Cheap & Cheerful Suppers for Mid-May

Friday

• pork fried rice, using leftover pork roast, carrots, cabbage, asparagus and onions, plus brown rice
• scratch vanilla pudding

Saturday (husband cooks)

• black bean tacos, using kale in place of lettuce, and canned tomatoes in place of fresh
• carrot sticks

Sunday (husband cooks)

• tomato-vegetable soup
• homemade breadsticks
• leftover Boston Cream Pie (daughter made this early in the day to have at lunch)

Monday

• leftover soup
• leftover breadsticks
• leftover vanilla pudding

Tuesday

• leftover soup
• grilled cheese sandwiches
• leftover cake

Wednesday

• whole wheat penne with bolognese (a fancy name for basically spaghetti, right?)
• broccoli
• (I had my bolognese over the last of the asparagus, then had a potato on the side)

Thursday

• homemade pizza (brown rice, topped with pizza sauce for me)
• cole slaw

I'm cooking a separate dinner for myself each evening. I am temporarily "off" gluten and dairy. (The bloating and pain went away overnight; sadly, the abdominal fat did not.) So, while I make these meals for the rest of the fam, I microwave myself a potato, scramble an egg, fry some turkey bacon, slather apple wedges with peanut butter, top chopped celery with egg salad, and heat veggies. It's all working out well for me, in some ways better than usual as I can eat only when I'm hungry and not feel I need to eat as much as I serve everyone else. It's also a good excuse to eat bacon. ;-) All of the weeknight dinners have been simple ones, which makes everything super easy for me.

How about you? Anything interesting on your menu this past week? Any outdoor plans for this weekend? Is the weather expected to be nice where you live, this next week? I am volunteering in my once-per-month job with a charity luncheon, tomorrow, and hopefully seeing my daughter in a performance in the evening. It should be a busy day for me.

Have a great weekend!

My Own Piece of Victorian History

This is one of my great great grandmother's irons. She had two irons that I know of. I always wondered why she would need two irons, after all, my own mother had just one iron and that was completely satisfactory.

Watching Victorian Slum House this week filled in the blanks for me. My great great grandmother had two irons, so that on ironing day, she could keep one on the stove at all times, and have a hot one to work with for afternoon without wasting time waiting for an iron to heat up.

Words of wisdom from one of the children in the Slum House, "every penny counts when you're in Victorian times because it could be the one penny that gets you your meal." This child was telling jokes on a street corner in London, for a penny a joke. She described the work as embarrassing, but she was willing to do this for the benefit of her family.

We're obviously far removed from needing to take on humiliating or back-breaking work to feed our families, or request any of this of our children. So, it is difficult to imagine this life.

If there is a lesson to be learned from this show, for me personally, it is to work hard whenever there is opportunity, plan for tomorrow, because one never knows what difficulties may lie around the corner, to appreciate the blessings that I have today, and to be compassionate with someone who has less than myself.

How about you? What have been your thoughts on this show, if you've been following? And I'm guessing that I'm not the only one who owns one of these old irons. I see them in vintage and antique shops frequently, so there must be many of them out there. Do you have one, too? What do you use yours for? Mine is a book end for some of my cookbooks.