One Year of Blogging Done!

Last weekend was the one year anniversary of Oscoey. I can’t believe how quickly the last year has gone! I have learned a lot about blogging over the past year and gotten to know many fabulous bloggers as well.

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When I first started out blogging with my very first blog post:

Welcome!

I had all sorts of ideas of what I wanted the blog to be and then the reality of life set in and I had to way scale back my ambitious plans.  There simply was not time for me to be posting quality posts 3 days a week, be on top of social media all day long and be an active member of all the blog groups I am part of and have some semblance of a home life. Luckily I realized pretty early on that it is ok if I can’t write an article for a few weeks or if I miss out on pivotal twitter discussions because I am not doing the blog as a full-time business making gig. I am doing it because I enjoy writing about our life and I love the community of people I have become a part of.

My blog first started out as a basic mom blog with many posts about the garden and recipes. I loved my weekly garden posts and will continue them on a less frequent basis this year. I love looking back at how the garden changed over the growing season.  I am probably going to scale back on the recipes though. Mr. Oscoey is more the cook in the family and now that I am working again I really don’t have time to cook much any more.  I use my banana bread and chocolate chip cookies recipes all the time though. They are a great dairy and gluten free choice for any sort of social gathering you need to bring an item to.  I am planning on making my dairy and gluten-free banana bread to bring with a jar of homemade jam to our work potluck at the end of this month.

I have spent a little time focusing on urban homesteading on Oscoey because I firmly believe that people should grow at least a little of their own food. It is easy to set out a pot and even just grow a little bit of lettuce. Connecting with nature and understanding the seasons is something a lot of people have lost. Growing your own food is the easiest way to regain that connection and as an added bonus you have cheap organic produce to munch on! I am very excited to start our garden this year and I look forward to spending time out there with the kids every day. They love to graze and eat whatever is in season and that is fine with us!

After I had done the mom blog thing for a while and focused on our little urban homestead I found the personal finance community and I haven’t really looked back. I love reading about personal finance, talking about savings strategies and getting inspiration from others. I will be honest and tell you I was a little nervous when I added the “Finances” category to the top of my page but then I did the Uber Frugal Month Challenge this January and I loved being a part of that community and jump starting our frugal mindset once again.

My crossstitching progress pictures seem to have fallen by the wayside…and that is mostly because I have not been stitching.  I would love to have the time to stitch every day and I am very inspired by my Instagram feed with everybody’s progress but I am honestly too tired at the end of the day to even think about picking up a needle.  This picture was taken almost a year ago and even though I have actually made progress on the piece I am no where near finished with it like I had hoped.  I also have several sewing projects I would love to write about that I have not worked on in months so I think one of my blogging goals for this year is to talk about some of my projects and spend some time tracking them on a weekly basis to motivate me to finish them.

Oscoey had a great first year! I want to thank everyone that is a regular reader of the blog! I love your comments and interacting with you. Here’s hoping to another great year of blogging!

Banana bread was one of those things I always meant to make but never got around to. We would put bananas in the freezer and inevitably forget about them. I have tossed so many bananas into the yard waste I can’t even remember. Part of our plan to be more frugal is to waste less food. Food waste is a huge problem, especially in America with up to 40% of all food produced wasted according to the National Resources Defense Council.  Many people buy more than they need and a lot of it gets tossed out.  We have always gone through the pantry a couple of times a year and donated what we are not eating but that is harder to do with the lettuce you fully intended to eat but has now formed a mushy mess in the bottom of the vegetable drawer. I have been really working hard at lowering our produce waste lately and only buying enough fruits and vegetables for us to actually eat.

Our efforts have been working and we no longer have several bananas in the freezer or mushy lettuce in the fridge but we do run out of fresh fruit and vegetables sometimes but you know what? It is completely fine. I keep frozen fruit and vegetables in the freezer and when we run out I make sure to go to the store the next possible day.  We have gotten much better about buying only what we need and now that our berries and squash are beginning to ripen I don’t really have to worry about running out.  We just head out to the garden and see what we can find.  Right now we have blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and huckleberries ripe and my kids have been out there daily munching away.

Finding a good banana bread recipe was a difficult task.  We don’t like it very sweet and it needed to be easy enough for me to put together with the kids running around.  I found this one at Mr.Breakfast.com several months ago that I absolutely love.  We have since gone gluten and diary-free and I have been able to adapt it easily with pre-made gluten-free flour and coconut oil. I also cut the sugar in half because we are trying to reduce our sugar intake in our house.

I found some gluten-free flour at Costco that I thought I would try it with this banana bread and so far I have been really pleased with it. I can’t taste any garbanzo beans and unsuspecting family members haven’t been able to tell the difference so I may branch out to something else.  I have been hearing about this butter flavored coconut oil for months in my mom’s group and I used it with the banana bread. I am not sure if it is worth the extra cost yet.  The container is not very big and using 8 tablespoons for the banana bread recipe made a huge dent in it so I might just reserve it for recipes where it really matters. Ha ha don’t look at the salt I used.  We have been out of Kosher salt the last couple of weeks and my husband and I kept forgetting to buy it. He is a huge salt lover though so we have many different kinds stashed away in the cupboard and the sea salt made the cut as our temporary substitute.  Do you guys ever do that? A box of Kosher salt lasts us many months and we never remember to buy it when we are out. Somehow since we rarely need salt it slips our minds every time we are at the store. I should probably start buying two so we have an extra for our emergency kit.

First things first measure out your coconut oil and your sugar.

Cream them in a bowl. I am fond of the hand mixer for smaller jobs but you could use a stand mixer as well.

Beat 2 eggs into a bowl.

Mash up your bananas. I did them one by one in the egg bowl to save on dishes.

Add your flour slowly.  I split it into 2 1/2 cups and 1/4 cup and slowly mixed them in.

Yum! If you like nuts or chocolate chips in your banana bread you can add them here. My son is too young for nuts so I leave them out.  We also don’t eat a lot of sugar so I leave out the chocolate chips.

Pour your mixture into a greased loaf pan and tamp it down. Bake for 40-50 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

There you have it! Yummy banana bread fresh out of the oven. The hardest part is waiting for it to cool!

Gluten-free Dairy-free Banana Bread

July 15, 2017

Servings: 8-10

Prep: 10 min

Total: 60 min

Difficulty: Easy

Print This

Quick and easy banana bread easily made gluten and dairy-free.

By: Oscoey

Ingredients

• 8 Tablespoons Coconut oil (or butter)
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 beaten eggs
• 3 bananas
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 and 1/4 cups All Purpose Gluten-Free Flour mix
• Optional 1/3 cups Walnuts

Directions

• Step 1 Grease a standard loaf pan and set oven temperature to 350 degrees.
• Step 2 Cream the coconut oil and sugar together in a large bowl.
• Step 3 Beat two eggs together and add them as well as three mashed bananas to the bowl.
• Step 4 Mix in salt and baking soda. Add flour, mixing slowly.
• Step 5 Bake for 40-50 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean in the center of the loaf.

Have you seen these cool candy toys made in Japan? They have all kids of fun food items to make!

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For Christmas I bought this  Takoyaki candy from Japan for my teenager. Takoyaki is one of her favorite foods and she found it online and wanted to try it.  It was ok and I wish I had gotten pictures of it but she had fun making it with the three year old and we had a good laugh out of it.  The oldest is heading off to college next year and to make her last year memorable I have been randomly ordering funny things off of Amazon to see how she reacts.  A couple of months ago I found this Japanese Candy “In A Toilet”  Drink Toy on Amazon after scouring the site for the perfect gag gift.  I ordered it hoping it would come before Easter and it happened to come last week on a particularly difficult day so I had her open it right away to cheer her up.  

We put it together on the kids’ art table which has been heavily used so please ignore the paint and or sticker mess in any of the pictures.  The three year old wanted to help so she was in charge of stickers and taste testing.  We did not look up where to place the stickers since the three year old was impatient and put them all over the toilet piece.  The girls had fun putting it together.

Despite the instructions being in Japanese there were excellent pictures and it was very easy to put together.

I love the details put into this candy, they even included a little piece of bathroom floor for the toilet to rest on.

Once the toilet was put together you pour the powder into the toilet, add water to the back of the toilet and enjoy! The mixture forms bubbles in the bowl of the toilet which you drink out of with a straw.

I tried the red flavor (strawberry) and it tasted like sour strawberries, similar to the filling in Zots, remember those?  Our three year old absolutely loved doing this activity with us and drank most of both flavors on her own.  My teenager and I got a good laugh out of it and now I am searching for the next thing to try.

Maybe I will get the Kracie Popin Cookin 9 Item Bundle with Sushi, Hamburger, Bento, Takoyaki, Cake Shop and More and dole them out slowly when we need a good laugh.  Seriously, I highly recommend them for a fun family activity.  Trying to figure out how to put the kits together builds teamwork skills, allows little ones to practice fine motor skills and gets your kids to try something new and exciting to eat.

Happy “cooking”!