Invent A Snack! Organic Living Challenge

April 28, 2011 By 14 Comments

Challenge: Invent a Snack!

This week’s challenge is to invent a snack using organic ingredients! I will be participating in some fun challenges over the next 3 weeks, and I hope that you guys will join me! Plus, there will be a fun giveaway to go along with these challenges!  (I will post today about the giveaway.)

Snacks are usually eaten in a hurry and when you are quite hungry, so I try to keep snacks stocked up for my kids. I don’t keep any processed, ready-made snacks in my house, so I am always coming up with new ideas for healthy snacks for my kids. Today, I am going to share a list of healthy go to snacks that I have for my kids, and the rest of the week I will share some healthy foods and recipes that all of my children enjoy!

Making Snacks Appealing:

I want my kids to want to eat their healthy foods. One of the best ways I have found to get my kids to eat their fruits, veggies, and nuts is presenting them in a fun manner.

I use muffin tins, and fill each cup with different healthy foods. The rule is, all of the food has to be eaten in the muffin tins before they are refilled. Since, these muffin tins are colorful, and have bite size snacks in them that my kids can get anytime without asking, they are a big hit!

Here is a list of different items I put in the tins, and yes my kids love all of it! They usually head for the nuts first, but the fun looking veggies get eaten as quickly as the sweet fruit. This is the one way that I have been able to get my kids to eat just about anything.

  1. raw nuts (almonds, walnuts, pecans, etc.)
  2. broccoli
  3. cauliflower
  4. berries (blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, etc.)
  5. apple slices
  6. pear slices
  7. melon balls
  8. carrots
  9. sweet potato sticks (A family favorite. I just peel them and cut them in French fry shapes and they eat them raw. They are really good!)
  10. peas
  11. celery
  12. cucumber
  13. cheese cubes
  14. pear slices
  15. grape and cherry tomatoes
  16. spinach leaves

Basically I just take whatever is fresh out of the garden, cut it up and add it to the muffin tins. To save time, I pre-chop the fruits and veggies and place them in plastic bags. This way I can quickly refill the tins when they empty.

Healthy child has some great tips to help you save money and learn more about organic living:

This blog post is part of the Easy Organic Living program co-hosted by Baby Center and Healthy Child Healthy World and sponsored by Stonyfield.

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Rice Noodles With Chicken and Vegetables Recipe

February 14, 2011 By 8 Comments

I made this the other night night & it was SO good! We actually ate all of it. It made up about 12 quarts and is only about 1200 calories for the entire pot.

1 bag bean sprouts
1 yellow onion chopped
2 large carrots chopped
1/2 cabbage chopped
6 cloves garlic
2 cans of chicken or 3-4 breasts of chicken
1 pound rice noodles – cooked
3 eggs – scrambled
cilantro to sprinkle on top to taste
3 T oyster sauce
3 T soy sauce
1.5  t brown sugar
3 T coconut oil

Saute onions and carrots until onions are lightly caramelized in the coconut oil. Add the garlic, bean sprouts and cooked chicken and saute for a couple of minutes. Add the rest of the ingredients other than the cilantro and mix well. Top with cilantro. We served the adult portions with thai chili sauce. It was such a quick and easy meal, but SO good. (-: My family actually begged me to make it again the next night. I hope you enjoy it!

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Budget Saving The Natural Way

January 1, 2011 By 4 Comments

Well, in honor of the new year, I am planning on revamping Budget Saving Mom a little, and adding a lot more posts about how to eat and live a healthy and organic lifestyle. For the past couple of years, I have slowly been making changes to our lifestyle so that we are able to eat and be a lot healthier.

I had wanted to begin a healthier lifestyle for years, but it always seemed so overwhelming. After some health issues in our family, I decided that it was definitely time to change our lifestyle. I didn’t want to give up our favorite things, so I just found ways to make small changes to our favorite foods to make them healthier.

I knew that these changes needed to be life long, so I decided to slowly implement the changes in the order that they made the most sense for our family. I wanted to make sure that the changes that I made were not overwhelming. I knew that eventually I wanted to make everything from scratch. I wanted to make my own cleaners, deodorant, soap and eat as organically as possible. I also knew that there was no way that I could implement all of those changes at once.

When my friends see the changes that we have made, they are always interested and asking tons of questions. Everyone wants to live a healthier lifestyle, but it can seem so overwhelming. I am going to be explaining the changes that we made in the order that we made them. Everyone’s family is different. We all have different opinions about what is best for our family, but hopefully you will be able to glean some helpful tips to use for your family!

Starting Monday, I am going to start talking about bread. This seemed like the easiest change to make to our lifestyle, so it was the first change I implemented. I decided that I would start grinding all of my wheat and making all of our bread. I will talk about why we made this change, the easiest way to make bread and the most affordable way to make this change.

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How To Grow Pumpkin

May 25, 2010 By 13 Comments

How To Grow Pumpkin

Pumpkin are harvested in the fall. However, you plant the seeds once the temperature is consistently reaching 70 degrees during the day. They are similar to winter squash and will cross pollinate with them. Pumpkin takes up lots of room. We don’t grow these in our garden, but out back because the plants are so huge. However, I love pumpkin, so we are planning on planting quite a few this year. (500 feet!) I LOVE making pumpkin bread with fresh pumpkin. It makes me never want pumpkin bread with canned pumpkin again.

If you have no option but to plant them near your winter squash, it will not affect this years crop, but you won’t be able to keep your seeds and have pumpkins the next year.

Plant your seeds in hills. It helps to soak your seeds the night before they are planted. You can have about 4 plants per hill. The hills need to be about 10 feet apart. We eat the pumpkin and the pumpkin seeds. Pumpkin seeds can be delicious when baked with butter, brown sugar and cinnamon. We mainly grow it for the flesh of the pumpkin, so a good cooking pumpkin is the variety that we will grow.

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Saving Your Seeds – A Huge Budget Saver

May 13, 2010 By 26 Comments
Saving Your Seeds

Saving Your Seeds

I have written about how important the seeds that you buy are. We only buy open pollinating seeds. These are the two companies that we have bought from in the past:

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds – Here’s what their site says: We only offer open-pollinated seeds: pure, natural and non-GMO! We offer heirloom seeds from 70 countries, including many that we collected ourselves.

Seeds Of Change - They offer over 1200 different organic seeds to choose from

The reason that we buy from these companies is that we are able to save our seeds. This means that we can purchase seeds only one time. These seeds are more expensive than seeds that you buy at local stores.  However, it is a one time purchase, after that, we are able to produce our own seeds. This is a huge savings for us. We continue to add different plants each year, and so our variety of plants has grown. We are now able to grow our garden FREE each year.

How To Save Your Seeds:

Saving your seeds is really, really simple! Anyone can do it.

1. Pick your very ripe and mature produce that is open-pollinating. You only want to save mature seeds. For instance, make sure that the watermelon seeds that you save are black.
2. Remove the seeds from the fruit or vegetable.
3. Spread the seeds out onto paper towels. If there is plant matter on the seeds, try to remove it. Make sure that none of your seeds are touching each other.
4. Label your paper towel with what types of seeds you have.
5. Leave the seeds out on your counter to dry for several days. You want to make sure that they are completely dry. Your squash seeds will probably stick to the paper towel. Just scrape them off, and they are fine to use.
6. Store your seeds for the next year. Your seeds need to be in a dry, cool, dark location. We typically put the seeds into baby food jars or ziploc bags and store them in the freezer to hold until the next year.

Alternate Method to Save Pea and Bean Seeds:

Peas and beans are also really easy to save. We typically select a few pea and bean plants in our garden that will never be picked. We allow the plant to produce peas and beans and dry on the vine. Once the seeds have completely dried on the plant, we pull them off to save them for the next year. To ensure that they are dry enough, you can still leave them out for a day as shown above. Peas and beans can just get mixed together, and it has been helpful for us to bring these in in large quantities.

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