Just popped the bread out of the bread machine and it's looking (and smelling!) good (selected a potato bread to which I added a little olive oil and rosemary), plus the stew is still bubbling away in the crock pot. It feels really relaxing to have dinner all ready when I come in the door after a busy afternoon. Mind you, I'm not always this organized (Warning, warning! Understatment Alert!!).....

I managed to use up my squash in the stew, some potatoes, and a big handful of garden green beans I froze last fall. I have many, many bags of frozen green beans still in my freezer, but am steadily trying to use them up this winter (by sprinkling a few into just about everything I make, heh). It was, for whatever reason, most definitely a green bean year around here last season. EVERY gardener I know produced an *abundance* of them. My father presented me with bags full every week -- and we had our own mini- bumper crop of them to contend with that my son had planted and tended. My sister's boyfriend had many gajillions of green beans as well, and invited us one day late in the season to come and help ourselves to the bounty. Kids and I drove out there one afternoon and picked for what felt like hours, coming home with buckets full of the most beautiful, untarnished beans ever -- yet still had barely managed to make a dent in his crop (though not for lack of trying). Frost was just around the corner at the time, and I felt sick to waste all those beauties (think of all the hungry people in the world, etc) -- but I had to wave the white flag at some point, having already taken about as much as I felt I could possibly handle. It took days to process them all -- beans are rather intensive what with all the picking over and trimming and snapping to do. Most of the beans I froze since that's by far the easiest method -- in two-to- three cup, recipe-sized quantities. Some of them I canned. And a few of them I pickled using an untried, for me at least , recipe ('Dilly Beans'). As such, I was unwilling at the time to make very much, since I had no way to predict how well they were going to go over with DH and kids (for example, I'm pretty much the only one eating the bell pepper pickle relish I canned two seasons ago, thankyouverymuch). Naturally, I should have guessed that the kids would go BONKERS over them, especially since I didn't make that many!! Ah yes, you see - I'm still thinking (obsessing?) about all those lovely organic green bean freebies I left behind, to be wasted by frost.....

In any event, any savings I might have incurred today by cooking out of my pantry, was dramatically offset by gas expenses schlepping my family around town. Unfortunately our second vehicle is not starting right now for whatever (and hopefully not too expensive) reason. This left my husband without a means to get to his volunteer soccer coaching gig on the east side of town. However in the meantime, my kids had their dancing classes on the west side of town to get to. This meant driving to the west side to drop off my kids, driving back home to meet DH in order to drop him off on the east side of town, retrieving the kids from the WEST side, and chauferring one of said kids to meet said DH BACK over on the EAST side. How crazy is that??? (On a happier note -- this afternoon I found my favorite winter scarf that I was certain was lost for good and would be needing to be replaced. It was hanging on a hook in the dance studio -- yay!)