http://wp.me/p7LpQN-BL ..read more

The Magic of an Apron. Want to know a secret? I wear an apron pretty much every day and I love it. Ladies, if you don’t wear an apron, you may be missing out on the forgotten magic of apron-wearing. I’m a nice person, and I’m pro-homemaking magic, so I can’t have you being all muggle in your routines. It would be sad. I have been wearing an apron almost every day for over a year now, and it changed my attitude and level of effectiveness as a homemaker. Who knew?! Here’s the deal: you can wear an apron only to protect your clothes when you are doing something you predict will be messy (utilita ..read more

Surviving the back-to-school season without resorting to convenience foods! How to make twenty-four to twenty-seven simple chicken freezer meals for your Instant Pot or crock pot in just a few hours. I prepared these recipes (chicken lentil stew, chicken white bean chili, Tuscan chicken stew, chicken veggie soup base, and chicken enchiladas) plus those from my fully prepared meal post and my ground beef post in the last few days using the planning method I explained here. You can do it too! Now I have roughly sixty total meals in my freezer to use when I can’t spend much time in the kitchen ..read more

Today I made between 24-27 meals and saved up to $1000.00. This is why I hassle with Instant Pot/Crock Pot freezer meals. The investment of time is absolutely worth it. In part one of this series, I explained how to do fully cooked freezer meals. In part two I helped you think through planning so you can apply the method to your own meals. Follow the links for more information. Here in part three, I am showing you how I do a freezer meal cooking session for ground beef/turkey meals in the Instant Pot and Crock Pot. On the day of cooking, these meals take mere minutes of hands on time to prepa ..read more

Welcome to post number two of how not to starve when your school schedules start back again. It’s a time of family transition for all of us and these meals make it so much easier on busy days. In my last post I told you how I do fully-prepared freezer meals, so check that out if you missed it. Today I am explaining how I plan for freezer meals you cook on the day you eat them. What You’ll Get: A freezer meal planning method you can apply to any of your own favorite recipes. These meals are prepared uncooked and then frozen. You cook them on the day you want to eat them. Links to the simple de ..read more

  Ready Or Not, It’s Coming. That’s right. September is coming. Back to school is happening in a few short weeks. On my long list of things to get done before we return to our homeschool schedule, this is an item of grave importance: Make Freezer Meals So You Don’t All Starve In September. Yep, I wrote that down, and I meant it. As a Remedial Homemaker, I know that a shift in our routine throws my family for a loop and I’ll take a while to adjust. We are launching into a new phase of our homeschooling, and it will demand a lot of my attention and time. Every year, as we are readjusting t ..read more

I feel cheated. Most of my life, my culture has screamed at me that to be “barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen” was the lowest, most scornful aim for a modern woman–and if a man were to want me there, well, he must be an abusive, pitiably stupid, Neanderthal. To be fair, I know resistance to this idea stems from beliefs that women are less valuable than men, or that they are only capable of domesticity–absurdly false ideas–but that doesn’t mean “barefoot and in the kitchen” is a bad place to be. It doesn’t mean it’s offensive for a husband to want his wife to embrace the kitchen as the sou ..read more

Diligence means more and does more than we’ve thought. Friends, it’s safe to read this. I promise I’m not about to push you down and give you one more thing to feel bad about. Go ahead and shelf your gut reactions to diligence in the context of homemaking for a minute, and have a chat with me. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. I never thought I, the truly remedial homemaker, would talk about diligence other than to say, “I wish I was a more diligent homemaker”, but here I am because I had a lightbulb moment reading through Proverbs this week. Hang with me here. This is so good! “The so ..read more

Did you see the post over at scarymommmy this morning? The author is talking about her frustration and exhaustion at being “the only neat freak in a house full of slobs”. She’s tired of being the only one who cares about the house, jealous of her sister who gets to live with people who give a crap and pick up after themselves, and she cries at the mess after just one day of relaxing hyper-vigilance. We hear that, don’t we? Can You Relate? Even as a self-professed remedial homemaker I can relate to the frustration of no one in the house caring as much as I do that it looks nice. I get frustrat ..read more

Yes, I emptied my dishwasher this morning. Wahoo! I’m practicing my current habit and it’s helping. Want to know something super embarrassing? It seriously only takes five minutes to empty a dishwasher in a tidy kitchen. I didn’t know that before consistently practicing this habit. How Is That Possible? How could I possibly not know how long it takes to empty a dishwasher? Simple. If I’m often “doing the dishes” when there two or three days worth and I unload as part of “doing the dishes”, then I never experience what it’s like to be caught up and have unloading the dishwasher be a separate t ..read more