Some sewing and cooking

So there have been a few sewing and cooking developments lately. First, I wanted to show a photo of the pajama bottoms I made for my husband. He loves them and wears them all the time. You would have thought that I gave him gold or something, but that's how much he appreciates it when I put effort into something and that's why I'm keeping him around! I also made some very successful tuna melts with my homemade mayo, a little dijon mustard, and some tuna, with various Christmas-gift cheeses on top. My husband also scored the bread for free at work. So really all we paid for was the tin of tuna ($0.88) and the cost of one egg yolk and some oil, about 15 cents. We got four sandwiches out of it. The recipes I looked at online called for more stuff, and claimed to make only 2 sandwiches. They must have been pretty thick with tuna salad because we had tons of toppings spread out over four.

I was craving a spaghetti dinner last week. I don't usually eat tomato sauce because my husband used to be allergic to tomatoes. He's okay now but doesn't really like how they taste. So I got a can of tomato sauce for about a dollar and fried up some sausage (we have a friend who makes sausage and gives us a lot. I cooked the tomato sauce with some basil and oregano and added a little red wine. I made my husband a white sauce from flour, butter, and milk. I divided up the sausage between the two sauces and roasted half of the bottom of a butternut squash. Then I just had to boil pasta and we had dinner! We had two dinners out of this one.

I would also like to report that I am the master of the $5 chicken. Some friends alerted us that there would be some whole chickens on sale for $0.86 a pound. So I bought one chicken and got nine meals from it. First, I roasted the chicken. We each ate a half breast for dinner. My husband took one of the other halves for lunch, and I made Kraft Dinner with a carrot and the other half. Then I made "pasta with stuff" with the meat of one of the legs. Next I made chicken salad with the with the meat of the other leg and the leftover mayonnaise from the tuna melts. Then my husband took off the remaining meat from the carcass and served it with potatoes and carrots. Finally, we took the carcass and made stock, which made a whole lot of soup (2 or 3 servings each, I daresay). So that comes to about $0.50 per meal for two people for the protein.

The final thing I have to report is that I did some sewing for decorating. I took some pieces of felt and cut them into triangles, and then sewed those triangles onto rickrack. I made a string of them and have hung them up as bunting above one of our windows. I hope to do a second one soon.

Merry Thriftmas

I had a great time with Christmas this year, in part due to having hardly any money. I spent a dollar on decorations (floral wire). We have a plastic tree which we decorated with ornaments we have collected. We hung our little string of Christmas lights. I made an advent wreath from branches that a nice man at the tree lot gave us for free. We made popcorn strings to go around the tree and paper cut-out snowflakes to go on the windows. So it looked very festive around here.

We decided on some new traditions. Those crafts were part of it, but we also decided to donate to the food bank. We don't have a lot to offer and I am scared to let go of food, but we did it and hopefully we helped someone. We also wanted to contribute to a toy drive, but we only had two toys, and they were used, and we either needed to donate new toys, or a truck would drive up to collect our donations, which hardly seemed fair when there were only two toys.

We got lots of food sent from our families. I did my shopping at the dollar store, the used book store, and the grocery store. I made my husband some pajama bottoms from a sheet that I got a while ago from the Salvation Army. They're Thomas the tank engine pajama bottoms. It would have been pretty funny to watch me sew, as I did every seam wrong at least once and ended up sewing the legs shut or something like that. Eventually it worked out and they look pretty good. I will try to get a picture soon. He seems really happy with them.

Then there was food. It was just the two of us but I put out appetizers of cheese, sausage, smoked oysters, smoked almonds, crackers, fig spread, antipasto, and pepper jelly. All these things were gifts! I also baked for a few days so we had popcorn balls, butter tarts, peanut butter cookies, and banana bread. For dinner I made roasted chicken legs with homemade mustard, mixed roasted veg, gravy, mashed potatoes, and stuffing. I am especially proud of the stuffing because I took breadcrumbs that I had been saving up for six months and made a huge amount of food. It blows my mind that people throw away their stale bread heels and then go out and buy dried breadcrumbs in the store. I put all my stale bread pieces in a plastic bag in the freezer. You never need to buy breadcrumbs again. You can either cut them up or grind them in the food processor if you want finer crumbs. Anyways, I had only made stuffing once before, and that was 10 years ago, so I was pleased with how it turned out. I also made my gravy from a mix because I have some mix, and I didn't know how much the chicken would drip. Anyway it dripped a lot so I put some of the fat into the gravy, which was a really good idea. I added the rest to the mashed potatoes. We ate this with our ginger beer and we were so full after we didn't have room for dessert. I had to put most of the desserts in the freezer, save the popcorn balls. I actually have decided not to make popcorn balls again because I cut my hands up pretty bad on the caramel.

We ended the evening by watching a wonderfully terrible movie, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Highly recommended if you like B-movies.

Mustard and stock, with developments in laundry detergent

My big canning project this week was mustard. I used this recipe: http://smedette.wordpress.com/2011/08/11/recipe-spicy-beer-mustard/

I chose it because I wanted to be able to can it, so I can share some as gifts and also keep it shelf-stable as long as I needed it. I don't have a pressure canner so I needed a recipe with vinegar. Anyways, it was loads of fun, and pretty easy to do. I omitted the horseradish and onion powder, because the recipe said it was okay to play with these. I don't like my mustard too hot and the vinegar made it plenty tangy. The recipe made three cups of mustard, which I canned in one-cup jars. Exciting!

I also made stock this week. I make stock frequently so it didn't occur to me to share it earlier, but I realized that many people don't know how to make stock. If you can boil water you can make stock! I gather scraps from vegetables and chicken bones in a one-gallon plastic bag that I keep in the freezer. When that gets full, I dump it into a large pot that I fill with water and I add a couple of bay leaves and a handful of peppercorns, if I have them. Then I bring the water to the boil, then reduce it to simmer and let it do that for about an hour. Then I cool it and strain it. I usually use most of the stock I just made in soup that evening, with a little bit set aside in a two-cup container for rice pilaf, and a few quarter-cup containers for Chinese food. I freeze these containers until I'm going to use them. So you can do all this for basically no money because you are using what other people consider to be garbage. Seriously. The only thing I wouldn't put in it are fruit scraps and the peels of russet potatoes, which are kind of dirty. (You can dry citrus peels in the oven and use them for mulled wine and such, and the rest of your fruit scraps you can use to make vinegar. Vinegar!) So if you do nothing else, you should make stock. Soooo easy and it saves you a lot of money over storebought stock.

I am learning about making your own laundry soap. Holy crap! It's so easy and cheap! You need borax, washing soda (soda ash, which I use for dyeing), and bar soap. The best type of bar soap to use is fels naptha, which is really cheap. I'm going to check my nearby hardware store. You only need 2 tablespoons per load. It doesn't have nasty chemicals or scents and is much better for the environment and allergies. If you need fabric softener, you can use vinegar in your rinse cycle, but I don't usually use fabric softener and I think it would be a pain in our commercial machines.

We have been doing a bit of low cost decorating for the Advent/Christmas season. I made an advent wreath with floral wire and evergreen branches. We threw evergreen branches on some surfaces and made popcorn garlands to decorate the tree with. It's been very exciting. I have made a present for my husband (more on that later, once he's opened it). I'm also doing my Christmas baking now. I've made banana bread and will also make butter tarts, peanut butter cookies, and popcorn balls. Maybe oatmeal raisin cookies too if I have enough time and butter.

Happy holidays everyone, and happy homemaking!