Cheap & Healthy Dinner

Hello! We are enjoying the cool breeze of a thunderstorm, and just finished a pretty awesome dinner that gave us a TON of leftovers! I wasn't sure how it would turn out, I didn't have a recipe or anything, and we were pleasantly surprised. Mind you, there are only two of us, so if you're a larger family, you won't have as much left over as we do. 

Ingredients:

1 sweet onion, chopped

1-2 bags of mixed vegetables (we bought a "stir fry blend," it had snap peas, yellow peppers, broccoli, carrots) 

1.5 lb. ground turkey (I'm positive this would taste good with any kind of Turkey, not just ground.)

1 lb. brown rice

seasonings

Onion: $0.89. 

Stir Fry Veggie Bag: $1 each. 

1.5 lb. Ground Turkey: $2.07. 

1 lb. brown rice: $1. 

Cook rice according to instructions (our 1 lb. bag turned out to have 2 1/2 c. uncooked rice, & it took approx. 35 minutes).  While that is cooking, chop onion & start to brown the turkey. Once turkey is cooked, drain, I added some fresh ground pepper, and add to a big bowl, cover.  In same pan, sweat onion. In one final pan, steam vegetables (ours were frozen, so according to our bag instructions). Drain vegetables. By this time, the rice should be about done.  When rice is finished, add half the rice to the bowl, stir to mix with turkey.  Add the onions, stir.  Add the rest of the rice and steamed vegetables, stir.  Season to taste.  We used salt, pepper, basil, and cajun.  Shawn added garlic to his. I'm sure a garnish of parsley, mint leaves, or even sage would make a great addition. 

We hope this helps, even a little.  We know what it's like to eat on a budget, and this easy and CHEAP recipe will keep us full for a number of days! 

What cheap meals do you like to cook? 

Getting Settled

Howdy!! We are getting used to the South Carolina life, and loving it! (Except when it rains and we are stuck inside.)  Shawn got a job down here, I'm still waiting to hear back about a graduate assistantship (fingers crossed!) and life is just so... happy, enjoyable, loving, fun, and interesting! 

In our little town, we are less than FIVE whole miles from (in no order): Food Lion (think cross between Save A Lot and Tops), Bi-Lo (more upscale grocer, think Wegmans), Family Dollar, Dollar Tree, Dollar General(I'm sensing a pattern here...), Walmart, Chick-fil-A (Shawn's new favorite place for chicken), Hardee's, Sonic, Auto Zone, Big Lots, Verizon, Waffle House, Walgreens, the DMV, Wells Fargo, Piggly Wiggly, and Heads Up Hair Design (which was the best $25 hair cut I've ever had in my whole entire life - super thorough, helpful, and well trained!). And so much more.  I couldn't even list everything in an entire post - there is A LOT. 

We've gone to my Colleges (it's a joint degree between two) and I fell in love with the Campus an library at the Citadel. I've started to dip my foot in to the world of podcasts, and I'm still unsure about if I like them or not.  We went to pick up my seven novels for one of my courses (18th Century Novel), we drove around Charleston and loved seeing the different architecture, we've spent an afternoon at Folly Beach, we had one dinner date in Murrell's Inlet and stopped at a few places in Pawley's Island, we've read books, we've adapted to our hookups, we've seen a lot of wildlife and dragonflies, it goes on.  We are really blessed and thankful to be living in such a place that has so much to offer, explore, and experience.  

But most importantly, we've begun to plan for the future.  Our hopes, dreams, where we want to be, where we want to go, vacations we want to have before we die, where/how we should live within the next few years, and most importantly, we've set up a game-plan as to how we want to achieve our immediate and semi-long term goals (within 5 years).  And we made a small little poster that's hanging on the wall in the hallway to remind us every day to try and get a little closer to those goals. 

And of course, Velvet found a new place to hang when we forgot to close the cabinets :)

We checked out Lake Moultrie, which is less than a mile away from us, but this photo was near the public boat ramp, about 14 miles from us. 

Shawn has been working on our lawn? Area? What do we call it? Here he's working on the back (secondary) driveway.  He also gets on a Ford tractor like this one and bush hogs it (big lawn mower).

These photos were from our trip to Pawley's Island.

We went to Capt. Dave's Dockside for dinner and Shawn tried some more hush puppies.  He wasn't a big fan of these, because he tried some down in Hilton Head at Hudson's, and those had onion in them, which are much more to his taste. These were too sweet. 

View from our dinner table! Right on the inlet, and people can go on boat rides, walk around, shop a little, or even dock right up to the side and come in to eat! 

It may be fake, but it's still pretty huge!

Lots of morning time snuggles

And the puppy has figured out he can sit on the couch and see what's on the dinette table and smell Mommy's dinner even better

This picture is Folly Beach, about two hours before the peak of high tide

The beach wouldn't be complete without my favorite bird: the pelican! There were so many! 

Shawn got to see pelicans hunting for food, and I caught it on video! Pay attention to the pelican on the right :)