I live in a cozy old home in the Piney Woods of east Texas.
This is my journal
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Not gonna lie, I really miss the Mardi Gras parades in Baton Rouge. To celebrate in our own little way I made Jambalaya. I lucked out and found Cajun sausage on sale. Just the right amount of spice. I also made some bread pudding. It wasn’t from scratch, but Donny had gotten this box mix and with its name you know it had to be good. it was.
I added ice cream to mine. Don’t judge me.
And because it’s Fat Tuesday, here are some throw backs to some of the parades. Our favorites were the Krewe of Orion and the Krewe of Artemis.
We’d always end the night with the best root beer in icy mugs at Frost Top.
We always watch the Super Bowl. Mainly because calories on Super Bowl Sunday don’t count. We didn’t really have a team we were rooting for this year. If we had to pick it would have been the 49ers, oh well. I didn’t really know what food we were going to make until I found this beauty at Sasquatch.
Y’all, it’s a giant bag of Ortega cheese sauce! It was 5 bucks and the cans of cheese sauce are almost that so it was a great deal. It was so good. No we didn’t eat it all and because we don’t have a spigot for it, I just stuck a wine cork in the hole.
Donny got me some baby Coronas because I can never finish a full sized one. Nothing better than nachos and beer.
We were influenced by a super bowl commercial so when Donny went to pick up Hannah from work he grabbed a bag of these on the way home. Completely addicting and that commercial was so cute.
And we cannot forget what month it is. Best dessert ever. We got Bavarian cream this year.
I’m not the type of person that doesn’t like January, but this one had me in a weird state. It took me longer to recover from the surgery that I had than I thought it would. I don’t work at Funtastic Events in the winter so I missed that. In general I was grumpy, annoyed and had no energy to do anything. It really sucked. I wasn’t depressed or anything like that, I was just in a funk.
Since Hannah had gone off of her meds we had started supplementing magnesium, her folate that she has to take with any supplements or medication and 5-HTP. I had read up on how this supplement boosts your serotonin. Since I was in a not so good place I decided to start taking it also.
I’ve only been on it a little over 2 weeks, but the difference in my mood is incredible. I take it at night with my magnesium and these are the changes that I’ve noticed. I sleep like a log. I have energy during the day. Even if I don’t feel like doing something that needs to be done I do it anyway. I’m a nicer person to be around. I make sure I get up, do my hair, put on makeup and get dressed every day.
Since we had the snow/ice weather my car was awful. I had enough energy to take it to the car wash and now it’s clean as a whistle.
Our home had gotten cluttered with things that needed to go back out to the shed. It bothered me so much but I just didn’t feel like doing anything about it. Now everything is back in order.
My daughter’s boyfriend bought her this
Seriously????? a 6 foot tall teddy bear that weighed as much as a toddler. It drove me nuts, and her too, because it took up almost her entire bedroom. I finally did something about it.
So if you are having any of these issues, I highly recommend this supplement.
On a different note, two nights in a row we’ve had a chicken that wouldn’t return to the coop. Since chickens are blind at night, she’d come to the side door and cackle. She just made herself at home in the kitchen, eating honeydew and listening to jazz while I cooked.
My cat is not impressed.
Now I’m going to go finish an episode of Black Mirror I’ve been watching. If you have never watched it, it reminds me so much of the Twilight Zone.
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.
The Funky Frugalista 