Cheap & Cheerful Suppers for the Week of Labor Day Holiday

I've been feeling very tired the last month or two. Over the weekend, I asked my family members to take on some of my smaller tasks, so I could focus on my main ones. One such task was organizing the kitchen fridge. One daughter went through every container in there, freezing some items, combining same and similar items into a single container, asking family members to eat up their own leftovers, and throwing away a few spoiled foods. She also put foods that should be used up in everyday meals soon in one spot and suggested a plan for using those foods. I didn't take a before photo, but here's the after. It is such an improvement!

This same daughter will be picking vegetables for our lunches each day, too.

My other daughter agreed to bake desserts for us. She picked the blackberries and made a pie for us on Wednesday. This daughter has also said she'll bake cookies for us each week.

My husband has volunteered to clean up the kitchen in the mornings after breakfast for me and tidy up the deck and patio periodically. All of these changes have been making my week a lot less stressful. I was wearing myself out trying to fit everything in each day, Since the changes, I've had more time to make jam, syrup, and blackberry juice, as well as dig all of the garlic, start winter salad seeds, organize all of my saved seeds for next year, and put together all of the food for our Labor Day cook-out.

This year's garlic -- I hope it lasts 9 or 10 months.
I'll be replanting about 70 cloves in October for next year's harvest.

Friday

We actually didn't have a family dinner this night. I was feeling under the weather, so I went to bed early.

Saturday

bean and garden vegetable soup

scratch biscuits

fresh blackberries

Sunday

refried beans

sautéed kale

homemade flour tortillas

fresh blackberries

I was able to use all of this produce in our cook-out on Monday

Monday Cook-out

We invited our son and daughter-in-law over for the afternoon and evening. The two of them picked a couple of quarts of fresh blackberries to take home with them. We cooked out over our patio fire ring and enjoyed conversation and a star-filled sky.

I used what I could from our garden and foraged produce, as my son and daughter-in-law don't have a garden. I like to share the extra good fresh stuff with them when we can. I didn't have chocolate bars for making s'mores, so I melted chocolate chips with a bit of shortening and made semi-sweet chocolate patties on a sheet of foil, then hardened in the fridge for a couple of hours. The blackberry lemonade is juiced blackberries combined with homemade lemonade (bottled lemon juice, sugar, water).

hot dogs in homemade buns

rosemary, garlic, Parmesan and olive oil mashed potatoes

tomato, basil, cucumber, mozzarella salad

kale, apple, celery, raisin, pecan salad

blackberry lemonade

s'mores

Tuesday

ground beef, zucchini, green bean, garlic, onion sauté, served over

brown rice

fresh figs

tomato salad

Wednesday

baked beans (using up 2 almost empty ketchup bottles and some flat cola)

watermelon rind pickles

garden green beans

pasta, garden vegetable and mozzarella salad (using up some cooked pasta)

blackberry pie

Thursday

black-eyed pea, vegetable and hot dog soup

scratch cornbread

tomato and cucumber salad

leftover blackberry pie

the last serving of apple crisp baked with apples that had been knocked off the tree

I baked a double batch of hot dog buns, 2 loaves of sandwich bread, a small batch of blueberry muffins using the last of the garden blueberries, and this apple crisp to use as breakfast 2 days this week. Our breakfasts have consisted of homemade yogurt, blackberries, fresh apples, apple crisp, eggs, toast, biscuits, blueberry muffins, milk, coffee, tea, and juice. I salvaged enough fallen apples over the past month to trim bruises, then chop and fill 3 gallon sized bags of apple pieces to use in crisps this fall. I know many people eat apple crisp as a dessert. In our house, apple crisp is breakfast fare for late summer or early fall mornings. Our lunches used produce from the garden plus bread, cheese, peanut butter, raisins, eggs, rice, and blackberry lemonade.

We are now harvesting tomatoes, cucumbers, celery, zucchini and patty pan squash, green beans (pole, mainly, but a few bush beans too), lettuce, kale, carrots, spinach, nasturtiums, radish greens, garlic, blackberries, apples, figs, blueberries (the tail end), and rhubarb. When I pick celery, we use the entire rib, leaves and stem both. If I only need the stem for a salad, I save the leaves to use in something else, like soup. And I'm only cutting one rib at a time, not the whole plant like what you would buy in the store. I'm hoping to get more celery overall this way. 11 of my celery seedlings made it to the plant stage, and of those 11, only 6 really grew well.  

I hope all of your meals hit the spot this past week. What was on your menu? Do you like crisps and cobblers as breakfast foods, or are they strictly desserts in your household? It's beginning to feel a bit like fall here -- cooler mornings and the aroma of apples baking in my kitchen. Is it feeling like fall there yet?

Wishing you a wonderful weekend!

A Victim of Credit Card Fraud

Back in June, I got an alert on my credit card that a large purchase was attempted online with my number. The charge was declined (fortunately) and I canceled that card. At that time, we were in physical possession of both cards on that account, at no time previously had our cards been out of our possession, our computers are completely within our own control, we use a locked mailbox and pertinent mail had not gone missing, we had used only cash on our drive down to Arizona and back for gas and incidentals (but used our credit card for hotel stays) and basically could not figure out how someone had our number. This had happened to us about 4 years prior with a smaller charge, resulting in our canceling that number, too. 

Then last week I was going through our statement and found a charge that wasn't ours. I called the merchant and requested the charge be reversed, then called the bank to cancel that card. The charge in question was for Amazon Prime, so no physical address was used. This recent fraud was committed just 2 months after changing our account number. We've been baffled as to how our account could be compromised so quickly, especially since we've used this newest card at only a handful of locations (grocery store, utility bills, our church, 3 different online or payment sites that we've used many, many times in the past). Our bank asked us to remove any credit card information stored on online merchant sites (which we'd already done except one site for my husband). 

Obviously, I want to know how someone could have obtained our numbers. An article on CNBC news site lists the following as possible ways someone's credit card info may have been stolen:

• lost or stolen cards
• skimming card info at point of payment, such as a gas station pay at the pump
• hacking your computer
• calling about fake prizes or wire transfers
• phishing, such as fake emails
• reading the card number over your shoulder at the checkout
• stealing physical mail

None of the above possibilities fits our situation. This has been unsettling to me. It's made me want to cancel our cards and stick with only cash. Our bank has been good about quickly sending out new cards with new numbers. But I'm not sure I want this hassle going forward. It's been a couple of decades since my husband and I were cash-only people. I suppose we could manage without cards. Would you ever consider ditching credit and/or debit cards and using physical currency exclusively? Have you been the victim of credit card fraud? Were you able to pinpoint how the thief got your number?