Ideas for Leftover Bread

My parents don’t eat a lot of bread. However, my daughter loves the carb-rich staple, so my mom and dad stocked up on various breads while we were visiting them earlier this month. Still, my mom was adamant that we consume every bit of bread before we left, so it wouldn’t go to waste. No easy task considering I’m not a big fan of starch. Not wanting to upset my mom I did some research and found a couple of incredibly delicious ways to use up extra bread. The following recipes are simple and tasty enough to even get non-bread … Continue reading

Meals to Make from Bread

Stretch out your food budget by not letting anything go to waste. When you are faced with dinner time and there is “nothing” to prepare, take a look into your pantry. There are so many things you can make with what may be available. Today let’s take a look at bread. You can usually find bread in most people’s kitchens, and it is great for turning into meals and side dishes. This post is part of the Ideas for Cooking from Your Stockpile series. Main Meals: Try these ideas to make bread, fresh or stale, into a main meal. The … Continue reading

Saving Bread Ends

With bread prices going through the roof (I spotted a small loaf of oatmeal bread in the store here for a whopping price of $3.69!) you might not have the luxury of tossing those bread ends–you know the ones with all of the crust? Personally, they don’t bother me, especially when they are homemade (I’m making a loaf of oatmeal bread as I type. It will cost mere pennies). But, I do know many people who toss these ends because no one in their family will eat them. If that is the case in your family, you might want to … Continue reading

Time to Toss: What is the Shelf Life?

Cleaning out the pantry is a great idea. Not only will it improve your home by removing clutter, but chances are good that your kitchen is harboring food that has long since reached its natural shelf life. This is especially true for spices, seasonings and staples. Using old spices is the equivalent of tossing dirt on your food. On the other hand, there are some foods that can last almost indefinitely. Although I cook a lot, there are still items that I just don’t get to on a regular basis. When we moved last year, I took the opportunity to … Continue reading

How I Saved $200 on a New Appliance

Some people kill plants, I kill bread machines. It is inevitable that whatever bread machine wanders into my house will wander back out into the trash. It isn’t that I am tossing the bread machines out the window or making bread in the rain, it is just that I haven’t found an appliance that will hold up to frequent use, an average of two to three times per week. We are serious about our homemade bread. Our last bread machine did pretty well, lasting almost seven years! It was a higher-end model, and we spent about $160 for it new. … Continue reading

9 Meal Ideas for Leftover Chicken

The prices on whole roasting chicken has been pretty good lately, so I have been finding myself buying quite a few chickens for our meals. My family likes roast chicken, so it isn’t usually a problem, except for the leftovers. They can get a little boring after a while. That is why we usually have one meal of roast chicken (I vary the seasonings), and then use the leftover chicken in new dishes, some of which I can freeze.   Here are my favorite ways to use leftover chicken.   Chicken Pot Pie: You can use a butter crust, shortening … Continue reading

My Bulk Cooking Section –Organized Pantry

Yesterday’s project of organizing the pantry yielded some food that needed to be used up soon. Time to do some bulk cooking. These are items that were nearing the expiration dates or had just over stayed their welcome in the pantry. What I didn’t mention in yesterday’s post is that I actually cleaned out two pantries, plus a smaller three-section bin that usually holds produce. In the latter, was a five-pound bag of organic potatoes that were just threatening to grow eyes. I hate potatoes with eyes. Ew. I mean, really ew. So, this afternoon I decided to attack the isolated … Continue reading

5 Things to Make From Scratch to Save Money

Homemade is usually best, especially when it comes to saving money. Here are five things you can make from scratch to save money. They include homemade cleaners, food prepared from scratch, baby items and more. Pizza Pizza dough is quick and easy when you make it in a bread machine. Even with loads of toppings, two large (restaurant large, not supermarket large) thin-crust pizzas will cost you around $4. For a little more money, you can buy prepared dough, but of course making your pizza completely from scratch means a lower cost as well as a lack of preservatives and … Continue reading

Spice Up Thanksgiving Layouts

Depending on the size and scope of your Thanksgiving Day festivities you could opt to create an entire scrapbook documenting the occasion or simply dedicate a few pages in a holiday-themed memory album. Many beginner scrapbookers select the latter because they don’t know how to fill the space. However, you don’t have to shoot hundreds of photos or go broke purchasing stacks of expensive embellishments to get rid of white space on your layouts. An affordable way to spice up your Thanksgiving layouts is to pepper them with poems that sum up the tone of the holiday. Fortunately, you can … Continue reading

Use FIFO to Save

What is FIFO? If I didn’t know better, I would think it was the latest hot Christmas toy in the form of an electronic dog, or a new way time of money management account. FIFO is neither of these things, but a way to store and stockpile and save money by buying the things you need at the lowest prices and then using them in an organized way. To simplify things, FIFO stands for First In First Out. It means that when you stockpile and store things in your pantry, you use up the oldest stuff (the first in your … Continue reading