by Carrie on June 4, 2010
Trying a new format for my What I’m Reading roundups. In the roundups, I’ll pick only the best of the best and add my thoughts. If you still want to see the list I was doing before, you can check out my new and improved blog roll. Let me know what you think of the new format and what your preferences are.
The Local Cook shows us how to make formage blanc. It looks so easy. When I went on my tour of the Cowgirl Creamery in April, we each got a few full size products to take home and formage blanc was one of them. I just finished my tub earlier this week. It’s so good on a bagel in place of cream cheese or spread on crackers.
Cheap Healthy Good weighs in on food, finance, and judging others. Posts like this remind me that I’m very fortunately to be able to afford all of whatever type of food I could ever dream of wanting. It’s truly a luxury and I think most people in the same position often forget that.
At Finance for a Freelance Life, you can read about how Mrs. Micah is moving past wasteful frugality. I’m a big believe in enjoying quality items to the fullest. I’d rather have fewer, higher quality things that I use all the time than a house full of junk. Whatever you do, don’t buy the high quality stuff and then “save it” by also buying the junk and using that instead.
Get Rich Slowly suggests when you save money, actually put it in savings. I don’t always do this, but I do have a special ING account that I put “extra” money from things like stuff I sell on eBay in.
People are going nuts over this $149 Wii deal and the $199 Wii with free Wii Sports Resort deal but I think most people are missing the point that the standard Wii now always comes with Wii Sports Resort.
Disclosure: Some links in this post are affiliate links.
by Carrie on May 21, 2010
Disclosure: Some links in this post are affiliate links.
by Carrie on April 9, 2010
I just love free reusable tote bags. I’ve already got a stack all of which were free but a few are starting to get a little worn out so I’ll be planning to pick these up this month as well:
Check this post out for info on Seventh Generation coupons and rebates to score some really cheap Seventh Generation products (and don’t forget to enter my Seventh Generation giveaway for a chance to win some free products):
And my main issue when it comes to food is portion control (especially on the junk food) and I have a good friend who has had fabulous success with Weight Watchers which I thought was all about portion control but this post reveals that a lot of it comes down to artificially fat free products and food substitues:
by Carrie on February 26, 2010
First things first, make sure you pop over to my other blog, Carrie Actually, and enter my $15 iTunes gift card giveaway (ends 3/1).
Now on to today’s link round up:
by Carrie on February 11, 2010
Early last year, I got it into my head that I wanted all the recipes from all my cookbooks and magazine tear outs indexed in one place on my computer so that it was easy to pull together a meal plan. At that time, I decided to start by listing them all out by dish type in a basic text editor.
More recently, I was browsing around the blogosphere and came across Mommy Snack’s Menu Planning Recipe Box and I loved the spreadsheet idea but it needed a little tweaking to work for me.
Here’s what I came up with (click the image to enlarge):
Download the .xls file so you can play around with it yourself.
I’ve got several columns for sorting the data in various ways, left to right they are:
- a place to mark which recipes I’d like to use on my next meal plan
- name
- type of dish (main, side, salad, dessert, etc)
- protein
- produce
- starch
- tried/favorite
- notes (seasonal info or cooking notes if I want to make changes to the recipe in the future)
- source
Rather than using Google Docs (which I love because I can access my files easily from multiple computers), I decided to go with Microsoft Excel. Excel does a couple things that made my digital recipe box easier than it would have been in Google Docs: 1) it remembers what you typed in the same field in rows above so that you don’t need to type the same cookbook name over and over again, 2) it has filters so that once all my recipes are in, I can easily narrow it down to just chicken dishes, just desserts, just recipes I’ve marked as favorites, or even search for recipes with the word chocolate in the title.
