Filed under: Blog Biz, Smart Spending by Chelsea

Kim from Shopping Bookmarks just posted a guest post I wrote about Grocery Shopping Strategies – go check it out! It highlights savvy grocery shopping habits such as developing a storage system and buying online at sites like Alice.com. Visit the Shopping Bookmarks blog to read the full post.

While you’re there, check out Kim’s other money-saving tips. She scours the internet for the best prices, sales and coupon codes, then posts them to her site so you can find all the best deals in one place. I’ve found her blog particularly helpful during the holidays – her Black Friday previews definitely helped me strategize my plan of attack!

Filed under: Food for Thought by Chelsea

Photo credit: CS Cyrus Media

Thanksgiving weekend is over and I trust you’ve all recovered from your food comas. I successfully made a turkey for the first time! I have a full Turkey-making report (complete with really gross pictures) that I plan to write up into a how-to post eventually…hopefully sometime before next Thanksgiving.

Here’s a rundown of which recipes were crowd-pleasers and which ones, well, weren’t:

Crowd Pleasers
Spiced Sweet Potato Casserole – The people who like sweet potatoes really liked this. Those who don’t like sweet potatoes probably just never will. One day I’ll accept that and stop trying to force-feed them.
Green Bean Casserole – As I mentioned in my recipe rundown post, we use Cream of Chicken instead of Cream of Mushroom. It’s a family favorite.
Almond Steamer – Yuuuum. This one’s gonna be remade for Christmas. And New Year’s. And maybe a few days in between.
Pumpkin Sweet Rolls – These never fail for an awesome (and relatively low calorie) breakfast. I actually stock up on canned pumpkin and make these year-round. There’s a lot of ingredients and they’re kind of a pain to make, so I quadruple the recipe and freeze half so there’s plenty to go around and we can have it twice without me having to go to the hassle of making it every time.

Not So Popular
Maple Bacon Salad – Bacon + apple + maple syrup: what can go wrong? A lot, apparently. Everyone took a few bites and left the rest to wilt.
Pumpkin Crème Brulee – Sounded good. It wasn’t.

So we got a couple new recipes for our holiday cookbook and learned that just because a couple ingredients taste great separately (ahem, pumpkin + crème brulee) doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to taste great together. Live and learn.