Ok, glad I got that out. Today I tried to stay busy by doing some much needed organizing in the kitchen and making a truly remarkable (scoff) and inventive dinner. I really enjoyed organizing today, I find that when I focus and organize and clean a space, especially when it is one that I spend a lot of time in, that I tend to enjoy it more and feel more open and creative within it. I already spend a lot of time in the kitchen and have done a great deal of work in there so far, but today I was able to get it to the place where it feels like home. I am so excited to share!!!
Easy Organization
Cabinet Conundrum
When I became the lady of this house there were already cabinet doors missing, food from 2 prior roommates that had pretty different tastes than myself, drawers were a wreck, and the cabinets were all disasters. There were open bags of food, dirt and crumbs caked into the corners, moths, mealworms, and weevils. It was astounding (and disgusting) to me. I tend to become overwhelmed easily so I bit off little bits of the cleaning process at a time.
I began by cleaning out the old food and food that was open, eaten, or had ingredients that I refuse to eat in them. While I cleared the cans and boxes and bags out, I also wiped down inside the drawers and cabinets and cleaned out those dirty corners!
My next task was to find a place for everything. I created a system (a crappy system, but a system nonetheless) for where pots, pans, silverware, appliances, jars, and food went. During this, my super OCD went into overdrive and I was inspired. I took our excess Mason jars (love these things, y'all. We use them as cups, measuring spoons, whatever... they are so handy!) and put anything that was in an open bag or box that I could fit into them, also anything that I had bulk of downstairs.
After filling as many jars as I could fit into the cabinets, I took a small notepad that a friend graciously gave me and made matching labels for each jar, then taped them with packing tape onto the jars. Now my labels are waterproof and can be easily removed whenever I change ingredients.
I LOVE THIS GREEN SOLUTION! Now I have matching storage jars lining my cabinets. Not only do they match, they are airtight, making my food stay fresh for longer, and they are so cute!
Here is a picture:
You can see what is left of my summer canning in the close up:
Soap Scummy Sink
I HATE SOAP SCUM! I get so tired of scrubbing the rim of my sink every time I do the dishes to get the soap residue off from where I put my scrub brush when I am finished with a sinkful. I had made a makeshift soap dish from a Mason lid for this wonderful bar of odor eliminating coffee and vanilla soap I got from Nourish while we were on our honeymoon.
Tonight we ate a dish with mushrooms in it. Mmmm. When I was done chopping them, I had a decent sized plastic mushroom container made from a surprisingly sturdy plastic left over. I washed it out and made it into a small dish caddy, to sit on my counter near the sink and keep the soap scum off of it!
Ooh, another picture:
Drawer Dilemma
Oh, I hope you all LOVE these witty little subtitles. It has taken a lot of thought to come up with such... silly... titles.
We, like every other couple in the US, have a junk drawer. Oh, it makes my skin curl to think about it. I hate it. Phone books jammed in there with rolls of duct tape, dozens of batteries rolling around, scissors... I swear it is dangerous!
Today I went through with an old folder from college and old plastic baggies and organized all of the takeout menu's (that we never use) and coupons and important business cards into the folder and batteries (by type) into the baggies. All of the scissors were collected and corralled in between rolls of tape. No picture of this for y'all but trust me, it looks wonderful!
(trying to) Eat Well on a (crappy) Budget
Well, we are poor. Seriously, we are. We both work part time jobs and try to do side work to fill in the cracks but that really can only go so far. We buy store brand items for pretty much everything and I have been using pretty much everything that we rarely used and had stockpiled in the pantry. It has been kinda fun to mix incredibly diverse foods together just because it is what we had... case in point, last week we had sugared carrots, garlic mashed potatoes, and balsamic baked tilapia because that was what was going bad in our cabinets. It turned out to be so good!
This week my sweet honey's stomach has been hurting, the stress lately is making his Crohn's flair up, so we have a really exciting week of bland food to look forward to. I HATE BLAND!!! Sigh.
Last night we had a somewhat failed attempt at beef and broccoli, I didn't realize that I had gotten a pound and a half of beef rather than half a pound... so I used significantly less broccoli and we had a really nice beef meal.
Tonight my darling had the idea to stretch the leftovers with spaghetti and boil more vegetables in with the spaghetti. I adapted this by pulling out the wok again and working with some special ingredients from a more prosperous time - dried ground ginger and sesame oil and seeds. I made a sesame/ginger/garlic sauce with onions and mushrooms, stirred in more broccoli, meanwhile realizing that we had no spaghetti. We had about 1/2 cup of dried macaroni and 1/4 cup dried whole grain egg noodles. It was
It was SO tasty! And we have another lunch and dinner worth of it. Hooray for inventive and (somewhat) healthy eating! [NOTE: I wish our pasta was all whole grain but we are getting to that point, trying to eat what we have first though. And I wish the meat had been organic but again with the budget...]
Here is a look at Yumi Yumi Teriyaki Surprise:
Another thing we do to save money is pack lunches. Every night that my darling works, I pack him a lunch, the same things every time (mmmm, variety). A salad with olives and a pickle and a whole grain turkey sandwich. He uses a water bottle that we refill to ~savetheplanet~ and we reuse our plastic bags. I put his dressing in an old ketchup room service bottle (from our micromoon in Chicago).
I love that he is about eating healthy as this lunch is inexpensive, easy to make, and HEALTHY! I make our bread (grinding our own flour! Yum!) and we use turkey or chicken for his meat, mixed salad greens (we are looking into growing our own) and some Sunchips or pita chips.
OOH! Another picture!
Oh, don't mind the gratuitous picture of my marvelous breadmaking equipment - a Nutrimill and woman's best friend, Electrolux Assistent. LOVE THEM!
Well, this has been long, but hopefully entertaining. Thank you all for reading, tell your friends so we can start a discussion about living and learning to live green!
Be well, all of you. :)
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