During the cold days of our last three winters before selling the house and buying an RV to travel the country into our retirement, my mind is (thankfully) constantly thinking about downsizing. Knowing we still have plenty of time, it’s easy to say “what’s the rush?,” but I don’t want to save it all for a mad rush at the end! Need to TAKE ADVANTAGE of our available time instead.
So. Why am I babbling about this?
Because it’s that mindset that has led me to two purchases lately! Generally, ANY purchase for the house these days gets met with “will it fit into our future life/lifestyle”? If not, we don’t buy it. It has really helped cut down on impulse buys and wasteful spending!
The first item that passed that test was an Instant Pot! At around $100, the hope is it will replace a couple other large items – i.e. crock pot, large soup pot, steamer, hot plate – that ALL take up room! In the first 30 days, and I made a full pot roast dinner, chicken fajitas, hard-boiled eggs, one pot pasta and meatballs, baby back ribs and steamed fresh veggies – which all came out great!
Itching to try more – and start letting this toy SAVE us some money!
This is probably second nature to many of you, but I kind of shop wrong – LOL! I get it in my head that I want……..pulled pork – and run out and buy a pork roast whether it’s on sale or not! I really need to get better at buying what’s ON SALE, and finding a recipe I want to make with it.
Which led to the next purchase. A whopping $5 for a recipe app called Paprika! (Android & iPhone) As I started getting sucked into the Instant Pot Facebook communities, I saw recipe after recipe I want to try. I started “saving” some of the links on Facebook. I started pasting others to Pinterest. My head was already swimming with “how will I know where I saved which one” thoughts!
Until…………in one of the threads on Facebook someone mentioned the Paprika Recipe Manager and everyone jumped on board that it’s the best thing since sliced bread. My first thought was, “ugh – I have so many cookbooks and written recipes that I’ll have to enter!” My second thought was “OH! I’m going to have to do that as part of downsizing anyway!”
And, realistically, I don’t use half of my hard copy recipes or cookbooks anyway – because they’re not at my fingertips when I’m shopping! This allows me to be standing at the store, seeing “X” meat on sale, to pop open the app, pick a recipe I know I like or that a friend recommended, hit a button and have a list of all the rest of the ingredients I might need to pick up in order to make it! Sah-weet!
I’ve already put all my recipes IN it! Went through all my hard copy cookbooks and only had to hand enter a few – most of them I just searched for the same recipe in the app’s browser, found the same recipe, clicked a button and it imported the whole recipe – with a picture, ingredients, and instructions! And of course, it’s all cloud based, so even if you lose/switch phones, it’s still all there!
All cookbooks are gone from my house – given away or donated to the library……..
