After being on antibiotics and steroids for 4 days now, I am feeling a lot better.  I'm still not well, but I am no longer coughing from my bronchials or choking on gross stuff in my throat when I lay down flat, so that is a huge improvement.  Plus the steroids are giving me energy.  My sprained wrists are feeling a lot better, too, though if I make certain moves with my left one it still stabs.  My sprained ankle is still sore, probably because I couldn't rest it like I mostly could my hands.  You still have to walk.  And it is wobbly, risking another turn at all times, so I am using my cane outside again just for balance.  Otherwise, things are pretty good.

The challenge is going well and we still haven't eaten out.  I didn't make the stew yet.  I did make the sausage, bell peppers, and onions and we had baked potatoes with it for dinner last night. 

The night before that I made crockpot spaghetti and meatballs with my special pour and dump spaghetti sauce.  It's kind of homemade.  Three to four cans of 15 oz tomato sauce depending on how saucey you want it to be, I did 3, a can of tomato paste, a cup of dehydrated onions but you can use a whole fresh onion, I was too tired, 2 pint jars of my home canned diced tomatoes with thejuice, two heaping spoonfuls of garlic from the jar or one whole head of diced garlic.  I didn't use my own meatballs.  I had a big bag of Kirkland Italian meatballs in the freezer from Costco so used about 40 of those.  They are the 1 inch size meatballs if you want to make them from scratch.

Just put a thin layer of sauce in the crockpot, layer the frozen meatballs on the bottom of the pot, then add in the rest of the sauce and let it cook on high for 3 hours.  Then break a pound of spaghetti in half and add to the crockpot and completely cover with the sauce.  Continue to cook on high for half an hour.  Stir the noodles, bringing sauce and meatballs to the top and mixing together.  Makd sure noodles are completely covered.  Cook for another half an hour on high.  Check noodles for doneness.  They should be perfect, but if not, cook another 15 minutes.  Stir everything one more time before serving.  So easy.

I don't often eat breakfast or lunch, but today I had sort of an in between meal.  We had two small potatoes leftover from a previous night that would have about equalled a regular potato, so I chopped those up and fried them in avocado oil with salt, pepper, and paprika.  Put a little ketchup on and called it good.  And it was good.  My husband finished off the leftover spaghetti and meatballs.  My son finished the sausage, onions, and bell peppers, and my daughter had a smoothie.  She doesn't do well with solid foods until around dinner time because of her meds.

We have been very good with managing leftover waste this week and only had to throw out a package of corn and a little rice.  It was a seasoned box rice that had been cooking around in the pantry and no one really liked it.  We have one more box of it and when I make it again, I am going to add onion powder, garlic powder, pepper, parsley, and oregano.  Maybe a bit of salt.  And cook it in chicken broth.  It was way too bland.  The corn I bought at our last Costco trip right at the end of December.  I got bronchitis then and it got pushed to the back of the fridge and was forgotten about.  When I was cleaning out the fridge I found it.  Still, it wasn't that bad.  Usually when I clean out the fridge we throw out a lot more.

Then we will be completely out of that brand of boxed rice.  I think we have one box of Zataran's dirty rice left.  After that I am going to learn how to make dirty rice and Mexican rice myself.  I won't worry about learning the type of rice that no one really liked.  I do  know how to make saffron rice and I have a recipe for turmeric rice that I've been wanting to try.  I don't often make saffron rice because of the cost of saffron, but I am seriously thinking about getting the type of crocus that makes saffron.

The bulbs are expensive, but after a couple of years they make baby bulbs and I can separate them and have more flowers, so I can harvest more saffron threads, so I think it will be worth the investment.  Unlike regular crocus, they bloom in the fall, so that will be interesting.  I'll have to put them in their own bin with other bulbs that bloom throughot the year, like tulips, daffodils, snowdrops, other types of crocus, iris, and gladiolus, so something is blooming all year.  The autumn crocus can go in front so they don't get lost in the shuffle.  I won't get a ton in the beginning.  You can usually only get 2 to 3 threads per flower, but if I have enough flowers, I can make the rice a few times a year without buying the saffron from the store at the high, high cost.

I think I will make stew tomorrow.  I'm just not in the mood for it.  I'm in the mood for cheeseburgers with lettuce and carmelized onions.  I chopped an extra onion up last night, so I don't even have to bother with that.  I'll make some cole slaw first so it can sit in the fridge and meld flavors and then can finish off the bag of French fries and if that is not enough for everyone there are tater tots.  I will probably skip the potatoes since I already had some today and have an orange instead.

I only spent $109.23 over the course of two weeks, saving $290.77 from my grocery budget.

I did buy some groceries yesterday, but I will put that in separate post.  It was payday.