Death by clipped recipes. Life by Living Cookbook.

I think my love of recipes from newspapers, magazines, those cards that get sent to you in the mail as a try these & buy the rest of us advertisements, etc. are going to be the death of me. I’ve spent years amassing clipped recipes & other loose recipes that have never found a good or even mediocre home never mind an organized one as I save my recipe box for those recipes that I’ve tried & liked & those that are my go to or family recipes. I recently discovered, purchased & started using Living Cookbook. I am in love. It’s an amazing program & I haven’t even used most let alone all of it’s features. Thanks to Living Cookbook & my multifunction inkjet printer all of those loose recipes are getting scanned, captured in to Living Cookbook & the paper copy is going in to recycle. Since my computer is a notebook I can just take it to the kitchen with me & set on a shelf where it wont be risking injury or death or I can print the recipe out & use the print out. I’ve been scanning recipes like a possessed mad woman & while I’ve gotten through a lot I swear it’s project without an end in site. Living Cookbook is great as it lets you organize your recipes however you want in to as many cookbooks with as many or as few “chapters” as you like. I’ve created several cookbooks all with the same “chapters” to organize my recipes. I have a cookbook called “To Try” for recipes I haven’t tried yet, one called “Tried & Liked” for those recipes I’ve tried & liked enough that I want to keep around, & finally one called “Tried & True” for those recipes that are my go to recipes or are recipes that have been in my family for years. The feature I’m currently loving is the feature that lets me capture recipes in to the program from the internet or a document on my computer by copying & pasting it into Living Cookbook. Which is why I’m spending many many hours scanning my loose recipes in to my computer because even with having to do some editing/correcting entering the recipes by scanning & then copying & pasting is much faster & more accurate than if I was to type them in.

Blogs I Love

This post is about the blogs I’ve fallen in love with.

The Sublurbs ( http://remleml.com/thesublurbs/) Be it bento, glutten free, Disney, gardening, pets or any number of other subjects you’ll find them written about at The Sublurbs. This blog makes me lol regularly and even cry every so often.

Yikes Money (http://yikesmoney.wordpress.com/) This blog seems to have a bit of everything too as long as it relates to doing things inexpensively.

The Steampunk Home (http://thesteampunkhome.blogspot.com/) A home decorating blog featuring a decorating style that the blogger (at least) calls steampunk. I think I’ve fallen love with this “style” of decorating & it might just be making an appearance in my home.

The Smitten Kitchen (http://smittenkitchen.com/) This is my favorite food blog. The recipes I’ve tried from this site have been great & the blogger’s son is absolutely ADORABLE.

It Made My Day (http://itmademyday.com/) This isn’t really a blog but I consider it one. At this site people submit things that made their day be they funny, happy, or strange. This site makes laugh & smile every time I visit.

Take a few minutes to visit these wonderful sites & after you have I’d love it if you came & let me know what you think of them.

Oh my! Me? A business owner?

I can’t believe it. I’ve actually started the process of opening my own small home based business. There are 2 people I can blame or thank (depending on how it goes). The first is my friend B (the same one who came over & helped me with some stuff around the house) because he introduced to his friend D & is a great friend. The second is D. D is rapidly becoming  a friend & if  it wasn’t for his current project & his encouragement to do it myself when I mentioned my idea to him I probably wouldn’t be doing this.

Oh my!! How time flies.

Eeeek!!! I just realized it’s been two months since I posted. Ooops. Gotta love friends. One of mine came over a couple of weekends ago & gave me some help around the house. That means that somethings that have been on the to deal with list for an embarrasingly long period of time got done. I’ve been planning (sort of) my fourth trip to Disney World. I’m a Disney addict that loves Mickey but has a crush on Figment. What can I say? I think that purple & orange dragon is beyond adorable. I’ll tell you more about my Disney addiction in another post. I’m reading an incredible book called “In the Courts of the Sun” by Brian D’Amato which is also another post. That’s it for now. I’ll be back soon with more.

The magazines are coming & coming & coming…

I was looking for  a note I’d written myself the other day and I did eventually find it burried under a stack of magazines. That wouldn’t be bad except it was a stack of unread magazines. Which made me wonder why I have all of these unread magazines. So I started thinking about it and realized that I had subscribed to a bunch of magazine using reward points and while subscribing is cheaper than buying them in the store I had failed to take one critical factor in to consideration when I subscribed. What was the factor? It was the rather obvious one of when & where I read the magazines. I don’t drive so I take the bus everywhere which means I frequently end up with time to kill after doing some grocery shopping. When that happens I get a magazine and something to drink. I sit either at the bus stop or inside and read the magzine and sip my drink while waiting for the bus. The problem with magazine subscriptions is that they come in the mail which means the most recent issue of  Magazine X is sitting at home on a shelf in my entry or in my mailbox while I’m at the store waiting for the bus sans reading material since I never think/remember to grab a magazine or 5 on my way out the door to do the grocery shopping. Guess I should start shoving a magazine or 3 in to my bag before leaving the house. I’m letting my subscriptions lapse and maybe I’ll go back to buying them in the store.

WooHoo!!! I’m so EXCITED!!!!!

I was a member of  the declutterdivas website from the begining and a mod or administrator for almost that long too. The site disappeared a month or two ago and I figured the owner had let it die. I’ve missed the site but had accepted it’s passing. So you can imagine my excitement when I checked my email yesterday afternoon and had an email from another admin from divas saying that “we” had a new site and giving me a link to it. I promptly followed the link to http://www.declutterourlives.com, registed and posted. I’m happy to have an online home again. The boards at http://www.passporterboards.com have become a second home but divas was well special and I’m thrilled that it’s evolved and is back online.

Reductions & Increases

I’ve been making my own bread (gotta love that bread machine) for awhile and recently started making my own soda thanks to SodaStream. I have a recipe for making yogurt in my crockpot and am going to start making my own yogurt once I’ve eaten the store bought yogurt I already have in my fridge. Just need to figure out how I’m going to do strawberry-banana. Maybe, I’ll try mashing a some (frozen) strawberries & a banana and mix that in to my yogurt. Last week I received the soymilk maker and soybeans I had ordered through Amazon and am looking forward to making my own soymilk once I’ve finished off the half gallon I have in my fridge. All of this for the sake of reduction. Reduction of the amount of  trash I toss out. Reduction of the amount of money I spend on things that are going to be consumed and last but certainly not least on the list of things I hope to reduce  is the number of  heavy & usually bulky items that I end up having to lug home on the bus.  Hopefully, I’ll be increasing the amount of things I recycle, my health, & the amount of money I have to put toward savings & the things I enjoy doing such as travel.  To help with this effort in reduction I’m currently reading “The Coupon Mom’s Guide To Cutting Your Grocery Bills In Half” by Stephanie Nelson & “The Complete Tightwad Gazette” by Amy Dacyzyn.

Of Cake Mix & A Baking Tip

As I type this I have a cake in the oven an chocolate orange cake to be precise. I want some cake and had a chocolate cake mix in the pantry. However, I’m low on eggs and didn’t want to use most of what I had left on a cake. Which brings me to the tip part of this post. You can make a cake from a mix without the water, oil, and eggs by substituting 1 – 12 oz. can of soda. Diet or regular, any flavor soada or cake mix. It doesn’t matter except for taste. So you may want to avoid combos like grape soda and spice cake but that’s just me.

Do you stream?

SodaStream, that is. (http://www.sodastream.com/) I do. I started about 2 weeks ago when I received my starter kit & the syrup I ordered and must say that I absolutely love it. I’m loving not having to lug heavy bulky cans home by bus or taxi since I don’t drive. It’s enviromental friendliness delights me. Instead of recycling or throwing away 12 – 1 liter, 6 – 2 liter, or 33 cans I dispose of 1 recyclable bottle that’s about 7″ tall x 3.5″ wide x 2.75″ deep. Plus it uses no electricity and I control the amount of fizz and the amount of syrup that goes in to the soda. I keep a 2.5 gallon dispenser jug of water and the syrup in the fridge so I can have fresh cold soda anytime I want in minutes or nice cold water if that’s what I want. It’s so quick and easy to make that I even make the soda I drink at work before I leave for work in the morning. The syrups are corn syrup and apartame free and while they don’t taste exactly like Coke or Pepsi they’re good. I get the Zero which is compared to Coke Zero on the website and really like it and I absolutely love the diet Cranberry-Raspberry. The diet lemon-lime was good too. I didn’t like their Pete’s Choice it just doesn’t cut it as a Dr. Pepper replacement for me and their Diet Cola didn’t do anything for me either. If you buy 10 bottles of syrup at one time you get the 10th bottle free and you can exchange your empty carbonating bottles for full ones for the price of the gas and shipping. I think this is going to be good thing for my checking account and for the enviroment.

PS. I’m really really really loving not having to deal with all those empty cans and the boxes those cans came in.

Ugh! Weddings are expensive.

No. I’m not getting married. I am however invited to a friend’s wedding. A friend’s out of state wedding. Luckily(?), it’s being held in a hotel so you get a discounted rate when you book a room for the wedding. So far my total for attending this wedding is $351.54 and that doesn’t include the $198+tax(es) for a room at the hotel for 2 nights. The breakdown is as follows.

$230.51 = roundtrip airfare

$45.50 = roundtrip airport shuttle from/to home

$48.17 = for a dress (Thank heavens for sales, coupons, and a missing button as it’s original price was $80)

$27.36 = for a purse that goes with the dress (it too was on sale original price $44)

I still need to get shoes, makeup (mine’s so old it’s scarey), and a wedding gift and of course I’ll be paying for the hotel room when I check out of the hotel the day after the wedding.

Did I mention that weddings are expensive?