Spinach As Finger Food



Spinach Thingies (shown cut into quarters)

 This recipe is based on Dr. Praeger's Spinach Littles, of which we're big fans. No fun shapes, but the toddler-friendly texture and flavor are similar. Any fun ideas on what to call these?

16 oz. frozen spinach, thawed and excess moisture squeezed out
1 clove garlic
1 Tbsp canola oil
4 medium potatoes
1 red onion, cut into chunks
2 egg whites*
1 Tbsp arrowroot**
1 Tbsp water
1 tsp salt

1. Peel and slice potatoes into small chunks. Boil potatoes until tender.
2. In the meantime, place onion in food processor and pulse for a few seconds. Add spinach and pulse again for a few seconds.
3. Whip potatoes until smooth in a stand mixer or with hand mixer.
4. Make a slurry by mixing the arrowroot and water in a small bowl. Set aside. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
5. In a saucepan, heat the canola oil and garlic until the garlic "speaks" (makes sizzling sound). Add the spinach/onion mixture. Then add the whipped potatoes.
6. Be sure that the bottom of the saucepan is covered with the mixture and add the egg whites (You want to avoid cooking the eggs on the bottom of the pot) and the arrowroot slurry. Stir until combined and remove from heat.
7. When the mixture has cooled enough to be handled, create patties (each about the amount that would fill an ice cream scoop) and arrange on a cookie sheet covered with cooking oil spray.
8. Bake the patties for 10 minutes (this will help the arrowroot to set).
9. To freeze, tuck the patties into aluminum foil pockets (to prevent the patties from sticking together). When they have cooled completely, place the foil pockets into a freezer bag and freeze.

On serving day, place the patties on a cookie sheet sprayed with cooking oil spray and broil on each side for approximately 5 minutes. Watch carefully to avoid burning.

*For a vegan version, use egg replacer. I'll update when I've made the recipe again with an egg replacer.
**Arrowroot will likely be in the baking aisle of your grocery store.

Here's Linus enjoying his spinach after the plate idea was abandoned:

Four Websites Worth Your Precious Mommy Time

Stonyfield Rewards - With most rewards programs, it takes forever to build up enough points to get anything. Not so with the Stonyfield program. If your family uses Stonyfield products (hello, YoBaby yogurt!), you've got to get in on this. I've already gotten a free magazine subscription, a free four-pack of YoBaby yogurt, and two free HappyBaby products.

Upromise - I didn't use Upromise for a while because I thought that since we don't do much shopping at conventional grocery stores, it wouldn't work for us. And then I discovered that they also offer online shopping savings. Savings as in "free" money going into a college fund for the babies based upon a percentage of what I spend shopping online. I downloaded the toolbar that reminds me when I'm visiting a participating site, and just with Christmas shopping, I added about $30 to their account. Yeah, it's not going to pay for a degree, but if I can save enough over the course of 18 years to pay for a semester of books, it's worth it.

Environmental Working Group's Cosmetic Database - This database has cosmetic products rated according to toxins and allergens. I'll admit to not running everything I use on myself through this database, but I certainly do for anything that goes on the babies. Just run some of your family's favorite products through it for kicks and giggles. You might be surprised.

Amazon Mom - Okay, this one isn't exactly a website, but it's definitely worth checking into. When you sign up for the program, you get 3 months of free Prime membership, which means that you get free 2-day shipping. Then for each $25 you spend on baby products, they add another month of free Prime membership, all the way up to a year (and the Terms & Conditions page says they may extend it - yippee!). As if that wasn't fantastic enough, if you do the Subscribe & Save thing on their diapers, you save 30% on diapers. Seriously. (Yes, we do cloth diapers, but I'm on an every 3 months schedule with the Amazon subscription. It works out well with any traveling, weekend excursions, nighttime diapering, etc - and having two babies. You could even do every six months.) The only catch is that you have to cancel the membership when your time is up or they'll charge you for another year of it. Eh, put a reminder on your calendar.

What about you? Any wonderful websites to share with fellow mommies?

November Challenge

I'm not big on New Year's resolutions. I'd much rather issue my calls to self-improvement throughout the year. This month I'm issuing myself a money-saving challenge. I'm going to start a price book.

Huh? What's a price book?

I came across the idea of a price book as part of the Home Management Guide found on Want What You Have as well as a strategy recommended by The Coupon Mom. A price book consists of a chart with columns for item, brand, store, quantity, cost, and unit price. It can help you save money in two ways (that I currently know of):

• Knowing which store sells the item you need at the lowest cost
• Knowing when an item is really on sale. Did you know that manufacturers pay for space in a grocery store's weekly circular? The price advertised may not actually be any lower than it normally is. It's a little retail head game.

Here is a handy-dandy template for making a price book.

Since our food shopping choices are limited by our family's food philosophy (see Our Family Food Philosophy), I think our non-food shopping is the budget area with the greatest savings potential. Therefore, I'll concentrate my efforts on getting information on non-food items.

For the next month, I'll take a notebook with me when I make a trip to the stores we frequent and make notes about the items we buy. When I've compiled some data, I'll enter it into a spreadsheet, or maybe I'll go more low-tech and print out a few copies of the template.

All of that information is going to come in quite handy for step two of this process. Step two involves a coupon database and a drugstore. But I don't want to spoil December's challenge.

10 Free or Almost-Free Things To Do Outside Your House With a Baby

1. Take Baby to the park and take pictures.
2. Take Baby to the park and put Baby in a swing. But not a super tiny baby.

3. Take Baby to the park, put out a blanket, sprinkle some toys around, and let Baby do whatever he or she is developmentally capable of at the time. Babies love being outside.
4. Take Baby on a walking trail. If your stroller is as beastly as mine, look for a paved one.
5. Take Baby for a stroll around the mall. While it’s best to do this on a day when you have strong financial resolve, an impatient baby can help motivate you to move it along. Babies don’t like waiting in lines.
6. Take Baby somewhere with a patio or a big window. Ice cream or warm beverage-type establishments are ideal. You get a treat, and baby gets to people watch. Lucky for Baby, no one finds his or her staring weird or intrusive.
7. Take Baby to the library for story time. Babies are never too young to enjoy a book or a song.
8. Take Baby to the library and have your own story time. While you’re there, check out some books to read at home and maybe even a little something for yourself. I do recommend using the online catalog to check availability BEFORE you go. Not only do babies hate waiting, but the library is also the perfect place to forget about every book that’s ever sounded interesting.
9. Take Baby to visit a family member or friend.
10. Join the local chapter of MOMS. I happened upon MOMS when we made our cross-country move, and it’s been the key to helping me keep my sanity while we’re away from everyone I’ve ever known. Even if you’re surrounded by friends and family, though, MOMS is still a wonderful organization. Check it out. Shout out to my MOMS gals!

http://www.momsclub.org/

Weekly Dinner Schedule

I like organization. I like schedules. For the professional mom, schedules are especially important, as they help provide a sense of routine and order to what could be a chaotic sort of lifestyle. It was this desire, along with my enthusiasm for saving money on groceries, that led me to create this handy dandy weekly dinner schedule. How does a dinner schedule save money on groceries? Why, because I've built in a few days that help slash the grocery bill. How does that work? Read on...

Here's the schedule:

Monday: Meatless Monday
Tuesday:
Wednesday: Leftovers Day
Thursday: Salad Day
Friday: Fishy Friday
Saturday:
Sunday: Soupy Sunday

Meatless Monday: You might have guessed that on Meatless Monday, we don't eat meat. We do this for three reasons:

1. Eating less meat is good for you. Unless you live in a cave, you know that a diet full of saturated fat leads to all kinds of health problems.
2. Eating less meat is good for the environment. As certain population centers become more affluent, (take China, for example) they will increase the worldwide demand for meat. It simply isn't sustainable for all of us to eat meat at every meal.
3. Eating less meat is less expensive.

What do we eat if we don't eat meat? We do a lot of pasta and pizza. If my husband didn't hate beans so much, we'd eat lots of beans. Perhaps you've heard that they're good for your heart. Shhh... don't tell him, but I've been thinking of sneaking some lentils in...

Leftover Day: In order to make Leftover Day work, you've got to make sure that you made enough food to have leftovers on Soupy Sunday, Meatless Monday, and/or Tuesday. Leftover Day will significantly slash your grocery bill, and as an added bonus, your fridge stays less cluttered.

Salad Day: Given my obvious fanaticism for alliteration, I'd like Salad Day to be on Saturday. Alas, the lettuce tends to get a little too wilty by then, so Thursday it is. Salad Day is a good opportunity to get in several of those vegetable servings that we Americans are so infamous for not getting enough of. It's also an easier/quicker/cheaper meal if you play your cards right. It's nice to get creative with salad day... keeps it fresh.

Fishy Friday: Not only does this day make me dizzy with alliteration delight, it also fits in with the tradition of fish on Fridays. You know you should eat more fish. Fishy Friday reminds you to do it.

Soupy Sunday: Every frugalista foodie knows that soup is a grocery budget's best friend. It fills you up, and often is chock-full of vegetables. If you make your own stock, it's even cheaper. Also, it's super easy to just make a giant pot that can go on to be lunches, fare for Leftover Day, or treasure for your freezer.

What about Tuesday and Saturday? What do I make on those days? Whatever I want. On at least one of those days, I make something to keep in the freezer. On the other day I might thaw something from the freezer.

Being the easy-going sort of lady that I am, this schedule isn't set in concrete. If I'm short on time one day, I might switch out a more time-consuming meal for a faster one that was dedicated to a different day. It saves a lot of time when I'm planning out the meals for the next week and writing the grocery list. And EVERY mom knows that's important.

10 Painless Ways to Cut Your Family’s Spending

1. Dump cable

You won’t even miss it. Why?

a) In the modern world cable is practically obsolete. So much content is available online now through sites like Hulu, Youtube, or even through the network’s website. If you’re patient enough to wait for a show to come out on DVD, there’s Netflix, one of our family’s favorite benefits of living in the 21^st century.
b) Think about it. Almost everything worth watching is on the major networks FOR FREE. Our family’s exception is Dexter. We have to have Dexter, so when a new season comes available to download on Amazon, by golly, we download it that instant. That isn’t free, but it’s chump change compared to what we would pay for cable.
c) What’s on cable? Junky reality shows. I’ve never kept up with the Kardashians (although sadly that hasn’t protected me from knowing who they are), and I’m pretty sure my IQ is at least a couple of points higher for it.
d) If you have children, you have precious little time for television. In fact, why don’t you go check on them? I think I heard something.

2. Pare services down to the basics

If you have a cell phone, do you have a really good reason for keeping a land line? If not, chuck it.
Decide why you have a cell phone. The budget answer is “for making necessary calls”. The rest of it - the web browsing, the text messaging, the ring tones, the apps, etc. - are all unnecessary. The $5 a month (plus tax) that I used to spend on a rudimentary texting package was one of the first things to go when I quit my job. I can think of far better ways to spend the $60 a year that it was costing to avoid having to speak to people on the phone. If you’ve ever made a budget, you know that $5 here and there adds up.

3. Grocery shop smarter

Before you make your grocery list (you do make a list, don’t you?) shop your pantry, refrigerator, and freezer first. If you’ve got half a package of bacon, put BLTs on the menu. If you’ve got some leftover stock or vegetables in the refrigerator, roll it over into a soup.

Learn how to work your store’s deals. Before our move, we were Earthfare shoppers, and I knew how to work that store like nobody’s business. Four times a year, Earthfare puts out a little booklet of coupons. One such coupon was for $1.50 off a tray of chicken. Of course, they’re counting on people buying boneless skinless, chicken breasts. But we bought legs, priced at a whopping $3-ish, so our final price for a meal’s worth of chicken was about $1.50. Doesn’t that just make you giddy?!

4. Use cloth diapers

When the babies were born they were so tiny that we had no choice but to put them in preemie disposables, and from that little run, we estimated that it would cost approximately $300 a month to keep them in disposables. That’s a significant sum of money. Over the course of a year, that’s $3,600. If they both stayed in diapers until the age of three, it would be $10,800. Compare that to the $500-600 we have invested in cloth diapers. With the exception of the diaper detergent we buy to accommodate Linus’s skin issues and wipey solution wafers, that’s a one time expense. I’ll not pretend that there aren’t times when I’d rather just not have to deal with the extra laundry, but if we’re saving about $9,000, I can deal with it. Cloth doesn’t have to be an all or nothing thing. We carry a stash of disposables in the diaper bag for running around on the weekends, and Mr. Heavy Wetter wears a Huggies Overnight diaper for nighttime.

Curious about how much you’d save if you switched to cloth? Here’s a calculator:

http://cutietooties.com/calc.php


5. Make your own baby food

Not only do you get more peace of mind from making your baby’s food, but it also costs much, much less to do so.

6. Eat in

Unless you’re eating from a dollar menu somewhere, eating out is expensive. And if you are eating from a dollar menu, I think you’ll find it to be extremely expensive in the long run. A break from cooking and having to do the dishes is wonderful every now and then, but does the pleasure eating out gives you justify the gross difference in cost from making your meals at home? Since we’ve cut back drastically on our eating out, I find that I appreciate and enjoy it more when we do go out. If I regret anything from our pre-parenthood days, it’s the amount of money we spent eating mediocre food at restaurants. Oh, how I wish we had saved that money instead.

7. Do your own beauty services

Do your own pedicures and manicures. Yes, the foot rub feels good for the five minutes it lasts, but it’s not worth $40. I will say, though, that sometimes a professional may need to be called in when the feet become too hooven.

Pluck your eyebrows instead of having them waxed. I had mine waxed for many years, so the shape is already there. All I have to do is pluck the errant hairs as they come in. That’s an easy $15 a month saved.

8. Use hand-me-downs

When people offer, accept.

9. Use the library

With the availability of catalogues that can search an entire system, it’s much easier to use the library than it used to be. Our family uses an estimated $600 worth of materials every month. Calculate how much you could save here:



10. Never go into a store without a list

And never buy something that isn’t on the list. What percentage of your purchases are impulse purchases? Take out your grocery store and Target/Walmart receipts from the last month and highlight the items you decided you needed when you got to the store. Add them up. It’s more than you thought it would be, right?
　http://www.friendsforthelibrary.org/value.html