It doesn’t get much easier than this friends.  A little sugar, a little orange zest, a little jar.  It all comes together to make a sweet gift for the holidays that’s always appreciated.  You can give it in small bottles like the picture, with a tag recommending what to sprinkle it on:
-pancakes or French toast
-shortbread or sugar cookies
-cheesecake
-chocolate pudding Read more

Although I have been switching our family to using sucanat in place of refined sugar, there’s a small happy spot in my heart that sucanat hasn’t filled; the flavored sugar spot.  There’s something about flavored sugar that speaks to me on so many levels.  They speak to the freakishly frugal part of me, to the gourmet loving refined palette part of me, and to the part of me that loves DIY projects and secretly wishes I was a pioneer of old.  Flavored sugars take about five minutes of work and make a fantastic gift that’s cheap and easy. Read more

I have a lot of quirks that have developed out of my need to be frugal. One of them is saving my butter wrappers. Whenever I have softened a stick of butter for baking, I fold the wrapper up and stick it in the freezer. Then, when I need to grease a pan, I pull it out and unfold it. After a few minutes, the butter residue is soft enough that I can use the wrapper to grease my pan. Waste not want not!

Last year we got a TON of corn with our CSA.  If you’ve been trying to figure out how to freeze sweet corn, don’t worry, I did all the figuring out for you!  This year I got it down to a science.  With the first frost we recently, it’s time to start preserving all that lovely corn we’ve been seeing at farmer’s markets.  Fortunately, preserving corn in the freezer is so easy! Read more