In advance of the bitter cold moving across much of the nation, we made certain we had enough firewood. We had a half cord of wood at the beginning of the season, and we never run through that much in a year. Surprise! This is the year that broke those rules! We have already run through that half cord of wood, and it's only the first week of January. We ran out and bought a quarter of a cord over the weekend. We need to get out and take care of this situation as soon as the weather warms up again. This was poor planning on our part... we really should have made certain that we had a full cord of wood before winter hit.
We both stopped on the way home from work tonight and filled the gas tanks in our cars. Full tanks are less likely to freeze overnight in this cold. Before winter set in, we had winterized the house by turning off the outside water spigots from inside the house, and unhooked the garden hoses. Tonight, we'll leave the doors under the sinks open to make certain that heat can get around the pipes so that they don't freeze. If I had pipes in my ceiling, I would be up in the ceiling, making certain that they were covered by the insulation before they froze. (Do you have water sprinklers in your house? Then you have water pipes in your ceiling.) We have exposed pipes in the laundry room in our basement. We plugged the space heater in down there earlier today, to keep the pipes warm. Now, we're going to cross our fingers and pray that the power doesn't go out.
We went out to our favorite produce stand and bought a 50 pound bag of potatoes for $20.
I spent $1.00 on two giant bulbs of Kohlrabi.
I spent $1.00 for three pounds of beets.
I found an awesome bag of produce on the seconds shelf, with two heads of lettuce and six bell peppers for 50 cents.
I made a huge pot of bean soup with a portion of the ham bone leftover from Christmas. The ham bone was jointed, so I cut it in half. I'll use the other half to make another pot of soup tomorrow. The ham soup made two separate dinners for all 5 of us. I packed the leftovers up into three bowls, which I sent back to college with oldest child this morning.
We made Red Flannel Hash with the beets and a head of cabbage that was in the fridge.
We made a stir fry from some of the bell peppers, kohlrabi, mushrooms, and two bags of frozen broccoli I had in the freezer. The sauce was a home-made sauce made from a recipe I found in my cookbook that we've been using for years. It is a spicy sauce that is reminiscent of Szechuan, but not quite that hot.
We had a salad for lunch made with the lettuce from the bag of seconds.
Tonight's dinner was a vegetarian lasagna. I cut up all of the rest of the odds and ends of veggies we had sitting in the fridge and put them into the spaghetti sauce to go into the lasagna. A bell pepper, spinach, an onion, a handful of mushrooms, and a carrot went into tonight's pot.
We made a Shepherd's Pie. Made with ground beef, a bag of frozen mixed veggies, and a whole bunch of mashed potatoes, this was a quick and easy dinner. The biggest disappointment was that we had no leftovers!
I finished sorting our digital pictures from 2011. They've been stored on my back up drive, and on a third party host. I've put them into the 2011 folder and sorted them by event. My next goal will be to get them organized into an album before the end of 2014!
We spent a lot of fun time together as a family, we played Monopoly, Apples to Apples, 4 Kings in a Corner, and Pathway.
We celebrated my husband's birthday with the broccoli stir fry and a cake, and then we watched Sherlock. Our birthday present to him was a scrapbook that we put together of our trip to the Pacific Northwest over this past summer.
What did you do to save money this week?
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