Eat Your Frog

What!?  First we are eating elephants and now frogs!?!?  Just like the elephant, the frog is a metaphor.

“Eat a live frog every morning,
and nothing worse will happen
to you the rest of the day.”
~Mark Twain 

So, this week’s bite is to make your daily to-do list (do your best, we will learn how to make these lists later), and pick the thing that you will least enjoy doing and get that done first.  Your day can only get better from that point on.

Tsh makes a point to tell us that eating our frog should NOT be part of our morning routine (bite #2).

I’m hoping that chewing and eating this bite will help me finally swallow the last bite!

What’s your frog??

How did you all do with your second bite?

I bombed it miserably.  I officially hate the morning and getting a morning routine was next to impossible this past week.  Each day, my morning pretty much looked like this: **alarm**, hit the snooze, **alarm**, moan, roll out of bed, feed children, get to school on time.

So, unless hitting the snooze and moaning count as being part of a morning routine, this is something I am going to have to come back to and work on.

I guess eating the proverbial elephant is alot like eating steak.  Sometimes you get a tough bite and have to chew on it for a little while.  So I’m going to keep on chewing on our second bite and move on.

How’d you do?

Friday: Beef stroganoff
Saturday: Crockpot Robusto Chicken
Sunday: MUSTGO
Monday: Meatloaf
Tuesday: Baked ziti with garlic bread
Wednesday: Sausage with small red potatoes and garden salad
Thursday: MUSTGO

I keep two gallon sized Ziploc freezer bags in our freezer.  One holds vegetable trimmings.  I put all sorts of things in it: onion skins, the ends of the onions that always get chopped off, carrot skins, garlic skins, pieces of garlic cloves that are left after squishing it in the press, celery ends……you name it!  As long as it isn’t rotten, it goes into the bag.  It’s also the perfect place for pieces of celery that get wilted and are floppy.

The other bag holds chicken bones and skin.  I’ve completely stopped buying chicken without bones since I’ve realized that (1) you pay more money for boneless, skinless anything and (2) I can make chicken stock with them!!!  So, after I cook chicken, I pull it off the bones and the bones get tossed into the bag.  If I’m making something that doesn’t require the skin to stay on the chicken, I pull it off and put that into the bag as well.

Earlier this week I cooked a roaster chicken in the oven.  We carved what meat we wanted for dinner that night and a couple of days later I picked the remaining meat off of the carcass to use for another meal.  The carcass combined with the bones that I had saved from a week or two ago was enough to make stock.

Left over chicken bones, vegetable scraps, and some nearly dead carrots for chicken stock

I dumped everything into my 7 qt. dutch oven, added some pepper corns, filled it to within an inch of the top with water, covered it with the lid, and brought it to a boil.  I let it at a nice, rolling boil for about an hour and then turned the burner down so that it was just simmering.  The concoction simmered for about 3 hours, then I turned the stove off and let it all cool down until I could work with it without burning myself.

Everything in the pot and ready to go

The next step is to strain everything out of the stock.  I don’t have a strainer, so I use my largest metal mixing bowl and two colanders.  My larger colander has holes that are on the larger side (a piece of fettuccine can fit through the holes) and my smaller colander, which I put inside of the larger one, has smaller holes (a piece of uncooked spaghetti is just big enough to not fit through it’s holes).  I place the two colanders into my mixing bowl and pour the entire contents of the pot into the smaller colander.  Then I pick up the larger colander (which also picks up the smaller colander) and let all of the stock drain out of it.  For the most part, my two-colander system works well.  I’m not overly picky about wanting a perfectly clear stock, so whatever might get through the double colander doesn’t bother me.

Next, I either can or freeze the stock.  This week I decided to freeze the stock because I really didn’t feel like getting the canning things out.  I poured the stock into a gallon sized Ziploc freezer bag, double bagged it, and the put it into the freezer.  You’ll note that I didn’t strain off the chicken fat from the stock.  I choose to keep the fat in my stock because it helps beef up the immune system (See?…giving people chicken soup when they are sick is done for a reason!!!).  If you wanted to remove the fat, keep the stock in the bowl or pot and let it cool completely.  The fat will rise to the top and solidify.  You can easily remove it with a large spoon.

Completed chicken stock double bagged and ready for the freezer.

So, that is how I make chicken stock for free.  Do you have a different way to use up food scraps?  Feel free to share what you do down in the comments!

Now before you decide you don’t have the time to read about some game app on Facebook, let me tell you how WeTopia is different.  When you play WeTopia, you are actually helping people around the world……..for free.  All it costs is a little of your time.  Like 5 minutes out of your day type of time.  Seriously, I spent more than 5 minutes in the McDonald’s drive-thru last week for a frappe.  I think I can find 5 minutes to help someone who is in need.

When you play the game, you collect “joy” and every 100 joy is a hot meal sent to Haiti….or some new books for someone in the US to read.  When you play, you are providing clean water for people to drink or funding for a school somewhere.  You choose what program you want to help.

People playing WeTopia are making it possible for 3 year old Kenny to have a warm meal

I love helping people, but we don’t always have the money for me to donate to organizations.  So far, people playing WeTopia have been able to donate 114,623 hot meals, 469,940 liters of clean water, 1,537 pairs of shoes. They have raised 38% of the total cost for the US Change Program in Louisiana, 18% of the US Literacy Program in Kentucky, 28% of the health care program for homeless kids in New York.  They are helping to fund a school that needs to be built in Flemands, Haiti as well as  textbooks to kids in Haiti.  They have fully funded a pharmacy that cares for up to 200 people a day in Haiti.  ….and they’ve done this all just by playing this simple game.

WeTopia is still in the beta version and is currently working on making some new connections that will provide things for other areas around the world.

So, if you are going to waste some time on Facebook, let me encourage you to check WeTopia out.  Now that I think of it….is it really wasting time if you are helping someone?  No, I don’t think so.

There are a few blog authors who make me do that frequently.  I’ve mentioned one of them quite a bit this past week.  Tsh Oxenreider seems to make me go ‘hmmm’ alot lately.  What she has to say really hits home with me right now.  She just posted questions to help you make some goals for this year on her blog, SimpleMom.net.

I was really happy when I realized that the 5 subject areas for Tsh’s questionnaire were the 5 areas that Hubs and I focused on when we wrote our family purpose statement.

Take some time to look at the questions on Tsh’s blog.  They might just make you go “Hmmm”.

Now that we’ve got a new and shiny family purpose statement, let’s put it to good use, shall we?  It’s time for our second bite!

Establish a morning routine

I’m not going to lie.  This is going to be a hard one for me.  I absolutely loathe getting out of bed in the morning.  The alarm goes off and I roll over and hit the snooze a few too many times before realizing that I need to somehow feed, dress, teeth brush, face wash, and hair style the kids in 45 minutes or less.  It’s chaotic, it’s stressful, and it is certainly not the right way to start the day.

So, how do we come up with a morning routine?  What do we put in a morning routine? Tsh says to “pick the things that fuel you the most, and faithfully treat yourself to those things, in the same order, every day.  Choose five things, and plan to do them first thing in the morning.”

Here are some ideas that Tsh gives:

• Take a shower
• Pray
• Exercise
• Drink a glass of water
• Stretch
• Make your bed
• Read your Bible
• Meditate
• Journal
• Take vitamins
• Read encouraging quotes or a devotional
• Review your family purpose statement
• Listen to a particular song
• Sit outside for a few minutes with a cup of coffee
• Dump your brain (an upcoming bite)

The number one rule is to make sure these five things focus on you.  Don’t check your email or Twitter, don’t throw a load of laundry into the washer, and don’t pack the kids’ lunches.  First do these few things that will feed your soul.

We’ll recap this bite on Sunday.  Have a great week!!

Well, how did you do with the first bite of your personal elephant?  Did you get far on your family’s purpose statement??

The opening sentence for our’s will most likely be tweaked a little bit, but the “meat” of the purpose statement will not change.  I do feel that the things we chose are both timeless and not too general.  So, here it is:

We believe that our purpose as a family is to live to the fullest potential that God has given to us.  We will accomplish this by:

• Striving to grow in God’s likeness
• Making family togetherness a priority
• Living with a direction
• Being the light to those around us
• Having a welcoming home full of love, joy, peace, and contentment
• Being financially responsible
• Living simply
• Living healthy lives
• Being good stewards of God’s creation

I took each family value above and broke it down into what it means to us right now.  The values themselves will probably remain the same, but the interpretation of each value may change a little as our kids grow older or things change in our lives.  Here is what each value means to us right now:

Striving to grow in God’s likeness

• Raise up Godly children
• Strive to spend time with God daily
• Memorize God’s Word both individually and as a family
• Serve others

Making family togetherness a priority

• Communication
• Time management
• Meal times together
• Bible reading/memorization as a family

Living with a direction

• daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and lifetime plans
• daily routines
• meal plans

Being a light to those around us

• Show God in our actions
• Invite neighbors over once a year
• ‘See a need, fill a need’

Having a welcoming home full of love, joy, peace, and contentment

• A house that is clean enough to have people over on a whim
• Use gentle words and tones
• Uncluttered
• Simple

Being financially responsible

• Debt-free
• Have an emergency fund
• Give freely
• Educate the kids on financial responsibility (bill paying, budgeting, etc)

Living simply

• Uncluttered
• Enjoy what we have
• Quality over quantity
• Care for what we have

Living healthy lives

• Limit eating out
• Grow some of our food
• Limit processed foods
• Be active at least once a day

Being good stewards of God’s creation

• Enjoy God’s creation outside as much as possible
• Be good stewards of the environment
• Cultivate food and flower gardens

Now that we have a family purpose statement, it will be alot easier to figure out other steps in the elephant eating process.

I’ve decided to have a larger canvas made with our family purpose statement so that it can hang in a prominent place in our home.  I’ll be sure to share a picture whenever I get that done.

Feel free to share your family purpose statement in the comment section below.

I do them Friday through Thursday because Hubby gets paid every other Friday and that’s when I get my grocery money out.

So, here is the next week’s meal plan:

Friday: Oven roasted chicken with red potatoes and green beans with garden salad
Saturday: Haddock with Macaroni and Cheese balls
Sunday: Broccoli Cheese soup
Monday: Creamy Chicken Noodle stuff (crockpot meal)
Tuesday: MUSTGO (all leftovers “must go”)
Wednesday: Sweet and Sour Chicken with fried rice and egg rolls
Thursday: Steak with light fettuccine alfredo and garden salad

Do you do meal planning?  What’s on the menu for this week??