Month: July 2024

august

august

August is one of my favorite months of the year.  Just the mention of it drums up an image in my mind of completely dry lawn the color of straw, ripened wild blackberries, salmon filets, salmon running in local rivers, fresh corn from local farms, 

SERIES:  salads and the wedge

SERIES: salads and the wedge

Week 5 of the summer salad series brings us to a classic – the wedge salad.  Although not an entrée salad, it is my favorite accompaniment to steak.  Blue cheese and red meat are a rich and decadent combination.  For this reason, the wedge is 

planning, an underrated “hack”

planning, an underrated “hack”

In a previous budgeting post, I shared that the best tool to manage your grocery spending is planning.  Most anything that you spend time on planning will have a better outcome.  Planning is the difference between success and happenstance.  Planning is an underrated hack.

There’s something about hacks that bother me.  We have to be careful of picking up the attitude or mindset that we can find shortcuts to everything.  Some things can’t be abbreviated, outsourced, or distilled down to an easier process.  Sometimes you have to take the hard approach, do the difficult thing, and do the right thing if you want a real outcome, a lasting habit, fulfillment, or satisfaction.  The accelerated pace of the world we live in during this point in history often looks down upon something that requires a lot of work, takes a lot of time, or induces a lot of failure in the process of learning.

California has a law that if you want to get a divorce, you have to wait six months to file paperwork.  What wisdom and yet a complete contrarian to the expectation in our culture that screams, “if I’ve made my decision, why should I have to wait any longer to move on?”  This would prevent many from dating for at least six months until their divorce was official.  Might be a good thing for someone exiting a broken marriage.  I’m not a marriage or emotional health professional, but the point is, that’s a long time of saying no to the thing you may want to do and yes to the thing you probably should do.  I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts where the host invited an entrepreneur in the fitness and nutrition industry to discuss healthy habits.  Much of their discussion revolved around the idea that everything is connected.  Good sleep leads to good health, eliminating alcohol, regular exercise, and good eating habits lead to good sleep.  There’s no shortcut around what we know and have known about human health for eternity – nutrition and fitness are critical elements.  They went on to discuss our culture of avoiding the hard stuff by creating hacks and how short-sighted and ineffective that approach is.  The host went so far as to say “you can’t ice bath your way out of a bottle of whiskey every night.”  That’s exactly it.  There are no shortcuts around the fundamentals in life.  So stop looking!  And instead spend the energy that you would watching endless Tik Tok videos doing the actual thing that’s proven to get you the actual result.

I recently listened to a sermon from a church that we love and have gleaned so much from over the last ten years.  The message was highlighting how God created us, in his image, to be like him, who make order out of chaos.  It highlighted how God, during the 6 days that he created all things, did exactly that – created divine order out of nothing.  If you think about all the arenas in life where we have responsibility (work, home, relationships, volunteering, and so many more), our primary role in each of them is create order out of chaos.  In our best form, we are creators just like our creator.  How exciting!

Here are some methods of planning that we’ve found very helpful as we manage our life, our goals, our time, and our money.

  • Vision Board
  • Goal Setting
  • Seasonal Bucket List
  • Calendaring
  • Budgeting
  • Meal Planning
  • Making a Grocery List

You can tackle each individually, but the interesting thing is that you’ll see how connected some are to another.

  • Vision board > Goal Setting > Seasonal Bucket List > Calendaring
  • Vision board > Goal Setting > Budgeting
  • Budgeting > Meal Planning > Grocery Shopping

VISION BOARD

A vision board is usually a one-page document or a cork board that includes a lot of images representing things that you want your life to be about and long-term dreams that you have for your future.  You can use a board, a statement, or a bulleted list – the form is less important.  These aren’t trends, someone else’s ideas, or things that you’ve just recently thought about.  Sometimes, they are the things that you’ve had deep in your heart for as long as you can remember.  They’re the things you were created for.  Other times, they can be things you’ve always found yourself gravitating toward as an adult.  The point is they are what you will aim the direction of your life toward, so make sure you like them and that they deeply resonate with you.  We were lucky enough to have someone older than us direct us toward developing a vision for our lives.  It has been a critical starting point for both goal setting and financial planning.

GOAL SETTING

Goals are the things that you want to accomplish in a defined period of time.  We like to set them annually and post them on the refrigerator, so that we can keep them in front of us.  Some of your goals should take you closer to your vision.  Others can be focused on personal development, things you’re interested in, physical challenges you want to set, etc.  Goals will help you be thoughtful about how you spend your time.  They’ll help you prioritize accomplishing the things that are important to you versus wasting time away on things that really don’t matter.

SEASONAL BUCKET LIST

These are just fun!  We’ve started using them ahead of each of the four seasons to list out fun things that we want to accomplish in that season.  I love it when life is seasonally driven, and I can adjust my activities to take full advantage of things that are only available in those months of the year.  Summer feels like it’s only two months – July and August.  That’s 8 weeks, and only 16 weekend days.  When summer comes, I want to suck every last drop out of the vine-ripened tomatoes, local corn, hikes in the sub alpine, floats down the river casting an elk hair caddis or chubby Chernobyl toward rising trout.  There’s no time like it.  So, I write down the activities I love, make the sacrifice it takes to prepare for them and make an effort to put away the things that chop up my time into small meaningless bits that we like to call time confetti.  Things like running errands that I can do much more efficiently, YouTube videos, social media, etc.  Somehow those never make the seasonal bucket list.

CALENDARING

Everybody has a calendar that they manage, many of us have multiple calendars depending on how many responsibilities we have.  And sometimes it feels like the calendar is managing to us rather than us managing the calendar.  In seasons like summer, where my bucket list is long and time is limited, it helps if I calendar out everything I value most.  Time is the most valuable resource we have and when we realize how limited it is, planning becomes a critical discipline to manage my most valuable resource.  Then, when something comes up, I can say yes or no, and still feel like I managed what I did with my time versus someone else managing it for me, or summer just happening to me.

BUDGETING

I’ve talked a lot about budgeting on the blog already.  What I will say in the context of planning is that budgeting is a tool to fuel our vision.  Budgeting prioritizes our finances so that they’re specifically targeted at funding the most critical priorities we have.  Like calendaring, it takes all your limited financial resources and directs them toward what is most important to you.  So instead of spending whatever we want eating out without knowledge of what we’re spending, it targets every dollar toward what we envision for our future.  This includes our seasonal bucket list – if we have a summer trip on that list, we fund it with our budget because it’s important to us.  That could include anything you want to do.  The point is you’re leveraging your finances, and creating a plan around them, so that you can financially do the things that are important to you.

MEAL PLANNING

Meal planning helps you prioritize your time – it minimizes trips to the grocery store.  And it helps you prioritize your food budget.  If you have the ingredients you need to cook a meal you like, you won’t be left scrambling at the end of the day, resorting to ordering takeout because who wants to go grocery shopping and then cook a meal after a busy workday? 

GROCERY LIST

A grocery list is a direct outcome of meal planning.  It’s hard to make an informed list without having a plan about what you’re going to cook.  But if you can make a list, you can confidently shop knowing that what you put in your cart and what you spend your money on will be utilized efficiently.  Ideally, you’ll have just what you need for the week ahead, nothing more and nothing less.

everything bagels

everything bagels

A freshly made everything bagel toasted and topped with plain Philadelphia cream cheese, alongside a cup of coffee.  It’s a satisfying thing.  Any Starbucks CHONGA (acronym for cheese, onion, garlic) bagel lovers out there?  The catalyst for making bagels at home was two-fold.  We were 

SERIES: salads and modena salad

SERIES: salads and modena salad

One of my first posts was dedicated to vinaigrettes.  It walked through a guide on how you can freestyle vinaigrettes once you understand the relationship between the ingredients and what role each ingredient plays (i.e. acid, emulsifier, fat, etc.).  In that guide, I provided balsamic 

chorizo breakfast burritos

chorizo breakfast burritos

I associate breakfast burritos with being on the go – heading to some sort of adventure.  I love road trips, I love camping, and I love weekend adventures.  And sometimes those things call for early mornings on the road where you just need someone else to make your breakfast and your coffee for you.  So good coffee shops (that offer dark roast coffee mind you, don’t get me started) that have either killer breakfast burritos or breakfast sandwiches will spur in me the ability to stave off hunger until I can get to them or go out of my way to visit them.  They become a memory of the road trip or adventure in and of themselves.  So much so, that when someone says breakfast burrito, the immediate memory that usually comes to mind is a coffee shop in McCall, Idaho that I visited with friends probably 15 years ago where I had a great breakfast burrito and a great cup of coffee on my way to some adventure because that’s what you do in places like McCall.

Trips, food, and experiences outside our homes inspire what we do inside our homes.  That’s the beauty of the balance of time away and time at home.  Both are necessary and the balance is delicate.  It’s like adjusting the focus on a nice set of binoculars, it just needs a slight adjustment to be either in or out of focus. 

Breakfast burritos are like pizza or enchiladas or tacos – you can make 1,000 variations of them that are all good.  This is a recipe that we’ve discovered and love to make at home.  The recipe takes you through turning ground pork into chorizo.  I don’t know about you, but every store-bought version of chorizo I’ve had is really greasy and not very meaty.  This is the opposite.

Chorizo Breakfast Burritos
Yield: 8 servings

Chorizo Breakfast Burritos

These are one version of a killer breakfast burrito. They'll take you straight to a mountain town coffee shop that serves breakfast burritos (at least that's what they do for me)!

Ingredients

Potatoes

  • 2 russet potatoes, diced
  • 2 TSP chili powder
  • olive oil
  • salt & pepper

Chorizo (see note)

  • 2 LBS ground pork
  • 4 dried Ancho chiles
  • 5 dried New Mexico chiles
  • 1/2 yellow onion
  • 3 cloves of garlic
  • 1 TSP dried oregano
  • 1/2 TSP ground cumin
  • 1 TBSP salt
  • Freshly ground pepper
  • 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
  • splash of water

Burritos

  • 1/2 onion, finely chopped
  • 2 jalapenos, finely chopped
  • 16 eggs
  • 8 flour tortillas
  • cheese (cotija, jack, or cheddar)
  • 1 TSP salt
  • black pepper
  • salsa or hot sauce of choice

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 400F. Combine the potato ingredients in a bowl and toss to coat well. Bake in the oven for 25 minutes, flipping them about halfway through. Set aside after cooking.

To make the chorizo. Destem and deseed the chiles and toast them in a hot skillet for 60 seconds. Place them in a bowl and cover with hot tap water. Place a small bowl or plate on top of the chiles to keep them submerged. Allow to soak for 30 minutes. Drain the chiles and discard the soaking liquid. Add the chiles to a blender along with the remianing ingredients (except the pork). Blend until if forms a thick paste. Combine the paste with the ground pork. Divide into two 1-LB servings, freeze one and sauté the other pound in a skillet for this recipe.

Saute the onion and jalapeno over medium heat until tender. Whisk the eggs and add to the onion mixture along with salt and pepper, cooking over medium heat until done. Set aside.

To build the burritos, heat up a tortilla in a hot skillet. Add the eggs, potatoes, chorizo, cheese and salsa or hot sauce of choice. Roll tight and saute in a dry skillet until each side is crispy and golden brown. Serve immediately.

Notes

Chorizo: You don't have to make this, feel free to buy it for a shortcut.

Inspired by: The Fogglifter Cafe (McCall, ID) and mexicanplease.com

whole wheat & oat waffles

whole wheat & oat waffles

We definitely prefer a protein-based breakfast.  It just feels like it sticks with you longer than carbohydrates.  But every once in a while, it’s fun to have waffles or pancakes.  While a bit healthier, this is actually our “go-to” waffle recipe because it’s so good!  

SERIES: salads and tuscan bread salad

SERIES: salads and tuscan bread salad

Week 3 of the summer salad series brings us a Tuscan bread salad.  Although you can make this anytime of year, this salad shines when basil, tomatoes, and romaine are in season in the local produce stands or your home garden.  This recipe was inspired 

steak au poivre and frites

steak au poivre and frites

Steak au poivre wasn’t anything I’d ever had before until I heard of a couple of people talking about it.  It was around the time of my birthday, so I requested it as my birthday dinner.  Mike is a great cook and was gracious enough to make it for us.  There are few things that I like better than steak frites.  I enjoy buying cuts of hanger steak, seasoning them well, grilling them and serving alongside some homemade shoestring fries.  Au poivre just ups the ante with a delicious sauce and makes it feel extra special.  I hope your celebratory days are filled with treats like steak au poivre and frites.

Steak Au Poivre & Frites
Yield: 2 servings

Steak Au Poivre & Frites

This is a delicious treat of a meal that will make you want to choose it for celebrations!

Ingredients

  • 2 steaks of choice (I prefer Hanger or Tenderloin)

Au Poivre

  • 1-2 TBSP olive oil
  • 1 shallot, minced
  • 1/2 cup chicken stock
  • 1/4 cup cognac or brandy
  • 1/2 cup heavy cream
  • 1 TBSP butter
  • salt

Frites

  • 2 russet potatoes, sliced into 1/8" or smaller matchsticks
  • olive oil
  • salt

Instructions

To make the sauce, heat the oil in a saute pan over medium heat. Add the shallots cooking just until they're soft. Next add the chicken stock and cognac. Cook to reduce to half (5-10 minutes). Add the cream and reduce by half again. Set aside until ready to serve.

Grill the steaks to your desired doneness.

Preheat the oven to 425F and toss potatoes in olive oil atop a parchment lined baking sheet. Salt generously and bake for 15-20 minutes or until adequately crispy. Be sure to space the potatoes out well and flip halfway through.

Serve the steak with the sauce and frites!

Notes

Inspired by: Cree LeFavour & Shaye Elliott

blueberry muffins

blueberry muffins

Nothing says Saturday morning like a blueberry muffin with a cup of coffee.  If you’re in need of a blueberry muffin recipe, look no further.  Honestly, this is the best blueberry muffin I’ve ever had.  Serve alongside some scrambled eggs and it makes a breakfast.