A little Tip for Gaining Freezer Space

As I'm starting to think about baking Christmas cookies, I realized my freezer is already PACKED. Time to buckle down and eat up freezer food and defrost the freezers! I thought I'd share this one little idea I recently came up with to gain back space.

(Bake 20-24 minutes at 425 degrees)

Do you have boxed frozen good items like fish sticks, egg rolls, chicken nuggets, etc? Do you often use a few and put the rest back in the freezer, creating dead, wasted space with a half empty box? Try putting the left overs in a bag instead, labeled with the cooking time & temperature. Or better yet, if the food is bagged inside the box, I simply toss the box and recycle a bread tab to close it (above), writing the baking time and temp on the tab. You'd be amazed how much space you can get back!

Not sure you'll be able to identify the food in the bag? Simply cut out the description/name/photo from the cardboard box and slip it inside the bag with the food.  If there are more baking instructions than can fit on a bread tab, you can always cut out the panel that has the instructions too.

Voila!  Extra space to fill with actual food!

Making Wax Paper Fall Leaves

This week we had some fun with a little fall project: leaves made from crayon shavings on wax paper.  I found the idea via Pinterest on this blog.  However, I thought I'd do my own post on our experience and show you more of the process with more photos.

First I had the boys flip through this leaf book and look at our own trees and choose colors from our box of crayons that match the colors of the fall leaves.

Remove the wrappers on the crayons.

Lay out a piece of wax paper and scrape some crayon shavings in red, yellow, and orange.  Sammy wanted a little blue and green as well!

Cover your ironing board with a towel and lay the wax paper on top. Use a knife to reign in the shavings.

Lay another piece of wax paper on top of the shavings.

Put a paper towel on top of the wax paper to protect your iron.

Using a low temperature, iron your paper.  Press and keep moving. Add more paper towels if it begins to bleed through.

Check it periodically to see how much it is melting.

Use a butter knife if you need to blend and spread the wax more.

Finished wax paper sheet

Find some leaves outside and trace them on the wax paper.

Cut out your leaves

Done!