Yard Sale Tupperware! WOOT!

I was raised in a yard saling family. I remember going on weekends when I was a kid, my mom would fill up the station wagon with me, my sister, my brother and whichever of my cousins that wanted to go. There were always so many of us that someone or two had to ride in the hatch area. So we would take our allowances and go out town to the yard sales.

When I was a teenager, this became a little embarassing when she would shop sales that were in my home town but I outgrew that. In the last few years o her life, we would often hop in my car and go together, looking for treasures. It's one of those things I am glad about.

Lately, I've been teaching my little one about yard sales. He loves them and wants to go with me whenever we find one. The oldest will slink down in the car and pretend he isn't there, but not the youngest. Today, we were on our way shopping and stopped at one. We strolled past the usual boxes of dusty shoes, VHS tapes and used lipsticks, half-full bottles of lotion, etc waded through the racks of too-small clothing when I spied this in amongst the  tattered, self-help books on a bookshelf. In a split second, I knew I must have it.

One of the things I love about the doctor's office is that they always have some cool gadgets to play with, like model bones and body part posters. I handed it to the little one and told him to go ask the lady how much it was. Being an obedient child, he did, and she said "50 cents!" it will be a great item when we do our anatomy class! It has a little pull-out drawer with a piece of paper inside that details how to use the model. As we were headed to pay, I noticed a box on the end of a table....

I love pricey kitchen stuff. I DON'T love paying for pricey kitchen stuff. One of what I call my hobbies is upgrading my kitchen items via thrift stores and yard sales. I have a weakness for Tupperware but it's so expensive! Every piece I own has come from a thrift store or a yard sale, and I have never paid more than $3 for one, that one being a giant green mixing bowl with a lid, my mom used hers for many things and I do, too.

I rummaged around in the box and removed some recycled sandwich meat containers and some partially melted rubbermaid bowls and several lids that didn't have bowls to go with them, then I carried this up to the lady at the desk and set the bones down with the box.

The veggies and dip server was $1 and I'll use that thing a LOT
I needed some airtight canisters and there are 1 large, 5 medium, and 1 small of the ones with red lids. There are 2 small ones with beige lids. I'm not sure what the orange thing is but I'll use it for something, probably spaghetti.
She charged me $3 for everything in that box, including the dip server. They're dirty where they've been in the garage, but half are running through the dishwasher tonight and the other half will be tomorrow. What a great deal for only having to wash them! I spent all day being happy about that box of Tupper.

And that was our day. Yard sales rock!

Things That Make You Go Mmmmmmmm

Today's entry will be about one of my favorite things to eat, we grew up calling it Slim Toast! You may have encountered this dish before under one of its pseudonyms, hen in a nest, popeye, moon egg, egg in a basket, toad in the hole, eggs-in-toast, cowboy egg, and one-eyed jack.

The reason we called them Slim Toast was because my dearest cousin married a man named Slim, back when I was still very young. One day, they were hanging out with my mom (one of the coolest ladies in the entire world) and he mentioned that he had invented these fabulous treats. Mom had been serving them up to us for as long as I could remember and I can't remember if she told him that or not. I'm sure that he really thought he had invented them, though. Anyway! From that point onward, Mom called them Slim Toast and this is how you make them.

That's my mom's biscuit cutter...

You need 1 bread per egg and some butter. I like real butter. Medium eggs work best but all I had today were jumbos, so there will be some spillage. I also use just regular bread from a loaf, but there are some restaurants that use thick sliced, artisan bread.

 Cut the hole, my bread tore on the side but I don't care, the egg will make it stick together.

 Melt a pat of butter in the hole on med-low heat. I like to swirl it around in there so that when I crack the egg into it, it pushes the butter out into the sides.

Crack the egg into the middle and pop the yolk, I like cooked yolks. This is also where I like to add salt and pepper, break little bits of butter onto the corners, and put the lid on. After it sets some, you can turn them. It will probably leak some, it leaks less if you use a smaller egg and make sure you let it set.

 After flipping them a few times, I always cut a slit in the middle to make sure the yolk is solid and if it is and the toast is golden brown, flip them out onto a plate. These are so good, and they always make me think of my mom and Slim, who are both no longer with us, and their great senses of humor, which is a prerequisite to marrying into my family. RIP you two, you are and will always be, missed.

Saving Money on Car Repairs

I know there are many Do It yourselfers out there who do their own DIY car repairs. My husband is NOT one of those people. I used to work on an old Mustang that I had, and am comfortable with doing repair work on a 60s era car, but no matter how awesome of a car it would be, my guys want to have a vehicle with some modern amenities like ... oh let's see... A/C, power steering, seats that aren't pleather etc etc.

At the worst of the recession, when my husband lost the job that brought us to Alabama, we spent what we had saved up on a beat up, 90s model Toyota Camry. We had to, because he had been driving a company truck and we had to find something. The car definitely came with some issues but the motor was strong and it only had 75,000 miles on it. Now, I can hear many of you saying "That's young for a Toyota!" but those miles were teen-driven miles and the car was pushing 20 years old so we weren't delusional about making it last to 250,000 miles old. We used it to get us around town for errands and job interviews all the while the axles made a funny popping noise, the guy at the quickie lube place unplugged a crack that was in the radiator so it started leaking, it would sometimes not start and I'd have to have a jump, and the brakes started making noise. I bought some brake pads and brought them home. That was the first time I heard The Speech.

"I am not a mechanic. I am a technician."

So I placed an ad on Craigslist, offering $25 for someone to come over and do my brakes. Within minutes, I had 5 responses. I selected a guy who said he lived in our town and actually works for a shop as a mechanic. He showed up and fixed the brakes and said that when we got the new radiator, to give him a call. We did. He replaced the radiator and hoses for 50 bucks. By that time, we were filling the radiator up with water just to get around town and before we came home again).
He replaced the axles, the belts, the motor mount, and the wiper arms ("Those are not snowplows" he said after learning I tried to use them to wipe the snow off the windshield...) for $150. He said he'd do it for anything more than $50 so I gave him extra because I want him to stay willing to do the work.

Now, I have to buy the parts and I am OK with that. I didn't realize the markup that shops do on parts until I received an itemized estimate last month for a strut job, thinking it would be too hard for him to do in the driveway. The shop's estimate was over $900 for just the front end struts. Each strut assembly was listed at $322 just for the part so $644 for the 2 struts, not including labor, which was another $300.
I bought the struts at AutoZone for $165 for the pair. We borrowed a strut spring compressor tool from the loaner tool service there for free. He put my struts on for 100 bucks. The savings was phenomenal.

So if you are "not a mechanic" but need your car worked on, maybe check your local Craigslist. Ours has several guys who offer to do jobs at home, I got lucky the first time, you could too. And your bank account will thank you.

There's a fickle eater in my house!

My youngest son is a fickle eater. It pains me greatly to say that, but it is true. One day, he loves tomatoes, the next day...I can't coax him to take a single bite. He has done this with bananas, pickles, olives, tacos, sandwiches, pasta, apples, eggs, mandarin oranges, the list goes on and on. He has a love/hate thing with chicken and can tell if I substitute ground turkey for ground beef in a recipe (ground turkey is easily less than half the cost per pound than ground beef...). The only constant for him has been his consistent love (since infancy) of plastic food and his love of candy.

It baffles me daily when we eat something that he previously enjoyed and suddenly, it is no longer on his list of acceptable foods. That doesn't mean that he won't love that item again in 2 months, 2 weeks, or even 2 days. I wouldn't call him a picky eater, just fickle. "I'm not in the mood for that anymore" he'll say, and he will choose to just not eat.

For the longest time, I have been making his plates into things that make him laugh or that he will call "fancy" and it is the greatest way yet to get him to eat his lunch and supper. It's not a banana, it's a smile. A slice of tomato can make great eyes, big, red clown noses, etc. He loves to have a layered sandwich like he sees on TV. I've discovered that he doesn't like sandwiches, but if they are made on brown and serve rolls or cut into little squares and served with toothpicks like hors d'oeuvres, he will eat in record time. It doesn't bother me to put a little extra love into his food. So, today I made him some lunch with some ham that he had deemed unacceptable yesterday and banana that he didn't like anymore last week. It came out like this.

 Those are ham and cheese minis with sliced tomato and tomato ears (with marshmallow earrings), a banana, a sweet pickle nose, and 2 olives on toothpicks. Even when we're out of bananas, I try and garnish his plate with olives or something because those little touches make a huge difference in how he perceives his food. I don't know why unless it is something I learned once on food network when the chef said "You also eat with your eyes."
I always know what will happen when I set his plate down and his face lights up and I hold my breath till he says "Now THAT'S fancy!" I get back a plate that looks like this:

With the proper presentation, I can get him to eat almost anything. At least, for now, till he figures out my trick.

4 days with no power and we're still eating the mayonnaise

We live in an area of Alabama that was affected by the recent storms. We didn't get hit by an actual tornado, but 100 mph straight line winds will take down trees, power lines, and roofs.

I woke up at 5:15 to the sound of the tornado sirens, the sight of the love of my life fumbling with the TV remote and just after 6 AM, we finally peeked outside and were greeted with this:

Now, that massive oak tree has a 15 foot circumference at its base (we used string and then measured the string) and used to provide the loveliest shade in our side yard every afternoon. The neighbor thinks it is 100 years old but I think closer to 200, unfortunately, the chainsaws couldn't get through the trunk for us to count.
So! It was 6:30 AM and there was a tree across the road on top of our power lines. Despite the fact that no one had had their caffeine yet, we were all wide awake. It was time for a little damage control.

The first thing I did was 'splain to the kids that complaining would not get them any results and not to make a bad situation worse.
The second thing was make sure that they all understood that my deep freeze was strictly OFF limits. I knew it would be several days before I even needed to look at the food in it to see if it was thawing out.
Then I called next door to see if they were ok because the tree was in their yard, too.

For the rest of the day, we all wandered around the neighborhood, looking at each other's trees and chatting about how it would be no easy fix. Well, all except for Alpha Man, HE spent the day napping. OK, OK, not the whole day...he did build me this ultra-fancy, high tech grill with cinder blocks from the garden and the bottom rack of the oven.

I had to be able to cook but didn't want to heat up the house using the stove, which is gas. I didn't even remember that I could light it manually until my beautiful mother in law told me. She may have saved the day with that, because at least we could have sweet tea. Here is a side view before we made some adjustments.

Now we had a method of cooking, so I set about looking through the fridge for things that needed to be eaten. I hate wasting food. We all ate ice cream that afternoon and grilled hot dogs that night.
Day 2 is when we realized that it would be days of no power. The street department came, though, and cut up the tree until they couldn't anymore, then they cleared the road by shoving the massive trunk aside with a tractor (I kid you not!) and moving on. That day, I emptied the fridge for the most part, ummmm...sortof....we ate scrambled eggs for lunch and I moved everything that needed it into the freezer compartment and stuck half a bag of ice in. The other half was in a cooler with some insulin. While I was in the freezer, I felt up a package of chicken breasts and they were still frozen in spite of the fact that we were in and out of the fridge getting things so I figured no worries. We also had many things in the cooler like the cheese, which we were nibbling on, and stuff like mayo.

In the meantime, we were all taking walks and sitting on the porch reading books and playing board games. At this time, the youngest son said "I like it when the power is out. We all pay attention to each other and not electronics!"

Day 3 is the day I took the hand saw and cleared off the branches on our trampoline. The other neighbor's tree fell onto it. That wasn't the first time a tree has fallen onto it, but the other time we just repaired the net and it was fine. The boys love the trampoline so much but after getting it cleared off, I discovered the frame is broken. The neighbor has offered to help get a new one but I hate asking when I know they are going to be spending a few thousand bucks clearing their yard of fallen trees. We ate supper at the church.

The next day, I went to the store and bought several bags of ice and as soon as I got home, we opened up the deep freeze and I felt around for things that were getting soft and shoved ice into all of the holes. I cooked my husband some lunch over a campfire with his late grandmother's cast iron Dutch oven, using things that needed to be eaten anyway. I threw into the hot pot a package of sausages, then cut straight into it an onion, a squash, a zucchini, threw in a can of black beans and another of tomatoes and let it cook.

In the end, it looked like this...It would have been awesome served over some rice. That's his grandmother's spoon, too.

At about 8 PM on the 4th day, the power men who came from North Carolina turned our electricity back on. They let it run all night and then turned it back off on Sunday morning  to do some more work. It was turned back on at about 5 PM.
In spite of the fact that everyone I know personally threw out the entire contents of their freezers and refrigerators, I did not and I don't think anyone will be any the worse for wear. I'm not the only person who saved their food, as I spoke with several people in stores who were just as determined as I was and buying many bags of ice. I would say that this choice may not be for everyone, so always go by your USDA guidelines for food safety.