Beer Bread

We bought a case of beer for my son's 5th birthday party.  There's a lot of beer left.  (Yes, I understand that it might seem weird to buy beer for a kid's birthday party, but the beer is for the adults and the cake is for the kids.  Have to lure the parents there somehow.)

In any event, we bought a "mix" of the local beer, and it came with a fair amount of IPA.  I don't really like IPA.  I've tried to, and some of them aren't bad, but it's really not a drinking beer for me.  So I can get through about half of it, and lose interest.

So I decided to try and make beer bread in the bread machine.  Well, my machine did not come with a recipe.  So I googled, found recipes, and decided to adjust them to fit my machine's ratios.  Which just means...I substituted beer for most of the water.

Camping Food

This weekend we celebrated Easter holiday by going camping in Joshua Tree with our friends and neighbors.  Not the best way to spend the weekend after I started watching my diet again, but hey.

Joshua Tree is between 4 and 7 hours from where we live.  Through Los Angeles, in 0 traffic, 4 hours.   Yeah.  We've never tried that.  In traffic through Los Angeles, 7 hours.  We've never experienced that either.  We've been on this trip twice now, and one trip to Big Bear Lake, which is similar in distance.  Every time we've driven there, we've gone the "back way" or "northern route" (thanks to my friend Bob for the suggestion).  This means the Pearblossom highway.  Which, if you google, is considered a death trap highway.  I guess a lot of people are very impatient and try to pass on the double yellow.

Gas Prices

So, we've all seen gas prices, right?  Hereabouts, the cheap gas is about $4.25 per gallon - ouch!  That's certainly not very frugal.  As I went to the Earth Day celebration, I started thinking about alternatives to driving.  So I did some math.  I like math.  See below for the results.

I did not look into the feasibility of going down to one car.  And when I calculated the trip cost, I did not count wear and tear, or insurance, or any of that, simply because I'm going to have the car anyway, and I'm lazy.  I believe the government reimbursement rate right now is about $0.55 per mile, so you could always use that.

Now, I live 10 miles from work.  My husband and I actually work one block from each other.  The ideal way to be green, and frugal, and simple, would be to carpool.  But we don't.  Why is this, you ask?  Well, school.  Our son is in school.  School goes from 8 to 5 pm (preschool).  So the drop-off guy (spouse) gets to work at 8:30 am, and the pick-up gal (me) has to leave work at 4:30 pm.  That's an 8 hour time difference, which drops to 7.5 if you insist on eating lunch.  Now, we both have flexible ENOUGH jobs that in reality, we could likely work 8:30 am to 4:30 pm on most days, and make up the extra by working at home.

But we don't.  It's so easy to work at home with a kid though! (kidding) Truthfully, in our industries, it would be hard to do that day in and day out.  I do that very schedule when my spouse travels.  But for every day he's out, that's 1/2 hour I have to make up the following week.  Consider that I work 40-42 hrs/week, when my coworkers are generally doing 50+.  Then again, I don't sit and BS in the lunchroom or in my cube.  I work.  And so many times my work folks want to have a meeting at 5 pm.  I always miss those.  But I digress.

Now that  you know why we don't carpool...here are the other options that I explored:

1.  Driving separate.
2.  Taking the bus.
3.  Biking.

Here's the summary:
Driving: 30 min R/T, $3.25
Bus: 102 min R/T, $3.50
Biking: 90 min R/T, $0

You can see that the bus is about the same price as driving my car, but takes a LOT longer.  Truth be told, the bus involves a 26 min walk to the bus station (we are not near a very good bus line), a 21 min bus ride, then a 4 min walk to work.  If I did that round trip, I would be losing 72 minutes.  And it would not be practical considering the school schedule.

Whereas the bike ride is 45 min one-way.  50 if I'm really dogging it.  I have a mountain bike with slicks.  If I had a road bike and clip shoes, I could go faster, but then I'd be patching more flats.

Instead, what we do when we can is this:
I bike to work in the morning.  Spouse drives with his bike on the back.  I drive home with my bike on the back.  Spouse bikes home.  This saves one round trip in my car, and $3.27 per day in gas.  We each get a 45 min workout, and it's better for the environment.  It does take some planning though (must bring a bigger lunch!)

We like to do this 1-2x a week.  But bad weather and business trips do mess us up.  We did do Tues/Thurs this week, most we've done in awhile.  And we both have to be VERY careful.  Despite bike lines, we don't have the best drivers around here.  I will admit that in the afternoons, when I drive I am tired and not very attentive.  When biking, we have to be extra vigilant.

So y'all, what do you do?  Bike, walk, drive, carpool, take a taxi, fly...how do you get to work/school?

Baked Chicken Legs and Salad

These days, Tuesdays are tough to plan for.  We've run out of last week's CSA veggies and don't know what we're getting this Tuesday.  So today, I planned for chicken and "side".  We ended up with mixed greens and some arugula, so the side was clear.  It was also pretty easy to make a salad (washing the greens first).  Today we rode our bikes to work (10 miles).  I ride to work, spouse rides home (more on this at a later post).  Our bikes ride on the back of the car the other direction.

I buy organic free range chicken legs for $1.99 /lb at Trader Joe's.

Falafel and sauteed chard

I love greens. Particularly kale. I can tolerate collard greens if cooked long enough. But chard...I really want to like chard, but have had a hard time falling in love with it. Until this recipe. It was the first recipe that came up when I googled "chard recipes". Gotta leave it to allrecipes.com.

I did, of course, slightly healthify it, as I normally do. I cut the butter and oil in half (I mean...1/4 c. of fat? Really?) Maybe even cut it a little more. It was easy and delicious, and my son who yelled "I don't like it" ate it right up after he actually tasted it.

Single Parent Food

Bean tacos (yes, that is sliced American cheese, didn't feel like shredding) and steamed veggies.

Stir-fry tofu and frozen veggies with quinoa.

Skillet Pasta

You can go to the recipes tab to find this recipe. It's so darned good. I used some meatballs I made from the free range local beef we had for dinner on Saturday (burgers...mmmm...). And steamed asparagus. 0.99/lb. I love spring! Delish!