There are a few recipes that are so simple, I finish them and just sort of stand there feeling like I missed something. "Is that really it?" I wonder. I feel that way with baked potatoes. When recipes are so simple that I feel like I'm getting away with something, the usually go in the crock pot. Anyone who has used a crock pot knows of its magic; you dump in the ingredients, leave the house, and come home to dinner. I have yet to test the limits of everything a crock pot can do, and for a long time, it seemed like the only crock pot recipes I could find were shredded meat (like my Green Chili Tacos) and pot roast. I wanted to make complete meals in the crock pot, not part of a meal. Then my mom made me ham lentil soup when she was over, and I am forever grateful, because we needed a good ham recipe. My husband's job gives him one free turkey every Thanksgiving and one free ham every Christmas, and the ham so huge that we have slabs of it crowding our freezer all year long. So, this recipe is #anotherscrapsaved
Since all the ingredients besides the ham are dirt cheap -- lentils, carrots, celery -- it's basically free dinner for us. ...which is convenient, since I've made a goal to save $300 a month in groceries. It's going well so far, but I haven't quite made my goal, so it's too soon for me to present my methods. Stay tuned. But you came here to learn about ham and lentil soup, so without further ado, here's my fav cheap/easy/yummy soup
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Easter is today, so it seems like a good time to talk about how to use up extra hard boiled eggs. Lucky for you, I recently had to use up thirty-six of them, and cooked eggs can’t be frozen without making the whites tough.
Here's how we used 36 hard boiled eggs: First, I let my three-year-old and my one-year-old eat as many as they wanted. This wasn't hard because they were reaching their fingers over the edge of the table trying to get at them. Incredibly, the three of us ended up eating ten the first day.
When I first went on a hunt for affiliate partners, I assumed using them would be a chore. I had no idea how excited I would be about the great products I can now offer my readers.
Already, I have Home Chef and Plated - for both, you order the meals and they bring all the ingredients to your door; Valley Food Storage - food with a shelf life of 25 years; Peapod - a grocery delivery service; and the company I want to tell you about today: $5 Meal Plan $5 Meal Plan Do you struggle with meal planning? Do you ever go to the grocery store and not know what to buy, or look in the fridge and not know what to make? Is your grocery bill astronomically high and you want to lower it? Five Dollar Meal Plan offers weekly plans to cook meals that generally cost only $5 per meal to make. It's only $5 a month and the first two weeks are free; considering how much money you can save planning cheap meals, that's a great price. When I first heard about this company, I thought they just gave you a list of recipes each week and that's it. Even if that were true, it's well-worth the purchase; I believe proper meal planning is not only the key to food management, but also the key to happiness. But this company has an entire social network with exciting features:
Sorry that list got pretty long, but there was just so much stuff about $5 Meal Plan that I like! You're probably thinking, "Fine, but do the meals actually taste good?" The Facebook followers certainly seem to like them, but of course that isn't enough for me. When I get back from vacation, I plan on testing an entire weekly meal plan. Not only will I tell you how the cooking went; I will also price out the recipes to see if they really pass the $5 test. Stay tuned! When I'm done, I'll post links to my articles on this page. Have you tried $5 Meal Plans? What did you think?
From the start, my husband has been 100% supportive of my quest to stop wasting food.
A few days ago, I saw in the fridge that he had actually saved two bites of oatmeal that one of the girls didn't finish. I would have either eaten it myself or given it to the dog, but he put plastic wrap on those two bites and put the bowl in the fridge. Yesterday, my husband and I got shrimp po-boy sandwiches and we ran out of shrimp long before we ran out of bread. He saw me eyeing the ends of his sandwich and asked, “So, what are you going to do about restaurant food?” He's still getting used to my commitment to never waste food, so I often hear him ask "what are you going to do" questions. |
I will never waste food againI've been tired of throwing out food for years - not to mention tired of our huge grocery bill! I decided to make a change and vowed never to waste food again. In this blog, I'll show you how I do it. RECIPESArchives
January 2020
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