Day 61: Today I am

1. Grateful that The Compact makes it easy to discover fraudulent charges on the credit card.

"Honey, did you buy something at such-and-so?"
"Is it the grocery store or Goodwill? Nope, didn't buy it."

2. Hearing on the radio that depression rates have skyrocketed this winter due to the weather. As a two-time PPD veteran, I totally understand and I'm glad that spring is on the way to hopefully improve those statistics.

3. Curbing a huge urge to go buy something by going to the library and checking out twelve books at semi-random. When I likewise feel the urge to get rid of stuff, I can then return said books to the library. Win-win. And hopefully I'll discover a new favorite author. Win-win-win.

4. Celebrating the fact that in six days, our family of four plus dinner guests one night only made one kitchen bag of trash.

5. In a similar vein, happy that I only threw out one Tupperware's worth of leftovers (six day old oven fries that were turning brown and limp).

Day 54: Six degrees of bacon

I like it when each meals provides a stepping stone to the next.

This week, it all started with a package of bacon.

I cooked some up and put it into a pie plate filled with the remains of a bag of frozen hashbrowns. I added two half blocks of cheese left over from other recipes, leftover broccoli, and eggs and milk. Ta-da: quiche!

Tonight I threw some dried beans into the crockpot with the rest of the bacon. After cooking on low for 10 hours, I added some seasoned salt and served them with homemade cornbread muffins and sweet potatoes. 

Three days from now, those leftover beans (sans the largest pieces of bacon) will get mashed to become burrito filling. 

This week there was also a secondary story line involving stir fry made from leftover rice, leftover cooked veggies, and a minuscule amount of chicken left in the freezer after making BBQ crockpot chicken for sandwiches.

I'm sensing a theme: if you want to use up your leftovers, make lots of stir fry and quiche. And be willing to have a lot of non-recipe meals.

If you're not bringing home the figurative bacon, it helps when you can stretch the literal bacon.