Just Call Me Miss Suzy Homemaker...

We defrosted our last turkey that was in our freezer for yesterday's dinner. As you can imagine, a 14 lb turkey will yield a lot of leftovers when there are only two adults and three children under five dining. So today was the "Use up all the leftover turkey before it goes bad" Day. I made four turkey pot pies. Three went straight to the freezer and the last one is for our dinner tonight. I also made two large crockpots of turkey soup which will yield enough for four dinners. One will be for dinner tomorrow night and the other three will go straight into the freezer for nights when I'm just too tired or too lazy to cook. So far, I've got about 7 containers of frozen chicken/turkey soup...It's a sickness, I tell you. I can not throw away a chicken or turkey carcass. I just can't. I know that there will be such good flavor from the roasted bird that will simmer all together into a tasty soup. Yum! And so inexpensive! I'm a big fan of getting the biggest bang for my grocery buck.

Also, tomorrow is our turn to provide snacks for Maddy's preschool class. As soon as we all got home from church, I went straight to baking some muffins for tomorrow's fare. They are so easy and so good! Oh, and pretty healthy for you, too! I got the recipe from the side of the cereal box! Here it is:

Apple-Raisin Bran Muffins

1.5 cups raisin bran cereal
1 cup milk
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs, slightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1.5 cups finely chopped pealed apples (approximately 2 small)
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
2.5 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup sugar
2.5 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350 F.
Spray regular-sized muffin pans or mini muffin pans with nonstick vegetable
coating spray.
Combine cereal, milk, oil, eggs and vanilla. Let stand 10
minutes.
Stir to break up cereal; stir in appleas and walnuts.
Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and cinnamon.
Add cereal mixture all at once to flour mixture; stir just until
moistened.
Spoon evenly into prepared pans.
Bake 16-18 minutes for regular-sized muffins and 10-12 minutes for mini
muffins or until tester inserted in center comes out clean.
Remove from pan and cool on rack.

Makes 15-18 regular sized muffins.

I've made them before and they're yummy! I'll send those in tomorrow and then I'll just do fruit cups and granola bars for Wednesday and Friday. :)

I also made some banana-blueberry muffins today. I found a mix in the back of my pantry yesterday while putting away my groceries from my latest commissary run. I figured it needed to be used soon and I also found a can of blueberries Robin had bought once by mistake. I've been shuffling that darn can of blueberries for what seems like forever. So. I mixed them into the muffin mix and voila! Banana-blueberry muffins are born! ;)

So, now I have three pot pies, three soups and about four dozen muffins in my already overstuffed freezer. Hooray! I'm all set.

I also went on a coupon bender yesterday. I was so determined to beat my total saved in coupons from last commissary run. It took me three hours to do my grocery run yesterday. My cart was so darn full, but, when all was scanned and totalled, I'd spent $341.70 and saved $72.95 in coupons! I used 98 coupons yesterday. Scarey!!! What's even more scarey is that I had to also replenish my meats as my freezer was pretty much depleated of it's stores over the past five weeks and I still had a full cart. So full, in fact, that one of my gallons of milk fell off and crashed to the floor, broke and had milk flowing down aisle seven. Oh, the embarassment! :O Thankfully, someone came quickly and mopped it up.

Now I'm pooped. I'm going to kick back for an hour or so before dinner and then I need to get to grading my tests I gave on Friday. :( That stinks, but I need them d.o.n.e! by tomorrow so I can start fresh with my students on their new units in all my French classes. Not a fan of grading, but it is a necessary evil of teaching.

Happy Sunday everyone! :)