Our traditional, homemade tomato sauce, uses crushed, uncooked, tomatoes from our annual Fall tomato canning event.  Tomato sauce is easy to make and incredibly versatile.  We use tomato sauce for pasta, other sauces, soups, etc.  Making homemade sauce is a no-brainer, so don’t purchase the canned variety at your local supermarket.  Plus, our recipe hails from Calabria, Italy – a region that produces […]

Bringing your lunch to work every day is one of the easiest ways to save money and control your diet (trust me, you don’t want Sal at the local deli making your hero sandwich).  So, when the Canadian, frugal living, blogger SaverQueen asked me to do a guest blog post for SaverQueen.com, a make your own lunch entry came immediately […]

5 Reasons Why It’s Important to Have Good Social Skills Italians are  generally viewed as a very social and outgoing.  Italian society puts great emphasis on communications and  personal relationships and its part of the reason why Italians have a reputation for conveying warmth and openess with both native and non-natives alike. In turn, here are five advantages associated with […]

Melinda Beck of the Wall Street Journal’s Health Journal column has an excellent piece on everything you wanted to know about the common cold (and, yes, your mother was right, chills may lead to a cold).   Here are some great tips / info to help you get through the last few weeks of winter: 1. When we experience a […]

Free Money Finance hosted a Carnival of Personal Finance this week and included Scordo.com’s article, “Starting Your Own Business: An Interview With a Practical Entrepreneur”  Cindy at Small Homestead hosted a Carnival of Homesteading and included Scordo.com’s article, “How To: Canning Tomatoes”  Both Carnivals have tons of other great content including: – How to Manage Job Burnout at Digerati Life  […]

I’m often asked how and what I purchase for food each week given my love for food and my desire to save money.  And my answer is: I look for fresh, high quality, food first, then price, and finally food items that gave me pleasure.  My first stop at the local, independent, market is the produce section.  Fresh fruits and […]

There’s been a ton discussion over at thekitchn.com recently about fritatta (the omelet like dish popular in many European countries).  As a small child my mother prepared a fritatta as a quick weekend meal, and now as an adult I make frittata about every week (it’s nourishing, full of flavor, and can usually be prepared with whatever leftovers one has in the fridge). […]

WiseBread.com recently released a list of the top 165 personal finance web sites.  WiseBread used traffic, incoming blog links, RSS subscribers, link authority, and Compete scores to determine the rankings.  The chart is also updated on daily basis so you can actually re-visit the chart each day and see different sites move up and down in the rankings. Personal finance […]

According to the Journal of Consumer Research, “shoppers pay a disproportionate amount of attention to the leftmost digits in prices and these leftmost digits impact whether a product’s price is perceived to be relatively affordable or expensive” In one experiment, the researchers took two price points ($2.00 and $4.00) and lowered one price by one cent turning $4.00 into $3.99 and […]

I love making salads from leftovers in the refrigerator and because we are now in a recession I can tell you all about it and not feel cheap!   Here’s a salad I put together yesterday and it was not only incredibly tasty, but it filled me up way past my regular dinner time. Ingredients: – 1 head of Romaine lettuce […]