Home of Slightly Cracked Dreams

Welcome back to another year of Menu Planning here at Kin’s Home.

As usual, not much goes to plan, and while I had intended 2009 to be the home of healthy recipe’s, it appears that, at least initially, it will be the home of frugal recipe’s instead.

A few of my favourite sources for frugal recipes are Super Food Ideas magazines, Taste.com.au and a couple of Women’s Weekly basic and “cheap eats” type cookbooks.

I also have a few personal favourite recipes that work out quite cheap, and especially good for stretching to additional family members (hi Dad!) or storing for leftovers.

Picking up cheap meat is another strategy I’ve used for frugal meals before, and it looks like that strategy will be ramped up for the next few weeks.

And now without further ado here’s what’s on our menu this week:

Monday: Sausage Casserole I make with normal sausages which I pick up in bulk lots and freeze in meal size portions, and add extra veggies for a sneaky way of getting them into the kids additional bulk and stretching. This meal serves 3 adults, two children and one to two leftover lunches.

Tuesday: Haystacks These are a frugal favourite, not only for us but for many families with whom I’ve shared the recipe. It’s a great, vegetarian meal with opportunities to dress it up if you have company, or keep it simple if saving money is the objective. My kids love them and always ask for more. There’s usually enough leftover for lunch the next day too.

Wednesday: Spaghetti Bolognaise Always a crowd favourite. I picked up some cheap meat last weekend - 500g of Pork Mince for $1. I bought 3 packets home. I made up a batch using one lot of mince and adding some baked beans and lots of veggies to stretch it even further. I now have 2 meals worth of bolognaise sauce for the total of $5.10. I can’t beat that kind of value. If I need to stretch it further I add a home brand garlic bread for less than $1 and that will usually stretch the meal to another adult or two, and a green salad always goes down well.

Thursday: Apricot Chicken This is another family favourite, made reasonably cheaply if you can get chicken on special. I picked up 4 meals worth of Chicken Marylands for a touch over $10 last week, so again for under $5 I have dinner on the table and something we all love.

Friday: Homemade pizza. There’s nothing like making your own pizza dough and using a bread machine it’s so easy. Apparently. Hubby looks after that because he loves making breads and stuff. It’s super easy and cheap. Then allowing the kids to add ingredients of their choice to their own mini pizza’s is a great way to get them “cooking”.

Saturday: Sausages on Bread. There’s nothing like a BBQ to make it feel like summer. It’s high on the simplicity scale and extremely portable. Depending on the weather we could go to a park, or the lagoon and enjoy a swim before dinner, and maybe, just maybe, an icecream for desert.

Sunday: I try and do a roast once a week. I have a great recipe somewhere (that I need to dig out) that is a 30 minute roast chicken using chicken pieces. Using the Chicken Marylands I picked up last week I can have a roast dinner on the table in 30 minutes and for less than $6.

And unfortunately that will almost eat us out of meat in the freezer, so I hope I can pick up some reduced meat this week as I brave the shops.

What’s on your menu plan this week? Do you have a menu plan? If not, check out my How to Menu Plan post and then head over to Orgnaizing Junkie and post your menu and see what everyone else is eating this week.

It’s official.

You know you’re getting older when Dr Who is younger than you.

Matt Smith, the 11th Doctor, is just 26 years old.

To be honest, I’ve just watched an interview with him, and I think he’s perfect, it’s just he’s so young. Younger than me.

Which is of course my problem here (in case you hadn’t guessed).

I guess I’m just starting to feel old.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the last few days, and while it’s hard in some ways because things are very open ended at the moment, there are a lot of things I can specify now what my goals are.

One thing I found with last years goals was that it was hard to focus on so many things all the time. To keep them in mind. I tried to read them as much as possible, but in about September I decided that perhaps it would have been better to simply choose a couple of things to focus on each month.

When I sat down today to seriously think about my goals for the coming year I came up with 24 categories I wanted to set goals in. Woops - I think that kind of defeats the purpose a little bit. Those 24 were very specific projects. I thought perhaps I should try and put them in categories, and these were the one’s I came up with: Blogs, Craft, Social, Work, Kids, Home, Me.

I’ve slotted each of my specific projects into each category. Maybe instead of year-long goals (given the uncertain nature of the coming year) monthly goals might be the way to go? With some over-arching goals to work towards (similar to last year - eg. maintain credit average at uni).

What’s your strategy for goal stetting?

For the record, these are my categories and sub-projects:

Blogs: Kin’s Home, Kin’s Money, a new blog, Aussie Bloggers

Craft: Knitting, Sewing, Cross-stitch, Cards, Jewellery making

Social: Lions, Youth of the Year, ABA group

Work:Uni, Tupperware, Jobs

Kids: School, Daycare, Dancing, Gymnastics

Home: Scanning photos, Decluttering, Gardening

Me: Exercise, Health

In an effort to distract myself I’m going to keep sharing the exciting things that happened on our holidays. Enjoy!

The Eumundi Markets are an icon of the Sunshine Coast. Now 30 years old and still going strong, it had been 15 years since I’d last been. Needless to say at the age of13, there wasn’t a lot I remembered from that visit, and taking people who had never been before was great to see it through a tourists eyes.

There was such a wide variety of stalls it was hard to know where to start. In the end we tried to see as much as we could. The kids complained of the heat and tiredness after a while (the 5 or so hours they’re open is hardly enough time to see everything) but perked up when we found the face painting lady who’s been there as long as anyone can remember. She did a fabulous job turning my girls into butterfly princesses.

The food smells were to die for, and we tried as many different foods as we could fit in.

I could have spent all day scouring the stalls and spending up big. Fortunately the visitors needed to move on and so my bank account was spared the devastation that would have surely followed. As it was the girls were treated by Aunty Bells to a fantastic book “I Wish My Mother Was An Octopus”

The markets are well worth a visit if you’re in the area. The variety of products on offer is amazing, and there isn’t much of the “$2 chinese junk” stalls you see at so many other markets these days (there is a bit, but not enough to be worried about - the vast majority of products are exellent quality).