Keeping the family organized in the New Year...

 

With the new year quickly approaching, we are all thinking of what we want to do to make next year better... I will be using Cozi even more to keep us organized and be sure we don't forget work Potlucks, meeting or any of that fun stuff we love to do!  Over the next few weeks I will be making a list of goals for 2013 and sharing it with y'all to help me achieve those goals I will be using Cozi!

 

Now what is Cozi you ask...

Cozi is an app that I have played around with in the past and recently went back to as the Mommy Brain was taking up room in my purse as well as the fact that it had one major flaw... No reminders and lets face it we all need little reminders on some stuff!  

Cozi offers connecting the whole family in one place including your busy pets!  Each family member has a different color assigned to them to allow you to keep everything straight! you can do almost anything on here from

• Tracking Appointments, Activities and Events
• Meal Planning
• Multiple To-Do Lists 
• Multiple Grocery Lists (Great for us couponers!)
• Store Recipes 
• Journal Family Events
• Leave Messages For The Family

Some other great features are e-mail reminders, text your grocery list to your husband on his way home from work and much more!

Cozi is available online from your PC, Andoid or Apple devices.

Have questions or added advice on Cozi?  Feel free to comment here or email me at nicole.riens@gmail.com !

Cozi Gold

I am using the Cozi Gold via the monthly payment option (it was a softer blow to my wallet lol), I am loving it, its worth $5.00 per month to have everything in one place and accessible from my phone, also Kevin can see it from his and add to what he needs too! It will also help me remember all the family Birthdays with the NEW Birthday Tracker!

There is a special of 40% off for Cozi Gold this holiday season! Get Cozi Gold for $29.99 a year.

Cozi Meal Planning Tips

 

Anyone ever click on the tips tab of a program they are using??? Well I did today and found some great info, check it out all of this is great for meal planning with Cozi! (Information taken directly from Cozi)

In the Recipe Box, you can:

• Add, store and access all your recipes in one place
• Add ingredients from any recipe to your Cozi shopping list

In the Dinner Plan, you can:

• Click on a day and start typing in a meal idea
• Drag and drop recipes into your dinner plan, or move recipes from one day to another

How to add recipes from around the web:

Place the “Add to Cozi Meals” button on your toolbar to add recipes from other websites to your recipe box. To get the button on your toolbar, follow the instructions for your browser: (use this link here to get to the tips page and add to your toolbar)

• Internet Explorer: Right click on this link:
  Add to Cozi Meals
  , and choose “Add to Favorites”. (If you get a security warning, say Yes.) In the Add a Favorite dialog, choose Favorites Bar in the “Create In” field.
• Firefox: Right click on this link:
  Add to Cozi Meals
  and choose "Bookmark This Link".
• Chrome or Safari: DRAG this link to your browser's bookmark toolbar (don't just click the link):
  Add to Cozi Meals
  . Chrome users: You may need to turn on "Always show bookmark toolbar" in browser settings.

If you are using Cozi Express, you can reach this page on cozi.com in your web browser to add these buttons to your browser toolbar.

Stock your recipe box with ideas from the Cozi picks section:

Cozi picks are family-friendly, family-tested dinner recipes.
Add a few Cozi picks to your own recipe box and get started dinner planning in a snap!

Organizing The Family

 

Cozi is an app that I have played around with in the past and recently went back to as the Mommy Brain was taking up room in my purse as well as the fact that it had one major flaw... No reminders and lets face it we all need little reminders on some stuff!  

Cozi offers connecting the whole family in one place including your busy pets!  Each family member has a different color assigned to them to allow you to keep everything straight! you can do almost anything on here from

• Tracking Appointments, Activities and Events
• Meal Planning
• Multiple To-Do Lists 
• Multiple Grocery Lists (Great for us couponers!)
• Store Recipes 
• Journal Family Events
• Leave Messages For The Family

Some other great features are e-mail reminders, text your grocery list to your husband on his way home from work and much more!

Cozi is available online from your PC, Andoid or Apple devices.

There is a "Gold" version that offers more features however I am not sure I can justify $50.00 a year for an app.

Have questions or added advice on Cozi?  Feel free to comment here or email me at nicole.riens@gmail.com !


****UPDATE****

I am now using the Cozi Gold via the monthly payment option (it was a softer blow to my wallet lol), I am loving it, its worth $5.00 per month to have everything in one place and accessible from my phone, also Kevin can see it from his and add to what he needs too!  I am going to add our routien to it to help us along with Money Saving Moms Challenge!

Cozi Beef Goulash

As  many of you know I have been using Cozi instead of the Mommy Brain, I am totally loving is and even signed up for the monthly paid version Cozi Gold. (well worth $5.00 per month)! Well there are some meal planing features including recipes and a way to store your favorite family recipes, they e-mail me new ones once per month and I can add them to my recipe box if I want and it makes it great to be able to check them while in the grocery store from my phone. Cozi will even add the ingredients to your shopping list!

Well today we tried out the Beef Goulash and loved it! I made it with ground turkey and found that because I was using a Cast Iron pot I needed to add about 1 1/2 cups of water to get the pasta to cook all the way through, but my pot holds heat so I added this slowly as it cooked and I noticed it needed more liquid.

 

This version of goulash, made with hamburger and elbow macaroni, was a popular family dinner in the 1970s. Do you remember it? It's a crowd-pleaser and fits any frugal budget. Plan it for a night when you'll have big appetites at the table.

Cozi Beef Goulash

Ingredients

1 lb ground beef
1 large onion, chopped fine
1 green pepper, diced
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 can (14.5 oz) diced tomatoes
1 can (15 oz) tomato sauce
1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp salt (or more to taste)
pepper to taste
2 cups elbow macaroni

Preparation

Prep time: 20 min | Cook time: 40 min | Servings: 6

1. Brown ground beef.

2. Add onion and green pepper. Cook over medium heat until soft (10-15 min).

3. Add garlic, tomatoes, tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper to the beef mixture. Reduce heat and simmer 20 minutes.

4. While the beef mixture cooks, boil the macaroni al dente, drain.

5. Add the macaroni to the beef mixture, stir well, and simmer another 20 minutes, covered.

Organize The Whole Family

 

Cozi is an app that I have played around with in the past and recently went back to as the Mommy Brain was taking up room in my purse as well as the fact that it had one major flaw... No reminders and lets face it we all need little reminders on some stuff!  

Cozi offers connecting the whole family in one place including your busy pets!  Each family member has a different color assigned to them to allow you to keep everything straight! you can do almost anything on here from

• Tracking Appointments, Activities and Events
• Meal Planning
• Multiple To-Do Lists 
• Multiple Grocery Lists (Great for us couponers!)
• Store Recipes 
• Journal Family Events
• Leave Messages For The Family

Some other great features are e-mail reminders, text your grocery list to your husband on his way home from work and much more!

Cozi is available online from your PC, Andoid or Apple devices.

There is a "Gold" version that offers more features however I am not sure I can justify $50.00 a year for an app.

Have questions or added advice on Cozi?  Feel free to comment here or email me at nicole.riens@gmail.com !

Winter is here!

 I know that it has been quite some time since I have posted but I have been very busy with work and life. I will do my best to write every few days as best I can from now on if not more frequently. And as y'all can see from the blog theme winter is finally here! No more weather over 100 degrees, we have actually been below freezing the last few nights and had ice this morning.  All of this means soups and fire in the fire place!

David has gotten very big and is changing daily.  Hes 27 inches long and 18 pounds, hes also eating table foods, his favorites are pancake with turkey bacon and fruit, all ground up of course as he still has no teeth at 7 months old.  He is crawling, climbing, and walking along furniture and one of his favorite things to do is unplug mommies laptop while she is working (it no longer holds a charge so it dies when he does this). he also loves to play with Nabby and loves the Christmas tree. 

These are a few pictures from the past week, we went to the Gaylord Texan on Thanksgiving and saw the ICE exhibit "Shrek The Halls" David Loved it! Thanks Auntie Suzzy and Uncle Jon we had tons of fun!

So couponing was on hold for a short time do to a limit in my time available but I am now working on getting back into it as best I can, I have even taken it to work with me to work on when I have a few minutes to spare.  When people see it all they ask lots of questions and I always direct them here as best I can.

This was a trip to target that I had last week that resulted in spending just 47 dollars and some change and yielded a 10 dollar giftcard! not pictured were the paper towels and toilet paper.

Before my break I was working on reorganizing some things and I will continue to do so now that I am back, please watch for changes and bare with me while they occur.

Another tip tha that I have for saving some money this holiday season is seeing if the store offers a discount on open or damaged boxes (Lowes dose this which saved me 10% on this fireplace screen with tools)

On the meal planning front the Cozi app that I have mentioned before now has many new features as well as meal planning, I love it for my shopping list that can have headers, as well as the calendar that it will add my to do list to. Pageonce is also a great app for keeping track of your finances all in one place

 So the Christmas Holiday is quickly approaching and has me in full holiday spirits, the house is decorated and lights are up outside, I only have couple of gifts left to pick up then mail gifts to California for family and get the cards in the mail (I will be working on this tonight), I have gotten some great deals including some free next day shipping for calling the company to see I could get a deal because of a discount code I used, putting me under for using the code that was out, I will share this company's name at a later time as to keep the surprise.

The tree is missing some ornaments now thanks to my tiny helpers (Nabby, Holly and David)

 This is what I have done with David's portraits and I will continue to add to it as he has more taken, I was told that you need to either remove the glass or use mats to prevent them from sticking to the glass.

 

Okay so I think that is it for now I will try to post more later if I have some time free tonight!

My Favorites Part 2

Android Applications 

Couponing


Savings Star
Geo Coupons
Kroger
Cash Flow
ShopKick
Key Ring

Mommy Apps

*Pageonce*
Cozi
Baby ESP
Period Tracker
Baby Canter My Pregnancy Today
Baby Bump Pro
Meet Up

For Fun

Angry Birds
Angry Birds Rio
Angry Birds Seasonal
Pandora 
E Buddy



General

Amazon
Facebook 
Gmail
Google Maps
Blogger
Picasa Tool
Photo Bucket (backs up all your photos and videos as you take them then edit them later)
Weather Bug

Meal Planning Basics

So this is a new feature wooo hooo, check back each week to see the meals that I have planned.  We follow a low cholesterol, heart healthy diet so ingredients can be changed some!  I will try to include recipes when I can as well as a shopping list, recipes can be found on the separate Recipes page (a tab is at the top of the page just click!)

 

This is one of my favorite simple cookbooks i will be adding recipes from it to the meal 

plan many of them can be found in the newer Betty Crocker cookbook

So I know this isn't the clearest of pictures how ever I wanted to show y'all how I Have done my m
my meal planning in the past I used post its at the bottom of my calendar
(a monthly weekly one that i got at staples)this allows me to move things around
if need be and can save me time later by moving things to a new day!

Currently I am using Cozi and just put it in at 6pm every day , I also have the Cozi app on my phone and I love it because I can have it email things to Kevin, I also keep my shopping lists on it and my to-do lists! Kevin can also add to the shopping lists from his phone and it show up on mine.

Links for meal planning


 

Click the Crock-Pot to be taken to Coupon Newbies Croc-Pot dinner thread!

Click on the Chicken to be taken to Coupon Newbies quick meal ideas!

My Ingredients 

I always use ground turkey instead of ground beef, and boneless skinless chicken breasts, brawts are always turkey or chicken.  All of the bread products we use are whole wheat and come from the discount bread store. I bake cookies once a week for lunches and snacks, muffins are from mixes along with brownies and cakes, I just buy them when they are on sale. I keep Splenda, brown sugar, white sugar, wheat flour and all purpose flour on hand along with other ingredients for baking and Bisquick!  Cheese is also a staple in our home

• When a meal says Bisquick ____ the recipe can be found on the box or Bisquick website!
• Meals like bbq beef are store bought (loyds) when on sale! along with other items like volia, or Bertolli.
• Pizza is made from scratch every week! (Kevin dose this)

Breakfasts


I keep eggs, egg substitute, cereal, bagels, English muffins, frozen hash browns, turkey bacon, turkey sausage, and oatmeal on hand and we fix what ever we have time to that morning if something is gone it is gone till the next time I make it to the market!  Bisquick comes in handy in the mornings too!


Lunches


I keep bread and other sandwich fixings on hand its just part of the weekly shopping (try to make it last 2 weeks when we can!) these items include: peanut butter, jam, lunch meat, lettuce, and sliced cheese, condiments are considered staples as well. I also keep hot dogs, fish sticks or frozen chicken fingers, fries and tater tots!

Other Meal Ideas

• Taco Salad
• Ceaser Salad
• Chili 
• Chili Mac
• Potato Casserole
• Shepard's Pie
• Swedish Meatballs
• Sausage & Peppers
• Mince(great on a rainy or snowy day, I serve over mashed potatoes recipe can be found here)
• Beef Burgundy (from Betty Crocker one dish)  
• Corn Chowder (recipe on recipe page)

Keep Checking Back for more meal planning info!