and the list goes on...

We are trying to get our house ready to list by the end of this month. There is so. much. work. I've been trying to do at least one thing each day toward the house & have been fairly successful, especially during the week. But today, I have a few sewing projects so I have to switch gears from the painting, organizing, decluttering mode & try to enter the more sedate, calm, meditative mode of sewing. One of my projects is a gift for a friend, so it actually has to be good. :-)

Lately, we've been spending so much money to fix up the house & do work on the land that it keeps eating our grocery budget right up. So it's been nearly a month since we've had more than $30/week to spend on food. Jeff and I have been supplementing with our own spending money when we get tired of the pantry choices, but the freezer, cabinets & basement storage are all running low. I'm trying to look at it as another chance to work out those tightwad muscles -- sometimes it's too easy to slack off -- but frankly I'm getting tired of workarounds. And yelling at Sassy for eating "too many oranges" in one day, even though the poor thing is still sick & could surely use the Vitamin C. I feel like such an ogre, hoarding the fruit, doling it out one by one after she's proven her case to me. Anyway...

The key in a tight market is to not waste anything, so I've developed a new system on cooking day. Cooking day usually happens every Monday through a confluence of factors that involve me paying bills over the weekend and realizing how poor we are, doing a tiny bit of grocery shopping on what little money we have, spending one full weekend trying to find food for us in the house & looking at the empty refrigerator first thing on Monday morning, thinking I'll surely KILL myself if I don't have ready food for the next 5 days. Or at least be really hungry. And so I cook. And cook. And cook as much as I can think of that day. And it lasts us until Wednesday maybe.

Well, as I was heading to the trash can with my sweet potato ends, I decided it was so wasteful -- why not prepare them for Sofie? So I've kept a small pot of water on the stove all day to which I've added:

sweet potato ends
2 bites uneaten eggs
walnuts found on the floor
popcorn spilled on the floor
cornbread batter from my beater hook (I rinsed it off in the pot instead of in the sink)

Tonight I plan to put all my old leftovers from the fridge into the pot before I boil it all up for her. And hopefully, we can spend our money on people food instead of dog food during this time.