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.

The Cost Of Eggs

 I am in a lot of different Facebook groups. Egg prices are becoming more and more ridiculously expensive. I was being rather boastful in saying that our egg prices, here in southwest Washington state, were still relatively affordable. While they are, especially when compared to other parts of the country, I have noticed a decided jump in prices.

A few weeks ago, I could buy 5-dozen eggs, at Walmart, for a few cents over $9. That was pretty affordable. Today, that same 5-dozen pack of eggs is over $13. That's a $4 jump in just a few weeks time.



This morning, I went through all of our major stores' websites and gathered screen shots of what they are charging for eggs. I did not get Winco's prices because they do not offer curbside pickup and I don't really shop a lot there as I find the store to be very crowded and I'm not really into crowds. Their prices run very close to Walmart's prices, however.

Here is the cost of eggs at Walmart. One peculiar thing I noticed is that an 18-pack is cheaper than a dozen. I'll definitely go for the 18-packs, if that's the case!

Here is the cost of eggs at Safeway. They are running a bit higher than Walmart is. I watch for sales there and I also watch for markdowns.

Fred Meyer, at this particular time, has the cheapest dozen eggs in our area, at $1.99 per dozen.


As far as getting the best deal for your money, Walmart has this in the bag with their 18-packs of eggs. If you buy 2 18-packs, it will run you just over $5. If you buy 3 dozen from Fred Meyer, it will cost you $5.97.

Now, in a few months, we'll be adding chickens to our little homestead up here. I've been cautioned that chicken feed is expensive. I don't doubt that at all, but, as everyone who knows me can attest to, I will find the best deal on chicken food.

We have our chicken coop. We bought this one off of Facebook Marketplace, last spring, before there was ever an egg shortage, for $100. It has 18 nesting boxes in it. We plan on getting 15-18 chickens. We have those 6 chain-length fence panels. They are 10-feet long x 6-feet high. That will be our chicken run. I will sell extra eggs. I will charge $5 per dozen for my farm eggs. I will get it, too. I am also not above bartering. In fact, I love to barter!

I priced chicken feed this morning. I looked at Wilco Farm Store, but they are super expensive, so I didn't even bother taking a screen shot of their prices.

So, I looked at Tractor Supply Company and Walmart.

Here's the cost of 40-50 lb. bags of food from Tractor Supply Company. I'll go through between 2-3 bags per month with as many chickens as I plan on having.

This is the cost of comparable bags of chicken feed from Walmart. It's much more affordable to get it from Walmart than it is to get it from TSC.

Of course, I'll be supplementing my chickens with garden produce. Remember those huge cabbages that I grew last year? Well, the leaves that we tossed out into the yard to compost down can go to the chickens. Our eggshells can go back to the chickens.

So, in a few months, we'll have laying hens and, hopefully, within the next several months, I'll be selling my eggs to make my chicken venture self-supporting.

Cowboy Calico Beans

 Bob and I are trying something a bit different this month. I found a menu template and I sat down and figured out 31 main dishes for dinner. I filled it in with all sorts of different ideas. I put in everything from Cod Mappas to breakfast for dinner. I let Bob choose what he wants for dinner the following day.

He chose Cowboy Calico Beans.

I've made this recipe multiple times since we moved out here into the country. It's become a favorite.

All good recipes, in my opinion, start out with a chopped onion. This was no exception.

I used 1/2 of a green bell and 1/2 of a red bell. Color is a great thing in recipes as you eat with your eyes first.

This recipe contains four different types of beans. I ordered a case of butter beans from Amazon so that I could have them on hand. That's how much we like this recipe. Butter beans are hard to find here locally.

Everything cooks together, slowly, for 45 minutes to an hour.

This is a perfect ending to a cool and blustery day.


Cowboy Calico Beans

1 pound lean ground beef
1 medium onion, chopped
1 bell pepper, chopped
1/4 cup ketchup
3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoons yellow prepared mustard
1 15-oz. can butter beans, drained and rinsed
1 15-oz. can pinto beans, drained and rinsed
1 15-oz. can lima beans, drained and rinsed
1 15-oz. can pork and beans

Cook beef with onion and bell peppers until cooked through and no pink remains. Drain. Add to a large pot with all the other ingredients. Cook, covered, over low heat for 45-60 minutes until everything has melded together. Make sure to stir every now and then to stop from sticking to the bottom of the pan.

**You can also add all the ingredients to a slow cooker and cook on low temperature 8 or so hours.

January 2023 Trader Joe's Grocery Haul

It was absolutely gorgeous out this morning.

Here's a close-up of that bent top tree. The colors this morning were just stunning.

Back in October, I went down to Portland and got an eye exam and ordered some glasses. They told me I needed bifocals. I went down the first part of December to pick them up and they were not anything that I could live with, so I had them redo them all together. I have one eye that is far-sighted. I have one eye that is near-sighted. I simply wanted one pair of reading glasses and one pair of driving glasses and I didn't need all that bifocal junk. Anyhow, having that ice storm, etc., we didn't make it down there until today.

Since we were headed toward Clackamas, we decided that we'd go to Trader Joe's and stock back up on wine.

I do not drink wine. I cook with it. Trader Joe's has that 2-buck chuck that I like. It tastes pretty decent and it works for whatever I want to cook it in.

There was a beautiful view of Mt. Hood going over the bridge from Vancouver into Portland.

After picking up my glasses, we headed down the freeway to Trader Joe's.

Trader Joe's has super cheap bottles of wine. They run $2.99 each. I picked up 5 different types: Pinot Grigio, Merlot, Shiraz, Chardonnay, and Cabernet Sauvignon. Bob found his favorite ginger cookies. I can't believe how affordable the grape tomatoes were!

Of course, we couldn't forget the doggos!

I see tons of people talking about this seasoning blend. I thought I would give it a whirl. I'm not exactly sure as to what I will put it on, but I now have it.

This is another item that was incredibly affordable. These were $2.49 cents for a pound of these little Persian cucumbers. The ones I get at Safeway are very poor quality and start rotting within just a few days. These were very fresh.

I love those pea crisps that you find in the snack aisle. I thought I would give these a whirl. They are delicious!

Bob is the one that spied my very favorite tea blend. I'm enjoying it over ice right now.

Yuzu is one of those things that I've been wanting to try. Now I get to see what it tastes like.
In Oregon, you have to pay a 10-cent can deposit. Because I'm a Washingtonian, I don't get to turn these in. No matter. We'll just recycle them like we do with the other aluminum cans.

I planned out a month's worth of meals. I only planned out the dinners and it was only the main dish. I'm going to be making teriyaki chicken bowls. These will make a great side course with them.

Bob loves tamales. He picked these out for a hot quick lunch sometime.

I've been slowly amassing the ingredients to make Budae Jiggae, or Korean Army Base Stew. These rice cakes are one of the ingredients.

I also wound up buying some reusable produce bags. I'm so sick of bringing home produce in those plastic produce bags and they wind up in the trash. All the produce bags at Trader Joe's are compostable. I saved the one from my green bell peppers to reuse, as well.

So, there's my grand total of $61.48.

We really enjoyed going through Trader Joe's this morning.

The Start of Thanksgiving Cooking 2022

 I'll admit that I use broth in a box throughout the year. It's not that I can't make my own stock. I absolutely can. It's just that usually I have no room in my fridge or freezer to horde chicken or turkey carcasses.
That changed. Our old little chest freezer gave up the ghost on us. We didn't realize it, and we lost a full freezer full of food. We bought a new chest freezer, however. I stocked up on several turkeys and turkey breasts. We don't eat turkey nearly enough throughout the year. I made us a turkey dinner, using one of the frozen turkey breasts that I had squirreled away, just because, not long after we moved up here to Kelpie Kapers Farm. I found whole turkeys for 98 cents per pound at Walmart. I bought 3 of them. Likewise, I found turkey breasts at Safeway for $12 or less. I bought 2. I purposefully kept room in that chest freezer to store my bones so that I can start making my own stock. My goal is to become less dependent on the supermarket supply chain and slowly work over to using my own home produced items. I will start with growing amaranth and quinoa next year.
I'm getting ahead of myself. I tend to get a bit excited when I talk about my self-sufficiency goals.

Back to making stock. The key component to any successful and delicious Thanksgiving feast is a good homemade turkey stock. Safeway had turkey necks for sale. I bought a pack of 3 of them. They were a bit on the spendy side, at over $3, for a piece of turkey that nobody really ever thinks of...but I sure do! Not only do turkey necks make a delicious stock to use for dressing and/or gravy, the meat off of the necks is some of the most delectable meat on the whole bird! It's just a major pain in the keister to pick it off the bones. That's why I only do it when I want to make a dinner that I want to impress Bob with.

I decided a few weeks ago to start collecting vegetable scraps to make my turkey stock with. They hung out in the freezer for a bit.

I bought my vegetables for Thanksgiving with the idea of most of them being multipurpose. I'm adding chopped fennel to my dressing this year. I bought a fennel bulb with a lot of fronds and stalks on it so that I could use it in my stock. Not only that, but I saved my asparagus ends for the stock. A word to the wise and because my sister, Ginger, gave me a heads-up about putting asparagus ends into stock. Too many of them will cause your stock to have a bitter taste to it. Use them sparingly. I'll still save them because I like to use them to make cream of asparagus soup. That's a different blog post for another time, though. 

I added in a shallot that I simply cut in half. I didn't bother peeling it. There's no need. The solids are all strained out and discarded (except for the turkey necks). I added in 3 or 4 bay leaves, celery, carrots, a whole head of garlic that I cut in half. I left the skin on the head of garlic. It's like the shallot. There's no need to peel it. I also added in a couple of parsnips that had seen better days that I had in the crisper drawer.  I also added in some Penzey's Bavarian Herb blend. It has all the good stuff in it. Some kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper finished it all off.

I love that we have well water up here and we don't have to use city water. I added in 2 quarts of cold water and a good glug of a nice oaky chardonnay.
I put this over high heat just until it came to a boil and then I turned the heat down to low and let it simmer. It reduced by over a third. I added another half quart of water to it and let it condense down again.
When all was said and done, it took around 2-1/2 hours to get a quart of some rich looking turkey stock to use in my stuffing and gravy recipes on Thursday.

Cheers!

Sneaky Supermarket Tactics To Get You To Spend More Money

 Yesterday, Safeway's new sales ad came out. They advertised 5 pounds of russet potatoes for 47 cents as a digital deal with their Just For U program. I knew I wanted to partake of that deal and I wanted to get some other things that would finish up my holiday shopping for Thanksgiving. I can just sit back now and start cooking ahead of next Thursday. No stress. I like that.

I noticed a few things that gave me pause yesterday. The first thing is that Safeway no longer sells their onions by the pound. They sell them by the unit. I used to pay 69 cents per pound for their medium yellow onions. It's now 69 cents each. I haven't bought onions for a while, as I grew a lot of them in my garden and was simply using those. But, I ran out. I knew I would. I know I want to plant a lot more next year, but that's a different blog post.

The tags in the store still look as though onions are 69 cents per pound, if you don't read the fine print. I think it's sort of sneaky on the part of Safeway, too. They could have just been on the up and up and put a sign on their website that they were no longer selling by the pound. They didn't do that. So much for transparency.

So, for a week's worth of onions, it cost me $5.52. I used to pay around $3 for that amount. The cashier said that they implemented this just a few short weeks ago.

Next, I noticed the eggs. I haven't bought eggs for several months because we have awesome friends who gift them to us. Bob does handyman type stuff for 3 or so people who love to send eggs home with him. I'm completely grateful for them, as well. But, with all good things, that has come to an end for this year as chickens do take a break from laying. We are on our last dozen and decided to buy some more to stock up a bit.
Yikes.
That's all I can say about that.
Yikes.

Normally, if I purchase eggs from the supermarket, I buy them by the 18-pack. At Safeway, large eggs are $3.69 per 18-pack. I buy eggs 3 dozen at a time. I don't like to run out of them. Three dozen eggs, if I purchased them by the 18-pack, would have cost me $7.38!
Holy Expensive, Batman!!
I glanced over at the large 12-packs. They were $1.89 each.
Hold up!
If I buy 3 of those vs. buying 2 18-packs, it would be cheaper. It's like almost $2 cheaper. To be exact, it's $1.71 cheaper.

Here is the link to view yellow onions being 69 cents each on Safeway's website.
Here is the link to view the cost of buying an 18-pack of Lucerne eggs.

The moral of this blog post is to make sure you're doing the math. Use a calculator, if you must. There's no shame in it.If you have a smartphone, you have a calculator.  Read the fine print on the tags to make sure that they are selling by the pound or if it is the price each. Supermarkets are going to try to squeeze every cent from you that they can. If we remain vigilant, we can keep those extra bucks in our pockets and not into the coffers of non-transparent supermarkets, especially going into the holidays.
I hope this post helps you out and makes you aware. These supermarkets are, quite literally, banking on the fact that most people are rushed and not going to look that closely at what they are doing. Well, that rat race is going to have to make do with one less rat. I always take my time to get the best prices that I possibly can and, when I find something shady, I'll let you guys all know about it.
Take care!

Isolation or Solitude? Our First Year

It was this time, exactly one year ago, that we made the choice to move out of the (literal) rat race from the outskirts (suburbs) of town and go fully rural on property that would allow us to do what we want, how we want and when we want.

We moved in January just as we experienced a flood that totaled my husband's car. It started snowing on Christmas, we got quite a bit, and it was white out for a week and, then it warmed up quickly and started raining. With all that melting, the runoff, coming off the Cascades, came right down the rivers, and where did we live? Yep. Right on the banks of the Cowlitz River.

We had just hauled our first load of stuff up here that morning and that night, we went through this.

This view is one that I will never tire of seeing each morning.

 
In April, we got a good 6-8 inches of snow in a late freak snowstorm. I've never seen it snow in April before. Not here anyway.

After the snow melted, spring hit. It was a glorious sight to behold.

With the coming of spring, this herd of elk migrated up through our front yard.

Summer. Beautiful summer!

Now, we full-swing into fall and the leaves are changing colors, and it looks like a painting. Of course, the camera cannot adequately show what I'm looking at, and I don't know how to edit photos.

So, the question is this: Is this called isolation or is it called solitude?

I don't mind not seeing people every single day. I don't mind not seeing an approaching car every day. I don't miss hearing other people on a daily basis.


I'll go with solitude, and it's sheer and utter bliss.