Family Snow Trip

We've gone to this lake with my extended family every winter for more than 10 years. It's an annual tradition that we plan a year or more in advance so that all my siblings and their families can come. We all feel it's important to get together, so we save during the year to be able to afford the trip.

And all came. All 16 of us now. In a three bedroom cabin.

Good thing we all have fun together. We played games, laughed, and ate some really good food.

And had this view off the balcony of the new place on the lake we rented this year.

We also had fresh snow right before we arrived, making the snowshoeing really fun and the scenery beautiful. My brother and husband blazed a trail for us through the new snow.

Under blue skies and warm sunshine.

Fresh snow, beautiful lake, spending time with my wonderful family?

That definitely works for me.

-Jami

This is linked with Works for me Wednesday.

Using Up: Italian Vegetable Beef Soup

On the first day of the week I had planned to try lots of new recipes, I had to scrap the first one in order to make a slow-cooker meal so I could do some last-minute shopping with my son before he heads to Mexico for Spring Break.

Best laid plans and all that...

I did have a lot of odds and ends of vegetables in the fridge to use up, though, so it was a good time to make this soup that I flavor with wine, garlic, and Italian seasonings so I can christen "Italian Vegetable Beef Soup."

I don't think my family knows it's leftover soup, and I'm not gonna tell them. Shhhh...

These are the things I pulled out of the freezer and fridge:

-2 cups garbanzo beans (frozen last November!)

-3 cups turkey broth (hey, I just use what I have)

-3 carrots and two parsnips, chopped

-my last bag of frozen garden green beans (don't add until the last hour of cooking)

I had chopped all these and added them to the slow-cooker pot before I took the previous picture:

-2 cans of tomatoes

-one onion

-1/4 of a head of red cabbage (from December!! man, it can last a long time...)

-a slightly wizened red pepper (don't throw it out, chop and freeze or use right away for soup)

-the last center stalks of a bunch of celery (very wilty, I might add).

Then I chopped up 1-1/2 pounds of Elk steak that was in our freezer, courtesy of our friend Dan.

Free is a very good price.

But I've used any cut of beef, including leftovers and hamburger before. And I've even left the meat out, just using beef stock.

But then it's really just vegetable soup. And my family complains, "where's the meat?" Sheesh.

Now throw all the ingredients (except frozen beans) in the slow-cooker with:

- about 1/2 cup of wine

- a couple cloves of garlic

- 1-1/2 tsp. Italian seasoning

- salt and pepper

- a tsp. of beef bullion (because I was using up turkey broth...)

If the chopped ingredients are not covered with liquid, add a just enough water to cover as pictured.

Cook on low for 7 hours, add the green beans and cook for another hour. It can also be cooked on high for 3-4 hours.

Serve sprinkled with a little freshly grated Parmesan and alongside some yummy artisan bread.

Needless to say, you can change this up any way by using different beans and vegetables. I've even used pork and chicken stock, just switching to white wine and keeping the same seasonings.

There. A nourishing and tasty meal using up whatever's in the fridge at a cost of way less than five dollars!

-Jami

This is linked to $5 Dinner Challenge, Tasty Tuesday, and Tempt My Tummy Tuesday.

Monday's Menu

After almost a month with very little snow in the mountain pass by us, it snowed the week before our annual family weekend snow trip! And then the sun came out for our excursions on Saturday. Wow, we were blessed.

On to a normal week of menus, though, and this week I'm making a concerted effort to try some recipes I've pulled out of magazines recently. When I outlined the steps I take to menu planning I wrote that most of the time I use our family's tried-and-true recipes or look at past menus for inspiration. That's because it's the easiest and makes for a pretty quick menu planning session.

But I do like to try new recipes and will keep them with my menus to remind me to include them in a menu. I hadn't done this in awhile, so this week I'm actually going to try four new recipes because they looked fairly easy and I had the ingredients on hand already.

We'll find out if any will make the permanent rotation or if they will end up in the recycling bin. Or if I'm crazy for trying all these new things and I'll end up just making a fall-back recipe (usually spaghetti or tacos).

I'm including the links to the ones I could find. Family Circle won't let me to the tart recipe without signing up for a newsletter, so I'll post it later if it's a keeper. :-) Maybe you'd like to try some of these with me this week? If so, let me know how it went for you!

Monday- Onion, Bacon, and Spinach Tart (with less onions for the kids), slaw made with Dijon Vinaigrette, sourdough bread

Tuesday- Chicken Teriyaki, brown rice (make extra for Friday), vegetable stir fry

Wednesday- Mexican Layered Three Bean Casserole, green salad with spicy vinaigrette, chips and home canned salsa

Thursday- Baked chicken, Roasted Vegetable Pie (substituting potatoes for the squash), green salad

Friday- Chicken Rice Burritos made with leftover rice from Tuesday and chicken from Thursday, vegetable platter

Saturday- Turkey burgers on home made buns, oven fries, carrots

Sunday- Spaghetti using frozen Roasted Tomato/Vegetable Sauce

-Jami

Fun Friday Links

I'm off for our annual family snow weekend, but thought I'd pass along some fun places I've visited this last week.

I shared with you my system for starting seeds and where I do it now (the kitchen was supposed to be temporary...5 years ago, *harrumph*), so I thought it would be good to share with you the DIY system that DigginFood came up with. Grow your seeds under a light using an IKEA shelf...smart!

I love, love, love reading about Clay and April over at Coal Creek Farm. Their love story is very similar to ours, complete with 1980s hair and acid-wash jeans.

Finally, The Inspired Room inspired me to think about decorating in new ways with this post about lessons from Anthropologie. Good stuff.

-Jami

Spring Seeds

I just got the first of my seeds started last weekend.

If you've downloaded the PDF of my Organic Gardening Checklist (located in the sidebar), you know that I'm a little late. *sigh*

But I've mentioned before that the checklist is the ideal, and well, I hardly ever live up to the ideal. Like, never. Seriously, I've never kept to the dates on that list in the five years I've used it. But it's a goal and helps me plan what I am doing, even if it's late.

And if you wonder why I even do this, remember my post waxing poetic about starting seeds and the four great reasons to start your own. And only one of them is about saving money.

I could spend a lot of money on special seed-starting cells, water reservoirs, and grow lights, but I choose to keep it frugal by buying $5.99 plastic dome kits and reusing them for a few years, along with reused 6-pack and flower pots. I use a normal, cheap, fluorescent shop light with one cool bulb and one warm bulb.

I wrote about the steps I take to start my seeds, as well as what I use, last spring and these new pictures look very similar. The one new thing I spent money on this year is a seedling heating mat. With coupons (of course!) and discounts, it cost about $13 dollars and I'm hoping it will improve the germination rate for both my sweet and hot peppers. I can usually get good hot peppers consistently, but since I wait for sweet peppers to get ripe and sweet (it was such a revelation to discover that green peppers were unripe- that's why I never liked the bitter things!), it's hit and miss as to how many I may get in a season.

I've been told that some people in my area leave the peppers on heat mats until it is nice and warm in the garden, and even then they grow them under greenhouse-like plastic. I'm definitely going to experiment this year with the peppers to see how I can increase their yield. I might've gotten five ripe peppers last year (out of six plants!) if I was lucky, so anything should help.

The broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, lettuces and even some of the tomatoes are up already. I just never get over the thrill of seeing the little green shoots coming up out of the dirt. I've had great germination so far, even from some seeds that were five years old! I just dumped a lot of the seeds in a cell because I wasn't sure if any would come up, and I think they all did.

Have you started seeds yet? Have you ever? There are many reasons it's a great idea, and frugality is only one of them!

-Jami

This is linked to Frugal Fridays at Life as Mom.