Time To Cook A Large Turkey

Remember all of those large Butterball turkeys I purchased before Thanksgiving. Well, I decided it was time to cook one today. It's pictured above about 1/2 way through the time it needed to roast.  However, we will not be having the usual fat laden sides that go with it. I didn't stuff the turkey. DH can have a scoop of Betty Crocker made on the stove. We will have tossed salad to go with it. I will also make gravy but use a fat free gravy packet and no drippings. Then for our snack tonight, if we are hungry, we will have homemade strawberry sorbet made in my Vitamix.  This turkey will make a few meals for us now including some soup. The rest will be portioned  and sealed into foodsaver bags. I will use it whenever a recipe calls for chicken. 

Since I will be weighing myself tomorrow, I am getting excited to see how much I have lost. I do have a pretty good idea after going to the Doctor's yesterday. I will let you all know tomorrow.

These are the other things I have done today to save money:

* Once the garbage and recyclables were picked up, I went out and very quickly grabbed those cans. The winds here are about 60 mph today so I didn't want to have to buy new garbage cans if they blew away. Even going out quickly to get them, they had already blown down the street. So many of my neighbors have come home from work over the past few months to find they no longer have cans.

* I had enough points to order another $ 5.00 Amazon.com gift certificate from Swagbucks. These are adding up quickly for gifts during the year.

* Changed the furnace filter. I do this monthly. A clogged filter wastes energy.   

* Vaccumed the coils on my refrigerator to keep it running energy efficiently.

* Ran a very full dishwasher with 1 tbsp. of Cascade liquid. An appliance repairman once told  me that you don't need any more than that of Cascade liquid. I ran it on the energy saving cycle.

* I continue to drink nothing but tap water for beverages. The one exception is one cup of  coffee in the morning.

* I had a box of saltines that had gone stale. Rather than throw them out I put them on a cookie sheet in the oven while the turkey was roasting. They are again crispy and I can use them with my tuna or  chicken salad for lunches. If this hadn't worked, I would have made crumbs from them for breading baked chicken and pork chops.

* Needed to send a sympathy card so I went to my box of cards to see if I had one. I did from a box of assorted cards that I had purchased at a garage sale for $ .25 last summer.

* Made some homemade iced tea for DH whose soda stash is getting mighty low.

*  Cut up carrots and celery into snack size sticks and put them in my green containers that keep produce fresher longer. These will be used for snacks.

*  I used the last of my cajun seasoning in the gumbo. So I had to make more. Mixed together 1 tsp. each of black pepper, white pepper, ground red pepper, garlic powder, paprika and onion powder. I poured it into the empty bottle and it will be ready next time I need it.

Please feel free to leave a comment and share with all of us what you did today to save some money.