Sunday, January 28, 2018

Cleaning/Downsizing

I can hardly believe it's already the end of January. I don't know what happened to the month. I haven't really been posting because we mostly spent our energy cleaning and downsizing.

We had a friend from out of town come stay with us for a weekend so we spent the first two weeks of the month cleaning and dusting for that visit. Even when our rooms were tidy, they were so dusty that they were filthy. We spent at least a couple days wiping everything down with damp rags to remove the dust buildup. While cleaning the house was sort of unfun, we have really enjoyed having it clean the two weeks since.

We are trying to arrange our schedules so we maintain it a little better. Once upon a time, we had a bi-weekly maid, but we can't afford that anymore. So we are now trying to schedule a once-a-week cleaning (by us) of one of the floors, i.e. main floor, upstairs or basement. Our hope is by alternating each week through the different levels we manage to keep the house from getting so filthy again.

This past week we worked upstairs. Since we'd just cleaned for the visit, we were able to focus on another long-neglected activity. It only took us 8 years, but we finally hung some art in the guest room.

Monday, January 1, 2018

Menu Planning

Happy 2018!! I hope you all enjoyed your holidays.

We are currently revamping our menu-planning and cooking habits. We actually started a couple weeks ago, but I'm just now getting around to blogging about it.

We had fallen into some pretty bad habits food-wise; we were eating way too much junk food. So, Jeff is back cooking regularly again. I've been spending a fair amount of time doing menu planning to utilize the food from Jeff's pantry system and incorporate the canned food we have in the pantry and the produce we're getting from the food deliveries. I turned weekly deliveries of Organics to You back on starting today. This is our first Organics to You delivery of 2018.
I've created the menu spreadsheet in Google Sheets because Jeff can reference it on his computer or his smart phone and he can click on the links for the suggested recipes. I also made a second sheet for tracking the shopping list. I'm enjoying the menu research again because it distracts me from doing stupid things like online shopping.

I have really enjoyed the Allrecipes website because it allows you to look up recipes by ingredients, which is really helpful when you're looking for something to use up specific pantry items.

Next weekend, we'll be picking up 25 pounds of meat from Deck Family Farms. They have a deal where you buy two 25-pound boxes and pick them up on different dates. We usually pick up one box, use it up, then get the second box. They usually have a booth at our local farmer's market, which is part of the reason we buy from them.

Activity at Jeff's food blog should pick up again as he gets back to cooking.