One Hundred Dollars a Month - Page 1340 of 2143 - I am your typical housewife living in high maintenance suburbia. I have a handsome husband, 2 kids and a flock of pet chickens. I try and feed my family with $100 a month. With the help of coupons, gardening and bartering I am able to squeeze the most out of our grocery budget and still manage to have a little fun along the way.

Cast Iron Skillet Chicken Pot Pie

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By Mavis Butterfield on January 15, 2014 · 9 Comments

I don’t know about you but when the weather stinks and it’s cold outside all I want to do is stay in my pajamas and crank up the heat and cook something delicious. Garden chores can wait for another day if you know what I mean. 😉

This recipe for cast iron skillet chicken pie is so over the top delicious, you may just have to make two of them.

Here’s the recipe, I hope you like it, we sure do.

Ingredients

1/3 cup butter
1/4 cup flour
1 cup chicken stock
2 cups mixed frozen vegetables
2 cups chicken, cooked and shredded {I use Zaycon Chicken}
1 teaspoon drued thyme
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 egg for egg wash
1 pie crust {Homemade Pie Crust Recipe}

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Melt the butter in your cast iron skillet by popping it in the oven for a minute or two. Then whisk the flour and butter together. Slowly add chicken stock and salt and pepper until you have a nice little gravy. Add cooked chicken and vegetables, stir.

Next roll out your pie crust and then place it over the top of the pot pie filling. Brush with an egg wash and bake at 350 for 45 minutes or until the juices are bubbling and the crust is evenly browned. Serve warm.

~Mavis

Looking for more awesome cast iron recipes? Check out The Lodge Cast Iron Cookbook. I think it’s pretty awesome.

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12 Goals for the New Year – Week 2 of 52

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By Mavis Butterfield on January 15, 2014 · 5 Comments

I came up with 12 goals I’d like to accomplish next year with the hopes of being able to cross one off my list per month to make them more manageable. I thought a great way to hold myself accountable to the things I want to accomplish this year would be to do a weekly update.

After all, we all need a little help staying motivated sometimes. Here’s how I am doing so far:

1. Clean, de-clutter and organize my entire home in 30 days or less. – Isn’t it amazing all the cool stuff you find when you go through and clean your entire house? I purchased this Keep Calm and Carry on bag last year at Heathrow airport and had totally forgotten about it until I was cleaning out the bedroom the yesterday.

It’s made of burlap and would be the perfect sort of bag to bring to the beach. If I was a beach person that is. I’m not sure what I’m going to use it for yet but I’m sure glad I found it.

2. Fit into the same jeans I wore 8 years ago when we moved into our house. – Thanks to the help of my new handy dandy pedometer and knowing that I need to get 10,000 steps in each day I’m feeling confident I’ll be able to fit into those jeans by the end of summer.

3. Travel. Tickets have been purchased!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂 I’m keeping the plans a secret for now though until we get all the details worked out. Stay tuned!

4. Send my daughter to college without having a nervous breakdown thus spending a week in bed sobbing.

5. Get 3 new teeth. 😉

6. Pay off my car. Here’s a video of us when we bought it last summer.

7. Finish the primitive folk art rug I started 4 years ago. – Lucy puggle and I spent about an hour going through all my wool strips and sorting them into bags. I finished another star on my rug and am really starting to enjoy rug hooking again and am already thinking about what I want to make after I finish my coffee table rug. Do you have any suggestions?

8. Family Day. Do one thing together as a family every Sunday. – This past Sunday we went to the LeMay Car Museum in Tacoma, Washington. We took a bunch of pictures so be on the lookout for those tomorrow. If you are a local, it’s worth the addmission price that’s for sure.

9. Secret Plan #1

10. Secret Plan #2

11. Secret Plan #3

12. Convince the HH we should buy a Salt Box Style House in Colonial Williamsburg.

Mavis: It’s a sign. See, we are suppose to move there.

HH: Seriously? The Colonial Williamsburg Society wants a donation. Look, it’s bulk mail. It is not a sign.

Mavis: Thanks Debbie Downer.

13. Spend at least 1 hour a day working in my garden. The weather in Western Washington has been pretty nice lately and Lucy the Puggle Dog and I have been working outside every chance we get. Now if I could just teach her how to pull up weeds my garden chores would get done much faster. 🙂

So there you have it, an update on my 12 goals for the new year.

How about YOU? How are your 2014 goals coming along?

~Mavis

P.S. YES, I know I wrote down 13 goals. I’m fairly certain I won’t be able to attain one of them {gee, I wonder which one?}. But I wanted to add it in there anyway because I believe in miracles.

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How to Avoid Impulse Purchases

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By Mavis Butterfield on January 15, 2014 · 9 Comments

With the holidays come and gone and a LONG stretch of winter yet to come, it’s easy to pass the time with shopping. Plus, now is the time they start clearancing out pretty much EVERYTHING from the holiday rush. The temptation to grab a killer deal is in your face pretty much every time you walk into the store. All those great deals can add up–financially and physically cluttering your space.

Here’s few tips to get past the impulse to buy all of those steals you come across:

Set a time limit. Maybe something like a week? If you are still thinking about it in a week, it’s probably something you would use.
Don’t use shopping to cure a bad mood. It’s a nasty trap to fall into, and it really doesn’t, in the long run, fix the problem.
Stay out of stores. Period. It’s really easy to avoid shopping–or finding that serving dish you didn’t even know you HAD to have if you never step foot inside the store. Plus, on the bright side, you won’t even know about the “deals” you are missing.
Remember what your mom used to say? Birds of a feather flock together. This applies with impulse shopping. Avoid going shopping with friends who also have impulse shopping habits. It’s easier to slip up and justify an unnecessary purchase when you have help.
Replace the urge to go shopping with another healthier habit. For example, clean something or exercise.
Keep yourself busy with meaningful tasks. I know that sounds super cheesy, but if you don’t have time to shop, you won’t.
Apply the one in, one out rule. If you buy something new, you have to get rid of something you already have. I have a friend who did this with shoes. She got a shoe rack and all of her shoes have to fit on the one rack. If she buys new, she has to get rid of a pair–if she doesn’t have any she wants to get rid of, she doesn’t buy new pairs.
Even if you do make a purchase, remember stores have return policies for a reason. You still have the opportunity to take it back {if it is unused, of course} if you get it home and feel remorse.
Establish a self-imposed layaway plan. Divide the cost of the item up over a month or several {this obviously applies to those bigger purchases}. Put money aside each week. If you don’t have money to put aside one week, the purchase date gets set back. If at the end of the “layaway” you have the money and still have the desire to purchase, you’ll know it’s a solid, guilt-free purchase.
Pay cash. Cash is still king. Using a credit card gives you instant gratification in that you get to have the item right away, but the bill still comes. Using cash may make you think harder about the purchase.

How about YOU, how do you avoid impulse purchases?

~Mavis

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Mavis Garden Blog – Fresh Dirt

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By Mavis Butterfield on January 15, 2014 · 17 Comments

I don’t know what it is about filling garden containers with fresh dirt that makes my heart sing, but it does. Maybe it’s knowing spring is right around the corner and pretty soon my backyard garden will be up and running at full speed again.

Some days I walk around the garden and shake my head at all that needs to be done.

Other days I just walk outside not knowing what the heck I’m going to do then somehow get a ton of garden chores done. I know I should make a list, but it seem less daunting {and more fun} to just head outside with Lucy the Puggle Dog in tow and pick up a shovel and start looking around for something to do.

Yesterday I spent a couple hours in the garden digging up 2 old garden beds and moving the dirt to the new lasagna garden.

Originally I was planning on replacing all 16 of my garden beds this winter, but after a lot of thought the HH and I decided instead of expanding we would reduce the size of our garden instead.

Yep, over the next few weeks we will remove 6 of our raised garden beds. This will give us a total of 10 4×8 raised garden beds, 1 lasagna garden, 1 greenhouse garden and a few containers to work with this year.
It will be our smallest garden we’ve had to work with since moving here 8 years ago but with everything going on this year I think it’s time to pull back a little.

Now, what do you think I should do with these steel drums?

I was kind of thinking they’d make a cool fire pit. What do you think?

~Mavis

This post may contain affiliate links. These affiliate links help support this site. For more information, please see my disclosure policy. Thank you for supporting One Hundred Dollars a Month.