crochet along
I did the crochet along with maybe matilda. It was a lot of fun to get into crochet again. I had so much fun, I made two and then also found a pattern for a simple sweater for my daughter and made that in 4 days(pictures to follow). It was really fast to make, total for each less than 4 hours. So, here are my pictures for my 2 lovely cowls.
Menu Plan Tuesday
I found this blog and I decided that I wanted to join in the fun. I am going to try to weekly do a menu plan. I have done them before, but I let it drop. But, I know that if I don’t, we will eat out more which is more expensive and we waste food. We often times like to cook big and have leftovers for lunch and some of the other meals through out the week.
Plus, my husband thinks I won’t keep up on it, so there is another motivation. I don’t know why I can’t do a menu plan on Monday or Sunday instead of Tuesday, but at least I am starting. So here goes…
Breakfast Lunch Dinner
Wednesday
-Smoothie -hard boiled eggs, salad -crockpot roast
Thursday
-Smoothie -leftover roast/ salad -left over roast
Friday
-Smoothie -Salad -beef fajitas w leftovers
Saturday
-Eggs -salad -boiled chicken w/ roast veggies
Sunday
-Smoothie -eat out -mexican chicken soup
Monday
-Smoothie -leftover soup -left over soup
Tuesday
-Smoothie -salad -chicken tacos
Snacks this week:
snacks larabars
string cheese
fruit
kind bars
So my groceries list for today is:
grapefruit
apples
frozen fruit
avocado
roast
chicken
lime
milk
chipotle chiles in adobo sauce
lettuce
tortillas
salsa
chicken
And my To Do list for this week is:
boil eggs
make yogurt
make chicken broth from leftover chicken
I am running out of yogurt, so I need to make yogurt today so that I can have yogurt for the day after tomorrow…
I need to make chicken broth for the soup I am making from the leftovers.
Lynn
Crochet project
So, basically, I can knit and crochet. But, I like knitting more. But, I saw this Crochet Along from Maybe Matilda and I had to join.
Time Out Cowl
This pattern is a called a Time out Cowl. You can get a free pattern from the Lion Brand website.
I saw this and immediately thought of my mother-in-law. She always wants a scarf for her neck and shoulders and I thought that this would be a perfect Christmas present. (Let’s hope she doesn’t read this blog).
So, since fall is firmly in place. I feel like playing with yarn now. This is my next project. Wish me luck. I tend to start projects well and not finish them. But, since this is a Christmas present, I hope to finish it.
Day 9 Maker’s diet and a headache.
So, yesterday I ended up having a massive headache. Usually my headaches can be tied to some source, like the food I eat. One of the reasons I am doing this diet/way of eating is because a lot of processed foods give me a migraine. I get a headache from MSG, maltodextrin and artificial sweeteners. But, I couldn’t tie this headache to anything I ate.
Along with the headache, I also got light-headed and felt really out of it. When I left work, I was actually sort of afraid to drive. But, I managed to get home safely and pick up my daughter as well.
And yeah, I do get a little hypoglycemic, but I had eaten in the last hour and I wasn’t hungry. But, sometimes when I feel like this I just need dinner, a snack won’t do…
I went home and laid on the couch while kiddo played in the living room. Pete was super-sweet and made me dinner while I lay there. He heated up some fish soup my sister made. (By the way sis, really good). But, I knew it had flour in it as a thickening agent, and white flour is not on my diet, so I decided that could be one of my cheat meals this week. So, since I was having a cheat meal anyway, I decided to make some garlic bread, since I was worried that I was feeling this way because I hadn’t had carbs much.
Moral of the story: I don’t know if the bread helped or not but I did feel a lot better after dinner and I was eventually able to function almost normally.
Side Note: When you have a headache, don’t swing your 15-month-old daughter up in the air and let her head connect with your chin. It won’t help your headache, your child will cry and you will still be feeling it the next day…
Update: Headache was probably due to a cold, seems like a lot of people were out of commission with headaches this week…
Maker’s Diet
So, I have decided to try the maker’s diet. I have been doing Weight Watchers, which I like, but I also really want to move to eating more whole foods. I have looked into nourishing traditions and for my analytical mind, there was not enough research to support the claims to my satisfaction. Although, I believe that there something to their claims.
I was looking at some blogs, specifically maker’s diet mom, and I looked up the book and started reading it. They now have a maker’s diet for weight loss. One thing I like about this book is that the author has gotten a few doctors to review it and has some research to back up the claims.
I started thinking about it and researching it and decided to try it. It definitely meets my goal of eating healthier. I also have acid reflux and I want to stop taking medicine for this. I hope it can help.
Here are the pro’s and con’s of this diet:
Pro’s
-Eating Healthy
-Possible Weight loss
-Trying out the Coconut oil (been wanting to try it)
-Lots of vitamins and nutrients
-Possible health benefits
-Drinking lots of water is good for you.
-They have you exercise.
-It gives you 2 cheat meals a week, which makes it so much more do-able.
Con’s
-Expensive (supplements and vitamins very expensive, specialty food expensive)
-Keeping to a diet is hard.
-Going to the bathroom all the time, due to the amount of water they want you to drink, is annoying!
-They have you exercise (which might mask the true effect of the diet), plus exercise is hard.
-It is 16 weeks and I don’t know if I can do it for that long. (The old one was for only 40 days).
Final Con – The book isn’t extremely helpful or user-friendly. To get the whole diet you have to pull from multiple parts of the book. It doesn’t give you portion sizes or give alternatives to salads for lunch. So, I don’t know if it is ok to have leftover dinner for lunch the next day or do I need to have a salad?
So, a couple of things I have decided while doing this diet.
1st-I can’t worry about getting everything organic, up here, it isn’t possible and extremely expensive. I will do my best though.
2nd-I am going to continue on Weight Watchers, I am just going to count my points along with the Maker’s Diet.
First 2 days:
So, I started this yesterday and it went well. I found out in the last two days that I do like boiled eggs and garbanzo beans. I also can have a smoothie for breakfast and it will last me a while if it has yogurt, flax-seed oil and coconut oil. Plus, it was super yummy!
I also exercised yesterday! They suggest a 3 min. warm up and seven 30 second really intense workouts broken up with minute and a half slower movement. I did it!
But, I did it mainly because my husband reminding me that it would make me feel good to exercise and it did…
I did have to pee all the time and yes that was annoying, but I didn’t really get hungry except right before a meal. And actually, I couldn’t finish all my lunch because it was too much (both days).
So, so far so good (wow a lot of so’s in that sentence). I am going to keep at it. Wish me luck.
Lynn
Budgets and Freezer Cooking…
I love the website, from Once a month Mom. In fact, last year, when I was pretty pregnant, my friend Christy and I did the whole cook for a month in one exhausting day. (I so overdid it that day, that I had really bad swollen ankles and some contractions a month or two before I was supposed to..)
Christy and her family gobbled up the food, Pete and I, not so much. We still have a couple things in our freezer that I am scared to try. So, not for us, sadly.
But, recently we started to get on a budget, using The total money makeover by Dave Ramsey. We have done babystep number 1 and are working on step 2. Which means and emergency fund in place and start paying off debt. We are really excited about this. But, how does this relate to food?
Since, we are on a budget and we both like taking leftovers for lunch and we don’t have the time or inclination to cook much during the week, I cook big on the weekend.
This is the start of the third week on this and it has worked great. I made up a huge batch of enchaladas for the first big batch and a large pot of chili later that week. I also made a big batch of sourdough muffins. Yum!
We were still eating on a little of that the next week, I then made a pasta dish with kielbasa, green beans and Parmesan cheese.
This weekend, I made a large batch of chicken teriyaki with brown rice and veggies. We put it in individual servings in bags. I have 14-16 servings sitting in my fridge and freezer.
It is going to be a yummy week…
Making Cheddar Cheese
We made cheddar cheese last weekend. It was my whirlwind cooking weekend. I had been wanting to make cheese and my husband love cheddar and that was the one he wanted me to make. So, we looked up the recipe and found out that I had all the ingredients except calcium chloride. I went to the local health food store and they actually had it!
I got my recipe from www.cheesemakingrecipe.com
We don’t have access to raw milk, so I had my husband buy 4 gallons of whole milk from the store for our experiment…
Pete bought the milk on Friday, and since the fridge was full, we put them in the dog room for the next day. We have a room that is not very insulated that keeps fairly cool when it is chilly outside, which in the Far North, it is sadly, still winter… Don’t worry about the dogs in that room, they are Newfoundlands and like it cool. We keep the beagle where it is warmer…
Anyway, the next day, I put the milk in a big stock pot and then realized the stock pot was too small. So, I then had to go to the store and get a large canning pot that would be big enough for the milk to fit in.
So, got home put the milk in, heated it up, and let it get too hot! I had the heat on and went to work on my sourdough and let it get too hot. It is supposed to be about 86 degrees Fahrenheit, but it got to 91. So, I had to wait for it to cool. It seemed to take forever, an hour or two. Then my husband woke up from his nap, and checked the temp and it was about 84, so he put it on the heat and raised it to 91 again… 
So, again had to wait for it to cool, finally it was at the right temp, and I added the ½ tsp. of mesophilic powder. I let it sit there for 45 min like the recipe said. It wasn’t hard to keep the right temp, the milk doesn’t seem to cool or heat too quickly.
We then added the rennet, stirred, added the calcium chloride (because it was not raw milk), stirred and let it sit for 45 minutes.
Then, we had to cut the curds into 1/2 inch squares, I did it like Wardeh showed on gnowfglins. Then you have to slowly heat it to 97 degrees over 40 min. and keep it there for another 30 while stirring occasionally. You are not supposed to stir for the last 5 five minutes.
Then you drain the whey through a cheese cloth in a colander, I used 2 layers of butter muslin. You keep a 1/3rd of whey in the bottom of the pot and put the colander with the curds back in the pot and basically steam the curds for an hour. (I suggest having a little less whey in the pot, I think it would have been better if all the cheese hadn’t been touching the whey, that is what we are going to try next time.)
You are supposed to keep the temperature the same, so we turned up the heat until we got it up to the right temperature and then turned the heat off. We checked it occasionally. We just kept the thermometer in the cheese during this time.
When the hour was up, I took the cheese out and cut it into pencil sized strips and then mixed in a Tbs of salt.
The cheese curds in a bag ready to eat!
These were the cheese curds and they were yummy and yes, they did squeak like they were supposed to!
Then we put most of them in the cheese press and pressed it for a day…
By the way, this is what my daughter did while I cooked…
crawling in the cupboards!
Cheese and sourdough
This weekend, I had a mad cooking rush… I made cheddar cheese, cheese curds, soft cheese and a bunch of sourdough things. I made 4 loaves of sourdough bread, sourdough waffles and sourdough English muffins…We are still eating off all the yummy things I made this weekend.
Now, I am not usually that motivated, but I have been working on my master’s and I haven’t had the time to do much of anything other than write. I did manage a little time with my beautiful daughter and husband 
Well, back to the cheese… I am doing the e-course from gnowfglins. Love it! Anyway, the night before, I added cheese culture to a 1/2 gallon of milk in a 1/2 gallon glass jar (thanks to Christy for the jars!) Then I let it sit on the counter. The next day, 12 hours later, I poured the concoction into cheese cloth, let it drain until it didn’t drip anymore whey. I then scraped it out and tried it.
Sadly, we were not fans I stirred in some herbs and tried it with crackers and it was pretty good. It tasted like a herb-y dip. But, neither my husband or I eat much of that kind of food, so I brought is over to a friends house. I figured that it would get eaten over there…
Next post…cheddar cheese!
Check out other great ideas for living more sustainably over at the Simple Lives Thursday blog hop. You’ll find this story and much much more!
Sourdough bread and english muffins
So, using the gnowfglins way of making sourdough, with their no-knead bread. Which in turn is a version of artisan bread in 5 minutes a day, which, by the way I love. I made this great sourdough wheat bread. It was a little dense and didn’t rise that much, but it was really yummy. It had all the things I love about really good wheat bread. I love the nutty, moistness of wheat bread. It was sour, and I don’t love sourdough, but it did have a really good sour after taste that wasn’t too bad, but really good.
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- Only this much left!
I also made some sourdough english muffins from the same recipe. I just flattened out some of the dough, with some flour and then heated up a cast iron pan and cooked them for a few minutes on each side. My husband loved them. I didn’t take any pictures of the english muffins because we ate them too fast. 
