Chocolate Pumpkin Icebox Pie from the Pantry Stash

I am saving money. Week by week, sometimes day by day, sometimes one challenging minute at a time, I'm setting aside bits of hoarded cash--a $3.99 ipad game that Willow wanted me to buy for her, but that I asked her to pay for herself. Plus tax, that's five dollars in my stash.

A trip to the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, sans the typical visit to the gift shop. That's a good fifty bucks in the stash.

A choice not to order take-out at all last week. That's thirty bucks in the stash.

I'm saving money for a (hopeful) September trip to Disney World, if you must know. Yes, it's silly and expensive, but the girls and I want to go, and Matt is willing to indulge us, and so I'm saving money.

One of my most controversial money-saving experiments, and one that I'll have to evaluate for a couple more months before seeing if it's actually worth it, is attempting to do without one of our weekly trips to the grocery store each month. We spend approximately $150 a week at the grocery store, so that's $150 straight to savings every month if we can pull it off. The theory behind the practice is that we have ample food supplies in the pantries and the freezer--stuff that I bought at good price in bulk ages ago, stuff that I have a lot of and don't regularly use, stuff that got lost and then re-purchased and then found again during the Great Kitchen Remodel. I certainly don't need the excess, and I certainly don't like the clutter that an entire case of canned tomatoes, or three half-used jars of tahini, or a giant bag of powdered milk out of which approximately one quarter-cup has been taken, adds to the minimal storage in this house.

Wouldn't it be nice to save money AND declutter our food storage, and spend a week eating a nice canned  tomato-pesto soup with homemade bread and last year's frozen corn, and chicken and dumplings from that frozen chicken we need to process, and DIY pizza with homemade dough and all those bits and bobbles of leftover cheeses, and barley with our stir fry one night instead of rice, and peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches for lunch one day, because why on earth do I have half a jar of marshmallow fluff in the back of the pantry?

That's the idea, anyway.

So with a can of pumpkin (minus the quarter-cup that I used making pumpkin-spice latte creamer), a cup of chocolate chips, and a pie crust that I found in the back of the freezer (I DO know how to make a pie crust from scratch, but Matt doesn't, and he's the one who made the pumpkin pie last Thanksgiving. Apparently frozen pie crusts come in pairs?), I whipped together one of our favorite desserts, the chocolate pumpkin icebox pie from Chocolate-Covered Katie. I often make desserts from Chocolate-Covered Katie, and I'm always pleased with them--they're healthy-ish, since they're minimally sweetened and made mostly from highly nutritious foods, they're delicious and satisfying, and they feel better in my tummy, probably because they don't have all the usual crap. I have a big sweet tooth, and it's highly UNUSUAL for me to be satisfied with desserts that aren't southern redneck rich, so these are extra happy foods.

The chocolate pumpkin icebox pie calls for lots of nutrient-dense pumpkin, a pie crust that you could make far more healthily than Matt's leftover Pillsbury pie crust, a cup of melted chocolate chips, whose sugar content you can monitor when you select the brand, and some extract (I used vanilla and orange extracts, because that way I could use up the last little bit in the orange extract jar, and I really liked the resulting flavor). It looks like this after it's set:

But less than an hour after all four of us came back from sledding, the entire pie looked pretty much like this:

I usually make hot cocoa from scratch these days, so I had no idea that we still had all these envelopes of powdered hot chocolate! Another no-groceries-week score.

Hands Off My Pinterest!

Snowy Day

Our part of Indiana has not yet been blanketed in snow this winter.

It's odd.

Right now, for instance, there's thunder and lightening outside, and the making of what would be several inches of snow by the afternoon...if the temperature was only twenty degrees colder. Which it usually is in January.

Odd, indeed. A little troubling, frankly.

We did have a light snowfall this past weekend, when the temperature WAS twenty degrees colder (see? Odd), and even though the snow didn't even completely cover the ground, it was very special for two reasons:

1) It was a weekend, and Matt was home with us. It NEVER snows on a weekend when Matt can be home with us, usually.
2) On one of their visits since last winter, the girls' Grandma Janie and Poppa brought them thin little plastic flexible sleds. Unlike our antique wooden sled behemoth, with actual metal runners, these little sleds don't actually require that much snow to work their magic.


Do you hear that laugh? That kid was AIMING for me!

Even the adults got into the act:

Even me, your normally dedicated behind-the-camera woman!

The girls' other favorite snowy day activity, when they're not sledding, is to explore the snowy playground--

--where slippery snow makes even your most run-of-the-mill playground slide vastly exciting--


--and where there's always just one last bit of virgin ground to dedicate to angel-making:


The girls will tell you that their favorite part of the day was the sledding, or the sliding, or how Momma fell on her butt, or the hot chocolate and chocolate pumpkin icebox pie that we came home to afterwards.

My favorite part of the day, however?


This guy. Always.

Dehydrated Orange Garland, Country-Style

I know, I know, it's so countrified that it kind of makes me wonder when I'm going to start cross-stitching ducks in bonnets, but still...

Pretty, right? The view straight out my study window in winter is, shall we say...unlovely--something about the next-door neighbors and my sinking suspicion that it's their bathroom window, uncurtained, that I'm staring directly into through the bare branches of the rose of Sharon that sits between our houses. I've gotten into the habit lately of putting some pretty things up in the study window, then, pretty things that can be taken down when the rose of Sharon flowers in the spring, pretty things that look especially pretty when placed in a window, such as this dehydrated orange garland that the girls and I made, so lovely to look at when back-lit by the morning sun:

Our house is naturally so dark that blocking a window at all seems almost criminal, but until we find our dream house one day, with many bright windows and lots of roses of Sharon but absolutely no neighbors for acres and acres, this will do.

Seriously, though, a little curtain in front of a bathroom window? That's not hard!

Math We've Been Loving

In this season, this week, this moment, we've been loving:

puzzles

Base 10 blocks and stamps

magnetic Fractiles (thank you, Santa!)

answering prompts and recording work in the girlies' math journals (thank goodness that they love these, because they've been incredibly effective!)

anything ipad app or CD-Rom. Anything.

doing chores to earn more money to buy more ipad apps (I'm a mean Momma, and I make them do the math to figure out how much tax they have to pay me back for each app, too)

computation--addition and subtraction and math facts up to ten!

computation--triple-digit addition and subtraction with borrowing and regrouping!

Khan Academy--finally I understand the concepts of borrowing and regrouping!

LEGOs

making recipes, almost always involving delicious sweetness (because who doesn't need a little more sugar in their diet?)

calendars--what's the day? What's the date? Is it still January? Will it be Spring tomorrow? No? Why not?

pogo stick and jump rope, and the oh-so-important Counting of the Jumps

Sometimes my girlies' minds are fairly quiet and restful--lots of quiet pretend play, lots of lounging with a lovey and listening to audiobooks, lots of looking at books and picture books and relaxing sorts of stuff. Lately, though, it's like both their little brains are exploding into new stuff all at once--it's lots of math, Ancient Egypt AND Ancient China AND Paleolithic peoples, Magic Tree House and Tales of the Frog Princess being played on two different CD players in two different rooms while one child also reads a different Tale of the Frog Princess and the other child works at a Dr. Seuss Kindgergarten CD-Rom, hiking and walking and hiking some more, swimming and ice skating and gymnastics and ballet, a playdate in the morning and a playdate in the afternoon, a documentary on the Great Pyramid before bedtime, the little one learning to read, the bigger one learning to borrow and regroup, making clay terra-cotta warriors and salt dough maps of the Fertile Crescent, chess club, and they both seem to have grown inches in days, so that all their brand-new fleece pants are just almost too short, sigh.

It's thrilling, and a privilege, a little startling, and a teeny-tiny little bit sad (where have my babies gone?) to watch these minds at work.

Tutorial: Baked Ham and Eggs

Grease a muffin tin--standard, silicone novelty shapes, or my favorite mini-loaf pans--then add in one slice of ham, letting the edges stick up. Break one egg on top of the ham, and add spices, cheeses, or diced veggies:

Bake in a 350-degree oven for 20 minutes:

The baked ham and eggs made in muffin tins are perfect to put inside biscuits or English muffins. The novelty shapes are cute for holiday breakfasts. And the mini-loaf pans?

One hearty breakfast, one fabulous series of books:

One excellent start to an excellent day.

Our Comfy New Desk Chair

I swear, I've been wanting to do this for years, and it just never happened. A mom friend borrowed the yoga ball for her pregnancy, and kept it to use with her babe while she was wee. We got it back deflated, and had misplaced the hand pump by then. We found the hand pump at some point, but had misplaced the yoga ball by then. Also, what to do with the giant office chair that already lived at the desk?

There was a room move (hey, THERE'S where we put the yoga ball!), a garage sale (goodbye, giant office chair!), and experiment with cheap-o metal folding chairs (ouch!), and finally, finally--

--my long-awaited yoga ball chair.

I'm in love for the following reasons:

• It's comfy. It's vastly more comfy than the hard, chilly metal folding chair, and even more comfy than that giant office chair with the back that was a little too deep and the armrests that were a little too in the way.
• It's active. I'm pretty heavy-set, and I'm always looking for ways to be more active. Bouncing a little, rolling a little, sitting up straight--it just feels better than shlumping in a chair.
• It takes up MUCH less room. Just roll it under the table and boom--tidy!
• The girlies love it. The yoga ball is more comfortable for them, too, and they're free to roll it off and play with it when I'm not using it, as long as they bring it right back to me when I need to sit at the desk.

It's getting a LOT of use, and so I really doubt that a yoga ball chair is ultimately going to be cheaper to own than that pricey office chair, because I've already resigned myself to the fact that an air-filled ball that gets this much use is bound to need regular replacing, but it's fun.

How fun is an office chair?