Things have been quiet around here because Super Coupon Girl is still in England! I’m very much looking forward to coupon clipping once again when I get back to the US. I did, however, find a creative way to save money on our grocery bill during my absence – Jai joined the Nutrisystem Blogging Challenge and received 10 days worth of free food in exchange for a review on Contest-Corner.com. The meals he received are pictured above, and include breakfast, lunch, dinner, and desserts. I’ve talked about using product reviews as a form of bartering before, and it works out well!

Readers: Have you bartered for anything recently?

Thanks to the deals I got at Safeway last week, I had lots of versatile ingredients on hand which I’ve been able to use in many meals. The day after my shopping trip, I split my big package of ground beef in half and used it to make both taco meat and hamburgers.

First, I combined half the meat with chopped red onion, seasonings, and an egg. I then formed the meat into 8 balls (since we had 8 buns!) and flattened them with a plate to make patties. I cooked these on my George Foreman Grill and had a delicious batch of burgers in minutes!

I topped the burgers with ketchup, mustard, swiss cheese slices, and lettuce from the boxes of free salad I got in the mail. We enjoyed a couple of burgers for lunch, and then refrigerated the rest of the patties for later meals.

For the taco meat, I browned the other second half of the ground beef in a frying pan and then placed it in my brand-new slow cooker! I’ve been wanting a crock pot for some time, and I had a gift card for CSN Stores because of a review I’m working on for Contest Corner, so I was able to get a brand new slow cooker, a tea kettle, and a digital meat thermometer for $5.48 out of pocket after applying my gift code. I’ve mentioned previously how much I enjoy working with CSN, since I’ve gotten so many useful things for cheap or free – so I think you’ll be excited to know that there is another gift card giveaway in the works for my loyal readers, so you can snag some bargains too. Stay tuned this weekend for your chance to win!

I’m new to cooking with crock pots, but I love it so far. Normally, you can cook the raw meat right in the slow cooker, but the general consensus seems to be that ground beef is better browned in a pan first, to keep grease out of your meal. I was also getting a late start, so I didn’t want the meat to be undercooked!

I didn’t have any packets of taco seasoning on hand, so I took some inspiration from this recipe and added a ton of spices to the meat to make my own. I threw in garlic salt, pepper, cumin, coriander, turmeric, taco sauce, and even a little curry powder. I also found a packet of red pepper flakes from Pizza Hut in my fridge – I keep Ziploc baggies filled with leftover fast food condiments! – so I added that as well. I threw in chopped red onion and the last lone baby tomato from our garden, 1/2 a cup of water, and left it to cook on low for a few hours.

When it was time to dish it out, I pulled out my handy taco holder – isn’t it cute? It fits the taco shells and condiments all in one! For toppings, I set out shredded cheese, more lettuce from the salad mix, and – you guessed it! – taco sauce packets from the fast food condiment bag!

The tacos were delicious, and made several meals – there’s a lid that fits on top of my taco holder, so it was super easy to store and serve the leftovers. Yum yum!

I also made some sweets last weekend. I had some cake glazes that I was reviewing for Contest Corner, so I made a pan of tasty brownies using this Paula Deen recipe. I adapted it by using margarine instead of butter and omitting the mint chips and frosting.

As you know, I love to stretch my leftovers and repurpose them until every last bit has been used! And if I can’t find a recipe to use what I have, I see if I can make one up. These are my latest kitchen experiments:

I recently received a jar of raw honey to review for Contest Corner, so I used it to make a honey glaze for the pork roast I got inexpensively with a coupon. The glaze consisted of honey, soy sauce, brown sugar, olive oil, and seasoned rice vinegar – click here if you’d like the full recipe. It was a big hit!

This made enough for two separate meals, and I still had a bone left with scraps of meat and lots of nice glaze. I decided to get really experimental and see if I could make it into a soup!

I put the bone, glaze, and two potatoes in a stock pot with some water and cooked it for several hours. I ran it through the food processor to blend, then added some more water and returned to the stove. The “Soup” was so thick and rich that it was more like a sauce – so I decided to freeze it and use it later as a gravy! I think this would be great on meat or even mashed potatoes; I might use this at Thanksgiving.

Another one of my recent kitchen creations involved repurposing fast food leftovers. I had a tiny amount of nachos left over that we had gotten at a local Mexican restaurant – It wasn’t enough to feed even one person by itself, so I made a “Nacho Scramble”!

I put the nachos in a frying pan and sauteed with chopped green bell peppers and corn.

I then added a little flaxseed, eggs, cheese, and Taco Bell taco sauce – this isn’t the first meal I’ve made with leftover sauce packets!

Nachos and scrambled eggs aren’t a combination that you would automatically think of, but this turned out very tasty!

Readers: Have you come up with a unique way to use leftovers? I’d love to hear about it!

Here’s a sampling of what we’ve been eating lately:

I’ve been making a lot of stir-frys recently. This one utilized my free tofu, which I fried in olive oil and seasonings and served over grilled veggies.

This stir fry consisted of green bell pepper, cabbage, carrot, and zucchini, cooked in a homemade peanut sauce using peanut butter, soy sauce, brown sugar, and rice vinegar.

I’ve also been making a lot of pasta dishes! I whipped up another spinach lasagna in my George Foreman grill, because we enjoyed the last one so much. The tomatoes are one of the few things to come out of this summer’s garden!

I recently received a George Foreman Evolve Grill to review on Contest Corner, so last week’s menu revolved around my new kitchen toy!

This grill comes with a deep dish plate, so you can actually use it to make lasagna, believe it or not! For this dish, I used lasagna noodles from the stockpile, a can of tomato sauce that I got on clearance, frozen spinach, cheese, and two baby tomatoes from the garden.

I served this with a loaf of homemade french bread, a bottle of wine that Jai got as a birthday gift, and a chocolate cake, made from a Duncan Hines mix that I will also be reviewing on Contest Corner! Mmmm.

The next day, I used the remainder of the french bread to make ham and cheese paninis for lunch. I used up the last packet of .04 cent ham that I got back in April – this ham has been such a fantastic thing to have on hand. I stored it in the freezer and would thaw out a package whenever I needed one. We had a lot of company over for meals last month, so this was perfect for sandwich stations – I would set out the ham, a loaf of bread, and various toppings so that everyone could make their own sandwich. Frugal and delicious!

I also grilled some veggies along with meat strips from my freezer stockpile for dinner on Thursday and Friday night. (I had thawed out two packages of meat, so I needed to make sure they were both used up!) I served these with tortillas and cheese so that we could make fajitas.

So there’s my grill-centered menu for the week! If you have an Evolve grill and would like more details on the recipes, you can click here to read my review on Contest Corner.

A lot of my meals this month have involved my new toy: A food processor that I reviewed for Contest Corner (You can read my review of it here if you’re interested). I’ve never owned a food processor before, so I’ve been having great fun putting it to use. Here’s a sampling of what I’ve been making:

Fruit smoothies with banana, frozen strawberries, tofu, and milk – I love smoothies, especially during summer months!

How’s this for a extra-frugal tuna casserole: I used a free box of Ronzoni macaroni from my stockpile, free organic celery, .22 cent cream of mushroom soup (that I paid for with a gift card!), frozen onion from my freezer cooking day in March, milk, and seasonings.

The main reason I’ve been wanting a food processor is to save time chopping vegetables. Another neat aspect is that because it chops so finely, it means I can add more veggies without increasing volume or overloading the taste – I was able to add a lot more celery to this casserole than I would normally.

I used the free potato salad dressing that I got last month to make a big potato salad for a family reunion this past weekend. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo of the finished product, but it was a big hit! I used 3 pounds of potatoes, 7 hardboiled eggs, and plenty of celery. This was a perfect way to use up some of my potatoes – every time I buy a bag of potatoes, half of them end up going off before I have a chance to use them, so I’m making an effort to utilize potatoes more often so that they don’t go to waste.

What’s on your menu this week, readers?

As you know, we’ve been eating from the stockpile recently in a bid to save time and rotate some of the items in the pantry before they go off. So what, exactly, have we been eating? Here’s a few examples:

For breakfast, I’ve been using up the last of my .07 cent oatmeal. I like to stir in about 1/4 cup of raisins before I cook it – good and filling!

I’ve been making a lot of rice and bean burritos, because they’re so delicious and easy! I use my rice cooker almost like a crockpot – I’ll put in a cup of brown rice, then chop up carrots, onion, and cut corn kernels right off the cob. Then I add some Chipotle seasoning salt and water, and cook it all in the rice maker. The batch pictured above also used the last of the cilantro that I had on hand.

Once it’s finished, I put the rice mixture in tortillas, add canned black beans from the stockpile, and a little cheese – there were a few cheese sales last month, so it lasted for a while.

Remember the steaks I made during my freezer cooking weekend? I had one left, which I cut in half (It was big enough for two portions) and served with corn salad from my garden, garnished with shredded carrot and canned pear slices from the stockpile.

Coconut chicken & rice – I was sent a tub of shredded coconut to review on Contest Corner, so I decided to try it out in this dish. I used chicken thighs, white rice, carrots, frozen onion, coconut oil, a can of pineapple, garlic, peanuts, and soy sauce from the stockpile. You can click here to check out my review for the full recipe and more pics. (You’re also welcome to enter my coconut giveaway, too!)

During my freezer cooking marathon, I started defrosting two packages of ground beef that I put to use in a Shepherd’s Pie:

This is a family recipe with no precise measurements, but here’s the gist of it:

I put the ground beef into a pan with a bit of olive oil and about 2/3 of an onion, chopped. I cooked it until brown, and then added one stock cube dissolved in two cups boiling water. I left it to cook a few more minutes, then turned off the heat and put it into a baking dish. Next, I parboiled two or three sliced carrots and layered them on top of the meat. Then I boiled some potatoes and used a handmixer to mash them with butter and milk, and spread the mashed potatoes over the meat and carrots. I then cooked this at 350 degrees for about 35 minutes. This was served with slices of homemade bread and butter – a must-have with Shepherd’s Pie!

We took this over to a friend’s house for dinner, and everyone enjoyed it. This served 4 people, and there was a fair bit left over. We left some with our friends, and had also had leftovers for dinner the next night.