How to Make Mashed Potatoes
Every homemaker should know how to make mashed potatoes.  Potatoes are a basic frugal  cooking ingredient that will allow you to stretch your grocery budget while adding nutrition to your menu plan.  Follow the directions in our step-by-step tutorial / recipe below to learn how to cook mashed potatoes.  We’ve also [...]

How to Cook a Turkey
Everyone should know how to cook a turkey.  The teaching of this basic skill, however, is often neglected in our upbringing! This step-by-step tutorial on how to cook a turkey is designed for cooks of all levels.  Even if you’ve never attempted any major cooking projects before, this will allow you [...]

Frozen grapes are a delicious frozen treat that is just right for cooling the summer heat. They’re a wonderful alternative to popsicles and, best of all, they’re healthy!

Recipe: Barbi’s Frugal Deep-Fry Fish Batter
This frugal batter recipe is great for deep frying fish if you want it to taste restaurant-style. I had fish to fry, but had no beer to make a beer batter or Tempura mix. All the recipes I knew took one of those two ingredients, and I knew I could [...]

Crockpot Beef and Broccoli is great to put on the meal planner for the day after a roast. It can be made with leftover meat from a roast, chopped into bite sized pieces, or from uncooked meat. (Roasts are an economical way to feed your family, as the per pound prices are considerably lower than [...]

Inexpensive ingredients make this one of my favorites! Roasts are an economical way to feed your family, as the per pound prices are considerably lower than other cuts of meat. This recipe is for pork roast, but can be adapted to other meats as well. I really do use beef broth in my pork roast; [...]

Barbi’s Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup
Inexpensive ingredients make this one of my favorites! This recipe is flexible and amounts depend on how large a batch you want and what you like to be prominent in your soup. If you like it meaty, use more chicken and less vegetables. If the noodles are your weakness, add extra [...]

Like the versatility of using baking mix (aka Bisquick) but don’t want to pay the extra? You can make your own:
Ingredients:
10 cups All-purpose flour
2 cups Shortening
1/3 cup Baking powder
1/4 cup Sugar (you can substitute Splenda if you want, but refer to their website for substitution tips first)
1 tbs salt

Directions:
1. Combine dry ingredients
2. Add shortening [...]