Case in point: last week, I decided to put in a little time over Labor Day weekend doing some bulk cooking. Between homeschooling and finishing my book, I don’t have much time to cook dinner, so having a bunch of meals waiting in the freezer will be a big help.

On Friday I bought the necessary ingredients after choosing five recipes from one of my favorite bulk-cooking cookbooks:

Potato Chowder

Salisbury Meatballs

Sweet and Sour Meatballs

Chicken a la King

Rice Pilaf

On Friday night, I decided to get a head start by making the Salisbury Meatballs. Make meatballs, make sauce, combine in bags and freeze. No big deal……except that six pounds of ground beef turned out to be 170 meatballs. That takes a while. My dh had to come in and keep the meatball factory going so I wasn’t up cooking until midnight.

On Saturday, we (yes, this had now become our project) started making a new batch of meatballs after lunch. It was another 170 meatballs plus sauce, so we didn’t get the Sweet and Sour meatball recipe in the freezer until just before dinnertime. I decided to take Saturday night off from cooking; my dd threw a couple of frozen pizzas in the oven for dinner.

On Sunday I waited until after lunch to start the Potato Chowder. My former-engineer husband figured out how to fit 10 pounds of potatoes on the oven rack so they could be baked together. He also helped scoop out the baked parts after they cooled. This process took longer than I thought it would, as did the chowder itself.

Monday morning, I baked eight pounds of chicken parts in the oven for two hours; by the time they had cooled, we (yep, poor hubby’s helping again) had picked all the meat off the bones, I’d made the sauce and it had cooled enough to put in the freezer, it was close to dinnertime.

But there was still the Rice Pilaf to make. I had saved the easiest for last, and it certainly was the easiest of all the recipes, mostly because my culinary student daughter diced four stalks of celery and four carrots into tiny perfect cubes. Still, by the time the rice pilaf had cooled off enough to be frozen, it was evening. The three-day weekend was nearly over, and I was good and tired of being in the kitchen.

That said, we now have 24 frozen meals and six side dishes stacked neatly in the freezer. It sure makes me feel good to look at them. But so much for my Labor Day weekend. It went by in a blur of meatballs and plastic zipper bags.

They’ve been sawing and painting for the past day, and Josh is very excited to see the project coming together. Most 17-year-olds wouldn’t get so excited about doing this. But Josh isn’t like most 17-year-olds because he has developmental delays.

When he was a baby, I sometimes wondered what homeschooling him would be like. I’d become accustomed to the pace set by his three older siblings. I wondered how much longer it would take him to learn the things they learned by certain ages.

This is why it’s good that God doesn’t give us the ability to see the future. The person I was back then would have been pretty freaked out to know that we would spend years (literally) working on the alphabet and basic counting, or that at age 17 he still wouldn’t be ready for Saxon 54, the wonderful math book all three of my older kids used.

Several years of working on simple concepts wore down my naïveté and helped me see that Josh wasn’t going to do things on his siblings’ timetable. You might be thinking that should have been obvious to me once I got his diagnosis when he was 18 hours old. But there’s a difference between knowing a fact and living the reality of it. I had to live it to really realize it. Then I had to accept it. And finally, I learned to make other plans when it came to his education.

I could have continued prepping him for traditional math, trying year after year to get him to the point of learning multiplication tables. After all, the experts say that people with Down syndrome have a learning curve that goes up almost all of their lives. Those who don’t learn math by age 10 may learn at 15 or 20 or later. That would seem to make a case for keeping at those multiplication tables until he finally caught on.

But what kind of life would that be for him, forcing him to do the same work over and over, making him miserable? There are so many other things he needs to learn, things he will need to know in his life. Our time is better spent working on useful subjects that he has an aptitude for, making the learning much more pleasurable. So I taught him to use a calculator. Why waste precious time trying to learn those darn times tables?

Instead, my husband and I both make time to teach Josh to work with his hands, which he loves. He’s very creative and enjoys working with color, so my husband has been teaching him how to paint with watercolors. They make craft projects together. Josh also helps his dad mow the lawn and trim its edges. He’s very proud that he’s allowed to use the weed whacker.

In addition to working with Josh on basic reading and math skills, I teach Josh about cooking. He loves to make meals for our family, and especially enjoys the praise he receives at the table when we eat his creations. He also makes his own breakfast and uses the microwave to make his lunch.

One of his sisters got him a cookbook that he loves because it’s got plenty of pictures of ingredients. He’d use it every day if we let him, but the recipes aren’t the healthiest. So most of the time, I try to include him in what I’ve planned for dinner instead of using his cookbook. But he does love that thing, and brings it to me if he sees me making out the grocery list.

His sister who still lives at home also cooks with him. As a culinary student, her homework assignments are often made in our kitchen. A few weeks ago she asked him to help her make a strawberry cheesecake from scratch. It was delicious 

These activities teach Josh a variety of skills while letting him enjoy the relationships he has with all of us. He’s a people person, so relationships are really important to him. We enjoy our activities with him, too. But it took us a while to get to the point to where we could look at them as educational for Josh. It wasn’t easy to let go of the idea that he should be studying certain subjects at certain ages. Once we accepted that he was different, we could embrace and enjoy who he is at each age and what he’s capable of doing, or not. Facing facts is certainly not easy, but it does make life easier once you do it.

Of course, we were fortunate that we had a diagnosis for him shortly after his birth. It hit us hard at first, but at least we knew what we were dealing with. I think it must be harder if a child has delays or difficulties that are not obvious or even present at birth, such as autism or delays of unknown origin. The slow dawning that something is wrong is very painful for those who love the child. But it is what it is. All you can do is pray for help in accepting your child’s situation and diagnosis, because once you accept those things, you’re in a position to look at your child and his future as an open slate, unencumbered by the expectations you have of your ‘typical’ children, and instead full of possibilities that will educate your child and bring him joy.

I recently read about a homeschooling mom whose son was dealing with multiple developmental issues including Asperger’s. He struggled with traditional high school subjects because they were so hard for him, and as a result, had come to hate homeschooling. I wondered if his mom had actually accepted his disabilities yet. It occurred to me that if she had, she could get rid of the world history and grammar textbooks that cause her child so much frustration and replace them with musical instrument lessons or art classes, subjects that allow for creativity and self-expression. And she would not feel guilty about it, either, if she had faced the facts of his situation. I pray that she was able to find a solution to her son’s painful difficulties, because I know how hard this road must be for her. When it comes to disabilities, acceptance is key.

Josh’s Cookbook:

This month’s lead article is the first in the Back to Basics 2010 series; it’s called “Kids and Cooking.” Let me know what you think!

(PS…..Just three days left on the Buy One, Get One Free sale…..don’t miss out!)

After so many years of reading homemaking tips in books and magazines, and later on at websites, I thought I’d read them all. But this week I stumbled onto two tips that I’ve never heard of, and now I wonder why I never thought to do them? They make so much sense!

The first tip is in this beautiful cookbook I’ve been reading called Organic and Chic: Cakes, Cookies, and Other Sweets That Taste As Good As They Look. (Seriously, it’ll give you a sugar buzz just flipping through it.)

Author Sarah Magid shares this tip along with her brownie recipe:

I like to be resourceful and eco-friendly by covering the bottom of the brownie pan with butter wrappers, butter side up. (Save butter wrappers by placing them in a plastic freezer bag whenever you go through butter sticks. Simply defrost when you’re preparing your pan.)

Later in the book, she elaborates a bit:

They make the perfect coating because they’re already covered with a thin film of butter. Just fold each one in fours and snip the corner off in a rounded shape and place it in the pan, buttered side up. It will open up into a round that’s perfect for smaller pans.

Ever since I learned about what’s in margarine, I’ve used butter for all of my baking and cooking, so I know I could amass a nice little stack of butter stick wrappers fairly quickly. And using them in baking pans would save money on parchment paper. Again, why didn’t I think of that?

By the way, did I mention that this is one gorgeous cookbook? Her cakes are works of art. Those concerned about the sources of their food will appreciate the fact that she bakes with only organic ingredients, and shares her sources for them as well as for her equipment.

I’ll share the other great tip next time

I was raised on Bisquick baking mix. My mom was sick a lot, so when my dad came home and found four hungry little kids waiting for dinner, he’d whip up a batch of pancakes made from Bisquick.

I never knew you could use Bisquick for anything besides pancakes until I was married and started cooking every night. That’s when I learned that you can make dumplings, and Impossible Pies, and all sorts of good things. I even sent away for a Bisquick cookbook that I still use today.

But at some point along the way, I learned that General Mills, maker of Bisquick, donated money to Planned Parenthood (you know, #1 provider of abortions in this country), so I stopped buying Bisquick (or anything else from General Mills). Instead, I learned to make my own baking mix.

I don’t know if General Mills still supports Planned Parenthood, but I do know that homemade baking mix is cheaper than Bisquick and works just as well. I make baking mix in my food processor, but you can use a pastry blender in a bowl to do the same thing. A food processor does make it less lumpy, though.

Here’s the recipe I use for baking mix:

10 cups flour
1 T. salt
1/3 cup baking powder
2 cups shortening

Blend together dry ingredients; cut in shortening until it looks like flour. Store in a tightly closed container. Keep in refrigerator during the summer.

My food processor isn’t big enough to do the recipe all at once, so I make half at a time and dump it all in a big plastic container:

5 cups flour
1 ½ t. salt
2 ¾ T. baking powder
1 cup shortening

(BTW, I use Aldi flour and shortening; definitely less expensive than store brands.) I use this mix for oven-fried chicken, adding spices to it and shaking it with the chicken pieces in a plastic bag.

The other night I made dumplings to go with stewed chicken. How easy is this?

Dumplings

3 cups baking mix
2 t. dried parsley
1 cup milk

Mix together until soft dough forms. Drop dough into boiling stew, on top of meat and veggies. Cook on low 10 minutes uncovered, then 10 more minutes covered.

Living here in chilly Wisconsin, we love our hot chocolate. I usually buy big boxes of hot chocolate mix at Sam’s Club, but decided to try to save a few dollars by making my own. Since I have a food processor, this isn’t hard to do.

There are many hot chocolate mix recipes online. Here’s the one I found, with ingredient costs in parentheses (all ingredients purchased at Aldi):

Hot Chocolate Mix

4 cups dry milk ($1.87)

1 1/2 cups sugar ($.26)

1 cup powdered coffee creamer ($.26)

¾ cup cocoa powder ($.50)

½ package instant vanilla pudding ($.25)

Blend ingredients together in a food processor. Use 1/3 cup mix in a mug of hot water.

A mug of this hot chocolate tastes fine. The instant pudding prevents the mix from sinking to the bottom of the mug. So what’s the problem?

The cost! It works out to 14 cents a serving. A box of 60 envelopes of Swiss Miss mix from Sam’s Club is $5.38 for 60 envelopes, or 9 cents a serving. Bummer. I didn’t work out the price ahead of time because I figured homemade would be cheaper.

However, all is not lost. Our son loves a brand of peppermint hot chocolate mix that is a bit expensive. Adding ½ t. of peppermint extract to this mix recipe makes the hot chocolate he loves at far less than its usual cost of 28 cents per serving.

R2D2, aka DAK

Some people apparently take frugal tips pretty seriously; note a couple of cranky commenters at this post. Two thought the blogger’s tips were too common, and one misguided soul suggested the blogger stop homeschooling, put her kids in school and start an in-home daycare.

Instead of complaining that someone’s frugal tips are too basic, most commenters helped by sharing their own tips. I think I’ll do the same for the next few posts.

Bread machines

My beloved Oster bread machine died several months ago after about ten years of use. The unit still worked but the pan began leaking oil (or something similar) into the bread because the seal was shot. A perusal of eBay introduced me to a few people* who would love to sell me a replacement pan for $20 plus $10 shipping.

Not interested. Instead, I hit the local Goodwill and bought a replacement, a Regal for $9. It made so-so dough and baked bread that resembled a doorstop in shape and heft.

I waited patiently while watching Goodwill for a new bread machine but kept seeing the same type as the Regal. A blogging friend suggested I buy a Zojirushi BBCCX20 Home Bakery Supreme Bread Machine as she’d had great luck with it. I checked it out on Amazon: $200+, and some (though definitely not most) people had trouble with it.

I know how ticked I’d be if I spent $200 on anything and it didn’t work right. So I decided to keep being patient and checking Goodwill. But then I saw a Sunbeam breadmaker at Walmart for $50. It had pretty decent online reviews, so I decided to use my birthday gift money to buy one, but when I went back, they’d cleared out that model and replaced it with another, whose model number came up empty on a Google search. Not a good sign!

Not long after this, I stopped by Goodwill and found four bread machines. Three were Regals or looked like them. The fourth was so funny looking that I didn’t realize it was a bread machine at first. But it came with recipes, and at $5 it seemed worth the gamble.

Turns out it’s old (1990) and works great! It has quite a fan club, and I can see why. I thought I was being so clever calling it R2D2 until I found out that many people call it that.

Anyway, it makes great bread and dough, it was $50 cheaper than the bread machine I saw at Walmart, and $200 cheaper than the Zojirushi. Definitely worth waiting for!

* Sounds like a profitable racket, so I gave my old Oster and the Regal to my eBay seller daughter, hoping she can make some money off the parts, paddles and manuals

Isn’t she just the cutest thing? And this is just one of several short films made by her grandson, a filmmaker who wanted to preserve his memories of her.

Grandma is 93-year-old Clara Cannucciari; her 30-year-old grandson Chris is the filmmaker. When Chris posted his films to YouTube, neither of them had any idea that a turbulent economy would make their series on Depression-era cooking a smash hit on the Internet.

Clara has had an interesting life, as this article describes. Watching her in the kitchen brings back my own “grandma memories”….maybe it will do the same for you 

Here’s the link for the entire series of films, so you don’t miss out on any. Enjoy!

Amish Farms Holmes Co, Ohio

I usually try to get the lowest price on everything. This works fine for most things, but it occasionally backfires.

Take chicken, for instance. I always bought large quantities of it and froze it when the price was right. I didn’t care what brand it was, I just went by price.

Then I started to see Amish chickens for sale in the grocery several years back, and I thought, what a rip off! Why should I pay several dollars a pound for chicken when I can get it for 89 cents a pound? Who buys that stuff anyway?

Before long, I started seeing articles about the chicken sold in groceries and how it contains all sorts of antibiotics that are reducing our immunities, and hormones that are making little girls mature too early. And I got to thinking, maybe I should be watching what kind of chicken I buy…. 

One week the local Piggly Wiggly put the Amish chicken on sale and I splurged on some (even the sale price was higher than what I usually paid for chicken). When I baked it, the whole house soon smelled wonderful! And when we ate it, well, all I could think was that this was like I remember chicken tasting when I was a child in the 1960s.

I thought it was all in my head, but the next time we had chicken, it was my usual sale-priced store brand, and it tasted like nothing compared to that darned Amish chicken.

Since then, I’ve gotten hooked. I try to stock up when Amish chicken is on sale. Sometimes I run out before it goes on sale again, so I’m stuck with the regular stuff, which I still buy, but I don’t like nearly as well.

I’ve noticed a few name brands are now offering “all-natural, no hormones, no antibiotic” chicken, and the price is better than the Amish chicken. But you can’t match the taste. There is nothing better than Amish chicken, I’ve decided. So I buy it when it’s on sale, and I pine for it once I’ve used it all up…….

Sounds silly, but that’s what you’re doing when you pitch leftovers.

Leftovers get a bad rap, but when you throw out leftovers, while they’re fresh or once they’ve gone bad, you’re throwing away your food dollars.

I think leftovers are wonderful. I often double a recipe I’m making for dinner and we eat it two nights in a row. My husband doesn’t mind (he loves home cooking), and it means I only have to reheat dinner the next night instead of making something from scratch. Since I work at home, I’m always looking for easy, economical ways to make dinner, and leftovers fill the bill.

Yesterday we had a wonderful rump roast with mashed potatoes and peas for dinner. Afterwards, there were no veggies left over but quite a bit of roast. So I cubed the leftover roast, added the drippings, and put the cubes in the fridge.

Tonight I nuked some potatoes, then sliced them and fried them in a little oil with some leftover onion slices. I added half of the beef cubes and stir-fried them until they were hot. Topped with Trader Joe’s organic ketchup, it was a delicious dinner.

I put the rest of the beef cubes into the freezer. The next time I make noodle soup, I’ll toss them in, along with any leftover celery, carrots or onion I may have sitting in the fridge at that time.

I do that a lot with meat. If I’m oven-frying chicken pieces, I like to cook extra (the family packs are always a better price anyways) and freeze the uneaten chicken after stripping it off the bones. Then it just waits in the freezer to be added to soup or chicken tortellini salad.

Sometimes I forget what I have left over in the fridge. I used to be afraid to use old leftovers because I wasn’t sure just how old they were. But I got in the habit of writing down menus ahead of time, and now I just look at the calendar to see which day we had the pork chops, or whatever. I’m pretty strict about leftovers; once they’re four days old, I’m afraid of them. So I make a real effort to use them up before the fourth day.

Often, I find weird odds and ends in the fridge and wonder how to combine them. An omelette serves this purpose pretty well. All sorts of veggies or meat taste good in a cheese omelette. A little leftover cheese is good in muffins or bread. A couple of lonely hot dogs can be sliced and stirred into a pan of homemade cornbread. Mmmm….there’s never any leftovers of that stuff!

On the rare occasions when we go out to eat, we always bring the leftover part of our dinner home with us. Restaurant portions are so huge these days that you can’t finish dinner anyway, but they taste even better as the next day’s lunch. I’m not embarrassed to ask for a take-home box. If anyone who sees me with it thinks I must be cheap or tacky, that’s only fair, because I think people like that are stuck-up and very likely not debt-free like we are.  ;)

Whether your leftovers come from the fridge, the freezer or the restaurant, the most important thing to remember about leftovers is that they’re like money…if you lose track of them, it costs you. Leftovers can really stretch your food dollar by making sure you don’t waste anything.