Happy New Year!

 

Wishing you a blessed, healthy & prosperous 2023

This Month's Grocery Spending - December 2022 & YE Totals!

 

My final grocery post for 2022!  Unbelievable that the new year is upon us and it will be time to start afresh again.  I have a lot planned for groceries, shopping, meal planning, cooking, preserving, money saving, you name it, for 2023. Lots of good stuff!  I can hardly wait to get started.

 

I stocked up on produce and a handful of pantry items

Now let's get down to business on my December grocery spending.  With the Christmas holiday and New Years Eve and Day thrown into the mix to plan for I think I did really well in keeping my spending super low.  I shopped the sales, stocked up on produce at the beginning of the month and dairy products in the middle of the month, many of which were on sale.  I even sprinkled in a few pantry restock items.  My final total for the month came in at $58.16 for food.  My non food spending came in at $2 for two tubes of toothpaste and $1.48 for some detergent I picked up at Wal-Mart.

 

Dairy was the main theme of this shopping trip

I'm extremely pleased with my year end totals for food and non food spending.  I did not do a lot of non food spending as you will see.  I had done a really good job stocking up the linen closet with laundry and cleaning supplies as well as toiletries in 2021 so I didn't need to purchase much this year.  My grand total came in at less than my monthly budgeted amount for the entire year at just $24.16  Things are looking pretty good too as far as my non food spending next year as I'm still pretty well stocked.

 

Not bad for the month of December!

Last week I stocked up on cheese when it went on sale for $1.69 per package

My final total on food is the one I'm most proud of and amazed by this year because we ate really well.  Lots of healthy and nutritious meals were served and plenty of treats now and then too.  No deprivation here and I always had cream for my one nice cup of Keto coffee each day.  That was my priority and it still is.  I love that special mid morning cup of coffee each day. By shopping sales, markdowns and loss leaders, downloading digital coupons and FREE offers, making lists and sticking to them and minimizing my food waste I was able to keep my grocery spending very low.

 

I am not complaining about this at all!

What is your priority item?

As I head into 2023 my goal is to continue to keep my spending as low as possible.  Cream in my coffee is still a priority item as I've watched the price of that stuff nearly double in the past year.  Unreal!  I'll be making changes and working around rising prices as best I can to continue to keep to my extremely low grocery budget.  I know I'll have to get pretty creative in order to manage this, but I also know it can be done.

 

Adventures In Decluttering

 

I've been a busy girl.  I started my New Year's decluttering project an entire month early and I'm really glad I did because it has been a bigger job than I imagined it would be.  I am doing an entire house declutter, every single nook and cranny.  I decided to begin at the furthest point from my front door and work my way forward so I started upstairs in my bedroom and I've been ruthless.  In the furthest point from my front door sat a BIG procrastination pile - photos and sentimental childhood and high school items and I tackled it like a pro.

 

Now I only have one bin of sentimental stuff and one box of photo albums

I went through all of my art, craft & sewing supplies

and everything got nicely labeled

To begin I printed off a copy of my checklist as a guide and because checking stuff off of a list is somehow very motivating, at least for me anyway.  Once the photos and sentimental stuff was done I went through my closet thinking I probably wouldn't find much since I'd recently decluttered my clothing.  Wrong!  I found stuff.  It always amazes how you can always find something.

 

I emptied a bunch of bins and got rid of that set of plastic drawers

I washed and reused what I could and donated the rest

Once the bedroom was done I went into the second bedroom thinking I wouldn't find much in there either since I'd cleared that room and redone it over the summer.  Wrong again!  I found quite a bit actually, filled an entire bag with donations.  Next was the upstairs bathroom and once again I found stuff.  It took me about a week working in time slots to complete the upstairs of my home and then I headed downstairs to the living room.

 

I shredded a bunch of papers

and washed more containers to reuse

The living room and dining room went really quick and surprisingly so did my kitchen, including the pantry.  I did get rid of a blender, a fondue pot, a skillet and a bunch of little things I didn't use anymore.  In the downstairs bathroom I found a few things too.  So far I had managed to empty out a bunch of storage bins and I took a break to wash them all up so I could reuse them when I went through my sewing and craft supplies.  I even had a friend wrap all of his Christmas gifts at my house with my wrapping supplies so he could help me use some of it up.  That saved him from having to buy anything this year and I still have quite a bit left for next Christmas.

 

I sorted and sorted and sorted

Sewing supplies and fabric were next on my list and I ended up taking everything into my living room to sort through, purge and reorganize.  Then onto my craft supplies which I did the same way.  For a solid week I worked on this until I had it really fine tuned and I filled up another bag with donations.  Once I had made it through the downstairs bedroom I was about 80% of the way done.

 

cleaned and tidied

and finally set up the vintage sewing box I had purchased years ago

The storage closet under the stairs was next and that wasn't too bad either.  I found a few things to get rid of and did some reorganizing in there as well.  Same with the laundry room.  The only space I have left to tackle is my garage but I'm waiting until the weather warms up a bit before I head out there.

 

I even have some empty spaces!  Check out that top shelf!

Bye-bye blender!

I will be filling up the bed of my truck with five bags of donations and a couple of those plastic drawer storage sets plus a couple furniture pieces and taking that load to the animal rescue thrift store not too far from my home.  Right now it is all sitting in my garage waiting for me but my house just got bigger!  Ha, ha, ha.  Then guess what I did?  I printed out a new checklist and on the first of the year, I'm starting over and doing it all again.  I'm curious to see how much I find this next time.

 

My Tireless Retirement - Week 38

 

Hello, hello my friends!  How was everyone's Christmas?  I hope it was the best day ever!  My Christmas was just lovely and Santa was very good to me.  My week leading up to Christmas was fairly low-key and uneventful.  I listened to Christmas music every day and watched several old movies last week.  I cooked some wonderful meals and even did a little bit of baking.

 

The only shopping I did last week was to go into Albertson's and pick up four packages of cheese that were on sale for $1.69 each.  I was getting a little bit low on cheese so this sale came at the right time.  I see grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup in my future.  Yum!

 

Friday I made the rounds and delivered all of my homemade friends and neighbor gifts.  I wrapped them all up with things I already had on hand which made for some more happy decluttering.

 

Christmas Eve I made pesto shrimp for supper along.  Dessert was simple, delicious gingersnap cookies I had baked.  Christmas morning I baked a quiche I had squirreled away in the freezer and we enjoyed that with a wonderful Bloody Mary.

 

Jack's favorite part of Christmas is playing with the wrapping

I pan grilled a nice sized rib eye steak (big enough to share) that I had in the chest freezer for Christmas dinner, made some au jus to dip it in, baked a couple potatoes which I served with butter, sour cream and some sliced green onions and steamed some broccoli.  My BFF provided a bottle of wine for the occasion.  All of the food was amazing.  We definitely ate well on Christmas  Eve and Christmas day.

 

Very blessed and fortunate

It was such a nice, relaxing and quiet week.  I couldn't have asked for better.  And the gifts?  I was spoiled with candles, a Pampered Chef cookie press, chocolates and a bunch of DVDs, all kinds of goodies.  A really exciting thing I got was an electric hot plate that I'm super excited to try out.  I was thinking about buying one as a way to help conserve my electricity use and then I got one for Christmas!  Yay!

 

The little Victrola got a workout

As we complete the final week of 2022 I hope you are doing well and feeling fulfilled.  Take good care of yourselves my friends, count your blessings, thank God and let's finish this year out with a bang, shall we?  I'm excited for all the possibilities ahead in 2023.  Mostly, I am grateful to all of the wonderful people I've had the privilege to meet through all the years of blogging.  We are truly a special bunch.

And the winner of the cookbook is Lori.  Email me your address my dear and I'll get this sent out to you next week.  Congratulations!  Have you guys signed up for Happy Mail yet?

 

Merry Christmas

 

My Love Of Vintage Cookbooks

 

I am very fortunate to have a small collection of vintage cookbooks that belonged to my grandmother, her mother and my mother's mother as well as her grandmother.  Unfortunately it was due to their passing that I inherited these treasures, however I am so happy that I do have them.  I have always loved old cookbooks and I have great memories of sitting in their kitchens pouring through their lovely collections of cookbooks, reading the recipes, copying some of them down onto recipe cards and making them once I had returned home.  Sometimes they had written down recipes on scraps of paper and tucked them inside along with recipes they had clipped out of newspapers and magazines.  It was a true treasure trove and still is.

 

I love the lists of menus in these old cookbooks

This old 1927 Butterick cookbook belonging to my great grandmother has seen a lot of action

My favorite thing to do at thrift stores and antique shops is to seek out the cookbook sections and I've often come home with vintage Better Homes & Gardens as well as old Betty Crocker cookbooks.  I've resold a lot of them over the years too and I've kept some.  I love the simplicity of the recipes and the ingredients they used.  I also love the menu plans, the tips and tricks sections, the recommendations for health and nutrition, and the shopping and economics of good homemaking.

 

The All About Home Baking 1933 cookbook was falling apart

None of the original pages are bound anymore

I carefully photocopied all of the pages and remade it into this binder
complete with sheet protectors so I can use it often and I do!

My great grandmother's Butterick cookbook is dated 1927 making my grandmother four years old at the time.  It is loaded with housekeeping, health and economy tips, lists of suggestions for soup ideas and sandwich fillings.  I just love it.  Another one of my cookbooks is from 1934 and it is amazing with all of the beautiful photos and menu suggestions.  It also houses my grandmother's go-to fruitcake recipe that she always used.  I plan to use these cookbooks more often in the coming year, I may even make her fruitcake over Thanksgiving weekend like she and I always did.  You just never know!

 

Quite easily this one has become my favorite go-to cookbook for baking

Circa 1967 - Giveaway!! 😊

And, if you made it to the end of this post then good for you!  I'm going to give away one of my Better Homes & Gardens vintage cookbooks.  I may even give away two!  If you are interested in this giveaway and you live in the United States all you need to do is leave me a nice comment.  Pretty easy, huh?  Then next week I will select the winner and post the name or names.  After the holidays I will mail out the cookbook.  You can call me a wimp if you want to, but I don't want to go to the post office between now and New Years.

 

 

My Tireless Retirement - Week 37

 

Good morning Friends!  I hope you are doing well.  The final week before Christmas is upon us.  I plan to do a little baking, a little cooking, a lot of celebrating and truly enjoy this beautiful holiday. There are gifts under my tree, food in my cupboards, my home is warm and lovely, I am blessed beyond measure.

 

My girls patiently waiting for me to bring them goodies

Decluttering is messy business and by Monday it was starting to drive me crazy.  I made a lot of progress over the previous two weeks and it feels really good, but I had to stop and clean up the mess I had made.  Having things put back in order felt really good too.  Fortunately, my 15 Minute Housekeeping regimen kept the house clean while I was working on this project, it was mostly a matter of tidying up where I had been doing all the sorting and reorganizing.

 

Makes me happy 💝

I decluttered the crisper drawer in the refrigerator by using up the two partial heads of cabbage, a carrot, some green onions and a piece of a yellow onion as well as a half package of leftover lunchmeat, all of which needed to be used up before it spoiled.  I chopped it all up and cooked it in my electric skillet with some leftover oil I had from making the tortilla chips on Nacho Nite and some rendered bacon fat I had in the fridge.  Because it wasn't a lot of meat I beat up a couple eggs to go in there for extra protein and then added a cup of cooked rice I had leftover from making Broccoli Beef for supper the previous week.  I seasoned it with soy sauce and minced garlic and just before serving drizzled some sesame oil over the top.  I also had a little bit of leftover sweet chili sauce to use as a very flavorful garnish.  I love when I can take a bunch of leftovers and create an entirely different meal out of them.  It was delicious!  There was enough for four meals too, so leftover leftovers.

 

Not a bad meal for a bunch of leftovers

Speaking of Nacho Nite, it was so good we ended up having another one this past week as well.  Along with a glass of wine and a couple Christmas movies it made for a really nice evening.  Funny thing, I had leftover tortillas to fry up for chips, taco meat, cheese, sliced green onions, olives, sour cream and salsa so technically it was just another "decluttering project" (wink, wink).

 

These were delish!

I was able to get all of my errands run well ahead of the snowstorm and cold front that moved in on us Wednesday afternoon.  I headed out that morning to pick up a few groceries at Fred Meyer and then ended up at Wal-Mart for some more specific sized containers for organizing.  Fred Meyer's selection of storage bins was crap and grossly overpriced.  

Mostly dairy this time

Even some items on markdown - cottage cheese & sour cream

I got one snap tight lid container to keep all of my laces and trims in for my sewing and crafting supplies.  I needed one larger than the one I already had.  I also picked up two of the shoe box size containers with the snap tight lids to organize my baking supplies and cookie cutters and another one to hold my hand mixer and immersion blender plus their attachments, spending less than $20.  I love having things neater and more organized.  I also purged a bunch of stuff while I was at it.

 

I might actually be able to find stuff!

I gathered up all of my jars of spent candles, removed the leftover wax, melted it down and made one candle out of that.  All of the empty jars ended up in the glass recycling bin clearing off a shelf in my hall closet and I got a FREE candle in the process.

 

I filled up another trash bag as well the recycling collection bin and topped up the glass recycling bin I keep in the garage.  Donation bag number four is now half full and I placed another set of those plastic drawers out to go to the thrift store too.  My house is getting bigger!  I hear some of you are working on some decluttering too.  How's it going?

 

Journaling For Mental Health

 

I love to make journals and I love the idea of what you can do with a journal, however, until this year I wasn't one who wrote in a journal on a regular basis.  In the past I've done journaling for events or vacations and I've also done a gratitude journal, but to write down my thoughts on a daily basis just wasn't something I did.

 

I use my dayplanner all the time

I knew this year was going to be a hard one for me.  I had been struggling with my health, my job was a major source of stress, my youngest child was going to graduate high school and head off to college and my closest friend was in the end stages of ovarian cancer.  I knew 2022 was going to be a year of a lot of changes and high emotions and let me tell you, it has not disappointed in that respect.

 

One of the things suggested to me long ago by a friend of mine who was a therapist was to write things down in order to get it out of my head.  I loved the concept, but I never did it, which is crazy as I am an avid list maker and dayplanner user.  I write those kinds of things down so I don’t forget and I don’t have to try and remember everything in my head.  It worked great and I have been doing it practically my entire adult life.  I menu plan, I map out my projects and my goals.  I've seen how writing these things down leads to success.

 

This year I decided, with all that was going on and all that was likely to happen, it would probably serve me well to write my thoughts into a journal every day.  There is not right or wrong way journal.  You just write down whatever you want.  And now that I've been doing it I can honestly say this simple exercise has been a true game changer.  It really does help.  I don't have to carry all of these thoughts, concerns, anxieties or fears around with me.  I just write it down and leave it in my journal.  I write down what I'm thankful and grateful for.  I write down quotes that inspire me, scriptures that touch me, wonderful things or sad things that happened that day.  I even doodle.

 

My new daily journal I made for 2023

Journaling declutters my mind, my soul and my heart.  It is just as freeing and liberating as when I declutter my home.  While I don't sit down and read my prior entries I can see as I flip through my pages just how much my journaling has evolved since the beginning of the year.  At first I just wrote down insignificant things like what I ate or the weather.  But as time went on I found myself really enjoying the process and letting go of a lot of emotional thinking that really weighed me down mentally.  I'm really glad I finally decided to take that step.  I've even prepared my journal for 2023 because I think it is that important.  Journaling is definitely good for my mental health.