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"New Year's Eve." Photo by besighyawn (Allan Chatto). From the Flickr Creative Commons.

To start my 2011 off right, I need not to be dragging the emergency food storage planning forward with me. ☺

So, I present to you my draft 6-day plans for

• men (2,500 calories)
• women (2,000 calories)
• and a few ideas for meal planning for very young children (1,000 – 1,400 calories).

Children, of course, are the wild card. They can rarely be made to eat anything they don’t want to….even in an emergency. The best bet for small children is to make sure you are storing at least one food they reliably eat (for example, Cheerios or noodles or tuna fish).

There is still more to do on this food plan. I am going to make our family actually eat each of these meals to see if we like them and/or if there is enough flavor/calories in this meal plan. I also have to figure out how much to store if we do decide we like these things.  But I am going to take a break from it for a bit.  You will hear back from me again on this in a little while.

One thing that has been very interesting to discover through this process is that counting calories and nutrition is far too complicated. This is an area of life crying out for a quick and easy technology solution. With so many people concerned with their weight and health, why should it take hours to calculate what you have eaten in a day–whether you have eaten too many calories, too much salt, sugar, or fat or what changes you need to make to improve your diet?

In the ideal world, it would be great to require that all food products have a bar code that could be quickly scanned with an iPhone or a 10 digit code you could type into a website. Over the course of a day, you just scan as you eat (veggies from the fridge, fast food or restaurant food, canned goods, etc.) and at the end of the day, you get a report on what you ate and perhaps where you could do better to achieve your health goals. It would be quick, personalized information–not judgmental, just informational.

Until that day arrives, we have manual tracking, standardized dieting food products like Weight Watchers or frozen foods, and a few websites with databases of various foods. Every food manufacturer reports their nutrition information in a slightly different way and the consumer is left to do their best to make sense of all of it. It is hardly surprising that so often we just give up, eat what we want and hope we are doing OK.

If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to improve your eating habits, you might consider looking at the foods you eat the most often and research whether there are healthier alternatives. You may be surprised to learn how a small change in your ingredients (switching to a whole wheat flour, or a high fiber breakfast cereal, etc.) could make a big difference.

Happy New Year to everyone! May 2011 bring us all a bit of good economic news, great health, excellent organization and much happiness!

"Can display." Photo by Maureen Lunn. From the Flickr Creative Commons.

Time is running out for my 30-day emergency meal plan! I am still hard at work on it with just a few more calculations to run. In the meantime, I wanted to share the breakfasts and snacks I have come up with so far.

My final challenge is to try to pull together all these breakfast, lunch, and dinner options to see if a healthy plan meeting most of the recommended nutritional requirements is possible!

The sodium count is by far the most challenging. Fortunately, there are many people now on low sodium diets that have forced food manufacturers to come up with lower sodium versions of almost every product. Making simple changes, like swapping out one brand of pancake mix for another had a huge impact on the overall sodium count. It has also been eye-opening for me to discover how much sodium is in so many different foods, including ones you don’t think of as being “salty.”

Since our family generally likes cereal, oatmeal and pancakes for breakfast and would be ok eating these things over and over again, I didn’t try to come up with 6 different options for breakfast. Instead, I came up with the following four:

All-Bran Strawberry Medley Cereal at amazon.com.	1. All-Bran Strawberry Medley Cereal with nonfat powdered milk and 1 can Dole pineapple chunks. (400 calories, 365 mg sodium)
Quaker Quick 1 Minute Oats Original Instant Oatmeal Value Box - 55 Servings at amazon.com.	2. Quaker Instant Oatmeal (plain) made with powdered milk and raisins with hot chocolate to drink. (500 calories, 195 mg sodium)
Arrowhead Mills Pancake Mix, Oat Bran, 2 Pound Bags (Pack of 4) at amazon.com.	3. Arrowhead MIlls Oat Bran pancakes made with dried dates and served with maple syrup. (420 calories, 177 mg sodium)
Carbquik Baking Mix at amazon.com.	4. 2 Carbquik biscuits (a lower sodium and higher fiber biscuit mix alternative) with gravy from a packet mix, with one cup natural applesauce and a packet of dried fruit. (320 calories, 480 mg sodium)

One thing I have learned in my food planning research is that it is really hard to get enough daily calories out of your main meals without adding any snacks. Generally if you have enough calories in the main meal, you are blowing the sodium count, fat count or some other nutritional guideline. So it generally works out better nutritionally to have somewhat smaller meals and more snacks. Some dieters swear by this method of eating as well to curb hunger cravings.

What are my staple emergency snacks?

Skippy Peanut Butter, Super Chunk, 16.3-Ounce Jars (Pack of 6) at amazon.com.	1. 2 unsalted rice cakes with 4 Tablespoons chunky peanut butter (450 calories, 240 mg sodium)
Fiber One Chewy Bars Oats and Chocolate Flavor Thirty 1.4 Ounce Bars at amazon.com.	2. Fiber One Oats n’ Chocolate granola bars (140 calories, 90 mg sodium, 9 g fiber)
Sun Maid Fruit Bits, 7-Ounce Bags (Pack of 6) at amazon.com.	3. Fruit bits or raisins (~120 calories, 20 mg sodium)
Navitas Naturals Really Raw Cashews, 16-Ounce Pouch (Pack of 2) at amazon.com.	4. 2 oz raw cashews (or other raw nuts) (320 calories, 0 mg sodium)
Hershey's Milk Chocolate Kisses, 19.75-Ounce Bags (Pack of 3) at amazon.com.	5. 9 Hershey Kisses (an indulgence to be sure but a relatively low-fat way to get in your chocolate fix) (200 calories, 35 mg sodium)
Kettle Bakes Potato Chips at amazon.com.	6. Low-salt baked potato chips. (120 calories, 115 mg sodium). It is really hard to find low-salt or no-salt chips locally but the Internet offers numerous options for a salty snack with less guilt.

In my next post, I hope to pull this all together into a 6-day meal plan (that can be repeated 5 times for a 30-day plan) for a male, female and child. Stay tuned!

Soon it will be time to pack away all those holiday decorations for another year. Ugh! I doubt if anyone really enjoys this step. We all know it is essential to get holiday decorations put away in a relatively organized way so that all of these treasures can be preserved for another year of use.

Recently, I came across some incredible videos at HGTV.com from organizing expert Star Hansen. The videos below have some awesome ideas for putting away your holiday decorations in a compact and organized way.

Here she uses a trunk and fabric layers to put away outdoor decorations.

Here she takes her organizing magic indoors into the typical basement:

If you still have a few days (or weeks) until you pack away the holiday décor, here are a few organizing tools you might consider adding to your arsenal.

Sterilite 66Qt Holiday Stor Box (Pack Of 4) at amazon.com.	These are the most useful boxes for packing away your Christmas treasures. They are large and fit a wide variety of objects. They have a green and red top so they are easy to identify as holiday storage bins and (my favorite!) they have a clear base so you can see what is inside without having to unpack it.
Christmas Ornament Storage Box at amazon.com.	If you have a large number of breakable ball-type ornaments, a box like this is a must. Since most of our ornaments are the child-friendly non-breakable kind (i.e. plastic or stuffed animals), we just toss them in a big storage box and wrap in tissue any that happen to be fragile.
Household Essentials 6032 Christmas Tree Bag with Green Trim at amazon.com.	Those who insist on fresh Christmas trees each year have a storage advantage over those of us with artificial trees. At the end of the holiday season, you just pitch the tree for garbage pickup and/or recycling. If you have an artificial tree, like we do, you have to find a place to store it for the year. We used to store our large artificial Christmas tree in the cardboard box it came in. Over time the cardboard deteriorated and it was also VERY heavy to lift. One year, we picked up some tree bags at an after Christmas sale and packed away the tree in two sections. This both made a more attractive and durable storage option but more importantly, it reduced the lifting weight of the tree into two more manageable portions. The tree bags are also easier to lift than a box and you can either sling the straps over your shoulder backpack style or have two people each carry one handle. For a little more money, you can get a rolling duffle bag for your tree, which would be great if you don’t have to lift your tree up and down stairs.  If you store your tree upright instead of disassembling it, they make a bag for that too! A friend recently joked that the ultimate Christmas tree storage would be a trap-door in the ceiling where a fully decorated tree could be raised up at the end of the season and lowered down the next!
The Christmas Light Co. 3 Holiday Storage Reels in a Bag at amazon.com.	There are few tasks more frustrating than untangling holiday lights. This set of reels lets you roll up your lights for tangle-free, stress-free decorating next year.
Wreath Storage Bag - 25 Diameter at amazon.com.	If you have artificial wreaths to store, this clear bag is a great way to protect the wreath from dust and still be able to see the contents inside.

Now is a great time to assess your own holiday storage needs and see if you need to buy any specialized storage supplies. Many of them are on sale now. For my part, I really need a better holiday card display solution. I love all the creative ideas out there.

Umbra Petal Desktop Photo Holder at amazon.com.	This cute flower-inspired holder would be great not only for the holidays but throughout the year. It could hold birthday cards, notes, bills, reminders, etc.
Kikkerland Randon Hanging Photo Mobile at amazon.com.	This one is a bit small for my needs but I love the “mobile” aspect of it and that it looks like the Calder mobile at the National Gallery of Art. Wouldn’t something like this be fun suspended temporarily in your foyer during the holidays?
Umbra Fotofalls, 55" High Metal Floor Standing Display at amazon.com.	This one can be used as either a photo tree or if our photo cards ultimately stop coming as people transition to digital delivery, this could be used like a modern Christmas tree for ornaments or other decorations as well.

Have an undecorating or holiday storage question or tip? Please share in the comments.

Christmas Morning.....before

For those who celebrated Christmas, hope your holiday was lovely and that you enjoyed celebrations with your loved ones thoroughly! We had a wonderful Christmas here. The actual Christmas morning event seemed to last all of about 10 minutes with lots of packages and wrapping paper flying as two little ones tore into every present. It was a bit of a shock to see all the work that had gone into Christmas devoured so quickly but a good reminder to keep detailed Christmas preparations in perspective too.

We still have a ton of cleaning up to do around the house but decided to take a few days just to relax and take it easy. We needed some down time just to be slothful, indulge ourselves in whatever time-wasting guilty pleasure we wanted and let the brain relax. I hope that all of you schedule at least one “lazy” day before the New Year begins.

Sometimes a lazy day is a bit boring. Sometimes you feel loathsome at the end of it, thinking of all the productive things you could have done instead; but generally you will wake up the next morning fully refreshed and newly energized. Your “to do” list doesn’t seem quite so overwhelming and you might actually be excited to get started on it.

Now is also a good time to take a moment to reflect on how your holiday celebrations went this year and think about what you might do differently next year. Last year, I posted my wish list for 2010 wanting to reduce the amount of time spent on holiday card photography, card mailing and cleaning the house. I am two for three on these goals. There was more time for holiday card-related activities this year because of the shopping truces. I don’t know that the holiday card took any less time this year but it was far less stressful.

Unlike the vast majority of bloggers on the Internet bemoaning the lack of holiday cards sent this year, we received a bumper crop of holiday cards. We received truly adorable cards from so many family and friends! It was one of the best parts of our holiday, getting all these little “hugs” in the mail. Although many are predicting the extinction of the mailed holiday card, it is something I would miss and I truly appreciate everyone who took the time to mail them to us!

What would I like to see happen next year?

1. The shopping truce saved so much time (not to mention money) that that idea might be a keeper. Donating to charity in lieu of gifts might be another option or reinstituting drawing names for presents.
2. Taking my oldest daughter to the Nutcracker ballet was a great mother-daughter holiday experience. Next year perhaps my youngest daughter can join us too.
3. Holiday house cleaning needs to get easier somehow. I will continue my efforts to develop more efficient cleaning and organizing routines for our household as well as our decluttering efforts throughout the year.
4. Putting some handmade twists on décor and ornaments is something I enjoy doing and will try to plan ahead for some small projects that will add to our holiday joy and not to our stress.

What were your highlights? What would you do differently next year? Please share in the comments.

Chaos ensues within 10 minutes after opening presents!

"Blogging -- What Jolly Fun!" By Mike Licht, NotionsCapitol.com. From the Flickr Creative Commons.

There have been so many wonderful blog posts this year celebrating the holidays.  I could probably make a list of 100 or more ideas but the following half-dozen were the ones I kept coming back to for inspiration.

1. Wreath ideas from The Nesting Place. The Nesting Place compiled dozens of front door wreath decorating ideas here.  If you are looking for a way to festively welcome guests at your front door throughout the year, you can’t help but be inspired by these suggestions.

2. Sweet Paul’s holiday countdown has been beautiful and wonderful with a tip each day for crafts, cooking or decorating.  Some of my favorites include this family photo wrapping paper idea and these candy and popcorn wreaths.

3. The Reluctant Entertainer’s ingenious remembrance to a departed loved one by preserving their handwriting in ceramics. You could either use the stenciling technique she suggests or hire a potter (here in Fredericksburg there are plenty of potters to choose from at Liberty Town Arts Workshop) to make you a custom piece with engraved writing.

4.  June Cleaver Nirvana’s Hilarious Post about Holiday Photos with Children.  Anyone who has ever had to stage a family portrait with small children knows how fidgety and unpredictable this can be.  This post about a traumatic experience with a mall photographer will guarantee a laugh.

5.  Fun French-inspired Holiday Outfits from Les Chateau des Fleurs by Frenchy. This blog is a really fun read with many great ideas for adding a little French sophistication to your life.  There are many posts I could choose from this month but I thought her adorable holiday photo outfits were just charming and original.  Here is the one she wore for her own family holiday card. And this cute 1950’s inspired photo shoot, complete with some sort of Photoshop manipulation of the finished photos to give them an antique look was Vogue-worthy. There was also this incredible Parisian snowy day outfit.

6.  Relaxing Yoga Routine from Esther Ekhart at yogatic.com. Esther Ekhart is one of my favorite yoga instructors.  In addition to being beautiful to watch, she has a lovely, soothing voice.  She posts regular videos on her website at yogatic.com that you can view for free.  She offered up the simple one for holiday stress below that I love.  The beauty of this routine, is that if you are too stressed to actually sit quietly and do it yourself, just stream it in the background while you do something else and it still has a calming, relaxing effect on you!

This will be my last post for the week. To those who celebrate, have a very Merry Christmas filled with love and joy!

Looking for a great holiday gift for a neighbor or friend or a wonderful Christmas morning breakfast treat. I have just the thing!  A lovely, sweet-but-not-too-sweet cranberry bread.

We discovered this recipe over Thanksgiving.  We were supposed to be making a “cranberry chutney” for my daughter’s class Thanksgiving project but since none of us were that interested in eating the finished chutney we wanted to make something else.  We flipped over the bag of Ocean Spray cranberries and found this wonderful recipe for “Classic Cranberry Nut Bread.”

We just happened to also need to use up a large quantity of mandarin oranges and we had a ton of almonds on hand so it was perfect.

Cranberry orange can be a difficult flavor.  If the orange is too bitter (it can be surprisingly hard to find a sweet orange at the grocery store), our family generally dislikes the taste.  The milder flavor of the mandarin oranges was perfect for us.

It takes a little bit of work to get all the ingredients prepped.  You have to cut up the fresh cranberries (which I learned are white inside with small seeds!) into little pieces.  Since we were using fresh oranges, we also had a lot of squeezing to do to get the juice out and the orange peel grated.

The end result, however, is so heavenly!  You must try this!  My husband, after tasting it the first time said, “You should make this every weekend!”  Alas, it will be more like once a month but this is a new classic at our house.  Enjoy!

CLASSIC CRANBERRY NUT BREAD
Recipe from Ocean Spray Cranberries (my modifications in italics)

INGREDIENTS:

2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 cup orange juice (we used mandarin oranges and squeezed our own juice)
1 tablespoon grated orange peel (again, we used the mandarin orange peel)
2 tablespoons shortening (I don’t remember adding this so I am not sure if I put this in or not.  If I did I probably used butter.)
1 egg, well beaten
1 1/2 cups Ocean Spray® Fresh or Frozen Cranberries, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup chopped nuts (I used sliced almonds.)

DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 350ºF. Grease a 9 x 5-inch loaf pan.

Mix together flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and baking soda in a medium mixing bowl. Stir in orange juice, orange peel, shortening and egg. Mix until well blended. Stir in cranberries and nuts. Spread evenly in loaf pan. *Sprinkle top with additional sliced almonds.

Bake for 55 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool on a rack for 15 minutes. Remove from pan; cool completely. Wrap and store overnight. Makes 1 loaf (16 slices).

Holiday window decorations are fun and festive.  Many people refrain from doing them, however, so they avoid “messing up” their windows, since window washing is low on most people’s house cleaning tasks.

At some point in the past, some enterprising individual found a way to both decorate and clean your windows at the same time!  Enter Glass Wax.  Glass Wax is a window cleaner that goes on as a clear liquid but dries with an opaque finish.  Someone figured out that it would be great for stenciling windows for the holidays or even making freeform designs.

Glass Wax window stencils appear to have been popular in the 1940’s and 1950’s and then fell out of favor.  You can still buy a Glass Wax-type product at the Vermont Country Store, “purveyors of the practical and hard-to-find.”

I cannot think of another example of decorating/cleaning but I applaud the inventiveness and multitasking nature of this product!  We have fun putting them up.

Nerdy Fact about Glass Wax: I learned about Glass Wax for the first time in law school.  It is one of the classic cases in trademark law. The trademark office refused registration of the trademark “Glass Wax” in 1947 or so because “if it contains wax it is descriptive and if it does not it is deceptively misdescriptive.” (209 F.2d 802 (1954).)

Today, I will continue my quick, lighthearted holiday posts so that those who are already overtaxed by holiday responsibilities can relax and be entertained for a bit.

Last weekend, I attended a neighborhood holiday cookie and ornament party.  As I was rushing about last-minute trying to figure out what to make, I remembered a silly recipe I first heard about in junior high.

I was on a committee with two other girls to plan a class potluck holiday party.  We went around asking everyone in the class what they were going to bring.  One girl (a sweet friend) indicated that she would bring a dessert consisting of cornflakes, marshmallows and red hot candies.  As we raised our eyebrows at this interesting confection, she assured us, “It’s really good.”  As we did the planning we snickered as we wrote down “cornflake thing”  for one of the desserts.  In the end, the girl brought something else so we never got to taste the cornflake dessert.

I was reminded of this interesting dessert when someone on Twitter (unfortunately, can’t remember who) recently posted a similar recipe.  “I have to bring this.” I thought.  If nothing else, it will be good for a laugh.

There are a ton of recipes out there for this luscious dessert.  Here is one from Kellogg’s, the makers of Corn Flakes cereal.  The basic ingredients are simple, butter, marshmallows, vanilla extract, green food coloring, Corn Flakes and red hot candies.  You melt the butter, melt the marshmallows and add green food coloring and vanilla extract.  You then add Corn Flakes to make a Rice Krispie treat like dessert.

The cornflake treats in progress. Yum?

The hard part is getting the hot, sticky mix out of the pan and forming it into circular wreaths before it hardens.  If you are really good (or have an extra pair of hands to help you) you can manage to form the wreaths and stick the red hots on the molten mix so that they will stay put as the wreath cools.  If you are more of a novice (like me) you will barely be able to get the wreaths formed before the mixture cools and you will need to stick on the red hots either by remelting the butter/marshmallow remnants in the pan, dipping the red hots in and sticking them to each wreath or you can also use vanilla icing (suggested in the Kellogg’s recipe).

They come together quickly and I let them harden up a bit in the fridge before putting them on a plate for the party.   They were bright and cheery looking!  The cornflake texture and shape made them look like holly wreaths.

The finished cornflake holly wreaths.

At the party, all the neighbors brought wonderful, elegant, homemade cookies, mostly in chocolate.  I set down my bright green and red cookies among the other dishes and thought they were already having the desired hilarity effect.

Later on in the party, the cookie judging commenced.  There were several categories of judging for the cookies.  To our amazement, we won in the “best decorated” category.

As we were leaving the party, we filled up a little treat box taking home one of each cookie.  When it came time to take ours home, I discovered that these wreath cookies are a little heat sensitive.  Sitting out for an hour or so, they had started to melt just a bit so that the stacked cookies were becoming one big sticky blob!  I have no idea how everyone else managed to taste one (or if they even did!).  If you are going to make these yourself, definitely don’t stack them or put them in individual plastic treat bags.

When we got home, we finally tasted one ourselves.  It tastes an awful lot like a Rice Krispie treat.  The red hots were a bit crunchy and would have been better if they were more like a jelly bean in texture.

But overall, it was cute and it was (literally) a winner!

I always like to look for creative and recycling-oriented gift wrap ideas.  Last year, my tip was to take wrapping paper you don’t particularly like or that is not holiday themed and wrap your gifts with the back/plain side of the paper facing out.

Having used up all my wrapping paper, this year, I needed a different tip. I first looked for something that we had too much of.  That was simple…..children’s artwork!  With two prolific artists in my house, we generate around 25 drawings per day.  We of course save the best ones in a scrapbook but what to do with all the rest?  We repurposed them as beautiful wrapping paper!  I strap a couple of pages together with clear backing tape to make a strip of the right size and wrap the gifts.  Smaller drawings can be used for gift tags.  I feel it honors the artwork to give it a last hurrah before it is recycled or thrown out.

The result is a personalized and unique gift!  One gift recipient (who you will not be surprised to hear is a mother herself) actually wondered whether the wrapping was the gift itself!  She carefully undid the wrapping and wanted to frame it!  We were honored.

Decorating for Christmas and other holidays can involve so much stuff!  Sometimes it can get a bit overwhelming to pack up and store all of those holiday decorations.  How can you lighten your burden?

Look for opportunities to multipurpose your decorations so that they are not just for holiday decorating.  We learned this one year out of desperation when we didn’t have a tree skirt.  A quick look through the linen closet revealed some red plaid sheets that were perfect for the purpose.  The sheets can be bunched artistically beneath the tree for a decorative (and washable!) tree skirt and used throughout the rest of the year.

You might think of this tip when you are purchasing holiday table linens (for example go with a stripe, plaid, floral, tapestry or solid color that could be used on other occasions too rather than a holiday-printed pattern), hand towels, dish towels or tableware.  A few years ago I picked up these cute snowman and Santa teapots with cups.  The snowman is far more useful and can be used well into the winter months for hot cocoa.