DIY Instant Oatmeal Packets

With both my husband and I rushing to get to work in the morning, the dog to take out and Luc to get ready and off to daycare, mornings can be a little crazy for us just as they can be for most families. While I try to have healthy breakfasts planned and made in advance that doesn't always happen, especially towards the end of the week. These DIY Instant Oatmeal Packets have helped to keep us fed and sane on weekday mornings over the past few weeks. These were inspired by a post on Once A Month Mom but I've made a couple changes to make them a little healthier. Not only are these much less expensive per serving than the pre-packaged commercial varieties but you get to control the sugar content.

The skim milk powder and the sucanat may seem expensive when you buy them, but you can make 200 oatmeal servings using this small bag of milk, and about 145 servings of oatmeal from this bag of sucanat! And of course oats are super inexpensive, especially if you buy them from a bulk store (which clearly I did not do this time!) I also store mine in little reusable containers rather than using up plastic baggies . And while quick oats are not quite as healthy of steel cut oats, they are still considered whole grain (nothing is removed, they're just cut up smaller), so you don't have to feel quilty for succumbing to convenience.


This recipe is for the equivalent of one of those little comercial packets which I find is a good toddler serving size. However, I also make double sized portions as adult-sized servings. You can whip up, assembly line style, a dozen of these in about 3 minutes! You could use brown sugar rather than the succanat but not only is the succanat less refined and healthier, but it really tastes better. This recipe is for a really basic oatmeal but you can experiment with different spices as well as adding dried fruit.

DIY Instant Oatmeal Packet (1 serving)

- 1/4 cup quick oats
- 1 tsp instant milk powder
- 1/2 tbsp succanat
- pinch sea salt
- pinch cinnamon

Mix all into a small resealable container and store in the cupboard for use on those crazy mornings! To use add contents to a small bowl, add 1/2 cup of boiling water, stir and let sit for 2 minutes. Enjoy.

If you have a little more time on your hands here are a couple of my favourite Oatmeal recipes: Chocolate Raspberry Oatmeal and Birchermuesli!

Amazing Play Kitchen and Market Stall Ikea Hack

Check out this amazing play kitchen and market stall hack over at IKEA Hacker using the RAST bedside tables! I'm currently looking for a great play kitchen for Luc and if only I had more time on my hands and were as ambitious as this DIYer I would totally make these! 

Activities from the Kitchen: Ball Bash

My son had so much fun with this one, as you can see from this video! This is a great activity for burning off some excess kid steam particularly on a bad weather day when stuck indoors. This activity is dead easy, inexpensive, quick to set up, and a fun way to practice hand-eye coordination. 

 To set up the Ball Bash you will need:

- a ball (beach balls are good for toddlers as they are large and easily batted 

           around, preschoolers might prefer a smaller and more challenging  

           ball-just make sure that there's somewhere to attach a string to)

- a wooden spoon, paper towel tube, or similar

- some kitchen twine

- a piece of duct tape

Attach the string to the loop of the beach ball nozzle, making sure it's secure. Tape other end of string to the ceiling just out of your child's reach. Hand your child the wooden spoon and let the whacking begin!

DIY Non-Toxic Potty Cleaning Spray

What goes in must come out. So while this isn't food it is a useful recipe. It uses mostly ingredients that you will have on hand in your kitchen and you can whip up while you're in there anyway. If you're like me and are uncomfortable using toxic cleaners around your munchkins, this cleaner works great and you don't need to worry about what you are exposing yourself and your family to. This spray cleans, disinfects, and smells good while doing it. This also isn't a job for your regular all-purpose cleaner since something acidic works better with....um....protein based messes. Just dump out the dump, rinse with hot water, spray, wipe and rinse again.

DIY Non-Toxic Potty Cleaning Spray

- 1/2 cup white vinegar
- 1 tsp liquid dish detergent
- 1/2 tsp lemon essential oil
- 1 1/2 cups warm water

Grab an empty spray bottle from your recycling (or buy one for the purpose). Measure out your ingredients in a liquid measuring cup and carefully pour in spray bottle, or alternatively, use a funnel. Shake before using.

* Will keep indefinately

DIY Baby Wipes

I had been meaning to try making my own baby wipes for ages. Not only are commercial wipes expensive, but they are made from mostly polyester fibers that take at minimum 300 years to biodegrade, and the majority of them contain ingredients that are questionable (i.e. parabens) especially for having around your little one's most delicate bits. 

I know that most granola types would promote using reusable cloth wipes. In a perfect world I would use cloth diapers and cloth wipes. However, we have a tiny washing machine and a terrible dryer and I am already completely overwhelmed with laundry, which is often a twice a day event around here. That's my excuse and I'm sticking with it!

Most of the instructions that I came across for homemade baby wipes involve painstakingly removing and then folding sheets from an entire roll of paper towel into a box. Who has the time? Then I happened upon instructions at White House, Black Shutters that literally take 5 minutes to make. But best of all, they work amazing. You do have to use Bounty paper towels just as Ann Marie says...I tried a couple others that were good quality but they were still total fails. While Bounty are expensive, I got mine on sale for $5 off. When I did the cost comparison calculation, I can make 1680 homemade wipes for the cost of 477 commercial ones!

The only changes I made from the original instruction was to make only one container at a time...just to ensure that I would have no issues with mold and to add a couple drops of tea tree oil to the solution to stave off diaper rash.

Check out the full instructions here!

Staple Recipe: Homemade Yogurt

Although I've always been meaning to try, for some reason I have always been a little intimidated by making homemade yogurt...I somehow think I'm going to poison us all! When I've looked into making it before, I've encountered so many different methods -- thermos, oven, slow cooker, yogurt maker, etc, etc that I had the impression that it would be time consuming to find what method would work well. 

Then I  read a recent post on making homemade yogurt over at Dinner with Julie and I finally decided to give it a try using her directions since her method needed nothing more than a pot, a jar and a towel for equipment coupled with minimal effort. 

It could not have been easier or turn out better....all on the first try! It was thick, creamy and just plain good and we've been enjoying it all week. I'm so excited about having added this new staple to my home cooking arsenal.

  If you've ever toyed with the idea of trying to make yogurt at home, or even if the thought hadn't crossed your mind until now...check out Julie's instructions here...you won't be disappointed!

UPDATE: I have found that to get thicker yogurt, just simmer for 10 minutes rather than the 2 minutes in the instructions.
 
Is there anything that you're a little intimidated to try to make yourself?

Staple Recipe: 50/50 Bread

After reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (which is an excellent read if you've never read it), I was inspired to try regularly making bread at home. I had tried making bread by hand using the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day method before Luc was born, which worked great, but I had trouble sticking with it.


I didn't have great memories of my mother's attempts with her bread machine. It usually ended up with bread that if you dropped it on your foot you could injure yourself and that wasn't very tasty. So, I was surprised that Barbara Kingsolver's husband used the bread machine to make their bread in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. But, I figured it would be worth a shot. Turns out my mom still had that bread machine packed away, so I borrowed it. My first attempts were terrible. 


So I borrowed a bunch of books on bread machine baking from the library, and set to work trying to learn how to produce edible bread. Turns out it is possible to make really good bread from a bread machine and we haven't bought bread since I started using the machine 4 months ago. These two books: The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook and Whole Grain Breads by Machine or Hand were indispensable to me in becoming a bread machine convert. 


This half white, half whole wheat bread recipe is our daily bread. It took me a lot of tries to get it how we like it (like 15+!). It goes with everything and makes great toast. Please note that this bread is unsuitable for the delay timer setting. 

(I'm still working on a 100% whole wheat bread that isn't too heavy and also isn't too sweet tasting)

50/50 Bread

- 1 1/4 cups water, room temp
- 1 lg egg
- 2 tbsp canola oil
- 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
- 1 1/2 cups bread flour (or Canadians can also use all-purpose)
- 3 tbsp dry buttermilk powder*
- 2 tbsp dark brown sugar
- 1 1/2 tbsp gluten*
- 1 1/2 tsp salt
- 2 1/4 tsp instant yeast

 Place all of the ingredients in the pan, except yeast, in the order listed. Make an well with your finger in the dry ingredients and add the yeast. 

Set crust on medium and program for Basic (White) or Whole Wheat cycle (my mother's bread machine made it better on Whole Wheat Cycle, my new one works better on Basic; try both).

Remove immediately from pan when done. Let cool before slicing. Can also be frozen. 

* makes one 1 1/2 lb loaf

* you can find dry buttermilk powder and gluten (also called Vital Wheat Gluten) at bulk goods or health food stores as well as some better stocked grocery stores.
 

Activities from the Recycle Bin: Crayon Holders

Ok, so this isn't really an activity in and of itself, but it does help the kiddos in going about their activities in an orderly way and it makes it easy for them to help clean up after themselves. I found this Montessori-Style crayon holder made from fruit cups(!) at Mom's Crafty Space and I loved it so much that I thought I would share it here. Click here to see how she did it.

Fledgling Foodie Activity: Fruit Activity Cards

Luc would eat fruit all day if we let him and lately he's been really interested in learning the names for different fruits. I came up with these Fruit Activity Cards to play into that interest. They cost literally nothing to make and could be used in so many ways. We did a simple matching game of finding fruit from bowl and putting it with the picture, but you could also add a tasting component, make a game of grouping them together to match what your child is having for lunch, etc, etc. Since these were successful, I'm planning to make more fruits as well as vegetable cards and perhaps ones for other foods. 

To make these cards you will need:

- a cardboard box

- some plain white printer paper

- clear packing tape

- colouring materials (I used Luc's crayons since they were handy)

- scissors

I printed the outlines out on the computer using clip art and then cut them out, but if you can draw you could just draw them. I found most of the clip art here, and just did a Google image search for the others. I sized them to all the same size in Word and then printed them. You could add the names of the fruits to the cards if you wanted to make the activity cards into a pre-reading exercise as well.

Colour in your fruit images and then cut them out. Cut out pieces of the cardboard box to match the size of your fruit cutouts. Line up the two pieces and cover the whole card with clear packing tape.

Now you and your munchkin are ready to play!

Activities from the Recycle Bin: Plunker

I thought I would test out the idea of posting baby, toddler, and kids activities once a week and see if people would be interested in these posts. These activities would either be food related, made with items that you would find in the kitchen heading to the recycle bin, or be activity-based recipes. The idea is that they will be quick and simple things that you don't have to be an experienced crafter to pull off. I will post a few over the next couple of weeks; please let me know what you think!


This is an idea I got from the book Things to Do with Toddlers and Twos. This activity takes advantage of the compulsion of toddlers to put things into holes. You will need an empty clean coffee can or similar. Just cut an X into the lid and you have a Plunker.

Now just find a variety of items from around your home that your toddler can drop in to make a satisfying sound, making sure obviously that they are too large to be choking hazards. Look for a variety of materials (wood, plastic, rubber, metal, etc) so that they all make different noises as they hit the bottom of the can.

And that's it! Super simple, but appealing to ones and twos and when they tire of it, you can just put the can back into the recycling. Luc also enjoyed working on his fine motor skills by practicing taking the lid on and off.

December Challenge: Cutting our Grocery Bill...Results

Well I said that I would post with how I did with our December challenge to cut our grocery bill by a further $130 and I just finished tallying our receipts. And the result? We beat our goal and cut $170 of our grocery bills (both food and other grocery items)! That means that since we started this endeavor to trim our grocery costs we have cut a total of $639.39. The best part about this challenge has been that we are still eating food that is healthy and tasty. 

The single biggest contributor to this drastic cost cutting has been more effective meal planning, and I can't emphasis its importance enough. It requires some time up front but cuts down costs, waste, and stress... plus it's a great creative brainstorming exercise. I am so pleased with how things went this month and we have the freezer and cupboards packed to give us a great start to January. 


Happy New Year to Everyone!

Staple Recipe: Poached Whole Chicken

For some reason, it took me until this year to poach my first whole chicken. I had used the technique with breasts but never the whole bird, as well as saved up my bones in the freezer for making broth which is much the same technique. After I realized what a great way to cook poultry it was and how incredibly far I could make one chicken go this way, I felt like a total dumbass for not getting with the poaching program earlier! Not only do I get enough chicken meat for 4 or 5 family meals, but I also usually get around 20 cups of delicious homemade broth. I usually freeze all the broth in two cup portions, except for what I will use in the next couple days, in either containers or baggies put in a large freezer bag. The chicken you can use in literally hundreds of ways. I like to cut off at least one chicken breast and slice over a salad and toss the whole deal with dressing for when I'm in a big rush. The rest of the chicken I usually shred with my hands and freeze in one cup portions to use in any recipe where cooked chicken is called for. you can even save the chicken fat if you'd like, its good to make Matzo balls and it also tastes good in savory breads. 

Some easy uses I like for the chicken include: quesadillas, White Chili (this is an excellent one), chicken pot pie, chicken curry, etc etc etc. I hope that if you aren't already in the habit of poaching whole chickens that you will love this technique as much as I do! You will need your biggest stock pot with a lid to make cook this in.

Whole Poached Chicken

- 1 whole chicken, 5-6 pounds
- 1 large onion, peeled and quartered
- 2 carrots, cut into big chunks
- 2 stalks celery, cut into big chunks
- 1 bay leaf
- 1/4 lemon
- big handful of fresh parsley, stems and all
- small palmful of peppercorns
- any other scrubbed vegetable scraps you have hanging around, I usually keep them frozen in a bag to add to this, such as leek, fennel, parsnip, etc. If I have some on hand, I also throw in a couple sprigs of fresh thyme.

Place everything into your stockpot. Fill with water until the chicken is covered by 2 inches. Bring to a boil over high heat, then lower the heat to medium and simmer for 25 minutes. During this time, skim off any of the gross grey stuff that comes to the top. 

Turn off the heat and cover the pot with a tight-fitting lid. Let the chicken poach in the hot liquid for 1 1/2 hours. 

Remove the chicken from the stockpot, letting the juices drain, making sure that they run clear (which tells you that it's done, if juices are pinkish it isn't cooked, heat to a simmer and turn off and let sit 1/2 hour more). Transfer the chicken to a cutting board and let it cool. Strain out the vegetables from the broth and discard. Let the broth cool. Once it is cool, transfer it to the fridge. 

Once the chicken is cool, remove the meat from the bones, shredding with your finger, discarding the skin and bones. Either keep the breasts whole or shred it all. Pack up the chicken to store in the fridge or freezer. 

Once the broth is cold, you can skim off the fat and either discard it or save it for another use (it also freezes well--I freeze it in Baby Cubes). Divide the broth how you'd like, and store it in the fridge or freezer. 

DIY Non-Toxic All-Purpose Antiseptic Cleaner

 















This is a non-directly food related post but while you are preparing healthy food for your children, you may want to "green" your cleanup. Non-toxic all-purpose and kitchen cleaners can be pricey. This recipe literally costs pennies to fill a spay bottle. I have have tried at least a half dozen different formulations and I have found this one adapted from Better Basics for the Home: Simple Solutions for Less Toxic Living by Annie Berthold-Bond is the most effective homemade all-purpose solution. This is a great cleaner for everything from wiping down kids stuff, to crayon marks, washing baseboards, and countertops. Just let sit a few moments on crusty kitchen cleanup to let it do its work before wiping up.

DIY All-Purpose Antiseptic Cleaner

- 1/2 tsp washing soda (you can also use baking soda, but it isn't as alkaline and so won't be quite as effective)
- 1 tsp borax
- 1/2 tsp liquid soap or detergent 
- 2 cups hot water
- 1 tsp total antiseptic essential oil (i.e. I like 3/4 tsp lemon and 1/4 tsp rosemary but you can also any combo of: sweet orange, lavender, tea tree, thyme, rose, cinnamon, eucalyptus, or birch) 
Add washing soda, borax and soap to a clean spray bottle. Pour in the hot water and essential oil, cap, and shake until the minerals are dissolved. Give the bottle a shake each time before using. 


Makes 2 cups.

December Challenge: Cutting Our Grocery Bill...Again

Over the past several months we have made serious efforts to cut our grocery costs (including things like baby supplies, toiletries, cleaning supplies, etc) for two reasons. Firstly, we had gotten lazy and stopped keeping track and when we finally added up one month we were SHOCKED by the amount we had spent. Secondly, since going on one salary it is no longer a choice, but a necessity that we cut our costs, and since we live very frugally in every other regard, the only place left to really cut back was on our grocery/household bills. 

So, since August we have managed to cut $470  off our monthly grocery bills. Sounds great, right? But we are still overspending and still spent $130 dollars more than our monthly budget last month. I am absolutely determined that for the month of December we WILL be on budget. 

But it isn't so easy. We are determined to still eat healthfully and well and I  have basically run out of ideas to creatively cut back. So I think it will just come down to brute determination and keeping track of how we are doing throughout the month. I find that the biggest challenge is that it takes more time to be so careful and plan everything so that little goes to waste and we still eat a balanced and varied diet, and time is something I seem to have very little of between looking after Luc, going to school part-time, cleaning, volunteering, taking care of the dog, etc etc etc. 

 I will post with how we have done at the end of the month! 


Some of the ways we cut out $470 so far:


- I bake all our bread (works out to be about 50 cents a loaf plus I can make what I feel like plus its preservative and additive free)
- Switched to store brand diapers
- Make even more DIY cleaners than before
- Eat less meat and use less pricey cuts
- Freeze anything that can be frozen and might otherwise go to waste
- Carefully plan out weekly menus 
- Started shopping at cheaper stores (although the customer service certainly leaves something to be desired...)
- Buying more items in bulk
- Shopping sales
- Shopping local seasonal produce (not just for financial reasons but ethical ones as well)
- Only buying organic items for those which are most contaminated (this is the only one so far that has bothered me but it necessary for the moment) 
- Making all my own broths and stocks
- Switching brands on some toiletries 
- Using more coupons


and quite a few more...any other ideas would be very welcome!