Love to cook, hate to plan.....

I know, I know....it's been months since my last blog. That's part of my problem, I am really bad with finding time to do all the things I want to do....

...and my post title is a little off....I do love to cook, and I actually like to plan too, I'm just horribly bad about it. It's a little bit of ADD and a whole lot of a crazy life that gets in the way. But the thing is, I NEED to plan my family's meals so that we don't end up just picking up something or going to an actual restaurant. And like I said, I actually like planning meals. It's just so time consuming to look through all my recipes, write the ones I want in a calendar, and then make up a shopping list. Because it requires at least a little bit of undivided attention (which is in short supply many times), it often doesn't get done, and therefor it's either eating out or really quick (and not the healthiest) meals at home. I am quite envious of my friends who this comes easy to.....they have no problems making a meal plan with paper and pencil. But I was not gifted that way in the least bit. Considering my affinity for all things high tech, I decided that was the route to go in finding help with my meal-planning woes!

Quite a few months ago, I found a wonderful site www.e-mealz.com. It is a GREAT meal-planning site, but it is a service that provides preplanned meals with recipes and a shopping list included. I still highly recommend this service, and I used it for about 6 months, but what I REALLY wanted was a meal-planning service that allowed me to enter my OWN recipes.

So for quite a few months now, I've been looking for a good meal-planning program or website that meets my needs. First, it has to be easy to use, almost as easy as having it preplanned for me like e-mealz. But specifically, it needed to be easy to import recipes. I have quite a few recipes stored in Word documents, plus I LOVE LOVE LOVE www.allrecipes.com to find great recipes. I also visit several cooking blogs and find recipes there as well as always copying recipes that get posted on Facebook or shared at church gatherings. So, I needed a program that was very easy to import or input all those recipes. I also wanted something that made it super-easy to do the actual weekly planning. Finally, I wanted a really easy to use shopping list. I was willing to pay for something like this (if it worked, it would be saving me lots of money), although I wanted the price to be reasonable. I also wanted to be able to try it out with full functionality before I had to pay for it.

So, after looking at just about everything there was out there, online and off, I finally found my ideal meal planning help in Plan to Eat.

Plan to Eat is a web-based program that allows you to enter recipes, share recipes with your friends, drag and drop recipes into a calendar for meal planning (so easy!) and then generate a shopping list (you set the dates that you want the list for) for your meal plan. It is SUPER easy to enter recipes, and you can group them by course, cuisine, and/or your own keywords. This makes it incredibly easy to pull up what you are looking for to add to your calendar. For instance, say I want a Mexican chicken dish. All I have to do is pull up main course, and then narrow it to Mexican, and then keyword chicken. Voila! Chicken enchiladas it is (or whatever recipes that you've entered for those categories)! It is super easy to import recipes from other websites too. All you have to do is enter the web address for the page the recipe is on, and it auto adds the recipe. It's very cool, trust me!

The drag and drop feature for adding items to your calendar makes things SO easy too! The recipes are listed on the side and you drag them over to your calendar. You can also add individual items to your calendar such as "canned peas" or "frozen broccoli" that you don't need a recipe for, but they are auto added to your shopping list. You even have the option of posting non-food things on your calendar that might affect your meal planning, such as an evening school event or even a reminder to defrost something for the next day. I LOVE this feature! You can also save a group of meal plans for later if you want. For instance, if you have a really good week of meals planned, you can save the whole week and use the same plan again at a later time. You set the dates, so you can save as many or a few days as you want.

The shopping list is great as well. Items are auto added and grouped into grocery store categories (you can change the category if you don't like where it puts it). You can remove items that you already have, and put them back on the list if you change your mind. You can set the dates of the shopping list to whatever you like, depending on your shopping preferences. You can also set it up to have lists for separate stores, but I haven't used this feature. Another nifty feature is that there is a mobile website where you can access just your active shopping list from your phone. You just pull up the site and when you put the item in your cart, you check the item off the list and it disappears. I find this to be SO handy since I don't have to print off a list (although you can) and then keep up with it!

Plan to Eat does have a subscription charge of $5/month or $39/year, but they do give you a whole 30 DAYS to try a fully-functional site for FREE without ever entering your credit card. I tried it for 2 weeks and knew that it was exactly what I was looking for. I went ahead and signed up for the year subscription, but they are still giving me the rest of my 30 day trial for free. That's pretty cool too!

So, if you are like me and have the best intentions but need a little help with meal planning, you might check out Plan to Eat. If you do try it out, let me know what you think. We can even share meals using their recipe sharing tools!

One of my kids' favorite things about Thanksgiving....

....is, believe it or not, sweet potatoes :) Not just any sweet potatoes, but the sweet potato casserole that I only make at Thanksgiving. And it is REALLY REALLY good, even for ones like me who are not big sweet potato fans. About 6 or 7 years ago, my friend Shannon brought this to a Sunday School Christmas party, and it was so good that I got the recipe. Every year since, I've been making the recipe at Thanksgiving, and the kids start asking several months before if I'm going to make it again.

So, I thought I would share the magic with you :) Here's the recipe...it's not a super quick one, but not too hard and definitely worth the effort!

Sweet Potato Casserole

Ingredients:
- 4 cups sweet potatoes, cooked and mashed
- 2 cups white sugar
- 4 eggs, beaten
- 3/4 cup butter, melted
- 1 cup evaporated milk
- 1 t. nutmeg
- 1 t. cinnamon
- 2 cups miniature marshmallows

Topping Ingredients:
- 1 1/2 cups crushed cornflakes
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1 cup chopped pecans
- 3/4 cup melted butter

Directions:

1) Wash sweet potatoes (skin on) and poke a few holes in them with a fork. Cover potato with oil, and wrap in aluminum foil. Cook potatoes at 375 degrees for 1 to 1 1/2 hours or until very soft.

2) In large bowl, mash sweet potatoes (without skin). Mix together sugar, eggs, 3/4 cup butter, evaporated milk, nutmeg, cinnamon, and marshmallows. Scoop mixture into greased 9X13 baking dish.

3) Bake 20 minutes in a preheated 400 degree oven.

4) While baking, mix together in a small bowl the crushed cornflakes, brown sugar, pecans, and remaining 3/4 cup melted butter.

5) After baking casserole for 20 minutes, remove from oven and spread the topping over the casserole.

6) Return to oven and bake an additional 10 minutes.


This recipe works well if you want to put it together (without the topping) the night before and pop it in the oven on Thanksgiving day. Hope your family enjoys it as much as mine!

My cool new toy

So my hubby and I have been looking at cell phones for a few months now. Our 2 years on our contract was up and we could upgrade our phones in September, but James really wanted to wait until the new phones came out for the holiday season. I had already decided that I wanted the new HTC TouchPro 2 that came out online a few weeks ago. They don't actually have it in the Verizon stores yet, but we went to another carrier and tried out their version, and it was pretty cool. It's been out of stock online though pretty much since it's been released, so I hadn't gotten one yet.

Well, in the meantime, Verizon launched a new phone, the Motorola Droid, that runs on Google's new operating system (I guess that's what you call it....I'm really not too tech savvy about stuff like that) Android. I wasn't looking at anything new, but in looking for himself, James read about the Motorola Droid and told me I ought to check it out.

I am so glad I did, because it is SO cool! Now, I realize that I could live without all the bells and whistles, but all those bells and whistles are SO fun (and many are useful). It's a touch screen phone with a slide out keyboard. An actual keyboard was one of my requirements and this one works well. The touch screen is really easy to use as well and works so much better than my last phone (the technology has improved SO much in 2 years). My favorite part is that there are TONS of free apps that you can download....and they are so cool.

One app that I really like is the Bible. Now, you've got several choices of Bible apps, but in most you can search, browse, bookmark, and take notes all with about 20 different versions of the Bible. Very cool!

I also love the Facebook app as well as the Pandora Radio, where you can tell it your favorite artist or song and it will put together a playlist of similar songs and artists. I typed in "Todd Agnew" and pretty much liked all the music that came up.

It also comes with Google Maps and it's navigation system. You can actually get the street view as you are driving, but I'm thinking I should watch the actual road instead of the road on my phone :) I has verbal driving direction too, so not to worry.

My FAVORITE app, however, is the barcode scanner. It uses the phone's camera and you aim it the barcode on a product and it scans it and locates the product. You actually use this in all sorts of other cool apps. I have definitely played with this one the most :) ShopSavvy is this really cool program that lets you scan a product barcode and using the GPS feature, it searches for the best price on the product locally as well as online. This will be a really handy feature when Christmas shopping! I also found this really cool app that lets you make a meal plan and keeps track of all your nutritional info for the day. You just scan the barcode of the ingredients you use or on the food that you eat and it automatically calculates it. You can also look it up in it's extensive database of foods and restaurants. It's probably not an app that I will use, but it's very helpful none the less. THE VERY COOLEST thing that I found was a little app called Key Ring. You know all those little cards for stores' loyalty programs that you carry on your keychain? You use the barcode scanner and scan them in your phone. It stores them, each with the store's logo, and you just hit a button and it pops on the screen. You hand that to the cashier to scan, instead of having to carry all those little cards. Since I've already lost my Kroger card and my others are getting pretty beat-up, I can't WAIT to use this!

I know there are tons of other things that I will discover about the phone, but I just thought I would take few minutes away from playing with the thing, and tell you about it. Seriously, it's a pretty cool phone :) I know that the iPhones have been around for a while and do many of the same things, but this was my first "smart phone", and I'm just loving it!

Another WOW recipe!

....and I wasn't expecting to like it that much either, but boy was I wrong! Tonight I made another recipe from E-Mealz, Crustless Spinach Quiche and it was SO good! The kids (except for the usual suspect) loved it too. I'm not a huge spinach or quiche fan either (I'll eat it in stuff, but it's not my favorite), but this was the exception. And it was really easy to make too. I will definitely be making this again!

Here's the recipe:

10 oz frozen spinach, thawed and squeezed
8 oz shredded mozzarella
1/2 cup cream
1/3 cup prepared pesto (this is next to the pasta sauces....it was hiding way up on the top shelf at Kroger)
5 eggs, beaten

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Reserve 1/2 cup of cheese, and mix remaining ingredients. Pour in greased pie plate and cook for 30 minutes. Sprinkle remaining cheese and heat until melted. Serve with spaghetti sauce or marinara for dipping.

Thrifty to the extreme....

So I know several people who make their own laundry detergent, but as thrifty as I am, I have never gone there.......until yesterday :)


It all started a couple of weeks ago when 2 ladies in the laundry aisle at Kroger were carrying on about something that one of them had found.....


Lady #1: Did you find it?
Lady #2: YES! I should probably buy all they have!
Lady #1: That's great....I'm glad that we finally found it.


Then there was giggling and muffled conversation (I'm not THAT nosey that I tried to pick up the intimate conversation that they were having over this mystery product), and I decided that I would mosey on over the the spot where Lady #2 had found her prized product. What I found was Fels-Naptha Laundry Soap.
It said it was great for pre-treating stains, and since my favorite pre-treater has been discontinued, I've been on the search for a replacement. It was $1.19, so I thought I would give it a try. I took it home, tried it out, and it seems to work pretty well. I read a little online about it, and it seems that it is a great remedy for poison ivy too. Not that I've ever HAD poison ivy, but if I did, that's good to know. I also found several recipes for homemade laundry detergent that used Fels-Naptha, but I just really didn't want to go there. I have a hard enough time cooking dinner, and I wasn't interested in cooking laundry detergent.


So, a few days ago my cousin Stacie sent me a message on Facebook and asked if I had any recipes for laundry detergent that I had tried. She shared hers (which didn't use Fel-Naptha, but another laundry soap called ZOTE). I was still resistant to the whole idea, no matter HOW much money you save because 1) you have to cook the stuff 2) the recipes are for large batches that have to be stored somewhere and 3) the descriptions I've read of them say they are "goopy" and it sounds like a HUGE MESS waiting to happen when the kids do their laundry! I like to save money as much as the next person (probably more), but I have my limits :) Besides, I LIKE my laundry detergent!


However, she made me curious. So I looked and found a recipe for POWDERED homemade laundry detergent that sounded simple enough. Still, I didn't rush out and get the supplies because my Purex 2-in-1 laundry sheets are really simple to use and work well.


When I was at the store yesterday, I happened to be on the laundry aisle and low and behold, they had all of the ingredients for fairly cheap, so I decided what the heck, I would give it a try.


Basically, the recipe is 1 cup grated Fels-Naptha soap. I used a Pampered Chef grater and it took about 5 minutes to grate the whole bar (which yields 3 cups, so I tripled the recipe). Add to that 1/2 cup of 20 Mule Team Borax and 1/2 cup of Arm & Hammer Washing Soda (not BAKING soda, it's different stuff). You just mix it in your container and use 2-3 tablespoons per load. Very simple to make!



I still wasn't prepared to like it, but I tried it out on quite a few loads of laundry yesterday, and it actually works well! I used it in cold water and in warm water, and it did an equally good job in both. The only thing I haven't tried it on yet is towels and sheets, but those are on the agenda for today. I really like the fragrance of my other laundry detergent and this has NO SMELL to it at all. I guess I'll have to just go back to using Downy to get my fragrance, but that's OK. I like my April Fresh Downy! The good thing though is that the clothes did smell CLEAN. It got out all the odors of the laundry....and believe me, clothes from a day's work at Chick-fil-A smell really funky :) Even clothes that were nasty sweaty were odorless when they came out. That's a good thing!


The detergent doesn't get sudsy in the wash, and when I opened the washer mid-load, the water had a gray appearance (but none of the ingredients are gray). I'm not sure if that was the dirt from our clothes or what, but it was a little disturbing :) Oh well, what goes on behind closed washing machine lids needs to stay behind closed washing machine lids :)


While I didn't go through measuring out exactly how many loads I can do with the supplies I bought, I will say that the ingredients cost $1.19 for the Fels-Naptha, $3.59 for the borax, and $2.69 for the washing soda, for a grand total of $7.47. The Fels-Naptha will make 3 of the recipes above, but the boxes of borax and washing soda will make MANY MANY more than 3. I'm guessing that I spent around $1.50 for the tripled recipe that I made and it will wash around 32 loads (if you use 3 tablespoons per load) which is about 4 and a half cents a load. My current laundry detergent is around $6 for 20 loads or 30 cents a load. Not that I was going to switch simply because it was cheaper, but that's one added benefit!


If anyone has tried any other laundry soap bars that are a little bit fragranced, please share what kind you used and where you got it. That is my next goal, since I like a little fragrance to my laundry, to find a fragranced laundry soap bar (as long as it cleans well).

Yummy, yummy soup!

I just wanted to share a recipe for Wild Rice Soup that we had for dinner tonight because it is SO good! It is an E-Mealz recipe and one that I've made before. It actually wasn't on this week's list, but I substituted it in because (as I've said before), I love it!

It is a potato based soup that has wild rice and cheese in it. I don't even care for wild rice that much, but it works in this recipe. We had it along with wheat rolls and cantaloupe for a crowd pleasing meal (well, except for Dakota who doesn't like ANYTHING!)

Here's the recipe:

1 box Uncle Ben's Wild Rice
2 cans cream of potato soup
1 small onion - chopped (I used frozen chopped onions instead)
3 cups milk
2 tablespoons butter
1 lb Velveeta

Cook the rice per the directions (this takes 25 minutes....just so you know ahead of time. The rest of the soup is very quick to make)

Mix soup, onion, milk, and butter in large saucepan. When heated, add Velveeta in small chunks and stir until smooth. When soup is smooth, add cooked rice.

That's all there is to it. We add crumbled bacon to the top for an extra special treat!

Culinary delights from across the pond

OK....I had a little more fun in the grocery store :) As I was wandering down the aisle, I ran across a curious little section of food...the British foods. I took some pictures to share with you....


Product #1: Pinhead Oatmeal - so is being a pinhead a requirement for eating this or does eating it make you a pinhead?


Product #2: Digestives Milk Chocolate - sounds YUMMY (and like a laxative)!




Product #3 Robinson's Barley Water - is this like the precursor to beer? Orange and lemon flavored? Another big YUM!

Product #4 - I have no words for this......

Yes....I know that we have our own "delicacies" like Sloppy Joes that wouldn't sound too good if you didn't know what they were (and they might not even sound that good even if you DO know what they are). I'm curious what some of our American foods sound like to those in other countries :)