Planning the Perfect Turkey for Thanksgiving

For our family Thanksgiving is all about the TURKEY. I've been cooking at least one whole turkey every year for the last 25 years or more, so it seems simple. But every year I hear people fretting about the fact they have to make THE turkey this year.

Here are a few tips that I've picked up over the years.

If you're buying a frozen turkey, be sure to give yourself enough time for it to defrost (preferably in the refrigerator)....my 14 lb turkey is going to take 4 days to defrost in the fridge

Invest in an electric roaster pan, this has saved my sanity on more than one holiday. The turkey can cook all day while you cook everything else in the oven.

Use online tools like Butterball.com to figure out how much turkey you need, how long it will take to defrost and how long it needs to cook.

Watch for grocery specials...this year I'm getting a FREE 14 lb frozen ButterBall turkey by using my customer rewards card at a local grocery store....I had to spend a minimum of $300 on groceries in a 45 day window, but since I needed to spend at least that much on groceries this month it was a GREAT deal. ButterBall currently has a $2 off printable coupon on their website that is good until the end of December.

Easy Peasy Red Beans and Rice - crock pot style

This is a VERY easy recipe, makes a lot, is tasty and can be served many different ways.

*cross posted from my personal blog*

Easy Peasy Red Beans and Rice - crock pot style

2lbs dry kidney beans
2 cups brown rice
8 - 12 chicken bouillon cubes
garlic powder
onion powder
3-4 bay leaves

Soak your beans over night or do a quick sock (as described on the back of the package). Dump in your 6 qt crock pot and fill with water until the beans only take up only half the space in the water. Add your two cups of brown rice (uncooked), garlic powder and onion powder to preference, chicken bouillon cubes and bay leaves. Cook on high until beans are soft and rice is done (you can cook longer and it won't hurt it). It will take approximately 6 hours on high or 10-12 hours on low. Taste great served with chips, on burritos or with cornbread. Top it with a bit of cheese, sour cream and or salsa. Just as a side note, mine needed a little more salt and pepper before eating - I used 6 bouillon cubes. My hubby likes to add red pepper to his personal serving :).

Bread, delicious bread!

I found this recipe & wanted to adapt it to try with my kitchen aid stand mixer. I also had some white flour I needed to use. AND I never make just one loaf of bread, so I wanted to double the recipe. This is what I came up with and it's officially a WINNER in this house. It was very tasty!

Christina's Honey Half Wheat Bread


INGREDIENTS:
3 cups unbleached white flour
4-5 cups whole wheat flour
4 teaspoons active dry yeast (I buy it in bulk @ costco) = 2 packages
3/4 cup honey
2 teaspoons salt
2 cups warm water
1/4 cup butter


Here is how I made it.

Warm 2 cups of water up in a measuring cup (approximately 110-120 degrees), then stir in active dry yeast. Let it stand approximately 5 minutes, until foamy.While yeast in standing, I measure out 3 cups white flour, 3 cups whole wheat flour, and 2 teaspoons salt, into a bowl. Then in another measuring cup, I measure out honey and heat it up for 30 seconds (makes it easier to pour). In my kitchen aid bowl, I put my butter (melted or room temperature) at the bottom. Then I pour my water yeast mixture in and mix it. Then I add my honey and mix. Then I add my pre-measured flour into it and mix by hand for a moment. Then I put my kitchen aid bowl on my kitchen aid stand mixer and start it going at speed two. I gradually add the remaining flour (1-2 cups whole wheat) until the dough is still kind of sticky, but still is hangs onto the dough hook. Once it reaches this point, I let it run for a 4 or 5 minutes more. By then, it forms a nice smooth ball of dough (leaving some of the dough on the edges of the bowl). Then I take my ball of dough out, and plop it into a greased bowl to rise. I will often scrape out the dough that is stuck to the sides of the mixing bowl and add it to the ball of dough and knead it for a minute. Let it rise until doubled and punch down.

Divide in half or in three parts (just in half produces two LARGE loaves, three parts makes 3 average size loaves). I don't do anything fancy to shape my dough. I just pat and punch until it feels as if I've gotten most of the air out and then do some more patting until I get into the shape I want it. I then put the dough in two (or three) greased bread pans and let them *almost* double and at that point I bake them at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes.

*cross posted from my personal blog, http://www.clothconfessions.blogspot.com

Rainbow Cake

Over the past few weeks, the food blogsphere has been buzzing about rainbow cakes. All because of this post. To tell you the truth, I hadn't heard of them until someone linked that blog entry on the LOK Household forum. The idea of a color cake certainly piqued my interest. With a combined birthday coming up in July, I thought I might give it a try. My problem was that the author (as well as many variations I found around the web) only showed how to do a round cake. With a big family, most cakes I make are sheet cakes. In fact, we eat cake rather often around here since a box of mix is pretty cheap and a sheet cake can feed my crew nicely for dessert (we usually skip frosting and just use powdered sugar or fruit for topping). So, my plan to make a rainbow cake this weekend turned into a bit of an adventure as I decided to see if I could get as good results with a rectangle baking pan. Since this is feeding a crew, I doubled the recipe. The post above noted a diet version of the cake. I decided to make the traditional version.

Here's the ingredients. I would normally use a generic cake mix, but Duncan Hines was on sale. Assuming you have food coloring on hand, the cost of this cake (including the eggs and oil for the cake) is about $5. Mine easily fed my family of 11 with leftovers. I actually wanted to try the neon food coloring, which added another $4 to the cost.



Make the cake mix as noted on the box. Separate the batter into small bowls. Add 10-15 drops of food coloring, depending on how deep you want your color. I wanted this to be a family food project, so I had the kids mix the colors. They had a blast. Note that I used both the neon food coloring and some regular food colors I had on hand.





I decided to do a wide variety of colors. The neon food coloring made things interesting! I have to laugh. In the original blog post about rainbow cakes, the author had such nice pictures of her colored batter in glass bowls. Nothing like that in these parts. We used Gerber snack bowls and Zoopal spoons!



I wasn't really sure how to arrange the batter, so I just winged it.



Here's the finished first layer.



I then just poured the remaining batter in various spots over the top of the first layer. When you do this, don't worry about the batter mixing. As long as you simply pour the batter on top (or next to) another color, it will be fine. The completed "pour":



My cake was doubled, so it took about 45 minutes to cook. Just cook according to the box directions and be sure to check it periodically. It's done when a toothpick in the center comes out clean. Cool thoroughly. Even though the picture is not the greatest, you can see the colors came out quite nice. I said the cake looked like a jigsaw puzzle. Jim said it looked like a map.



Here's a side view of a few of the cut pieces. I was very pleased. Doing a sheet cake worked out perfectly. As you can see, the neon food coloring definitely made some bold colors.



Because this was a test cake, I purposely did not frost it right away. I did go with the same type of frosting as the original blogger. I used lemon pudding, only adding half the milk (1 cup) so that it was very custard-like. I then folded in 2/3 of the container of whipped topping. I then frosted each piece before serving. Here's a bit blurry picture of the finished product.



The experiment was a success. The cake looked great and tasted great too. I have 2 kids' birthdays on July 4th (yes, can you believe that--2 of my kids born on Independence Day). I originally thought that doing a rainbow cake would be cool, but this technique would also make a great red-white-and-blue cake.

Whatever I decide to do for the birthday, the most important thing is that the kids had a blast making the cake...and even more fun eating it.



You can find the full recipe (including printable version) HERE.

Experimenting with menus

I am going to be trying a little experiment with my menu planning style. For this month (and into the next I guess) I am going to make a two week basic menu (and their will be repeats, trust me) and we'll just repeat for the second half of the month. I know, people have said to do things like this before, but I'm slow at catching on LOL!

I loath making a menu every week, after doing the same thing for weeks on end I feel a tremendous pressure to change things up and impress my family (this is all in my head btw - they're happy to eat whatever they don't have to make themselves).

SO, tell me how do you plan your menus? or do you even bother?

Fifteen minutes or less....

I value healthy eating, but I also value my sanity :). As a mommy of five precious little bundles, managing the home and homeschooling, I am left with very little mental energy to really think about much else, like cooking! I have little unwritten rules to make my life easier, one of which is making dinner prep no more than 15 minutes long. Any longer and it's not a practical meal for me to make for my family more than once every great now and again. Prep time does not include cooking time, so if it takes me 5 minutes to throw a casserole together and an hour to cook it, that still qualifies.

We love to eat pizza around here (what good ol' American family doesn't?), but I am unwilling to pay for the delivered kind and right now I don't have the time management skills to make my own pizza dough every time we have pizza. Thus was born the tortilla pizza. I'm sure it has been made many times before in many different ways, but here is how we do it around here. General ingredients are as follows: 1) Burrito sized flour tortillas, purchased in the ethnic food section for $2 for a pack of 10 (each has 5 grams of fiber and 5 grams of protein per serving), 2) shredded mozzarella or cheddar cheese, purchased in bulk from Costco to cut back on the cost, 3) pepperoni, also purchased in bulk at costco to cut back on the cost, 4) fresh roma tomatoes purchased at costco in bulk (we LOVE costco!). You can add all sorts of stuff to these if you'd like (green peppers, onions and mushrooms for instance), but this is the basic recipe.

Heat your oven to 425 degree F. On tortilla #1, add slices of roma tomato, top with cheese, then add pepperoni. Pop it in the oven on a cookie sheet for about 4 minutes. While first one is cooking, prepare the second one. As soon as the first one is done, slide it onto a plate and pop the already prepared tortilla in the oven and proceed like that until you have all that you need cooked. One will serve and adult in our house (served with cut up veggies and fruit of some kind). Also, if you do not have fresh tomatoes (or just don't like them!) a can of crushed tomatoes is a great substitute.

I hope you enjoy!

Large Family Recipes + Meal Planning

First of all, I wanted to announce a brand new area on the Lotsofkids.com website. Large Family Recipes is a new sub-site focusing on recipes for large families. These recipes are a compilation of recipes submitted by the LOK visitors and staff. There are currently over 350 recipes and the number is growing. Be sure to check it out HERE.

Also, I just posted a very extensive article on meal planning on the main LOK site. You can read it HERE. Now, admittedly, there are a lot of articles out there about meal planning. In fact, our blogger Denise did a post about this subject a while ago. Whether you use the system in the LOK article, Denise's, or another, meal planning is truly an essential in a large family kitchen. It can be hectic enough around the house. It really is a blessing to have one thing taken care of ahead of time.

One of my favorite frugal cooking sites was Steph's Kitchen (of www.stephskitchen.com--there are a few other Steph's out there and I don't want to get them confused). Steph offered hundreds of budget meals and recipes. I was saddened to learn that after being a staple of the internet for years, Steph closed her site for good late last year. One of the articles she had which I saved was on meal-planning. I am posting a copy of it below in the hopes that it will offer yet another viewpoint on how to meal and grocery planning.

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Do you feel like thisafter a trip to the grocery store?

With three children, I know I sure have! But, since I simplified my meal planning and grocery shopping, I am able to breeze through the grocery store in less time and with less headache.

In my earlier days of marriage I would go to the grocery store empty handed~no list, no coupons, no store ad, and no earthly idea of what I was going to buy for a weeks worth of dinners. That must explain why we ate so much "prepared" food. Prepared food is okay once in awhile, but I like to rely on my own home-cooking now, and going to the grocery store un-prepared is a disaster waiting to happen~missing key ingredients, forgetting you need toothpaste, or only buying enough food to last 5 days instead of 7, then going back and doing it all over again!

So, with that in mind, skim through my meal planning tips and apply what will be of use in your household. Those I have shared my plan with say it's easy, quick, and saves them money. Use that money you saved to treat your family to an evening treat at Baskin Robins! Yum!

STEP 1

ORGANIZE THOSE RECIPES!

This part may be time consuming at first, but once you have completed this important step, you'll reap the rewards from having done it. There are many different ways you can organize your recipe files~by category, by ingredients, by ease/difficulty, alphabetical, etc. I have mine organized in Recipe Books according to category (Appetizers, Meat, Chicken, Casseroles, Soups, Cookies, Pies, etc.). This, with my cookbooks, magazines and index cards, are stored neatly in my pantry. Space will determine where you store your cookbooks and recipes, but if they're organized, they'll be easily accessible anywhere (except maybe the attic!).

Okay, now you have that job done~whew! You deserve a rich mocha espresso!

In your organizing, did you notice you have quite a few recipes that you have clipped or marked in a cookbook that you have not yet tried? I sure did! So, to eliminate the hunt-and-peck game for that "something new" to try, I created a simple file of just recipes to try. I took a big recipe filing box and made category cards (this can be fancy or simple, however you wish to do it). Then I filed all of the loose recipes behind the appropriate heading. On an index card or piece of paper for each category, write down "to try" recipes in cookbooks (title, cookbook and page number) and file them accordingly, too.

Now you're set...tried-and-true recipes are organized, and you have a handy box full of recipes you want to try. You are ready to begin meal planning.

STEP 2

MEAL PLANNING

Grab a piece of paper or two, a pen and your "To Try" box. If you shop weekly, number 1-7 on the top of your paper (1-14 for two weeks). Now you have 7 (or how many ever you're shopping for) dinners to plan (the fun part, I think). Start with line number one, and write down a complete meal (ie: Lasagna, Garlic Bread, Salad...or Grilled Steak, Rice Pilaf, Green Beans). Continue on down through the remaining lines, trying to add a new recipe or two if possible. I usually add 1-3 new recipes a week. I often put my family through what we call "the guinea pig test".

To save money, try to plan meals according to your grocery stores specials. If their chicken breasts are on sale, plan a couple of meals using chicken (there are several on my recipe page!), or the same goes with ground beef, roasts, pork chops, etc. Also browse your coupons for ones that expire soon and see if you can't incorporate that item into a meal or dessert. I can often times buy a box of cereal for well under $2 because I buy the store's special and use a coupon to go with it. I have bought items for pennies using this thrifty method. Another money-saving tip: plan on using leftovers! If you make a pot roast one night, automatically plan on French Dip Sandwiches the next night. Team it up with some home fries and a vegie or fruit of some sort and you'll have a complete and inexpensive dinner!

STEP 3

SHOPPING LIST

Once you have all numbered lines filled in with a complete menu, now go through those recipes and determine what ingredients you need to buy. Categorize your second sheet of paper (or the back of the first one) with appropriate headings (meat, dairy, produce, canned, frozen, bread, cleaning, etc.), leaving enough space in between categories to write down what you need underneath. Let's take the first line, Lasagna, Garlic Bread, and Salad. Under meat, do you need ground beef for your sauce? If so, write it down under "Meat" (or if you buy canned, write spaghetti sauce under "Canned"). Same with lasagna noodles, cheese, spices, etc. Continue on with the Garlic Bread and Salad. Once that line is completed, move on to line number two, and so on. Very simple, and not as time consuming as it may sound.

Once you have your dinner ingredients complete, decide if you'll be doing any baking in the next week or two. If you will, write down the ingredients you will need. Now is a good time to try a new dessert recipe!

Now go through your refrigerator and cupboards to determine what staples you are low on. Don't forget to keep breakfast and lunch items in mind...cereal, eggs, bread, fruit, etc. Make sure to check out your bathroom and cleaning needs, too. Running out of toilet paper is the pits!

Want something even easier? Keep a handy list posted on your refrigerator or somewhere within easy reach, and whenever you run out of something, write it on the list. Just grab that list when you're making out your shopping list!

STEP 4

TACKLING THE GROCERY STORE

This part is easy when you have a tidy little list with you! Bring along your list and menu, and your coupons. Make sure you take your menu, because often times I have had to refer to it during my shopping. Better to be safe than sorry. If you've been shopping in the same grocery store for awhile, you probably know the layout by heart (and you can even organize your shopping list by the store layout rather than category, if desired). Tackling the store now should be a breeze. You'll no longer be rushing around with no idea of what to buy, and going through the same aisles three times because you forgot something, or are "planning" meals as you go. We can all simplify life in small ways, just like this.

THAT'S IT! THAT'S ALL THERE IS TO IT!

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*** I do want to note that over the last couple of months, I have tried to reach Steph to offer her free hosting to put her site up again. Unfortunately, I have been unsuccessful at reaching her. In the past, she has allowed people to re-post her recipes and articles with proper credit, so I have posted the above article in that spirit. ***

On her original site, Steph offered a wide range of monthly menus which could be used for easy meal-planning. While her site is not up any more, you can find a copy of a good portion of it at the Internet Archive. Here is a link to the monthly menu page to help inspire you: Wayback Machine.