, and get out the butter. This morning we actually had bagel toast because I went slightly bagel-crazy at the breadstore on Tuesday. 1.89 bagels were buy-one-get-one, so I bought two and got two. So, four total. But then if you spend so much you get one free, and I got two free, and all that was on the free shelf was, you got it, Bagels. So two more bags, for a total of six. We were pretty liberal with the bagels that whole week.

Dinner: Quiche. I got a bag of some kind of yellow stuff with chunks from The Place last summer. I just squeezed half of it into a pan and baked it, only to discover when I took it out of the oven that it was quiche filling. Then this next part still has me buzzing with how fantastic it is: on our way home from Webelos, Eric and I stopped at the store for a certain meat deal that was sold out. Ok, so be it. But PIE CRUSTS!! Pie Crust 2-packs were on sale for a buck!! I put four in our basket. Then on the back of each box I noticed a coupon for a dollar-off-two-boxes, bringing the per-box total to 50 cents and the per-crust total to 25 cents. I came home with eight boxes-- and I'm still super-psyched about having so many pie crusts ready to go!! Anyway, that was serendipitous, because I had already planned quiche for thursday, and therefore had the crust all ready to go. I told the children it was a fun breakfast pie called quiche and they ate their pieces pretty well. I thought it was astonishingly delicious, especially for something from The Place.

January 6th

Breakfast: Toad-in-a-hole. I sometimes call this Pig-in-a-hole because it sounds funny. Funnier. Anyway, I got the "recipe" for this from the Pioneer Woman's cookbook, and I really like it. My family really likes it. Seth had two this morning, so, his compliments to the chef.

Dinner: Pioneer Woman Comfort Meatballs with mashed potatoes. Obviously from her cookbook. These were delicious. I would add a smidge less onion next time, but next time is still two times away, because I had to double the recipe, which I then divided into three dinners-worth. Confusing? I know. It's a pound and a half of meat, and we usually just go One Pound. So when I doubled it, it was three One Pound sections, two of which are in the freezer. Does anybody know if mashed potatoes freeze well? Because then I could just have the whole dinner ready to thaw and serve. Look into these meatballs. They're like little mini meat-loaf-balls or something.

Tuesday January 5th

Breakfast: planned cream-o-wheat, actually had oatmeal. I make my own instant oatmeal packets with a recipe I got online at http://www.betterbudgeting.com/articles/frugal/breakfast.htm and the children tolerate them reasonably well. I dehydrated my own strawberries and blueberries to put in them, too, to make fancy flavors.

Dinner: Pioneer Woman Simple, Perfect Chili, from her cookbook. My friend Jess went with my sister-in-law Gretchen and me to the book signing. We had to leave without getting our books signed because of the extreme enormity of the crowd and due to Jessica's curfew of 10pm. The missionaries were coming for dinner and we fed them chili last month when they came over, too, but I forged on, because New Recipe! It was pretty good chili, made especially delightful by sour cream, cheddar, and fritos piled high. Even the children thought it was pretty good. No big tomato chunks.

The Explanation

Here is what I did: I sat down one day (January4th) and wrote up a list of all the breakfasts we'll have for the months of January and February. Then I also wrote up a list of all the dinners we'll have for January and February. Lunches I left to chance and leftovers. Many of the dinners and several of the breakfasts will be new recipes, gleaned from ward and community cookbooks. So I'll be web-logging my success or anti-success with the menus and the recipes. Looks like I'll have to catch up a bit...

Speaking of AWESOME~

I can't come up with original web content myself, but I can poach stuff like this from other sites. This is, once again, from verydemotivational.com .

I Don't Usually Find Cool Stuff Online

...but I did today. I regularly check failblog, mostly for videos of people falling down, but also for funny pictures of doofy stuff. They're great because you can get the site to filter out all the yuck with a g-rated option. But then they have all these links to other fun stuff. And as you can see on the picture I lifted, this one is from a link to verydemotivational.com, which is all posters like this. Some of them are very coarse, so use extreme caution. This guy was just so...well...awesome! I just had to bring him to my blog.