Cooking and Insomnia

I could not sleep at all last night. I was still wide awake at 6:04 am. It sucked. I got up at 5:00 am and made some popcorn. That is because my stomach was growling after spending several hours doing research on frugal recipes on Mike's laptop. I found out that you can make popcorn in the microwave in regular lunch bags. I was so excited because my kids love it and I know it has lots of bad stuff in it and it is so expensive. Since our cook top bit the dust, I don't have the option of cooking it on the stove. I really hate to do that anyway because it is such a pain and it just adds a big pot to my already large stack of dirty dishes waiting to be washed.

The recipe search was a success. I found a lot of really cheap recipes to make for the family, since I never have enough money to cover the weekly grocery bill anymore. Even with the cheap recipes and coupons, I don't have quite what I really need, but at least I am getting closer. Tonight I made a pasta recipe that was easy and delicious and only cost me $12 for the whole family. All of the kids liked it and there was enough left for Mike to take to work for a dinner during the week.

I also made a dish called Jiffy Oatmeal Crunch. I added some chocolate chips instead of raisins, since I want the kids to actually eat it! It was so good that we ate the whole 9 x 13 pan today and I had to make another for them to have tomorrow for either breakfast, lunch or snack. I'm going to try it with cinnamon and maybe some dried apples next time. Hannah and I hate oatmeal and we even liked it. I would have made more tonight, but I ran out of oatmeal.

I made my menu for the week today and I am pretty happy that we aren't going to starve to death, even on our very limited budget!

Oh, and our microwave broke yesterday. Just stopped working, great. This is the second microwave we've had in the past 8 years. I figured we just had to add that to the list of things that we would have to learn to do without, but then Jack brought his out of the attic. Then, even better than that, our microwave started working just fine today. Apparently it was just overheated. Mike thinks it may have had something to do with the fact that it really, really needed to be cleaned out.