Carrie Bartkowiak v. 5.0

Works For Me Wednesday is hosted by Shannon at Rocks In My Dryer. Visit today’s carnival there to find more great tips from other bloggers!

~*~*~*~*~As a homeschooling mom, I often find that I don’t eat. Sounds funny, doesn’t it? I’m home all day, I’m feeding the kids… why wouldn’t I eat?
Well, I’m just too busy. Plus by the time I get the kids fed, I don’t feel like eating anymore, and the thought of actually fixing myself something to eat just kills the impulse to eat anyway.

I cured this with a weekly chicken. The whole family has come to count on that chicken to be there whenever they want a quick snack, and it’s so easy.

Rinse off a whole chicken and toss it into a pot of cold water. Add in chunky vegetables if you want (it isn’t necessary, but makes it all taste better) such as a couple of carrots cut into thirds, big chunks of celery, and a quartered onion. Sprinkle in your favorite spices - mine are rosemary, thyme, basil, and a bay leaf.

Let this chicken bubble around on a good simmer for at least 2 hours - I usually let mine go for 4. If you wander by it and notice any foamy fat gathering on the surface, skim it off with a spoon.

When it’s done, use a big slotted spoon and pull the chicken pieces (it will fall apart) and veggies out into a big bowl. Strain the stock and let it cool down - now you’ve got a great homemade chicken stock that you can refrigerate or freeze to use in later recipes.

Pull the chicken meat off of the bones and put into a quick-to-access container in the fridge. Toss the bones.

Now not only do you have fantastic chicken stock, you’ve got really tasty chicken meat ready for eating anytime! What we use ours for:

• Quick chicken sandwiches
• Chicken quesadillas
• Chicken wraps or tacos
• The munchies (just grab a few pieces and stuff them in your mouth, lol)
• Chicken pot pie

This is virtually a hands-off (well, except for picking the chicken, and I get hubby to do that, lol) way to get a healthy and convenient snack ready and waiting in the fridge. It’s completely cured my lack of lunches, because in less than 2 minutes I can be eating something tasty! It works for me!

PS - to really capitalize on this, also keep some plastic containers or zip-lock baggies full of shredded cheese, shredded lettuce, diced tomatoes, and diced onions. Also, having some tortilla wraps on hand is a must for our kitchen!

What do you think? I wanna know! Please leave a comment :)
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This past week it’s been the library that’s been getting the attention, and boy does it need it.  For TiT I’m featuring 3 of the bookshelves we’ve got in there.

Before:

It took a *lot* of purging and sorting - the “containerizing” is actually done by the bookshelves themselves so no containers.

After:

The top 4 shelves on the left actually have books that weren’t even there before; they were stuck in a few big crates that we brought from my parent’s workshop (where we were storing stuff before I got into my purging spree). I got rid of a LOT of books, papers, and folders.

Not only are all of the shelves organized by topic, I’ve started putting little stickers on the spines so that the kids can easily tell where the book goes when they’re putting it away. You can see those on the bottom row of books on the left. Those are all Science; the left side is Science 1 (people, animals, plants), and the right side is Science 2 (technology, weather, machines, space). All Science books get a green sticker, but the sticker either has a 1 or a 2 written on it to show which section it goes in.  There’s also color-coded labels on the shelves themselves that say what each shelf is.  I also moved the TV over to the left onto the media counter. (The computer is there too.)

Yay! It looks so much better.

What do you think? I wanna know! Please leave a comment :)
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Yup, I’m joining in! I’m entering my disaster area, which my regular readers also know as my Utility Room. I did try to put this room into a Tackle It Tuesday mission, but because we’ve been moving so much stuff around, the instant I cleared the floor in front of the cabinet it got stacked full of stuff again from the next room over as *that* room started getting decluttered.

To the far left we have our cabinets, which are full of more big power tools in cases (like that Dewalt case there in the front), paint cans and painting supplies from when we moved in and repainted the whole house, and more tools and cleaning supplies.

The brown cabinet holds all manner of hubby’s tools, papers, some small propane canisters - all kinds of stuff, both inside and on top.

To the right, buried, is a dresser that I’ve been trying to use to keep things in like tablecloths, gardening supplies and seeds, a community sock drawer for the kids, and things that don’t really have a home anywhere else.

In front of all of this are more of hubby’s tools, his ladder, boxes of cables and who knows what else, a garden hose, a space heater, empty coffee containers (there are a lot of those, he keeps them because they “could be” some kind of organized container), and a hamper full of clothes.

Here’s a better shot of the dresser. Primarily on top of this is where all of the fishing supplies got thrown.

You can barely see the washer over to the right side - imagine having to do laundry in this room!

The dresser’s top was meant to be a large flat space for sorting and folding clothes as they came out of the dryer.

Yes, those are in fact MORE tool cases piled on top of my washer. Along with a basket full of old Xbox controllers that no one uses anymore since the boys got a new Xbox 360 for christmas.

Note the window - there’s a horizontal blind hanging *in* the window (see the twist rod hanging down?) and there’s also another horizontal blind from some other window in the house sitting *in* the windowsill. Don’t ask me, I have no idea why it’s there.

Turning back around to our left, we can see what’s on the other side of the room.

Yes, that’s a deep freezer buried there.

The box on top holds a ceiling fan that has yet to be installed.

The Huggies boxes are my Poor Man’s Portable Laundry Sorters. As I’m going through the laundry and come across things like underwear, I’ll toss it into the appropriate box (they all have a name on the front). Then each person can come get their box, take it to their room and unload it, and bring it back. That’s the theory anyway.

Stuffed back into the corner are my pantry shelves. I love this shelving unit; too bad I can’t easily get to the far end of it. There is a little bit of space there, but that’s taken up by the cat litter box.

Right behing me from this position is my dryer, which also has tons of tools stacked on top of it, and it sits about 4 feet away from my washer. In between the washer and dryer are two tall hampers (one for dark clothes, one for light clothes), a number of discarded baby gates, some tall boxes full of window screen and some kind of wire mesh, assorted long pieces of lumber for projects hubby never got to (like those long wood pieces stuck behind the deep freezer), and all kinds of other things. It was just supposed to be the laundry hampers in between there, but hubby has found that the “walls of height” made by the washer and dryer are convenient for stuffing all manner of tall things in there that have a tendency to fall over. Hence, that area has gotten so full that the two hampers don’t fit anymore and are usually sitting out in the middle of the room.

The Plan:

The plan is to get ALL of the tools out of here. Once that happens, I’ll have to add more shelving to store and organize things. I have a “standing hanger” thing that sits on the floor, has a rod going across about 3′ up, and you hang clothes on it… but nowhere to put it. (Obviously there’s no floor space.) I’d like to dump that all together and install an actual rod somewhere.

My pantry shelves need to be turned around so that we can access the whole thing. Everything needs to be unburied and the stuff needs to find a home.

I had really hoped that I could do this all in one day for a Tackle It Tuesday, but there’s just too much to be done and too many changes and installations (like shelves) that need to be made. So now it’s the 30-day Organizational Challenge project!

(I actually have at least 4 rooms I could enter in to this project, but alas, we can only enter one.)

What do you think? I wanna know! Please leave a comment :)
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