Menu Plan Monday - August 9th

Good Monday Morning to you all :-) I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. We had a fun one, yummy Margaritas on the front porch on Saturday night with the neighbors and a Chuck E. Cheese party for Kristen to go to today!

I had my menu already planned for this week but then realized Jason will be in Denver on Monday so I've changed it a little. It means Kristen and I can have fish ;-) So, here's what's on the menu this week (and I won't need much from the store which is a good thing as my grocery budget is looking low - it's gotta last til the 20th!) . . .

Monday - Tilapia, (might have mac & cheese and broccoli with it)

Tuesday - Rotisserie chicken mashed potato and corn

Wednesday - BBQ Chicken Pizza (I want to try and get three meals out of the chicken, the third might just be chicken noodle soup made with the carcass!)

Thursday - Enchiladas (using up the crockpot salsa chicken I froze last week), w/salad

Friday - Sloppy Joe sandwiches (this is also in the freezer and needs to be used before it gets lost at the back and stays there for months!)

Saturday - Dogs on the grill, potato salad and beans (it gets us through the weekend)

Sunday - Sunday Brunch . . . eggs bacon, waffles, OJ - perhaps some left over dogs and some rice and beans that are in the freezer for dinner.

Sorry I don't have any links or photos. I'll post tomorrow some pictures of the meals we had last week.

++++ I was just sufing Orgjunkie.com looking at more Menu Plan Monday's and I found the blog that had the Crockpot Salsa Chicken :-) You can find it HERE at Lyn's Kitchen Adventures!

Sunday Musings . . . . August 8th

The first week of August already over :-) I hope the rest of the month goes as quickly, or at least the heat goes away! Every day this week was over 100 degrees, it's not nice.

Kristen had her first riding lesson this week, but other than that we haven't done anything but go round to the pool a few times. It's the only way we can get outside and stay cool, otherwise we just stay indoors.

It was Jason's birthday on Thursday. He took the day off work and we went out for a quick bite to eat to Wendy's (gotta stick to our budget...they have a great 'dollar menu' there) :-) Later in the afternoon Kristen and I baked him a cake, and we had that and pizza for dinner.

Here's a few more pictures of birthday boy and his #1 fans . . . .

and birthday kisses from Boo!

We're off to a birthday party at Chuck E Cheese today (oh yeah, I can't wait!) and Jason is flying off to Denver to teach a course. He'll be back tomorrow night though. I will be planning my menu later, did really well sticking to it this past week, and I'll share with you what we thought of the recipes. Have a wonderful Sunday.

From This ..... To That!

So, we went from this. . . . .

to this. . . .

which then looked like this . . . .

which I then moved downstairs and it looked like this. . . .

and I moved the 'bar height' table up to the game room and it looked like this . . . .

and a night time shot. . . .

I set the kitchen table a little more last night and played around with the camera a bit - thought I'd add these pictures and join in with Tablescape Thursday. Always a fun 'party'. Go check out all the other wonderful tables (after you've looked at mine of course!)

(above) gives you a better idea of how the table looks with the rest of the kitchen. I've kept the chairs from the other table as bar stools for now, because the bar stools I had there I just painted black and I don't think they go as well!

The table looks similar to the other setting I did HERE, (looks the same because I used a cream table cloth then) but I added green plates under the napkins, and new tea-lights I got from Ikea.

napkin rings bought recently from Pier 1



I love Kristen's beautiful center piece :-)

Hope you enjoyed the transformation :-)

Birthday Boy!

Happy Birthday to my sweet hubby Jason
~ 39 today! ~

First Lesson!

I just have to share more 'horsey' pictures this week .... this is Kristen's first ever riding lesson. The only other time she's been on a horse was at a county fair when she was about 3 yrs old!

The first 'big' task she did (which I thought pretty scary) was lead the horse (all on her own) for a few yards, turn him around and walk back to the teacher with him. When she stopped him to turn around he immediately bent down to eat the grass!! The teacher said "if you let him look at the grass, he'll think he can eat it"! She managed to pull him away from the grass and carry on and walk him back. Above pic is after this and they went in to the riding ring .... Kristen is listening to the teacher (Ms. Sharon) talking about the 'lunge'.

Kristen, holding the lunge on her own telling the horse to 'move on'

Then it was time to get on the horse! Don't worry, she didn't get on backwards, the teacher had her turn around on the horse and sit all 4 ways, front, side, back then side, then front again. This was to show Kristen how much movement she can make on the horse without thinking she was going to fall off.

She was a little nervous once the horse started to move, who wouldn't be, the experience was very new to her. I heard Ms. Sharon say "take a nice deep breath"! She could probably see Kristen had stiffened up the minute the horse moved! But it only took a few seconds for her to relax :-)

How's this for progress... Look Mom no hands!

So as you can see, Kristen really enjoyed her first lesson. I must admit there were times I was a little nervous too ;-) That's my baby up there on that HUGE beast!!!

Linking up to Outdoor Wednesday.

Thrifty Tuesday!

I don't know if I'll make every Tuesday post a 'thrifty' one but for the next few weeks, while I take a break from PW recipes, I thought I'd share with you a little more info on my menu planning and how I'm saving money on groceries. I keep forgetting to take pictures of the meals we're having, but hopefully I will start doing that, so I can recap on the week and show you the meals I made. I'm also trying to work on making a menu list of the meal week and adding a shopping list. That way for future weeks I can just pull out a pre-made menu including the shopping list and go shopping. Kinda like the Kraftfoods '1 bag - 5 meals' concept, but with my own meals.

I must admit I don't usually like following a recipe when I'm making dinner, I prefer to just do simple things like grill chicken breasts and serve with salad or veggies. So I'm working on keeping things simple like that and if anyone wants my menu/shopping list I can try to get it up on my site or email it to you.

As I mentioned yesterday in my Menu Plan post, I didn't stick to the menu last week at all, but that's ok. It's not set in stone, I don't have to follow it if I don't feel like it, it's just easy to have it written out incase I don't want to think about 'what's for dinner tonight'. I've found too that some nights because we have left overs there's really no point in making a new meal the following night (of which I'd probably also have leftovers) because the fridge just starts to fill up with .... yeah, you guessed it - leftovers!!! So, here's what we did actually have last week:

Monday - I did make the taco meat and we had soft tacos, with spanish rice and my homemade ferried beans.

Tuesday - I made the pasta salad I mentioned last week HERE, and had hotdogs on the grill with Bush's bbq beans.

Wednesday - I made the Crockpot Salsa Chicken, BUT we didn't actually eat it! There was still leftovers in the fridge and neither one of us was hungry at dinner time so we just ate a little later while watching 'America's Got Talent'! I think Jason had hotdogs again ;-)

Thursday - I made enchiladas (but not the creamy ones) using some of the salsa chicken. They were SOoooooooo Good :-)

Also on Thursday I made some apple sauce using the apples that I'd picked from our tree! This turned out really nice. The recipe was just 1 cup of water, 1/2 cup sugar and a tsp of lemon juice.. the blog I found the recipe on didn't say how many apples so I used 4 large ones to try it out first. .... then we just mashed them after boiling for about 20-25 mins. Sprinkle a little cinnamon on and a spoonful of icecream - yummy.

Friday -I can't even remember what we had now! So I need to get better at keeping track of it all ;-)

If you'd like to try planning your meals each week here's a great link I found to help you get started:

Menu Planning Made Easy - @ Stone Soup


I surf around a lot for blogs like this and will share as and when I find good ones. I hope you find them helpful.

Until Thursday ;-)

Well I've been trying to get pictures all day of the table in the kitchen, but it's just so bright with the sunshine this is the best I could do today. I will try to take some better shots and perhaps some night shots (candles lit etc) and post again on Thursday.

I didn't want to not post anything after saying I would add pictures later today. I do like how the table looks, but I must say it's rather strange seeing it there..... it looks so low!!! Of course I know that's because I've been used to the higher table for over a year now, so I'm sure I'll get used to it again soon.

I'm wondering if I should paint the chairs? What do you think? I've seen similar sets where the back and the legs are cream but the seat is left wood. I think that would be kinda tricky to do without getting paint on the seat from trying to paint around the 'spindles' on the back of the chair. You can see (click to enlarge if you need to) I have two cushions on the chairs right now, they are the ones I made to go outside on the porch but I've not really used them out there yet because it's been so hot we never go out front. I like the splash of color they give, so I might consider just making two more so I have 4 and leave the chairs as is? I'd love your input ;-)