March Goals / February Goal Review

Better late than never? I thought so, too.

February Goal Review

Eating Better: We've really slipped up on sugar intake. But we are getting back on track.
Eating Better: I haven't succeeded in getting DH to eat very many fermented foods.
Eating Better: Figured out what I was doing wrong with my yogurt. Yay! It was perfect last batch.

Finances / Eating Better: My garden progress is pretty pathetic. I've started a few seeds indoors, but I really need to get my peas started pronto! As in yesterday. Hoping to do that this week.
Finances: I kept a better eye on our budget. And I definitely used Mint.com weekly to help me succeed in that. Yes! For February we came in $3 under both eating out and grocery budget. After a month or two of struggling, this felt great!

Personal: I really did clean out the closet! What, you can't tell? But I did...
Personal: I did this... But my better system sits in the kitchen at this moment chock full. So full the lid doesn't close anymore. Sad.
Personal: Driving did not happen this month. I don't know what to do about this.
Personal: Posture. Ha. Funny.
Personal: I did not really do much brainstorming about simpler meals to do, but I did find a couple by accident. Wait, scratch that. I found at least 3 meals that are fairly quick to prepare which I have added to my repertoire. My subconscious did this without me even trying. Eat it! (I did. It was good).

House: We decided not to get a house right now. A lot of my friends are getting one and I really, really want one, but DH and I talked about it and we decided it's much better financially to pay off our debt first... And that leads me to our goal with which we are replacing our "buy a house" goal.


March Goals / New Yearly Goal

Revised Year Goal

Debt: Pay down 16.5k in debt by Christmas. This will be between 1/3 and 1/2 of our debt. I am really excited. We just sunk our 5k we had saved up for housing expenses into it, so that leaves 11.5k to go. Bring it, debt. I will own your a$$.


March Goals

Eating Better: Get better about DH packing lunches / meals to work so he eats good, hormone-free, junk-free food even at work. This also applies to my weight loss goal for DH. Yay.
Eating Better: Eat wild-caught fish or liver once a week. (Dreaming, probably)
Eating Better: If my book on raw milk ever gets here, read it and talk DH into switching. :)

Financial / Eating Better: start the rest of my seeds.
Financial: Continue vigilance on budget. Any time I can come under budget in a category, that means faster debt payoff which means less time until we get a house.

Personal: I'm really discouraged in this area, so I'm only posting 1 goal. Follow Project Simplify's weekly projects to whip my apartment into shape. I only found out about it today which means I am a week behind, but since I am almost done with all my homework for the week, I'll be able to do last week's project tomorrow and then have the rest of the week for the current week. I am really excited about this.




PS, our auto insurance almost cut itself in half now that we've hit the 6 month mark of having insurance with a "real" insurance company. More dollars to go towards debt!

Tuesday Trimmings

Well, I have no particular agenda today, so I thought I'd give you random updates about what I have been cooking and scheming. I don't really know where else this stuff would go, hence the "trimmings." Lame, I know. Deal with it.

Cooking
I've actually started a number of cooking projects lately. :)

Sometime in the last week or so I turned almost 6 lbs of cabbage into sauerkraut. It's "sauering" on my counter as I write this. I love love love sauerkraut now, which is crazy because I used to think it terrible. The first time I made sauerkraut, I wasn't that crazy about it, so it languished in the back of my fridge for months until December when I pulled it out again and tried it and "yum" was the only word-sounding noise I could get out in between mouthfuls. So I now I am making a big batch and I am excited. I'm also a lot less paranoid about leaving food out on the counter this time around. (Eating fermented food cures you of some paranoia, apparently).

I also bought a bottle of kombucha and started growing my own SCOBY so I can make my own. If you don't know, kombucha is basically a superfood. It's filled with good bacteria for digestion (like yogurt) along with all kind of other stuff for energy, etc. It's really good for your liver. It's slightly carbonated and my husband says it tastes like beer (what? he's weird). Read more about this good stuff, here. Or you can google it and come up with hundreds of other sites. Unfortunately it takes like 3 weeks to grow a SCOBY so it will be at least that long before I can make my own. *Sad*

Just this weekend I made a huge pot of homemade chicken noodle soup with real bone broth that I left to simmer overnight on Saturday. The soup is delicious and hopefully just what the doctor ordered to help us sickies get over the rest of this annoying cold... Hmm, I should post a recipe.

A week or two ago I made pasta which turned out better than ever before. This is ironic since 2 things happened differently: for one, I set out to follow the directions, for two, life got in the way and I left it abandoned in the "resting" stage for about 6 times as long as the directions say to. Haha, I love irony. Seriously, best pasta I've made. So much flavor and it kept its shape really well even when being cooked extensively in soup. I'll be making more soon, I bet.

This weekend I made 2 casseroles and froze them for those "menu plan, menu shman." nights. It's a recipe I adapted from my mom--who knows where she got it. It's basically an egg and bread casserole, but with yummy things like mushrooms, cheese, and onions (and for me, spinach). I love it. I had a hard time not chowing on the filling when I was layering the casserole because it tastes sooo good. It turned out really well this time. (another recipe? ... Hmm)

This weekend I also made another loaf of sourdough bread, as well as quasi-sourdough sweet potato "quick-bread." It tastes amazing. This all started because I had half a sweet potato from like, 3 months ago that I put in the freezer with the intention of "getting around to it." Ha! Success.

Finally, this weekend, I made a half-batch of yogurt--Much more manageable. I'm doing it this way from now on. I also used the whisk attachment on my blender to mix in my yogurt starter and it was convenient. Good trick for next time.

^Most of the above things fall into my "continue eating better" annual goal DH and I set a week or two ago. A "sub-goal" beneath that was to eat more fermented foods--both sauerkraut and kombucha fall into that category, yeah! We noticed a huge difference in our digestion and general well-being when I bought several bottles of it from the store and were drinking it everyday. At a little over $3 per 16oz bottle though, it's definitely not in the budget. This was also one of my January goals. So far I think breaking down goals into "baby steps" to do each month is going to be great. Sauerkraut is great for you and it's also got good bacteria for digestion. It's also stupidly high in vitamin C, yay. And yogurt, well, that's another healthy food, especially since it's just milk, bacteria, and a little sugar.

Ah well, I was going to post about other stuff, but it looks like I've got more than enough random stuff to talk about just with food so I'll save the others for another day...

(This post wound up being much more focused and much longer than I was expecting...)

What about you? What cooking have you done?

Cost Breakdown Yogurt

So, regular yogurt costs about $0.50 per 6-8 oz single serve, or about $3.00 for 32 oz plain or vanilla.

For organic yogurt a single serving costs $0.75 per 6-8 oz cup, or about $4.00 for a 32 oz container of traditional yogurt, or $3.50 for "liquid yogurt." While tasty, liquid yogurt is just weird to me.

A gallon of organic milk costs $6. I bought the liquid yogurt as starter. Keep in mind, I will hardly ever have to buy starter again.

So, $6 / 16 = $0.375 per cup I used 2 and 2/3 so $0.99-$1.00
I used about 2 ounces of starter so $3.50 / 16 = $0.22
plus 1/4 cup of sugar = like $0.05 if that
and a bit of vanilla so, another $0.05

For a grand total of $1.32 for 3 cups, or 24 oz.


$3 * 3/4 = $2.25 which would be the cost of 24 oz of regular, inorganic yogurt.

So, $2.25, versus $1.32. Win.

Yogurt, Cute Shoes, and Croutons

What do these three things have in common?

Well, I'm not really sure, except that they were a part of my day. Also, tasty soup.

I made my first big batch of yogurt--almost a whole gallon. I didn't have enough jars to use the whole gallon. Actually, I probably could have fit the whole thing, but I didn't know how much space I would lose when I added my starter so I over estimated and my jar for my starter next time was only 2/3 full). My hubby was so funny when I was making it. He was on his computer, watching with half an eye, if you will, and randomly interjecting with insight like "is it yogurt yet?" He eventually got up to see what it was I was doing and was very surprised at the simplicity.

"So all you did was heat up milk, add yogurt, and now the whole thing's yogurt?"
"Yup."
"Wow, that's so cool."

That's almost verbatim what happened (but my memory sucks so... maybe this didn't happen at all.. *twitch*).

By the way, this yogurt may be my best batch yet. I haven't tasted it yet, but as I was pulling it out of the cooler today, I noticed it was much firmer than the last batch when I took it out of the cooler. I turned the jar on it's side before putting it in the fridge and it only started to pull away from the side of the jar when it was completely horizontal. This was the jar of starter so it wasn't all the way full so it wasn't like it just didn't have anywhere to go.

We went to Walmart to get shoes for hubby today. So of course, bearing the burden along with him, I looked at shoes and, in order to fully understand his pain, even tried some on. :) I found a super cute pair of... ok, I'm a bit embarrassed, brown loafers and they were soooooooooo comfortable. Seriously. They were also leather, which doesn't matter at all, but was kind of cool. But they were $30. So rather than give into spontaneous purchases, I used my willpower to put them back in their little box and back into their little piece of shelf. But I want them. And if, in a week, I still want them, I may go back and buy them.

Croutons. are. tasty. But they are so overpriced. So this is my second attempt at making them by hand. This time was much better. A bit heavy on the garlic, but in a salad, I think it will be a good contrast. i used half a loaf of the french bread I made last week and put them in a bag so I could shake them up with the olive oil / spices combo to coat them. It sort of worked. I baked them on a much lower temp this time and it worked much better. They are really good!

Ok, that's about it for now. Now I have to try to be productive for an hour or so until bed time.

PS!

Yogurt Phase of Step 2 is now complete!!!!

I will probably talk about this more after this week, but my yogurt is awesome.

Step 2: Organic Eggs, Yogurt, and Butter

Step 1 was organic milk. After much ridiculosity, I finally bought my milk and I love knowing that I've cut out one more source of bad things in our food. In just that short time we've already used almost a whole gallon -- can you tell I was in milk withdraw from not having it for a week?

Step 2 is to continue down the dairy path: Eggs, Yogurt, and Butter.

Eggs
I actually just used my first organic egg last night in some scrambled eggs I made myself for dinner. The awesomeness that is Whole Foods makes it so easy to get these products that I want. I bought these eggs from a local farmer (ok, so about 100 miles away, not great, but not terrible), through Whole Foods. It was just easy. They look so much different than store-bought. I mean, apart from the fact that they are brown. They're not perfectly shaped, some are smaller or larger. They have these fun little speckles on the shells. Generally the eggs were actually larger than the normal "grade a large eggs" from the store which I thought was interesting.

Yogurt
So far, I really want to make my own. My first attempt didn't go so well. You can read about my ultra noob-ness here. Really, who knew?

When I have my first solid (get it?) success at yogurt, I will consider step 2 essentially complete. I expect I will only continue to improve my yogurt-making skills, but currently I definitely can see I need to work on it.

Butter
I just opened my last box of regular butter, so probably soon I will switch to organic butter. Once again I am going with Organic Valley brand. They sell it at Whole Foods which makes it easier for me.I might even buy some at the store today when we go.

Stay tuned for step 3: Chicken.

PS, random funness, I posted this at 10am on 10/10/10. mwhahaha.

Yogurt Fail-Sauce

Wel'p.

My poor yogurt I made this week wasn't meant to be.

At first, it didn't really ever "gel." So I finally had the guts to open a jar of it thursday night and realized it gelled a little bit, but it was still really runny. It tasted ok but wasn't quite sweet enough for my tasted. So I thought, hey, I'll just reheat it and add more yogurt starter, and do it all over again now that I have a thermometer. This should be cake. Riight.

The cooking process did not leave me hopeful. First, all of the whey got cooked out of it. So it was all these little curds, almost like cottage cheese, only not as pretty, in a pale yellowy liquid. I let it cool to the proper temp and then blended it very thoroughly on the "liquefy" setting on my blender. It seemed to help. I added more starter and a bit more sugar and blended it more. Then I poured it in the jars and let it rest in the coolers.

Friday morning I got out my Frankenstein jars of yogurt and I knew my hopes were dashed. Of course, it had re-separated. It was the right sweetness this time, but it had a nasty grainy texture. I just couldn't eat it. I feel bad because I could at least eat it the way it turned out the first time. Plus I had no idea that a second cooking would completely kill the homogenizing that they do to milk.

So I threw it away. Sad day.

Tomorrow we're going to the store to get more milk and I'm going to make a smaller batch so that if it fails again I won't waste quite as much milk. I am really hoping I get it right this time as I don't have too much starter left. I think it will work. I think with a thermometer for the first cooking, everything should be fine.

Lesson Learned: Don't ever, EVER try to re-cook a failed batch of yogurt. It's nasty.

My Yogurt is... Yogurting?

Fermenting? Resting? Curing? Well, whatever it is, it's doing it's thing in the cooler and hopefully the result will be tasty yogurt. I made 6.5 cups and split it into 2 jars, and I drank the last half cup that wouldn't fit. It was tasty. I don't have any canning jars so I just used some (very thoroughly washed out and then sterilized) salsa jars.

Hmmmhmm, Salsa yogurt. Just kidding. I added a bit of sugar and vanilla so we'll see how it goes.

Sometime soon I will establish a price point of this yogurt, made with organic milk, vs organic yogurt.

That's all for now. Now I must make myself go write my document for work. I am awesome at procrastinating.


:)