Just as it’s handy to have freezer meals ready for busy nights when you need supper on the table in a hurry or for those nights when you simply don’t feel like cooking supper, it’s equally as handy to have breakfasts ready to pop into the microwave or toaster oven on mornings when you’re running late or for weekend brunches.…
Have you seen the price of Christmas stockings? Not the plain red ones with a bit of fake fur at the top (our kids had these when they were little) and can be picked up at the dollar store.   I’m talking about the really nice ones. I’ve seen them priced anywhere from $20 on up. You can make your own…
Did your pear or apple trees produce an over abundance of fruit this year? In this post, I’ll show you how dehydrating pears or apples is such an easy way to preserve them to have them to use all winter long. When our neighbors across the street gave us a plastic grocery bag full of pears from a friend’s pear…
Everyone in our family loves mushrooms. We love them raw as snacks. We love them sliced and fried in butter or mixed into stir fries. Fresh mushrooms are great to have on hand to add to all sorts of recipes. But as our kids went off to university and college, we found that sometimes a package of mushrooms didn’t get…
We started making our own meat stocks years ago and let me tell you, we will never go back to buying store bought stock or broth again. The difference in taste and quality are amazing. Not to mention, they are very inexpensive to make; especially chicken and turkey stock because you’re using the bones leftover from roasting the bird (for chicken…
Earlier this month I wrote a post about an activity that Dave and I call memory builders.  For this month’s Christmas on a Budget post, I will be discussing turning memory building activities into traditions. As a military family, we rarely lived close enough to family to have the traditional Christmas of visiting Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house on Christmas Day…
Are you getting tired of the canning posts? I hope not because there’s more to come over the next little while. Today, I’m going to share two lessons I learned from this past weekend. Saturday morning, I decided I needed to get out of the house and away from home for a bit, so we drove over to the Collinsville…
A local farmer was selling corn from the back of his truck yesterday, so we stopped to check them out. When I asked how much, the farmer said, “Three dollars a dozen ma’am and there’s a worm guaranteed in every ear. We don’t use any sprays on the corn we grow.” I asked for 6 dozen. Once he’d gotten those…
Well… when you own a pressure canner… (<-affiliate link) canning season runs year round because you’re replenishing your stock of soups, stews and broths. But this is by far the busiest time for canning. Yesterday our son and I went to one of the local farmer’s/flea markets just to see what might be available. We came home with a bushel…
I love to sew, but I know there are those who either can’t or simply don’t want to, so for this month’s Christmas on a Budget post I thought I’d share two inexpensive no-sew ideas for things you can start collecting now to have ready come December. First up… Our family is making the switch from using paper gift wrapping…