Doins In My World Lately

I've been doing a lot of crafting, and a lot of pinteresting which is uncharacteristic of me. Some of my more recent projects are shopping tote bags.

This pattern is called the Fat Sack by Terry Atkinson. It's a little fussy, but nice, sturdy and big. It takes about a yard of fabric and I've made 2 and have 4 more in progress.

I've also been making wreaths. I've discovered different supplies at DollarTree and Dollar General and I've been going to town.

This wreath is still in progress and uses cut up pieces of plastic tablecloth tied to a wire wreath. Julian has proclaimed it the worst craft ever and tedious af. lol

This clothespin wreath was an experiment and is not very structurally sound. I'm either going to have to find better glue or a better method.

I've also been crocheting on 2 projects. One project is called Lily Pond and is a crochet a long from 2015. It's very intensely complicated and has a lot of techniques I'm not familiar with but I'm plugging along. I am on the second set of blocks. It will be beautiful when finished! I've already started planning my next afghan. It's called Floral Dreams. I'm also working on a cardigan I designed and don't have a picture of because it looks really boring right now. I plan to embroider all over it. It's in my favorite crochet technique, Tunisian crochet. I have not done much, if any, embroidery in my life, and now I'm planning a large project. That's the way of the my family. haha.

Last but not least is my oatmeal can craft. This is way out of character for me but was fun! I have put my paintbrushes in it. Organization is fun for me and pretty organization is a bonus.

Food Prep for our Household

I know there's a million and two blogs on food prep, but this one is how we do it. We have come to food prepping over the last year as our household's needs have changed. Julian had gallbladder surgery almost 2 years ago and is unable to tolerate a lot of fat, and I'm in the process of losing a lot of weight (55lbs so far) so the food prep in our house is guided by our nutritional needs. Colter, my husband, is able to eat just about anything, luckily. As I have mentioned before, we are low income, and thus don't buy very much fresh produce, onions, potatoes and carrots, occasionally celery about covers it. We buy frozen vegetables in quantity, as well as frozen fruit. Buying frozen produce fits our budget and our eating habits. We focus on lean proteins. I buy 90% lean hamburger meat, pork loins, pork chops, whole chickens and chicken breasts.

We used to cook every other day, but it didn't always get done, nobody wanted to cook, nobody wanted to eat whatever we were cooking on the fly and we were eating too much pasta.  I have rebelled against food prep in the past because all you see online is the pretty little containers with a day's food in them and I knew that wasn't going to work for us. Finally, I decided to make food prep work FOR us. Julian eats about 6 meals per day and I eat 3. Colter eats sporadically and has other things that he eats outside of the food prep foods. I needed a quantity of food each week. First, I involved Colter and Julian. I made a mutual pinterest board and we pinned things and looked at them to see if they would work for our house, which is an ongoing process.

Each week we average 5-6 lbs of hamburger meat, a whole chicken/pack of chicken breasts, less hamburger if we are also cooking pork chops or loin.  I also prepare a dozen eggs with a package of frozen veggies every 4-5 days for my breakfasts. For Julian's breakfast we can steel cut oats so he can dump and heat. If we are using a whole chicken, I make stock with the chicken and bones, and then use the chicken in the casserole. We have 4 big containers that we put casseroles and meat mixes in. Popular around here are a burrito bowl (taco bowl type thing), goulash, meatloaf and sometimes a pasta bake with meat sauce.

I like routine, so cooking variations on a theme helps me out shopping too. I rarely go to the store with a specific list. I buy the same things over and over again, mostly shopping around the edges of the store with a foray into the baking aisle for flour and sugar, and into the frozen department for veggies and fruit. 

I have very strong beliefs about cooking whole, unprocessed food. Julian and I do not eat very much processed food at all and it meets our nutritional needs. I'm so irritated with the sugar content in commercial bread, I'm embarking on making all of our own bread. I call Wal-Mart whole wheat bread, brown sugar bread, because brown sugar is the third ingredient! I also have cut out high fructose corn syrup from my diet, based on my research it is very harmful to your body and sugar levels. 

However you choose to meal prep, it has to work for you and your household. There's more ways than the pretty little bento boxes on pinterest. I do keep track of what we're cooking week to week so I can see trends, and when we get tired of something, we look for a replacement meal and test it out.

Good Luck on Meal Prepping!

Taryn

Reusable Household Items

We have been making the transition to reusable household items. I've long had a problem with paper towels, but in the last year or so, I've really been noticing how much money we spend on stuff to THROW IN THE TRASH. I really noticed this with paper towels and zip top bags in particular. With the current state of affairs with the coronavirus, I have almost fully made the transition with my household away from paper towels. This was made easier by the impossibility of finding them in the stores. We have a decent set of kitchen towels, maybe about 15, and we have a basket by the washer for dirty ones. I looked on pinterest and there are many versions of reusable paper towels. Some even in the rolled form of paper towels, snapped or velcroed together.

Unpaper Towel Tutorial by A Blossoming Life

But if you're not attached to rolling them up, any sort of kitchen towels will work, it just takes a collection of them. We have 2 nails near the sink used to hang damp towels up after drying hands. 

The area that has bothered me the most has been our prolific use of zip top bags. We use them for food storage, marinating and stuff storage and organization.  I have been looking for silicone zip top bags but never had the money together at one time to buy a set. Recently, for my birthday, I was gifted a set and they're amazing, I definitely will be saving my pennies to buy a big set. 

There are many more items on my pinterest board I'm interested in, oilcloth bowl covers, shopping bags and washable sponges to name a few. With each idea I weigh the economic impact to our household. We aim to be as self sufficient as possible, and I recognize that I'm lucky I can sew, crochet and knit.  I am not transitioning to reusable items for any specific impact on the environment exactly, I just think that if we were using more reusable products the economic impact, especially on low income families like mine, would be beneficial.  My son and husband drew the line at reusable trash bags though ;)

If we convert fully to reusable bags and don't use paper towels, our household savings will be $250 per year!

I'm sure I'll write more on this topic.

Taryn

Introduction

Hi, I'm Taryn. I live in Central Texas near Austin in a very small town. I grew up in and around this town visiting my grandparents so it's familiar. I'm 42, have 2 sons, Blaise is 20 and Julian is 19. I have a husband, Colter, who is the absolute love of my life. We were high school sweethearts and broke up when he went to the Army and I went wild in college. He left the Army and I never finished college and here we are, married happily for almost 3 years. I've lived a lot of my adult life with privilege I didn't realize I had, and quite frankly, thought I deserved.  Colter is from a different walk of life and has opened my eyes to a lot of issues that I never left my house enough to notice, wasn't a problem in the area I lived and I didn't ever worry about. Issues such as homelessness, food insecurity among people with jobs, full-time jobs even, addiction and addiction recovery, the disparity of living conditions among the people of our country and on and on. What this has turned into, within me, is a fascination and need to be as self-sufficient as possible. Right now, we are not, except in a small way. I have major goals in this area, huge garden, canning, livestock raising and slaughtering and all the things that go with a homestead life, which we don't have yet. What we have right now is a small container garden, in a borrowed back yard, forays into canning, waterbath only so far, weekly meal prep with whole, unprocessed food and my hatred for paper towels.  Welcome to my world.