Someday A Goat

Linkity Link 10.20.2011

A few favorite blog posts from the past few weeks. Links open in new window.

Crockpot Apple Butter Great topping for work breakfast, although I'll likely reduce the sugar. If it's sweet enough after the first cooking session, I might leave out the sugar. I keep meaning to check out Aldi, inexpensive apples might be just the opportunity.

A Dose of Financial Reality Today v. 1970: Affording education and housing, from Trent at The Simple Dollar. I'm lucky that my parents paid for my college education. I know people still paying off loans, and others who aren't going back to school because of the cost. This can't be good for the long-term success of the U.S. over the next few decades.

The Forever Recession Seth Godin perfectly delineates the changes I truly believe are coming to the way we structure employment. There are days I sit in my cube with literally nothing work-related to do, but management still freaks out about internet usage. I'd be happy to take less money and only come to work when I'm needed, freeing up time for other income-producing pursuits.

The Style Guide: "Comfortably Dressy" For too long I've let lack of money be my excuse for not being more thoughtful about my appearance. I can guarantee I have more clothes than Rachel at A Small Notebook, but look nowhere near as polished. Wearing a bit of mascara and powder to work for the past two weeks has been my first step toward looking nicer. Working on my clothes is next. Money Saving Mom also linked to a fantastic scarf tutorial.

Linkity Link 01.22.09

I've decided that my feed reader is the downfall of my blogging schedule. For some reason, I feel the need to get all items read, all the time. I have 102 subscriptions and a full-time job, so that's not really practical. I'm working on a better way to have valuable and regular content, and in the meantime, here are some links that I've been enjoying while not writing articles.

Simple Mom is eating a frog first thing in the morning. Sort of. This excellent productivity post needs to be printed and tacked on my wall.

Philip Brewer, one of my favorite writers at Wise Bread, has information about claiming the 2008 stimulus rebate if you didn't last year. You can be sure that our check is spent and long gone, but one of my coworkers mentioned a few weeks ago that she had never received one. Her income was so low in 2007 that she didn't need to file taxes (she recently graduated college). Since eligibility for the rebate was based on 2007 tax returns, she thought she had just missed out. I told her I thought she could still get the rebate when she filed taxes for 2008, and once I saw this article, I had more information to send over. She's a very happy camper now.

Cooking

Kris at Cheap Healthy Good has a Jenny Craig Morrocan chicken and orzo recipe that my husband and I tried last week. Unfortunately, I promptly forgot that my husband told me we were out of cumin before I went to the store for orzo, so we just threw in a pinch of curry powder, and increased the other spices. We also used homemade pork stock instead of chicken, and we had some chicken already cooked and shredded from the last batch of stock, so we just threw that in near the end to warm. It was fast, tasty and warm, which was perfect for a winter weeknight.

Garden

J.D. at Get Rich Slowly is a pretty avid gardener. His 7 tips for starting a garden are excellent for both new and experience gardeners, with plenty of additional linked resources. February is garden planning month in my house this year, so I expect that topic will be popping up more often.

Linkity Link 11.24.08

Homemade candles are a great inexpensive gift idea, no matter what season. Stephanie at A Year of Crockpotting covers how to make candles in a crockpot. I have quite a bit of essential oils, so I might try this after the holidays.

Cooking

Need buttermilk but don't want to go to the store? Heather at Home Ec 101 has the buttermilk substitution answer for you.

Ree at Pioneer Woman Cooks makes caramel pumpkin gingersnap cheesecake. If we weren't arriving at my mom's house until Thursday afternoon, I would have definitely planned on subjecting my family to this. I think the TSA would probably take it and eat it if I tried to bring in on the plane though.

At 10c a pancake, I've got to try this buttermilk pancake recipe from Cheap Healthy Good.

I love roasted potatoes. And mustard. Deb from Smitten Kitchen makes me drool with this recipe for mustard roasted potatoes -- they would be so good with steak.

Linkity Link 11.18.08

I think of Gail Vaz-Oxlade as a Canadian Suze Orman -- a tough lady who doesn't take any mess. I've never watched Gail's show, but I've been reading her blog for a month or two now. I like her no-holds-barred approach to helping people get out of self-created messes. She posted this week about working past the typical 40-hour work week.

Deadline looks like a simple reminder service, it caught my eye where many similar services have just not done it for me. I just changed cell plans and have unlimited texting now, so I may have to try this. Review from Jackson West at Lifehacker.

I really like the idea of setting up a firewall account, especially for some extra protection for online shopping. Post from Gather Little By Little, with the original credit to Jim at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. As soon as we have a little extra, one of these bad boys is getting set up at ING, and I think I'm going to ensure that we have a firewall account.

Cooking

I always seem to want to include 80 bazillion recipes in my link roundups. You should see my recipe-to-try file. I will be 85 before I get to them all. 

Chicken Pot Pie from Smitten Kitchen. Also, this winter fruit salad looks yummy. My husband loves pears, so I may have this dish for our first-ever Christmas at home.

Mushroom and Spinach Crepes from Closet Cooking. Also, Kevin's Hot Sweet Onion Dip would be perfect for football game days.

Mmmm. Bacon-wrapped green beans. Two of my favorite things in this world. From a guest poster on Pioneer Woman Cooks.

Linkity Link 11.08.08

It's easy to get lost in reading, reading, reading about personal finance and never really achieving much change on a personal level. Trent's post on The Simple Dollar about taking action was an inspiration last week.

Kelly at Almost Frugal has some great tips for keeping up on appliance maintenance, which I am terrible about.

Lifehacker looks at TaskFive, a very intriguing task manager. I have a hard time with to-do lists that last several pages, this might help keep me on track with tasks.

Cooking
Putting together a light lunch for a day party isn't always easy. While I've never been to a Sip'n'See (that was named that way anyhow), Pioneer Woman's stepmother hosted a Sip'n'See with a mouthwatering menu. PW followed up with another post linking to recipes.

Oh me oh my, these chocolate chip cookies must be tried. Smitten Kitchen is regularly one of my favorite reads, and she takes readers through the quest a writer from The New York Times went on to find the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Yum.

Mmm, I can definitely empathize with only being able to cook certain foods while the man is out of town. Check out Pioneer Woman's pasta with eggplant.

Update, 11/17/08: I made this pasta with eggplant recipe with some modifications and can confirm that it is in fact delish.

Linkity Link 11.02.08

I hadn't yet heard of GotoDaily, which Lifehacker linked to this week. Worth taking a look at for discount codes and printable coupons, and a couple of other similar sites are listed in the comments.

If life is annoying you, read this post on Zen Habits. Gratitude goes a long way to improving outlook, and this reminder came at the perfect time.

J.D. at Get Rich Slowly encounters a problem that most of us like to ignore thinking about: hard-drive failure.

Jenny, aka The Blogess, makes me laugh hard enough to cry when she's talking squirrels.

Mrs. Micah takes it a step beyond basic credit reports with her post about ChexSystems.

Wouldn't it be cool if light bulbs were wifi hotspots?

Cooking

Stephanie at a Year of Crockpotting rounds up some of the best ways to save money with a crockpot. Now if only we could get over leaving the crockpot on all day while we're at work. Also this week, a yummy and hearty looking soup, pasta fagioli.

Squawkfox's raw-food take on nori rolls sounds like it would be just the thing to enliven my brown-bagging this week.

Holy massive resource, Krista at Life, In a Nutshell, lists many, many frugal meal ideas.

Kris at Cheap Healthy Good recommends Giada's orzo with sausage recipe. I think the husband might dig on this one.

Investing
If only I had cold hard cash to invest--of course above and beyond any debt payments, emergency funds, etc.--I would be buying individual stocks that I felt are undervalued. Over at Blue Jeans Millionaire, Richard's post about small caps got me thinking about where I would put my imaginary money.

Nora Dunn's article on Wise Bread is a great primer on asset allocation.

Linkity Link 10.24.08

Yay! I finally slogged through all the unread items in my feed reader (I had a family emergency two weeks ago, and the feed reader has been stuck at about 600 unread items out of my 96 subscriptions, no matter how I tried).

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye this week:

Dollar Cost Averaging vs. Value Averaging Patrick at Cash Money Life has a good explanation of two similar investment cost averaging strategies. Not that I have any extra money to be investing at the moment, but if I did, I would seriously be considering value averaging.

Journal Live I think I might try this download mentioned on Lifehacker at work (I'm on Windows at work, Macs at home), although I'm a little scared about what the results might show about how much time I'm actually spending on "real" work.  

Crockpot rotisserie chicken We ate rotisserie chicken at least once a week before our grocery store raised the price on them, and this post from A Year of Crockpotting might just be the ticket to one of our easiest standby meals.

Lentil Love If I've ever seen an all-encompassing post on a foodstuff that manages to remain short enough to be readable, this is it. From Wise Bread. 

Small Business Pitfalls Part 2 Also from Wise Bread, this post is particularly relevant for anyone starting up.