I think it will involve lots of leftovers for my husband and some really simple items at home during the day for me.  Complex flavors are just not doing it for me.

The tricky part is my son.  He’s at a stage where he wants to eat exactly what I’m eating.  How do I convince a sixteen month old to eat his fruit and vegetables when I’m sitting down with saltines and ginger ale?  I guess I have to start waiting until nap time to eat.

Well, I’m going to go lay down and think on this.  Hopefully, I’ll have a plan by the weekend.

I’ve roasted large sweet peppers before but never small spicy peppers.  The process was exactly the same.  I placed the peppers under the broiler until they started to char.  Then placed the hot peppers in a paper bag for twenty minutes.  This made the skin of the pepper easy to slide off.

Once they were skinned, I sliced them in half and removed the seeds.  Then it was just a matter of chopping them all up.  The finished product was quite small and I found myself wondering if it would really lend anything to the bread.

I mixed up my wet and dry ingredients.  When I was folding the batter to combine them, I added the chopped peppers halfway through.

Then it was just a matter of pouring the batter into a buttered baking dish.  The recipe called for a metal pan but my kitchen arsenal does not include a pan of that size.  Oh well.

When I took the cornbread out of the oven, it seemed relatively normal.  You could barely see the peppers.  But the taste?  Mildly spicy if you had a bite with no direct piece of pepper.  With the pepper, oh boy, there was a kick.  It caught my husband off guard.

It was light and fluffy and packed a punch.  We didn’t even put any butter on it.  I picked out the pieces of pepper and my fifteen month old enjoyed it, too.  We even had some left over to go with lunch the next day.

It was something different that’s for sure.  Given that I love both spicy food and bread, I enjoyed this opportunity to combine both and use up some of my peppers.  Now I can’t wait to try out the Southern Cornbread which is supposed to be much denser and richer, which is what I think of when I think cornbread.

I’m pregnant with baby #2!  My chubster is going to be a big brother.  It’s still early, I’m still in my first trimester.  I just couldn’t wait to share the news with everyone.

I’ve been diligently saving my firstborn’s baby items.  I have clothes and blankets washed, folded and sorted by size in plastic bins in the basement.  The swing and bassinet are disassembled and stored safely away.

The only thing that needs to be replaced is the infant car seat/carrier.  Ours was a hand-me-down and by the time my son outgrew it, there were beginning to be signs of stress in the plastic.  Since we’ll only need to purchase this one item for our new baby, I’m looking forward to shopping for it.  Maybe I can find a great deal.

I must admit, I’m a little bit nervous about what this first trimester will mean for my frugal endeavors.  Last time, I had round-the-clock nausea that caused me to lose eight pounds.  I had strange food aversions that changed minute by minute.  In my fourth month of pregnancy, the doctor finally put me on medication to ease my suffering.  I hope that this time around, I’m a bit less useless.

At least I know that this baby will be born into a debt-free household.  And if I find that the only thing that sounds appealing is a cheeseburger and a big bag of pluots & gummi bears, we can make room in the budget.

No matter how it goes, something tells me that life is about to get just a little bit crazier.

1. Cancel cable.
2. Set a budget.
3. Stop drinking bottled water.
4. Learn to change motor oil at home.
5. Clean with reusable cotton rags.
6. Make my own household cleansers.
7. Join a CSA.
8. Purchase split quarter of beef.
9. Switch to a bank with a higher interest rate.
10. Purchased used clothing.
11. Use a hand-me-down high chair.
12. Grow food in the backyard.
13. Program the thermostat.
14. Sell off losing investments.
15. Mend broken clothing.
16. Pump gas in the morning.
17. Pay insurance premiums annually.
18. Negotiate a lower internet bill.
19. Utilize the employee stock purchase program.
20. Make my own baby wipes.
21. Use cloth diapers.
22. Water down store-bought detergents.
23. Clip and print coupons.
24. Use the debt snowball.
25. Switch to free computer virus protection.
26. Track every penny spent.
27. Spend less than we earn.
28. Switch to CFL bulbs.
29. Keep car tires properly inflated.
30. Borrow books from the library.
31. Sell off old collectibles.
32. Participate in Food Waste Fridays.
33. Fill the gas tank at Costco.
34. Reduce the household trash output.
35. Apply every spare penny toward debt.
36. Purchase pet’s flea medicine in bulk.
37. Cancel Netflix.
38. Cancel gym subscription.
39. Make handmade gifts.
40. Drive used vehicles.
41. Make yogurt from scratch.
42. Implement the one-in one-out rule.
43. Bake bread from scratch.
44. Purchase non-perishables in bulk.
45. Tackle household repairs by hand.

Some of these things honestly did mean rather small savings.  Yet, combined they really added to our momentum.

Now that we’ve paid off our consumer debt, I’m hoping that we can keep our nose to the grindstone and start getting rid of our mortgage debt, too.  Hopefully, I’ll keep learning new and interesting ways to save money and keep sharing them along the way.

Remember that spicy cornbread I kept mentioning?  Well, I went to make it earlier this week.  I was reading through Baking Illustrated and they mentioned that cornmeal can spoil rather quickly.  Not good, considering I could not for the life of me remember how old my cornmeal was.

I poured some into the sink and examined it.  It seemed fine.  So I started measuring out ingredients.  I poured a cup of cornmeal into my mixing bowl and… ick!  There was a meal worm in my mixing bowl.  Gross!

So the whole box of cornmeal went into the garbage.  I suppose I could’ve looked into composting it, but it didn’t cross my mind at that point.  Unfortunately, I also wasted the flour that I had already poured into the mixing bowl and the two tablespoons of butter I had melted for use in the recipe.

Oh well, lesson learned.  I have to start keeping a better eye on my pantry as well!

Apologies for the sloppy pile, my son and I were both starving when I brought these home.  In fact, I think leftovers were in the microwave as I frantically snapped a shot and stored these away.

Anyway, this week we have red leaf lettuce, red beets, cauliflower, carrots, parsley, summer squash, padron peppers, tomatoes and strawberries.  I was relieved to read that padron peppers are actually sweet, not spicy.  It seems rather convenient to have these small, seedless sweet peppers.

I have a couple of challenges this week.  Not only to use up all my veggies, but to start plowing through my freezer too.  My deep freeze is mostly empty in anticipation of the split quarter of beef I will soon be receiving.  The refrigerator freezer is another story.  It’s the kind of full where if you open it, things fall out.  Not good.

I’m hoping to use up some bread, fish, chicken and tomato puree from the freezer this week.

Thursday: Beans with Pesto Bulgur.  Side of roasted beet slices in mustard cream sauce.

Saturday: Pork and Veggie BBQ Skewers. Uses padron peppers & summer squash (plus store-bought onions, mushrooms and pineapple).

Sunday: Marinated Swordfish.  Side of steamed cauliflower and quinoa.

Monday: French Bread Pizza.  Side of buttered beet greens

Tue & Wed: Spicy Chicken Rice Bake.  Makes great leftovers because the rice & veggies taste better the second day.

Hopefully I can work some baking into the week as well.  I’m purchasing some buttermilk just so I have to motivation to use it up.  Maybe I’ll finally get to make that spicy corn bread that I was supposed to bake last week.  My red peppers are begging to be used.

When we purchased our home, we put 5% down and took out two loans.  A first mortgage for 80% of the home price and our second mortgage was for the remaining 15%.  It probably wasn’t the smartest idea to purchase a home with so little down, but we were young.  Truth be told, our home was an impulse buy.

It doesn’t feel real yet.  When we first sat down and took an honest look at our debt load, it seemed like we had an impossible task ahead of us.  How could we possibly pay off this $108,000 worth of debt?

It took a ton of work.  We had to set a budget that balanced down to zero.  We had to mercilessly cut expenses.  And we had to apply every spare penny toward our debt.

We’re now down to just one mortgage, but the work doesn’t end here.  Our house is still under water by about $80,000.  Fortunately, between paying off the second mortgage and signing away the rental, we’ve freed up an extra $1150 per month.  We’re going to go the debt snowball route and use this money to pay down the first mortgage.

I’m going to let this sink in for a few days.  I’ll try to acclimate to the feeling of only owing on a single mortgage.  When we first sat down to figure out our budget, we were in the red, spending more than we were earning.  Now we are saving nearly 50% of our household’s net earnings.

I thought that paying off all of our debt would make me ecstatic with glee, but truth be told this feels more like relief.  It’s as though I’ve been holding my breath for the past year and a half and now I finally have the chance to breathe.  Exhale.  Wow, that feels good.

My husband and his brother decided to purchase the house from their aunts.  Their mom, my mother-in-law, would keep her share of the house invested, which essentially acted as a down payment for the home.  With their mother as a cosigner, they purchased the home and kept it in the family.

His brother moved in and rented out the spare bedrooms to friends.  My husband made a $450 payment each month and essentially, the house became a rental to him.  It’s not an arrangement that would work for all families, but for this close-knit group it went off without a hitch.

Fast forward five years and much has changed.  My husband and I bought a home, got married, had a baby [in that exact order].  He became the sole wage earner for our family.  When we started our financial turnaround, we ruthlessly cut expenses.  But the rental, we treated with care.

We knew we needed that $450 each month.  We knew we needed a good relationship with his brother even more. We couldn’t ask him to sell.  That house was his home, after all.  One night I asked my husband… What if we just gave it to him?

The relief we felt at this prospect let us know we had found the perfect solution.  My husband would sign over his interest in the house to his brother.  We would gain that money in our budget each month.  His brother would take over the full payment, but get to keep what had been contributed to the house thus far.  Everybody wins.

This month, my husband signs the papers and his brother takes over ownership of the home.  I like to think that it would make Armando happy, to see his eldest grandson settling down in his home.

As for us, we couldn’t be more thrilled.  We came away with both family and budget intact.  It’s that much more we can sock away each month to try and get our own mortgage out from underwater.

Truth be told, it only needed to sit for two weeks.  I stuck it in the very back of my bottom corner cabinet and forgot about it.  But hey, that just means that it’s now extra minty, right?

I strained the mint leaves out and poured my lovely pale green vinegar into these little bottles I had in my cabinet.  Last year, I made a big batch of homemade kahlua, bottled it up and gave them out as Christmas presents.  I had ordered these bottles to package them and ended up ordering two too many.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand.  When I bottled up my vinegar, I was pleased to find that it actually smelled of mint!  I served this vinegar with olive oil and a splash of balsamic over a salad of butter lettuce.  It tasted really light & fresh.  I’m excited to try making a vinaigrette with it.

This tasty treat was super cheap to make.  A gallon of vinegar costs $1.50, so the two cups I used cost a mere nineteen cents.  The cup of mint was leftover from fixing cucumber raita for dinner last night and otherwise would’ve ended up in the compost.

The nifty thing is that you can try this with all sorts of herbs, whatever you have lying around.  I look forward to trying this herbal infusion again next time I have some extra basil lying around.

I need to start working through my freezer stash as I’ve got lots of goodies and no room in there.   Next week, I need to make sure to work in some fish recipes and a french bread pizza.  And maybe use up a bag of my frozen raspberries making some sort of baked treat.  We’ll see.

Anyway, I know I’ve been rather absent this week, but I’ll be back next week with lots of good news and victories to share.  Hope everyone has a fantastic weekend!