"On The Money" Meals!

Growing your own food is a great way to save money. I dont normally buy organic food, but I was checking out the prices of it and it is always more expensive. I am growing my food organically, using no pesticides and I am having so much fun in the process! I plan on canning my green beans and maybe some of my tomatoes. We will eat a lot of things fresh, which saves on your weekly grocery budget. We moved to our new house in November last year, and ever since, I have been so excited to use the raised garden bed that is in the back yard. It's a small garden maybe 6' x 6'. I have never had my own garden, so I have been wanting to try my hand at it. So in April, I prepared the dirt and added a product called Bumper Crop. The dirt looked old, and part of the raised bed was full and part was not. It looked pretty hopeless at first but when I added this in and started working with it, it really started looking good! Potato While I was preparing the soil, I foun...

Hope everyone is having a great Memorial Day! We had a picnic today and plan on playing volleyball with some friends this evening. I hope that we all took time to remember our fallen heroes. I am forever grateful for what they have done and the sacrifice they made. And I'm blessed to live in this country! Our picnic food was yummy and super easy. We had pork BBQ sandwiches, chips, watermelon and homemade chocolate chip cookies. Yesterday, I put a pork loin in the crock pot on high for about 5 hours. I just put it in, pour one can of chicken broth in, sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper and your are done! I make gravy from the broth and shred the pork and serve it on top of mashed potatoes. It is one of my husband's favorite meals. I serve this pretty often since Kroger has these pork loins for about $1.88/pound pretty often. One loin gets at least two meals with my family, and if Im lucky and have a little leftover, I make soup or BBQ with it. So toda...

I love listening to podcasts. Listening to them while I'm folding laundry or cooking or cleaning just makes the task more enjoyable and I think I'm more productive when I listen to them, too! I don't know why, but whatever works, right? I listen to all of my podcasts on my phone, but I think that you can hear all these shows on a computer as well. I figured I'd share some of my favorites with you. America's Test Kitchen . Host Christopher Kimball is interesting to listen to, full of knowledge mixed with some dry humor. Most of the time, the guests are informative and fascinating. They do product reviews -"What's Hot and What's Not", wine tastings, food tastings, recipe challenge of the week and they also do listener calls, which I have personally learned so much from. The Splendid Table  Lynne Rossetto Kasper is a very intelligent host! She knows so much about many different topics. I love it when they have their frequent guests Jane and ...

It took me a long time to come up with a way to keep my recipes organized. I have a very simple method now that I stick to most of the time. If I don't stick to it, it's probably because I'm feeling lazy at the moment.  I have a recipe binder. It's nothing fancy or high tech. But it works! And it's easy to keep up. I apologize in advance for the poor lighting in these pictures. Fancy, right? I have my binder separated into different sections.  Breakfast, Main Dish, Sides, Soups and Salads, Desserts and Misc. Every two weeks I plan meals. I pull the recipes out of their sections and put them into this plastic page protector that is shown here. When I'm finished making a recipe, it goes back into it's designated section. I'll go over how I meal plan in another post. When I come across a recipe in a magazine that I want to try, I tear it out and put it in the divider of the section it would go in. This helps me remember ...