First Attempt with the Instant Pot

Well, I bit the bullet and used my new Instant Pot today. I made chicken broth because I had all the ingredients on hand and I wanted to compare it to my crockpot recipe.

The Instant Pot wasn't nearly as complicated as I thought it would be. When I first read the instructions, I felt seriously overwhelmed but once I started actually doing it, it was pretty self explanatory. Just go step by step and it works.

Step One - Put all the ingredients and the liquid in the pot.

Step Two - Twist the lid until it latches and you can't lift it up anymore.

Step Three -  Make sure the Steam Valve is set to Sealing.

Step Four - Push the button you need to use and then press Adjust and then the + or - sign to change the timer. Since I was making broth, I pressed Soup and then adjusted the time to two hours.

Step Five - Wait a minute and it'll beep and start all on it's own.

I swear, if the manual was formatted like this, I wouldn't have stressed out about it nearly as much. It's pretty much as easy as a crockpot with just a few extra steps.

Then, when the food was done, the Instant Pot beeps again and the timer switches over to let you know how long to leave it for a Natural Release. The Natural Release basically means you leave it alone for 10 to 15 minutes and the pressure releases (mostly) on it's own. You still flip the valve over to Venting right before you open the lid to prevent suction but that's it.

If you need to open the Instant Pot right away, you use the Quick Release method instead. For that, all you do is flip the valve over to Venting right after the Instant Pot beeps to alert you that it is done cooking. Steam comes shooting out (Be careful) and when enough pressure is released, the valve drops and you can open the lid.

It's not nearly as complicated as the manual makes it seem and that makes it much more likely that I will use this new contraption often. Yay for sisters who buy you cool presents like an Instant Pot.

Also, the broth was just as good as my crockpot version. It was rich and flavorful and all around better than store bought. And made in 22 hours less time. WOW.

Best Sister Ever

Months and months ago, my sister got an Instant Pot for Valentines day and she's been singing the praises ever since. In case you don't know, an Instant Pot is a type of electric pressure cooker with six other functions like a slow cooker, yogurt maker, rice maker, etc.

I was curious about my sister's Instant Pot but I didn't plan on ever buying one. Pressure cookers kind of intimidate me and I couldn't imagine adding another gadget to my kitchen. Plus, they're a little expensive for a student budget.

Then I went to visit my sister this spring. Oh how I stared at this thing! My envy started growing by the day. My sister and I talked numerous times about how I needed to start saving for one.

Then came Prime Day when I saw they were almost 50% off. I quickly double checked my bank account ... and realized I couldn't do it. Waaaaah. So like any normal sister, I texted my sister the link with this message, "I want it, I need it, I can't afford it. BOOOOO."

She boo'd back and I moved on. Two days later, I come outside to a huge box from Amazon and can't figure out what the heck I had bought. Yup, she bought it for me.

Now, just in case you don't understand my surprise, my family doesn't really give gifts. My mom stopped giving us Christmas and birthday presents when I was nine and my sister was seven. My sister and I go years without exchanging gifts. AND THIS WASN'T EVEN MY BIRTHDAY. I was so surprised!

The included note said Happy Birthday, Merry Christmas, and Happy Kwanza! Which really shows how rare it is for us to buy each other gifts.

I'm so excited but I'm also slightly terrified of this thing. I added all the ingredients to make bone broth and then chickened out and put the inner bowl in the fridge. Yesterday. I've read the instruction manual 3 times and I still don't understand how to make it work.

Help!

Batch Cooking Fail?

I have been craving bean burritos like crazy lately. Generally my cravings aren't a problem but because Fiancé is allergic to beans, I knew I wouldn't be making them for dinner anytime soon.

Then I ran across this recipe for budget freezer burritos. I was sold. Super cheap, burritos and freezer cooking? How could I not be.

So I went to Aldi's and bought all the ingredients for a grand total of $8.24 and came home and made 18 bean and cheese burritos. My cost was only 45 cents per burrito! This should totally be a batch cooking win right?

No. Apparently when you don't eat beans for a long time (say because your fiancé is allergic to them and you don't buy them) your body forgets how to digest them. My neighbor ate one and is perfectly fine. I ate one and I feel like I'm dying. It's been over 24 hours and I still feel blah.

And I have 16 burritos left. I think I am going to see if I can slowly reintroduce beans to my diet so I can eat these. They are REALLY GOOD.  I spent a long time Googling last night and apparently other people have had the same problem and they could fix it. Here's hoping!

Finances Update

Last December I wrote a post about how Fiancé and I had dug ourselves into a financial hole that was rapidly getting too deep. Digging us out of a hole

After half a year, I decided to see how we did. Law school is expensive in so many ways that don't include tuition and books and it only gets worse the farther along I go.

I had six goals and only about half were a complete success.

GOAL ONE: Stop Eating Out - This one was mostly a success. We had a few hiccups when I got stressed around due dates and finals but overall, we ate at home way more often. In general, I do most of the cooking because fiancé isn't very good at meal planning. However, he made it a point to have the ingredients for the couple meals he does well and if I didn't have time to cook, he made the time. I also found a few really frugal meal ideals that drastically stretched our food dollars. I will probably write about that later.

GOAL TWO: Batch Cook Easy Cheap Meals - Definitely a success. I get email alerts for the weekend sales at Winn Dixie and when they had chicken leg quarters on sale for 25 cents a pound, I bought 20 pounds of chicken! It sounds insane but I broke it down into about 12 different freezer bags and each one had a different sauce. I had BBQ, Italian, Teriyaki, Sweet and Sour and many others. Then all I had to do was throw it in the crockpot before class and make rice or noodles when I got home. The sauces were all inexpensive marinades bought on sale so dinner cost between 2 to 4 dollars total (depending on the vegetable) and we usually had two or three days worth of leftovers. We obviously didn't always eat chicken but I made a couple ground beef and pasta freezer meals as well and the whole freezer lasted us months.

GOAL THREE: Work More Hours - Well, this was an utter failure on my part but was a success for Fiancé. My job ended shortly after the new semester and due to my insane course load, I didn't really see how I could get a new one. Fiancé found a new, great paying job and kept his part time one on top of it. That was a fabulous financial decision because a couple months later, his department at the new job shut down and he was back looking for a job. Him keeping his part time job really saved us a lot of stress.

GOAL FOUR: Stop Being A Crutch For The Other - Success! So the last couple years, we had had so many family emergencies, surgeries, and long periods of unemployment that we had stopped budgeting and splitting the bills. Whoever had more money would pay the bill and then when they were broke, they'd look to the other person to save the day. We have stabilized quite a bit and so have not had to fall into that trap for quite a while. We split all bills 50/50 so we are more able to anticipate future bills and budgets. As a consequence, we don't end up flat broke quite so often.

GOAL FIVE: Keep Our Bills Low - Until last month, this was definitely a success. We cut out all sorts of unnecessary bills before the New Year and didn't add any of them back. Then, we got overconfident. Fiancé's job was going well, I was employed for the summer and we had lived in Florida for two years and had never gone to Disney World. Yup, we ended up signing up for the annual pass (which is paid for monthly). Four days later, we found out his department was getting shut down. Oops. So this got downgraded to better but not a success. We should have put that extra money on our credit cards but we got caught up with the Disney excitement. You live and learn.

GOAL SIX: Pay Off Credit Cards - Failure. Complete failure on both our parts. My balance is pretty much the same as it was last December and I think Fiancé's is a little higher. On my part, I tried to pay more than the minimum due but couldn't always manage it. Then I forgot about some annual bills that were linked to my credit card instead of my debit and that pretty much undid all the work I had done on it. Fiancé did really, really well on paying down his credit cards but then his mom came to visit for the first time since we moved out here. He wanted to show her all the things he loves about Florida and he put it all on his credit card. Sigh.

Overall, I'd say we did better that we had been but we still have so much to work on. We obviously need to focus on our credit cards and keeping within our budget for food and such. We also have a friend coming to visit us this summer so I hope we can budget for that instead of going crazy with expensive ideas.

One thing that wasn't exactly a goal but I am glad I started doing was finding small ways to bring in extra money. Not necessarily jobs but small things like getting paid for research studies (not medical or anything) or mail in surveys (pays better than online ones but aren't as easy to find) and saving gift cards for expenses instead of using them to splurge on things we didn't need. I even started getting small gift cards (think 5 dollar walmart ones) by switching from searching on Google to searching on smaller, less known search engines. After awhile, those five dollar gift cards add up.

I also make it a point to use coupons on the necessities that I tend to forget that I will need. Every couple weeks I cut out the coupons for makeup, paper towels, soap and the like. When I need to buy something, I look at my coupon pile first and then spend a few minutes trying to find a store coupon that matches. If I can find a store sale at the same time, so much the better. In the last week, I bought Pantene shampoo and conditioner at $1.67 a bottle because I had two coupons and a store deal. I also used my CVS extra care bucks and a coupon to buy paper towels where it actually put more money in my pocket than I spent. CVS had the big pack of Bounty paper towels for ten dollars and I used two five dollar extra care bucks plus a dollar off coupon. Because my savings were more than the cost, I got a couple cans of dog food. I paid a $1.54 but got 10 new extra care bucks to spend on whatever I want. Eggs, toilet paper, frozen pizza, whatever I need. Think about that for a second, I paid a little over a dollar and a half for a 12 pack of paper towels and dog food and got ten dollars to spend on anything (except alcohol) at CVS. If I had just waited until we were out of paper towels and picked some up without a plan, I would have paid ten dollars, wouldn't have had dog food, and wouldn't have ten extra care bucks to spend on next weeks random need. What a waste!

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Digging us out of a hole

I bet you thought that if I hid from the blogging world for months, I'd come back and blog about law school. (The blog is called Taking On Law School after all) But you would think wrong.

I'm going to talk about finances and confess how Fiancé and I dug ourselves into a hole this last year that we now have to find a way out of. Between Fiancé bouncing back and forth across the entire nation due to family issues, unexpected unemployment, one surgery (mine), one significant back injury (his) and the feast and famine aspect of living off my student loan check twice a year, well, we put more debt on credit cards than any one couple should ever have. This last month has been the worst in the seven years we've been together. Fiancé injured his back in November and couldn't work for two weeks. In the almost eight years I've known him, he's called in sick one time. ONCE. Since we were already living paycheck to paycheck to pay back everything from my surgery and me not being able to work for awhile, this knocked us out of the game. For the first time in my life, I had to borrow rent money. We immediately cut every bill we possibly could, stopped buying food and canceled Christmas. I also doubled my work hours two weeks before finals. I had to do what I had to do and I wanted to avoid living in my car more than I wanted good grades. We shall see how that panned out next week when grades are released.

The good news is that 1) Fiance is now back at work and 2) it made us realize that we stopped looking at our finances just because it scared us.

So here is our new plan for 2016 -

GOAL ONE: Stop Eating Out - Now, in a funny turn of events, grabbing Mcdonalds too much last semester kind of saved our butt this last month but not exactly in a good way. In September, I did my normal batch cooking for the semester but rarely had the motivation to actually cook out of it. So when it came time to stop buying things cold turkey, we had over ten casseroles in the freezer, 8 crockpot meals and numerous sides. Why didn't we eat them before? Because I was lazy. However, when I went back and looked at how much we spent on fast food, we easily could have managed to pay our rent last month. So POOF. No more eating out.

GOAL TWO: Batch Cook Easy Cheap Meals - I'm thinking lots and lots of dump chicken meals with enough ground beef meals to keep us sane. If I remember in the morning, I can dump it in the crockpot. If I don't, I can dump it in the oven. Either way, we need to stop treating ourselves with food just because we had a bad day.

GOAL THREE: Work More Hours - This is something we're both committed to. Fiancé just got a second job and will be working 6 days a week, over 60 hours a week. I'm still in school but I'm going to keep my hours higher for as long as my boss will let me. I'm volunteering for every extra assignment I can and it seems to be helping. By working more, we will hopefully be able to dig ourselves out of this debt mess and save for the next big emergency.

GOAL FOUR: Stop Being A Crutch For The Other - One reason we go in this mess is that when my surgery happened, Fiancé was working. So I relied on him to pay my half of the bills. Then when Fiancé lost his job, I had just gotten my financial aid money. We obviously have no problem covering each other (we are getting married after all) but we sort of stopped dividing bills. A big bill would come up and one would pay it without the other having any clue how much we were spending. We used to be pretty good with a budget but this last year has just been so crazy, there was no way to budget so we stopped trying. Now that things are slightly more stable, it's time to get back to it. So this week, we finally sat down and went through every bill we have and taped it to the living room wall. Our goal is to have both of us split all our bills so one, my loans aren't covering two people when it's meant to cover one, and two, my loan money doesn't run out like it did this semester.

GOAL FIVE: Keep Our Bills Low - When we crashed and burned, we went and stopped all the bills that are nice to have but not necessary. Netflix, kindle unlimited, knitting software and my wine club went out the window and I have no intention of getting them back until we pay off our credit cards. Those ten dollars or less a month bills are sneaky. Half of them, I didn't even remember we had! Good grief.

GOAL SIX: Pay Off Credit Cards - Now I'm not sure how long this one will take us but I'd like to at least double our current payment plan. It would be awesome to pay them off in 2016 but with two people making less than 10 dollars an hour, that might not be possible. We will have to see.

Now this whole post is all about the things we did wrong. However, we did do some things right. Right before this latest catastrophe, I applied for a bunch more scholarships and I was just informed last week that I got an additional $5,000 a year scholarship. Added to my previous scholarships, this basically means I don't pay tuition anymore. YAY!! Another thing I did to help avoid this mess was when Fiancé was unemployed, I got a paying job. Yes, I still have my unpaid internship too so it's been a tricky balance but it was really the only thing that kept us going as long as we did. I'm so so glad that I didn't wait until we were broke to do this because by then it would have been much too late.

What do you guys do to cut spending?


EDITED TO ADD - I literally just hit publish and I get a text from Fiancé with the news that they're cutting his hours at work again. UGH. Sometimes we just can't win.


UPDATE: Click HERE to see how I did after six months (or so).

If I'm this busy now ....

Whew. The last few days have been a whirlwind. Most of my classmates are finally in town so we are all trying to meet and greet as much as possible before classes start. So far we have made a beach trip (only five minutes from my house!! Bliss!), met for lunch twice, met for dinner, went bowling and did a winery tour and tasting. And with all of that, I think I know five people's names. I'm such an introvert. 

Plus we have a bunch of reading for our mock class next week. I am really hoping that my lack of motivation and attention span is because it's for a mock aka fake class. Otherwise I am in serious trouble. I sit down to read and a minute later oh, I forgot to feed the dog. So I feed the dog. Sit back down and man, I'm starving. Feed myself and go back to my computer. Rinse and repeat. I've read plenty of cases in undergrad but when it's for Law School, I can't focus? Uh oh. 

Add to my hectic schedule, I had decided that this week was going to be my batch cooking days. In three days I cooked or prepared my way through ten pounds of hamburger, six pounds of chicken, three pounds of ham, over fifty hotdogs and I'm not even sure what else.  

However, my freezer is now stocked for the next couple months and I won't be forced to eat McDonald's when I'm too tired to cook. All I'll have to do is turn on the oven or microwave. Whew!! 

Oh! And today I drove to Orlando to see my dad! It was amazing. Days after I decided on this school, my dad's union voted to send him to their convention that is randomly being held ... In Florida. I can not explain how nice it was to see a face from back home. He's heading back to Seattle tomorrow so it was definitely worth the long drive on crazy freeways to see him. 

That's been my week. I can't wait to see what next week will bring. As of right now, Monday through Friday is booked except for Tuesday. I'm sure I'll find something to do with that entire day of free time. Who knows, I might even finish the reading. 

Cooking

This is a very non law school post about ... food and cooking.

I HATE COOKING. I find it stressful and annoying and it takes much too much of my precious time. Unfortunately, I happen to be pretty good at it. And my fiance is very, very, very bad at it. Try running out of milk so substituting tequila BAD. ( Yes, he was drunk when he made this decision but there have been many times when he has proven over and over again that he should never be allowed to create subsistence for himself or others.) He is an awful, can not make tuna helper without help cook.

This creates a problem because I like to eat. I really like to eat. And I seriously dislike eating boring cold foods such as sandwiches or cereal or really, anything that is convenient. I crave some sort of meat, potato, veggie and bread for every meal. Now this obviously creates a problem when you can't afford to eat out every meal and you also hate to cook. Not to mention not wanting to weight five hundred pounds.

My solution? Batch/Freezer cooking! I have two plans of attack for this. I either set aside an entire weekend and make three months of food to hide in the freezer or I make a huge amount of one meal and stick the rest in the freezer. (Both meant I had to buy a chest freezer but trust me, it more than made up for it's cost in only a few months. I love my chest freezer and even named him Nelson. I have problems but that is neither here nor now.)

While I was still in college, I would do the three month plan. I would get my financial aid check and spend about three or four hundred at the local Walmart, three or so days cooking six or seven hours a day and BAM, we had food through finals. It was awesome!! All I would have to do is come home from class, grab something, throw it in the oven and an hour later we would be eating. No prep, no standing over the stove and no mess.  Genius!!!!!! I will say it again, GENIUS!!

This method started to fail me once I entered the real world of full time, Monday through Friday employment. And then I added a second job. Once I began working 6am to 8pm Monday through Friday, the absolute LAST thing I wanted to do was spend my entire weekend cooking! (Remember, I completely hate the process of cooking!) So what happened? My second job ended up paying for us to eat out everyday. My entire paycheck was spent on restaurants and fast food. So NOT why I got a second job in the first place.

This was not going to work long term.

So I started my second batch cooking method. Each weekend, my goal was to make one meal that I could triple and put in the freezer. For example, I would prepare one dish on Sunday, put two quarters of it in the freezer, in two separate containers. We would eat it Sunday and probably Monday evening as we both love leftovers. But then a month later, I could throw another container of it in the oven and we would have a ready made meal. Then a month later, I could do it again.

The next week, I would make a different meal and rinse and repeat.

Even somebody who hates to cook can fulfill a goal of cooking only once a week!

It is not as convenient as the three month plan because it takes a while to stock up on enough meals to not be bored with the food choices. It also is a little more expensive as you can not buy in bulk quite as well nor get all the chopping of say ten onions done all at once. But it is indefinitely better than cooking a new meal each night.


This week, I am making spaghetti.