Surprise, a Productive Fall Weekend!

This weekend, my husband and I had a chance to catch up around the house.  For him, that meant spending two full days collecting the millions of leaves that have fallen on our yard and getting them mulched with the mower and into the compost pile.  For me, that meant a few things:  putting our vegetable garden to bed for the winter, doing some cooking ahead and... playing with my new Nutrimill grain mill!  I love when it happens this way - I didn't really plan to get all of this done, so the fact that I did was a huge bonus!

Here's what I was able to do:

          ::  Put our vegetable garden to bed for the first time in the 5 years I have lived in this house.  It always seems to get really cold really fast, and the fall ends up being such a busy time for some reason.  I always have the best of intentions, but I have never actually pulled up all of the old plants and organized the beds for next year... until now!  Not only did I clean out the dead plants, but I gave each bed a thick blanket of mulched leaves and grass clippings, that will hopefully block out some of the weeds in the spring and also add nutrients and organic matter to the soil.  We didn't have a stellar year in the vegetable garden, and I just didn't spend the time out there like I usually do, so I'm hoping my little bit of extra garden love this fall will translate into a more productive season next year.  It certainly can't hurt!

         ::  Cooked now so we can eat later without a lot of fuss.  I love cooking from scratch and eating healthfully and frugally, but there are only so many hours in the day, so I try to be efficient about it.  On Sunday, I made a big pot of of brown rice and black beans for the freezer, a small pot of chili for lunches this week, some sausage/potato/bean soup, a loaf of bread, and since the oven was on for the bread, I threw in some potatoes to bake to eat with the chili this week.

The rice and beans are something I do regularly.  For the rice, I make a big pot, and then portion it out in approx 2/3-3/4 cup servings in plastic sandwich bags, freeze, and then pull out any time we have a meal that goes with rice.  Since brown rice takes a good 45 minutes to make, I don't have to worry about planning too far ahead for the rice when I have portions ready in the freezer.  To eat, we just put the frozen rice (without the bag) on a plate and microwave 2 minutes.  Not only is it a time-saver, having rice portioned out saves our waistlines too.  We know we can always heat up another bag if we want more rice, but we never really feel like it once we finish our first helping.  On the other hand, if we had a big pot of rice... we probably would eat more.

For the beans, I randomly chose an amount of 4 cups of dried black beans from my recent bulk purchase you can read about here.  I soaked them in water overnight, and then put them in a crockpot with a bunch of water.  I cooked them on high for a good 8 hours or so - it took a long time to heat up.  Once the beans were tender, I let them cool a bit, and then portioned them out without the liquid into 1 cup bags for the freezer.  Now, when I'm making soup or burritos or some other recipe that calls for canned black beans, I just go to my freezer instead.  I ended up with 10-11 cups of cooked beans from 4 cups dry.  This way is cheap, took almost no work on my part, and the beans don't have all the added salt or packaging that canned beans have.  No work and a great final product?  I'm all over it.

        ::  Last but not least, my grain mill and food grade buckets with gamma seals arrived!  It was a pretty busy week so I didn't have a chance to store my bulk purchases or try out my grain mill until Sunday.  I cleaned out the buckets and seals during the week, and then let them dry for a few days to make sure all of the lid parts were completely dry before storing my beans, oats and wheat.  The gamma seals on the 5 gallon buckets are supposed to keep the critters and moisture out.  We'll see!

As for my Nutrimill grain mill, it is wonderful, I love it!!!  I used hard white wheat from my recent bulk purchase and made some finely ground flour.  It was so easy.  Then, I made a loaf of bread with my current favorite recipe.  It was INCREDIBLE.  Seriously, I could have just kept on eating it until the whole loaf was gone.  It turned out lighter and fluffier than my bread usually is when I use store-bought whole wheat flour.  I'm never going back!  I knew I would love my new grain mill, and I have not been disappointed.

I'm always looking for more ideas to save time in the kitchen without sacrificing quality or $$. What kinds of time- or money-saving cooking projects do you do?