Super Bowl Grub

 I roasted a chicken last night for dinner. Bob wanted it and I told him that I had no problem with it but we were going to use the leftovers to make his Super Bowl dinner. I'm not a football fan. I don't watch the game at all. I wouldn't know a quarterback from a linebacker, nor do I care to. I do like to make Bob a good dinner, though, and I'll use anything as an excuse to do so.

I got online and did a Google search and found a collection of like 125 recipes that use leftover chicken. I found one for Buffalo Chicken Mac and Cheese. It sounded good. I had everything on hand to make it. I did cut the recipe in half because, as written, it just made way too much for the two of us.
I also found a recipe for Mexican Street Corn Casserole. Again, I had all the ingredients on hand and it sounded good and I've been meaning to make some Mexican street corn and haven't quite gotten around to it yet. So, I figured tonight would be the night to do that.

Any good mac & cheese recipe starts out with a boatload of shredded cheese. This one is no different. Do yourself a favor and do not buy pre-shredded cheese. This is extra sharp cheddar and mozzarella. I froze the leftover cheese for another time.

It's amazing, to me, that I had some fresh cilantro on hand. I chopped this up for the corn recipe.

The mac and cheese starts out with the typical roux. The different thing about this recipe is that the macaroni noodles are cooked in the sauce rather than cooked separately in salted, boiling water.

The sauce for the mac and cheese has all the components as buffalo chicken: buffalo sauce and ranch dressing.

This Mexican Street Corn Casserole was delicious. There's no two ways about it. I did add a can of rinsed black beans to it because I thought they would taste good. It didn't disappoint. I'll make this recipe in the future.

What I like about the Buffalo Chicken Mac and Cheese is that it's a one -pot, stove top recipe. It worked out well because I had the corn casserole in the oven while I was making this recipe on the stove.

Buffalo Chicken Mac and Cheese. I'll make this recipe again, with some tweaks. First, I'll leave out the cream cheese. It wasn't needed, in my opinion. I'll cook the noodles separately, as well. I'll cut back the cheese to 1 cup total. I'll up the blue cheese (I used gorganzola) to 1 cup and I'll melt that into the sauce that coats the noodles. I'll also leave out the bacon. It wasn't needed. As written, the recipe is roughly 3.2 stars out of 5. I made this recipe exactly as written except I cut it in half.

Mexican Street Corn Casserole. This is going into my regular recipe rotation. I like my addition of black beans. I'll leave that in there. This recipe was 4.1 stars out of 5.

Here is a photo of our Super Bowl dinner tonight.
Bob said he hopes the Eagles win. Me? I don't really care, but I'll say the Eagles, too, because we're going to see the band The Eagles in a week. The tickets were our Christmas present to ourselves. I'm super excited about that.

Is Walmart Being Shady With Their Customers?

 I wanted to get a small Walmart order since Bob said he was low on milk. I'm not a milk drinker, so he has to tell me when it's time to buy some. I figured I would take advantage of their lower prices and get a bunch of yogurts as we've been eating those at night to appease our cravings for something sweet. Walmart also tends to offer the lowest cost eggs in town, so I added a dozen to the cart.
I set pickup for the next morning and went off to bed.
I got a text from them the next morning stating that one of the things that I ordered was not in stock and did I want a substitution for it? I didn't, so I clicked that option and sent it back to them. We headed over that way to pick up our order.

This is what I looked at when I ordered eggs.

I went with the $2.28 dozen, of course.

Where I take issue is when the clerk put our groceries into the car, she informed us that the eggs were not available. I took note that she did not say in stock. I asked her, specifically, if I went into the store, would I be able to buy them. She said yes. She then went on with some weird explanation that the cheaper eggs were in a styrofoam container and styrofoam wouldn't scan into their system with grocery pickup. That's odd to me because all 3 of those options are in styrofoam. So, going off of what that clerk told me, none of these options would be available to me for grocery pickup even though they specifically state that they are.
The other odd thing is that I've purchased these exact eggs in the past with absolutely zero issues as evident with what I circled in orange. 

So, going through all the options, Walmart has these that, according to the clerk, will scan in their system.

I don't know about you all, but I'm not going to be forced into either #1: having to trek through Walmart in order to get a dozen eggs at a reasonable price or #2: have to purchase an option at double or more the cost.
This is a deal breaker for me with Walmart. I will be buying eggs at a bit of a higher cost from another store from here on out.
I realize that it's a small amount of money, but if you multiply that by every single other person that is getting this exact same song and dance, it adds up to a lot of money.
In my opinion, it's a scam.
I left feedback for them and I don't know what will come of that, but don't state that something is available for pickup on your website and then tell customers that it's actually not available unless you're willing to wade through their very crowded store. I'm not into it.

More Pantry/Freezer Stock Up

 I did a bit more stocking up because I didn't use all of my $100 weekly budget yesterday at Safeway. I decided to order grocery pickup from Fred Meyer last night. I get loyalty reward coupons from Fred Meyer each month and I really try to utilize them to get the most for my money. I knew that I only had a $20 budget to work with.

Bob and I enjoy having a couple of hot dogs for lunch and Fred Meyer had the Bar S brand 10 for $10. I bought 5 packs. They freeze well and we can simply pull out a pack and that should last us a week. If we get ambitious, we can get our tripod cooking grate and put it out over the fire pit and cook them on there. I don't care how old I get, I still love to have a couple of hot dogs with mustard.
I stocked up on a bottle of chocolate syrup for Bob. He's a chocoholic. He loves chocolate. I have a hard time eating chocolate as it gives me horrid acid reflux, even after taking a antacid. I tend to avoid it.
I bought the mandarin oranges for me. Those are my chocolate.

One of my loyalty coupons was for a free jar of Kraft mayonnaise. I like the stuff made with olive oil. The puddings are for Bob. The chocolate chips are to make chocolate chip cookies with and I actually got 3 green peppers, not 1. I'm going to slice them up and freeze them.

I wanted the red potatoes to make a specific recipe with and I held onto the salsa coupon from last month.

So I was still able to bring this small grocery haul in under my $20 budget and we have several more meals in the freezer for our no spend challenge.

Let me know in the comments if you like seeing these types of posts. If you do, I'll continue to post them.

Stocking Up & A Week's Worth Of Groceries

 We're getting ready to do a no spend challenge coming up starting in March. When I say no spend, I mean that we will eat what we have stocked up in our freezers, in our refrigerators and what we have stored up as far as canned and dry goods. The only things we will buy will be milk products, and those will be limited to milk, half & half and heavy cream. I will not be buying yogurt because I'll simply make my own. We won't be buying cheese because I can make yogurt cheese and farmers cheese from milk. We will be able to buy produce, as well. Some produce I can grow in my Aerogarden or I can start it out in one of my raised beds, like lettuce, chard, peas and spinach.

Anyhow, I've allotted us a $400 grocery budget to get by for February and I'll also use that to stock up stuff that we use regularly, like coffee, flour, etc.
I'm challenging myself to see exactly how far we can go, spending as little as possible. I know we can do this.

Now, onto my grocery haul this morning. I shopped at our local Safeway. I saved 64% off of my total. By carefully planning my trip and allowing for a few impulse purchases, I was able to save $20 off of my total. I will use that $20 at another store to stock up on some other items that are way cheaper there than at Safeway. Whenever I shop, I have 4 tabs open on my laptop. I have Amazon, Safeway, Fred Meyer and Walmart pulled up. I go between those 4 stores. I find that Walmart and Amazon usually have about the prices on many things. Fred Meyer is a bit more than Walmart and Safeway usually has the highest prices of all unless you shop the sales, like I do.

My total, before discounts and coupons, was around $140. Safeway has a deal this week, if you buy 3 or more pounds of 93% lean ground beef, it costs $2.97 per pound. I decided to completely top off our chest freezer with ground beef and I bought 12 pounds. If it wasn't on sale and, if I didn't have a Safeway Just For U account, it would have cost me $101.88. I paid $36.64 for 12 pounds.
In the produce depart, they had fresh sage, in a clamshell, for $1. We decided to roast a chicken this coming week. The juicing carrots are Bob's big expense that he feeds to our wild rabbit population. The deer eat them, too. By feeding them in areas away from the garden, they stay out of it because they know they will get a carrot if they do.

I added coupons on Just For U for $10 off $50, $20 off $100, $5 off $5 or more produce and 10% off the entire purchase if it was over $50. Just with those 4 coupons, I saved over $40. I also got a free yogurt, 50-cents off of Yoplait yogurts, which were on sale for 24-cents each, limit of 12. The Noosa yogurts were $1.49 each, which is a fantastic price. These are delicious and they are usually quite expensive. I bought 8 of those at that price.

Here are my total savings. Saving 64% is nothing to sneeze about. 24 meals of ground beef for just over $36 is a phenomenal price. I also got quadruple the reward points (for gas discounts) for buying over $20 worth of produce.

End Of January Garden Happenings At Kelpie Kapers Farm

 I think a good start to 2023 would be to show you all what's going on around Kelpie Kapers Farm. First, I'll attempt to walk you all through what I plan on doing as far as getting a flock of laying chickens going here.

Bob put up the fence so that the cats could go outside last summer. They didn't really use that pen all that much, to be honest. They like to go out into the yard with the dogs and they seem to mind pretty well doing that, so that's what we've been doing these past several months. We are going to expand that pen. I'm going use 3 more of those fence panels to trellis tomatoes and other things on. I had planned on planting out 100 indeterminate tomato varieties, but I think that 80 should suffice and I can use the other panel for cucumbers and winter squash. Anyhow, that will leave 6 panels to build a chicken yard. The yard will be 20-foot long x 10-foot wide. We plan on putting the coop inside of it and we also plan on putting a bird netting or a tarp over the top to keep flying predators out. We just need to figure out a solution to keep them from going through the gap at the gate. We also need to figure exactly where we want to put this. I think having it partway under those fir trees will be a great thing for helping to shade it during the heat of summer, but I also have to think about the fact that raccoons do climb trees, so there's that to factor in, as well.

The rhubarb is doing quite well. I believe that I'll have a bumper crop of it this coming year. I have 2 plants. I'd love to add about 3 more, but I'll have to see if I can get these seeds to grow or not. I'm not going to buy anymore crowns. Bob covered it with a bit of soil.

See? It's healthy and thriving in it's blanket of straw.

There's the 2 rhubarb crowns enjoying their place. Now, I just need to figure out how to keep Rose from walking over them.

Here is one of the two beds that I planted out with garlic at the end of October. I plan on harvesting it sometime in later July or early August.

Here is the second bed of garlic. They are growing right along just fine. They even went through our 3 day deep freeze.

I poured a small amount of milk over the end of this log last spring. I knew what would happen and just look! So cool! I love having fungi grow!

Bob started doing some cleaning down on the terraced garden. On the next day that it's not raining, you all know where I'll be.

We have to add some serious amendments to these raised beds. That soil that we bought in bulk flat out sucked.

Here is the start of the first 20-foot long greenhouse. I'll be able to grow some serious crops in there!

We're not putting the cover on until winter's over, though. We don't want to lose this. We just need to figure out where to put the second one.

I plan on putting okra, melons, winged beans, cucamelons, butterfly peas and all my peppers into the pair of these greenhouses.

One frame up and one to go...as soon as we figure out where to put it. Bob is even contemplating parking his car over on the back side of the trailer and putting that other one alongside of that one. I suggested putting it out front. I'll let you all know where we decide.

Side Hustle

 You all know that Bob is a licensed electrician. He's technically retired, but he does take a side job here and there. Sometimes, they are super boring, like replacing a GFCI for someone, but, occasionally, they can be pretty cool. He invited me to tag along with him this morning.
First, we had to stop for a gas station food car picnic. I don't know what it is about gas station food, but we love the stuff! Some of the gas stations, in this area, put out some really good food. Let me know in the comments below if you want me to post more about those.
Today, we stopped at the Texaco out on Industrial Way. Bob got French toast toronados (which I thought were gross) and I got a small container of cheeseburger macaroni and some deviled eggs. That gas station makes some seriously delicious deviled eggs!

I don't know who makes their deviled eggs in there, but I'd love to have them make me a dozen or so. They really are that good.

Bob's French toast toronado. He said it wasn't bad. It had a sausage in the middle of it. I thought it was pretty gross.

After that, we were off to our destination.

Yes! He's going to doing some electrical work on a couple of houseboats! We were offered one to move into, but I'm just not interested in that. If I wasn't into gardening and country living, maybe.

He's going to be getting this all rewired and ready to rent out.

The nearest neighbor is in a boat.

That one is a 2-bedroom houseboat. It's close to being done enough to rent out.

I"m not sure how big the other one is, but it needs a lot more work done on it.

The view would be absolutely stunning! I wouldn't mind that at all.

That's the ramp down to the boat-house.

Lastly, I'll leave you all some views of the beautiful Columbia River.

We were told that it's 30 feet deep right there, under the houseboats, right off the bank.