Homemade yogurt

Okay, well as you know (if you've read back posts), my goal for this week had originally been to make yogurt, but then I changed it to bread (which I'll be making later today). Someone told me to do the yogurt too and I caved to peer pressure. :-D So yesterday I made yogurt with 1/2 gallon of whole milk and 1/2 cup of Aldi's brand yogurt which has live and active cultures. Today it's finished and my daughter had it for breakfast and she was NUTS over it!! She had 3 (very small) bowls. Now, granted, my kiddo can eat like no one else in this world but still, that's a lot!! I found the recipe on here.

Don't mind the messy kitchen. We're moving in 2.5 weeks and everything is such a disaster!

First I started with 8 cups (1/2 gallon) of whole milk. I put that in the crock pot on low for 2 1/2 hours.


After the 2 1/2 hours was up, I unplugged the crockpot and left the lid on for 3 hours (guess I forgot to take a picture of it unplugged, but you can imagine it :-D!)

At three hours, I scooped out 2 cups of the warm milk and put it in a bowl and whisked in 1/2 cup of the live and active yogurt (the starter).



I put the yogurt and milk mixture back in the crock pot and put the cover back on. Then I tucked it in to bed over night with a big fluffy towel (still unplugged).



In the morning, the yogurt was DONE! It was actually pretty thick...or so I thought. But I usually buy the light yogurt, and that was what the consistency was. You can also add 2 tablespoons of dry milk or gelatin to thicken it up. I bought some dried milk and plan on trying that next time, especially since I want to use lowfat milk instead of whole milk. For us, the yogurt plain was not tasty enough so I added in some honey, which made it oh so good!! I also added in blueberries to my daughters breakfast. From what I read, adding in the fruit ahead of time can make it more watery so I'm just going to add it in as we eat it.


I debated about putting a picture of my kiddo on here, but it was just too funny not to share a picture of her with her mouth WIDE open, eating the blueberry and honey yogurt.


VOILA!! Very VERY yummy! It made so much, that I gave some to my grandma!! And I can't believe how EASY it was!!! MUCH cheaper then buying yogurt too.

Have you heard of People String? I hadn't until now, but you can earn MONEY!

My friend tuned me in to this new networking site. I was really hesitant to join it at first because I hadn't heard of it but she did research on it and couldn't find ANYTHING negative about it. So then I did a bit of research too and it seems pretty legit! They are trying to compete with the big boys apparently--facebook, myspace (is that a big boy anymore though?), twitter, etc.

You actually get paid to be on here. You earn $0.10 just for signing up and for every friend who signs up under you, you earn $0.50. You can also earn points and money by clicking on advertisements around the site, signing into the site and checking your email. I think there is a max to how many friends you get paid for, from what I researched, it's 100. But at $0.50 a pop, that's $50!!!

I also just found out that you earn points for searching and those points add up and you get a percentage of the sites advertising revenue, which is tracked by your people points. Um, sign me up!!! I think this sounds really great and while I'm a little sick of social networking sites, if you pay me, I'll come! :D

Sign up today to start earning money: Earn Money on People String!!

Free pizza today at Little Caesars!!

I found this on MN Coupon Adventure (thanks Karen). Today, if you bring 4 non-perishable, healthy food items to Little Caesars, you get a free large Cheese or Pepperoni pizza for FREE!! Check out Little Caesars promotional section on their website. My husband is going right now with 2 jars of Classico spagetti sauce, a bag of barley and a box of whole wheat Chex cereal! Free pizza AND doing a good deed--could life get much better?! I don't think so!!

Goal for this week: Make my own bread

Okay so every week, I have a goal to make something new and from scratch. Last week I made cereal bars. I was going to make homemade yogurt this week, and I may still, but my priority has moved to baking homemade bread. Since I started staying home, we eat 2-3 loaves a week. At $1.69 for whole grain bread, that starts to add up when your budget is $60 a week. Why am I spending that money on crappy bread when I could make it myself?

I have no good answer to that question, so I might as well try to make it from scratch.

I don't have a bread maker though which stinks. I used to, but when we were robbed last year, it was stolen. So I have to make it without a bread maker. Luckily, that's the way it was done for thousands of years so there are a few recipes out there! :) I want my bread to look like this:


So I'm going to use the recipe that I found on here. It's from The Simple Dollar, which I've never been to before but a quick glance at it proves that it may be interesting! I'll have to take a closer look at it and see what I can find. I'm going to start out making a white loaf, like the author suggested but I will have to figure out how to make whole wheat because that's what we eat. We may eat thrifty, but I try to make it as healthy as can be.

I'm excited about this though. Wednesday is my grocery shopping day so I'm going to get yeast then, and I know I need more flour because of all the baking I've been doing (ick, my jeans are feeling a little tight today, better exercise!). I really hope my bread looks that pretty, and I hope it works!

I may still try yogurt but I don't know. Only if I have the time and/or patience. I know, it's terrible. You'd think I would have more time...sure I do, but it's spend chasing around my 16 month old who thinks she's Wonder Woman!! Plus, we're packing and I have a paper to write that is due on Friday! Busy, busy week!!

I'll let you all know how my bread baking goes! Wish me luck!

My first full week of being a SAHM

Well, this blog is not just about being thrifty, but also learning how to be a stay at home mom. So I figured it would be good to post about that first week. It was not nearly as productive as I hoped. Well, maybe productive isn't the right word. I actually got a ton of stuff done...In fact Mon-Wed of last week, I was at the store every day. It was freaking exhausting! I'm trying to figure out our groove here still. Thursday I made a not-leaving-the-house day because I was so exhausted from all the running around!
I feel kind of lost because I don't totally know my daughters day yet. I asked my husband what she usually does during the day and it's a lot of playing. The only set in stone things were Sesame Street at 10, breakfast, snack, lunch and snack. Other then that, they would just play all day.
I have these fantasies of going on field trips, going to story time every Monday morning, doing arts and crafts (my daughter LOVES to put stickers on paper), etc etc. So far, we haven't done any of that. Now, granted, this is our first week, and we're getting ready to move in 2.5 weeks but I'm just impatient for that SAHM feeling to kick in. I DID bring her to the library once and there were other (obviously) SAHMs and they were talking to each other. I felt out of place. Silly isn't it? They were also quite a bit older then me....but that doesn't usually make much of a difference. The majority of my friends are in their 30's.
I just need to get a feel for how we'll do this, and I know that. I think every week I'd like to make a goal of doing SOMETHING different then being in the house or regular errands. We have a membership to the Children's Museum so that would be easy. Once the weather warms up, we'll go to Como Zoo a lot because that's just a small (non-required) donation to get in. We'll also be able to take walks, go to the park...and whatever else. I don't know what else. I need to find THRIFTY activities we can do that will work for a very small baby and a toddler because at the end of next month, I'll be watching a 3 month old in my home.

This week our goal is to make it to the Children's Museum. In fact, I think Friday would be a great day for that. My daughter has a well child visit on Friday morning at 9:30 so if we bring her snack and a lunch with us, we could go straight to the museum afterwards and spend probably about 1.5 hours there before it's nap time.

This blog post really had no rhyme or reason other then to just check in with myself. :)

Bear with me!

Since my blog is so new, I'm still working out the kinks and figuring out just how I want it to be. I am trying different background and color combinations and sometime in the very near future, I will actually have a cute little logo of some sort. What, I don't know, but between my husband and I, we'll come up with something good! So please bear with me on the changes you'll see. I am looking for just the right background so you might see some different ones. :)

Celebrating a birthday and keepin' it cheap!

My father in laws birthday was a few days ago and we invited him over for dinner for his birthday. Pre-thrifty me, I would have gone out and bought a whole grocery bag full of stuff and made dinner or even worse, we would have spent $50 going out to eat. Good gosh, $50....I can't even IMAGINE doing that anymore. So here is the breakdown of what we're having:

3 Pound Boneless turkey-Free from Rainbow for purchasing a ham (it also came with gravy mixings)
Mashed potatoes- a 5 lb bag of potatoes was on sale at Rainbow last week for $0.79 and we're only using probably 1 lb of potatoes today
Some frozen veggie, probably corn- Got on sale and with a coupon for $0.67 at Rainbow if I remember correctly

I made a chocolate cake from scratch which I've NEVER done before. I also made the frosting from scratch. I had all the ingredients around the house. It LOOKS like it's going to be good...if it is, I'll post the recipe! Heck, I even had some birthday candles from a while ago! Pre-thrifty me, I would have gone to Byerly's and spend $20-$40 on a cake. CRAZY!!

Even the gift we bought him wasn't bad. We went to Kohls and they had those neat digital frames on sale for 50% off. We got him a digital keychain so he has pictures of our daughter and us and it was $14.99. THEN we had a $5 coupon so it only cost a little more then $10 with tax.

All in all, not a bad deal on everything, and still a wonderful meal with what looks like a VERY tasty cake to eat!!

It really can be done. REALLY! :)