Valentine's Day Menus

I'll be cooking 2 meals for Valentine's Day this year, brunch and dinner. If family wants to snack in between meals, that's up to them. 

I'm trying to use what we have on hand as much as possible. I went shopping this morning for the remaining items, but overall didn't spend all that much additionally. Here are the menus:

Heart-shaped waffles -- I bought a waffle iron at Value Village (thrift store) last July for $5.59. 

Brunch

egg, pepper, onion, cheese, sausage casserole (using frozen eggs, a frozen onion/pepper medley leftover from Christmas brunch, cheese we already have, and 2 sausage links from the freezer, diced)

scratch waffles (maybe no-egg ones)

canned pears (from the pantry, need using)

orange juice (from frozen concentrate. I did have to buy the oj this week.)

bacon (from the freezer, leftover from Christmas brunch)

coffee, tea, cocoa, milk

Dinner

beef fillet (from the freezer)

chicken Cordon Bleu (2 ready-to-cook servings from the freezer, leftover from birthday dinner last year)

sautéed fresh green beans and garlic (I did have to buy the green beans)

baked potatoes (Again, I did have to buy the potatoes)

scratch cherry pie (our tree cherries, pitted and frozen)

We had some leftovers from Christmas Day brunch, an entire unopened package of bacon and about 1/3 of a bag of frozen peppers and onions. 

With the dinner's beef and chicken, since there are about 6 servings total, after cooking I'll slice each up, and we can all enjoy some of both. I tried to make dinner as stress-free as possible. After all, it's my Valentine's too. 

For both of the meals, I only needed to buy 1 can of orange juice concentrate, almost a pound of fresh green beans, and some potatoes. The rest we had on hand, which I think is pretty good considering I haven't been doing that much grocery shopping for over a month now.

How about for your household? Will you be cooking any special meals for Valentine's Day? Will you be dining out on or near the holiday? Is Valentine's Day irrelevant for you? 

And this is why we save . . .

This morning we woke up to a cold house and a bad electrical smell. The blower motor was stalling and eventually shut the furnace down completely. The bad smell was the motor as it was trying to restart itself.  My husband called the furnace repair company at 6 and left a message. We must've been the first to call in this morning, as just after 8 AM the repair guy knocked on our front door.

While the repair guy was working on our furnace, we did our best to stay warm, using 2 1/2 space heaters, the electric fireplace in the living room (that serves as a heat source), and the stove in the kitchen. I got the cast iron griddle going and made a batch of no-egg pancakes and a small pot of brown sugar syrup. I also kept a kettle of water heating instead of using the microwave to heat tea water. Between the griddle, the syrup heating, and the tea kettle, the kitchen wasn't too bad.

I said we have 2  1/2 space heaters. The 1/2 heater is a small desktop heater. We used that to keep a bathroom warm. The other 2 portable electric heaters kept the downstairs warm enough, while their heat rose toward the upstairs bedrooms.

This is perhaps one of the worst weeks of the year to have the furnace go out on us. The lows are in the 20s overnight and highs are in the 30s. Homes in this area are not as well insulated as homes in regions that routinely have very cold winter weather. So the house cools down very quickly.

The repair guy worked for close to two hours. He has it barely working again, with the warning that it won't last more than a couple of days. It needs a new blower motor, which is a factory-ordered part and would take 60 days to receive, not to mention its very hefty price tag. Our furnace is old and has a few other issues that will fail sooner rather than later. It sounds like the cost of all of these repairs would just about equal the cost of a new furnace.

So, the furnace sales person will be out in the morning to advise us on what would work for our house that can be installed as soon as possible.

If you're keeping track, this has been a very expensive year for my family, new roof, new car, laundry and oven repairs, my dental/medical bills, and now a new furnace. We'd been saving for a new furnace for several years. So this is something we're prepared for. We could have splurged on many luxuries along the way -- taken extravagant vacations, gone out to eat in nice restaurants, bought chic new clothing for ourselves, and/or driven the latest and greatest cars. Instead, for all of these 38 years, we've prioritized saving for rainy days. And the rainy days all came in just over a year's time. It took my husband and I all of 5 seconds to say yes to replacing the furnace. 

Having the necessary funds to cover our emergencies is about the best worldly luxury we could have.

There's no escaping rainy days. They happen to all of us. Having an umbrella and boots at the ready makes the rainstorm a little less stressful.