Southwest Chicken Casserole

Last night I baked a massive steggles chicken (which btw I got on sale for $2.67). I had a fair bit of chicken left over, so I went searching for a new recipe to cook for tonight. Settled on this Southwest chicken casserole, used the leftover chicken, which meant our meat for 2 nights was.... that’s right $2.67!!! Actually, we still have enough leftover for homemade pizzas. Loved this recipe and even miss fussy 7 year old ate it.

Southwest Chicken Casserole

230g pasta, cooked and drained

300g chicken, cooked and shredded

230g sour cream

1 onion, diced

1 Red capsicum, diced

2 tsp minced garlic

1 packet taco seasoning

100g grated cheese

Step 1:  Pre heat oven to 180 degrees

Step 2: Sauté onions, capsicum and garlic until soft.

Step 3: Mix all ingredients except grated cheese.

Step 4: Pour mixture into greased casserole dish.

Step 5: Sprinkle cheese on top.

Step 6: Bake for 20 minutes.

Enjoy!!

Stop by tomorrow as I’m planning to make homemade bread rolls. I have never done this before, so wish me luck! If all goes well, I will post the recipe tomorrowJ

Frugal Sugar Scrub

Hello friends.

I love Pinterest!!! I find all my ideas from there for cooking, parties, gifts, house reno's and the list goes on. Last year I thought I would finally try out one of the gift ideas that I had pinned (it's too easy to pin ideas & never try them). I decided to make some body scrubs to go along with some Christmas gifts that i was giving. There are tons of recipes on Pinterest but this is just the one that I decided to use...it was super easy & super cheap. In fact the most expensive part was the jar to store it in but even that was cheap! 

I love cinnamon, so originally i made a cinnamon scented scrub. Here is the recipe 

http://www.savynaturalista.com/2013/11/15/cinnamon-sugar-body-scrub/

After making it, i decided that the cinnamon smell didn't quite feel right, so i purchased a green tea essential oil. I made a batch of the same recipe, but swapped the cinnamon & cinnamon essential oils for 10 drops of the green tea essential oil and loved it!

As for the jar, i purchased a pack of 12 half pint mason jars off ebay, which cost $30 and was delivered to my door (the best kind of shopping when you have kids)! That means each jar cost $2.50 & i haven't come across them cheaper as yet. You can decorate the jars however you want & they make a cute gift.

That's all for now:)

100+ Cookies Recipe

Afternoon All,
I thought that it might be time to start sharing some good old frugal recipes. So I thought I would start with a well known one, but one that is definitely a favorite in our family. It's the 100+ Cookie recipe and here it is...............

 Ingredients

• 500g butter
• ½ cup white sugar
• 5 cups Self Raising flour
• 1 can condensed milk

Instructions

1. Preheat oven at 180C and prepare baking trays
2. Cream sugar, butter and condensed milk
3. Add flour, slowly mix to combine
4. Divide mixture into 4 portions
5. Add desired ingredients (to flavour) each portion. Such as 100&1000's choc chips, nuts and my all time favorite sultanas & cornflakes.
6. Roll rounded teaspoon of mixture into balls, flatten slightly
7. Bake for 10-12 minutes or until golden

They are yummy and stay fresh in an airtight container for over a week.

Seeing as you wont need 100 cookies at once, the other great thing about this recipe is that you can freeze them. You can either make up the batter & freeze the portions that your not using straight away, and then bake them when you want them. Or you can bake them all and then freeze them in zip lock bags until you want them. I do the 2nd option as its easy to pull them out of the freezer when you need them and they only take 5-10 minutes to fully defrost.

It costs under $5 to make the batter for the whole 100+ cookies and then you just add whatever you like to it. You definitely wont regret adding these delicious treat to your household! :) 

Princess Mia's Nursery

My gorgeous bubba is now 4 months old and we have just finally finished her room!  Our 4^th bedroom is really tiny, so at first she was going in that room, so we painted it. Then we changed our mind & she was going in with her sister, so we painted that room. Then we changed our mind again and decided to put her in with the study, so we painted it. Then we decided to convert the garage into a man cave & study and give the 2 older kids the bigger bedrooms. Clearly we are not great at making decisions! And now she is back in the original room that she was going in.  The great thing is that 3 of our bedrooms are now painted yay:)!

So our gorgeous little Mia now has the little room again. She still sleeps in a bassinet in our room, so I haven’t been too concerned about getting her room together, but she is getting older now so I thought I better get my butt into action as it won’t be long till she is in there.

So here it is......

I love making bunting and it is cheap as chips. I already had this fabric lying around. I am a very basic sewer and am not great at sewing straight lines, so this design is really easy. I just cut my fabric into flags, placed them back to back and sewed together using a zig zag stitch. Then I got pinking shears and cut along both sides. After that, all that is left to do is sew the binding on top. I used lace. You can either pin the flags to the lace or if you like doing things quickly like me, just place the flags in a pile in the order that you want to use and just pick up and place inside the binding as you go. Remember to leave room at each end of the binding so you can hang your bunting. The lace was $1.99 a metre & I used 2 metres, so this cost me less that $4 to make:)

My beautiful mother in law bought this lamp for our 1^st bubba but the cute lampshade that came with it got destroyed.

 I couldn't part with it so I bought a $10 lampshade from Bunning’s and painted it with some turquoise paint that I bought as a sample pot and decided it was too dark for our wall. Then just attached some pink lace. Decorating cost $0:)

I made her name out of paper mache letters bought from Spotlight for $3.99 each.

I used paint on the sides, scrapbooking paper on the front and then decorated with ribbons, felt and kindy glitz that I already had. When doing a project I often just use things that I already have around the house. It’s amazing the amount of stuff you probably have stashed around the house that you forget about. Total cost $12.

I bought a set of 3 bird frames from Kmart for $5. They were all hanging in a line with ribbon from smallest to largest. I cut them loose and put some coloured scrap booking paper in the photo spaces. The other 2 are hanging elsewhere in the room.

The curtains are block out and the perfect colour for the room. They were from Kmart and were a bargain $29. Sorry they arn't ironed!

There are some gorgeous gifts that we received that hang proudly in Mia’s room.

When she was first born, a friend made this gorgeous frame with all her birth details on it. It also happens to fit with the colour of her room perfectly.

One day I got a package delivered to the door. I was so excited when I opened it. My beautiful friend had ordered a personalised “Mia” baby package and one of the items was this gorgeous blanket. Love that she has a special blanket with her name on it!

My gorgeous sister loves making pretty things, so I asked her if she could make Mia a mobile that i had seen on pinterest. It’s so adorable and I’m not the only one that like it...it is Mia’s favourite thing!:)

So here it is the best view that i can get of most of the room, given that it is so small & i can't get a good angle. But it's the perfect size for a little person.

That's it for now.
Kylie xx

New Sinks

Hello:)

When we purchased our house in August, it had been on the market for over 6 months. It was on the market for a good price and they had an open house almost every 2nd weekend. No one seemed to be interested and let's face it, it was not exactly appealing to the eye. If you were someone who wanted to buy a house that had no work to do, then this was not the house for you. But for us, our goal was a little different. We wanted a house that had 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a double garage, in walking distance to school and church and in a culd-a-sac (i grew up in one & loved it).  This house fitted all that we had wanted in a house. Did it have some work to do? Yes, but we love a good makeover, so it wasn't something that scared us. Having done a major renovation on our last house, we were able to look at this house and straight away know the sort of money that we would need to put into it and if that's something we were willing to do. We knew that even if we replaced the kitchen, both bathrooms & all of the flooring, that we would still spend less than a house that was finished. Plus it would be exactly to our taste. Now all that doesn't need to be done in our house but that shows me that its a good buy. Plus I HATE debt, so a good bargain excites me.

  Although major renovations don't need to be done, there are a few gross things that i have never seen in another house and couldn't believe that they didn't change before they put it on the market. The bathroom vanity sinks were the worst of these. Disgusting doesn't even come close to describing what they were like. They were plastic sinks that had obviously had something abrasive used on them, which had removed all the coating on the sink. Therefore the sink wasn't shiny anymore, they were powdery. Being powdery meant that everything stained them. Every time we looked in the sink, we were greeted with foundation, hair dye who knows what other stains, all over it. Even grosser, if by accident your finger ever touched the sink, you would get a chunk of powdered sink under your nail (that would explain the gouges out of the sink)!  Yuk Yuk Yuk!!!!!

                                    Before...Ewww...this was as clean as you get it!

We ended up finding porcelain sinks that were a similar size as the current ones at bunnings for $29! The taps needed to be replaced too. We got them for $60 a set. Hubby had to saw back each bench a little to fit the new sinks in. So happy with our new ones and what an amazing change for $89 each!


                                                                            After:)

Thats it for today. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon, 
Kylie xo

Bringing an old buffet to life

With moving into our new home (in August), we finally had room for some more furniture:):)! 

I have wanted a buffet for a while now. This used to be my Grandma's and had been sitting in my sisters garage for a while and she was now keen to get rid of it. Perfect!! Just what i needed. Plus she only lives across the road, so it was even easier to get here. 

Obviously it's pretty dated, but nothing a coat of paint can't fix!

This is what it looked like when i got it. It also had a hutch, which we got rid of at the time but i'm now regretting doing that. It would have been perfect to house my crazy tea set that i have just started collecting....yes I'm an old lady at heart:)

Seeing as the buffet was lacquered, i had to use a primer/stain killer so that the lacquer wouldn't seep through the paint. I used Zinsser's 1 2 3 Interior & Exterior primer, sealer & stain killer. Cost was $24.90 and after 2 coats on the entire buffet, there was still plenty left in the tin. I removed the doors before applying the primer.

After the primer, i painted 3 coats of white gloss enamel paint. I used Taubmans Tradex White enamel paint. Cost is $49.90 for 4 litres. After doing this, another project and architraves/skirtings in 3 rooms, we still have plenty left in the tin! 

We kept all the same hinges, so the only other thing that needed to be purchased were the 3 door handles. This was actually the biggest cost in the whole project. They were $6 each, which only seems expensive cause it's a tiny little handle!

We already had the 2 tins of paint, so this whole project only cost an extra $18! That's my type of furniture! Love a good bargain:) 

Kylie xo

How we got to where we are now

My hubby Pete and I got married in 2003.In the middle of 2005, we bought our 1^st home. We had to wait for the house that fitted our price range. So when a little 3 bedroom house in town (when I say town, I mean the centre of Nowra!) came up at the right price and we jumped on it straight away. It had a lot of work to do but it was totally liveable and most of all it was ours. Over the next 8 years, we gradually renovated it, extending our mortgage to do the majority of it. This was fine at the time as we had the finances to back it up. During this time, we also had 2 gorgeous little people, Katie & Jack.

Towards the end of 2013, an unexpected tragedy happened which would result in me making a massive financial decision for our family. At this time I was working 4 long days a week in a job that I no longer enjoyed and found incredibly stressful. On top of that, I was travelling between 1.5-2 hours per day for work. At the time hubby was working 5 days a week & studying fulltime. We had a fairly decent income at the time but needless to say our family life was not fantastic. When our tragedy happened, I made the decision immediately (literally) that I would not be returning to work. Taking my wage out of the equation was a very big deal for us, especially given that only half hubby’s income was permanent, the rest was casual. Financially our life become harder, but in every other way, it become so much better. We had planned to finish our house, as we wanted to sell it and buy a bigger one in a suburb 5 minutes away. So we used everything we had and we completed the last few things on the house. At the start of 2014 it up for sale. It took 5 months for someone to make an offer and we accepted it that day. We bought the house that we had had our eye on in the suburb that we wanted. We got it for a steal because it had been rented to terrible tenants and let’s just say it wasn't very appealing to walk thru, so it had been on the market for over 6 months(at an already good price).  In August 2014, we moved into our new home. We sold our 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom, no garage home and bought a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom, double garage home. After paying out the $25K in fees (so much money straight down the loo), we still came out $20K less in debt. How awesome is that?!!! Bigger house in the area that we wanted and less debt! 

Due to studying and different work arrangements, there had never been a time that we had been on 2 full time incomes, so we had to often been on a small budget. Last year was definitely our hardest year and we would not have gotten thru in the way that we did, had it not been for the help of our beautiful family and friends. 

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When things are tough, there is normally light at the end of the tunnel. At the end of last year, Pete graduated from University as a teacher. We also welcomed our precious little rainbow baby Mia to our family. She is seriously Beautiful (Just like her older brother & sister)!!!

For now, we are still on a fairly small budget. However over the last year, i have come to realise how much you can do on a small budget. I’ve been forced to become more money savvy than I have ever been and I actually now enjoy trying to do things on a budget.  I love a good bargain, DIY reno’s & projects and trying to keep my grocery bill to $100 a week.  I had wanted to start blogging but hadn’t quite found my niche, but now here it is, the birthing of “A Happy Frugal life”(Thanks to my big sis for coming up with the name), doing life on a budget. Seeing as I’m really keen on making my house homely, there will probably be alot on the blog revolving around renovations and DIY house projects, but there will still be other things too. If you want to follow along with me, hit like on the Facebook page and subscribe at the bottom of the blog page.

Promise the next blog won’t be an essay (I know one friend who will be really happy about that!)

Kylie xx