Homemade Apple Butter: {10 Different Recipes}

Here are a few recipes for making apple butter that I’ve collected from around the ‘net for this week’s Recipe Hit List (many are good for canning long-term while others are smaller batches to be refrigerated). I’ve included a few slowcooker/crockpot recipes as well as some interesting flavor twists (such as maple, spiced apple, rum, [...]

Continue reading Homemade Apple Butter: {10 Different Recipes} …

From TipNut.com.

August 12, 2010 | Filed Under Frugal Living | Leave a Comment

Homemade Apple Butter: {10 Different Recipes}

Continue reading Homemade Apple Butter: {10 Different Recipes} …

From TipNut.com.

August 12, 2010 | Filed Under Frugal Living | Leave a Comment

Homemade Apple Butter: {10 Different Recipes}

Continue reading Homemade Apple Butter: {10 Different Recipes} …

From TipNut.com.

August 12, 2010 | Filed Under Frugal Living | Leave a Comment

The Simple Dollar Weekly Roundup: Memorizing Poetry Edition

All through my life, I’ve spent time memorizing various poems. The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. anyone lived in a pretty how town by e. e. cummings. Pioneers! O Pioneers! by Walt Whitman (probably my favorite).

I like the way the sounds roll off the tongue and paint pictures. I like reciting them (or pieces of them) to my children. I like the flavor of the words.

How to Adopt an Attitude of Gratitude Lately, I’ve been focused on seeing the good in every situation. There are many situations where it’s easy, but if you look deeply, there is good in every situation. (@ dumb little man)

Wants that Morph Into Needs This is lifestyle inflation and it’s one of the most dangerous opponents people have to building a sustainable free life. (@ personal finance advice)

See The Impact When You Donate To Charity I think the big reason that many people struggle with charitable giving is that it feels like a “give and see nothing in return” exchange. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to see what your money is going for. (@ christianpf)

I’m So Judgmental. I Want to Conquer This! Any Suggestions? Everyone has their own path. You can’t fairly judge others by the path you’re on. It’s like comparing a track sprinter’s times to that of a cross-country skiier. (@ happiness project)

It’s So Easy to Talk About Lunch I love this. If you want someone to talk, give them something very easy to talk about. Seth suggests talking about what to have for lunch, because everyone has an opinion. (@ seth godin)

Ask Unclutterer: Encouraging kids to help out at home My technique is to do it in very small timed batches. Our kitchen clock has a countdown timer, so we’ll designate a very specific task – “Pick up the Lincoln logs!” – with a very specific time frame – “Can we get it done in five minutes!?” – and then set the timer. The immediate focus and the short term really helps our kids (ages four and two) to take care of their stuff. (@ unclutterer)

Continue reading The Simple Dollar Weekly Roundup: Memorizing Poetry Edition …

From The Simple Dollar.

July 28, 2010 | Filed Under Frugal Living | Leave a Comment

Summer Meal Series #8: Chicken, Broccoli, and Mozzarella Calzones

This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen.

Homemade pizza is a big hit at our house (here’s a picture-filled post about our homemade pizzas). We all love our every-other-week-or-so homemade pizzas where we often experiment with ingredients and enjoy from-scratch crusts.

The problem with pizza, though, is that it’s not very portable. It doesn’t make the best picnic food (unless, I suppose, you order from Pizza Hut and take it to the park with you, but then you lose control over the ingredients and the cost).

Our family’s solution is to sometimes make calzones instead of pizzas. For us, a calzone is essentially an inside-out pizza – we just take the ingredients of a pizza we want to make, wrap it in pizza dough, and bake it. It comes out much like a sandwich, which is very portable, indeed.

This time, we made enormous calzones! (You don’t have to make them this big, of course.)

My intent was to show us eating these at the park, but the weather unfortunately didn’t cooperate at the last minute. We served the calzones with apple slices.

We ended up making six calzones that were approximately that size (two of them were somewhat smaller, about 60-70% of that size). I was only able to eat roughly half of that calzone for dinner. My wife, who is currently breastfeeding and who hadn’t eaten since a very small lunch, ate about 3/4 of one and gave up. Our children split the smallest one and that was about all they could handle.

In other words, this batch of calzones I’m about to describe fed two adults and two children for dinner, two adults and two children for lunch, and two adults for lunch again. Ten meals, in other words. Calzones are great meals to make in larger batches because they’re very good when reheated.

So how did we make them? The first step, of course, is to make the dough.

If you wish, you can always buy pre-made dough at the store. However, making your own homemade pizza dough is so easy, you shouldn’t waste the money on it – homemade dough tastes better, costs a pittance, and is healthier, too, because you don’t have the oils and extra ingredients and preservatives that large food manufacturers toss into the dough.

Here’s how I make the dough:

Four ingredients, plus some water.

4 1/2 cups flour
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons yeast
1 teaspoon salt
1 3/4 to 2 cups water (depending on air moisture in your area)

Heat up the water until it feels warm to the touch, then mix in the yeast, stir, and let it sit for fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, mix the flour and salt together in a bowl. Add the liquid to the solid and mix them thoroughly with your hands (or with a mixer) until it’s all consistent. Then put the dough ball in a bowl, cover it, and put it in a warm place for two hours or so to let it rise (or, if you’re doing it in advance, freeze the dough ball or let it rise in the refrigerator for about 24 hours).

That’s it. Here’s my dough ball.

It hasn’t risen much – it will roughly double in size before I need to use it.

Next, we mix the stuffing. You really can use pretty much anything you can imagine as a calzone stuffing. Here, we’re using cooked broccoli (about a pound), 3 cups shredded mozzarella (we grated ours, you can see the cheese grater in the picture below on the right), 2 cups shredded chicken, and about 1/2 cup pesto.

We actually have much more shredded chicken than we’ll actually use – about two cups’ extra. If you want to get a good amount, you’ll just want to cook one large breast and shred it. We cooked three medium breasts and shredded it all. Why? The breasts were on sale and shredded chicken breast goes good with tons of different recipes and in salads, too.

What happens next is complicated. Take those four ingredients, put them in a bowl, and mix them together. Your mixture is done.

I then took our big ball of freshly-risen dough and split it into six pieces, with two of them being a bit smaller than the others (for a variety of calzone sizes).

After flouring down the table, I got to work. I took one of the dough balls and rolled it out on the table until it was pretty thin and wasn’t rolling well any more. The circle was about the diameter of a fork (or a bit more) and between 1/4″ and 1/8″ thick (half a centimeter or so).

It does not have to be anywhere near a perfect circle. Just get it something that roughly approximates a circle and you’re good.

Next, just take a healthy spoonful of the mixture and put it on one half of the rolled-out dough, leaving a good lip around the edge of it. I also sprinkled a bit more cheese on top.

I put just a bit of water around the entire lip of the calzone, then folded it over to create a pouch with the stuffing inside of it. I then pressed down on the edges of the calzone so that the wet dough would stick together (and spread out a bit), then I rolled up that edge. This keeps the contents from spilling out in the oven.

Like I said, the ingredients above made six of these. Once they were done, I took two baking sheets, put about a teaspoon of olive oil on each one, and spread the oil all over the sheets (to prevent the calzones from sticking). I put the calzones on the sheets…

… made a few diagonal slices on top of each one, brushed the tops with a bit of olive oil, then stuck them in the oven at 450 F (230 C) for 18 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through.

And you have calzones!

Our total cost for materials for this recipe was $9.30, with roughly a third coming from the chicken alone and most of the rest from the pesto and the cheese. The broccoli cost about $1 and everything else was fractions of a dollar.

This recipe made ten delicious meals for my family, which averaged out to $0.93 per meal. That’s a great price for a delicious calzone!

Not only that, this meal is really, really flexible. You can pretty much put in any ingredients that you wish. You can put in all of the traditional pizza ingredients. You can put in nothing but vegetables. You can put in whatever produce is on sale at the grocery store. It almost all works.

Unsurprisingly, this is another big hit at our house, since it’s essentially an inside-out pizza. Everyone loved it and all leftovers were happily consumed.

Continue reading Summer Meal Series #8: Chicken, Broccoli, and Mozzarella Calzones …

From The Simple Dollar.

July 23, 2010 | Filed Under Frugal Living | Leave a Comment

Summer Meal Series #6: Simple Homemade Pasta and Pizza Sauce

This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen.

Today’s meal looks like a simple pasta…

… and it is, except that we do something a little different than most people seem to these days.

You see, we’re pretty picky about our sauce. We have found a few store-bought pasta sauces that we like, but they’re often $5 a jar or more. That’s a lot of money to pay if you have pasta with any regularity.

Our solution, of course, is to simply make the sauce ourselves.

This solves several concerns all at once. It gives us complete control over the ingredients for health and flavor concerns, but perhaps more importantly, it reduces the cost of a meal’s worth of sauce down to approximately the same cost as the absolute cheapest pasta sauce on the shelves.

In short, we can make pasta sauce at home that’s tastier and more appealing to us than any canned sauce we’ve found – even the $5-10 sauces – for less than $1 per jar (about $1.80 or so if you include lean ground beef in it, as we do).

The trick, of course, is that we make several batches of it at once and freeze all but one of them. In this example, we’re making five “jars” of sauce with a set of ingredients that’s just shy of $5.

A few notes on the ingredients, before I list them.

The ground beef is entirely optional in this recipe. If you want a meat sauce, use it. If you don’t, don’t use it. We used about 2.5 lbs. of ground beef in this recipe, averaging out to about 8 ounces of it per “batch,” or about 2 ounces per dinner plate for our family. I’d recommend using 2.5 pounds.

Second, we used canned diced tomatoes and sauce because, frankly, the fresh tomatoes aren’t quite here yet in Iowa. In about a month, we would be using fresh tomatoes for all of this, but the tomatoes currently in the store are still what I would consider ridiculously expensive. If you want to use all fresh ingredients, wait until tomatoes are in peak season and use fresh tomatoes for all of it. The price will be very reasonable and the flavor will be sublime.

Here’s our ingredient list.

4 medium onions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 28 ounce cans diced tomatoes
1 28 ounce can tomato sauce
1 tablespoon basil
1 tablespoon oregano
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon pepper
2.5 to 3 lbs. ground beef or ground pork (optional – if you don’t wish to use it, you can certainly add more vegetables)
2 4 ounce cans mushrooms (very optional – we didn’t use them)

You can, of course, add any other vegetables and spices you like. Chopped peppers are a good addition, for example.

First, we chop up the onions. We use an ulu knife (a gift) for this. It’s a special type of knife with a rounded blade that makes chopping vegetables quite easy. You basically grab the knife by the handle and rock it back and forth on the board – it chops vegetables quite well.

We also chopped up the basil and oregano:

We used fresh herbs in this. If you don’t have access to fresh herbs, dried basil and oregano work just fine. We just happen to have oregano all over the place this year (oregano sometimes just goes crazy in an herb garden), so we might as well use it.

Then, cook the meat, onion, and garlic together in a big pot until the meat is browned (or until the onion is browned a bit and really flavorful if you’re not using meat).

It’s cooking!

Once the meat/onions are ready, drain them, then add the rest of the ingredients (except for the mushrooms, if you’re using them). Stir it well, then let it simmer for 45 minutes.

If you have mushrooms you want to add, add them after thirty minutes of simmering.

Here’s the sauce after most of the simmering is finished.

Once it’s done simmering, just split it into five equal batches and freeze four of them.

We happened to have a bunch of leftover Ziploc quart freezer bags, which are perfect for this. Here are our bags, about ready to go into the freezer:

These freeze up really well. If we want to have a pasta meal – or a homemade pizza – that night, we just pull a bag out in the morning and stick it in the refrigerator. By evening, it’s ready to be warmed up to the desired temperature and still tastes great if used within six months or so.

As for the meal itself?

It was delicious. We had bread on the side with it (and some yoghurt after the meal) and it went over very well. We had a small amount of sauce left over, so we also made a lunch that consisted of the remaining sauce and a bit of the remaining pasta.

What did the sauce cost? Here’s our cost on the ingredients.

4 medium onions, chopped – $1.60
2 cloves garlic, minced – $0.50
2 28 ounce cans diced tomatoes – $2.38
1 28 ounce can tomato sauce – $1.19
1 tablespoon basil – $0.05 (from dried, estimated)
1 tablespoon oregano – $0.05 (from dried, estimated)
2 teaspoons salt – $0.02
1 teaspoon sugar – $0.02
1/4 teaspoon pepper – $0.01
2.5 to 3 lbs. ground beef or ground pork (optional) – $4.23

With the meat included, it totaled $10.05, so when you split it into five batches, each sauce batch cost $2.01. Very good for hearty sauce with meat.

Without the meat, it totaled $5.82, so when you split that into five batches, each sauce batch cost $1.16. That’s incredible, considering similar sauces at the store would easily be $5 a batch. We dearly love this stuff and prefer it to any store sauce we’ve tried.

Over the course of the five batches, if you’re normally buying large jars of gourmet sauce at $5 a jar, you’re saving $3.84 per meal. Over the five batches you made, you’ll save $19.20 – not bad for less than an hour’s work!

Continue reading Summer Meal Series #6: Simple Homemade Pasta and Pizza Sauce …

From The Simple Dollar.

July 9, 2010 | Filed Under Frugal Living | Leave a Comment

Freezer Cooking For Young And Old – Frugal Challenge

Is freezer cooking a new idea, or an old idea?

You may remember that back in January, my friend Christine, TheMenuMom.com, had a freezer full of food to eat up. She challenged her readers to join her in cleaning out the kitchen before they went shopping for more food. Click here to see how Christine’s challenge began.

I took the challenge and invited my dear readers to join me. Click here if you’d like to see how my challenge began.

Refrigerator empty The response to this challenge was great. Many of us found out that as we dug through our food supplies, we hardly had to leave the house to go grocery shopping. Our meals were inventive and, most importantly, frugal.

When our refrigerators and freezers started to resemble this one, many of us started thinking about re-stocking.

As I was reading the comments throughout this challenge, I noticed that there were many reasons that people stocked their freezers with ready-to-cook meals.

Many people, like myself and Christine, have young families with busy schedules so we need a house filled with food that’s ready for the oven.

Other families just like the convenience of having a freezer full of food so they don’t have to plan dinner every night.

And, some people remember their grandparents and parents stocking their freezer after the fall harvest. That is what my friend Patti of RemarkableWrinklies.com says is the reason she loves to cook up big batches of food to put in the freezer. Memories.

Old fashioned cooking is one of the frameworks around which The Hillbilly Housewife is formed. Living simply, finding alternatives to the oftentimes unrewarding, expensive, and wasteful methods of keeping a home and feeding a family, is what attracts people, like Patti, to The Hillbilly Housewife.

Like many people, Patti wondered what or who inspired me, a younger homemaker, to do things the old fashioned way; things like “putting food by.”

I was pleased to be invited to Patti’s website, RemarkableWrinklies.com, in order to answer these two questions:

1) What or who is the inspiration for The Hillbilly Housewife, and 2) Does “putting food by“ today still have the same importance as it did years ago?

Please stop by RemarkableWrinklies.com and see why the past is so very present in everything we do here at Hillbilly Housewife.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Thank you, Patti, for allowing me to answer your questions and give your readers, some having lived a frugal lifestyle for many more years than I, a look into what inspires this humble Hillbilly Housewife.

p.s. My frugal challenge today is to plan some freezer cooking in your own home and enjoy good old fashioned frugality!

To get started on the right foot, begin your freezer cooking with the right tools. Take a look at our resource Freezer Cooking Made Simple by clicking on the picture here. You’ll find easy to follow methods to get your freezer filled to the brim with hearty, family-friendly meals.

Continue reading Freezer Cooking For Young And Old – Frugal Challenge …

From Hillbilly Housewife Blog.

March 8, 2010 | Filed Under Frugal Living | Leave a Comment

Sprouted Rice "Oatmeal"

After I wrote about oatmeal a while back, I did a little bit more research on the topic. Oatmeal is one of the grains with the highest level of phytic acid content. Phytic acid blocks the absorption of nutrients. I couldn’t find a definitive answer to whether or not soaking oatmeal broke down the phytic acid in rolled oats, so I started looking for alternatives.

I thought rice might be a good place to start, especially since it can be sprouted. After sprouting, I cook up a big batch of rice to put in the fridge. When the boys want oatmeal, I put a bowlful in the microwave with a splash of milk. At first, we added cinnamon and stevia so that Daniel would try it, but I slowly cut back on the stevia to the point that cinnamon alone is fine, just like with real oatmeal.

The boys eat “oatmeal” the same way that they eat everything, in phases. Some days, all they will eat is “oatmeal”. Other days, they will eat everything but “oatmeal”. Thus, some batches last a day and others last almost a week.

This has been tricky with providing a fresh supply of sprouted rice. If they finish a batch too soon, I have to do an overnight soak with a few tablespoons of whey, instead of waiting for the next batch to finish sprouting. When they start one batch, I start sprouting the next, which generally works out fine. This is how I sprout rice:

Day 1-
At night:
Put one pound of rice in jar (I divide it into two jars), cover with water and let sit overnight, about 14 hours.

Day 2-
In the morning:
Cover with mesh cloth. Pour out water.
Refill jar immediately with water, and pour out the water.

At lunch
Refill jar with water, then pour out the water.

Before bed:
Refill jar with water, then pour out the water.

Day 3
In the morning
Refill jar with water, then pour out the water.

At Lunch
Refill jar with water, then pour out the water.
Check for a “tail” on the rice. It should be done soon. You can continue to let the tail grow up to 1/8″. After that it will start to change the flavor of the rice.

Only brown rice will sprout. I get cheapo Walmart brand brown rice for $0.72 per pound and have gotten decent tails from it. (It’s cheaper than the oatmeal I was getting, too!) Any brown rice will do, but white rice and wild rice will not sprout since they are already dead.

You might want to check out my new comment policy .
Copyright Under $1000 Per Month, 2009-2010

Continue reading Sprouted Rice "Oatmeal" …

From Under $1000 Per Month.

February 23, 2010 | Filed Under Frugal Living | Leave a Comment

The Simple Dollar Time Machine: February 20, 2010

Many newer readers of The Simple Dollar haven’t been exposed to the hundreds of great articles in the archives of the site, so this is a weekly series that highlights the five best posts from one year ago this week, two years ago this week, and three years ago this week. I call it … the Time Machine.

One Year Ago (February 14 – February 20, 2009)
Using a Gratitude Journal as a Personal Motivator to Save Money and Enjoy Life I’ve been using one of these for quite a while. It really, really helps to step back very regularly and ask yourself what matters in your life.

Struggling with the Guardianship Question Guardianship is an issue that all parents have to struggle with at one time or another. Who do you choose to take care of your children if you suddenly pass on? It’s not an easy question.

Bulk Breakfast Burritos: Convenient, Cheap, Healthy, and Easier Than You Think I love these things! We make batches of them fairly regularly and I thoroughly enjoy them for breakfast in the mornings.

Ten Vital Tactics for Making the “Money Talk” Work The “money talk” is when you sit down with your partner and discuss financial issues for the first time (or for the first time in a long time). It can be painful – but it doesn’t have to be.

About My Wife, Sarah The Simple Dollar wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her.

Two Years Ago (February 14 – February 20, 2008)
Training Wheels: Why I’m Spending Less and Less Time Managing my Personal Finances Once you have your finances properly in order, it takes much less time than before to keep them working the way you want.

Defeating Superman Syndrome: How to Progress Beyond the “Need” to Be the Financial Hero This was actually a pretty major step in my own financial journey.

Financial Independence: Defining It and Figuring Out How to Get There What does financial independence mean to you? It has very different meanings for different people.

Little Income, Big Debts: Managing Your Money in Your College Years The financial realities of a college student are much different than they are in other stages in life – and thus different concepts are needed to manage money appropriately.

Nine Techniques for Developing Patience Patience is a key part of surviving the long slog of financial recovery. Here are nine ways to cultivate patience in your own life.

Three Years Ago (January 31 – February 6, 2007)
The Art of the Thank You Note A well-timed handwritten thank you note can make all the difference when it comes to securing a job or cementing a personal relationship.

10 Options To Consider Before Getting A Payday Loan Payday loans are financial poison. Here are ten things to try before even considering one.

A Fascinating Look At Edward Bellamy, Inventor Of The Credit Card I really enjoyed researching and writing this article. It let me dig deep into an area I often don’t get to touch on on The Simple Dollar.

15 Things You Can Do Right Now To Help Your Career Yes, right now. You can make a difference sitting at your desk or standing in your workstation.

Is It Unamerican To Invest In International Funds? Does The Question Even Matter Any More? Here, I address nationalism and investing. I tend to think that globalism is here to stay, myself.

If you’d like to browse through more of the archives, visit the chronology, where all posts are listed in chronological order.

Nine Ways to Get More out of The Simple Dollar
This is kind of a FAQ for new readers and is posted each week along with the Time Machine. Here are nine great ways for new readers to dig deeper into The Simple Dollar.

1. Subscribe by email or RSS. Visiting The Simple Dollar’s website is great, but for many people, it’s more convenient to receive the articles in another form. It’s easy to join 60,000 other subscribers and get The Simple Dollar’s content by email or in your RSS feeder (if you’re unfamiliar with RSS, check out Google Reader.

2. Comment. Each article on The Simple Dollar has lively discussion. Just click on the green square in the upper right of each article on the website and join in!

3. Read my story of financial meltdown and recovery. The Simple Dollar isn’t based on what I’ve read in books or learned in school. I’ve made a lifetime of financial mistakes – The Simple Dollar is a record of what works for me during the process of getting my life on a better track.

4. Download my free 49 page e-book. Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance On Just One Page is completely free. It summarizes all of the key lessons I’ve learned along the way about personal finance in one tidy package – in fact, all of the main principles can be found right on the cover.

5. Follow me on Twitter – or other social networks. I post tons of interesting articles, quotes, follow-up material, commentary, and other material on Twitter. Follow me! If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s essentially an open discussion forum for people to share ideas and thoughts with other like-minded folks – you just choose the people you want to listen to and their ideas and thoughts are all delivered to you on a single page.

I also participate on several other social networks. Feel free to check me out on del.icio.us (it’s where I collect links, from which I select the ones that appear in my weekly roundups), wakoopa (what software I use), GoodReads (what books I’m reading), Facebook, and FriendFeed (which aggregates everything). I also have an irregularly-updated personal site, TrentHamm.com.

6. Dig through “31 Days to Fix Your Finances.” 31 Days to Fix Your Finances is an article series that outlines how you can get a grip on your finances over the course of a month.

7. Send me your questions and suggestions. Send me an email and let me know what you’re thinking, what you’d like to see, and any questions you might have. I try to respond to as many emails as possible and I read them all. I may even use your question in a future article!

8. Become a “Friend of The Simple Dollar.” If you find the stuff on The Simple Dollar valuable and are willing to spend five minutes or so a month to help me out with small things, please consider signing up to be a “Friend of The Simple Dollar”.

9. Email a great article you find to a friend. Find an article that you think your friend would love? At the bottom of each article, you’ll find a link that says “Email this” – just click on that, type in your friend’s address, and send it right along to them!

Continue reading The Simple Dollar Time Machine: February 20, 2010 …

From The Simple Dollar.

February 20, 2010 | Filed Under Frugal Living | Leave a Comment

The Simple Dollar Weekly Roundup: Comment Bug Edition

Earlier this week, I found an issue with the software I was using to manage comments for The Simple Dollar. I deleted a single character in a single line of code, breathed in deep, refreshed the page…

… and 7,000 (!) comments appeared in the moderation queue.

The bug was a simple one. Ordinarily, comments that need to be moderated are assigned a particular number in the database – let’s say it’s a 1. If I approve the comment, the number becomes 0. If I don’t approve it, the comment gets the number 99 and effectively vanishes.

The bug essentially revolved around the fact that some comments for moderation were being assigned the number -1 instead of the number 1. In a code edit, a – sign had been stuck into the code in front of a 1, effectively turning it into a -1. Thus, when I would view the comments that need moderated, I would only see the ones with a 1 and not see the ones with a -1. I’m not sure what percentage of comments this was affecting, but I’d estimate around 25% of them.

Anyway, I’ve got a lot of comments to deal with. I’m going to go through these in batches because it would take several days of nothing but comment moderation to deal with that many comments.

Here are some personal finance articles of interest. This past week, I spent a lot of time reading some lesser-known personal finance blogs and I’ve chose to highlight some of them this week.

Recipe for Survival: 23 Ways Restaurants Save Money This article summarizes very clearly why I don’t like eating out unless we’re eating out someplace quite nice. I simply have much more confidence in the food I cook at home. (@ coupon sherpa)

I don’t want to retire I think the biggest problem for many of us when it comes to talking about retirement savings is that we simply don’t want to “retire,” because often the word “retire” comes with a sense of being old and idle and incapable, whether that’s actually true or not. We don’t want to think about being the generic definition of a retiree. (@ a gai shan life)

When Pigs Fly: How I Fought My Parking Ticket and Beat City Hall A very humorous story about fighting a parking ticket with some good advice to boot, this article mostly made me wonder whether or not it was really worth the time. I think it’s more about the principle of the thing. (@ len penzo)

10 Frugal Ways to get Fit this Winter My frugal way of staying fit during the winter has been EA Active. (@ squawk fox)

Also, I’ve had several articles of mine appear on OPEN Forum, and I’ll be linking to them over the next few weeks. These articles usually focus on small business issues. Here are three recent ones.

Efficient Billing: A Big Key to Solving Cash Flow Problems Being organized when you’re running a small business is key, particularly when it comes to efficiently billing your customers. Here’s some advice on how to do that.

Six Steps to Audit-Proofing Your Small Business The most effective way to audit-proof yourself? Keep a paper trail of every dime going in and out of your business. Here are some effective ways to do just that.

Two Key Numbers You Need to Know to Manage Your Small Business These two key numbers come back to two key elements of a successful small business: cash in hand and effective billing. It’s all about the cash flow, after all.