Original Tip # 6; Eat Home-Save Money

Eat home; pay attention to leftovers and casseroles. Recipes are cheap over the Internet, and are in all kinds of magazines with recipes, including The Radish, which is given away. Look for heirloom recipes your parents had, even grandparents and great grandparents, and practice and be creative. The American Women’s Cook Book, The magazines like Everyday Food, PBS cooking shows, Mr. Food, Martha Stewart, and Julia Child are great sources to look. The Discovery Shop and thrift stores are wonderful places to look for vintage and antique cook books, so are yard sales and antique stores, library book sales, book stores and book store chains, catalogs. Many of these are on sale before they are even out of print, including Edward R. Hamilton Books and Amazon and Alibris. I love The White House Cookbook; my edition goes to Kennedy's administration. There are lots of tips, bits of history, and doable recipes. I spent only $3.00 on mine at my favorite indoor flea market. Reprints are nearlt $30.00. Lately, I've gotten good at looking at what is in the fridge and cooking with it. I can do lots with baked eggs and a ramekin. I make all kinds of pasta sauces with bottled sauce, wine, added chopped vegetables, basic white sauce with cheese metled in, canned clams, ground meat, any kind. My husband is great with all types of salads. He makes a mean tradtional French dressing. I'm good with simple buttermilk, sour cream, chives, a bit of may, all blended. I add salsa or tabasco to make it a Southwestern dressing. We find we spend more time together this way, though I admit I hate doing dishes and love going out on busy nights. I've gotten very Zen about doing the dishes, though, and can have dishwasher emptied and loaded in 4 mins. I still prefer washing by hand, and sometimes air drying big pots. I use the dishwasher on plants. Does anyone out there have cooking stories or recipes you would like to share with our readers? I would welcome a guest blogger on this subject. I have not been able to write quite as much; I had my first book signing on my metal doll book last week, and two more signings coming up. My short novela Tigress, based on Jack the Ripper, is also on Kindle, now, and I've been preparing other books for Kindle as well. But,we have had terrible sadness and turmoil. Our beautiful Emma, pictured here, died of feline kidney failure. I can't come to terms with that. My mother's death certificate read the same, though we really had no diagnosis given to us for her sudden death. Poor little Emmie was brave, and endured daily IVs of fluids. She seemed to get better, then weakened. She died in her sleep, in my arms. I had gotten intot he habit of waking up at night to check on her. She had been sleeping on our tub, with a fleece bed at one end, then was too weak to do even that. So, I would pick her up, wrap her in our favorite blanket with a Ceciley Barker fiary on it, and hold her. I feel asleep holding her, and she fell asleep into eternity at about 4:30 am July 22nd. I had to go to work after that. One week later was our wedding anniversary. Then, I had family disasters to deal with as well. I miss my little Emmie, and will never forget her. She was very smart, related to the original Hatfields by a former owner, and fierce as a little tiger. She loved her toys, and stuffed mice; we called them her dolls, and their last name was Mouse. Some spoke French, like Mme. Marionette Toinette Mouse and Mme. Le Pomplemousse. We were over the top for her. We stumbled on two tiny kittens, a girl, Bangles, and a boy, Tuxedo. They now live with us. They are full of energy. I've never had kittens. Emmie was only my third cat; our other two littel boys were elderly when we got them. One passed away in His sleep at 21, the other died quietly at home at nearly 24. They were our Daxie and Opie, and we inherited them. My mother worried for them, and wanted to pay their vet bills, but we paid them. She was cat phobic her whole life. All you had to say was "cat" at the table during an argument, and she would leave. No one knows where this phobia came from. Only she wrote in her memoirs that she had recuuring nightmares of being chased by cats and cows, even though she had a cat as a little girl. Go figure. So, now, we soldier on. Times are uncertain for everyone. That's all we can do.