Today's fitness check is part physical and part fiscal. For the physical half, I'm afraid J and I had had a busy week and only exercised once. So, yay for 2.5 miles walked! The other half of the eat less-move more equation is driven by the fiscal part of this check in.
J and I usually have fiscal freak-outs this time of year (the impending holidays/only 100 days 'til Christmas nonsense probably plays into that), so this one is right on cue. Lucky for us, this year's freak-out has actual data to support it!
Last January we signed up for mint.com. This is an awesome (free!) tool for budgeting, as it tracks every expense and every account (checking, savings, mortgage, loans, credit cards, etc.) in one place. The other day, we pulled our monthly average spending by catergory for the year. Most of our spending is pretty much non-variable (and mostly non-negotiable, like our mortgage, life insurance, and utilities). Other catergories are mostly non-variable with 'emergency' exceptions (for example, gas doesn't really vary, but new shocks for my car threw a wrench in the 'transportation' average; prescriptions don't vary, but wisdom teeth removal for J and a crown for me totally jacked up our 'health' budget). Now, we know that our emergency fund is supposed to be used for those expenses, but we aren't very good at actually taking money out of the e-fund except for when we really need to, and it takes way longer to build up than to spend it. Anyhow, after you account for our spending in those categories, you're left with food and entertainment. 'Entertainment' accounts for our individual hobbies for which spending doesn't vary too much, but we did notice that 'joint entertainment' has had some high peaks this year (Harry Connick, Jr. and the Kentucky Dinner Train to name two), but also that we go out to eat together a lot. Just going out for dinner is categorized as 'food', but going out with friends or going to the Movie Tavern usually gets dumped into 'joint entertainment'. Those expenses, together with our outragously huge food spending (for two people), made us realize where we have got to cut back ("eat less-move more").
Hence, our new food budget to ensure we eat less. Y'all. We've cut out food budget by two-thirds. We've left one or two outings a month together, plus lunch out for each of us once a week, but otherwise our food spending will happen at the grocery store, and even then it will be limited to $50 a week. (Yikes. We're totally not ready for our Extreme Couponing episode.) We did a practice run the other day, and I found I was able to get quite a bit for $50 (mostly at Aldi and without couponing). J has been cooking down his own stock for soups and making chili, which lasts for several meals, and is awesome. We're going to try to do this for a month, then we'll re-evaluate and go from there. Maybe we can start some healthy new habits with this shopping restriction. Wish us luck!
How do you budget? Do you use tools like mint? Or the old-fashioned envelope system?
Friday, September 30, 2011
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Thankful Thursday--September 29
Y'all know there is just one big thing for me to be thankful for this week (Okay, not true--I have lots more to be thankful for, but today, this is what is on my mind). Today marks four years of marriage to the best husband a girl could hope for. Happy Anniversary J!
(I couldn't pick just one picture for the whole four years, so I picked one from our wedding day and one from each of the last four anniversary picture sessions. Enjoy!)
(I couldn't pick just one picture for the whole four years, so I picked one from our wedding day and one from each of the last four anniversary picture sessions. Enjoy!)
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Fall Flowers
One of my favorite things about our church is birthday/anniversary blessings. On the week before (or after) your birthday (or anniversary), you get a special blessing from the priest before the eucharist. This week, there were two couples getting anniversary blessings (both of us with the same wedding day!), and after the service a member of the altar guild gave each couple the flowers from the altar. Aren't they just a beautiful example of fall??
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
The Very Hungry Caterpillar Cake
I thought about making this post a How To's-day post, but I don't think I'm qualified to tell you how to make/decorate a caterpillar cake of your own. I'll just share how I made my cakes, and if you're at all cake-decorating-inclined, you'll be able to figure it out from there.
So for starters, the planning for this cake started in May, when Baby E's momma approached me with the theme for his first birthday party. The theme? The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the children's book by Eric Carle. I immediately thought a cake with the food items the hungry caterpillar ate placed on the border would be adorable. That day, I sketched a cake in MS Paint to share (click to enlarge).
Cute, huh? Wait until you see the finished product!
So for starters, this is a lot of cake. Baby E's momma told me to plan for 25 adults and 15 children (Baby E is pretty seriously loved). Because of the fondant food pieces on the side of the cake, I knew I wanted to make a double layer cake, and I knew I wanted to make it half-chocolate/half-yellow cake to satisfy both preferences. To make it a little easier on me, I baked two 9x13 cakes in each flavor (rather than making a half-sheet cake in each flavor, then cutting each in half to stack),then I basically placed my two layer cakes right next to each other to make my two-layer half-sheet cake.
I frosted the cake with vanilla buttercream, and I am thrilled to report that I've finally figured out the correct timing for maximum whippy-ness in my frosting. Roughly five minutes in the stand mixer with just shortening, water and vanilla, then another five to seven minutes with the powdered sugar added is about perfect! (2 cups shortening, 2 tsp vanilla, 1/4 cup water, and just short of two pounds sugar) I think it took three batches to frost the cake (including filling), fill and frost the smash cake, and do the decorating on both. I also used some of this frosting to make the oversized cake pops that make up the caterpillar on top of the main cake. Those were not terribly successfully, and I think it had something to do with my extra-whippy homemade frosting.
To make the food pieces around the sides of the main cake, I feel like I kind of cheated. First, I purchased Wilton's pre-colored fondant so that I'd at least have primary colors to get started. The pictures in the book are beautiful and textural, so I knew I'd want to blend colors in a choppy way, and starting with pre-mixed primary colors helped me do that. Second, I used the book itself as my guide, rather than free-handing each shape. I scanned the pages that show the fruit into MS Paint and outlined each shape. Then, I deleted the the color and printed out outlines (I'm sure there is an easier way to do this, but this worked for me). I sized the shapes as a group so that they would retain their scale and made the largest pieces just shorter than the height of the cake. Then, I cut out each piece from my printout (cutting shapes apart for different colors as needed) and then placed each stencil on top of a rolled out piece of fondant to cut around.
When it was time to put the cake together, I cut out the hole the caterpillar went through and pasted the shape onto my cake using a liquid glue made of gumpaste and water. I waited to cut out the holes so I could intentionally put them in different places. This was one of the few times I went totally off-script and didn't always place the holes where they were in the book. After I'd put all of the pieces on the sides, I went back and hollowed out the hole area with a toothpick. This way, you could see all the way down the hole to the cake, and it looked like the caterpillar was eating his way through. (It was also a pretty useful way to see which half of the cake was the chocolate half and which was yellow!)
I mentioned above that the caterpillar on top was made of oversized cake pops (Go here to see what the heck a Cake Pop is and how to make your own). A. You probably should not try to make them twice as big as recommended. B. Use store bought frosting, or add a lot of extra sugar to your frosting to make it much stiffer before making your cake pops. C. You might ought to let your cake dry out a bit. Mine was fabulously moist, which probably didn't help the cake pop. Just my thoughts. I basically had to keep mine frozen until just before the party, and I had to give up on the 'pop' idea. The melted chocolate and frosting mess pretty much had to be shoveled off the cake before slicing (but it looked good on the cake, and isn't that what counts?).
To cover the cake pops, I put the frosting in a glass and rolled the ball around in it. Then, I used a knife to tap the frosting and make it stand up like the hairs on the caterpillar's back. I formed the antennae out of an extra cake pop that I didn't think I needed on the cake.
The smash cake almost felt like an afterthought because it was so easy to make, compared to the detail-oriented main cake. I think the idea of a caterpillar (at least, green worm) eating through an apple isn't specific to this book, but you don't often see a caterpillar on an orange, so I did that for the smash cake. This was just a double layer 6-inch round cake that I shaped a bit at the top to make it a little more orange-shaped. After the frosting set a bit, I went back and added dimples all over.
So there you have it, my take on The Very Hungry Caterpillar, in cake form!
So for starters, the planning for this cake started in May, when Baby E's momma approached me with the theme for his first birthday party. The theme? The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the children's book by Eric Carle. I immediately thought a cake with the food items the hungry caterpillar ate placed on the border would be adorable. That day, I sketched a cake in MS Paint to share (click to enlarge).
So for starters, this is a lot of cake. Baby E's momma told me to plan for 25 adults and 15 children (Baby E is pretty seriously loved). Because of the fondant food pieces on the side of the cake, I knew I wanted to make a double layer cake, and I knew I wanted to make it half-chocolate/half-yellow cake to satisfy both preferences. To make it a little easier on me, I baked two 9x13 cakes in each flavor (rather than making a half-sheet cake in each flavor, then cutting each in half to stack),then I basically placed my two layer cakes right next to each other to make my two-layer half-sheet cake.
I frosted the cake with vanilla buttercream, and I am thrilled to report that I've finally figured out the correct timing for maximum whippy-ness in my frosting. Roughly five minutes in the stand mixer with just shortening, water and vanilla, then another five to seven minutes with the powdered sugar added is about perfect! (2 cups shortening, 2 tsp vanilla, 1/4 cup water, and just short of two pounds sugar) I think it took three batches to frost the cake (including filling), fill and frost the smash cake, and do the decorating on both. I also used some of this frosting to make the oversized cake pops that make up the caterpillar on top of the main cake. Those were not terribly successfully, and I think it had something to do with my extra-whippy homemade frosting.
To make the food pieces around the sides of the main cake, I feel like I kind of cheated. First, I purchased Wilton's pre-colored fondant so that I'd at least have primary colors to get started. The pictures in the book are beautiful and textural, so I knew I'd want to blend colors in a choppy way, and starting with pre-mixed primary colors helped me do that. Second, I used the book itself as my guide, rather than free-handing each shape. I scanned the pages that show the fruit into MS Paint and outlined each shape. Then, I deleted the the color and printed out outlines (I'm sure there is an easier way to do this, but this worked for me). I sized the shapes as a group so that they would retain their scale and made the largest pieces just shorter than the height of the cake. Then, I cut out each piece from my printout (cutting shapes apart for different colors as needed) and then placed each stencil on top of a rolled out piece of fondant to cut around.
When it was time to put the cake together, I cut out the hole the caterpillar went through and pasted the shape onto my cake using a liquid glue made of gumpaste and water. I waited to cut out the holes so I could intentionally put them in different places. This was one of the few times I went totally off-script and didn't always place the holes where they were in the book. After I'd put all of the pieces on the sides, I went back and hollowed out the hole area with a toothpick. This way, you could see all the way down the hole to the cake, and it looked like the caterpillar was eating his way through. (It was also a pretty useful way to see which half of the cake was the chocolate half and which was yellow!)
I mentioned above that the caterpillar on top was made of oversized cake pops (Go here to see what the heck a Cake Pop is and how to make your own). A. You probably should not try to make them twice as big as recommended. B. Use store bought frosting, or add a lot of extra sugar to your frosting to make it much stiffer before making your cake pops. C. You might ought to let your cake dry out a bit. Mine was fabulously moist, which probably didn't help the cake pop. Just my thoughts. I basically had to keep mine frozen until just before the party, and I had to give up on the 'pop' idea. The melted chocolate and frosting mess pretty much had to be shoveled off the cake before slicing (but it looked good on the cake, and isn't that what counts?).
To cover the cake pops, I put the frosting in a glass and rolled the ball around in it. Then, I used a knife to tap the frosting and make it stand up like the hairs on the caterpillar's back. I formed the antennae out of an extra cake pop that I didn't think I needed on the cake.
The smash cake almost felt like an afterthought because it was so easy to make, compared to the detail-oriented main cake. I think the idea of a caterpillar (at least, green worm) eating through an apple isn't specific to this book, but you don't often see a caterpillar on an orange, so I did that for the smash cake. This was just a double layer 6-inch round cake that I shaped a bit at the top to make it a little more orange-shaped. After the frosting set a bit, I went back and added dimples all over.
So there you have it, my take on The Very Hungry Caterpillar, in cake form!
Monday, September 26, 2011
MP Summer To Do List Wrap-Up
Edit: When I was on top of posting daily, my mom would email me mid-morning to let me know my post wasn't up. Now that I'm sort of off that wagon, I guess she doesn't know to remind me when posts don't post as scheduled. Anyhow, here's Monday's post!
Y'all. Summer was not a productive season around the MP. Remember my list for the season--here and here? Well, we crossed off some things, and added a few things that didn't make the initial list. And there's still technically one week left of September (humor me) so maybe I'll cross something else off the list before it officially rolls over to my Fall list.
Here's where we are (added items in red):
Y'all. Summer was not a productive season around the MP. Remember my list for the season--here and here? Well, we crossed off some things, and added a few things that didn't make the initial list. And there's still technically one week left of September (humor me) so maybe I'll cross something else off the list before it officially rolls over to my Fall list.
Here's where we are (added items in red):
- Have new gutters installed
- Move the shed out back
- Replace the deck (best case scenario)
Clean and rearrange the laundry room- Finish the library built-ins
- Paint/Replace shutters
Replace doorbellAddress brass porch light (replace or paint black)Buy/build black trellis for roses- Build pretty new mailbox post
- Put down weed-preventing fabric/mulch and pavers in front beds (HALF-DONE)
Check back next week to see if anything else gets crossed off before I introduce our Fall list!
Sunday, September 25, 2011
September Sunday
One of the things I love about living in this part of the world is that you can never guess what the weather is going to be in the fall (or spring). A couple of weeks ago it was rainy and cool (and I loved it!). Today, we had a beautiful warm fall afternoon (and I loved it!). It was especially nice to have clear skies today since we had an outside birthday party (for baby E--I'll show you pictures on Tuesday) as well as our anniversary pictures (also outside).
I probably could have gotten away with short sleeves and shorts today like most of the party attendees, but I really, really wanted to go fall for the pictures. Lucky for me, it was one of those beautiful fall days that are warm enough for shorts, but cool enough that a turtleneck and jeans aren't entirely out of place! J and I had a great time with our photographer (anyone in Central KY, I highly recommend J.A. Laub Photography) at the Arboretum this afternoon. Abby photographed our wedding reception four years ago, and we've reconnected with her every year since to capture our anniversary (or some moment close to our anniversary). I can't wait to see the results from today's pictures. We goofed off a lot; we'll see if she got anything worthy of this year's Chistmas card!
I probably could have gotten away with short sleeves and shorts today like most of the party attendees, but I really, really wanted to go fall for the pictures. Lucky for me, it was one of those beautiful fall days that are warm enough for shorts, but cool enough that a turtleneck and jeans aren't entirely out of place! J and I had a great time with our photographer (anyone in Central KY, I highly recommend J.A. Laub Photography) at the Arboretum this afternoon. Abby photographed our wedding reception four years ago, and we've reconnected with her every year since to capture our anniversary (or some moment close to our anniversary). I can't wait to see the results from today's pictures. We goofed off a lot; we'll see if she got anything worthy of this year's Chistmas card!
Friday, September 23, 2011
Welcome to Fitness Friday
Hi everyone! So back in the summer of 2009, J and I started a new exercise regime, that led to some pretty decent weight loss on my part (50 pounds over the course of a year) and to both of us feeling better about ourselves. Then I quite my job and gained ten pounds the next month. And then winter rolled around and I gained ten more. And then spring rolled around and I gained five more. And then I crash dieted 10-15 pounds off. And then they came back.
I the meantime, J started Atkins last April and has lost 40 pounds. He's now the weight that I was at my heaviest (though not my current weight, if you followed the second-grade-math word problem up there). I'm more than a little freaked out about that.
Then, last week, we took a walk on the trail around the park behind our house. For the first time in almost a year, the 2.5 mile trail totally wore me out. Translation? I'm out of shape. So, since I've been struggling with my Friday posts, I decided to add a new category to Finicky Fridays. I thought about calling it Fatty Fridays, but J tells me that's negative self talk (something we avoid here at the MP). Then I decided on Fitness Friday (since that's what we're going for). And I thought maybe I'd do it on the first Friday of the month (since it's all alliterative), but then I thought that maybe I should do fourth or fifth Friday instead. Then, I remembered that since the over-arching Friday theme is Finicky, it really doesn't matter when I decide to post a Fitness Friday post. So you can look for them on Fridays. Next time I'll think about actually sharing stats. Feel free to join the fun.
I the meantime, J started Atkins last April and has lost 40 pounds. He's now the weight that I was at my heaviest (though not my current weight, if you followed the second-grade-math word problem up there). I'm more than a little freaked out about that.
Then, last week, we took a walk on the trail around the park behind our house. For the first time in almost a year, the 2.5 mile trail totally wore me out. Translation? I'm out of shape. So, since I've been struggling with my Friday posts, I decided to add a new category to Finicky Fridays. I thought about calling it Fatty Fridays, but J tells me that's negative self talk (something we avoid here at the MP). Then I decided on Fitness Friday (since that's what we're going for). And I thought maybe I'd do it on the first Friday of the month (since it's all alliterative), but then I thought that maybe I should do fourth or fifth Friday instead. Then, I remembered that since the over-arching Friday theme is Finicky, it really doesn't matter when I decide to post a Fitness Friday post. So you can look for them on Fridays. Next time I'll think about actually sharing stats. Feel free to join the fun.
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