Today in Review

Breakfast: Eggs with a homemade cheese sauce (now that we have cheese!) and a pound of that really good bacon from our processor.

Lunch: Tomato soup with fresh, homemade bread. I turned one of those ginormous cans of crushed tomatoes into potential tomato soup, pizza sauce, or meatless spaghetti sauce. I added sauteed onions, fresh garlic, dried oregano and basil, and salt and pepper and then immersion-blended it all together We ate some (with added milk and cheese, of course), and I froze the rest in 3 quart-sized freezer bags.

Dinner: Dirty rice with homemade bread. I tried to get rid of the rest of last week's loaf, but no one would eat it when there was fresh bread around! So, it also went in the freezer. It'll either get turned into bread crumbs or croutons, or it will be thrown out in a couple of years... Anyway! I made a very large batch of dirty rice, so what we didn't eat at dinner (which was quite a bit, since there were only 4 of us here) went into a crock pot for Sunday!

I also made a batch of chocolate chip cookies today. The Aldi's chocolate chips are decent, not great, but tolerable, but I don't care for the chocolate chip cookie recipe on the back of the bag. (My foodie side is showing itself again.)

Daddy made a Costco run for me today! He got 14 items for $107.62, and now we're ready to celebrate a few birthdays this weekend. ... Hopefully.

The balance I'm left with this payment period is now, I believe, $34.21. Well, at least we're positive, and hopefully in a couple of months this will be built up to more. I know that tomorrow we've got to pick up our beef (roughly $200 + whatever, if any, bacon we get from the same place), and sometime in the next week or so I think we've also got a chicken stock-up. Each of those will cut significantly into next month's grocery money, but after that we shouldn't have to buy meat for a while! It'll sure be nice to have a full freezer again!