Day 13 of 31 Days of Pinterest

Lucky Number 13 today. I was delighted to come across this pin from this blog post I have told myself for years I really need to start once a month cooking, or even once a week cooking would be nice. I even bought myself a nice deep freeze. Let me tell you what occupies my deep freeze, Popsicles, bags of ice and frozen veggies. Such a waste. The idea of OAMC is daunting to me. I promised myself I would read a bunch on how to do it and I will start it in the beginning of June so I can enjoy the summer with my girlies. This blogger made it sound so doable she did a fantastic job showing how she prepared for this. I was surprised at the savings she had even with "shopping" in her own pantry first. Their are tons of recipes out their for this type of cooking she listed the ones she used and she had a cooking partner which is a fantastic idea. Id love to get a local friend in on this with me when I take the first steps into doing this.  I can't wait to give this a whirl using my own recipes.

So tell me, what is in your freezer! and do share your favorite freezer cooking tips, this mama needs all the help she can get... thank goodness I married a chef!

Snack system

I sometimes dream of going back in time and never introducing the idea or the word "snack" into my children's vocabulary. Its treated as a entitlement anymore and they feel its something that should have no limit. I have tried a few systems to monitor snacks and most of them have failed. Yes, partly my fault for not keeping on top of it feeling like a mean mom for not indulging their hunger pains and the futile attempts of claiming "starving children in Africa....." You get the jest of it. Now what started happening more recently after I was down and out after gallbladder surgery is that I just answered "yes" when ever a snack request was made. Yes, again my fault I didn't want to deal with tantrums or being bothered much with requests. Then, a day or two later I would hear "we don't have anything to eat" then, I was puzzled but I just bought two 18 packs of granola bars, 8 cracker packs, 2 bags of grapes...etc. and its all gone...yep. Lord help me! what I saw in my head as two weeks of snacks where gone in two days. Now with 4 kids with their hand in the cookie jar so to speak I have learned to expect things like 1 pint of strawberries equals 1 snack, or a bag of apples will last 2.5 snacks (assuming its a bag of 10) So my solution (while time consuming to a degree is this)
you get 2 snacks per day. period. no exceptions. (well one exception which i will explain)