pay day and power cooking

Yes, that time of month again.  We had been living out of the freezer for the last month, hoping to empty it so we could clean it, but ran out of options for meals. So, we had to buy meat--Kachin-n-n-g!  I usually budget $2/person/day for meat, but with the price of beef had to do some fancy juggling.  Still, with a little care I managed to stay within the budget, but it meant a lot of power cooking.  so we started this morning, and by noon had the three biggest slow cookers bubbling away on the counter.  Tomorrow we'll deal with meatballs and hamburger patties for the freezer.

I made the mistake of mentioning that I was thinking about blueberry muffins and maybe a cobbler, so, of course, David made sure we had ice cream for the cobbler.  Over breakfast I started looking for recipes. but, lo and behold, there were blueberry muffin recipes in today's paper.  On second thought I don't believe I'll make my blueberry muffins with oat flour.  I am very grateful that I kept all of the old Five Roses and Pillsbury cook books I got when I married.  They are in tatters now, but I still use the recipes out of them.  More modern books talk about making cobbler with pie filling, but no mention of actually using real berries.

We also bought the makings for four batches of Rhubarb and \pineapple jam.  I'm not sure when I'll get to that!  This, too, was in an effort to clean out the freezer, as a good chunk of it is filled with last year's rhubarb.

Our only real extravagance this pay day was to buy a small panini cooker.  I also bought the meat and cheese to make myself a Reuben sandwich.  I had one a couple of months ago that had been cooked that way, without using butter on the bread.  Well, I tried it today for lunch.  Needs a little tweaking.

Beth, did you check Not Afraid of Color today? Seems like she made a whole bunch of owls while she was on holiday.  So cute, and I love the flower eyes!

So time for poker now.  We are both quite tired.  This working bit is for the birds, but mainly finished, so no worries.