Weekend Eats

I dont have much today, so I am just going to post pictures of the food i cooked this weekend.







Chickpea cutlets (made with navy beans instead, adapted from Veganomicon) and sauteed cabbage with onions.



















Soft pretzels (from Joy of Vegan Baking) with mustard and Warm and Cheezy White Bean Dip (from Eat, Drink, and Be Vegan).















Blueberry pancakes

















Oatmeal Cookies (from Joy of Vegan Baking).


















Nachos. Healthier than they look.

















Veggie Stir Fry over soba noodles

Summer

This past several days have been extremely hot around here. The weekend was just unbearable! Our house, charming as it is, is not equipped with cental air. We have window air conditioners in the bedroom and in the dogs' room, but the rest of the house is without. I have no desire to turn on the even, or even heat anything on the stove top. I swear my crockpot even made it get hot in the kitchen! It seems to be cooler today, which is nice. Yesterday I think I broke a sweat just turning the pages in my book!

A few months ago, Bill and I decided to try our hands at gardening. We went to Lowe'snd purchased a few seed packets and a couple of cheap pots. We weren't sure if anything would happen, but sure enough green stuff started to sprout. Bill has really taken to gardening. He does pretty much all of the maintaining. We dont have much of a yard, so we just have some sunflowers and tomatoes planted in front of the porch, and several potted plants (most given to us by Bill's grandpa) lining the porch. The greenery is a little overwhelming.
The sunflowers have grown pretty tall, although not all of the flowers have blumed yet. One of them is taller than me, which I think is pretty cool. We planted 4 different varieties, but it seems only 2 have bloomed.
We don't really know anything about gardening, and we don't really have a ton of free time. I think our garden suffers a bit, but it's just neat to see that we were successful in having anything sprout at all. It wasnt too long ago that in place of the sunflowers there was just a bare patch of dirt where Bill has dug up all the grass.

We have a couple other flowers (none bloomed), as wells as some tomatoes and several thriving kinds of herbs. We did lose our cilantro though. I guess it was too delicate for our newly greened thumbs.
The tomatoes seem to be growing very slowly and a little behind schedule. I hope that they survive. I really cant wait to bite into the first one! It would be great some day to have a big yard and grow a lot of our own food. If we ever have the space, I would love to plant a ton of strawberries.

Life, it just keeps happening

I've decided to start including photos in my posts, since i found a working camera in my husband's miscellaneous electronics box. I know that photos make blogs much more interesting. The photo you see here (courtesy of my cell phone, not the camera) is of one of our dogs. His name is Elliot and he is full of personality. He's a 3 year old mini dachshund, weighing in at about 11 lbs. I love this cutie.

Well, life has been a journey lately, that's for sure. There are a lot of new things happening all around, and while it's all been very exciting, it does wear a woman down to keep up with it all! I've been a Mrs. for 4 months now, and I am beginning to feel settled in to this new role. I still have so much to learn, and so does my husband, but in just 4 months, it's amazing how normal it feels now. There are some big changes happening at my job, and I've only been back with this company since May. I have also decided to start attending a different church, which has been more of a process than one might expect. I was at my previous church for almost 7 years, and so leaving it hasn't been exactly cut and dry. But I definitely felt the Lord moving me in another direction. There have been other changes and possibilities in my life too, but none concrete enough yet for me to talk about.

The big thing on my mind lately is finances. My husband and I decided before we were married to use this first year (and maybe the next) of our marriage to concentrate on eliminating debt. This means not buying a house, and not making any huge purchases. This means being more conscious of what we spend on groceries, making less trips out of town to visit our extended family, and keeping eating out to a minimum. This means keeping small purchases, well, small. and infrequent.

I have tried a few different budgeting tactics over the past few months, and think I have finally arrived at one that will work for us in the long term. Before Bill and I were married, we spent our money however we wanted to, living in the present. Now that we are married and have a direction and goals for our future together, our money need purpose. I tried a very strict budget and found it too difficult for us to keep, and found myself discouraged when we "failed". But what I have arrived are a couple of ideas that will work for us. The first is that, aside from bills and fueling our cars (cost that we can't really negotiate or change), will will only pay for purchases with cash. If I take out our allotted amount for groceries every week and put it in an envelope, I know that when the envelope is empty, I am done buying groceries. That makes me consider my purchases at the store just a little more carefully. When I was paying with my debit card, I didn't really fret about the possibility of going over the budget a couple of dollars. This new tactic should keep me on track. I have also decided to give Bill and I each a small allowance every week to spend at our leisure. If he wants to go out to lunch with his colleagues, fine, he can use his allowance. If we want to go on a date, great, we can use our allowance. If I want to get a new dress, fine. Just use my allowance, and maybe even have to delay my gratification by saving up my allowance to purchase it. This all might sound very primitive or elementary, but I think it will really work for us. I think it will allow us to have some fun without feeling guilty (unlike my old budget plan), but it will also keep us in check and make us think a little harder about how we spend our money.

Whew. That's all I've got for now. I am going to try to keep my posts more regular from now on. I think this is a good outlet for me.

What’s in a name?

I have been a married woman for about 4 weeks now, and it has been quite the adventure. Even in a short time I can see that marriage is a huge blessing, but that there are also challenges that need to be worked through. Being very much newlyweds, the challenge at hand is quite simply getting used to being married. One component of that, for me at least, is getting used to being called a different name.
First of all, a gripe. I am not yet officially Mrs. Newlastname. I am legally still Mrs. Oldlastname. The legal process of changing your last name is not quick, nor easy. I have begun the process (delayed slightly due to the fact that government offices are only open during the hours that I have to be at work), but its not official yet.
Lagality aside, I have taken to calling myself Mrs. Newlastname. It is fun to hear friends refer to me as this new name. It is also fun to be referred to as Bill’s wife and ot refer to him in conversation as my husband. But I am still getting used to it.
Being called by a new name is so strange. The first obvious reason is that I have been Erica Oldlastname for 24 years. Another reason that is strange is that even though I am referring to myself with my new last name, I am still signing my old one on any official documents or anytime I am shopping and need to sign my receipts.
The other challenge is that my husbands last name is quite unique. My old last name is very common. While using my new last name, I am learning that I now have to spell it out every time I say it, and that people mispronounce it constantly. That is just completely different form my past experience.

So why go through all the trouble? Why even bother changing my name? I didn’t have to. And things would certainly be easier if I didn’t (I have a very long list of notifications I need to make once its official).
I chose to take my husbands last name because I feel that it unifies us. Logically, I know that we are husband and wife no matter what we are called. And I know that we are unified by more that words or names. But sharing the same names is very symbolic to sharing our lives. It symbolizes that we are a family now, and our family is called by one name. It also signifies that I have changed my life. I like the statement that it makes.

How to have a nice wedding for under $6000

Yesterday over at Anna’s blog, she asked the ladies to give their input on wedding expenses. There were so many varied and interesting responses! I decided I wanted to put a little bit of our story on here, in hopes that it might help another couple someday.

I read on some wedding website that the average wedding in the United States costs about $24,000. That is approximately how much money I make at my job in a year (talk about perspective! No way am I going to spend a year’s salary on one day!). In the very beginning stages of our engagement, my fiancé and I decided we would set a budget for our wedding of $6000. I wasn’t even sure how we would come up with that much. But the first thing that had to happen is we had to get realistic with our expectations. I have been to a couple of very extravagant weddings. We had to know that that was not what we were going to have. I have also been to a few wedding that were done very inexpensively. These weddings were still beautiful, they were still fun, and at the end of the day, the couple was still married. If you want to do an inexpensive wedding, you have to adjust your expectations, and also realize that though your Wedding day will be a marvelous day, it will still only be one day, and you don’t want to spend the next couple of years (or a year’s salary) paying for one day.

Before I go into details, I want to preface this by saying that it is by the grace of God that we will have this wedding with pretty much no debt. One reason, which won’t work for every couple, is that my fiancé has been doing a lot of freelance work in addition to working his regular hours. The Lord really opened up a lot of doors for him to take on several projects over the past few months. Almost all of the wedding/honeymoon is getting paid for from his freelance jobs.

The company that my fiancé works for designed our wedding invitations and all other paper collateral. We only had to pay for the printing. This saved us so much money! We paid less than half of what couples normally pay for these things, and the invitations, etc were extremely unique and of high quality. They were fun and colorful and non-traditional, which fits our personalities pretty well.

We have also been blessed by a lot of talented friends. One friend is going to do our photos for free. He does photography as a hobby, not professionally, so we do not have to jump through all of the business hoops. He takes nice photos, and has experience doing weddings. Photography is often the largest cost of weddings, and we are having ours done (including the photo files) for free! We will have to have them printed though, but that is a much smaller cost. A different friend is going to shoot video for the wedding, which he is doing in exchange for my fiancé shooting video at a different occasion. With the help of my laptop, a friend is going to DJ the reception for us, with a PA system borrowed from a different friend. And as part of the ceremony, 2 other friends are going to sing and play guitar for us. We have a group of friends who will decorate the reception site and make sure things are running smoothly during the reception as well. All of our friends are doing these things as favors to us! When you are a planning a wedding, scout out the talent of your friends! By calling in favors from friends, we have been able to spend more money elsewhere.

We are having our wedding ceremony in the chapel at our church. We are paying a very small fee for this. If you are a member of a church, you can usually have your wedding there for free or for very cheap. Our church also has a lot of decorative items that they are letting us borrow. Perhaps your church does too. To save money, we decided to forgo costly flowers. The only flowers involved will be my bouquet, my bridesmaid’s bouquets, and boutonnières/ corsages for the groom, groomsman, parents and grandparents. All of the flowers will be fakes, which are cheaper than real, and means that I can keep my bouquet forever if I want to. We are going to use a lot of candles and ribbons to decorate the ceremony site instead, and it will all be very simple. Here is another great tip: see if any recently married friends have decorations just taking up space in their closets and basements that you can borrow. A good friend of mine is letting us use tons of candles, some ribbons, and an aisle runner. She also gave us all of her leftover bubbles for blowing after the ceremony. Think about it, after your wedding, what else are you going to do with all of those decorations?!

We are going to have our reception at a local community center. The one near our church actually has a lovely banquet room, just as nice as any fancy banquet hall. Definitely consider community centers when looking for an inexpensive reception site. Another option is to have the reception at your church if they allow that. Our church does, but because we are getting married the week before Easter, there are too many events going on at our church, so we are only able to use the chapel. To save money on cakes and decorations, we decided to order individual 8” round cakes for each table to serve as centerpieces. We are getting the cakes at Wal-Mart, and it works out to cost around $2/person for cakes. When I (briefly) shopped wedding cakes, the lowest cost I found was $4/ person. Our cake centerpieces are cheaper, doing double duty as dessert, and will be a nice unique touch that I think the guests will enjoy. We will also use confetti and candles to decorate the tables. We aren’t doing much else to decorate for the reception, because I don’t think it’s really very necessary, and I couldn’t come up with any other ideas that I liked.

The bulk of the money we are spending is on food. I read many books and websites about how to save money on food, and a couple great ideas are to have just a cake or punch reception, or to just serve light hor’ dourves. However, almost all of our guests will be driving from 2-3 hours away, and so we thought it only right to serve them a full meal. We are vegetarians, and are not going to be serving meat at our reception. This is a really good option to save money. I could not imagine how much it would cost to serve chicken to 180 people! Now I know many people turn their nose up to the idea of a vegetarian reception, but we are serving several styles of pasta, that are typically meatless anyway! People will not even miss the meat when they are eating fresh pesto pasta or spaghetti. This is an idea to consider if you are trying to save money. We also decided to serve the meal buffet style, so that we do not have to pay a wait staff. The pasta we are serving is quite delicious and I think that everyone will be very satisfied. The place that we are having our reception does not allow alcohol to be served. Our parents were very upset that we weren’t going to be able to serve alcohol, but it is actually a huge blessing that it is not allowed. For one, alcohol is very expensive! It definitely didn’t fit into our budget. Nor did hiring a bartender. And we also won’t have to worry about people drinking too much and trying to drive home.

One area that I saved a ton of money was on my dress. My dress was about $160. I did not buy a bridal gown, I instead bought a very lovely ivory evening gown that looks really beautiful on me. Some women may want to splurge a little more in this area. I preferred to splurge on the food instead, because the dress didn’t mean as much too me. I encourage bride to think outside of the box on this one. For one, a dress doesn’t have to be white. I honestly never wanted to wear a large white dress. I tried several dresses on at David bridal, and as I suspected, my short, high waisted, wide hipped, stature was significantly overwhelmed by the large, poufy white dresses. In my past dreamings of my wedding, I always dreamed of a small, more casual, less traditional wedding, in which I wore a pale pink gown. This dream didn’t match up with my fiancés dream however and we had to compromise a little bit in some areas. One was that he really wanted me to wear a white or ivory gown, and so I chose an ivory dress. I realize however that for many brides, the white dress is very important. Some good alternatives are to wear a white bridesmaid dress, a white prom dress, or a white or ivory evening gown instead. Hundreds of dollars can be saved in this way. Perhaps you could even borrow a dress. Maybe you could wear your mother or your sister’s dress. Some of the nicer secondhand shops in your town might also have bridal gowns in very good condition. Saving money is about being creative.

We also really lucked out on our honeymoon, although it is still going to be a little pricey. At some point I got my hands on a catalog for the Sandals resorts. These resorts are very expensive, and I didn’t think for even a second that we could afford it. But the idea of an all inclusive resort was really appealing to us. We searched around and couldn’t find anything we really liked. Then one day we went to the Sandals website and saw that they were having a 50% off sale! We couldn’t pass it up! It was only slightly more than we wanted to spend, but we think it would be well worth the little splurge.

My last tip is to beware of anything the with word “wedding” in the title. It means there has been an automatic mark-up in the price. One example is with our cakes. “Wedding” cakes are expensive, but the same amount of cake and frosting in any other form will cost significantly less. Here is one that really got me. I saw unity candle sets selling for around $30. These did not include candle stands/holder, just the 3 candles. That’s 2 tapers and 1 pillar candle. I will be getting my 2 tapers and 1 pillar candle at the dollar store for less than $5, thank you very much! Shop around, think outside of the box, do your research! You can also get a lot of wedding books and magazines at the library instead of buying them, and the internet has been an invaluable resource.

That about wraps it up for us. One thing that I want to note is that the $6000 we are spending on the wedding/reception/honeymoon does not include our rings. Those would add a good bit more to the total we have spent, but we have already paid for those in full as well. Rings do not have to be expensive though. It’s a good idea to shop around a lot.

On Cooking

One of my greatest passions is for cooking. I love food. I love eating food, and preparing food, and food presentation as a form of art. I even love shopping for food, searching out new ingredients, learning how to select the best produce, filling my cart with new and exciting possibilities. For me, food is more than just a vehicle to get nutrients into my body. It’s one of my hobbies.

I did not always like to cook. Growing up, I never learned to cook, and also never learned appreciation for a home cooked meal. As a child and a teenager, I would much rather get fast food or frozen snacks. I started learning to cook when I was 19, but my eyes were really opened up to the world of food when I went vegetarian at age 21. I started reading websites and books about vegetarianism, and started leaning about vegetables I never knew existed. My family doesn’t eat many veggies, so I didn’t know much about them. Growing up, my grandma was out primary cook, and she does not like to season her food very much at all. She also hates garlic (tragedy!). I had no context for the vast array of flavors and spices out there! As I began experimenting with spices and vegetables and cooking techniques, my taste preferences changed dramatically. I always hated onions as a kid, but now I use them in everything! I now love veggies, and I also love ethnic dishes. I also learned how to bake from scratch instead of from a box, and there really is no other way! Muffins from scratch only take a couple minutes longer to whip up than muffins from a box, and use fresher and healthier ingredients than boxed mixes.

I am blessed to be marrying a man who has adventurous tastes! When we met he was not a vegetarian, but he had no reservations about trying tofu or bean burgers or anything else. He loves my cooking so much that he now eats almost exclusively vegetarian too. The only challenge is scaling meals down to fit just the 2 of us. I really do find it easier to cook for a crowd. This is part of the reason that I love having dinner guests and throwing parties.

I will probably talk about food a lot on this blog. I will probably include pictures from time to time. Right now I have a crappy camera, but hopefully we will be getting a new one soon. I also intend to do some product reviews and kitchen tips.

crazy times

With my wedding just 33 days away (!!!), I have been super busy. I moved into our new place a couple weeks ago, and have been working hard to make it into a "home". This can be tricky at times, considering that DF will still need to move his stuff in as well. We want to gradually move his stuff in over the next 2 weeks, and after that, he will be staying with a friend for the last couple weeks before the wedding.

There are still so many small details to be worked out for our wedding day, it makes my brain spin. I wish I had more vacation days at work, but I am using them all for the honeymoon! Otherwise, it would be great to take a day or two off to really work the details out. Or just to catch my breath! It's clear to me that the honeymoon became a tradition because after all of that planning, the couple needs a vacation!

Anyway, I have a few good ideas that I plan to write about here in the future, but I just have not had time to wrap my head around them and get anything written that makes sense. Soon enough, life will settle down, and I can get into a better writting routine!