Being Numb to Small Blessings

Well, the Lenten Season has officially started for a few days.  Each year, we try to find a way to challenge ourselves with our sacrifice (even before we converted to Catholicism we had this tradition for some reason!).  This year, we spent a good deal of prayer and talking over what our sacrifice (or something extra) would be.  It seemed that everywhere we turned, skills and experiences from when we were our poorest abounded and arose.  This led to a discussion in which we began to realize both the good and bad of where we've grown to in our marriage and finances.  We've had quite a few ups and downs in our 9 years of marriage.  We've experienced both of us working so many hours that we never see one another or have time to even eat a meal together, being so poor that we sold our wedding rings just to have some food in the house, as well as finally being able to work on putting our credit into a manageable state and having a nice car (where we are now).  Sometimes, it's really easy to forget the hard times and live in the good...really really easy!  In some ways, you almost become numb to things that in previous times of your life you would be thankful for!  For example, we have a really nice economical car right now.  We are extremely blessed by this!  Sometimes it's easy for us to look at our high car payment and forget what it was like when we had no car and had to walk or bus everywhere in the middle of winter.  We also forget what it was like to have a car that got terrible gas millage and cost a fortune to do our day to day driving.  It's just so simple to become numb to our blessings!  Even with beginning our fertility treatments again, we sometimes feel trapped in how long things take.  We are so blessed to have wonderful medical professionals to work with this time around, but we still get so frustrated with how our situation is responding!  This numbness of the small blessings is what we decided to try and tackle this lent.  Our approach to it is mostly a financial one, but we're hoping that one thing will lead to another!  Our sacrifice for lent is that we are going to live on as little money as we can.  We've recently gotten into the bad habit of not eating at home for many of our meals.  This is one thing that is stopping!  Lent has only been going on for a few days, but I will say that already, I've seen some changes.  It's been years since Mike and I really sat at the table and had dinner.  Some of this stems from feeling the ache of the children we yearn for and some of it stems from enjoying being entertained while watching a show.  To be honest, as a housewife, I haven't let myself enjoy the blessings of staying home.  Our infertility has numbed me to them and slowly, one by one, I've let them slip away.  Even though we are only a few days in, things like preparing meals and keeping tidy have begun to have joy to them again instead of just a routine.  I'd forgotten how nice it can feel to have a meal on the table when M gets home and to sit and eat with him without distractions!  Some things have changed since we were those newly weds in our first apartment after we decided I would stay home.  M may not be able to talk as much during dinner now, but there is a niceness and a pride there too.  For so long it seemed pointless to set the table and lug the food out into the dining room for two, but these last few days  have reminded me just how nice it can be.

Well, now that that has been said, I plan on trying to update this with my thoughts more regularly (of course I always have the intention of updating more regularly, but it doesn't always stick!).  I'm going to try to get M to have a say some too!  As we started this, I quickly realize that there isn't much in the way of motivation or help for living with less money in the blog world (at least not that I could find).  I'm hoping to make new recipes as well as highlight existing recipes I find that are economical to make and can help feed a family.  We of course as a family try to take a whole food approach to our diet (we make everything from scratch we can) so we will incorporate that in as well where we can!  My first sharing of this type will be to share a recipe I found just yesterday.  It's called Greek Chicken.  Now, I know everyone's cupboard is going to have a different rotation of stock, but hopefully these recipes can all be played with to everyone's advantage!  You can find the recipe here!

My raw mixture ready for the oven!

I won't be giving you the entire recipe here because I want everyone to support the original blogger!  The recipe calls for simple ingredients:  Salt, oregano, garlic powder, pepper, lemon juice, olive oil (any oil could be substituted I'm sure), bone in skin on chicken, and potatoes.  I'll be honest, I used the last of my garlic powder just before Lent.  If I can find some cheap somewhere, I'll have more, if not...well, fresh garlic is always a good price!  For my variation of this recipes, I substituted some fresh garlic for the powder, used four small russet potatoes, a half of a small sweet potato and tossed a handful of hand broken mushrooms on top.

My finished chicken.

I'll tell you, we both loved this dish!  It was easy to throw together and since M found a bunch of chicken legs on sale for $0.88 a pound right before Lent, it didn't cost much.  We typically have everything that goes in this dish always around the house.  My thought is that even if you don't have oregano, you could easily substitute another seasoning and this would still be a really yummy meal!  I will warn you (because this part took me by surprise) the recipe calls for 1 1/2 hours for cooking time.  It's not really a bother because it's baking time and you can do other things while this is cooking, but this is not a quick throw together meal!  With the addition of the mushrooms and sweet potatoes, we were able to use the potato mixture as our side dish to the chicken.  For the two of us, I cooked a total of four legs, but we could have easily gone to a leg a piece if I had added another side dish.  I think next time I will experiment with some carrot mixed in the potatoes as well!

Well, I'll leave here until next time (which should be soon!).