Cheap & Cheerful Suppers for a glorious last week of September

Thursday's chicken
using this technique to cut a whole roasted chicken into individual servings

The weather has been very nice here, this week. I mentioned earlier that I spent a few hours at the beach on Saturday, just enjoying the quiet beauty of an autumn day. Then yesterday was so warm that I had the back door open for several hours.

Over the weekend -- I have a hard time remembering what we ate, as I'm not doing the weekend cooking. I do remember a cookout on Sunday, put together by one daughter. We had hot dogs, homemade buns, pasta salad, green salad, deviled eggs and s'mores.

Monday -- frittata topped with basil, Parmesan, sliced tomatoes, garlic, along with garlic toast and leftover pasta salad

Tuesday -- casserole made from leftovers, tossed green salad, pickles

Wednesday -- turkey breast (cooked, frozen), gravy (frozen), cranberry sauce, green beans, cornbread stuffing, pickles

Thursday -- rosemary roasted chicken, applesauce muffins (I had 2 empty jars from applesauce to rinse out, totaling about 1/3 cup of applesauce), acorn squash (from the garden), green peas

Tonight -- we'll have leftover roasted chicken with vegetable fried rice for a simple dinner


It was a week of heat and eat, and from scratch but humble meals. And although the weather said "summer," most of these meals felt like fall. I suspect the weather will feel more fall-like later next week.

I'm working on using foods from the freezer, like the cooked turkey breast and gravy, whole chicken, and frozen vegetables. It will soon be time to stuff my freezer with holiday specials. We're near the end of the month, so I'll be finishing up my grocery tally soon. I did get an amazing deal on milk this month, really amazing. So I also have containers of milk clogging up space in my freezer right now. But those should be used within the next 3 weeks.

How was your week? Anything special on the menu? Have a wonderful weekend!

Does anybody buy pen refills anymore?

This came up in conversation a week ago, about how we'd buy refills for our retractable ink pens and reuse the mechanical part of the pen.

I have a very specific pen that I like. The ink flows smoothly and dries very quickly. This makes for very fast writing for me. I can write my notes faster with a smooth-flowing pen, and I don't smear the page, as the ink dries so fast. I've gone through a couple of 5-packs of these pens in the last year, spending about $7 per package, or $1.40 per pen. The other day, knowing that my last of these pens was running low on ink, I thought to check for refills on Amazon. Sure enough, this pen that I use has multi-packs of refills for a substantial savings per pen. I ordered a 12-pack of refills for $10.55, or 88 cents each refill. That's about 40% off the price of a new, whole pen.

It just got me to thinking that we have become so accustomed to treating our everyday products as disposables, when some of them can be reused, refurbished, or refilled. Anyway, I slipped a refill into one of my used pens and I'm back in business. Less waste, lower cost -- that sounds good to me.

By the way, several brands of pens do make refills. If you have a favorite pen, check Amazon or Office Depot to see if refills would save you money, too.