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Thanks! :)

Chicken, Carrots, Potatoes

So wow! It's MARCH! I was taking a quick glance over my blog and realized that the last time I updated it was in JANUARY!

Anyway, it's not that I'm not cooking because I promise I am, I'm just apparently really bad at having time to type this with a little monkey getting into everything!

Also, foods haven't been all that exciting lately. It's been a lot of the same repeated.

Recently the baby was diagnosed as having an egg and milk allergy which has made life a little more interesting considering we're already gluten free around here. Luckily, it's a mild allergy on both counts and the doctor said that providing she doesn't have a reaction we can continue to give her both.

However, I felt kind of guilty doing it, so after a lot of reading and researching I decided to switch her over to goat milk. She is tolerating it MUCH better than the cow's milk thus far! As for the eggs, we're cutting back slightly and trying to avoiding giving them to her on their own but they are still around as well. If she does have a visual reaction I'll definitely stop and reassess this! :)

So here I am, practically 2am and we're watching Veggie Tales trying to figure out why WHY she is unable to sleep at night.

In the meantime I guess I'll leave you with one of the easiest recipes ever. I'm not sure exactly what to call it since it doesn't officially have a name. So. . .

Chicken Bake (Serves 2 & a baby)

Ingredients:

4 Chicken Drumsticks (bone in, skin on)

4 Potatoes (Peeled and chopped)

1 Large Carrot (Peeled)

Olive Oil

Directions:

1) Grease casserole dish with olive oil.

2) Mix potatoes and carrots into bottom of casserole dish.

3) Drizzle Olive oil over potatoes and carrots.

4) Place chicken on top.

5) Cover and place in oven. Bake at 400F for 1 hour.

6) Enjoy!

$100 Challenge - Week 2

Last week we spent a grand total of $54.85.

The breakdown:

$13.55 - Sobeys

- Ketchup 3.00

- Cheddar Cheese 6.49

- Ground Turkey 4.00

$14.75 - McDonald's :P

Meals for 2 people

$26.55 - Metro

- Pork rib Chops 4.79

- Nature's Path Cereal (gf) 4.29

- Select Cereal 3.29

- Kraft BBQ Sauce 2.49

- Cheddar Cheese 7.99

- 18 pack of eggs 3.59

So we had a slip up this week and ended up at McDonald's but despite that we still came out spending only $54.85 after taxes and purchasing plastic bags for 0.05 a piece.

We spent Monday and Tuesday at my parents' place this week because of issues with our apartment building once again. This helped us out with our food bills but not so much with our gas bills. Luckily they're only about a 15 minute drive from our house.

Unfortunately I was so busy last week that I really didn't write down what we ate. However, I know we did eat turkey burgers one night with potatoes.

I'm trying to keep better tabs on what we eat this week so I can report what we've been eating for your enjoyment!

Until next time. . .

$100 Challenge - Week 1

So I promised you all an update on Friday on how we did on our $100 challenge this past week. Well, it's been a busy week so I'm sorry but I'm updating this on Tuesday night, technically Wednesday now I believe.

Here's the breakdown of stuff.

We spent a grand total of: $36.81

Bear in mind we were using gift certificates for this first week so things might be a little higher next week BUT despite that I feel really good about this!!!

Our meals for this week:

Breakfasts (same every day not to exciting)

Cereal

Milk

Apple

Lunches

Ham or Egg Sandwich with gluten free bread (or regular bread for my husband)

Apple

Dinners (this is where things got a little bit more interesting)

Sunday - We didn't buy anything to make this recipe. Instead I dug through the shelves and used up what we had. Hoppin John is a pretty basic dish and for those of you who are superstitious, it's supposed to give you a prosperous new year! Here is the original recipe we worked from. I modified it because there didn't seem to be enough water and we had to omit a couple of things and I added gluten free ham but otherwise it's much the same. http://www.fromcowstoquinoa.com/2010/12/ring-in-new-year-with-vegan-hoppin-john.html

Monday - A simple night. Chicken, potatoes and carrots. - We had to buy carrots and chicken for this.

1) Preheat oven to 350F

2) Grease a casserole dish with olive oil (that's what we had).

3) Peel and cut up one potato per person and one large carrot.

4) Place potatoes and carrots in the casserole dish and drizzle lightly with more olive oil.

5) Set chicken drum sticks (bone in, skin on) on top of potatoes.

6) Put in oven and cook for 1 hour.

Tuesday - Gluten free Rice pasta with Classico gluten free tomato sauce and ground beef. We used up sauce and pasta we had already purchased. However we purchased ground beef for this.

Wednesday - Scrambled Eggs with Potatoes.

We use up groceries we already had in the house.

Thursday - A repeat of Monday's dinner because my hubby liked it so much and we still had some chicken left. :)

Friday - We went out for dinner at Wendy's but it was paid for by my husband's mother so it didn't hurt the budget. :)

Saturday - Cheeseburger Casserole. This was really quite good and found on the Bob's Redmill website. However, I didn't have Bob's baking mix so I used gluten free Bisquick which seemed to work pretty well. We omitted the onions (so the baby could eat it) and we didn't have tomatoes so we omitted those and served it with ketchup instead. Here is the recipe: http://www.bobsredmill.com/recipes_detail.php?rid=683

Snacks

We're lucky in this department because Christmas has left us an abundant supply of junk food. We froze cookies and are slowly eating them, we still have chocolate and we have frozen gluten free pumpkin pie to work with. We also have plain popcorn but that is getting less use than the chocolate at this point. . .

See you in a week for another update!

$100 Challenge

We recently welcomed in the New Year and my husband and I started talking about how much money we spend on food in a month and at $500/month we decided it's time to try to cut back!

The basic rules of the challenge are:

1) You have $25/person to spend per week. This leaves our family of 3 with $75 per week for groceries.

2) The $25 includes food only and not such things as food wrap or ziplock bags.

3) You can use existing foods that you already had in your pantry or fridge and these do not count towards your weekly grocery costs. (But should be recorded as such)

4) You can use coupons, points, and gift cards to reduce the cost of your groceries.

So we went shopping on Sunday and the total cost came to $12.19 after taxes. Pretty good start! However, we used a gift card so that helped significantly!

Here's what we got:

3 Cans Campbell's Chunky Soup (they do have some gluten free offerings check labels!) $4.47

Canada Dry Gingerale (a splurge) 2.49

Corn Flakes (Not gluten free - these were for my husband) 2.99

Cheddar Cheese brick 5.99

Extra Large Eggs 12 pk 2.69

Coffee 9.49

Lean Ground Beef 17.73

Chicken Legs (10 legs) 6.29

So far I have these ideas:

. . Breakfast will be cereal, fruit and cheese; Dinners will be recipes and so far lunch is completely up in the air.

I'll have to let you know how it all turned out for this week on Friday or Saturday! Stay tuned!