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Tip For Peeling Eggs

Image by khunaspix via freedigitalphotos.net  The best part of having your own chickens is fresh eggs.  Since spring feels like it has arrived in our neck of the woods, our chickens have ramped up their egg production significantly in the last couple of weeks.  This occurred right after I bought a dozen and a half eggs from Costco since I wasn't expecting to have so many fresh ones on hand for a few weeks yet.  Oops.  So here I was with a huge amount of eggs, trying to figure out what to do with them.  Then I remembered a family pot luck we had coming up and decided it would be the perfect opportunity to use up a dozen or more eggs in hard-boiled form on a big batch of potato salad.  Since I was making hard boiled eggs, I though I'd share my little trick for peeling them. I never realized that people have a hard time peeling hard boiled eggs until I got married and my husband was complaining one day about how he couldn't get the eggs peeled ver...

Healthier Popcorn

We eat a lot of popcorn in our family.  And I mean a LOT.  We buy our popcorn kernels in bulk, by the 25 lb bag-full.  Yeah....we eat a lot of popcorn.  When we first got married, it was microwave popcorn. While it may taste pretty good, we figured out that microwave popcorn isn't the best for you.  Since moving more towards real food, we have found a happy place with our popcorn making, and I want to share our recipe and method with you, as well as some other options. We use a stove top popcorn popper when we make popcorn at our house.  We were introduced to this method by my brother-in-law who would make us theater style popcorn whenever we would visit them.  He used the actual oil and popcorn salt that they used in movie theaters (purchased at Sam's Club) in his stove top popper.  That is originally how we used our popper as well, but then I started looking for healthier options.  This recipe is our favorite variation so far. Photo...

Christmas Planning Part IV: Paying for Christmas

While scaling back can take a big chunk out of the burden of paying for Christmas, the burden won't be completely gone. We still have to buy gifts or materials to make them, and we want to do fun things around Christmas that sometimes cost money. Since I don't advocate going into credit card debt for anything short of the most dire emergencies, here are a couple suggestions on  how to pay for Christmas.  One way we have done it in the past is to set up an extra savings account at our credit union and transfer $10-$20 a paycheck into it depending on what we can afford. If things are really tight, we sometimes only move over $5. If we have a windfall (such as a bonus or tax return) we will take a portion of that money and add it to the Christmas account as well. This Christmas account pays for both gifts AND activities thorough the Christmas season. I know someone that insists that they are too poor to save even a few dollars a pay check, so they put everything they buy for ...