Freezing Peppers and Other Fun Stuff

My cats have woke me up at 4 am. Not my best time of day. My schedule lately has been very hectic. I'm now working in St. Louis 4 days a week and while I'm there I just stay with my older son Sean to save gas and wear and tear on my car. Today is the day I drive down there and I'm going to be very tired. It's five now and there is no going back to sleep.

Last weekend the small farmers market here was selling homegrown green peppers by the peck (yes, I know all about Peter Piper). They were small and misshapen but $1.99 for a peck of peppers is an awesome price. Of course that meant I spent some time chopping up and freezing peppers.

Peppers need very little preparation to freeze. All you need to do is chop them up, spread them out on a cookie sheet and freeze. After they're frozen you just package them up.

I got a lot of banana peppers from my little patio garden but for some reason my green peppers never got any bigger than a quarter. I used up all the banana peppers as i picked them so I didn't have any to freeze.

I got mixed results from my other plants, too. The cherry tomato plant produced tons of delicious little tomatoes. I ate most of them right off the plant. We had fresh herbs all summer, my son Ryan has been making homemade spaghetti sauce with them. I only got a couple cucumbers and no zucchini this year. The zucchini plant produced lots of little tiny finger sized fruits but they rotted on the plant. I have no idea what was going on. Were about due for our first freeze so I've already started cleaning out the garden and getting ready or winter. These last couple years I've learned a lot with my little garden and maybe next year willbe even better.

Good Grief!!! It's After Labor Day

   I just realized how long it's been since I posted anything on this blog.I had pictures taken of my son's college graduation and of our Memorial Day picnic. But I never got around to posting them. Then my camera mysteriously disappeared from my car and reappeared two weeks later. It hasn't worked right since.  I miss it terribly, my cell phone just doesn't take pictures that good.

    It's been a very long, hot summer here in Missouri. The Graduate hasn't been able to find a job and has moved back in with mom (me). Hours are down at work, too, so I decided it was time to do something I've been thinking about doing for a long time.  I've opened a shop on Etsy to sell my extra craft supplies. I've always done my crafting for charity and I don't want to change that, but with The Graduate moving in, I just don't have the space to store it anyway.

Somehow he managed to shove most of what I had in my craft room (now his bedroom)  into MY closet and the rest of it is scattered around the apartment. It's going to be awhile before I find everything I want to sell.

I'm also continuing to go to yard sales, thrift shops and auctions to find yet more stuff so let me know what kind of craft supplies you are looking for and I'll keep an eye out!!

You can visit my Etsy shop here and see what I have so far.

I'm a Tattooed Lady and I Let the Grandkids Get Them Too

Ok, so they're only temporary but there was a Blessing of the Bikes on Main St in Troy today and there was a booth doing temporary tattoos. So we all got one (or two in the case of the kids).

Timmy looks so tough here, doesn't he? Awesome tattoo!!

Tyler wanted a big one so he got his on his back.

My turn, it can't show while I'm working so I had to get it on my upper arm.

Awesome, ain't I! So daring!!

And then Tyler decided he needed one where he could see it. So he went for a badger on his arm. It was a great morning with the grands and my son-in-law who opted not to get a tattoo. It's bad enough he has one on his arm with initials on it that are NOT my daughters.

The Horrible Orange Trench Coat

As many of you know I do a lot of crafting for various charities. Friday I stopped at a local nursing home and asked what they needed. One of the things she mentioned was activity aprons for their dementia patients. These are aprons with various things to fiddle with like buttons, zippers, laces and anything else that might keep their hands busy

I went out shopping for supplies for them Saturday. Found some just right zippers (short with a large pull), some fringe, lace and denim for the apron itself at a craft supply resale shop. Then I stopped at a regular resale shop and found a bead garland with lots of kitty cat wooden beads for only a dollar. Also stopped at a yard sale and found this horrible orange trenchcoat but the big orange buttons will be perfect and I only paid 10¢ for it! I'm having fun just doing the shopping, can't wait to start working on them.

If your local (or wouldn't mind shipping them) and have anything I might be able to use for these I would appreciate any donations. If you do any crafts see the list on Deb's Crafts of things the nursing home and hospice need.

I'm off to St Louis for a couple days again. It's a lot of back and forth for my job but I don't mind too much most of the time. I've made a lot of friends down there and this gives me a chance to visit. Hope you all have a good day.

My New Monitor Ornament

This is Beast (OK, I know, I didn't name him). He's a big cat and every time he gets up there I'm afraid he's going to knock it over. I usually call him Big Boy but since he was 10 years old when I inherited him last year and had gone by Beast that whole time I can't exactly change his name now. My other two cats have finally accepted him sharing their home but still haven't made friends which results in an occasional hissy fight in the middle of the night that wakes me up.

I have made a decision about my food contest blog. I am going to be shutting it down. It is too time consuming and has taken over way too much of my spare time. I've hardly had any time to work on my other blogs, do my charity crafting or even clip coupons. I wasn't even entering the contests, I was too obsessed with listing all of them. There's a lot of sites out there that list contests and mine wasn't getting any traffic. I am going to leave my craft related one up, I originally started it to keep track of the contests I entered trying to get more supplies for my charity crafting and I think I'll leave it at that.

Saturday is the last day to enter my Yoplait Yoplus Yogurt Gift Pack Giveaway. Please take a few minutes to enter.

I just entered a contest for the cookbook The $5 Mom Cookbook that looks awesome. The contest is sponsered by the Pssst... Network and General Mills who occasionally give me free samples and coupons. I think you need to be a member to enter so click the link and join if you wish. You can also order it through Amazon. It looks like a great book. It has 200 recipes for family dinners that cost under $5!

Today is Yo Yo Day

I didn't know that until this morning. In one of my online charity crafting groups that I just rejoined every 11th of the month is set aside for making Yo Yos, small crocheted circles. These are then joined together to make blankets to be sent to New York charities in honor of Sept. 11. So I made 11 of them this morning. If you want to learn more about charity crafting (and free crochet patterns) check out Deb's Crafts: Handicrafts for Charity for more information and to see some of the projects I've worked on.

I've been entering and blogging about lots of contests for groceries and craft items. Check out my contest blogs for all the listings.

The Sunday paper didn't have very many coupons I could use this morning so I only bought the one. When it has a lot I sometimes buy up to 6 papers. Our Krogers only accepts 3 like coupons so I try to keep it in multiples of three. I did go shopping yesterday and saved 48% off my order. Wasn't much on sale that I needed but it's still good to save what you can.

I'm a great believer in stocking up when things are on sale so I often stock up when a sale and a coupon makes something really cheap. I now have 5 loaves of Healthy Life 100% Whole Grain Bread in my daughters freezer ($1.39 on sale - 35¢ coupon doubled for an end price of 69¢ a loaf. This is of course not the only thing but it's just an example. How often do you find 100% whole grain bread for 69¢? I usually use a loaf of bread a week so this is 6 (counting the one I'm using now) weeks worth of bread. If you do this often enough you will eventually find that except for perishables you won't "need" anything.

Yard sales are starting around here so my Saturdays will be busier again. I've already seen a couple signs but wasn't able to stop. Next week I'll set aside some time for it.

Yoplait YoPlus Yogurt Gift Pack Review and Giveaway

We Have A Winner!!

The Random Number Generator chose #17 and the winner is Susan!!

MyBlogSpark and Yoplait gave me the opportunity to try new Yoplait Yoplus yogurt. This is from their information:

YoPlus now provides three important health benefits in each four-oz. cup:
Antioxidant vitamins A and E (now with 20% of your recommended daily value)
A blend of probiotic cultures & fiber (three grams of fiber per 4-ounce serving) for digestive health
Calcium and vitamin D for bone health
YoPlus is available in six delicious flavors including Strawberry, Vanilla, Cherry, Peach, Blackberry Pomegranate and Blueberry Acai.
If you are looking for all the great health benefits of YoPlus with even fewer calories, YoPlus Light is the perfect solution, with one third fewer calories than the original. YoPlus Light is available in three delicious flavors - Honey Vanilla, Strawberry Banana, and Key Lime - all with just 70 calories per cup.

I try to eat yogurt everyday so this was right up my alley. When I went to my local Kroger's they only had three of the six flavors. They didn't carry the light at all. They had my all time favorite, good old vanilla (I'm partial to vanilla ice cream too, ok so I'm boring) strawberry and blueberry pomagranate. Since they were on sale and I had a couple more coupons I bought all three.

Home for the taste test, now I couldn't eat three cups of yogurt all at once so I started with vanilla, yummy, creamy and good. The bluberry pomagranate was next and it's about to become my all time second favorite, I loved the tase, it was very, very good. The strawberry was also creamy and good just like yogurt should be. I will be definately be watching for sales and coupons for Yoplait Yoplus yogurt from now on. Why eat regular yogurt when you can get the extra fiber and other goodies in this yummy yogurt?

As well as the yogurt coupon I also received a gift pack that included an on-the-go lunch container with utensils, an insulated lunch bag, and a pedometer. Like I mentioned before I had a lot of fun with the pedometer, I actually walked four miles one day last week just doing my regular stuff.

Now for the good news! You can win the same prize pack I got! There are four easy ways to enter. Please leave a separate comment for each entry.



1. (mandatory before you do the others) Leave a comment about why you would like to try Yoplait Yoplus Yogurt.
2. Blog about this Giveaway!

3. Become a follower of this blog.

4. Become a follower of my Food Contest blog.


Contest will run until noon (Central Time) next Saturday April 17th.
Contest open to US residents only.
Disclaimer: Yoplait and MyBlogSpark.com provided me with the coupon and photo holder so that I could give my honest opinion of the product which I have done.