I love to start a weekend off with a savory breakfast. Skip all those sweet breads and pastries; just give me a veggie-filled omelet or scrambled eggs, hash browns (the real kind, not those greasy patties), and salsa and I’m set for the day. My refrigerator had been filling up this week with small portions…

I find it very interesting to see how we Americans take festive or historical days from other cultures and give them our own spin and importance, Cinco de Mayo for example.Today we celebrate another of these adaptive holidays, St. Patrick’s Day. While lots of people will be celebrating with sometimes raucous parades and lots of…

Sometimes I include recipes here that barely fit my overall blog objective, and today’s entry is one of those. It is not particularly fast and, if you don’t have raspberries in your yard or in the gardens of friends or family, it is unlikely this would ever fit the “frugal” definition. (And I did have…

When preparing to make some quick bread for a morning coffee, I started my usual online search, looking for muffins using the apple butter and raisin bran that I wanted to use up. While there were lots of recipes using these, almost all were unfortunately much higher in sugar and fats than I wanted. Not…

Long ago and far away, I copied this recipe on to a scrap of paper that I later glued to a standard recipe card that went into the file with the rest of recipes I collected. As much as possible, I always tried to document my sources, but this one says only,  “From a magazine…

Sometimes, having leftovers is not a bad thing.  Leftover breads, for example. Earlier this week, I made whole wheat hard rolls for pulled pork sandwiches. Not knowing exactly how many people would be at lunch, I made a large batch of dough–when you’re working with yeast breads, it takes hardly any effort to make more….

Have you ever thought of how much we tend to associate certain foods with specific seasons or holidays, often serving them only during a limited time period? Cranberries are like that. Make some cranberry relish to go with the Thanksgiving feast, maybe make a cranberry dessert during the Thanksgiving to Christmas festive season, but then,…

Winter weather has finally arrived, the richness of holiday meals is mostly past, and the time has come for simpler, more nutritious, frugal, and warming comfort foods. Here in Minnesota, we have the promise of weather perfect for being outside, enjoying the snow, even as our friends in the east are facing the “other side”…

In this time of holiday gatherings, office potlucks, and a desire to share home-baked gifts, finding recipes that are fast, relatively inexpensive, and even just a little healthy (or at least less unhealthy) can be a challenge. Enter mini-muffins. These bite-sized morsels are especially good for times when we want to try all the foods…

Over the years, I watched the Pillsbury Bake-off reward bigger and bigger prizes, often for what seemed like easier and easier dishes to make. It would be fun, I thought, to have a recipe that would just get me to the final bake-off, a room full of cooks and mocked up kitchens, chaotic and fragrant…