Goals Check-in: October

Here's my end-of-the-month wrap-up regarding my 2013 goals:

Food This Week 17

Freezer Inventory: October

Here's an update on what's in the freezers (YES! I have TWO of them) right now:

Food This Week 16

I have been enjoying my BEAUTIFUL new chest freezer. It's a smaller model than I had planned on getting (5.1 cubic feet as opposed to 7.2), because the closest store didn't have the first one available. I could have ordered it online and had it shipped to the store, but I saw the smaller one in person and realized that it had plenty of space for our current needs. Given that it would be easier to move, take up less space in the kitchen, and was about $30 less, I thought it was okay to change plans. (Plus the price recently dropped, and because of Sears's Price Protection policy, I got an additional credit when I followed up.)

On our way!

This is the stack of books I'm bringing along on vacation:

Read Aloud Roundup: October 2013

Read Aloud has a new crew of volunteer readers this school year! My wife has sat in for the past couple of months while the roster got sorted out, and now we have some fresh faces along with the "old hands" who have read to the same teacher's classroom for many years in a row. I think it's great for kids to have that ongoing connection (even part-time) with an adult role model, and to have that adult lead discussions on big topics.

This month's general theme was Being Different. (A new title about Dia de los Muertos fit the bill as well as being seasonally appropriate.) I asked the readers (particularly the newer ones) to keep in mind the school's mission: to empower student learning by teaching awareness, acceptance and non-violence, celebrating our diversity, achieving academic excellence, and fostering strong family-school-community connections.

Food This Week 15

My wife and I are headed out of town this coming week, on a trip to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. I planned it all and managed to keep my mouth shut even when I was dying to tell her (she wanted it to be a surprise), and there will definitely be some yummy restaurants on the itinerary. The meal plan for this week is therefore very simple! Just know that we will be enjoying fresh local foods from our B&B, at least one picnic lunch, and a variety of dinners that neither of us has to cook.

Tomato Overload!

I was surprised by a gardener's gift of green tomatoes: her plants were at the end of their growing season, and she'd already put up 40lbs? 60lbs? (A WHOLE LOT) of cooked tomatoes. Sounds like she's tired of them by now! So when she uprooted the plants while I was visiting, I got the green globes -- and a few half-ripened ones -- that were still clinging (instead of them going to compost). Now what to do with them?

Food This Week 14

Ah, serendipity! When I find myself wanting to make a meal with ingredients I don't have on hand, I add those ingredients to the "when it's on sale" grocery list. Sometimes they sit there for a while, but it reminds me to keep my eye out for a good price on those items, especially if they aren't advertised. This week, when I opened up the store flyer, I knocked off a handful of those ingredients -- one that had been there for about a month, and several that I'd recently added. Guess I can have pesto pasta, pastry, brussels sprouts, potatoes with my pot roast, and apples with peanut butter after all!

Weekend Catch-up

I know this blog's become more about life stuff recently. Groceries and meal planning, frugal living, and personal achievements aren't the only things going on for me right now, but I'm out of library school and there's not much library stuff I can talk about right now. I hope to come back to it in a while. In the meantime, here's what I've been up to this weekend!

Food This Week 13

My bulk purchases from Amazon arrived: whole-grain bread mix and pumpkin bread mix. (I got really tired of waiting for canned pumpkin to go on sale, and this will make a nice easy addition to potlucks or housewarmings and such.) That purchase, plus some coconut oil on half price, took me over the September grocery budget. I'll be reducing the November spending to make up for that, but it shouldn't be hard with all the food we have in the house.