Here’s what I made – Make sure to add your recipes and food posts to the link-up at the bottom!

Flatbread (We had it with Broccoli soup – Yum!)
Adapted from Heather Homemade 

You have no idea how easy this was! I don’t know why I hadn’t tried this already. No yeast, to rising time, quick and simple. It is thin – almost like a cracker – and perfect for soups!

Ingredients:
1-3/4 cups flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 – 1/2 tsp. salt (You may want to use less if you’re adding sea salt to the top.)
1/2 cup water
1/3 cup olive oil
grated Parmesan
thyme (I used dried)
sea salt
garlic powder
honey (I totally forgot to add this, but it was still yummy!)

Preheat oven to 450F.

In a mixing bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder and salt. Add the water and oil, and gently stir with a wooden spoon. It’s going to look super-sticky, but don’t add any more flour. Knead the dough with the spoon until it all comes together in a ball.

Split the dough in half. On an ungreased pizza stone or cookie sheet (I tried them both), roll out one half of the dough into a very thin circle, about 1/8-inch thick.

Bake for 5 minutes. Remove from oven and sprinkle with grated cheese, herbs, salt or whatever your heart desires. Then, place the flatbread back in the oven and bake for another 3-6 minutes or until it starts to get golden and crispy. Remove from oven and cut into sections. Repeat with the other half of the dough.

Also participating in:

Week 3 Update: This past week I worked at cleaning up our food storage areas. You may remember from my DIY Labels post that I was already working on organized my hot drink area. Teas, coffee and hot chocolate used to be stored in the cabinet that also held my spices, but I move most of it out onto the counter to make the spice cabinet a little less crammed. This challenged helped me further clean up that space. I went through my spices, checking dates and throwing out what was expired. I also took my baking spices out of the cooking spices cupboard and put them with all my other baking supplies. This might have been a bad idea, but I did tell my husband where they would be so he shouldn’t be searching all over for the cinnamon.

Anything I threw out, I wrote on the store list so that it could be replaced. Unless, of course, the reason it was expired is that I don’t ever use it. The challenge post suggested that I make a pantry inventory list. I’m pretty sure that would not work in our house. I do have a store list hung on the inside of the pantry door, so when we’re running low or out of something, I’ll know to get it when I’m out getting groceries.

I also organized my baking cupboard. I had a lot of misc. little things like sprinkles, colorings, and cupcake papers that I put in a small plastic bin. I also have a couple plastic canisters that I use to keep similar items together, like chocolate chips.

Week 4: Organizing Refrigerator and Freezer

This is something I’ve been meaning to do, but for whatever reason, I keep putting it off. But, it’s this week’s challenge, so I will get it done!

The first part of this challenge is to declutter the outside of the refrigerator. Ours is fairly free of clutter, just a few pictures, but I do plan to take them all down and give the fridge a scrub. The rest of the challenge is pretty self-explanatory – take out the food, throw away anything old and gross, scrub, and put the good food back. The hard part will be actually doing it.

Here’s what I made – Make sure to add your recipes and food posts to the link-up at the bottom!

Smoothies

This was my first attempt at making healthy smoothies at home. I started with a good assortment of fruits to choose from, some fresh spinach and just went with it. I made two different batches.

(Batch 1)
2 handfuls baby spinach
1 banana, peeled and sliced
12 strawberries
2 handfuls blueberries
1 apple, peeled, cored and sliced
1 kiwi, peeled and sliced
1 cup water

(Batch 2)
10 strawberries
2 handfuls misc. berries
2 handfuls baby spinach
2 stalks celery
1 banana, peeled and sliced
1 cup water
1 apple, peeled, cored and sliced

I didn’t like this one as much. It didn’t taste terrible, but I didn’t like how much I could taste the celery. I did find that adding just one apple dramatically reduced the celery taste, so I think you could even it out.

I ended up putting some juice in mine when I was done to thin it out a little bit, but I didn’t want to water the taste down. Unfortunately the juice I had on hand was not 100% juice and had some sugar added, so it wasn’t quite as healthy.

I should also say that I used my blender. Nothing special about it. Using a food processor or a dedicated smoothie maker might have broken it down even more, but I was quite pleased with the results. And I didn’t have to buy another appliance!

Here are some other add-ins that I’ve come across:

Oatmeal – Blend it up and add some fiber
Yogurt – I’m actually going to try this when I make my freezer smoothies
Chia Seeds
Cocao Nibs – I actually haven’t tried these at all yet, but super healthy chocolate – yum!

I have plans to make up some bags with smoothie ingredients to go into the freezer. I’ll let you know how that goes next week.

Also participating in:

Last week’s challenge was cabinets and drawers. For me this was fairly easy because I’ve always liked to have my kitchen stuff in its place. We have a cabinet for dishes: plates and bowls, one for glasses, one for bakeware, one for pots and pans, etc. But we do have a cabinet for food storage that is always out of control and a misc. utensil drawer that’s also a little unruly. Last week I took care of both.

My main focus was things that we don’t need and things that belong somewhere else. I found quite a few camping utensils that were just adding to the clutter in that drawer. They are now with the rest of the camping gear – where they belong. In the food storage cabinet, I found a lot of broken pieces and lids without containers. They all went in the trash. I also made sure that the things that I use the least are on the top shelf and the things that I use the most are down where I can easily see them.

Now, on to week 3: Pantry, Spices and Food

Step 1 for this week is decluttering and getting rid of expired food items. I recommend checking the shelf life on stilltasty.com before throwing out any expired food. Most expiration dates are when to eat an item for optimum taste. However, many canned and commercially packages items are safe to eat well after that date as long as it has been kept from pests and other contamination. Spices should be replaced around the expiration date – they’ll lose their flavor and that is the reason you use them. But, it’s not an overnight thing. Food isn’t good until midnight of the expiration date and suddenly it goes bad. It’s a gradual breakdown of nutrition and taste.

So, my goal for this week is to organize my spices/tea, baking supplies, and pantry cupboards.

For labels to help you get organized, check out these!

Here’s what I made – Make sure to add your recipes and food posts to the link-up at the bottom!

Freezer Meals

My husband does a lot of the cooking because if we waited until I got home from work to make a meal, we’d be eating at 7 o’clock. The thing is, I like to cook. I really enjoy making meals for my husband. So, every once in a while, I spend a little bit of my Saturday cooking meals that can be frozen and heated later. This not only allows me to contribute to the cooking, but also allows us to have access to quick and easy meals that I can alter to add in healthier ingredients, and it allows me to divide meals up so that 1 recipe meant for a family makes a few meals for the two of us.

Here’s what I worked on last Saturday:

This is a crock pot meal, except for the sauce. So, I made a batch of the sauce and divided it into two containers so that it is a better size for us and froze it. Now, when make this meal, I really only need the crock pot.

With this one, I also made extra alfredo sauce and froze it as well.

I actually made these a couple nights ago. Very easy!

I also made:
Meatloaf (Beef)
Meatloaf (Turkey)
Lasagna

Here are a few tips for freezing meals:

• If you don’t want to buy foil containers, line your regular cookware with waxed paper. After you freeze the meal, remove it from the pan. That way you aren’t holding up your regular cookware/bakeware.
• Reuse. If your using foil containers or plastic bags, both can be washed. For plastic bags, you can also put them back into the freezer, empty until you need them again, if you plan to make the same meals.
• When freezing quantities of smaller things, like the mozzarella sticks, place them on a cookie sheet so they don’t touch and freeze them for few hours or overnight, then put them in bags. This way you wont have trouble getting them apart. This works great for berries too.
• Make double batches. You already have all the dishes dirty and all the ingredients out. Save yourself some time and make a bigger batch now.

I actually started working on this a couple weeks ago, but I think it might be helpful for those participating in 52 Weeks to an Organized Home. Now, I’m not saying that in order to organize your kitchen, you have to go out and buy some pretty glass containers. If you want to, great, but look around at what you have first. Do you have some cardboard boxes still laying around after Christmas? If they’re plain, just trim them down to size. If they have writing on them, cover them with scrapbook paper/wrapping paper/whatever you have. Do you have extra canning jars? Or maybe you’re already using plastic storage but need to label.

Here’s a tip if you are planning on buying containers: If you need quite a few and know that a store regularly stocks the item, buy them 1 or a few at a time, whenever you can rather than dump a ton of money on them at once. I did this for my tea jars. I have lots of tea, but didn’t want to buy a cart full of jars when I was also getting groceries, so I’ve been buying them two or three at a time and slowly cleaning out my tea cupboard.

Note: You can also take advantage of the current packaging. In the jar on the left I have the back panel of a box of tea so I can remember what the tea is good for.

Here’s the scoop: I’ve created a simple, but pretty label for you to download and print out. There are three different sizes on one sheet, or you can download a single label and make it whatever size you want. You can find sticky paper to print on, or just use regular paper and glue it on. (I went with a repositionable sticker sheet that I had left over from school because (1) I already had it and (2) I may want to change the contents sometime.) The labels are blank, so you can print them out and hand-write on them, or pull them into an editing program like Gimp (Free), Photoshop, etc. and add your own text. You can also change the black to a color if you want to, using either of those programs.

Click to open pdf and save:
Single Label or Label Sheet

This year, I’m also participating in the 52 Weeks to an Organized Home Challenge at Home Storage Solutions 101. Every Monday a new challenge will be posted to work on through the week. Since last week’s challenge and this week’s are both in the kitchen, I’m going to jump right in and do them both. I’ll post my plan on Mondays and update when I’ve made progress.

My reason’s for needing organization are two-fold. First, I know that my stress level increases when I walk in the door, when getting home from work, and things are everywhere. I like things to be neat and in their place. Second, my husband and I are planning to move into our new house in the fall of this year and I don’t want to drag along things that we wont use and don’t need. So, let’s get started.

Week 1: Kitchen Organization (Countertops & Sink)

This is something I have fairly organized anyway because I know what I like to have handy when I’m cooking (my flour, sugar, oats, etc. sit in jars on the counter), and things that don’t fit. Our kitchen has two outlets. One in behind the refrigerator, and the other behind the stove. That means all the counter space we do have doesn’t get cluttered with appliances, because there’s no point. I put a power strip behind the stove to plug in the microwave, which doesn’t move from it’s spot, because face it, who wants to lug that things around?, and the coffee pot, because it gets the most use. All the other appliances are left in cabinets and come out when they’re needed and get put away again.  So, in this respect our counters are fairly organized.

Now, the kitchen sink is another story. Both my husband and I love to cook (and bake!). That means that sometimes, we make a big mess. I load the dishwasher with whatever dirty dishes I have, before work and before bed and run it when it’s full, but it seems like there is always some kind of dirty dish in the sink or a dirty cast iron pan on the stove (they don’t go in the dishwasher). So, this is something I’ll be working on this week.

Another thing I’ll be working on is keeping clutter off our portable dishwasher. It’s the place when keys, receipts, sunglasses and pretty much anything in a pocket gets dropped. I’d like this place to be in our mudroom, since that’s really the first room you walk into anyway. So, I’ll be finding a way to incorporate that into my organization too.

Week 2: Kitchen Drawers and Cabinet Organization

This week’s challenge also mentioned that it’s best to tackle pieces at a time, so especially if you’re working on both week 1 and 2, don’t try to do it all in one day. That’s a perfect way to get overwhelmed and you’ll be ready to give up.

Now this week’s challenge is something I really want to work on. I’m going to let you in on what my cabinets and drawers look like sometimes:

I’m going to take this week to clean, throw out and organized in my cabinets and drawers. Soapy water and vinegar spray, here I come!

Tomorrow, I have something that might help you get your countertops and cabinets organized.

Please bear with me as I try to get things put back. Thanks for your patience.