This week I got some help from the girls in my quest for frugality.  Lovana cooked dinner on Thursday for the family.  This kept us from having to get fast food.  She made white bean-sausage soup.  This is pretty close to what she did.

1 onion, chopped

2 carrots, sliced

3 garlic cloves, minced

6 cups chicken broth

3 potatoes, peeled and diced

3 cans white beans

1 package turkey kielbasa sausage, sliced

1 teaspoon thyme

1 bay leaf (remove before eating soup)

salt and pepper to taste

Salute the onion, carrots and garlic in a little bit of oil.  Add the remaining ingredients.  Bring to a boil, then lower heat to a simmer.  Cook until carrots and potatoes are soft, and the flavors are blended, 30 minutes minimum.  This soup can be simmered for much longer than that and the flavor gets better.

We ate this soup for dinner that night, and different family members had a bowl for  leftovers several times.

She also made a chocolate-banana cake with some of the bananas we received. She also made home-made Caesar salad, including the dressing.

Last week, we were given a 40-lb box of bananas, plus a plastic grocery bag full.  The box was in really good condition, and the bag needed to be used immediately.  Although this was given to us last Friday, we spent a great deal of time dealing with it this week as something needed to be done to preserve all of the bananas that were in the box.

We ended up making chocolate-covered bananas, frozen bananas (over 5 gallons), dried bananas–both plain and with spices and brown sugar sprinkled on them, and ate a ton of bananas.  We joke that we are going to turn yellow!

I did Ja’Ana’s hair.  I saved quite a bit of money doing it myself.  I’m not sure exactly how much I saved, but I know some people who pay between $65 and $100 to get their African-American children’s hair braided. I made sure to use extra conditioner, and to get her scalp  well-oiled.   This time of year, her scalp can get itchy and uncomfortable and the hair lotions help a lot.

Ja’Ana helped with the banana project.

This sounds really strange, but Rob was able to return one of the baby pigs and get another one in exchange.  One of them turned out to  not be properly fixed and the lady that we bought it from traded it for a new one.  A non-fixed male pig does not grow up to be good pork, and we have no plans to breed pigs, so it would have been useless to us.  The new pig is much smaller, so we did lose some money on that, but we are still really happy that she exchanged this one.  Rob had a friend come over to help catch the one that was going back, and they had no trouble catching it with a lot of scraps I had saved for that purpose.

Ja’Ana was able to go on a retreat.  She had earned about 1/2 of the money needed, selling pies as a fund-raiser.

The chickens started to lay again, after taking a mid-winter break!

I helped my niece figure out how to shorten a skirt she wanted to make more stylish.  She has a plan now, after consultation with 2 aunties and a cousin at our family lunch today, and she will bring it back next Sunday if she has any problems.

My husband and I were able to have a date last evening.  We were able to use Foster Parent’s Night Out for babysitting.  We used a gift card, and although it did not cover the entire cost of the meal, it helped tremendously.

We were given 40 pounds of bananas.  I started drying, freezing and eating them immediately.  We had the 4H club dry some for a project next month in their outdoors class.  Rob is going to have them make flavored oatmeal packets to take camping.

Our Toyota Rav4 had some recalls to be taken care of.  We took it in for those a few weeks ago.  At that time, they sealed the motor and we had to drive it for a specific amount of miles–I think 1,200-1,400(it escapes me right now)–and then return the car to see if it was burning too much oil.  It was, as Rob knew by the amount of oil he has been putting in there, and so they are going to re-build the motor to correct the problem.  There are over 100,000 miles on this car, so we are excited that it will get a fresh start on the next 100,000.

I roasted some hazelnuts for snacking on.  My mom gets them for me for free, so we enjoy them frequently.

One of our 4H members gave a speech on fruit and cookie bouquets and gave us the bouquet she made during the demonstration.  We enjoyed it very much.

I enjoyed this sunrise very much.

Much of my energy this past week was used in preparation for our monthly 4H meeting.  We have many other parents who teach classes during our all-day session.  I teach 3 cooking classes, using a total of 8 different recipes, and Rob teaches one outdoor cooking class (2 recipes per class) and one class titled, Outdoors, where he teaches activities dealing with nature, wildlife, outdoor cooking, camping, survival techniques, etc.  Because he was doing some extra cooking during his class, his class required the food drying project in the kitchen, and pots of oil to fry Navajo Fry Bread in outside on the deck.  He has almost 20 kids in that class.  Need I say more?  It was a whirlwind of a day.  We were very happy with how it all turned out.  Everyone was safe, happy, and excited for the fun they had.

One of the recipes he made with the kids in his class was baked potatoes in a Dutch oven.  The other pot has a recipe of Western Beans in it.

I try very hard to use my pantry items that I have purchased for the lowest possible prices, and then buy the rest of the needed items for all of those recipes, so it’s a fair amount of work.  This keeps the cost way down, though.  I also try to choose a mix between very inexpensive foods, such as the potatoes, and more expensive foods, such as the fish nuggets we made with one of the teams.

We had our family birthday party at my sister’s house instead of eating out as we sometimes do.  We were offered free accommodations in Mexico and thanked them, because it was awfully nice of them, but declined because we need to save our pennies and airfare, food, etc. would still add up to quite a bit.