A Domesticated Day

I've been super domesticated today.

While I haven't exactly been wearing a French maid costume and carrying a feather duster (Oh wait... that's Hubby's idea of domesticated.), I did accomplish a few things in the kitchen.

In light of my desire to save money, I figure the first step is to waste less. So I went all I-am-woman-watch-me-cook today. My tasks included:

• Homemade pizza sauce for the freezer. I harvested ripe tomatoes from my garden (at least something in that weed pit is getting used!), cleaned them up and made my homemade pizza sauce. At this point I probably have enough in the freezer for about a dozen pies, which is pretty good for someone who is a homemade sauce neophyte.
• Scalloped potatoes with spinach. In my fridge I had a bag of organic baby spinach that was ready to expire. I also had potatoes in my pantry that were beginning to grow eyes. I googled a few recipes, and ended up making my own hybrid of scalloped potatoes with spinach. In addition, I used Magic Mix for the "milk" in the potatoes, so I got a chance to rotate through a little bit of powdered milk, too. They'll be the perfect side dish for my other culinary project...
• Meatloaf. In addition to the other foods that were reaching the end of the life in my home, I also had two peppers (one red, one green) that had seen better days. I don't know why, but when I think about green peppers, I think about meatloaf. I found a recipe online that uses steak sauce or bbq sauce instead of ketchup. Coincidentally, I had an open jar of bbq sauce that needed to be used asap. Fortunately, I always have ground beef in the freezer, so it was only a matter of thawing it out.
• Black bean soup. Hubby gripes continually that I buy canned beans but never use them. So today I made a major batch of black bean soup. I have a recipe that is supposed to be a copycat version of Panera Bread's black bean soup... and it is close. Not exact, but close. It calls for red peppers (which, as I mentioned, were sitting in my fridge just begging to be used), so I figured I'd whip up a pot of soup. With all the rest of the food I made today, though, I just poured the soup into quart jars for freezing. It'll be super tasty and easy on an autumn day. All I'll need to do is make a loaf of homemade wheat bread for a complete meal!

I realize that most Domestic Divas would mock my pathetic attempts in the kitchen. But, at the very least, I rotated through some stock (most notably powdered milk and canned beans), used up some leftovers that otherwise would have gone into the trash, and managed to freeze some food for future (don't-feel-like-cooking-tonight) meals.