Great Food From a Box and a New Online Store...

This has already been a week of firsts and its only Tuesday!

I told you last post that I received a couple of free boxes of Dinner Kits and I cooked one on Sunday!  The Wanchai Ferry Orange Chicken Restaurant Favorite Kit was our first choice.  It was a pretty easy mix to use.  I had defrosted four chicken breasts (and that turned out to be way too many - two would be plenty) and I had to slice them into one inch chunks.  This was the most time consuming part of the process.  I then rolled the chicken in the dry sauce mix from the box.  While doing this, I cooked the rice that came in the box.  Once the chicken was rolled thoroughly, I put oil in a frying pan and fried the chicken up in the pan with hot peppers until it was brown on all sides. I then added the liquid sauce from the packet in the box, which smelled DIVINE.  The whole  process was pretty easy and the food tasted magnificent.  My husband said it was "restaurant quality" - which is funny because he had no idea it is called "Restaurant Favorite", but it definitely reminded both of us of our favorite dish from PF Changs.  I would say two things in criticism of the kits:  First, it says it serves five, but I don't think its really enough for more than three people, and those have to be pretty light eaters!  Second, it definitely needs some vegetable action with it.  I would add one of those steam packs of Chinese vegetables in the future!  But, overall, this stuff is great!  Again - if you are interested in a $1.25 off coupon, just leave a comment and I will get back to you with it!

Second new thing this week is Alice.com.  I got an email about this service and went over to check it out and ended up immediately ordering some formula off of it.  Basically, Alice.com is an online shopping service that allows you to keep track of your home essentials - food, cleaning supplies, paper products, etc. while eliminating trips to the store, cutting coupons, etc.  I have not had the time to explore all the options, but the price on the formula was better than both diapers.com and amazon.com, so I ordered six cans of it and got free shipping to boot.  I'm excited to figure out the coupon option - it looks like they will find and apply any coupon available on the internet, eliminating the need for me to go trolling around the internet looking for coupons, figuring out when and where to print them, etc.  That in itself is quite exciting!  I figure in the next few weeks, I will test it out with smaller purchases like the formula and see how it goes.  I will let you know.

The third and final new thing this week is my first "daily schedule" for me and Mackenzie!  I modeled mine after Heather's over at Want What You Have.  Although I am not officially a "stay-at-home" mom, I used her Daily Schedule for Stay-At-Home Moms because I only work a few days a week and I don't usually work typical hours, so it seemed pretty applicable.  Yesterday was the first day and although I couldn't stick to it because of a work meeting in the morning and a final last night, it was super helpful just to have some goals and timelines in front of me for both myself and Bean!  I got up an hour late this morning because Bean didn't sleep well last night, so I'm running an hour behind schedule now, but it still is working to keep me on task.  For example, although I'm an hour behind, I can see its time for me to get off the computer and go take care of some home cleaning tasks!