Friday Follow

TGIF!  It's been a long week and I'm so happy the weekend is almost here! 

It's been a landmark week for me - I participated in my first Wordless Wednesday, then decided that I had trouble with the wordless part so I "invented" Talkative Thursday.

This is my 3rd week participating in Friday Follow and so far I've really been enjoying it.  Without it I wouldn't have discovered some really great blogs.  Before last week most of the blogs I followed were for deals, coupons, freebies & giveaways.  Now I have discovered that I can read blogs not just for informational purposes but for perhaps an even more important reason - to make me laugh! 

Here are a couple I found last week, one by randomly clicking around the list and one because she followed me!

Emily from emcogNEATO:  It's hard to categorize this blog but what I can say is that she is an amazing writer and has a very unique voice. When I found this blog I went back and read every single post - pretty much took up most of free time on Friday but it was worth it.  She cracks me up - and  even made me cry at least once.  I now look forward to her posts every day! 

Missy from Loving My Children's Gifts: This is not the type of blog I would normally read, but I followed it as a return follow and I am so glad I did!  Even though I can't necessarily relate to the stories about her kids, she is so funny and engaging I love to read about them nonetheless. 

What other wonderful blogs will I find this week?  I can't wait to see!  Thanks for stopping by!

Dinner Tonight: Jerk Chicken

I have been meaning to try to make jerk chicken for a while but could mostly only find recipes that were overly complicated and involved buying exotic ingredients.  This is why I was really excited to find this post on the blog "From Blah to Ta-Daa."  I actually had all the ingredients on hand except for lime juice, and I needed to buy a lime for the rice we had earlier in the week so it worked out perfectly!
Traditionally jerk chicken is made with scotch bonnet peppers, which are some of the hottest in the world.  This recipe was noticably void of anything with that kind of heat, but I added some red pepper flakes because I thought it might need some kick.  I wasn't able to marinate it for the 24 hours it suggested, instead it got about 10.  I'm not sure if that made a difference as the chicken was still very flavorful.  Hubby was skeptical but took one bite and said "this chicken is good" so I figure it was a success! 
He was disappointed in my choice of side dish though.  He said that as long as I was making rice I should have made red beans and rice instead of just the rice pilaf I served.  Sadly, what he doesn't know (or won't until he catches up on my blog posts) is that I didn't make the rice fresh - I used leftovers that were frozen from the last time we had rice pilaf.  I think that the chicken had so much going on that all the spices in the red beans and rice mix would have been too much, but we'll tackle that next time I decide to make this.


***Tip*** The marinade included brown sugar.  My brown sugar is perpetually in a state of giant, dry clumpiness.  I remember seeing somewhere once that you could add a piece of bread and it would soften the sugar.  Last night before bed I tried this and this morning when I went to make the marinade the sugar was all soft and the clumps were gone!  It worked - how amazing!


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Estimated cost of meal:


Chicken: $1.20
Limes: $.75 (stupid freeze in Florida I think it drove up our lime prices astronomically)
Other marinade ingredients: $.50ish
Rice: Free (included in previous meal's total)
Bread: $.80

Total: $3.25

Former life total: Dinner @ KFC (still chicken): $13

Leaner Life Savings: $9.75 or 75%!!!

Talkative Thursday (?)

So I was thinking that Wordless Wednesday, though a neat idea, is really hard.  One of the main reasons for blogging is to have an outlet to blab all you want to whoever will read.  At least that seems to be a lot of people's reason. 

As I tried to sleep last night I had what I thought was a brilliant idea - a new blog meme that is a follow-up to Wordless Wednesday and would allow me to talk all I want, either about the picture from yesterday or whatever I so chose.  Anyone want to join me?   

Actually, it turns out this idea was so brilliant that someone else already thought of it, though they called it Tell Me Thursday.  It looks like only about 4 people participate, which is probably about as many that I would get so maybe I'm not quite the meme mastermind that I pictured. 

Regardless, since I can now use words, I wanted to post the companion to yesterday's picture.  These came from a trip to Puerto Vallarta.  At their zoo they let you play with the baby cats for a small fee of $10 (100 pesos) per person.  They also let you feed all of the other animals at the zoo and provide a bag of food for $5.  We fed monkeys, zebras, giraffes, camels, goats, toucans, wolves, coyotes, baboons, pigs, flamingos, probably more I'm forgetting, and the highlight for me, bears.  Turns out bears like peanuts.  And animal crackers.  It did seem a little strange feeding animal crackers to animals but it was still really cool.
On our first trip we held a two-month old jaguar and a one-month old lion.  I don't have those pictures handy but I might put them up someday. 

The second trip (a year later) we held the little angels pictured yesterday and below.  They are brother and sister but I can't remember their names.  It was really neat to hold a black one because they are so rare, though I suppose all jaguars are getting rare these days.
The reason I didn't put this picture up yesterday is because I hate the look on my face and couldn't defend myself without words!  But the cat is cute, so it's worth sharing anyway.

So apparently this isn't a good quality copy of this picture.  I'll try to update with a better one later, but I wanted to get this posted while it was actually still Thursday and semi-relevant! Fixed!!!

Dinner Tonight: Steak Sandwiches

As annoying as she can be, and as wrong about the actual time it takes a normal person to cook her meals, I like Rachael Ray.  Her food is usually pretty good.  Tonight's recipe is in her cookbook called "365 No Repeats" or something like that.  Someday I will take a picture of what my copy of the book looks like.  Let's just say that it has seen better days, and I am so glad I now have a gas stove because electric ones stay way too hot.
Anyway, Rachael's recipe for these yummy steak sandwiches is for some reason hard to come by online, but thankfully my trusty google came through for me eventually and I found it here.  Of course, as is almost always the case when I cook her recipes, I changed a few things.
I used sirloin instead of flank steak.  I think I've mentioned this before, but it really bothers me that flank steak is considered a "cheap" piece of meat.  I've never seen it on sale and it costs at least $8/lb at my stores.  Sirloin is a fairly good piece of meat and I've gotten it on sale for as little as $2/lb. 
Even though I do generally cook about four portions just for the two of us (hubby eats a lot of meat and I keep my 2nd portion for lunch the next day), two pounds of meat to make four sandwiches is just ridiculous.  I used one pound and still had enough to make at least six sandwiches. 
Hubby wouldn't eat the onions, so I only cooked a small onion instead of two big ones.  I used about 1/4 cup of chicken stock instead of the 2 cups the recipe indicated.  It just didn't seem necessary to waste all of that liquid if you were just cooking it all off, even though I know it might have provided an extra depth of flavor.  Since I was the only one eating it, I was okay without that. 
Though it took me about an hour to finish dinner, the result was very tasty.  I overcooked the meat a bit, trying to make sure it was done enough for hubby, but the flavor was still fine.  The onions were really yummy.  I added some dijon mustard to my sandwich just for kicks. 
I served with Terra chips, not only because Rachael Ray always suggests them as a side dish to most of her burgers/sammies, but because I got them for free!  They were definitely more exotic and interesting than regular potato chips, but unfortunately they didn't taste that great.  The texture was a little weird and inconsistent with so many different types of vegetables.  They were okay but I'm glad I didn't have to pay for them.
Ideally this meal would have been great with a nice salad or some asparagus, since it was lacking in veggies and those seem like they would go with the French aspect of the dish.

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Estimated cost of meal

Steak: $2
Marinade: $.75
Onion Mixture: $.50
Cheese: $1 (used provolone from Wal-Mart deli)
Croissants: $1 (on clearance at the Wal-Mart bakery since they were near their sell-by date!)
Chips: Free

Total: $5.25

Former life total: Lunch @ Andre's (they sell croissants, it's the best I can do): $32

Leaner Life Savings: $26.75 or 83%!!!

Wordless Wednesday: Good Kitty

Dinner Tonight: Pork Quesadillas

I decided not to take a picture of tonight's meal, since I realized that there were really no visual differences between pork quesadillas and the chicken quesadillas I have blogged about previously. 
This is the first time that I have attempted to make Mexican-style stewed pork and I think it turned out pretty well.  I put 2 lbs of pork shoulder in the Crock Pot and added a can of Rotel tomatoes w/green chiles, some water, garlic powder, chili powder & cumin.  It simmered on low for about 8 hours while I went to work.
When I got home I pulled it out and shredded it, then added some of the liquid from the Crock Pot and some salt.  It was tasty but not highly flavorful.  I think I could have made it more flavorful but adding the shredded meat back to the Crock Pot and simmering it for a bit, but I was afraid if the meat got too wet it would make the quesadillas soggy. 
As it was, it made a good quesadilla filling (would have been even better if I had some green chiles to add) but as hubby pointed out there's just not much to it on its own.   We had quite a lot leftover so we might find out soon how good it is as a chimichanga filling!
One of the best parts of this meal was how quickly I was able to pull it together.  I think I under-utilize my Crock Pot.  It really is such a wonderful thing to throw a few things in it in the morning and come home to have dinner almost ready. 
If anyone knows any great slow cooker recipes please pass them along.  Keep in mind that hubby won't really eat vegetables and I have an aversion to having to brown anything before putting it in the slow cooker as I think it kind of defeats the purpose.  I have a slow cooker cookbook and I swear 90% of the recipes involve browning.  Caramelization, schmaramelization.
My mom suggested I check out this blog but I haven't had a chance yet.  Think I might mosey on over there and see what I can find.  (Insert imaginary pause here as I go read this blog for a moment)...Guess what?  The most recent post is for Mexican pork!  If only I had seen that yesterday!  The citrus addition seems a little weird though.  I'll keep looking and maybe some of their recipes will show up on future Menu Plan Mondays.

Mailbox Monday

I didn't have a very good week for mailbox freebies, so I'm including several other freebies I picked up at the store this week to make myself feel better.  Please forgive the photo quality (or lack thereof) as I was trying to take these pictures in a hurry this morning and used my cell phone to make it easier to upload.

Grr... can't get my bullets to line up properly!  I'm beginning to think learning HTML might be a good idea.

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  Magazines: Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Weight Watchers, Saveur
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  Samples: Yogi tea
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  Coupons: Beechnut $1 off (don't remember signing up for this)
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  Giveaway win: L'Oreal Mascara & Lash Serum from Saving Money and Living Life
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  Store freebies: 2 bags Terra chips & some fruit crisps from Babies 'R Us (chips were on sale 2/$2, used 2 coupons for $1/1, checker made mistake ringing up and only charged me $.01 for one bag, making the fruit crips free too), Fruit snacks from Price Chopper (on sale for $1, used $1/1 coupon)

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  Poster from Redwood Creek winery, as modeled by hubby (I actually got 2 but one was stuck in the package and I needed to get to work)

Please visit A Frugal Friend for more great Mailbox Monday finds!