Best garage sale find: Twenty place settings of Corelle in an acceptable pattern! It included two sugar bowl, a creamer and the teapot. Our old set was quickly disappearing as pieces broke and I wasn’t looking forward to budgeting for a brand new set. I was telling MrPages at the garage sale, that the price the seller was asking was really good, when the seller yelled from across the yard that she would give us the whole set for half of what was on the tag. Best twenty bucks we’ve spent to date!
Best recipe find: Hamburger Helper – Home-style from my beloved More with Less: World Community Cookbook. (I love Extending the Table and Simply in Season as well.) It seemed kind of plain and simple, and I confess I thought the troops might not be impressed, but they all raved. It quickly became a weekly staple.
Hamburger Helper – Home-Style
Serves 4Brown in Skillet:
3/4 lb ground beef (or ground turkey)
1 t. salt
1/2 t. pepperAdd:
1 T. finely chopped onion (left in large pick-outable chunks or omitted for my crew)
1 stalk chopped celery
1/4 c. frozen or canned peas (We have used whatever chopped veggies were in the fridge or freezer.)
2/3 c. fresh ir canned tomatoes, choppedWhile beef is browning, cook in salted water:
1 c. crinkly noodles (we use whatever pasta we have. I used some left over macaroni and cheese the other day – well actually, it was KD – and omitted the cheese below. It was really yummy.)
Drain noodles and spread over meat mixture. Sprinkle over all:
1/2-3/4 c. shredded cheese or 1/3 c. grated Parmesan cheese
Simmer uncovered 15 minutes to blend flavors. Serve from skillet.
submitted Marie L. Berg, Kan.
A program on world hunger motivated the contribute to invent her own economical skillet dinner.
Taken from Page 121 of More with Less: A World Community Cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre, commissioned by the Mennonite Central Committee and published by Herald Press, copyright 1976.
Best used clothing find: Bathing suits for three of us in November! It was an exciting moment for those of us who desperately needed more coverage in the pool!
Best website find: Book Closeouts. I got the entire Narnia series in hardback for far cheaper than anything else I’ve found! The LittlePages have been building their Little House collections. The site’s catalogue is huge and I don’t usually browse there, but I always go there first when looking for in-print books that mainsteam booksellers no longer want.
Best used book find: Lord of the Rings trilogy in paperback. MrPages has been waiting years for his own copy.
Best used household find: A cast iron dutch oven which will be perfect for period appropriate cooking at living history. No more mooching off the other settlers.
Best music-related find: Zen Creative 2GB MP3 player. This mp3 player, while less popular, is actually more functional and offers more flexibility that an iPod (which MrPages refuses to buy). It has a slot for SD cards (like in cameras) so we can have a card full of our Librivox recordings, and one with classical music, and one with Christmas music. We have it plugged into speakers that are in various places around the house, or we use a small FM transmitter to listen in the car. You don’t need special software to use it, you can just drop mp3 files onto the thing and go. Audiobooks on the highway are the best time-killer ever.
Best techno-geek find: MrPages sometimes does gratis computer work for friends and friends-of-friends. He often comes away with old, mostly unusable hardware, which he, in turn, takes somewhere to be properly disposed of. Just before Christmas, someone dropped off an old broken laptop. It apparently worked find, but the plug-in jack was broken. MrPages made a few $10 Ebay purchases, dismantled the whole laptop down to shiny metal parts and lots of tiny screws, managed to put it all back together (just to have to take it all apart again to fix that one incorrect screw), and now we own our very first laptop! We plan on using it as a portable DVD player. (Our fifteen year old TV is hard to lug around the house.)
And I think that about uses up my creativity and so sums up our year.
Related posts:
This whole series was so much fun! I’m so glad you did it and I very much enjoyed reading all of this year’s highlights! I’m trying to think of a way to get to Snowy’s family to all do the same thing together as well.