Anyway, I am hoping to go to Aldi tomorrow to buy milk, eggs, fruit, and veggies to last us till the next credit card billing cycle. I suppose I really shouldn't care, but that tends to be how I end up breaking our finances down is according to the credit card billing cycle. I don't know. It's weird. It ends in the middle of the month. :-P But anyway, we have Christmas stuff, plumbing, and our car rental for the trip to Texas on the credit card for this billing cycle, so I just like splitting things up more. And delaying purchases anyway tends to make me do more with less anyway, which is a good thing. But it's not good if I skimp on buying important stuff or ignore good deals. And Aldi has inexpensive oranges and pineapples and pears right now. :-) And their bananas and carrots are always very reasonably priced.
At any rate, I had leftover mashed potatoes that I wanted to use for supper tonight. I have turkey ham and considered cooking that and green beans for supper. But when I tried to come up with inspiration for a nice glaze or seasoning for the turkey ham, I just came up short. Then when in the fridge I remembered I needed to do something with the ground beef we bought last time we went shopping - three pounds of it. So I browned half of it to use later for tacos or something like hamburger helper. The other half I turned into meat balls. I whirled four slices of sandwich bread in my manual food processor to turn it into crumbs and added that, two eggs, some milk, some ketchup, a tiny bit of mustard, dry onions, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, and pepper and then mashed it all up and put it in a glass pan in decent sized portions.
I couldn't find frozen green beans, so I'm thinking now that I must have intended to buy them and never actually did it. :oops: I did, however, have a bag of frozen broccoli florets, so I greased another glass pan and dumped the florets into it. I sprinkled them with salt, dill, a tiny bit of freshly ground black pepper, and...maybe that was it. I don't remember. I peeled some cloves of garlic for the corners and stuck them in the oven. And I put the leftover mashed potatoes in another glass pan (also greased) and stuck that in the oven as well. While these things were cooking, I made cheese sauce for the broccoli, because that's the only way Josh eats broccoli. :-P
I put a couple tablespoons of butter into my smallest pot, added a heaping tablespoon of white flour as the better melted, sprinkled in some salt and onion powder, and also added a tiny bit of mustard. After the mixture got bubbly, I slowly added milk a bit at a time to keep it from becoming too lumpy. Once I got to the volume of liquid I wanted, I stirred it till it was bubbly and a bit thick. Then I added four slices of American cheese and (after reducing the heat) stirred it till it was completely melted. Then I added a handful of grated cheddar. And that was the cheese sauce.
When we were at IKEA the other day, I found these perfect little plates for serving toddlers. I hadn't found anything of the sort, much less for a decent price before, so poor Felicity had been eating off larger plates, which just wasn't incredibly convenient. So tonight she got to eat off one of these plates for the first time and she was ecstatic and ate better than usual. I was surprised and of course happy. Mary sat in her new high chair (also from IKEA) and also ate more than usual and occupied herself quite happily while I ate. We had used a booster seat for Felicity once she turned one, I think, but somehow it's just not nearly as nice or convenient. At any rate, the high chair seems like an excellent investment. Most times, real meal times involve at least having one child in my lap, so it was kind of weird and extremely nice not to have my lap occupied by anyone. ;-)
Mary was pretty fussy and clingy today (she's cutting molars), though she did take a nice long nap, as did Felicity. They're both asleep again now, I think. And I'm super tired...so I think I'm heading to bed. :-)
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