I have just recently really started to use coupons when I shop. It is a major chore for me but the savings are worth the time and effort of the whole ordeal. Last night I went to the grocery store and remembered to bring my coupons and saved over $20 for the effort!

I have always enjoyed eating yogurt and Yoplait gets my vote for the best tasting as well as having the largest variety of flavors to choose from. It depends on what store you shop at as to which flavors you will find, but you can basically expect to find Cherry, Blueberry, Vanilla and Strawberry Banana. Yogurt is one of only a few healthy snacks that I can live with.

Dairy Queen has always been one of my favorite places to get ice cream and ice cream products, the banana split being my favorite. In the summer time I find myself going there at least once every couple of weeks. Their burgers aren’t bad either. The TV commercials of all of the different Blizzards that they are always coming up with keep my interest up and going back for more.

I’m tired of iced tea. Sodas just don’t cut it any more. Beer is best but you can’t go around drinking that day in and day out right? I used to really enjoy Kool Aid when I was a kid, so I decided to pick up a few packages of the flavors that they have these days and I have to say that I’m really enjoying them, a nice change.

One of the things that has disappointed about during the past few years is how many of my favorite restaurants no longer offer salad bars. Many of the restaurants have simply closed down. There are only two local restaurants anymore that even have salad bars, and I go to them as frequently as I can. My wife doesn’t usually eat salad; she tells me that she wants to save room for dessert! But last night we went out to eat and she decided to order the salad bar with her meal and she ordered her appetizer and dessert to go!

She certainly made up a huge salad! She ended up taking half of her entree home as a leftover, too! She said that was going to be a really good lunch for her to eat sometime in the next couple of days! I don’t think I’ve seen her so happy in a long time, bringing so much food home to eat later! She said that any time she can eat food that good without having to heat up the kitchen and wash up pots and pans is a good thing!

I have noticed that there are a lot of new 7-11 stores popping up all over the area. I’m not sure why there is such a sudden rush of 7-11s, not that I mind, I love a good cold Slurpee now and then and they usually have decent gas prices.

I was looking for the Slurpee song that used to be a hit back in the 70′s on YouTube.com, but I couldn’t find it, but I did come across the funny 7-11 prank call.

My next door neighbor came knocking on my door today, asking my permission to pick dandelion greens from my lawn. She said that I had the most beautiful dandelion greens. I laughed and asked her what does she use them for. She eats them in salads, she said. She said that if you pick them when they are very young they taste delicious. Well, I decided to try one for myself, and I thought it was very bitter. I told her to help herself to all the dandelions she wanted!

Can you even imagine that the English settlers brought dandelions here on purpose! They were afraid that their honeybees wouldn’t have enough flowers to survive so they brought dandelion seeds! Well, we have plenty of them now! I wonder what dandelion wine tastes like!

My wife and I decided to stay home for New Year’s Eve and just relax at home. We had a really nice dinner – beef stroganoff; one of my favorites! A nice bottle of wine, some home made bread. Relax by the fireplace and put on some mood music, dance a couple of slow dances.

The ringing phone blew those plans apart – my sister-in-law called us, in a panic. Her daughter had borrowed her car and hit a deer on the way home. The car is undriveable. She was calling me to ask me to go out with my truck and find the daughter and take care of the situation as best as I could. Since the accident was closer to my place than to hers it was hard to say no.

So my wife and I bundled up and hopped in the truck, off in search of the wrecked car. Sure enough, the front end was bashed up pretty good. We called for a tow truck and drove our niece back home. Thankfully she wasn’t injured herself – the deer was a large six point buck! Too bad for the deer, it didn’t survive the crash.

So the new year is off to a bad start – a car wreck on New Year’s Eve! Well, maybe that’s just a bad ending to the decade and we hope that this new year will be an improvement….

We went to my sister’s house yesterday for the big family gift exchange and dinner. We like to rotate from house to house to have the big family holiday parties. I can remember when I was younger I really dreaded going to the family parties, but now that I’m older I cherish them. Those folks who have musical instruments play them for our enjoyment and the younger kids dance to the music. We play games and fill up on a lot of great food. This year my sister went above and beyond and had a friend dress up as Santa to pass out the gifts! The kids were thrilled!

I hope everyone out there had a nice and peaceful day and had lots of good food!

Do you have a favorite flavor of ice cream?  I’m not sure that I do.  I really like a variety of flavors.  Lately my favorite is a pecan caramel praline flavor by Bryers.  The grocery store that I shop at doesn’t always carry that flavor, so when I find it I often buy several cartons of it.  I have never quite figured out why the price of ice cream fluctuates so much – it is almost as volatile as gasoline!  One week it will be almost $6 for the carton, then a few weeks later it will be less than half that price!  I find it very aggravating – when it is really expensive I won’t buy it.  I wonder if everyone shops that way and that is perhaps the reason why every couple of weeks the price drops!

A couple of months ago I decided to buy a couple of tomato plants.  I’ve never grown tomatoes before, and I didn’t know what to expect.  I planted beefsteak tomatoes, and they are ripening at a good comfortable pace so that we are not overwhelmed with fresh tomatoes.  I never expected fresh tomatoes picked out of our garden and eaten the same day would have so much great flavor!  My wife is surprised that I’m eating them because whenever we go to a restaurant and get a salad I order it without tomatoes, proclaiming that I don’t like tomatoes!  Well, now I’ve decided that I like them a lot, but it will be hard for a restaurant to come up with tomatoes that taste as good as what I’ve got growing right outside my door!

On the way home I noticed a wagon and young boy sitting under an umbrella at the side of the road. In the wagon were piles of fresh corn on the cob, cantalopes, and tomatoes. I pulled over and took a look. they seemed fresh and plump and reasonably priced, so I bought a few of each. I like supporting a local farmer and I like fresh vegetables, so it was a good thing all around.

I think that one of the hardest addictions to kick is the caffeine addiction! I love my morning cup of joe! I just can’t seem to get started without it! My doctor says I really should cut down on caffeine, that too much is unhealthy for me. So I have been slowly cutting back. I’m down to only one cup of joe a day. I’m pretty proud of that accomplishment! I’ve tried to switch to decaf for that one cup, but I get a terrible caffeine withdrawal headache that just does not go away – even when I take headache medicine! My wife tells me that every time she has tried to quit drinking tea that the withdrawal headache lasted for two weeks! I don’t think I can deal with that for two weeks and still go to work! Wish there was an easier way!

My wife has been talking about setting up her own business as a Personal Chef.  I teased her at first, telling her that she’s a horrible cook.  She got pretty mad at me about that!  Probably because I was teasing her in front of friends.  My bad.  Now that she’s explained it to me, I think it is a fine idea and I think she would do a great job at it!  She said she would meet with her client to determine their wants/needs, and set up a menu for a week.  She would go do the grocery shopping for the food, take it to their house and cook it there at their house, using their pots, pans, and dishes.  She would put all of the food in the refrigerator with reheating directions attached.  And that would take care of their dinners for a whole week.  For that she would charge the cost of the groceries and $200.  If she could get a couple of clients each week, that would be great!

My wife and I love to eat dinner at restaurant at The Senator Inn in Augusta. There is a good salad bar that I like to eat a lot of salad from, and they have a really good seafood alfredo dinner that my wife and I both LOVE. They also have some good steaks. The inside of the restaurant is really fancy, so we like to dress up in our “good” clothes to try to make the night special. Unfortunately there are usually a lot of people who show up there straight from their job at the farm, wearing their tattered jeans and flannel shirts or t-shirts with rude sayings on them and not even enough class to take off their baseball caps covered with grass clippings when they sit at the table. We try not to look at those people and try to enjoy our meal regardless of the low class folks that wander in from time to time. I think that this restaurant is classy enough that they should have a dress code for dinner – like shirts with collars, sports coat and tie.

Anyway, the food is good, and we enjoy eating there when we can!

One of my favorite local restaurants is the Outback Restaurant. I love their mashed potatoes, and they serve a great steak too. Sometimes I order the pork chop, but I have to order it without any spices on it; if I forget to do that I don’t like it at all. The are two things I don’t like about eating at the Outback Restaurant – first of all their booths and chairs are not very comfortable, and second is that on the weekend if you don’t get there early enough you have to wait a very long time for a table.

It’s a good system that they have, though, for waiting for a table. They take your name and give you a type of pager that has lights on it. You can go outside and sit on the porch and have a drink while you wait for the pager to go off. Usually by the time you have finished your drink, the light on the pager flashes and then you can go in and be seated, so it’s not usually too bad. Unless the weather is bad, and then it’s not so good because they have very limited, very uncomfortable waiting accommodations inside.

I was surprised when I logged onto my blog today to see that I had a huge number of spam comments awaiting moderation! I don’t really understand how these spammers work, if it is an automated system that they send out spam comments. I’m curious about how they pick and choose which blogs and posts to put their stupid spam comments on. I’d be interested in learning how that works, not because I want to do it myself, but it is a curiosity to me how they manage to get through to me in the first place. (And by the way, I don’t like the canned spam lunch “meat” either!

Have you ever even heard of “shelf stable milk?”  I hadn’t until I ordered a box of food from Angel Food Ministries.  Part of their basic box of food includes a small carton of “shelf stable milk.”  It is real 2% milk that is sealed in a wax type of container that does not need to be refrigerated until it is opened.  The expiration date on it is many months away; it keeps just fine until opened.  Puts me in mind of the canned sweetened and/or condensed evaporated milk. 

My grandparents tell me that during the “Great Depression” they would buy canned condensed evaporated milk because it was inexpensive and did not need to be refrigerated.  They told me that they didn’t even refrigerate it after opening it, they would just put it on the kitchen counter and cover the opening with foil to keep bugs out.  I don’t know what the “safety rules” are for refrigerating canned condensed evaporated milk, but seems to me that it should be refrigerated after opening.  What do you think?

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all of you “out there” in “Blog World.”  I hope you all had a great day and drank lots of green beer, and ate lots of corned beef and cabbage.  I like the light-heartedness of St. Patrick’s Day; I don’t know anybody who disdains it at all.  I can remember as a child being sure to wear green to avoid being pinched!  I don’t know where or how the “pinching” tradition started, but there were a couple of years in my youth that I wished that tradition didn’t exist!

I was given a crock pot today by my sister Amy. She had just bought a new one, and thought I might like to have her old one. Paula was thrilled to get the crock pot, too! We’ve never cooked in a crock pot before! Amy gave us the cook book that came with the crock pot, but it doesn’t really have very many recipes in it. Only a few of them sound like anything we’d like to try.

Paula decided we should try to find some crock pot recipes online, so we used a new search engine called Daymix.com that Amy told us to try to find the recipes. The search experience resulted in a few leads on some good places to get crock pot recipes, and it referred us to a few blogs about cooking in a crock pot. One of the blogs wrote about converting recipes from oven to crock pot and from crock pot to oven, which I thought was really helpful!