Tuesday Tips

These cheap soup recipes are proof that soup season is not only good for our tummies — it’s good for our wallets, too. I took three of my family’s favorite soups and did a budget breakdown on every one of them, because I was curious to see if soup is really the good deal everybody…

I ran out of evaporated milk making the Libby’s pumpkin pie on the can, swapped in heavy cream one for one, and it came out richer and creamier than ever.

This Tuesday tip: foods that never expire is a fun food fact I kind of knew, but not really — until I was doing a little research and found it written down in black and white. There are two foods sitting in your pantry right now that never expire: salt and honey. You can keep…

This Tuesday tip: breakfast bagel is a reminder I needed as much as anybody — because before you buy that breakfast bagel at the drive-thru, I want to show you what it actually costs to make it at home. I priced out a bacon, egg and cheese bagel piece by piece, and the whole thing…

This Tuesday tip: thrift hosting is my favorite budget hack for the busiest hosting season of the year. We are heading into fall parties, holiday dinners, and every kind of get-together in between, and before you spend one more dollar on a new serving platter, I want you to go check your local thrift store….

This Tuesday tip: stain removal comes straight off one special page of my great-grandma Anna Hanavan’s old family cookbook — a whole page of her household hints, all written out, and every one of them about a hundred years old. Anna was a Czech immigrant and a farmer’s wife out in Colorado, and she clearly…

This Tuesday tip: leftover buns is the one that keeps a whole bag of bread out of my trash can — because before you throw away those leftover hamburger buns or hot dog buns, you can turn them into garlic bread. It happens around here constantly, since the buns and the packages never come out…

Start with the room you’re standing in and give it a job. Plus how to still watch the meal planning class I taught at Get Organized HQ.

This Tuesday tip: pork loin is the one that stretches my grocery money further than just about anything else I do. I picked up a boneless pork loin at Costco — 9.79 pounds at $1.99 a pound, $19.48 for the whole thing — and I cut it down at my own kitchen counter into four…

This Tuesday tip: budget pasta is one I have been wanting to run the numbers on for a while, because Cajun chicken pasta is one of my family’s absolute favorite dinners and it tastes like something you would order out. So I sat down and priced out every single ingredient, and the whole pan came…