Once a Month Cooking are you crazy? Yup sure am

Hey remember me! The crafty Mom blogger. Ummm... don't think I can call myself that because it would imply that I have actually been blogging. So it's been a dog age since I've been able to sit and take a minute to blog but I'm hoping to make a change to that.


I wanted to share my recent project. It's not really crafty it's about food. With our little guy starting school it's been a struggle to have a meal ready quick enough so he can get to bed early enough without falling asleep in his dinner. I've been reading some different sites about once a week or month cooking. I found Once A Month Mom. I was floored at the variety of menus and the resources it provides. It has the menu with includes about 3 breakfast recipes, 3 lunch recipes and 6 dinner recipes. The idea is that you would eat each meal twice so you'd end up with about 24 meals. Other resources they have is a downloadable grocery list with a cell to put in how many people you are cooking with and it adjusts the portions. Recipes, labels for the frozen meals and instructions on how to use your time efficiently. I would strongly recommend looking through this site at all it has to offer.


Ok so as you can probably already  tell I decided that I was going to attempt this once a month cooking to see if I could save time and money. I'm a very frugal Mama and enjoy feeling like I'm stretching our family's dollar as far I we can. Just a quick side note about saving money, Mrs January is a fantastic site to assist you in that. I have been price matching my butt off and starting the couponing.


Anyways back on topic. Cooking, cooking and more cooking. Here were my thoughts before doing this.

• I can hunt down my groceries price match
• Buy everything in bulk when I could because we were cooking for 2 families
• All the majority of my cooking will be done during an off peak hydro time making some savings there
• I was going to do this with someone so we can share the work and make it fun
• This would be a one day cooking marathon saving me time during our hectic days and reduce that thought about ordering out when all is falling apart

So the cooking marathon was on. My Sister in-law was going to jump in on this adventure with me. We went through the menus and whole foods were for us. I enjoy making our food from scratch. Well most of it anyways. I went out with our grocery list getting everything reasonable priced. They used all foods that are in season which helped a lot. So most of the food was bought and this is what my counter looked like. Mind you this is missing a few things as well. After everything was bought we spent close to $500.00, that's including all the containers to package everything as well.






The night before our cooking marathon we did all our prep and then some. We made sure everything was all chopped up. I decided I was going to get a jump start by making up all the bread and tortillas. First time making tortillas and I'm going to do it again they were so delicious and really not that complicated. After about 6 hours of cleaning, chopping,  roasting 12 squash and baking up all the breads we were ready to get started.

The next day started very early for me as our kids don't know the meaning of the work sleep in. So my day started at 7am where I jumped right in. The day was filled with hard work but for the most part I enjoyed it. I really do enjoy cooking. It was also nice to have a kind of kid free day.

The day wrapped up for me at about 9:15pm. I didn't take any breaks because my eye was set on the goal of finishing in one day. I was exhausted by the end I didn't even take any pictures of our mound of food.

So my thoughts after my once a month cooking experience.

• I really enjoyed sitting down when everything was all done and feeling a weight being lifted from my shoulders. I don't need to think about what's for dinner every night.
• $500 for 2 families of 4 to eat about 24 meals for each family (which will have a good portion of leftovers) is pretty good in my books
• Instead of a one day grocery day I would have spread it out over a few weeks making sure to get things on sale
• I don't know if I'd do it with someone next time. It was hard for me not to do everything myself because I wanted the best price for everything, to push and get everything done and having someone else cook our food was a little different too

So in conclusion I feel like this is something I'd do again. I feel like our family could save as long as I was organized and didn't rush though the planning stage. Plus the cooking in of peak times for our hydro is the cheapest way to cook because we usually cook during the most expensive time. The feeling that we are organized for food for those crazy days is a fantastic feeling plus we had our first dinner tonight and it was AMAZING!!

Have you ever done freezer cooking? Do you have any tricks or tips? As a newbie I'd love to hear them.

Do you have a green thumb?

Well the crafts have been in low supply we still have been busy as can be.
I am not a gardener at all but have attempted a veggie garden that we have grown from seeds. The kiddies had lots of fun planting and watering our seeds. We could figure out why all our cucumber seedlings were dieing until little monkey showed me. He was ripping off the leaves and pretending to eat them saying they were cucumbers.... Just makes you laugh.
So far no veggies yet but everything is growing so well. Who knows maybe I am growing a green thumb.

Bread Bread I love Bread

I've always found making bread VERY intimidating. Using yeast, punching things down, kneading and more kneading seemed like a lot of work. Some of the recipes I didn't have a clue what they were talking about. My friend Ginny (the one I wrote about) told me to check out Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day  Well I checked out this book and the Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day out of our library and I have been having a good time.

It has been so EASY and simple to incorporated it into our menu for the week. Last week I made an olive dough and with that it makes 4 loafs of bread. We had two loafs of focaccia with onions and rosemary with our pasta. I also made Cheese and Spinach Calzones, which were AMAZING. It was thumbs up for these recipes and our company loved them as well.

I've also done the whole wheat dough and so far have made homemade cinnamon raisin bagels.

I am really impressed with these books and thinking that they are a good buy because there are so many different recipes. They take no time at all plus no kneading and the dough lasts about 2 weeks in the fridge. There are many different recepies you can make out of the one dough.

If you check it out or use these books let me know what your favorite recepie is.

Tammy

Mirror Mirror on the Piano

I really wanted a mirror for on my mantel. I was seen a few fantastic mantels with these beautiful mirrors. When I was a the salvation army I found this mirror for $5.

I'm not a huge fan of gold so I decided to paint it a nice white. I don't think it's done yet because there is something missing. I might do some glazing to bring out the details but for now this works.

By the way it never made it to the mantel but it looks great on top of our piano.

Until next time,

Tammy

A Thankful Tuesday

I'm so happy the nice weather finally decided to show up. Got to sit out back today and work on this project well the kids played. PERFECT day!

I read this idea in a parenting book I was reading. Once a week you sit down as a family and talk about thinks you are thankful for, for each family member. Some weeks you will find some silly things written on our fridge but we love this idea and I wanted to share it with you.




We were using post-it notes but I was sick of seeing those little yellow papers on the fridge. I decided to make little close-pin note hangers for each family member. Now we can use up that scrap paper from our printer. Works great for me!


Hope you have a sunny day.

Tammy

Bottle it up

 This organization was inspired by my little Monkey after a disaster with finger paints. He had a wonderful time decorating our couch and floor in a matter of seconds. We all know that the craft cupboard slammed with everything and is off limits. So I wanted to make something easy for him to take that is ok for him to get on his own, without getting into to much trouble.


I started to organizing our abundance of crafty supplies for the kids. Finding old jars some with lids so we don't have any spills for things like beads. Paper to cover up the sticky parts of the a few jars that I couldn't get off and an old tray I had laying around.

I just love this because not only does it make it easier to do crafts with the children it lays out a bunch of different materials. Monkey usually pick up the beads and pip cleaner, and goes to town. This week he's been using his imagination with the other materials. A new favorite is Moms cut offs of fabric and coloured popsicle sticks.



After some tidying of the bookcase, adding a few extra doors and taking some toys away here is our revamped kids storage area.

Tammy

Ginny is My Friend

My dear friend Ginny introduced me to the DIY and crafty blogs. If it wasn't for her I wouldn't be writing this right now. She always tells me she isn't crafty but it's all LIES! She has a fantastic imagination and some of the beautiful things the does blows my mind. I just wanted to share my non crafty  super crafty decor friends works of art.

 The beautiful revamped wreath, that was washed out by the sun. A little crafty work with a glue gun and some colour to make it pop makes ones fantastic spring wreath.

This chair went from garbage to gorgeous with a new seat and some paint. Ta-da!

After a Ginny and Tammy adventure to pick up free windows a family was getting rid of, here is one of the many ways she uses them in her decor. Beautiful.

 Just look at these yummy treats she made. Raspberry mousse and focaccia. I know you are jealous because yes I do get invited over and get to have some fancy Ginny treats.

Can't wait to see what she comes up with next. hmmmm.... maybe a DIY blog?

Tammy

Before There Was A Blog

 Well going through my pictures I found a few fun crafty things I had done earlier this year that I wanted to share. I really don't know where I found time to do these things but hey they got done and I got no sleep. That's what this Mama has to sacrifice to be crafty.

Like I said in my first post I started to crochet when I was expecting with my daughter. Since then I've been practising my skills and making lots of fantastic things. There are a few things I didn't take pictures of like a slouch hat for me and a mini bear for my Monkey but here are a few things I've whipped up.

These were just a few of the hats. Many of our friends got owls or skunks or ones with brims for Christmas. Well making these incredibly fun hats I seen so many adorable owl things. So I thought I'd try my hand at a little sewing. Which by the way I haven't done since grade school. I came across a pattern online and changed a few things and here is Sweetpea's little owl. She just loved the button eyes. I was going to make tags of different fabric on the wings but she was getting to be over that when I was making it.

I came across this photo well going through my project picture folder... Yummy caramel chocolate apples that the kiddos decorated. I think we will need to do this again soon... REALLY soon :)

Last but not least was a stool we found that the previous home owners left behind. Well my hubby was away on business I tackled this project but was so disappointed when I went to spray paint one night because the black spray paint was actually green. Being a very patient person... not at all... I went ahead and painted it green. After putting it in our bathroom I decided we are painting it cream but at least it functional now.

Until next time,

Tammy

What's on the Menu?

Well I was going through some blogs I seen this idea for a menu at Johnny In A Dress. We always have a menu for the week posted on our fridge. Most of the time it gets lost after grocery shopping or somehow last weeks one shows up and everyone gets confused. So I thought this was brilliant and making a menu helps you budget your food cost. It's easy to over buy food for the week and then wasting it in the green bins.

My lovely Aunt was getting rid of a bunch of things and gave me a few picture frames. This one was broken so I fixed it up, painted it and put some fun paper in the back. The circular patten didn't really work out it was to busy and made it hard to read. I got my dry erase pens our and wrote out our menu for the week.



Thanks this was truly a fantastic idea Natalie and I love that it is eco friendly by saving paper.


To check out the original and other crafty ideas at Johnny In A Dress.

Easter is almost here

Well spring is here, even though right now it's snowing outside. The mantel is done with the help of my lovely kids and we are all ready for Easter.

We had so many of those plastic eggs around. My goal was to find some projects we could do with the kids. We painted them, made some musical shakers out of them and rolled them around in paint to make different patterns.
















After we had fun rolling the eggs around I cut out eggs and laced them on a ribbon to finish off our decorating. We had a lot of fun with this one and I'm trilled it was a family crafty project.