Homemade Baby Food

Aug 17, 2011 by Lindsay

I am here to share yet another way I have found to save money! Andrew and Joshua never ate homemade baby food, but with Zachary I knew that I didn’t want to add $14 worth of baby food to the grocery list every week, so we gave this a try and I will never go back!

For vegetables I buy mostly frozen, some fresh. For fruit I have done fresh, canned or frozen as well.

I have made sweet potatoes, squash, green beans, corn, carrots, peas, peaches, pears, blueberries and bananas. (I have not bothered to make my own apples, I just buy natural applesauce in the big container from the store, it’s fairly cheap and I figure it’s ok to cop out on that one!)

Today I made spaghetti squash. First you cook the squash (or any of the vegetables you are making) I put mine in the microwave in a small amount of water and cook it until it’s tender. Then just scrape out the contents of the squash and put it in the blender. (If this were fresh carrots/sweet potatoes/different kind of squash I would peel the skin off first, then cook them and just transfer it to the blender.)

Add a small amount of hot water (I use the cooking water) and blend until it’s a good consistency for your baby to eat. Then I transfer my puréed baby food to a 4 cup measuring cup for easy pouring. Pour your baby food into ice cube trays and put them in the freezer.

Once your cubes are frozen you can transfer them to freezer bags.

When it’s time to eat just pick out a few different fruits and veggies and pop them in the microwave! On the menu today was carrots, peas, squash and peaches!

I add a little bit of cereal to thicken it up.

And I have one satisfied boy!!!

For those that are interested I did a little price comparison. If you buy pre-made baby food you get 2 containers for about $1.10. Zachary eats the equivalent of 2 containers per meal. So that’s $2.20 per day to feed him.

On average it costs me $1 to make 1 ice cube tray of homemade food. That’s $.07 per cube and he eats 6 per meal. So that’s $0.42 per meal, or $0.84 per day. Over 50% savings!

In half an hour you can make two kinds of fruits and two kinds of vegetables that will last you for 2 weeks and you won’t have to think about adding baby food to your grocery list! Happy puréeing!

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Stripe Delight & Bookpage Wreath

Apr 15, 2011 by Lindsay

*I realized that some of the photos weren’t showing, so I updated them!*

My mother-in-law makes an a-m-a-z-i-n-g dessert called Stripe Delight, this post has nothing to do with that!

I have had a really hard time focusing on decorating one room of the house at a time, I kinda just keep bouncing around from room to room doing a project here and a project there. Last week I got fixated on this wall in our living room.

Booooring. Right?

One evening I started looking through my stash of old decorations and picture frames looking for something to add to the wall. When my dear husband saw me doing so his comment was….

“Don’t you think it looks ok with just the mirror?” (he tends to think I over decorate)

My response…

“No, my love…it doesn’t.”

Then as I was trying to fall asleep that night it came to me, a vision….stripes.

My original idea was one I *stole* borrowed from my sister. She did stripes in her dining room simply by using the same paint color, just alternating finishes like high gloss and eggshell. So I tried this first, but this wall doesn’t get enough natural light to be able to see the difference. So  I re-taped my wall leaving the high gloss stripe and adding a stripe in a few shades darker.

I’m in love.

(Please excuse my lame photography skills, I need my husband to give me a lesson)

I am still on the hunt for a pillow that will add a pop of color in a burnt orange or yellow and I have a *piece of junk*  great new side table sitting in the garage waiting on some TLC to replace the one shown.

Here’s a close up of my bookpage wreath as well

I followed the instructions from Emily’s blog but made a few modifications of my own.

All you need is a wreath form and a book with pages that are thinner, mine were like thick tissue paper. Plus a glue gun and a stapler if you do it like I did.

First you need to rip out all the book pages. Then fold them in 3rds like a fan and I stapled mine at the bottom (the end I was going to use) and left the torn edge exposed.

I glued my first layer and then glued a second layer overlaping the seams of the first layer.

I then turned my wreath over and glued pages to cover all the exposed wreath frame.

I then turned my wreath back over and added my final layers. I folded two pages just like I did for the first two single rows but I stapled them together with one lower than the other (make sense?) This made it much faster than doing the rows separately.

Then I just glued my double stacked pages on to give it a nice full look.

The wreath frame cost me $4 and the book was $2 at a thrift store. Not bad!

I love the natural look it has, the whole wall now has the appearance of texture that it was missing before and I love it!

Happy weekend!

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Show Us Your Life- What you feed your kids!

Feb 4, 2011 by Lindsay

Today I am joining Kelly for a Show Us Your Life Friday! The topic is what you feed your kids! I had lots of fun going through pictures to find some of our kids eating, I was surprised to see how much we photograph our kids while the are so politely shoving their faces! haha!

Our boys love to eat. They usually eat lunch and then after I clean up I will eat something and it never EVER fails that when I sit down to eat they see me with a bowl or a plate and they always come begging for food! Cracks me up!

Breakfast everyday consists of cereal. The love to eat “Daddy’s cereal” which is Life, otherwise it’s Raisin Bran, Cheerios or Frosted Mini Wheats. Neither of our kids are big milk drinkers, but they do eat it on their cereal. Saturdays are their favorite breakfast day because that’s the day that Daddy let’s them help make pancakes and bacon. They LOVE their bacon! Oink oink!

Lunches everyday consist of peanut butter and jelly on wheat bread with any combination of the following – oranges, yogurt, cheese, grapes, pretzels, apples, bananas…I just feed them until they aren’t hungry anymore!

My boys would snack all day if I let them. After naps I let them have snacks, but never after about 4:30 otherwise it’s too close to dinner. Snacks are usually goldfish (actually, off brand whales!) Ritz crackers, chips and salsa, graham crackers or pretzels. Their absolute favorite snack is popcorn, we have this popcorn popper that makes the best popcorn and you can control the amount of salt and butter you add to make it better for you. Sometimes if it’s a REALLY special day we will add M&M’s to our popcorn, but not very often.

For dinner they eat whatever we eat. Sometimes it’s a battle, sometimes it’s not, but they always eat it! Dinners include things like stuffed shells, chicken rolls, spaghetti, enchiladas, chicken casserole, egg casserole and sometimes it’s simple like hotdogs or chicken strips! We usually have some sort of vegetable, salad or fruit on the side as well. If there is bread being served we make them eat their dinner first and the bread is their reward because they like it so much! There have been a few times in the past few weeks where one of the boys will insist that they don’t want to eat what we are having and we tell them that we will save it and they can have it for breakfast the next day. We haven’t had to follow through on that yet because they usually agree to eat then. It sounds a little harsh, but I want to know that they are getting good nutrition and I’m not fixing three different dinners every night.

Now, the one thing that the just don’t care for is macaroni and cheese. That baffles me. Doesn’t every kids like macaroni and cheese? But other that that the will eat most anything, including any and every condiment known to man! Haha! And what kid doesn’t like their share of treats as well! I don’t think we have encountered a treat they don’t like!

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Motivation

Nov 30, 2010 by Lindsay

What do you do when you wake up at 4:30 in the morning and can’t sleep? Well this morning I got up, ordered our Christmas cards and made a grocery list of freezer meals! I think that with the move I have not been able to really “nest” but I thought the least I could do was get some cooking done for after Zachary comes. That’s the hard thing about having older children and a husband….they still expect to eat even if you just delivered a baby and are adjusting to life with a newborn

The boys had school today so I took some of that time to go get the groceries I needed, and thankfully they weren’t with me because by the time I was done there was no room left in the cart! After I got them from school, fed them lunch and put them down for naps I started my cooking frenzy. This is what part of my kitchen looked like before…just part of the groceries!

So here are the things I was able to make and freeze.

2 servings of Chicken Rolls

2 servings of Stuffed Shells

2 servings of Chicken Caesar Casserole

2 servings of Spaghetti sauce

1 serving of taco meat

2 servings of Beef & Bean Enchiladas

I ran out of cooked chicken, time and energy so I have yet to make my Chicken Tetrazzini and Pasta Primavera, both of which I am making double so that makes a total of 15 meals in the freezer! Plus I have some over-ripe bananas that I will use for banana bread and the ingredients for Pumpkin bars (it’s always good to have something sweet in the freezer too!)

It was a long day of cooking and then clean-up which is always fun But I think I will say that it was all worth it when the baby gets here. I really should make a habit of just having one day every few weeks where I spend all day cooking meals that can be frozen, I think it would make the evenings much easier if I don’t have spend as much time to prepare for dinner!

Here is my freezer-full of disposable casserole dishes!

I labeled each item with what it is, cooking temp and time.

I attached links to the recipes that I have blogged about before, but here are the other recipes for those who are interested!

Spaghetti Sauce – nothing fancy

I cook up 1.5-2 lbs ground beef with one diced onion. Drain fat. Add one can of diced tomatoes and a jar of prepared spaghetti sauce. I split it into two freezer bags and freeze. When it’s time for dinner I cut it out of the bag, heat it on the stove, cook some spaghetti, garlic bread and green beans and dinner is ready!

Taco meat – nothing fancy again!

I had extra beef today so I cooked it with onion and seasoned it, put it in a freezer bag and it will be ready to serve with tacos whenever!

Stuffed Shells

1/2 box jumbo shells

1 jar spaghetti sauce

1 egg

7.5 oz ricotta cheese

1 1/2 C shredded mozzarella cheese

3/4 C grated parmesan cheese

dried parsley (to taste)

Cook shells. Place a thin layer of sauce on bottom of baking dishe. Beat egg. Add ricotta, 1 C mozzarella, 1/2 C parmesan and parsley. Fill shells with cheese mixture. Top with remaining sauce and cheese. Cover with foil and bake at 350 for 45 minutes. Uncover and bake 5 more minutes. (This recipe only uses half a container of ricotta, so I used the whole thing and doubled the rest of the ingredients to make a double batch.)

Beef Enchiladas

1.5 – 2 lb ground beef

one diced onion

1 can black beans

8 tortillas

shredded cheddar

1 can cream of mushroom soup

1 can enchilada sauc

Cook beef and onion. Drain fat. Add black beans. Place meat mixture in tortillas, roll up and place in baking dish. Mix mushroom soup and enchilada sauce. Pour over enchiladas and top with shredded cheese. Bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes. Serve with mexican rice, sour cream, refried beans a chips!

(The meat and beans makes a lot so each enchilada is big,  so I make 2 pans with 4 enchiladas each and that makes enough to feed our family twice.)

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All About the Boys!

Oct 24, 2010 by Lindsay

Between packing, an impromptu garage sale and working on the house I haven’t had much to blog about lately!

I did manage to capture a few funny moments on camera this past week though!

Poor J-man. When he is tired, he just cannot handle himself! One day this week we had a guy who was coming to inspect the roof for insurance something-or-another and I wasn’t sure if he would be stomping around on the roof or not so I kept the boys up from naps until he came so he wouldn’t wake them up. Well, Joshua had enough and decided to put himself “to bed!” I was working around the house and realized I hadn’t seen him in a bit so I went into their room and I found him….the lights were off, he had turned the fan on and had pulled out all the blankets and just lay down on the floor for a little snooze! He wasn’t actually asleep, but it did make me laugh!

Silly boy!

Thursday afternoon I asked if the boys wanted to help me make puppy chow. Andrew said no, which was surprising, but Joshua never passes up the opportunity to get on a chair and mess with all the stuff on the counter!

One Friday night we took the boys to church for the Fall Festival that the daycare was hosting and after a near disaster of letting Andrew jump in the bounce house and then scarf down a piece of pizza we came home and had a low key evening of popcorn and Praise Baby. We don’t take eating popcorn lightly in this house….as you can tell by the size of their bowls! haha!

Hope you are having a fantastic weekend!

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Friday Treats

Oct 15, 2010 by Lindsay

This morning I woke up and was feeling really good, so I decided to do my workout. I’ve been slacking a little bit as my belly is growing and making it more difficult to keep up.

I felt so good after my workout I did what any 7 1/2 month mama-of-three-to-be would do…..

I baked. A lot.

I made pumpkin bars, snickerdoodles and plan to let Andrew and Joshua help me make puppy chow later this weekend.

I am only going to share the recipe for the pumpkin bars today, otherwise this would be a really long post! I have been hearing that there is a shortage of pumpkin this year and when I was at Publix the other day I found that to be true! One of the employees said that they have been getting smaller shipments and as soon as they put it out it’s gone! So today when I saw some at Walmart I bought 4 cans just in case I can’t get any more this year!

You’ll need

3/4 C butter

2 C sugar

4 eggs

1 15 oz can pumpkin

1 C walnuts (I had pecans, so that’s what I used)

2 C flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp nutmeg

Icing :

3 oz cream cheese

1/2 C butter

1 tsp vanilla

3 C powdered sugar

Cream butter and sugar. Mix in eggs and pumpkin. Add dry ingredients. Stir in nuts. Spread on a cookie sheet lined with aluminum foil (this makes for easy cutting.) Bake at 350 for 30 minutes. Beat together all icing ingredients. Cool bars & frost.

I lifted mine off the cookie sheet before I frosted them and then cut them. One cookie sheet made 3 dozen bars. I froze almost all of them to use later! I made two batches so I made one pan with pecans and one without.  I’m not a coffee drinker but I think that this would be the perfect fall dessert to drink with coffee!

Last week I mentioned that I was expecting my new diaper bag, I got it and I love it! I am not using it yet though, I’m saving it for when Zachary comes

It is seriously like a piece of luggage, but it will tote everything I need! Haha! I love that it is a backpack so I can wear it easily if there is no room to store it under the stroller or shopping cart while I am out with my three dudes!

Go stock up on pumpkin and have a great weekend!!!

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