Ok everyone, I admit I have not exactly had, or really made time to update everyone on The Experiment lately. I am very sorry for that. I have not even updated family on Marvelous May. I suppose the next post needs to be a combo April – June post. I started a new job and things have been a little crazy with the end of the year for my class. I was pretty exhausted but I have been able to keep to my $100.00 a month budget mostly. I have gone over, at the most, $3-$4 over so I think that is doing pretty well. I will begin posting again this week, Lord willing and get back on track.

Thanks to everyone for your patience and you’ll hear from me soon.

Busy……. does this one word describe your life as of late?

This week, or weeks should I say, have been very busy with a trip home to Tennessee and Mr. Phillips working his tail off with an event called Secret Church and Easter Sunday. He is on staff at the Church at Brook Hills so check it out of you are ever in Birmingham. And let us know. We would love to have you crash at our place! We are really looking forward to getting back to a routine or at least some normalcy. Enter giant tornados. The state we reside in has had some pretty severe weather along with the rest of the Eastern United States. What’s a girl to do when tornados are swarming all around? Be in a safe room and blog, of course. So sorry this post is a little late but better late than never and as long as I have internet I’ll keep on keepin’ on.

So here’s what I got this time:
Bananas
Tomatoes
Apples
Beef Gravy
Organic Chicken Drumsticks
Red Onions
Sour Cream
Organic 2% Milk
Smart Taco Meat
Toasted Sesame Oil
Oranges
Parsley

Spent this Time: $38.57

Spent this Month: $103.56

Spent so far: $271.47

Menu Plan:

Last Week

Tu- Taco Salad
W- Leftovers
Th- Out of Town
F- Out of Town
Sa- Out of Town
Su- Out of Town
M- Steak, Mashed Potatoes, Broccoli

This Week
Tu- Lentil Shepard’s Pie, Tomato Basil Pasta, Yogurt
W- Leftovers
Th- Chuck Roast with potatoes, onions, and carrots, whole wheat flax bread
F- Rehearsal Dinner for a friend’s wedding
Sa- Lemon Chicken Drumsticks, Broccoli, Roasted Corn
Su- Leftovers
M- Tomato Soup, Rotel Beans and Rice, Spinach Salad

Side Note Adventures:

Meat, Meat…….Wonderful Meat
We were blessed by our parents to get 2 coolers full of grandma and grandpas organic beef from their farm in Tennessee. The butcher is using a new packaging that will keep the beef good for up to 5 years in the freezer as opposed to one year with the freezer paper he had been using. I want to make sure we recycle that packaging because if it can keep meat for 5 years in a freezer without freezer burn it can keep for a long, long time in a land fill. So we have been abundantly blessed with wonderful organic beef and it helps our budget stay low. Thanks grandma and grandpa!Mr. Phillips and I have been talking about visiting a few farms close to where we live to be our organic farm where we buy pork and chicken. More details to come on that one. So I need some advice….. do you buy from the store or a farm?

Smart Taco Meat
The ‘meat’ we recently got from Whole Foods is called smart meat (it is at other stores as well but as of late we have been shopping at Wholy Foods or as some of my friends like to call it…. Whole Paycheck). I was interested when I read on the package that it was not actually meat at all but vegetable protein. Anyone who knows me knows me and Mr. Phillips love meat but we have had to think about how much and how often we eat it given our experiment. Meat can be pricey and most don’t have the blessing of grandparents who have a cattle farm like we do so we have been trying to go meatless at least one meal a week. After having the Smart Meat in Mexican flavor, I have to say I really liked it. It smelled gross when I was heating it in a skillet but the flavor was really nice. It was perfect for our taco salads. Super yummy.

Bean Substitutes
Along with the whole meat thing we have been trying to substitute beans for some of the dishes we would normally eat meat in. I have not really done this before so it is a new adventure for we Phillips’. Our first dish was the Lentil Shepard’s Pie. I thought the best idea would be to do something I knew we liked before I venture out into other areas. I think it is a pretty frugal meal so I feel good about sharing it with you. So here’s the recipe:

Lentil Shepherd’s Pie

Ingredients:
1 pkg (16 oz) – mixed frozen vegetables
1 can or 1 1/2 cups – cooked lentils (I used some I cooked in a crock pot and froze)
1 jar – beef gravy
2 servings or 3 cups mashed potatoes
Shredded Cheddar Cheese (or whatever you have on hand) – to taste

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease an 8×8 pan and set aside. Thaw frozen vegetables in luke warm water (about 5 minutes). Heat thawed vegetables in a large skillet until soft, stirring frequently. Stir in beef gravy and lentils until heated through. Prepare either boxed mashed potatoes or make home made. Put lentil and vegetable mixture in the bottom of the 8×8 pan and top with mashed potatoes. Spread mashed potatoes over the top with a spatula. Note, the more you spread, the more messy it ends up looking. Then sprinkle cheese over the top to your taste. Bake at 350 degree for 20-30 minutes or until bubbly on the sides. Enjoy.

I hope you enjoy substituting beans for meat as much as I have so far. I guess we will have to see what works and what does not. Oh, while I was at my parents house in Tennessee I tried the smart bacon. Ummmm…. the smell should have alerted me. It tasted like bottom of an alpo bowl. Horrible. So just because one product is good doesn’t mean the whole product line is yummy. I have terrible taste in my mouth just thinking about it. Ewe.

Thanks for reading. It may not be much but that’s how we see it….. it’s a Phillipsology!

 

Hey out there.

This week has marked the beginning of the end of the year celebrations for my K4 class and man, am I beat! I’m really thankful for days off to recharge because I think I would be a little burnt out if I didn’t have a time to recharge. I can say that, thanks to my amazing husband who works very, very hard to make sure I can stay home even a few days while we don’t have little people of our own. I told him I think I actually work more now I’m at home some than when I worked 40+ hour weeks.

So if the posts are a little erratic, just bare with me and I’ll try to keep them brief and simple. Isn’t that an oxymoron in this day and age?

So here’s what I got this week:

Baby Spinach

Fuji Apples

Bananas

Organic Milk

Red Wheat Puffed Cereal

Spent this week:  $23.45

Spent this month: $64.99

Spent so far: $167.91

No pic of the receipt this week because I got a few things out of the norm to start on some projects and they were not included in the weekly budget, but don’t worry I used my blow money on them!

Menu Plan

Tu – Turkey Bow Tie Skillet (I have a TON of turkey left over from the roast Turkey I made last week so you will see mostly turkey foods this week)

W- Leftovers

Th- Turkey, spinach salad, garlic herb whole wheat bread (yep, I made the bread woop, woop!), couscous

F- Potato Soup, spinach salad, fruit salad or parfait (mmm…..mangoes, oranges, raspberries)

Sa- Out of town — Dreamland BBQ in Tuscaloosa (yep it’s the original one. Can I live in Alabama and not have eaten there?….it’ like a southern sin)

Su- Pinto Beans & Corn Bread

M- Turkey Green Salad, Bread

Side Note Adventures:

1. Yummy, yummy B-R-E-A-D

 

For some, bread is like a ‘no, no’ food but in the Phillips house we welcome it in moderation. We actually have a hard time meeting out daily grains quota anyway so I thought I would set out to try and make my own bread. I know mine has to be better and less expensive than what I see in the stores. But…..I’ll be completely honest, bread has really intimidated this little traditional cook. Something about it just seems like I could mess it up way too easily and waste a lot of money in the process. Enter, fantastic book! For my birthday my mom got me a book I read about on a blog. It’s called Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg, M.D., & Zoe Francois.

 

OK, her French name, Francois was my first sell that maybe she knew something worth reading. So I got the ingredients I would need (plastic canister from Wal-Mart, a pizza peel from Target, and bread ingredients from Whole Foods) and started my little adventure. I know there are grandmas rolling in their graves that I would even call bread making an adventure but I was born and raised in the city and we just didn’t make our own bread. Both my parents worked, even though I had an amazingly fantastic childhood, they simply did not have the time. So I’m really o

ut of my element on this one.

But can you believe…. I….. made…… bread! It was so easy! Next time I think I will let it rest a tad longer because Mr. Phillips likes it light and springy and mine turned out more ‘whole wheaty’ as he put it. But I flipping made home made, from scratch bread! OK, grandmas you may return to your resting positions in your graves. So if you are interested, go out and get this book. I 100% recommend it.  Yesterday I make the master recipe loaf and today I am making sandwich bread, and an herb loaf. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be able to write this! I really am pretty proud of myself, can you tell?

2. Don’t Knock it ’till you Stock it 

Yes, that was cheesy. I know am pretty cheesy at times. What in the world am I talking about? One simple word that makes my soup loving heart flutter…. STOCK. I love making my own stock. I was inspired to do it through The Cheapskate Cook and Simple Bites. Two blogs I read pretty regularly. I love both of them for different reasons and they have been the main inspiration of my traditional cooking methods over the past few years.

Vegetable Stock How-To

So anytime I use vegetables while cooking I take the things that would normally be thrown away and put them in a bag in the fridge. That way, every coupe of weeks I have fantastic ingredients for vegetable stock. I also do this for vegetables that are about to go bad but I don’t want to waste. The other stocks like chicken and turkey you can read about at the blogs listed above. Once I have let the stock boil and then simmer for about an hour I use my mesh strainer and get all the soggy veggies out and throw them away (maybe one day I can add them to a compost pile, but for now this is what I do). I let the stock cool completely and then spray muffin pans with vegetable oil and pour the stock in them. I then freeze the stock. Once they are frozen I pop them out of the muffin pans (sometimes with a knife because they like their little muffin pan home too much) and put them in a freezer bag and they are the perfect portion for my soups and other recipes I might need them for. There is nothing more frustrating for me than when I have a hug bag of stock and have to chip pieces off it. No thanks. So when its done, I have really, really yummy stock that I made and I feel like I made the most of the vegetables I bought as well. I also like that I know exactly what went in the stock. Some of the store stocks have pretty…um…interesting ingredients in them.

So those are my little rants and projects for this week. What are you working on?

I’m trying to be the best keeper of the home I can be, so that’s just how I see it….. It’s a Phillipsology!

 

Hello wonderful blog world. This week I was very happy to find super yummy fruit by the droves at the supermarket. This time of year is proving wonderful for finding tropical fruits. They are so yummy that I just had to stock up. I have heard food prices are on the rise so I thought this was a good time. I’ve read it all over the blog sphere so I bought for two weeks, sort of, and have just a little left over for items I might run out of.

So here is what I got this week:
Orange Juice
Organic Milk
Applesauce
Bananas
Oranges
Raspberries
Green Beans
Radishes
Plums
Nectarines
Mangos

Spent this week: $31.70
Spent this month: $41.54
Spent so far: $144.46

Menu Plan
Tu – Jambalaya
W – Chicken Sausage Soup (previously made and frozen)
Th – Dinner out (provided by my work during a meeting)
F – Roast Turkey, green beans, couscous
Sa – Steak, baked potato, broccoli
Su – Egyptian Lentil Soup
M – Leftovers

 

I do realize that all I have on the menu really doesn’t reflect what I bought. I really have so much left over from the past few weeks so all and all it has been a good month if I can keep it up for the rest of the month. A special thanks to everyone who reads. It really helps keep me accountable if I know there’s someone out there who cares. God is teaching me a lot and I want to hear the words ‘well done good and faithful servant’ rather than ‘you squandered all I gave you.’ Pretty stout motivation for me. So thanks for reading and the encouragement.

I have a few separate notes so here they go:

1. Bread and Fish

We have an amazing friend who God told to bring us fish and bread this week. I’m not sure yet what it all means. Maybe He wanted her to be obedient. Maybe something is coming soon and we’ll need it. Maybe He is showing me that He will provide for us like He did for the 2000 people with the loaves and the fishes so many years ago. I’m not sure it is for me to know yet but I will continue to pray and ask God what His lesson for me is. Until I have an answer from Him, I will keep doing my best to be a good keeper of what money He has entrusts to us.

2. S is for Strawberry

I grew my first ever strawberry this week! I have a teeny tiny little container for strawberries I bought this year and I might just add to them if they produce a decent crop.

 

 

 

3. Yogurt Ya’ll

I made homemade yogurt in the crockpot today! Yay! I used organic 2% milk and if you want to make some too check it out HERE. This was my second time making it and I used it in the place of a lot of dairy like sour cream and in homemade salad dressing. Oh!  have a lot to share today so bare with me. Here’s a link to some AMAZING frugal and homemade things to make such as condiments, dressings and syrups. The post is about making homemade substitutes for grocery staples. It’s a website I really like a lot called Simple Bites.

That’s all and that’s just how I see it… It’s a Phillipsology.

Hello all. Well March came and went and was a great month. It has been so nice to enjoy the great weather when we have had it. It has been a bit rainy as of late but to have the weather we did earlier in the month I suppose we can’t complain. This month seemed like it flew by with all the fun activities we had go on. It was a great month though and D and I are very thankful for all we got to do because of hard work ourselves or great friends/family.

So here are some highlights from the month:
Spring Break
Big Ole 26
Mom and Dad Visited
The Beach

Spring Break

Spring Break came and went in a moment is termed like. I am so thankful for the time off from work even though I really missed my little people by the end of it. I just can’t go for too long without them. The best parts about Spring Break are the rest of the things listed above so I’ll spell them out for ya.

Big Ole 26

D and I celebrated my 26th birthday. It was one of the best birthdays I have had. D just showered me with lots of love! He took me to Starbucks (can I say yum!), and to Zaxby’s(fav lunch place when I want to be bad;0), to the Botanical Gardens, and then appropriately to dinner at a restaurant called 26. We had such a great day and he made me feel so special and loved. To me, it is the best when someone shows how they know you on your birthday by doing those type of things and their thoughtfulness. I was really impressed by all the little things D pays attention to about me. I know for me it’s pretty easy to love on him with this sort of thing but I look for those kind of things. I don’t think it comes so naturally for him. That is a testament to how great of a man he is. Ok, ok, your about to hurl, I know. Oh! And his gift to me as if the other wasn’t enough was a 2 hour spa session. 1 hour facial, 1 hour massage. Well done husband, well done.

Mom and Dad Visited

 

This was such a great part of the month. I am very close to my parents so a visit from them is super special for us. My mom’s birthdays 5 days after mine so we celebrated in style. We went to Flemmings Steak House! I’m not sure if you are familiar, but they might have some of the best steak I have ever tasted. Pretty much everything on their menu is superb. It was a great night to celebrate 2 birthdays and enjoy family. We also went to the Botanical Gardens, which is just bursting with color this time of year. It’s so pretty and the Asian Garden are is one of my favorites so I wanted mom and dad to be able to enjoy it. I love how they are able to appreciate places like this that are breathtakingly beautiful but you don’t have to spend money to enjoy them. They know the best things in life – God made. We just had a really good time and I think my parents drank their weight in coffee. Ahhh the little joys in life. Haha.

The Beach

 

After mom and dad headed back to Tennessee (insert tear), D and I had plans to spend a few days at the beach in our state. We were given, yes, you read that right, given a few nights at a hotel/condo at the beach. These friends live in the area where the hotel is so they really didn’t need a beach stay when they live 10 minutes from there. We had a BLAST. We were able to relax and eat our weight in amazing seafood. There is just nothing like good seafood at the beach. I have very fond memories with my family of going to beach at least once every year growing up so there’s something magical about going to the beach now that I’m older , you know, like 26. Smile. We had time to sit on the beach in our beach chairs and just rest. D has been working a lot lately and he really needed this time more than I did but I sure did enjoy being there with him. We could have done without the sunburns but it’s a part of our little epidermises not seeing the light of day until we bake them in perfect 75 degree weather for 4 hours. I turned pretty quickly but poor Mr. Phillips just got redder and redder. The name lobster comes to mind. He is all better now, though peeling, so we will take it a little easier on the sun when we can get it again. I’m afraid it will be a while though.

That’s about all we got into this month. I think April will be a lot less go here, go there other than Easter so stay tuned next month.

It may not be much but that’s how we see it…. It’s a Phillipsology.