Sarasvati - Of Art and Knowledge

I have been incredibly fortunate this ast week, when it's come to groceries. A supermarket near my connecting bus stop has started a Dollar Sale, wherein many of the products it sells are marked down to $1. I couldn't resists stopping by to at least see what they had on sale, and I have, I must say, made out like a freaking bandit!

I made a point of going after work and only getting a few things at a time, no more than I and Daniel could carry home with us on the bus, so we'd save on cab money even if it took us longer to get everything we wanted. But what we did get still astounds me! I've sent around $100 there between Monday and today and come home with around 15 grocery bags full of stuff.

Smoked pork shoulder for $1 a pound. Pork loin roast for $1 a pound. 2 pork souvlaki stick thingies for $1. 3 bars of Ivory soap for $1. 10 pounds of potatoes for $2. Cartons of Egg Beaters, normally between $4-5 a carton, for $1 each - we ended up buying 8 of those. French fries, pasta, jars of spaghetti sauce, fruit snacks, cake, frozen dinners, bagels, tortillas, cans of soup, tubes of toothpaste, nearly all of it for $1, or else incredibly discounted.

The freezer can't hold any more food right now, and it's nearly all filled with meat. I've wished more than once that we had a chest freezer, because I'd get more pork while it's incredibly cheap, and just store it away for when we need it. The cupboard is about full to bursting. The fridge is the only food storage place with any room left in it, and even then it's a tight squeeze.

$100 has bought us enough food to last us for around a month. I'll be spending a little bit more tomorrow, getting some shampoo (not on sale), and some vegetables (carrots, turnip, parsnips if I can get them), and then this weekend I'll get some dried split peas, but other than that, we're pretty well set for food for a good while. Easily until we can afford another grocery order in 3 weeks time. I'm incredibly happy about being able to find so many good deals on so much food, especially when money has turned out to be a bit tighter for us this month than we'd originally budgeted for. This gives us a little leeway, so we're not feeling the pinch quite so much.

If there was any lingering delusion that autumn wasn't here already, it got blown away this morning, when the temperature dipped as low as it's been thus far: a mere 5 degrees Celcius. The nights are cold enough to really make me appreciative of a nice thick blanket or comforter. The afternoons are warmer, but there's still that particular kind of chill on the breeze that makes you shiver no matter how warm the sunshine.

With that all in mind, I bundled up this morning when I walked my daily three miles.

Well, I say "daily", but I've actually been slack on my walking goals over the weekend. Partly because I spent a good deal of Saturday hanging out with Cass, and Sunday was a day pretty much devoted to staying indoors and watching Rei play Ocarina of Time, watching a movie, and then curling up in bed with old episodes of Ranma 1/2 to keep us company. We did go out, but it was a short walk (a little less than 2 miles) to get some cake.

Tomorrow's going to contain a lot of walking, I'm sure. Not only will I have to walk uptown to get rent money from my bank account (1.5 miles), but then I'll walk from there to the north end (about 2 miles, I'm estimating) to pick up a few groceries, and then home again (1 mile). That's more walking than I normally do, but it all needs to be done, and it'll help me catch up on my weekly goal for HealthMonth. I haven't been doing too badly with those goals, but this weekend's slackness did put me a bit behind schedule, so I'm glad to have a good excuse to make up for that.

Fortunately, that should only take me a couple of hours, so if I leave early enough, I'll still have time to come home and make another batch of baked beans for supper. I want to make some multigrain bread, too, but I'm not sure if I'll leave that until Wednesday, to give me something specific to do on that day. I know I want to make a loaf of bread, and I also thought that using some leftover sausages to make some little sausage-and-cheese buns would be nice, too. Nicely portable, good warm or cold, and handy for Rei to take for lunch if he likes them enough.

Maybe on Thursday I'll try to scrub the rust off the muffin tins (they got rusty thanks to a ceiling leak in the kitchen, and I haven't had the patience to scrub them clean yet) and then make a batch of honey bran muffins for snacks. I might see if Cass's offer to give me some old bananas is still good, and make a loaf of banana bread too, just for fun. I've never made it before, but I do like eating it!

And with the exception of the cheese for the buns, all of these delicious things can be made with what's still in the kitchen, so I don't need to go and waste the little grocery money I have on buying a bunch of ingredients. It makes me feel good to know that I can make so many tasty things without needing to spend a lot of money on them. It just takes a bit of creativity and patience, and I'm learning more how to channel creativity into food and to be more patient with it and myself when I make mistakes. Cooking is good for me in many ways!

Today the only cooking I'll do will be to add another few potatoes and carrots to the leftovers of the turkey-vegetable stew, and some water. I ended up putting too much salt in when I first made it, and adding more vegetables and water to it will end up balancing that out quite nicely, and making the stew last longer. And since we still have plenty of potatoes and carrots in, this gives me a good chance to use them up before they go off.

Oh, for another icon spot so I can add a "Happy Domestic" icon. :p I know that when I get a job again, I'll be buying a paid account here. I really like Dreamwidth, as it's much more like what LJ was before they started to care more about money than pleasing their userbase, and I want to support them where and when I can. Just have to wait until then.

I've managed to keep up both a good amount of reading and writing since the beginning of the month, too, which bodes well for NaNo. I was worried for a while as to whether I could manage to keep pace with my NaNo writing as well as keep reading a good amount for my bookblog, but if this month is any indicator so far, it shouldn't be too big a problem. Even if I end up getting a job next month, so long as I stick to hard copies of books (rather than e-books, I mean) and read over my lunch and breaks as well as during the trip there, I should be just fine.

Making sure I write 1000 words a day this month is also a good warm-up for NaNo. I've been working again on Fractured. I'm only about halfway to where I was when I had to reinstall my operating system and lost everything, but it's going a bit better this time, with the plot and the flow of events, that I don't mind being a little slow with it.

Speaking of NaNo, though, I really ought to devote some time soon to planning out this year's project. I know what I want to write, but I thought that this year I'd actually do more advance work and create a chapter outline plan, so that things flow better and that I have more of an idea of what I'm doing if I end up, say, writing at work. In the past, when I worked in call centres in November, I'd have time to write some in between calls. But given that my main work was at home, I'd often end up starting what I knew I wanted to be the next chapter, whether or not I was done with the previous one. This led to me coming home, updating my writing file, finishing what hadn't been finished of the previous chapter, and trying to finish whatever hadn't been done of the chapter I'd started at work. Things got disjointed easily, phrases got reused far too often, and the whole thing felt like a mess. I didn't enjoy writing that way at all, even though it was a good way to boost my wordcount. So this year I'll do more planning and hopefully be able to avoid such situations in the future.

Of course, if I don't end up getting a job by November, this year may be a repeat of last year, where I met my 50k wordcount goal a little less than halfway through the money, and then couldn't keep myself motivated to write any more even though the story wasn't finished. Chapter outlines will hopefully prevent that from happening again too!

I feel much better, emotionally, than I have these past few days. My stomach's still playing hell with me, but that's practically par for the course, and I tolerate that as best I can while still going about doing the things that need to be done.

I decided last night to have another experiment in cooking, and so put some beans on to soak overnight. Boiled them today, then baked them in a mix of tomato soup, water, and a bit of pepper, with some Italian breakfast sausages mixed in. The sausages had been sitting in the freezer for a while, and since I couldn't refreeze them after thawing them, I just fried up the rest to grab as quick snacks or for breakfast or something.

The baked beans turned out awesomely, considering I hadn't made them before and didn't follow a recipe. I knew that normally people add bacon or pork along with molasses in baked beans, but since I don't like molasses we don't keep any in the kitchen, and we don't have bacon or pork right now, the sausages seemed like a good way to add some flavour. And I'm happy with the result.

Next time I make baked beans, though, won't be until winter. Seeing as how the range needs to be on for an hour and the oven itself on for 3 or 4, and the beans themselves are full of protein and fibre, they're best saved for a time when the apartment needs to be heated and we need things to warm us from the inside too.

Skinless boneless chicken breasts were on sale today, too, at less than half their normal price, so I picked up a package of 6. 2 will go into a chicken-and-rice casserole later in the week, and the others will probably be used when Rei makes his famous Cantonese chicken.

Must remember to buy another bag of potatoes soon, so I can experiment making croquettes.

The more I cook, the more I want to cook. If we could only have a bigger budget (meaning, if I can only get a job soon), then I can cook more often and make better things, and no doubt the variety of healthy (or healthy-ish) foods will help our health improve, and give me something fun to do!

Am I turning domestic again? Why yes, yes I am! And I'm loving it, too!

Maybe tomorrow I'll try cleaning the muffin pan again so I can make those honey-bran muffins I've been planning...