In today’s post I’d like to share my newest FO (finished object), a bit of gardening, and a lovely yarn store in Pacific Grove, California. It’s always fun to gather up the little things that have been inspiring me lately, so let’s just hop right in!

Good morning from a slightly cool, beautiful California spring morning! This morning I went on my morning coffee stroll through the garden, and while I didn't think I had a blog post in me this morning, the garden sort of told me that I did. I took pictures of the veggie garden and then I remembered we'd had a dinner party and some cute pictures of our new pup, and then my weekly blog post began to take shape!

First important update: doggie is doing fine and settling in so well.  He has his issues as all rescue dogs surely do, but he is a gem of a dog and is doing better with each day. He is very much feeling at home in the house and garden. At first he didn't really care to go in the back yard, but now that he understands that he can be inside or outside as he chooses, he is spending more and more time outdoors. I think next week we'll introduce him to the doggie door.

We have named him Biscuit as one reader suggested. It fits him so well and was approved by all, most importantly approved by our grandson. We read and loved the Biscuit books when he was little so that was a factor, but also that his coloring is that of a tasty biscuit sealed it!

Hello! If you live in the USA, I want to wish you a happy Thanksgiving holiday. I know you're most likely busy right now but I wanted to pop in to remind you to save that turkey carcass (such an unattractive word!) and make turkey soup! Last year I wrote step by step posts to make no fail turkey soup. This post is where it begins!  We will be a small gathering this year but whether large or small, I always make a big turkey because we are a family who loves their turkey. The day after Thanksgiving I'll be listening to carols, decorating the house for Christmas, and making turkey stock. I actually look forward to the day after! 

Both my pantry and freezer need a good cleaning. They’re unorganized and jumbled, and despite my best intentions, I’ve simply let them both go.

I know myself well enough to know that I can’t even begin to clean either one until I use up much of the food I’ve been storing. So before the hectic holiday season begins, I’m going to challenge myself to eat mainly out of my pantry and freezer—use it up, create some space, and enjoy the bonus of making Zero Dollar Dinners along the way.

After the challenge, I can give everything a good scrub. But October is going to be for cooking and eating what I already have, not for shopping. Want to do it with me? Please say yes! Read on to see how we’ll do it.

The Zero Dollar Dinner Challenge

Let’s start October 1st and plan our meals with the intention of making Zero Dollar Dinners—also known as Pantry Clean-Out Dinners—for all our dinners, and go as deep into the month as we can. I’ve done this for a week before, but this is the first time I’ve tried it for a full month.

We’ll give ourselves a pass to shop for anything needed to complete a pantry or freezer dinner. For example, I have two cans of chopped clams, but to make chowder I’ll need to buy potatoes, clam juice, and half-and-half. Of course, I’ll still need to buy basics like apples, lettuce, and milk—but shopping for anything that goes into the pantry or freezer is off-limits.

The goal is to use what we already have before freezer burn or expiration dates force us to throw food away—something I really hate doing.

The Key: Meal Planning

The key to this challenge is meal planning. Start by assessing what you have and creating a dinner list. I’ve already done this and came up with about a dozen dinner ideas to get us started:

• Canned clams → clam chowder

• Canned salmon → salmon patties

• A slice of ham from the freezer → lentil soup (two nights!)

• A single frozen steak → broiled and sliced for steak salad for two

• Frozen brats → an easy sheet-pan dinner (perfect for busy days)

I also discovered three boxes of muffin mix I bought with grand plans to bake when my grandson was here… and never did. October will be the month we finally make those muffins.

And then there are the little European sauce packets I picked up on a recent trip to World Market. I’d be embarrassed to show you how many there are. What was I thinking? My bad—and now I need to figure out how to use them. This could make for some interesting dinners.

Join Me?

I hope this strikes a chord with you. Let’s make some interesting Zero Dollar Dinners together! I’m pretty excited about this—especially if you do it with me.

I haven’t explained this plan to my husband yet, but I know he’ll get on board once I tell him my reasons… especially if he thinks we’ll be saving some money.

And don't forget Crazy Soup! My most recent concoction ended up being southwest in flavor and was a real hit! Mostly made from a frozen container of sliced tomatoes and summer squash and something else I didn't recognize or remember--I whirred it together with stock, then added salsa, corn from two cobs, ground sausage and then topped with crushed tortilla chips and snipped chives, all leftovers. I usually make a salad but this week I had leftover bread and I always have cheese, so cheesy bread made a nice compliment.

I know so many of you come here for the knitting and I do have several knitting posts planned for the future. I have 3 test knits either finished or close to it, but I can't share until the patterns are published. Sit tight for knitting content--it's coming!

Please scroll down to leave a comment. I love to hear from you anytime, but especially interested in knowing if you are going to join me in October. Just imagine how wonderful it will be to face the holidays with a clean pantry and freezer, and just how nice it will be to save some money. Send this to your friends, your mom, your aunt, let's do it together!

Photo source from the top of page: Lacademie

Now it’s time for the easiest part: the cooking.

Empty the entire frozen contents of your container into a saucepan with a little water. If I have a lonely carrot or some other small vegetable in the refrigerator that doesn’t have a future plan, I’ll toss that in too. Cook everything on low heat until it’s fully thawed and heated through.

Next, blend the soup with a stick blender and give it a taste. It will almost certainly need to be thinned, so add chicken or beef stock, water, or milk—whatever you think will work best with your particular mix of ingredients. Let it continue to cook gently and season with salt and pepper.

Taste again, then add one interesting complementary flavor: curry, dill, an Italian herb mix, chipotle seasoning—whatever feels right. This is also the point where you can add a small amount of leftover meat, rice, or pasta if you have it. Chopped pork chop or a sliced chicken cutlet works beautifully (though most of the time, I don’t have those leftovers either).

Taste once more and make one final creative seasoning choice. Then dish it up and add your toppings.

For toppings:

• For color: chopped parsley, chives, or finely diced tomato

• For a nutty crunch: toasted sesame seeds or pine nuts

• For a flavor boost: a swirl of pesto or sour cream, grated cheese, or diced bacon (a little goes a long way!)

• For freshness: grated carrot or cucumber for a crisp contrast

Top it with whatever you have in your pantry and whatever you think will be great. That’s the beauty of this soup.

This is a fun, frugal soup and it’s different every single time. Honestly, we’ve never had one we didn’t love. Sometimes the soup turns out orange or red, sometimes green or white—and occasionally brown (like the time it leaned heavily on grilled onions and sautéed mushrooms). No matter the color, it always tastes good. But if it does look a little brown, I recommend a quick sprinkle of cheese or something colorful so no one notices… lol.

CRAZY SOUP RULES:

This was a beauty queen of my Leftover Soups. There must have been a lot of tomato, carrot and red bell pepper in it.

This one I purposely left slightly chunky. It was mainly leftover  enchilada casserole and potato. At the end I added some leftover taco meat  and topped with toasted pumpkins seeds.

This was the one with the leftover cauliflower au gratin casserole, half baked potato, and tater tots of all things, then topped with crispy bacon and pine nuts.

This had a suspicious color of greeny brown. I'm blaming the grilled onions. I quickly topped it with cheese, sour cream drizzle, chopped chives and shredded red cabbage. It was delicious despite the color.

This one was mainly chard casserole, asparagus, potato and broccoli. I topped it with grated Parmesan, chopped garlic chives and some beautiful purple garlic chive flowers.

I'll admit that the first 47 years of my married life I was haphazard about planning and shopping for dinner. I love to cook and make a nice dinner most nights, but my prep skills were a disaster. I like to think I was spontaneous, but really I was just a crappy planner, which is funny, because I'm an ace at planning for a party. But for everyday cooking, I'd plan for two to three nights tops, make a list, shop, then forget several crucial ingredients which would send me back to the store at the most crowded time. Here's the thing, I loved to cook but hated to shop. Enter my retired husband. He said he would take over the shopping duties and claimed to enjoy it. Actually I think he liked having a reason to drive his vintage red Corvette around town and loved running into my girlfriends and chatting it up over the produce section. This was a great arrangement for both of us and we went along for a decade like this. Then 2020 came along and we were asked to stay home. Plan ahead. Make do. There would be no more popping into the grocery store and local vegetable stand every day. There would be no spontaneity or spur of the moment anything. We all had to change our ways. (And in those early days, there were loads of items that were impossible to find. People were hoarding. It's off topic but I still can't get over that. So rude!) So I thought, well, if I can't change my ways in a pandemic, exactly when could I change my ways? I talked to my daughter and daughter-in-law to see what they were doing about getting food into the house. Since they have less time than I do, they both have always planned ahead. (Talk to a busy person, they always have the best time-saving tips.) I picked their brains, embraced their ideas, added my own, engaged my husband in the process, tossed out a few ideas that didn't work, and now we have a way of planning our meals that is easy and rather fun too. 

Friends, here is how I plan my dinners two weeks at a time, make fast trips to the grocery store twice a month, and visit the vegetable stand only once a week. It took me a while to get it right, but now I love our new routine.

First, and since we can never remember what we like (!), we made a master list of about 75 everyday dinner ideas. It included all our favorite stews, soups, chilis, a dozen chicken breast/thigh recipes, you get the idea. They were often simple things that I don't need a recipe for such as teriyaki pan fried salmon served on a bed of salad or a whole roasted chicken which I could make blind-folded. But if the dinner idea needed a recipe, such as Bahn Mi Lettuce Wraps, I put the recipe in my newly created "dinner ideas" folder.  Most of my everyday recipes take about 30-40 minutes active cook time, and some much less. In this master dinner list I also included several dozen of our favorite side dishes. Sides like roasted asparagus or roasted tomatoes don't need a recipe, but if it did, I added the recipe to my dinner ideas folder too.

The next time I went to the grocery store I took pictures of the signs above the aisles. When I got home I made a spreadsheet with cells for labeled aisles in order, see third picture below. Now when I enter the store at one end I follow my shopping list aisle by aisle to the other end. No more running back and forth in the store for things I forgot. I'm in and out in a flash. 

Twice a month I'll have my husband go through the dinner ideas folder. He'll pull out what he'd like to see on the menu for the next two weeks, I'll add my own and add side dishes too. I write our dinner ideas down on my shopping list, mindful of what is in season, consider if we might do a night of takeout, then go through the recipes to see what ingredients I already have on hand and what I need to shop for. This completely eliminates forgetting things like sour cream or curry spice, and trekking back to the store, which is a no-no these days anyway.

As I cook the dinners, I cross them off my list. The following week I don't go to the grocery store, but I'll pop into the corner greengrocer for milk and to purchase the fresh produce I need for our remaining dinners. I know that some dinners, such as a big roasted chicken will last for three dinners--first night is roasted chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, then we'll have it again on the second night, and on the following night we'll have chicken salad. Then the bones get tossed into a large freezer container. When the bone container is full I'll make chicken stock and then chicken soup will be on the next dinner list. Some dinners will be doubled because neither of us mind planned leftovers. This is especially nice when we have Carter for the day and I don't feel like cooking dinner when he leaves, I can simply heat up the plannedover from the night before. We loved stuffed poblano peppers and lettuce wraps of any kind and have oodles of recipes for both, and they are perfect for doubling. 

And now I want to address all those cookbooks and recipes I've collected over the years. They did not avoid my 2020 decluttering extravaganza. My girlfriend lives in another state, but we decided to each go through our cookbooks "together" and get rid of the ones we didn't use anymore.  If there was a cookbook which was saved for only one or two recipes, the recipe was copied, put in my recipe file, and the cookbook was donated. My local charity shop took every discarded cookbook, thank heaven. And BTW, my recipe files got a deep cleaning too!  I was holding onto magazine clippings such as a super rich first course for a Stilton Stuffed Onion and even had one for Blueberry Chicken. What was I thinking? I had a good laugh going through it.

I hope you like my new-to-me dinner planning. I imagine if you live way out in the country this kind of meal planning is not new to you, but for me, planning ahead has been amazing. 

My recipes file is on the desk near my kitchen table where I do the meal planning.

My Dinner Ideas list is still growing. We need it because we forget what we like! Without this list we both just look at each other and can't remember a thing. The corresponding recipes are in the file folder.

Normally I print out my shopping spreadsheet two-sided so I only have to deal with one piece of paper. The list follows my store, aisle by aisle. I keep it on my desk and add things throughout a two week period then finalize it the night before I go shopping. No more forgetting things!

My condensed cookbook section is not too small, but now it is smaller by a dozen books.

We kicked off Christmas this year by hosting a gingerbread house decorating party with our little family pod of six. Carter 100% helped me from start to finish. This is obviously a wonderful activity to do with children, and even the tiniest ones can help. If you are concerned about offering so much candy, use pretzels, nuts, cereals, seeds, etc. instead. 

Day one we made the dough and baked the gingerbread pieces. I have a wonderful recipe that I've written down for you.  Find full recipe and how-to here.

Day two we covered cardboard pieces with butcher paper to act as bases, then constructed the houses with royal icing "glue".

Day three we did a decorating mock run because we were very excited and could not wait for the actual party.

Day four, party time! We asked each guest to bring a bag of candy to share but I made sure I had lots of candy varieties available as well.

This is a fun activity to do with your family or pod this year and you don't even need to bother doing it old school like I do. I know Target and Ikea sell pre-baked kits now, and of course loads of cute ones are on Amazon. Using a kit will dramatically reduce your kitchen time, but when I have Carter I'm usually looking for things we can do together, so baking the house pieces was a good thing.

You might have noticed my tablecloth. I actually cross-stitched it 30 plus years ago from a Bucilla kit. It's held up well and still looks so cute, especially for a gingerbread house decorating party!

I'll be back soon with more seasonal cooking, crafts and knitting, all of which are keeping us home; now more than ever it's important to stay home and stay safe. What activities are you doing this holiday season?

Hugs, Kristen.

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