My Week -- More Exhausted Than I Thought

Hi friends!

I hope you all had a good couple of weeks. I didn't post last Friday because I was simply wiped out. Thanksgiving preparations and execution did me in. I thought I'd recover by the end of the weekend. But this time, I was wrong. I'm just now getting myself back together. The foggy headedness has lifted and I'm pulling out of a funk. So, anyway, here I am with a somewhat brief post.

Our Thanksgiving

My son and daughter-in-law joined us. This was the first time we'd seen the two of them since early July. So we made the most of our time together. We were also celebrating their birthdays which were earlier in the month. The weather was just dry enough to sit around a fire outside on the patio while they opened birthday gifts, then we came inside. Still being cautious, we ate at separate tables inside. Our house is about 40 feet from the front wall to the back wall. The family room and dining room both have large doorways, separated by a hallway, and spanning the 40 feet front to back. So, I was able to set up two tables, one pushed up against the family room window and the other pushed up against the dining room window. I'd say we were about 30 feet apart the whole time we were enjoying the Thanksgiving dinner. I had two sets of serving dishes for each table instead of our usual buffet set-up. I even set up a small dessert table adjacent to each dining table. This separated dining kept us well-distanced while we were all eating and had masks off. After dinner we put our masks back on while talking together.

Our Menu

I roasted a turkey and made 5 side dishes, a relish and crudité tray, and two types of pie. Here's the whole list: roast turkey, rice pilaf, Italian mac and cheese, roasted carrots, purple potatoes and garden Brussel sprouts, a green bean casserole, a sweet potato casserole, tray of homemade watermelon pickles, cranberry sauce, celery sticks and olives, pecan pie, and pumpkin pie. No rolls or stuffing this year. Both my daughter-in-law and I are currently minimizing wheat and/or gluten. I tried to make everyone's favorites while steering clear of obvious dietary no-no's. It was all delicious and provided lots of leftovers for the rest of the weekend.

This week I've been moving more in the Christmas direction, doing some online shopping, putting up some decorations, and planning my Christmas cooking and baking.

We have a large shrub (just off the driveway in the front of the house) that we decorate every year. It's conical and looks a bit like a Christmas tree. Some of these ornaments we picked up from free piles over last spring and summer and some we bought a year ago. In between rainstorms one daughter and I got outside to put these decorations and lights on.

While decorating indoors I played free Christmas music using Spotify and made myself more peppermint mochas. Budget holidays.

Indoor Vegetable Gardening

All last month I shared with you how our radishes were doing. This week I thought I'd show you how the indoor lettuce looks. It's growing nicely and will hopefully provide part of a tossed salad on Christmas Day. I also have kale and spinach growing indoors right now, plus my tomato plant (grown indoors from a cutting) has blossoms on it!

Other Stuff

Last Friday we had our usual pizza and movie night. I made a pepperoni pizza and we watched The Bishop's Wife (1947). I found the movie on Pluto TV for free (has commercials). We really enjoyed the movie. It was highly rated as a classic Christmas movie, despite its rather lackluster title. 

I didn't record our meals this past week but I recall we had turkey leftovers, a really good turkey and pumpkin soup, a couple of yummy pasta dishes, and scrambled eggs -- all home cooked. I also made a couple of salads from indoor, home-grown veggies. Aside from the Thanksgiving meal, I didn't bake much this past week. Just too tired. I did bake 1 large loaf of French bread and a pan of cornbread, but no extra treats.

Looking forward to Christmas Day plans, we're thinking we'll do our holiday meal with our son and daughter-in-law similarly to our Thanksgiving, with separated tables for the meal and wearing masks while opening gifts. I look forward to a time when we can actually eat in the same room again. You know, everyone has different levels of what feels "safe". I'd guess that my family is on the very cautious side.I'm also doing practically all of my Christmas shopping online to be shipped or curbside pick-up. This means I miss out on a couple of stellar deals. But I also think not being in the stores prevents me from making impulse purchases.

Do you have special foods that you make for the holidays? I've been thinking through my usual list of treats and decided on caramel nut bars, gingerbread men, frosted sugar cookies (special request from one daughter), almond crèche bread (sweet bread filled with almond filling and folded to look like swaddling), chocolate dipped dried apricots, and peppermint bark. I give a selection of these goodies to my son and daughter-in-law each year so they can enjoy the holiday baking, too. For our Christmas Day meals, I think we'll go with a brunch again, as brunches feel easier to me than big dinners, and our standard homemade pizza dinner.

I know I've been mostly absent from my blog this fall. Life became exhausting for me. I continue to work on building my energy levels. The good news is I think I may be popping in here a bit more often this month. I hope you all had a wonderful couple of weeks. Are you in full-swing holiday mode yet, or is that yet to come for you?

Have a wonderful weekend, friends!

My Week: A New Toy, Tree's Off the Roof and Domestic Duties

Hi friends. How was your week?

I mentioned last week that I'd ordered another light garden for starting seeds indoors. This was a birthday gift for 2020 and 2021 plus a Christmas gift for 2020. I had put off ordering something for my gifts for those occasions, telling my husband not to buy me anything, instead I wanted to choose something. I had thought I'd be buying some clothing. But had another idea. I decided to buy something that could be useful for my job here.I really couldn't get all of the seeds started that I wanted, nor did I have the luxury of letting seedlings grow until larger indoors before setting out in the slug-infested cool late winter/early spring garden. With this light set-up, I can now start as many seeds as I like and not feel like I'm rushing any of them before planting. And since I'd decided on this as my big gift for those 3 occasions, I also thought it would be a good idea to order it now and use it over winter to grow vegetables for the table indoors. My light garden arrived Friday morning. Yay! It came in 115 pieces. Boo! The website said "some assembly required." This wasn't "some assembly," this was "all assembly!" Anyway, it was a long 4 hours putting this thing together. The end result is an attractive and very functional unit for starting and growing a gazillion seeds each spring. I immediately filled 6 containers with soil and started some spinach seeds, 7 seeds per container. By mid-week, several of the seeds had sprouted already. I'm looking forward to spinach salads in another month to 6 weeks. On Friday, I also moved some struggling kale and lettuce potted plants under the lights, as well as my tomato plant that I grew from a cutting.

Friday evening was pizza and movie night again. It was Grace's turn to choose the movie and she chose an Australian animated film from 1972, Marco Polo, Jr. Versus the Red Dragon. We were able to stream it for free through our library's Kanopy streaming service. The film was entertaining and family-friendly -- a good choice.

Saturday was the day the tree guy came over. He went up on the roof and cut the tree into long lengths then moved them off the roof with a rope. Once the long pieces of trunk were down, he cut them into fireplace lengths for us to split in the future. The logs did some damage to our garden, but overall things look okay. After he left, my husband went up on the roof to put temporary patches in place. We have 2 holes in the roof that will need professional repairs. The good news is the holes are on the small side (could have been much worse) and the leaking was into attic space and not living space. While my husband put patches into place, I began the clean-up below, dragging branches to a mulch area and the logs to a place where we can split them. I worked until the sun went down then headed inside to make dinner. This was a tiring day.

Sunday is my day to recover. After church in the morning, I just do whatever I feel like for the afternoon. I went for a 3-mile walk, baked a large loaf of French bread, and puttered in the house and garden. On my walk I noticed more than a couple of houses have. Christmas decorations up, including Christmas trees in their living rooms. We're not to that point in the season yet. I'm still working on a couple of birthdays for this month, then I'll move on to Christmas decorations. 

I have been in the mood for some holiday cheer in my beverages, however. You know that I prefer to make treats instead of buying them. Doing so saves money and allows me to tailor the treats to what works for my health. One of my favorite Christmas-y treats are peppermint mochas. If I buy one at Starbucks, it'll cost over $4 for a short. I can buy a 2-pack of peppermint oil for baking for about $4, regular price (even less if using a coupon). A 2-pack of peppermint oil will make dozens of cups of peppermint mochas. These little vials contain 1 dram each. There are approximately 57 drops per dram of oil. I use 1 drop per small peppermint mocha. So, each mocha costs me about 3 cents in peppermint oil, about 3 cents of cocoa powder (184 teaspoons in 1 pound of cocoa powder), 5 cents in sweetening, 10 cents in coffee, and optional 10 cents in heavy cream when I have it, for a total of 21 to 31 cents for a homemade peppermint mocha. (If I could have regular milk, this would be even cheaper. I can, however, have heavy cream in my mochas. The sacrifices I make for my health. . .) $4 vs. 31 cents -- Starbucks has a racket going on.

I've been tackling my fall housecleaning in small chunks this year. This week, I did some detailed dusting/cleaning of furniture, washed more baseboards, and cleaned up the back door area. I finally got the last of the saved seeds into envelopes for planting next year and potted some spring bulbs into 3 pots. These are bulbs that I salvaged from 2 larger pots that I repurposed into vegetable pots for this past garden season. I had taken all of the flowering bulbs out in order to add some fresh soil and plant some spinach seeds. The dried bulbs had been sitting in a bucket on the floor by the backdoor for months.

As usual, I baked a lot. I gave up on trying to keep up with the demand for French bread when baking 1 large loaf at a time. And on Tuesday I baked a double batch of French bread (uses 8 cups of flour). I hope this will hold us for a few days. I also made another batch of yogurt this week. I make yogurt about once every 3 weeks, waiting until we run out before starting the next batch.

I've noticed that we have fewer and fewer critters coming to eat in our yard these days. I saw a larger bunny on the back lawn one afternoon and a smaller bunny on the front lawn another afternoon. My small red squirrel stills come by from time to time. He's funny, territorial, and seems to have an eating spot right outside my bedroom window. He drags a pinecone about twice the size of his head up onto the deck railing, perches on the center post, and picks apart the pinecone until he's done. He's left quite a mess of pinecone bits for me to clean up. But the entertainment value of having him around is worth the extra work. I do believe that he is the one who dug out and ate several of my spring flowering bulbs this past summer. Again, I try to be generous of spirit with these creatures and forgive what they do to my plants.

My daughters had a couple of things they wanted from Walmart this week. So I piggy-backed their pick-up order and bought carrots, cabbage, celery, bananas, and pepperoni. I really appreciated that they let me add to their order and they did the pick-up. This saved me an hour of my time to get our produce this week through them. I stick to the cheap supermarket fresh produce this time of year, for the most part, with carrots, cabbage, celery, and bananas fitting that description. I still have produce from our garden and orchard and canned veggies/fruit that I can rely on for fall meals. Currently, I'm harvesting Brussel sprout leaves, kale, Swiss chard, turnips, beets, green onions, cauliflower leaves, spinach, and nasturtium leaves from the outdoor garden and radishes (and their greens) and lentil sprouts from the indoor garden. In addition, we have a ton of frozen foraged blackberries, lots of home-dried prunes, cherries, apples, and figs, some frozen rhubarb, and many jars of preserved green figs to use for fruit and lots of already harvested garden-grown carrots, potatoes, garlic, pumpkin and squash to use for vegetables. Considering my grocery purchases of produce this time of year are fairly limited, we still eat quite a variety of fruits and vegetables. I can't say this enough -- having a garden is very beneficial. Even if all I had was a balcony or small patio, I think I would always try to grow some of our food.

I'll be picking up another order from Fred Meyer over the weekend to take advantage of their butter sale -- $1.77/pound (limit 5 with coupon). I also buy our milk at Fred Meyer now, as it's cheaper than Walmart and I think higher quality (always good results when making yogurt and freezes better than Walmart's milk). And I had a couple of birthday gift items I needed for my 2 family members with birthdays this month. I easily made the $35 minimum for a free pick-up.

It's been a good week, and I feel I was productive. What were the highlights of your week?

One other post this week. Read it here -- Cheap & Cheerful Meals.