Yummy Rainbow Salsa!

A rainbow array of height-of-the-season tomatoes makes an incomparably beautiful salsa. The precise amounts of tomatoes, tomatillos and hot peppers can vary. Other produce also can be added, such as cooked sweet corn or scallions.

You can use any of the red tomatoes, such as the Ponderosa and Livingston varieties. Use this salsa as a dip or as a topping for tortillas or omelets. Here is the receipe- ENJOY!



Start to finish: 30 minutes

Makes about 4 cups

½ cup diced red onion

1 teaspoon salt

½ pound (about 6) ripe tomatillos

2 to 2½ pounds fresh tomatoes (a blend of sizes and colors)

1 medium-hot chili, such as serrano or jalapeno, or 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes

2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro

1 clove garlic, minced

In a small bowl, mix the onion and salt. Let stand for 20 minutes.

Peel and rinse the tomatillos. If desired, they can be roasted on a baking sheet for 15 minutes at 350 F, then cooled. This is especially good if the tomatillos are not fully ripe (they should be yellow-green or purplish when ripe).

Roughly chop the tomatillos. Dice all the larger tomatoes. Cut any small cherry or grape tomatoes in half and large ones into 4 to 8 pieces. Currant-sized tomatoes should be used whole.

In a medium bowl, combine all the tomatoes and tomatillos.

Dice the chili. If you do not want a hot salsa, carefully remove the seeds and the membranes from the pepper before dicing. Gently stir the chili, cilantro, garlic and salted onion into the tomatoes. Add additional salt to taste.

Let stand for 20 minutes before serving. The salsa is best the day it is made, but it will keep refrigerated for about a week.

(Recipe from Lawrence Davis-Hollander, author of “Tomato: A Fresh-from-the-Vine Cookbook”)

Frugal Notebook Benefits

A frugal notebook is a place to organize all these useful tools. It’s easy to put together and cheap, too. All you need is a binder, page protectors, dividers, index cards and a few printable forms, such as a calendar and checklists to get started. Many people store their information on their computer, but it’s nice to have a portable binder or index cards to slip into your wallet or pocket and a hard copy as a backup. Not only will this help you manage your time and home; it can be a great gift, too.


Category sections can include:

CALENDAR: For family member’s schedules, special occasions and meal planning.

FAMILY: This can include gift ideas and gift-closet inventory, clothing sizes and clothes inventory, recent photos and library-card information. You can also include school information such as progress reports, lunch menus and school-contact information. Organize your holiday planning, such as addresses to send cards, wish lists and decorating ideas, too.

HOME: Include information such as chore charts, home-maintenance schedule, cleaning routines, stain guides, homemade cleaner recipes, contact information for bills such as utilities, loans, cable, cell phones, Internet and waste management.


You can have a section for your home budget, too. Save any account statements, warranties, appliance manuals and receipts. You can add store hours, phone numbers and policies, too. Your garden journal can be added to this section. It can contain information such as plant care, seed starting, layouts and design, chores and frost dates.

HEALTH: Add information such as immunization records, fitness journals, insurance information, prescription information and doctor and emergency-contact numbers, such as closest contact if you’re unavailable, local hospital or poison control. If you have pets, you can add their medical records, too.

FOOD: Create and store your meal plans, recipes, cooking substitutions and kitchen tips such as conversions, homemade mixes, food storage and freezer- and pantry-inventory lists, your price book, coupons, rebate information, seasonal foods, takeout menus and master grocery list.

FUN: This can be a running list of activities to do on weekends, breaks and vacations. It can include free local entertainment, crafts and homemade craft recipes and projects, and movie and reading lists, too.

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Make Your Own Fruit Bouquets!

The edible fruit bouquets advertised on t.v. and the internet are lovely but WAY TOO EXPENSIVE! I have some tips on how to make one completely from scratch that will be just as beautiful and delicious for all occassions. Plus,this is a great activity for you&your kids or a whole family to do.. fun,easy,educational,inexpensive. Here we go -pay attention :)

Depending on the size of bouquet that you wish to make, you will need fresh pineapple, strawberries, cantaloupe, grapes, and parsely. For the bouquet shown here, I used 1 large pineapple, 2 pounds of strawberries, 1 cantaloupe, 50 grapes and a handful of parsley.


You will also need a few other items to make this edible fruit bouquet: a flower cookie cutter, a knife, a melon baller, kitchen scissors, bamboo skewers, a cutting board, a vase, and some floral foam or playdough ,the floral foam is easier to work with, but the playdough works just fine also.


Step 1. Using your knife, cut up your pineapple into 1/2 inch thick slices. (I used 5 slices total for this bouquet, but you can use more or less).

Step 2. Using the cookie cutter, press each slice of pineapple and cut out a flower of pineapple.


Step 3. Using the melon baller, scoop out one ball of cantaloupe for every 2 pineapple flowers. Cut the cantaloupe ball in half and lay the flat side of one half against one pineapple flower.

Step 4. Now take each pineapple flower and stick a bamboo skewer through the center. Make sure your skewer pokes through the pineapple about 1/2 inch. Now stick that part of the skewer onto a cantaloupe ball, but don't let the skewer stick out the other end of the cantaloupe ball. Do this for each pineapple flower that you have.

Step 5. Wash your strawberries (you can remove the strawberry leaves if you want). Then take each strawberry and stick a bamboo skewer into the top of it, but don't let the skewer poke out the other side.

Step 6. Take a bamboo skewer and stick it through about 6-7 grapes. When you stick one grape on, slide it down to make room for the next one. Repeat this until your last grape. Make sure that the skewer doesn't stick out of the last grape (the one on top). Then slide each grape up the skewer until they touch the grape just above it. I made 7 of these grape skewers for this fruit bouquet.

Step 7. Put your floral foam or playdough into your vase. You can use a flower vase, a basket or anything else. I do recommend using an opaque vase so the skewers & playdough are not visible through the vase. I used playdough for this fruit bouquet.

Step 8. Now you should have all of your fruit on skewers. Place each skewer into the playdough at various angles. You will want to create a spherical shape to the bouquet, so place the outermost skewers on a large angle and make them shorter than the center skewers. I had to break a few inches off some of the skewers to get them to the right height (I used kitchen scissors to help me break the skewers). This step is the most time consuming because you want the bouquet to look perfect. If you have trouble, just start putting in skewers into the playdough. Then adjust each one to look how you want it. The key to this step is to adjust your skewer lengths. Don't be afraid to break a good part of the skewer off (if you break too much off, you can always use a new skewer - I had a LOT of extra skewers at the end). Also, the playdough tends to get quite full of skewers, so if you place a skewer in and it runs into another skewer, twist it a little bit until it slides past the other skewer. Another key to making your fruit bouquet look AWESOME is to have plenty of fruit. Having too few fruit skewers makes your fruit bouquet look bare and skimpy.


You could stop at this point and have a cute fruit bouquet, but I recommend you move on to Step 9.
Step 9. Once all your fruit skewers are placed, place some twigs of parsley in-between the skewers. This fills in the bouquet, hides the skewers and makes it look more like a flower bouquet.

*Tip: You may have to remove a skewer and drop in the parsley from the top. This will give you a little more room to work with. After your parsley is in place, replace any skewers that you may have removed.

Once you have the parsley in place, YOU ARE DONE! You have a delicious and unique centerpiece. It will serve as a beautiful centerpiece and your guests will love the taste of this fresh edible fruit bouquet.

Place this fruit bouquet on your food table or somewhere prominent. When you serve the refreshments, you could have the guests just pull the fruit off of the skewers, rather than pulling the whole skewer out. That way, the parsely won't be falling out all over.

Salad Greens For Dinner

Mixed salad greens and Mesclun mixes are attractive and fun to grow, and they make a great container garden, indoors in a sunny window or outdoors.

Here’s a fun idea: Have the kids plant their own salad garden. They will enjoy cutting their own salad for dinner (little ones will need supervision) and as they cut, the greens will regrow.

Best Cookies Ever!

Storing holiday cookies?
Keep them soft by adding a slice of apple to the container (do change it frequently). And never store soft and crispy cookies together.

Pizza From Scratch?

Homemade Pizza

Instead of buying frozen pizzas, make your dough from scratch. A plain bread dough can be made in advance and frozen. A paste can be made with fresh or canned tomatoes & tomato paste mixed together. Top with your favorite topping and your expense should be somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.00. It can be a lot more fun to really creative with toppings, like for example have a member of the family get to choose all the toppings, which you can rotate who gets to pick each time. Also, you can have more than one person make the pizza like the kds or spouse- even invited guests!