Sacred Mundane: The Blog

I caught wind of this deal from FrugalLivingNW and I switched it up a bit for a wholefoods/healthy version, but it’s a steal of a deal no matter what.  Consider this your opportunity to stock up on all things orange!

If you’ve never done Safeway Delivery, now’s the time!  Just head to Safeway‘s online store.  Here’s what I bought, all of which are super deals:

• Garnet/Beauregard yams $.49/lb. (20 lbs.) (on the “clean 15” list of items you do not need to buy organic)
• 5lb. box Satsuma Mandarins $3.99 (2) (no need to buy organic, unless you eat the peel!)
• 2 lb. brick Tillamook medium cheddar $3.99 (6)
• 5lb. bag of Organic carrots ($4.39) (2)

Total $50.50 (order must be $50 or more), then enter promo code CJSAVINGS and it’ll take $15 off your order.   These are already fabulous prices on these items, for an additional 30% off ( $35.50 total, plus free delivery to your doorstep!!) is great. I scheduled mine to deliver on Wednesday so we’ll have fresh yams, carrots and mandarins for Thanksgiving day.   Yes, 6 blocks of cheese is a lot. But this is a great price on Tillamook cheese, which my family loves, and the “best by” date is August 2011 so we’ll have plenty of time to enjoy it. And yes, that is a lot yams and carrots, so here are some of the ways we use them.  This is a healthy bunch of delicious orange foods! Just what we need for cold and flu season!

Ways with Yams

• Roasted Yams are possibly the perfect food. SOOO delicious I have to only make a few at a time or I’ll eat them all. My kids love ’em too because they’re so sweet. But you have to cook them right:
  • Peel, rinse, and slice lengthwise.  Place on piece of foil, 1-2 on each piece of foil. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and fresh ground pepper. Wrap up into little foil packets.  Bake at 350 degrees for at least an hour.  They’re even better if after an hour you just turn off the oven and let them sit in there and soak for a bit.  It takes a long time to really bring out the sweetness and the olive oil and natural sugar from the yams carmelizes.  I eat them straight from the foil packets, or cut for the kids or mashed, or mixed into chili (yams taste delicious in mexican food).
• Puree. Yams are perfect for sneaking veggies into other food.  You can peel, boil, then puree with a potato masher right in the water.  Add to melted cheese for a delicious nacho dip, add to toasted cheese sandwiches or quesadillas for the kids, add to macaroni and cheese to veggie power, add to pancakes for a delicious change.  Pretty much anything with cheese in it can benefit from yams.
• Yam, parmesan & toasted pine-nut pasta. This recipe is SO good and easy.
  • Make 4 roasted yams (above)
  • Boil 1 lb. whole wheat pasta
  • Drizzle Olive oil in pan and add pine nuts, sauteeing until toasted (pine nuts are optional, it’s still super tasty without), then remove and add garlic, chopped onion or leeks, and either fresh oregano or sage (either is great, or if you don’t have fresh just use whatever italian herbs you have on hand).  Cook until soft, add pine nuts back, and mix that and yams all with the pasta, then add 1 cup grated parmesan cheese over the top and mix together. Yum!

Ways with Carrots

• Roasted Carrots. Follow exact same process as with yams.  Also delicious! Heidi devours these.
• Carrots sticks. (obvious) Peel ’em, slice ’em up, and have a big tupperware of them (in water) in the fridge. If they’re there, you’ll eat them!
• Puree. Follow exact same process as with yams. Great mix-in for chili, pancakes, soup (you can hide a LOT of carrot puree in most soups, it blends right in and you don’t even know it’s there) and, our personal favorite, applesauce. I put carrot puree in all our homemade applesauce and you can’t even see it.
• I pretty much just put carrots in any meal I make, unless it’s ridiculous.  They’re so healthy and so cheap, why not? Here’s to orange food!  Enjoy!

Know any other yam and carrot uses? Please share…  Here’s to delicious orange food!

I could have sworn that I used to be fun.  I wonder if I’m alone in this. Do you ever look at your life and think, “Huh, I could have sworn I used to be a real kick in the pants. Now I’m like a well-oiled machine: Efficient, effective, productive … but about as much fun as dirty laundry.”

Maybe it’s growing up, maybe it’s responsibility, maybe its being in ministry, maybe it’s having kids, I don’t know. But I know that while I would likely get high marks in frugality, efficiency, nutrition, organization and being conscientious and responsible, I feel like my fun-report-card is scraping by with a D-.  Remedy? I need to re-learn how to be fun!!

And what better way than by having fun with my kids and wonderful husband?  Today was the last day of Bible study for the season, and, incidentally, my last teaching engagement of the year. In fact, I do not have a single teaching assignment on my calendar.  And as much as I love teaching, it is wonderful to have nothing on my mind but snuggling up with my kiddos and re-learning how to add a little fun to our days.

So I shared in the last post that we are looking for creative traditions for the holidays and ways to spice up life at home.  Now, let’s be clear about something. I am a beginner in this area, ok?  To save you some disappointment, please do not expect any Martha Stewart craftiness or ingeniously creative new ideas.  I’m basically just trying to quit being a remedial mom and at least get a passing grade. So if any of these ideas are helpful, awesome.  But if the only thing you glean from these posts is that you feel really good about yourself in comparison to me, awesome. 🙂

Jumping in the Leaves

Yeah, so jumping in the leaves is nothing new, I understand that. But I just confess that my mind has been so preoccupied with other things that I just don’t think about taking the kids down the street and finding the biggest piles of leaves that we can.  So we trotted down the street today and collected leaves. We meandered, wandered.  When I usually take the kids out I confess I usually want to get “my” exercise, so I toss the kids in the stroller and huff and puff my way up the hills.  Not today. Today we picked up leaves and bugs and spent almost an hour digging up “dinosaur bones” along the walking trail.  We found a huge pile of leaves and after running and jumping, Dutch scooped up a huge pile, and with that sheepish grin, proceeded to dump the whole pile on Heidi’s head. I drew a deep breath, waiting for the cry, prepping myself to scold him. To my surprise, Heidi starting laughing hysterically.  Huge belly-laughs. And she proceeded to grab an equally huge scoop and dump it on his head.  The hysterical leaf fight was on, and they threw those leaves back and forth, up in the air, on each other’s heads, running and jumping and laughing, until they were both soaking wet and Heidi’s cream fur coat was spotted with dirt (I reminded myself that we had plenty of Shout spray at home).  We came home exhausted, and I realized, “Hey, we just have fun!  Woohoo!”

Play-dough

Yes, you must be really feeling good about yourself right about now, now that you know I have never made homemade play-dough with my kids. But we did today!   The kids got on chairs and we used the Kitchen-Aid and mixed up a batch of bright blue play-dough, and the kids played and played and played. Dutch played for almost 2 hours with that stuff. Who knew that the kid loves play-dough?!

Heidi’s Day

So the most fun new tradition I’m excited about is so incredibly simple, but that’s why I love it.  We each get a day. Whatever the day of our birthday is (February 16th, for example), that number day of each month is your day.  On “your day” you get to pick out what we have for dinner and the rest of the family does special things for you all day long.  Doesn’t that sound fun? I’d love to have a day just for me once a month! So today was Heidi’s day, which was pretty simple since she doesn’t have  a clue. But a friend brought us some fresh-baked pumpkin bread so we had “cake” to celebrate Heidi’s special day. Tomorrow is Jeff’s special day and he has requested Crepes for dinner…yum!  Of course for my special day I will be choosing a dinner that I don’t cook! It’s just fun to have an excuse to celebrate each family member once a month. I’d also like to incorporate in our sponsored children from Africa.  We could write them letters and send them a little something on “their day” and tell them our family tradition and tell them that we celebrate them on that day!

The other part of this is that on the number day of our anniversary (28th for us), that will be OUR day, and the day of our monthly date.  At this season of life it’s not realistic to actually go out on a date every week, so once a month is a great goal and with a number day in mind it’ll help us stick to it.  We obviously haven’t done this one yet, but we could do all sorts of fun special little things to add some romance to our special monthly anniversary day.

So, these may not be huge things, but they are little steps of fun that have already blessed our family so richly.  I am so excited for “Jeff’s day” tomorrow, and excited to continue in this journey of re-learning to be fun.  And to all of you fun moms out there (and those re-learning fun along with me), please pass along your wisdom and ideas!

Thanks,

Kari