Search Results for: blog our frugal monday night dinner

Cheap Dinner Ideas: Tacos!

When I want a low cost meal, okay a really cheap meal, that still has a variety of ingredients but will please my family, I pull out the tacos! Tacos are the one meal that my kids never, ever, complain about. The nice thing about tacos, is that not only are they a cheap dinner, but they can be customized somewhat to meet everyone’s needs. With some strategies, you can reduce the cost of tacos even more. Here are my tips. First, switch from regular ground beef to ground turkey. My family likes the 85 percent lean. It has a … Continue reading →

Our Frugal Monday Night Dinner

One of my goals this year is to spend even more time in the kitchen doing some cooking from scratch. While this does take time, it reaps many benefits. I can serve my family good healthy food with minimal preservatives, and for a price that we can afford. Since I do most of the cooking for our family of five, I need to find filling meals that will stretch. The cost of food seems to be growing weekly, and the stores have more and more rules that make saving money with coupons not as easy as it used to be. … Continue reading →

Frugal Month in Review: October 2008

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.” – George Eliot October has come and gone, but we can still enjoy fall and the celebration of Thanksgiving and all of the great joys of the season. Take a look back at all of the ways to save money that were featured last month. October 1st Frugal Halloween Costumes It is fall and Halloween is approaching fast, are you ready? What do the kids want to be? You can make some great homemade costumes … Continue reading →

Ask a Food Blogger: How Do You Create a Menu Plan?

I’m excited to answer my first food blogger question: I know I would eat healthier and we’d eat more meals at home if I had a weekly menu plan. But how do you go about creating one? You are correct on both counts: menu plans will help you eat healthier, stick to certain goals, and it will decrease the likelihood that you have to get take out for lack of preparation. One thing that can help with menu preparation is recipe software. Most recipe software has grocery list features as well as menu planning features. I have written before about … Continue reading →

Just Another Meatless Monday

A while back, I explained what Meatless Mondays are around our house. Basically, we set aside one night a week to eat a vegetarian meal. This helps us eat healthier, and we save a little money too. Monday nights have gotten to be quite fun, and I have especially enjoyed trying new meatless recipes. This last Monday I branched out from my tried-and-true Italian or Mexican dishes to make a meatless chili. The idea was sent to me by a reader in response to my original Meatless Monday article. Now, I know that it makes sense to most people that … Continue reading →

Tired, So Very Tired

I just read an article that said people spend and average of 673 hours per year doing housework. No wonder I’m so tired! If you break it down it doesn’t seem like that much. It’s about 13 hours per week or 1.85 hours a day. When you look at it that way, it’s easy to see where the time goes. When you come home from work the housekeeping begins, you check the mail, sort and deal with that, let the dogs out, start dinner, throw in a load of laundry, hang up the kids jackets, unload the dishwasher, help with … Continue reading →

Trying To Catch Up

Ever feel like if you could just get one more hour in the day you might be able to get it all done? I feel that way most days and it’s usually the housework that is the biggest time sucker. I try to be organized, I try to have a routine for everything but sometimes that routine gets thrown off. This past weekend my niece got married. It was a beautiful wedding. It also sucked up most of my weekend. We had the rehearsal dinner on Friday night, and then when I got home I had three different kinds of … Continue reading →

Here Come the Freebies! – Week of August 26, 2011

Everyone loves a good freebie! Many of this week’s selection of freebies are a great way to get your family fed when it’s too hot to cook or when you just don’t feel like making dinner that night. At IHOP, kids eat FREE for the entire month of August. This offer is good everyday between 4:00 in the afternoon and 10:00 at night. I believe that you get one FREE kid’s meal with the purchase of one adult entree. Del Taco has a printable coupon for one FREE Nacho Crunch Burrito. The fine print points out that you have to … Continue reading →

Timely Wisdom From The Great Depression

In these tough economic times, we may come to a point where we feel like we are fresh out of ideas for ways to save money and make our dollars go further. When this happens, it may be useful to look back in time and call upon the wisdom of our ancestors who survived the Great Depression. If you are lucky enough to know someone who lived during that time, they probably have many stories to tell about how they got through those lean years. Some of the things that people did during the Great Depression make just as much … Continue reading →

A Day in the Life of a Relaxed Homeschooler with Teens

Some time back, I am my fellow homeschool bloggers all discussed what a day in the life of homeschooling looked like from our perspective. I wrote A Day in the Life of a Relaxed Homeschooler part 1 Part 2 , and Part 3 Valorie Delp Wrote A Day in the Life of a Highly Regulated Relaxed Homeschooler part 1 and part 2 Karen Edminsten gave a peek into her homeschooling life with More Charlotte Mason: An atmosphere, a discipline, a life. I highly recommend you read these posts. It has been several years since I wrote my “Day In the … Continue reading →