After a slow start, my little garden is producing a good crop of tomatoes each day. I planted 6 varieties, including an heirloom plum type tomato (currently sprawling across a large part of the raspberries, even though I continuously tie these back to their stakes), a single grape tomato plant, and both yellow and red…

I have been making “quick” coffeecakes for decades, starting with two basic recipes from the 1962 Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. One was titled simply “Coffeecake” while the other was “Blueberry Buckle.” Over the years I have layered these with many kinds of fruit, have changed the toppings, have upped the nutrition with the use…

This is a recipe that uses a lot of raspberries, frugal enough if you have them free for the picking in the back yard or relatively inexpensively at a pick-your-own farm, but, yes I know, an extravagance for anyone having to buy them in the store. So you may need to decide if they will…

It’s raspberry season again, time for me to find new ways to use the ever abundant crop of backyard berries. This week I had some bananas to use up as well, so it was time to try  raspberry banana combination. This recipe stretches a couple of packages of raspberries into a lot of servings, in…

For a blog that proposes to present recipes that are economical and relatively quick/easy to prepare, sharing recipes for raspberries probably seems incongruous for many. I know that I have rarely bought fresh raspberries because of the very high cost, and even frozen ones were rarely, if ever, something that a budget-conscious shopper might buy….

Now that our local Costco is carrying tofu at a very reasonable price, I have been experimenting with it in more dishes. One success has been using tofu as a substitute for eggs in things like breakfast burritos, but my early attempts at adding cubes of it to stir fries were not as good as…

So some of us can’t seem to leave a good thing alone. Or perhaps, in our quest to use “frugal” ingredients, we look to the tried and true for inspiration. Whichever it is, I recently took a beloved family recipe and changed it in order to incorporate a freebie from my backyard—rhubarb. The old family…

I’ve posted so many dessert and cookie recipes lately, this site is starting to seem out of balance…at least to me, since my preference is still for the more savory/veggie parts of the meal.  While the rest of my garden is still more in the planning than growing stage, my tiny patch of asparagus is…

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had the good fortune to buy mayonnaise at a super-bargain price; since I don’t usually use this for sandwiches, salads, or really anything else, I started exploring how else I might be able to use my purchase. The natural place for me to start was a chocolate…

As promised, here is one more in my “series” of mayonnaise-based baked goods. This is an adaptation of the oatmeal cookie recipe I found long ago in a very old church cookbook from my mother. That recipe, using raisins instead of chocolate chips, is here:  http://frugalfastfun.blogspot.com/2014/05/old-fashioned-oatmeal-raisin-cookies.html As with the Double Chocolate cookies I entered here…