A weekend filled with Love and FOOD!

Normal weekend here on the homestead! We got some much needed fall cleaning done! YAY! We needed to get that done, Santa is coming to town soon!!! Plus we COOKED! I tried a few new meals! 

Here you see the girls chowing down on Sunday dinner with Grandma on the webcam! 

I love to take pictures of food... I'm weird... I put my heart and soul in all I cook so I like the memory I guess, Haha... So here is a little of what we enjoyed this weekend.....

We kicked off Friday with some Ceasar Chicken wraps!!! They were so good and the kids LOVED them!

We varied the recipe a tad, I added chicken, cucumbers, lettuce and diced tomato instead of what the recipe called for.... YUM!

I used this recipe here for the Grilled Chicken Cesar Wraps

Saturday was a FUN day of cooking! I roasted a chicken, YUM!

So with the chicken I did a few things! 

I took ALL the meat off! It was a 7lb Chicken I got about 6 cups of chicken that was enough for 2 dinners! 

I then used the drippings to make my Grandmothers famous gravy! 

I made a WHOLE pickle jar full, that will come in handy! 

(I forgot to snap a picture)

I then threw what was left of the chicken in a pot with about 3/4 a gallon of water, some carrots, onion and celery and simmered on low for 24 HOURS! Wow has my house smelled amazing.

If you need a good Bone Broth Tutorial this is a good one

I was excited that I got a WHOLE 9 cups! There is only 7 cups here, 2 cups went into dinner Sunday!

I was pretty excited for all that, I mean 2 dinners worth of chicken, a huge jar of gravy and 9 cups of broth for a whopping $7.32 you really can't get much more for your money then that!!! 

I am going to learn how to make bone broth and dehydrate it into a powder to reconstitute, that is going to save some serious cash!  Plus bone broth is of course one of the most nutrient dense foods we can consume!

So what did I do with the meat?!?!

Saturday.... Chicken and dumplings of course!

and for Sunday........

Chicken Pot Pie! 

I am not sure it could have gotten anymore comfort foody in here.... Until of course our Apple Pie came out of the oven.... HEAVENLY! 

The best part of cooking it's something we love to all do together! As a homeschooling Mom, cooking together is a great way to teach the girls through daily living! 

On that note I am off to snuggle my munchkins! 

Goodnight World! 

Happy Halloween and Birthday!

Yay! It's HALLOWEEN! It is also my Birthday, I have gotten so many calls from loved ones and friends it's wonderful to be remembered especially when you share your birthday with a holiday...
Holiday/Birthday's are pretty lame stuff!

Happy Halloween from our family to yours!

Recipe Cards.... A thing of the past?!

One of my favorite things to do is of course COOK! I am not a gourmet chef by any means, actually if you left me in a room with a bunch a of ingredients and told me to make whatever I wanted chances are I'd fail, horribly! I am a recipe girl through and through. I of course tweak recipes to my own taste but I do always have a recipe as a base! A lot of us do! Hello Pintrest! So if you are like me most of your recipes are online, I never take the time to print and file them in an old recipe box. I just pin them and go back to them when I need. I was finding that reading off my phone was a pain and my computer forget it! Where can I put it when I have VERY little counter space... Well.... How about the tablet! YES! But wait I spent a small fortune on that puppy to risk it getting broken so I had a vision today and I made it come true!!! 

What if I MOUNT my tablet!!?!? I searched online and came up with a few things like this...

But $40? Um, no... remember people I am FRUGAL! So I started to think, what would look cute, be functional and something I already have? So I started to look around and it hit me!!! 

HOW ABOUT A PICTURE FRAME?!?! How cute would that be!!!?!?!

THIS CUTE! Just enough space for me to hit the power button too! I grabbed and 8x10 frame off my wall and went to work...

It took a little bit of work, I hat to pull out the razor blade and chip away some at the top of the frame so it can really slide in and out via the top... This is my forever home and I know that I LOVE this idea so I screwed 4 small screws in the inside of the cabinet into the frame... but you can just as easily us some 3M Picture Hanging Velcro, that stuff is STRONG it holds my weekly white board on the fridge

I am super happy with the result... I can quickly and easily reach all of my pinned recipes and if I want to catch up on the latest episode of Hart of Dixie while I whip of breakfast I can!  

Who doesn't love Hart of Dixie?!!?

I can't wait till the next time I need to cook! Tomorrow can't come fast enough! 

There is one word that sums me up.... FRUGAL!

So I forgot to mention one thing about me that is SUPER important to all I do! I am SUPER FRUGAL! I don't like to spend money, well that's a white lie I LIKE to spend money but hey I'm no rich person so frugal it is!  So a LOT (pretty much all) of what I do is not only to be a little more "natural" and "greener" but it is to be FRUGAL! 

So that leads me to FOOD storage... We all know plastic isn't awesome... Plastic containers can release chemicals into the food and liquids we store in them. Yuck! I'd like to help limit exposure of nasty to to my family as best as I can. Plus who wants to keep buying tupperware! How many of them have you lost or thrown out... do the kids and hubby actually EAT the tupperware too? Maybe cause it sure hardly ever makes it back into our house....

So I have started to use GLASS! I love it! My husband used to pick on me for hoarding glass jars, well he isn't picking on me anymore! 

Featured is only 1/2 of what I have going on in my fridge right now! Say hello to Pumpkin puree, left over hamburger stew, evaporated milk, apple butter, homemade dairy free cream of chicken soup, chicken noodle soup, tomato sauce and my famous BBQ sauce!

I love to control the ingredients in my food (yucky preservatives and additives) as well as be frugal and make them from scratch, all the BBQ sauce you see there cost $3.50 at most and that not buying my ingredients in bulk (makes it even cheaper!) 

Few things about glass... it's free if you re-purpose it! It's SO easy to clean! Chemical free and you can FREEZE in it!!! Yep! FREEZE! When you do so make sure it's room temperature and leave plenty of head space, 1-2 inches I go with 2 inches to be safe, I recently blew up a jar in my freezer because the taco soup tried to escape through the bottom, WHOOPS! 

So... Hello, My name is Erica and I am about as frugal as they come! 

Hello There!

Hello There! 

This is my first post YAY! So I guess I will dive in with an introduction for those that come across my blog who don't know me! I am Erica the seamstress behind Sassy Green Creations but first and foremost I am a wife and mother. I have an amazing husband, seriously he is amazing... Matthew. We have been married since 2005. He is my best friend and I am so lucky to have met such an amazing man, there is nothing he can't do! Then 3 years into marriage in 2008 we were blessed with our first daughter, Miss Madison, she is the light of our lives and changed us both into amazing people! Then another 3 years later came our youngest daughter Miss Kaitlyn our little firecracker! We couldn't imagine life without them! 

So yay that is "the beginning" I guess... those life changes made me who I am today! I am a wife (a pretty awesome one if I might say so myself)  I am a stay at home mother who literally lives for my family. I prefer to take the natural approach with almost everything in my life. If we could we would be on a 100 acre farm somewhere living from our own land, so for now, here we are in rural(ish) eastern coastal NC on 1.1 acres....I spend my days cooking, baking, sewing, cleaning, kissing boo boo's and educating my girls and hope to grow them into great little people. The world needs more great and I hope to help contribute to that! 

So hang on and enjoy the bumpy ride!!!

Welcome to the Van Voorhis Homestead!