Check out Good Morning America Food Editor Sarah Moulton’s Best Cookbooks of 2009 (video!) Notice a certain orange-covered book on that list?   To celebrate, I’m giving away 5 copies of  Family Feasts for $75 a Week.  To enter, comment and share a money saving tip of your own. —————— You know the drill. You...
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For lunch today I adapted this recipe from Smitten Kitchen giving mushrooms the ‘caviar’ treatment.   True confession– I’ve never had a crumb of caviar in my life.  But this recipe is exactly what I love to do in the kitchen– jazz up something simple to make it taste like much more than a few simple...
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If braids and beads are not a normal part of your life, you may just want to pass this post on by. But with 4 African American daughters, hair is a fairly large component in our life. The following braiding brainstorm is one that I am very happy with. When we do lots of...
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I’ve been meaning for awhile to share a really simple way to make fire-starters for those of you who have a wood stove or fireplace. FRUGAL FIRE-STARTERS Materials: Egg cartons, the grey recycled-cardboard kind, NOT the foamy plastic kind Dryer lint, enough to fill the number of egg cartons you are using An old...
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My grocery spending for October was $845, quite a bit more than the $600 that I hoped to spend.   September’s super-frugality really depleted my stores.  I was nearly out of flour, sugar, rice, and oats. I bought 25 or 50 lb sacks of each of those things in October. I also had to stock up...
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A lot of people assume from the title of my book that I feed my mega-family for $75 a week. Um, no. That would involve more beans than I’m willing to serve. The $75 a week on the cover of my book actually refers to a family of four. (Little-known publishing fact: many authors,...
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As I shared the prices I paid for various items in September, often people would say, “_________ is never that cheap in my area.”   For example, apples for 33 cents a pound.  Well, ten months out of the year, I can’t find apples that cheap either.  Most of the time I pay at least...
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MEALS TODAY Breakfast: Eggs, toast (with this bread-yum!), bacon, juice, pears Lunch: Pasta Carbonera (Family Feasts p. 164 ), watermelon Snack: Leftover pancakes (we froze some extras from a different day) Dinner: Lasagna, cucumbers, tomatoes, ice cream ———— I am quite glad to be done with the spending challenge.  This evening during the older...
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Friday afternoon John and I took off on a plane to spend a couple days in Seattle, to celebrate our 23rd wedding anniversary. Though it was definitely more of a splurge than the rest of our month, I was still reasonably successful pinching our pennies. Our plane tickets came from frequent flyer miles (mostly...
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This weekend was an incredibly bad weekend for tallying food costs. For several weeks John and I have been planning a mini-getaway to Seattle. We planned to eat out, of course, but I didn’t include eating out in my $300 budget for the month, so I figured it would still work to keep track...
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