Beans Beans Everywhere

We had friends that told us that they were done picking beans in their garden and that we could pick some.  We have planted some in our garden, but they are not ready yet.  We got our garden in late because of all of the wet weather.  Here is what we picked last night in under an hour.

We will snap them today and I hope to can them tomorrow.  I like to have about 50-75 cans of beans to last the winter. We eat them about once a week and I always bring them when someone has a need for a meal.  Fresh beans are yummy.

I have to buckle down and get some schoolwork done.  I am enjoying the summer break too much.  We spent all yesterday afternoon by the pool and had a great time.  Oh well, it is summer and I am enjoying my summer.

I have also been walking.  I enjoy walking down the country dirt road near my house.  Here is what the view looks like.

Isn't that lovely.  We have been living here for about five years and we love the country.  Sometimes the kids miss having kids in the neighborhood nearby, but we import plenty and we love our quiet time.  I love socializing with others, but at heart I love just being at home with my family.

I guess I am going to go walk.  Evan wants to go with me and do some running.  He wants to get ready for soccer.  Gotta love some kids who like to be active.

Summer Begins Now

Well I was supposed to go to some training today and my summer was supposed to start tomorrow, but I got an email that it had been cancelled so now my summer starts.  We are going to do some cleaning and putting away today and go shopping this afternoon.  Ashley needs some shorts.  We are going to start at Plato's Closet.  If you haven't been there it is a great consignment store.  It mostly sells teen clothes, but sometimes we find mom jeans and shirts.  They have name brand stuff at good prices, so we will start there.  If we don't find much then we will go to Kohls.  We always have coupons for them and they have decent prices.

We had  deacon's dinner at our church last night.  We had smoked chicken and everyone brought sides.  Sometimes I am asked how do we afford not only to feed our family, but to bring dishes to church event, bring other families meals, and have others over all the time.  One way is to have some tried and true recipes that are cost efficient and can be made with bulk items that I keep in stock.  One of our favorites is crock pot mac and cheese.

This is easy.  I cook about three cups of macaroni noodles in boiling water.  In the crock pot I add half a stick of butter, about a cup of milk, three eggs, about three cups of shredded cheese, and a teaspoon of salt.  I mix it all up a cook on low for a few hours.  I like to add some Velveeta if I have it.  If it starts looking dry I add more milk.  This gets eaten every time I bring it somewhere.

I buy macaroni noodles in five pound bags and cheese in five pound bags from Sams so I usually have them on hand.  Having main ingredients for several basic dishes makes bringing a dish somewhere easy, especially if you work full time and don't have time to go to the store.

Well, I have to get off the computer and do some exercise.  My goal is to walk in the mornings and swim in the afternoons.  I have gotten soft this winter and eaten way too much junk.  Time to do something about that!

 

I know I haven't posted in forever.  There has been so much going on that I don't know where to start.  We had the death of a close friend a few month ago and while his wife was trying to get her feet back under her we got custody of there kids.  They have four kids and we have four kids so that made eight kids at my house.  Couple that with working full time, going to school at night, and everything else in my life, we have been pretty busy.  Now at last things are settling down and we only have our kids at home now.  Don't they look lovely.

 

 

I have only one more day of school work and then it is officially my summer break.  I am taking one college level class this summer, but besides that I am free.  If you don't count VBS, youth camp, and various other things that we like to participate in.

 

I have missed posting pictures. Here are some prom pictures.  I think Ashley was beautiful but I am biased.

 



These two are beautiful inside and out.  They both have a love of Christ and a heart for missions. 

Well, we have one more day of training then here comes summer.  Yeah!

Pantry Challenge update January 2

I went and did some shopping today.  Normally Wal-Mart is not my first choice for grocery shopping.  I don't think that they always have the best prices, but our little town only has a Wal-Mart and an Ingles and I wanted to get a few things to round out meals for the next week or so.  It was raining and I couldn't justify making the 15 mile trip to the bigger city so I went to Wal-Mart and got a few things.

I spent about $45 today.  I hate that the little pack of ground beef was $7.00 but I will mix it with some ground deer meat and make a meat loaf and some hamburger patties.  The bag of chicken was also $10.00 but at least it had 5 pounds of meat in it.  I wasn't planning on buying 8 pounds of pinto beans but it was such a good price at $6.00 that I couldn't pass it up.  I am hopping that we can put together about 10 meals from this and what we have on hand and that next weekend all I will need to get is some more fruit and some milk.  We will see.

Happy New Year

I know I still have to post my last El Salvador post and I will do that later today or tomorrow.  I really wanted to tell everyone Happy New Year.  We had a bunch over here from our church and a few family members over for New Years Eve.  I like to do New Years Eve because it is after Christmas and before school starts back up so I feel like I have lots of time to get ready for the party and to clean up after.  We love having people over, but with our work and school schedules we don't do it as often as I would like.

Also, I wanted to report on the pantry challenge so far.  We did make a trip to Kroger and to Aldi to get some New Years Eve party food.  I didn't include all of this in my $50 a week but I wanted to show that by shopping sales and discount you can still have a nice party.

 This came from Kroger.  The total was $14.00  The cream cheese and sour cream were on sale.  The broccoli wasn't but I wanted it for a stir fry and the English muffins we made mini pizzas out of.

 This picture is from Aldi. We spent about $35 on these.  We needed the cookies and white chocolate chips to make Oreo balls which is a New Years Eve tradition.

Here are the Oreo balls. Think the kids counted 185 of them.  I think all got eaten except for three.  They are always very popular.

So tonight I will make a pot of spaghetti.  I have home canned tomatoes and the herbs on hand and lots of pasta so I wont need anything from the store.  We don't like black eyed peas or collard greens so we don't usually have a traditional meal. 

Pantry Challenge

I am going to do a pantry challenge to start out the new year.  Many people around the net are doing this starting on the 5th of January, but I am going to start it tomorrow with the exception of New Years Eve.  We usually have a big group over on New Years Eve and will usually do some finger foods and everyone requests Oreo balls which are not cheap to make.  Right now we have an abundance of deer meat and sausage in our freezer and we put up lots of green beans, squash, and tomatoes this year.  My pantry is also fairly full and I would really love to clean it out some.  The bonus to all of this is to save some money after overspending the month of December.  So to get started I baked some breads to start off our week.

We will eat the cinnamon roll and cinnamon bread for snacks and breakfast and the wheat bread will become sandwiches and accompany soup. 

Dinner tomorrow night will be white bean soup with the leftover turkey bones from Christmas.  I already had the beans in the pantry and then I added carrots from the fridge and garlic and onion that I already had.  The beans came with a seasoning packet that I will add.  All of it will go in the crock pot because we have some appointments tomorrow and I will not be here all day to cook it on the stove.

We have some leftover chicken in the fridge so I will make some chicken fried rice on Tuesday or some chicken broccoli cheese casserole if I can get some broccoli.  I will let you know what I decide.  I hope not to spend more than $200 this month in groceries.  I don't know if it will happen but that is the goal. 

El Salvador part 2

Now I am going to talk about our work in the village.  The village that we visited was about an hour drive outside of San Salvador.  The people there were so warm and inviting.  We had two goals while we were in the village.  One was to build new houses for two of the families and the other was to hold a mini vacation bible school for the village children.  The girls and I helped with the VBS because we were useless when it came to building houses.

These are from inside the house before we tore it down.

As you can see these are pretty primitive houses.  The have no running water and very little electricity.  They may have a light bulb but not much else.  This is what it looked like as they were going up and the finished product.

They were really excited to have a new house.

These are some pictures of us playing with the children.

The children were so sweet and loving in the village.  As you can see, it was hot and we were in the dirt.  We were filthy at the end of the day, but the children had fun.  It was so interesting to see these people still living so primitively.  They wash their clothes in the river and bathe there as well.  They all seem happy though and we can learn much from these people.  It doesn't take things to make yourself happy.  We loved the village and were sad when our time there was over.

On Saturday we did a Christmas party for the village at the beach.  I will post those pictures in another post.