Weekend Thrift Store Finds

I love to spend the occassional weekend browsing our local thrift store aisles for beautiful and useful things that catch my eye. Here are a couple of my favorite pieces from this last weekend's trip: a vase and two candy dishes.

Beautiful? Absolutely.
Thrifty? At a price of 50 cents each, I believe so.
Environmentally responsible? Someone else discarded them and now I am reusing them.

Thick as Pea Soup

Until this week, I'd never made pea soup before. I am not a big fan of soup anyway and somehow the pictures of lumpy, green-gray soup have never seemed appetizing. But dried legumes are such an inexpensive and healthy food. The start of a brand new year was the perfect opportunity to try something I had never done before and a cold winter's day was a great match.


I skimmed through several recipes on the internet and gathered my ingredients: one cup of dried split peas and one cup of leftover Christmas ham from the freezer. (I know-- again with the leftovers-- but being thrifty means using up the things I already have, preferably in unique ways.)

The first recipe instructed me to run the dried peas through a food processor and then mix the resulting flour with water to form the soup base. Unfortunately, all my food processor did was whiz the split peas around and around until the motor overheated. I suppose a wheat grinder might produce better results but my old electric grinder probably wouldn't have worked and honestly I was too lazy to lug it up from the basement.


Note to self: save up and buy a hand operated wheat grinder.


Plan B: Soak the beans in water for several hours (adding water as necessary to keep the peas barely covered), cook them slightly to soften (about 15 minutes) and run them through the food processor again.  I included all of the soaking water in the processor.

This worked much better, however, the "soup" was still not smooth enough so I cooked the mixture for ten more minutes and gave it another spin in the food processor. I added approximately 1 1/2 cups additional water to keep the soup the consistency I wanted. I added the ham and let the soup heat through.


Overall, my family was not impressed with my efforts. My 16 year-old remarked that it looked like baby food. My 7 year-old (who was recovering from a queasy tummy anyway) told me that just looking at the soup made him want to vomit. The 2 year-old simply ignored the soup all together. Only my sweet 13 year-old son ate every last bite and that was only because he didn't want to hurt my feelings. He did suggest that I not cook it again for a very long time.


In the past, I have encouraged my children to try out new foods by reading a story that goes along with the meal. I did a quick search on Amazon and found a few books that I think would have been fun to read with my kids. Maybe next time....




I'll admit that the soup was pretty bland. I figured that the ham would flavor the soup but it didn't. I think some salt, a clove or two of garlic, a half a cup of diced carrots and perhaps a bay leaf would make nice additions.

On the plus side, the spring green color of the soup was gorgeous. I had trouble with the thick soup sticking to the bottom of the pot so I was carfeul not to cook the soup at a very high temperature. The result was that it retained the color of fresh garden peas.

Very Hungry Caterpillar

The new year always finds me revamping our 72 hour kits (emergency "bug-out" kits) and this year was no exception. With a family of six, space is at a premium so I try to focus on including only the necessities in as small of packaging as possible. With children, one of the necessities is toys and entertaining distractions. If just an hour in the car can be miserable for the parent of a bored child-- how about three stressful days? Besides the easy to gather card games and drawing materials like notebooks and colored pencils, this year I am adding flannel board stories for my two year old.

One of our favorite stories is  Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar. This particular book lends itself well to storytelling without the physical book (which would be a heavy and clunky thing to put in a kit.) My children are also familiar with the story and it can be told in a variety of ways. (I love this story so much, I even created a tissue paper mural in the math room at my kids' charter school.)

Although you can probably buy similar kits online from various WAHMs, using old scraps of felt made this addition to my kit practically free. The felt sticks to any cloth material (including T-shirts and car seats). I used left-over puff paints to add details to the figures and I glued different colors of felt together to provide variety. At first I used Elmer's glue but that didn't work very well. I finally went with the hot glue gun. I also originally opted not to put the holes in the food pieces but after I watched my son play with the the set, I went back and cut out holes in each of the fruits.




The entire set squishes easily into a leftover space or side pocket of our 72 hour kits. (I do store them in a little ZipLoc bag to keep them protected from moisture and to keep the pieces from getting scattered or mixed up with other sets.)

Other stories I am now working on include Old Mac Donald, I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, The Berenstains' B Book, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, and The Mitten. Some of these I will put in our kits and some I will put on our home-school shelves. I plan to change them out quarterly when I rotate the food in our emergency kits.

Feminine Pillowcases

I have this weird quirk about not mixing my pillowcase up with anyone else's. I know it's not like sharing underwear (kinda weird even if it's been washed...) or toothbrushes (eww, gross!) but I still imagine that I can smell my husband's hair products on my pillowcase even when it's been freshly laundered.

He thinks I'm crazy. Maybe I am.

For Christmas this year he asked for flannel sheets.The set I bought him came with flannel pillowcases as well and I was inspired to decorate my pillowcase with a bit of lace and ribbon. Such feminine charms are lost on my husband who can't stand frills. On the other hand, my heart skips a beat every night when I look at my handiwork. I figured this was a perfect compromise. My pillowcase is pretty. His is plain. They don't get mixed up. We're both satisfied.

It's a pretty simple project and took less than 10 minutes.

I wove the green ribbon through the lace and stitched it just to the open edge of the pillowcase about three inches in. I used two straight stitches down each side of the lace, not bothering to follow the scallops of the lace itself. At the end, I folded both the lace and the ribbon underneath, overlapped it by an inch, and stitched it down.

Black-Eyed Peas

Tradition says that eating black-eyed peas to ring in the new year will bring prosperity and good luck. Every year for Christmas Eve dinner, we buy a ham. This year we chose to start a new family tradition by cooking the leftover ham bone in a pot of black-eyed peas for our New Year's Day family dinner. It was accompanied by homemade brown bread, butter and strawberry jam.

The perfect start to a year of simplicity, thrift and bounty.

Beans and Ham
Soak dried beans overnight in enough water to completely cover, adding more water as necessary during the soaking process. (Allow 1/4 cup of dried beans per person.) After 10-12 hours of soaking, drain and rinse the beans. Place the ham bone and beans in a large pot and cover the beans with water. The ham bone does not need to be submerged. Bring to a boil over medium high heat and then turn the stove down to a simmer. Cook for several hours over lowest heat until the beans are soft.


Brown Bread
3 t dried yeast
1 T honey
1 C hot water
1/4 C whole wheat flour (plus 1 3/4 C)
Gently mix these first four ingredients. Let the mixture settle in a warm spot on the counter top until small bubbles appear on the surface. Then add enough whole wheat flour to make a soft dough (approximately 1 3/4 cups on an arid day). Knead well and let the dough rise. Form into a single loaf and let rise a second time. Once the bread dough has reached the top of the bread pan, bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or until the top crust is brown and sounds hollow when thumped.