My Accomplishments

It's been a while since I've written one of these!

A few weeks ago, I made and froze several freezer meals.  Since I hurt my knee over the weekend, we've been hitting up the freezer meals pretty hard.  THIS is why I go ahead and make freezer meals - so that when something unexpected happens, dinner is one of those things that we don't have to worry about!  We haven't had to run out and grab fast food, and we're not depending upon quick and easy food from the grocery store.  ONE less thing to worry about!  I'm counting that as an accomplishment!

I made a HUGE pot of black bean soup from dried beans.  We had the beans for dinner two days.  I took the rest of the soup, and froze it in containers - small containers, each holds 16-20 ounces of beans.  This is the perfect size to me to toss into chili and salads in the future.  Notice, it's about the same size as a can of beans? 

One of our local grocery stores had ham on sale after Easter. I picked up two of them, and cooked them both.  I sliced and diced the ham and portioned them out into single serving sizes and froze them.  These wonderful little bags will help with dinner prep in the future.  I didn't have the time to make bean soup this past week, so I took the ham bones and froze them in gallon size bags.  I'll come back to them later when I have the time to make bean soup.

I replaced the rope in my clothesline.  The old plastic rope had become stretched and worn.  Now that warmer weather is here, I want to get my clothes outside to dry again.  By line drying our clothes, we save a significant amount of money on our electric bill.  When we get to dry them outside, they get that wonderful outdoor smell of sunshine!

I used Kohl's cash that I earned recently, took it to Kohl's and combined it with a sale to pay $9 for a locket that I plan to pull together with some very special goodies.  I'll post more about that later this week.

We combined some hotel bonus points to make reservations for daughter's graduation trip.  We're going some place where we'll be able to take mass transportation the entire time we are there.  NO CAR RENTAL!!

I picked up a bag of lemons on the clearance rack for $1.  First, I zested the lemons and then froze the zest on a cookie sheet.  I then put the zest in a freezer bag.  I juiced the lemons and froze the juice in ice cube trays.  I popped those frozen puppies out and put them in another sandwich bag.  Next time I need lemon juice for fish or cooking, I can just pull out a cube or two, pop it in the microwave and melt it, and then pop it into the recipe.

I was helping clean up after a luncheon last week, and someone handed me the remains of a fruit salad and said "You can work magic with almost anything.  What can you do with this?"  Fortunately, the salad was mixed berries and kiwi.  (It was a goodly sized portion, too.  About 3 cups of mixed fruit!)  I picked out the kiwi and ate that first.  :)  The berries were a little mushy, so I mashed them up and made a batch of gluten free berry muffins. Mmmm..... berry muffins.... they were awesome!