The other night I was hand washing some dishes when I heard a POP. I had no idea what it was until I went to put a knife in my bristle knife holder. The whole side had just broken apart.
I couldn’t really do anything with the bristle part so we had to come up with another solution.
Donny had a great idea to get a magnetic holder that we could mount to the wall. We had one in our home in Baton Rouge and I really liked it. He Google searched and found one at IKEA and one at Home Depot. They were both $20 and, being, frugal, I thought that was really too much to pay. I did a Google search and found a magnetic tool holder at Harbor Freight for $2.99.
It’s super sturdy and holds all of our knives. Plus it gives us more counter space.
I 100% recommend this if you don’t have a lot of storage or counter space.
I have tried not to buy any pre packaged cookies, cakes, etc. So when last night I realized we didn’t have any dessert, I remembered seeing this recipe on my social media ages ago. It’s fast and really good.
Turn on oven to 350°. Put a little over half a stick of salted butter in a 9×9 baking dish and put it on the oven to melt.
Once it’s melted, put on Graham crackers. Just line the bottom. It didn’t have to be perfect. On to of crackers, sprinkle chocolate chips and coconut flakes. Pop that back into the over for about 10 minutes. Just keep an eye on it.
This is all that’s left, but I wanted to include a picture. Y’all, it’s so good.
It’s cold here in East Texas. We knew it was headed our way so we were able to prepare a little bit. My neighbor across the street took this picture of our house. The streets and roads are nothing but ice.
We have many stray cats in our neighborhood. Our laundry room is outside so we set up a heat lamp and beds. We brought Milo inside. He meowed a lot, but eventually did fine.
Milo went out with Donny to check on the chickens. We have to make sure that their water doesn’t freeze. We do have a heat source out in the coop and we crack the door because sometimes a cat or two will go out there to bed down.
What I do when we are iced in is cook. Today I felt like a short order cook in a busy diner. Since the kids didn’t have school they straggled in at different times. Our staple for breakfast is my breakfast sandwich. We changed it up today with pretzel buns.
We always loved the Whataburger Breakfast on a Bun, but these are so much cheaper to make and are actually better.
I have wanted to make corn chowder since we got the big bag from Sasquatch Trading Post. So that’s what I did. I would have liked to have added sausage, but I used ours for gumbo the other night. I decided on slab bacon and shrimp. Chowder is the best thing on a cold day.
For dinner Donny and Jack wanted big burgers, Hannah wanted a gouda grilled cheese and chowder and I just had the chowder. Ding, order up.
I had to finish off the day with, what I call, Diversity Cookies. They are just cookies with semi sweet and white chocolate chips. I could have made Mega Diversity ones by adding butterscotch chips. Maybe next time.
Tomorrow is supposed to be even colder so no school or work for anyone. Hmmmm, wonder what I can cook tomorrow.
My son, Jack, and I like to go thrifting. We have 2 shops that are our regulars. Saturday before I had to take Hannah to work he asked if we could go. I didn’t find anything at the first stop, but Jack picked up some sing-a-things.
I lucked out at the second one and found two amazing cookbooks. All of their hardback books are only 50 cents.
This one is very old. I just love vintage cookbooks. I prefer using cookbooks to using the internet to find recipes. I just don’t like all of the ads and how you have to read and read until you actually get to the recipe.
This cookbook is huge and heavy. I’ve never really been into Italian cuisine, but i looked through this while at the store and I saw many recipes that caught my eye. Plus the photographs are just gorgeous.
I also found this cute cropped longsleeve shirt by Another Love that is the perfect color for one of my maxi skirts.
And I cannot forget this little embroidered picture because I just love handmade things.
We found out about a grocery outlet in Gladewater that is just a short drive down Hwy 80. We didn’t know what to expect, but it looked interesting online. It’s called the Sasquatch Trading Post.
We drove right by it the first time because you actually drive through the gate and park on the side. When we walked in there was just so much stuff.
A lot of it was restaurant sized. There were also a lot of items from Germany and England. The prices were very good. For $40 this is what we got.
A 6 pack of cranberry juice, 10 packs of craisins, Louisiana Hot Sauce and 3 onions
Sliced Gouda, Camembert, broccoli, and slab bacon
Corn and hash browns
Hand rolled butter and European butter
Pretzel buns, hamburger buns and 2 huge baguettes
We were very impressed and will definitely be coming back to the Sasquatch Trading Post. All of the employees were so nice and the store was clean and products were easy to find. I can’t wait to make corn chowder and bruschetta.
Our weekends are Thursday and Fridays because those are Donny’s days off. Thursday we had to go to the feed store to pick up chicken food and on the way home we stopped by two estate sales. There wasn’t a lot left since they both started on Wednesday, but I was able to find this really cool knife and a super cute denim shirt. The shirt was $1 and the knife was $6. I thought they were both a bargain.
We were hungry and Donny remembered about this little Mexican food place that had opened up a few months ago. We decided to try it.
The menu had a lot of choices, all freshly made. I decided on 2 pastor street tacos and Donny got the steak quesadilla. The horchata was so good. Donny got the tamarind drink. He said it was good also.
Each taco was $2.50, which I thought was a reasonable price. They came with grilled onions, limes, radishes and a grilled jalapeno. Donny’s was much milder than mine so we traded because mine was so hot. I found out that radishes are served to cleanse the palate after eating something spicy. The tacos were very good. The pastor was cooked well. It was the perfect amount of food for lunch. Donny liked his quesadilla, but for $12 it wasn’t really worth the price. We will definitely be back though.
Oh, and I almost forgot, later on we ran by Walmart and I found the sifter I’ve been wanting. I had been using my sieve to sift my dry baking ingredients. This will make it so much easier. They are only $4.97 if you are looking for one. It makes a world of difference if you like to bake.
Donny had always been talking about this grocery store that he wanted to go to. They were always running really good sales on meat. He was off on Friday and it was such a dreary day we decided to take a little road trip to see what it was all about.
Lake O’ the Pines is so pretty. Hard to tell from this moving shot though.
After a little less than an hour, we finally made it.
And we found Crump’s.
For this being such a small town, this place was amazing. The produce section had this man cleaning off the onions before he put them on the display stand.
There was also a sushi chef making fresh sushi that rivaled any sushi restaurant and the prices were really good.
The main reason we came was for their meat. They do everything in house and when they run sales, you can get a lot for your money.
We spent $113 and this is what we got: 4 slabs of baby back ribs, 10 pounds of freshly ground beef, 2 beef roasts, a bag of potatoes, some rutabagas and turnips, barbecue sauce, 2 drinks and sushi.
This sushi rocked! Donny ended up getting chicken dumplings because all of the sushi had avocado and he won’t eat avocados.
This place is definitely worth the drive and we will be back again. If you are ever close the Linden, you should stop in.
I made 2 slabs of ribs last night. They were so tender they fell off the bones. These 2 slabs were about $13 for both. A half slab at Chili’s is $17. So I fed 4 people ribs, sauteed cabbage and mac n cheese for what one meal at Chili’s costs and we had leftovers for Donny’s lunch and for Hannah to eat before she has to go into work today. This is why I have such a hard time justifying going out to dinner.
I’ve had a bag of books that have been sitting on our egg swing for months. Yesterday Donny and I went to go give them to some little libraries.
I was hoping the train station would be open and it finally was. That poor library only had about 8 books in it, so I was able to empty my bag.
I also took 3 books because I’ve heard great things about this author, but as soon as I read then they’ll be going back to the train station.
Thrift stores are in inundated with books. In fact the one closest to me had 5¢ November where every book was only 5 cents. There were boxes and boxes. And boxes. You get the idea. So if there’s a bus station, train station or little library near you, please donate there instead of the thrift store. It’s always fun to find a good book to read when you are heading out on a trip.
I cannot believe how fast this year has flown by, especially December. I had so many Christmasy plans for us to do as a family this Christmas season, but because of my surgery and a nasty cold like bug that hit our house, we were only able to do a few things. The Thursday before Christmas we took the kids to go walk around downtown because they always have gorgeous lights.
No one else wanted to be the gingerbread man. Party Poopers.
Hannah wanted to drive around and show Gavin some of the lights we had seen a few weeks earlier. I loved this church with the luminarias. All in all it was a very good Christmas outing finished off with cookie baking, hot chocolate making and Elf.
On that Friday, I had cleaned the whole house, changed the sheets, dusted, they whole 9 yards. Donny and I were in the living room that evening when we heard a crash. We ran down the hall to see what had happened. Donny got to our bedroom first and asked me, “is that shelf supposed to be broken?”. This shelf had fallen, plant dirt and all, onto our bed.
At first I couldn’t figure out what happened. Our cat Bailey was just laying on the end of our bed. Then it dawned on me. A few days prior, Bailey and I were watching cat videos on Tiktok. She was glued to them. Glued. Unfortunately, they were the ones with the cats behaving badly, running and jumping all over the place. I guess she had decided to give it a try herself. No more videos for her. Ever.
I hope this upcoming year is full of happiness. I made pork, black eyed peas, cabbage and mashed potatoes. I know the first three are supposed to bring good luck. I’m not a big superstitious person, but I didn’t sweep, vacuum, do any laundry or take the trash out yesterday. I also opened up our front and back doors and the stroke of midnight. Bad luck out, good luck in. Okay, maybe I’m a bit superstitious, but it can’t hurt, right?
The Funky Frugalista 