Monthly Archives: January 2010

Eat from the Pantry: Week 3 and Week 4!

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Another late one.  Well, only late for Week 3.  Early for Week 4.  :)

These are the menu ideas I posted originally:
Hamburger Helper (1 left still)
Chicken and rice
Dried Pintos in crock and cornbread, deer tenderloin
Lemon Pepper Chicken
White Chili
Breakfast for supper
Spaghetti
Mac-n-cheese with burger in it
Salsa Chicken in crock
Potato Soup
Pizza Casserole (Hunter’s birthday meal EVERY year)
Pork Ham in crock
BBQ from ham leftovers
Marlboro Man sandwiches
Veggie/Deer stew
Meatloaf
Deer Roast in crock into BBQ
Pork Chops and Mashed Potatoes (last night)
Homemade Pizza We had pizza casserole instead
Chicken Spaghetti (in freezer already)
Mexican! (Tacos or fajitas…we have ingredients for both)
Hamburgers

I have no idea what we ate!  I only marked off 2 meals.  Hunter and the boys did eat the lonely frozen pizza on Saturday night since I had to work. 

One confession though…we ate out last night.  Dollar menu city.  Church night and two tired parents who finally gave up and ate out for the FIRST time all month!  GO US!!!!

Budget:
Walmart:  $15.07 on Thursday (last week) for milk, bread, cheese, diapers, bananas and…I can’t remember the rest and I can’t find my receipt.  Actually the diapers were FREE.  I won a coupon on the Huggies website for a free pack.  Quite handy.
DG:  Hunter spent $7.50 for bread and milk and coffee
Total for week:  22.57!!!!

So, my monthly totals are:
Food:  82.99
Pets:  16.54

Shoot.  I just remembered something.   To stay truthful, I ate out on Friday at lunch.  We had a conference at work and it was Lunch on Your Own.  It was around $7.  Add that to our food budget:  90.99!

Woohoowoohoowoohoowoohoo!!!  I realize that technically we have until Saturday (my birthday so it does.not.count in this since I am going out with friends!) and Sunday but I’m not going to the store so that’s it.  WE DID IT!!!  Can I just say how proud I am of us?  I never dreamed we’d make it this far.  And for about 90% of this adventure, we used cash to pay for our groceries instead of our debit.  Another new one for us.

Now, yall know I am going to the grocery store at some point this weekend don’t you?!?  LOL!!!  I have so much to restock but I am going to keep it reasonable since we need to stick to a tight budget anyway.  But it will be nice to have a few convenience foods back on the shelves.  And, of course, the animals all need feed. 

Overall, we cleaned out our pantry a good bit and proved to ourselves that we COULD do this.  Maybe we’ll try to do this a couple of times a year to clean out the pantry and remind ourselves how blessed we are with our full pantry.

Anyone else try this?  I’d love to hear some updates!

C-re

Coming Clean…

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I’ve decided something. 

It’s time to come clean.  Yall don’t know me.  We’re getting there aren’t we?  But I haven’t been honest.  I want yall to know ME. 

And part of that is a very simple thing. 

Hi!  I’m Carrie and I keep a tub of chocolate icing in my frig for “emergencies.” 

Nice to meet ya!

(And some people DO call me what sounds like Kayree so it wasn’t a total fabrication—it is my name.  I’m southern!) 

What’s your secret??

How I cook a deer roast in the crock

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Jilly asked how I cooked my deer roast in a crock in the comments last week.  It’s been crazy busy around here so I’m just getting around to answering! 

When I first started cooking venison, I always overcooked it.  Everything you see recommends that you cook it to beef-well temperatures.  I’d cook the heck out of a roast in the crock and it always came out dry and tough!  I’d all but given up on deer roasts but Hunter was surfing one night and found a website from a guy who cooks a lot of venison (he has NO idea what the website is now-Sorry!)  This guy was adamant that venison cooked well done should be cooked to around 150 degrees, not 180 degrees!  We decided to experiment with the temperature to see if we felt the meat was done at 150 degrees and it is!  It’s the correct temperature for a juicy roast that is cooked. It will have a very slight pinkish hue to it like a medium well beef I think (I’m a well-done kind of girl and I’ll eat this).

I don’t tend to follow a lot of recipes to a tee but here’s what I often do.

1 3-4lb venison roast (or larger if you’ve got a big one!)
1 small-medium onion sliced up
1 cube each of beef and chicken bouillon (or just whatever you have)
onion powder and garlic pepper (homemade mix)
Water (to cover the roast with)

Cook it on low for 6-8 hours (longer for a bigger roast), depending on your crock.  I’ve put the roast in there completely frozen before and it’ll cook just fine, it just takes longer.  Cooking on high will dry it out.  It will.  Venison needs a slow cook, in my opinion, in the crock and in a smoker. 

I wish I had more to offer!  I do add potatoes and carrots from time to time but we often eat the roast as is the first night and then the second night, we make barbeque sandwiches depending on how much is leftover.

Let me know if you try it!

C-re

Eat from the Pantry: Week 2

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It’s a late update on Week 2 of our Eat from the Pantry Challenge.  It’s been a long and rough week and a half for us and to be honest, I just haven’t felt that anything I posted was more important than what’s going on in Haiti.  My heart hurts for those poor, poor families.

So, anyway, here’s my update.

These are the menu ideas I posted originally:
Hamburger Helper (1 left still)
Chicken and rice
Dried Pintos in crock and cornbread, deer tenderloin
Lemon Pepper Chicken
White Chili
Breakfast for supper
Spaghetti
Mac-n-cheese with burger in it
Salsa Chicken in crock
Potato Soup
Pizza Casserole (Hunter’s birthday meal EVERY year)
Pork Ham in crock
BBQ from ham leftovers
Marlboro Man sandwiches
Veggie/Deer stew
Meatloaf
Deer Roast in crock into BBQ
Pork Chops and Mashed Potatoes (last night)
Homemade Pizza
Chicken Spaghetti (in freezer already)
Mexican! (Tacos or fajitas…we have ingredients for both)
Hamburgers

We’re not doing too bad, food-wise.  We still have a good bit in our pantry. 

Now, for the budget…

Walmart:  7.46 (diapers)
Walmart:  25.12 (color safe bleach, bread, detergent, 5lb potatoes, kids soap, sliced cheese, BBQ sauce, shredded cheese, coffee, bananas
DG:  Ginger Ale 0.77
Kroger:  6.81 (2 gallons of milk, 2 10-packs of instant oatmeal, 2 packages of tuna, 2 instant potato packages, 1 Warm Delight—the milk was $4 so I got ALL of the rest of it for 2.81!!!!!!)
TOTAL for week:  39.39
I also need to add a 20lb bag of dog food for Boone to my pet total–around $11 with my coupon.

I’m over.  I KNOW it.  Because I need to justify to myself, JL broke out with a stomach virus over the weekend (which is another reason why there have been no posts) and I had to wash every blessed thing on his bed, including all of his pillows and stuffed animals, and that used up all of my detergent.  And I needed the color safe bleach for the above mentioned bedding and I had none.  Without that, I would have been in pretty good shape…around $33 I guess. 

So, my monthly totals are:
Food:  60.42
Pets:  16.54

That leaves us about $40 to get through until the end of the month on food and household items!

Yall think we’ll make it? 

C-re

We (I) survived hunting season…

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without strangling Hunter OR my children.  It’s a miracle! 

Seriously, though, deer season is over.  Now the man keeps trying to go duck hunting.  We don’t EAT duck.  His response?  “Not yet.”

We were blessed with plenty of meat this year.  Hunter took 8 deer for our family to eat plus split another deer that someone else shot.  We paid to process only 2 deer (so we could have cubed steak); the rest we did ourselves with my KitchenAid mixer and grinder attachment (see the sweat on my brow from worrying about him breaking my true love).  He also took 1 wild hog which was a surprise to us all; we had this one processed as we had no idea what to do with it. 

I am surprised to tell you how much I like the wild hog sausage.  It tastes very good.  It has a strong flavor but it isn’t gamey.  I hope he’s able to get another one soon since we’re almost out of sausage!  We haven’t been real impressed with the pork chops from this hog though.  Just tough.  I think we’re out of them now but if not, I think I’m going to try the crock pot next time.

Hunter took the last 2 deer during the last week of the year and we processed them ourselves.  Here’s a picture of the final product (no worries, no blood!)

IMG_3979

There’s about 15 packages of ground, 1.5lbs per pack as well as tenderloin, backstrap, hams for roast and ribs (new, we’re going to try it anyway).  And stew meat!  Man does this help our budget; help, heck, it saves it.  We would be unable to do $70-75 per week if we didn’t have meat available to us like this.

I know it’s not for everyone but it works for us.  At this point in my life, it’s just like using ground beef.  I’ve learned how to cook venison and how to cook it well (I like to think anyway).  Eleven years ago, I wouldn’t touch the stuff.  Now, it’s about 80-90% of what we eat!

I’d like to say that peace will reign until next September but Hunter swears he’s going duck hunting again and that he can hunt pigs year round because its private land and that he’ll turkey hunt this year.  Sigh…I need a hobby.

C-re