20 Ingredients (or less) = 7 dinners!

In an attempt to save time and money, and just be more organized overall, I put myself up to a little challenge: Come up with a full week of dinners using 20 ingredients or less! It took some time and serious planning to put together dinner recipes that either have very few ingredients or share ingredients, but I'm hoping the time spent will pay off as I can use this meal plan over and over again. I've seen similar ideas before, which included a shopping list, as well as a few (or 15) "staple" ingredients already found in your pantry. I'm sorry, but Hungarian smoked paprika and coconut water are not staples in my house and can never be found in my pantry, which meant more to buy. How does that help me?? There are a couple of pantry items included in my meal plan, but they really are staples that I always have on hand, like flour, or ketchup. You use so little flour and ketchup this week, you could even ask a friend or neighbor if you can bum some if you don't need flour or ketchup for anything else.  I wanted to share this meal plan because I know there are so many busy families out there who might also benefit from an easy weekly meal plan. You'll find the recipes and shopping list for 7 dinners, and pictures if I remembered to take one.  These recipes are meant to feed a family of 4, but the recipes can easily be double or halved depending on your needs.  Please note: My efforts to include the menu, shopping list, and recipes all on one easy printable page has resulted in some very bare bones directions for the recipes.   You should be able to figure it out, but if not please comment and I'll clarify :)

You can find a link to the easy weekly meal planner HERE

So, here are my indredients for this weeks meals: (bet you can't tell where I shopped!) This week's meal plan includes 19 ingredients.  In case you are interested, I spent about $35 on these ingredients without crazy couponing or anything.  I also did not have to buy the beef, as we buy ours from the local butcher in massive amounts at a time. I think that with the beef included, you should easily be able to buy the ingredients for under $50.  As you can see, I'm totally fine with, and strongly recommend, generic brands, as they make no difference in the recipes. 

And, here is this week's menu:

Mexi-Pasta

Easy Hamburger Stroganoff

Cheeseburger Meatloaf

BLT Wraps

Bacon Mac & Cheese

Crock Pot Italian Chicken

BBQ Chicken Wraps

Below, you will see some pictures of this weeks yummy dinners.  Well, the ones I remembered to take a picture of anyway.

BLT Wraps

BBQ Chicken Wraps

Mexi-Pasta

Bacon Mac & Cheese

Creamy Crockpot Italian Chicken

In case you missed the link for the meal plan, here it is again: MEAL PLAN.  I hope that you find this meal plan helpful. For side dishes, you are on your own!  A nice green salad and some french bread will go nicely with many of these meals.  I really enjoyed this challenge, and am already looking forward to my next 20 ingredient or less challenge.  I realize there's probably too much pasta this week. But hey, it's cheap, versatile, and I kind of love it.   I'm hoping to cut back on the pasta for next time :)  Stay tuned!

Mommy and Emmalyn visit Grandpa and Grandma Olsen

Last weekend was a big weekend for me! I put on my big girl panties and drove to and through Seattle all by myself for the first time! And with a toddler!! With a DVD playing and snacks on hand, we departed on our 5+ hour journey. As we approached the pass, I started seeing signs that there would be road closures due to blasting on Wednesday at 8pm. I thought, "that must really suck!" Then I thought, "wait...today IS Wednesday!" Check the clock. Crap, it's a little after 8. Sure enough, shortly after that we met up with a long line of cars. You know it's bad when people are taking this opportunity to walk their dogs. By this time, the excitement of a movie had long worn off and Emmalyn had been fighting sleep for about 2 hours. Being stopped for 30 minutes feels like 3 hours when there is a cranky baby in the car throwing tantrums and toys. Finally I saw people getting back into their cars and moving along, YAY!! With about an hour left on our trip, Emmalyn finally gave into sleep. Ahhhhhhh, peace and quiet :). We arrived at my in laws home, only to have Emmalyn cry hysterically for a good 10 minutes. She did calm down, and slept like a rock. She must have known we had a fun day ahead of us!

And a fun day it was! We visited Forest Park. Friends who live in the Everett area, I recommend this park! There is a small animal farm, a huge playground, and an awesome splash pad. Emmalyn loved chasing the goats around and quacking at the ducks. 

Emmalyn's favorite part: the splash pad! Such a water baby!

 Unfortunately, it's all fun and games until someone takes a swing to the forehead. That someone was my sweet Emmalyn. I couldn't catch her before she reached the swing, with a girl swinging rather high on it. She took that swing right between the eyes, flew off her feet, and instantly had two black eyes. Luckily, she recovered faster than I did from the incident! She calmed down and took a nap. The only thing that calmed me down was watching Mike's 6th grade graduation on VHS! Who knew in 1997 that this would be my future husband??

The next day, we visited a family fun center. Emmalyn was far from impressed by the tubes, tunnels, slides, and play mats. I tried numerous times to coax her in, but she wouldn't have it! This was about as far as I could get her!

Despite a swing accident and fun center that Emmalyn wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole, we had a great weekend away!

 Emmalyn enjoyed blowing bubbles with Grandma.

And stealing french fries from Grandpa.

And digging for treasure under the furniture with Uncle Matt.

And keeping an eye on the neighbors with Tuff.

Thank you, Larry and Dorie, for a wonderful weekend! We hope to do it again soon!

VACA!!!

I love summer! Although the weather hasn't been exactly what I would consider to be "summer" weather, it's still time for VACATIONS!!  Here's a recap of the Olsen's most recent adventure with my parents to the Eagle Crest Resort in Redmond, OR:


Miss Emmalyn is ready to hit the road! Sunglasses and a magnadoodle (the wonderful suggestion from a mom of 3!) are essentials for our 4 hour road trip!  After spending the night in Grandview, we load up and follow mom and dad to our vacation destination.

While the magnadoodle entertained Emmalyn for a good hour, that hardly made a dent in our road trip. So...enter, DVD player!

The movie captured Emmalyn's attention for awhile, but not long enough. 

 So...enter, Grammy!

Grammy hopped into our car and rode with us for the remainder of our drive. A plus side to traveling with grandparents: build in entertainment!

Finally, after some road construction, crazy drivers (anyone drive a red Toyota Camry??), and a few stops, we finally roll into our final destination: EAGLE CREST!

I've been coming to the Eagle Crest Resort with my parents for over 20 years! Now I'm excited that Emmalyn gets to come and enjoy what Eagle Crest and the surrounding area has to offer.

We visited the High Desert Museum in Bend, OR.  The High Desert Museum is an indoor/outdoor museum that showcases some native animals to the area in the animal exhibits, but also shows a lot of history about the area.  The otter was sleeping, and we had to leave Birds of Prey show before we were asked to leave on account of Emmalyn's squealing (apparently it startles the birds), but we did enjoy seeing a bobcat, a lynx, a porquepine, and two huge bald eagles. 

Then, of course, there is swimming!

Emmalyn's teeth chattered most of the time, but she loved it anyway!!

Mom, Emmalyn and I had a girl's day in downtown Redmond while dad and Mike golfed.  Emmalyn took time to stop and smell the flowers...and suprisingly did not rip off too many of the petals!

One of my favorite things to do in Oregon is shop...TAX FREE!!! Emmalyn, however, was not so impressed.  Talk about shop til you drop!

I'm willing to bet that my parents' favorite part of this vacation was all the quality time with Emmalyn!

My most memorable part of this vacation was all the wildlife!

There were ducks and geese...lots of geese, which Emmalyn enjoyed feeding, and chasing!

Then there were chipmunks, which Mike enjoyed feeding by hand!

Our favorite animal encounter was with Bambi!  This deer had no fear and cozied on up to us, even tried to come into our townhouse!

Mom said it would not be a good idea for us to feed the deer...we did it anyway...

I really wanted to get a picture of Emmalyn with the deer, but as I inched closer to this few hundred pound wild animal with my first born in my arms, I decided that nothing about that was a good idea. So I passed Emmalyn off and snapped a picture of mom posing with the deer, as it took a few steps closer to our front door!

Three days flew by and it was time to come home.  Our vacation was way too short, as most vacations are, but we had a wonderful time! I'm already looking forward to our next vacation!!

Pinterest Weekend!

I am addicted to Pinterest!  However, I decided there would be no more "pinning" for me until I actually used some of the tips, ideas or recipes I've pinned.  So, I declared this weekend "Pinterest Weekend" to accomplish just that.  Thanks to Pinterest and Emmalyn's 3 hour naps, I have 8 meals in the freezer, a batch of soft and chewy chocolate chip cookies, handmade wall art, felt flowers to make headbands for Emmalyn, an amazing chocolate peanut butter dessert, and a sparkly clean shower!  Here are my projects for the weekend:

Peanut Butter Fudge Brownie Trifle

This is an amazing dessert! I do not have a trifle bowl so it doesn't look as pretty as it should, but it's delicious anyway.  It's a little time intensive, but completely worth the time (and the calories).


















Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

I've never been able to make soft chocolate chip cookies, until now!!  My search for the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe is over. 

















Felt Flowers

I plan on gluing these super cute felt flowers to headbands for Emmalyn.  It took me about 15 minutes to makes these 5 flowers, and it only cost about $1.

















Wall Art

It took some time to cut the leaves for this project, but I love how it turned out! I also love how cheap it was to make!  This whole project cost about $10. I already have lots of scrap booking paper, I had a 40% off coupon for the 16x20 canvas at Michael's, and a small tube of paint to add color to the canvas was less than $2.00.  P.S.  I have lots of leftover leaves already cut, if anyone would like to use them...













Crockpot Freezer Meals

I'm very excited about this one! I have 8 meals in my freezer, ready to be thrown in the crockpot.  There are 2 of each of the following: Teriyaki chicken, Savory Vegetable Beef Soup, Healthy BBQ Chicken, and Beef Stew. Yummy!










Tub Cleaner

for soap scum: equal parts hot vinegar and blue Dawn dish soap.  I used 1/3 of a cup of each and coated the shower, and because my shower was pretty soap scummy, I sprayed another round of 1/3 of a cup of each about an hour later.  After a good 2 hours, I scrubbed.  This was not magic by any means, it took some elbow grease and a bristle brush, but the soap scum that I've never been able to get rid of is GONE!




My house is not clean (with the exception of the shower) and the laundry is not done, but I sure had a fun weekend with these projects! Oh, and I started a blog :)