Category Archives: homemaking

Apr 29 0 comments
gifts, homemaking

Mother’s Day Gift Guide

floral gift tags
Photo credit

Mother’s Day is coming up in a few days! Have you thought about what to get your mom yet?

Here are a few great ideas that I’ve seen for making your own gift:

Now, let’s say you don’t have time or, like me, you can’t ship her something you made for whatever reason. You can still send her something handmade that will make her feel special! Think Etsy! I love shopping on Etsy.com. I can always find something pretty for the occasion. Here are a few beautiful things that I found when I recently browsed, looking for Mother’s Day gifts (and I don’t get compensated for linking to any of these — I just had fun browsing and picked these out all by myself):

Of course, you can always find great gifts on Amazon.com:

(Please note, I am an Amazon affiliate, so when you click to order on Amazon via links on my blog, I do get a small compensation. Thanks for supporting Island Homemaker!)

Happy shopping or crafting! I hope you have plenty of fun.

Apr 13 9 comments
frugal living, gifts, homemaking, in my kitchen

Top Ten Reasons to Make Your Own Convenience Food Mixes

Baking Mix

1. They taste good. Duh. Isn’t that one reason why we pick up mixes at the store? Whether it’s a cake mix, a box of mac and cheese, or a box of elaborate cous cous with olive oil and garlic, you’d have to agree that if it didn’t taste good to someone in your house, you wouldn’t buy it. You also have to agree that homemade food generally speaking tastes so much better than those boxes at the store!

2. Saves money. When you make mixes at home, you can stock up on whole food ingredients at bulk prices and make a whole bunch of goodies at a time. For example, it’s cheaper per unit to buy a box of split peas or beans at a wholesale foodservice store such as Smart & Final, Costco, or Gordon Food Service.

3. Make food friendly for picky kids. If Joey doesn’t like blueberries in his pancake or Susie doesn’t like mushrooms in her soup, you can leave them out.

4. Structure exactly what types of ingredients you want to add. It is easy to make food mixes for dietary needs and preferences. I do suggest that before making 10 or 12 bags of non-dairy whole wheat biscuits, however, you try them out and make sure your family likes them. If you prefer to add less sugar to your cornbread, you can! That’s the beauty of making your own mixes.

5. Avoid trans fats. Ever read a label and see something that says “hydrogenated” on it? Hydrogenated ingredients are not essential, and they are not good for you, either. They elevate the levels of “bad” cholesterol (LDL) and increase the risk of coronary heart disease.

6. Mixes make great gifts. In previous years, I have given homemade soup mixes to coworkers during the Christmas season, and they have loved them! You know how busy folks are during the holidays. It only takes a couple of minutes to put a soup mix into the crockpot and ta da! They have a meal ready after a long day of Christmas shopping!

7. Mixes are very slow-cooker friendly. Especially soup mixes. Cooking in the slow cooker is already easy. This just saves you even more time!

8. They are FAST and EASY to prepare. Whether you’re making soup mixes or baking mixes, you can mass-produce mixes in a short amount of time. Simply get out your ingredients, read over the recipe, and start adding ingredients to Ziplock bags. You’ll be surprised at how fast you can put together some great-tasting, healthy mixes!

9. Mixes invest in your future convenience. I love the idea of investing time today in making life easier tomorrow!

10. They make hospitality easier. We are admonished not to forget to entertain strangers (Hebrews 13:2). I believe that this call to hospitality goes beyond just having folks over. It might mean sharing food with those who have recently lost a loved one or gained a baby. Whether you take over a ready-to-eat pot of soup and steaming corn muffins, or whether you tie up some time-saving mixes and put them in a cute basket, think of how much easier it will be to heed the apostle’s admonition!

Well, have I convinced you? You’re probably either thinking, this is overkill… or show me more! Give me ideas!

I’m going to be featuring some delicious time-saving mixes that you can make in your very own kitchen, coming up in the next few days.

Be sure to subscribe, if you haven’t already, so you won’t miss any great ideas!

This post is linked to Top Ten Tuesday and Kitchen Tip Tuesday.

Apr 06 3 comments
frugal living, homemaking, in my kitchen, recipe, vegan, vegetarian

How to make vegetable broth

I love Trader Joe’s hearty vegetable broth. But with the nearest Trader Joe’s thousands of miles away, I figured it was high time to make my own vegetable broth. (Not to mention that I never, ever succeeded in using the entire aseptic container of broth at once and I had to freeze the remainder anyway!) Plus, making my own broth is just so… healthy and frugal!

I looked at a few vegetable broth recipes to get an idea of what to do, and then I ventured out and created my own because I didn’t quite have all the ingredients that you would have access to if you were making this in the U.S. Here’s what I added:

  • 10 cups water
  • 3 small onions, quartered
  • 2 large potatoes, chopped in large pieces {I peeled them but you can leave the skin on if you like.}
  • 4 green onions, chopped in big pieces
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 3 garlic cloves, crushed
  • a bunch of baby carrots
  • 3 celery sticks, chopped coarsely
  • 1 tbsp. soy sauce
  • salt to taste

before cooking broth

Uncooked veggies that I used to make this broth.

The recipes I was looking at suggested adding:

  • a bunch of parsley leaves, coarsely chopped
  • a couple of leeks, cleaned and chopped
  • parsnips
  • they suggested regular carrots, but I only had baby carrots on hand
  • 2 bay leaves instead of one
  • mushrooms
  • celery root (celeriac)

Basically, you sauté the onions in a little olive oil and add the veggies. Add water and seasonings and simmer on low for 1 – 1 1/2 hours.
cooked broth

The broth after 1 1/2 hours—veggies are all cooked down!

Then you strain the stock through a fine-mesh sieve or cheesecloth. You can either use it right away, or what I’m going to do is freeze mine in ice cube trays so I’ll have it easily accessible for use in future recipes.

broth making process

This picture may look slightly confusing. I didn’t have cheesecloth or a sieve so I used a produce bag that I got from ReusableBags.com. It had been a bigger bag but I accidentally shrunk it when I put it in the dryer once. So it was almost like a sieve or cheesecloth, until the potatoes began squishing through. :)

If you’d like ideas of other goodies you can add to your homemade vegetable broth, visit Lolo’s site. She has an awesome photo tutorial on broth-making!

This post is linked to Kitchen Tip Tuesday and Works for Me Wednesday.

Mar 31 8 comments
homemaking

Ironing issues

OK, so I have ironing issues. 

I am on my second iron in, like, 3 months. The first one, which I’d had for 3 years (and I bought it second hand) started snagging our clothes. Instead of ironing smoothly, it started catching on these little dent thingys in the bottom of the iron, which is, you know, supposed to be smooth… 

So I bought a new iron. And now, NOW, my new iron is starting to “catch” too. For shame! What on earth do I do?! And how did it get that way in the first place?!

HELP! Somebody… quick! (Um, if you have other random ironing tips, please do contribute. Maybe my ironing technique is wrong.) I really don’t want to go buy another new iron. Is there some way to get rid of those catchy dents? Can they be eliminated? And how do I prevent future ones? What works for you???

(Solve other people’s problems, too, at this week’s reverse WFMW.)

Mar 27 0 comments
frugal living, homemaking, in my kitchen

Sack lunches save MY economy!

DH and I have been trying an experiment. He has usually been eating lunches at the hospital cafeteria and just putting them on his ID and the money gets taken out of his paycheck. Somehow in the last few weeks, I convinced him that in order to start making headway on paying off our debts, we should both be taking packed lunches. (I’ve been taking sack lunches to work, for the most part, for a couple years. Every once in awhile I fall off the bandwagon and buy a lunch or two, or I forget to bring mine, but for the most part I’ve been packing my own lunches.)

Well, today I checked to see how his direct deposit looked – and I was so happy at what we’d saved by having him pack lunches, too! I figure I save a lot, too. Most of the places I would eat around my office if I ate out run about $6 per lunch. So that would be approximately $25 for a 4-day week that I’m saving ($50 per pay period). For him, it’s comparable – but maybe more.

So – packed lunches pay off, everyone! For more frugal tips, visit Frugal Friday at Life as Mom.

In a future post, I’ll talk about how I cook for those packed lunches, how I’ve greened up my own lunch-bag habits, and more! (I’ve only been packing BOTH of our lunches for about 3 weeks, so give me a little more time to figure out my schedule on packed lunch planning!)

Mar 02 7 comments
homemaking, in my kitchen

My new sea cow!

I’ve become great friends with my new sea cow over the last few days. Well, it’s not really a sea cow. It’s my new recipe software, called YummySoup! (by Hungry Sea Cow software company).

I bought it several months ago, but with Org Junkie’s month-long emphasis on recipe organization, I decided it was high time to put some more of my recipes on the computer. 

You see, a few years ago, I was a poor college student. What I did for Christmas presents that year (for my mom and grandma) was I typed up our family favorite recipes, printed them, stuffed them in sheet protectors, and put them in binders and gave them to them for Christmas. They loved the binders. I still like my binder. However, the system isn’t quite working for me – it needs to be reorganized – and I want pictures to go with my recipes, etc. 

So over this last weekend, I started typing up my newest recipe favorites in YummySoup! and adding pictures for the ones I’ve photographed. 

I totally love it! My mom has been trying to get me to use it more frequently. Now I’m convinced! We can trade recipe files back and forth over e-mail easily and import the recipes.  Here are some of its cool features:

  • I can customize the ingredients that I use often and it auto-fills easily.
  • I can drag-and-drop pictures into my recipe files.
  • I can easily import recipes from the internet. SO EASY. I love it. AllRecipe.com automatically imports. Others that don’t automatically import, I can highlight several portions to be “ingredient lists”, “directions”, etc. and it automatically makes a perfect recipe file! Wow. So user friendly. 
  • If I want to cook off a recipe on my laptop, I can use full-screen mode. Not that I would do that.
  • If I want to, I could even use my Apple remote and voice recognition. I haven’t tried that yet, but it’s supposedly possible.
  • I can trade recipes back and forth with whoever has YummySoup! software via e-mail. We can import each other’s recipes easily. If people don’t have YummySoup!, I can still send them rich text formatted e-mails with my recipe.
  • I think you are supposed to be able to use a grocery list function, as well. There’s so much I’m still learning, but I am totally smitten with this software! 
  • You can have smart lists where you can search for recipes with certain ingredients. 
  • Best of all, the price tag is amazingly affordable. It’s only $20!

There’s just one catch. You have to have a MAC to use this incredible software!

(By the way, nobody paid me to do this promotion for Yummy Soup! Nor am I giving software away. I am just totally loving using it, and for the Mac users out there who have been searching for good recipe software, your search is over. I just highly recommend getting yourself a copy!)

This post is linked at Kitchen Tip Tuesdays.

Feb 09 0 comments
green living, homemaking

My first recycling experience

So, this year I’m trying to go green, and that means I’m going to start recycling.

I should give you a bit of history. I have been intending to recycle for quite awhile. Last week, I cleaned out a messy corner of my kitchen where I had been stacking all these bottles that I intended to recycle. And you know if you follow FlyLady’s system of organization that February is the clutter elimination month, and they are doing the “Super Fling Boogie.” So I decided it was high time to actually recycle all those bottles.

Now, we don’t drink wine in our house. We drink sparkling juice, however, and I had all these Martinelli bottles piling up along with sparkling juice bottles from Trader Joe’s. I had at least 8 bottles. I think I had saved some of those Martinelli bottles since last summer. :-0

Dreadful, I know.

Procrastination is hideous. (Shudder.) In my defense, I procrastinate about very few things. When I was in school, I used to finish my research papers way in advance. But when it comes to recycling, you know, it’s just really hard to get the bottles in the car and remember to drop them off.

So on Friday I had a massage scheduled and so I decided to swing by the recyling booth thingy that is in the parkling lot of our local supermarket. Which, coincidentally, is about 1 minute away by car. I could have walked the bottles there.

Anyway, after so many months of procrastination, I arrived at the recycling booth (one minute away from my house.) I plunked the jars into one of the big rubber containers. The guy asked, “Are those your bottles?” pointing to a bag containing about 8 more Martinelli bottles.

“No,” I said.

The guy asked several other people who were standing around if the bottles belonged to anyone. Then he told me, “Why don’t you add those to your container.”

So I added the other neglected bottles to my container of bottles.

The guy swung the container onto a scale-looking kind of machine. “Two-twenty-nine!” He announced.

Having never recycled before, I suddenly wondered, am I supposed to pay for recycling?! I thought I got money back. Um, well, maybe I don’t get money back and I have to pay him. I began fishing in my wallet for $2.29.

I confessed to the guy, “I’ve never done this before. I don’t know if I have enough cash. Do I pay you?”

He said, “Oh no! I give you this piece of paper and then you go over to the grocery store and give this to them and they give you $2.29. Or you can have it subtracted from your grocery bill.”

Ooooops. I felt sooooooo dumb!

But relieved. I wasn’t carrying cash, so this was quite a relief.

Anyway, if you recycle regularly, you probably think I was incredibly stupid, and I’ll be the first to admit that I had no clue what I was doing. But hey, at least now I know how to recycle. And I get $2.29 off my grocery bill! :-)

And if you haven’t ever recycled, I’ll tell you that it’s really quite simple. Just remember, they give you money.

Feb 01 0 comments
homemaking, in my kitchen

My kitchen!

Here are a couple pictures of my tiny kitchen/ dining area. Just so you know what I have to deal with. :-) (These kitchens are meant for people who eat out all the time. I tell you.)

My colors are dark green (kind of a dark lime green) and brown, I guess. I can’t paint anything because we’re renting and have a finicky landlord. Also, I hate the linoleum flooring. If I could paint the kitchen, I’d paint the right-side wall either dark lime green or chocolate color and the rest a cream color.

This is my kitchen window:

Kitchen Window

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love the view! Because we’re on the second floor of our apartment, I have a year-round cute view of cumquat trees (mini-oranges). Believe me, it’s much better than being able to stare right across into my neighbor’s kitchen window. (Ugh. Joys of city living.) But back to my cumquat trees. There are darling birds that jump around in them and I occasionally see interesting birds that I’ve never seen before.

Um, yup. This is THE kitchen. My tiny kitchen. Mmm hmm. (On the right side, I have a counter thingy from Ikea, and a table.)

Kitchen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this is the tiny dining area, also part of the “kitchen” area.

kitchenette

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So yeah. You see what I’m dealing with… an itsy-bitsy kitchen. But hey, I’ve learned to cope. :-) I’m actually considering re-arranging a bit to keep myself a little more organized.

Jan 02 3 comments
frugal living, green living, homemaking, life in general

New Year’s goals…

I have been contemplating what kinds of goals (er, resolutions – but I like calling them “goals” much better) to make this year and have come up with several.

  • Journal at least once a week. (I used to be faithful at journaling, but I have been slacking ever since I moved to my current location.)
  • Exercise at least 4 times a week, with DH.
  • Simplify, organize, and go green. Recycle. Re-use more and buy less. Avoid unnecessary plastic and paper (remember to take my bags with me when I go shopping!!). I’ve been doing some interesting research on the internet and have come across several ideas about how to “go green.” I have been considering joining a CSA. (Community supported agriculture.) What you do is put a certain amount of money into some farms and they give you a box of organic fruits and veggies every week. So. I don’t know, I’m still thinking about that option but the more I think about it the more I like the idea. Fresh, non-supermarket organic veggies and fruit… every week… mmmm.
  • Finances. I happen to be in charge of finances at my house, and I plan to get organized in this department. I bought Quicken 2007 for Mac which will help me itemize stuff and help with taxes (I hope). We need to wipe out some credit card debt from when my dh was in med school, so we’ll be getting busy on that (we’ve been chipping away at it, but we really need to wipe it out…)