Hosting & Money Moves

Yesterday was the first day in over a week that we didn’t have some sort of rain or thunderstorm. In the morning I went out to the yard after my morning coffee to see how things are looking. The plants loved all the rain because things were popping off. I was able to get a second harvest of parsley & a huge amount of arugula. The parsley I cleaned and froze. Later this week I’ll run them thru our freeze drier to store in our pantry for the winter. Today I picked my first round of basil and made pesto. I freeze pesto in ice cube trays and have pesto blocks I can easily grab from the freezer. I’m near the end of my pesto stores from last year so this is perfect to replenish. My tomatoes, zucchini, herbs, peas & beans are all doing extremely well this year. My peppers: not so much. Last year we had an amazing pepper harvest though, so we did scale back the amount of plants - but I’m wondering if they were stunted early in the season with some cooler nights. I’ll keep watching and see what happens. G makes his own hot sauces with these, so I’m hoping we can get a few peppers at least.

As mentioned in my last post, last night I hosted a girls evening which turned into a girls early early morning by the time everyone went home, lol. With G gone it was nice to have people over and enjoy the nice evening outside on the deck. You know you are in good company when someone looks at the clock on the wall and realizes how late it is. For appetizers I made a garlic focaccia bread: Link and black lentil ‘caviar’: Link. All ingredients I had on hand, just required planning ahead in the case of the focaccia. My neighbour made a Mediterranean dip: which was delicious!

I was paid on Friday, and after looking at our finances, what we had still in our chequing account and what was upcoming this week, I was able to move the entire amount into our vacation fund for B.C.: $3,130 in total. This paycheque was much higher than usual because I was able to negotiate a signing bonus with a recent promotion I took. I’m interested to see what my regular pay cheques will be going forward now. I’ll find out later this month.

G calculated roughly how much his expense refund will be when he gets back from Vancouver: $2,900ish. We’ve been paying his credit card as charges have been applied and still been able to keep up with our other bills, so this amount can be completely directed towards saving goals. There is also the question regarding how much overtime he was able to work during the deployment - so at some point that will get paid out as he cannot bank those hours. Although sometimes the delay on these payouts can be months, so we’ve learnt to not count on these.

For dinner I made a batch of Vietnamese-Style meatballs. The recipe (link) calls for half pork, half ground beef - but we have so much ground beef in the freezer I opted to use all beef. Everything else for the recipe I had on hand in the pantry. Very easy prep and I will absolutely make these again. I had pairs them with some veggie potstickers from in the freezer and made a bowl with edamame, cucumbers, pickled onions, shredded carrots and sesame sauce drizzled on top.

Count down until G comes home: 4 days.