Chicken with Ginger Dressing (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

Last week, I found a great deal at Publix on Naturally Fresh refrigerated salad dressing - the store paid me $1.00 for each jar!  Besides the usual suspects of ranch and blue cheese dressing, I found a ginger dressing.  I bought it thinking it would be great on salad, but I decided to give it a try in a stir-fry that evening.

It worked great!  I loved the fresh ginger flavor.  And it wasn't too vinegary.

Here's the recipe:

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Roasted Garlicky Cauliflower (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

Here's an easy and very healthful snack recipe!  I'm not a big fan of cauliflower, but I love these roasted cauliflower bites with garlic and Parmesan!

Here's the recipe:

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Garlic Smashed Beans (Frugal Food Thursday)

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Happy New Year!

My resolution this year is to eat much healthier and to add more whole foods into my diet.  One food that I really love and that is yummy and super healthy are these smashed beans!

They're delicious with the tastes of Parmesan, black pepper, and garlic, but they have lots of fiber from the beans.  They're great as a side dish instead of pasta!

Here's the recipe:

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Cream Cheese Brownies (Frugal Food Thursday)

Thanks to Betty Crocker for providing the information and products for this recipe!

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

I love brownies!  I do like making them from scratch - here's my recipe - but sometimes even a good baker gets busy and can need a little help!

So I was really excited to receive the recipe for Cream Cheese Swirl Brownies from Betty Crocker!   The recipe takes a boxed brownie mix and adds a simple extra layer of sweetened cream cheese - it only take a few minutes for this extra step - and turns it into an amazing, delicious dessert!

Here's the recipe:

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Peanut Butter Blossoms (Frugal Food Thursday)

Thanks to Pillsbury for providing the information and products for this recipe!

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

This is the time to make and eat cookies!  I just recently made tons of cookies to package as gifts for my daughters' teachers, aides, and bus drivers.  And of course, a few for our family as well!

Pillsbury has some really great holiday cookie recipes that you'll want to try out!  Serious Eats and Pillsbury have teamed up to bring you easy, delicious recipes that will brighten any table. For the next few weeks, check the Serious Eats site for recipes, step by step videos, and more!

And there's a great giveaway involved: Pin any recipe to your Pinterest board, then enter to win a weekly drawing for a $500 gift card!  Giveaways and cookies - what could be better?

I checked out lots of recipes and decided I wanted to try the Peanut Butter Blossoms recipe, which is photographed above and I've listed below.  But with my busy days at this time of year, that seems a little too much work.  Plus it has ingredients such as shortening that I don't normally keep on hand.

So instead, I'm going to try using ready-made Pillsbury peanut butter cookie dough.  I purchased some earlier to day (thanks, Pillsbury!) and I'll use some Hershey's kisses that I got on sale, almost for free, at CVS.   It's not homemade, but it definitely fits my busy schedule.

Here's the original Peanut Butter Blossoms recipe:

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Fried Cinnamon Bites (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

Here's a Chanukah-inspired recipe I created last week when I received a free product coupon for Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls. (Thanks, Pillsbury!)  It's not the most creative or frugal recipe I've ever made, but it was a lot of fun for my youngest daughter and me to make together!

Here's the recipe:

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Turkey with Snow Peas (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

Happy Thanksgiving!

When you're done eating all that turkey, you'll still need some great recipes to use up the leftovers. Here's one of my favorites - Turkey with Snow Peas!

Here's the recipe:

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Bruschetta Boca Burger Pasta Sauce (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

It was a crazy day here at the Frugal Follies household - three daughters going in three different directions.  So I planned to make a quick dinner tonight - my 3 Can Veggie Chili.  But when I got to the pantry, I found no canned beans anywhere.  Guess I know what I'll be buying tomorrow at ALDI!

But, that left me without a plan for dinner.  So I looked in the freezer and found a box of Boca Burgers that I had bought when they were on a BOGO sale at Publix a couple of months ago.

Specifically, I had the Bruschetta variety - with tomato, basil, and Parmesan.  So I thought, why not cook the patties, then crumble them into a tomato sauce and serve it over pasta?

So that's exactly what I did - and the results were delicious!  I was concerned about the sauce having too many carbs, but a quick look at the nutrition label showed me that each has 8 grams of carbs, 5 of which are fiber.  So no worries there! (And no, this isn't a paid endorsement - I just really liked the product!)

I used a yellow bell pepper because I found it cheaply at ALDI last week, but of course, you can substitute a green pepper instead!

Here's the recipe:

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Cheap Turkey Lo Mein (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

I was cleaning out the freezer earlier this week when I found a package of turkey wings and legs from a turkey I had made a couple of months ago.  I defrosted the package and stripped the meat off the bones.  Voila, leftover turkey meat without the whole turkey!

I decided to make a lo mein dish with the turkey shreds.  Really easy and yummy!  Here at the Frugal Follies household, we are cutting down on carbs, so I only used about 2 ounces of thin spaghetti in the dish.  If you want to make the dish go further, add more noodles.

Here's the recipe:

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Quick Minestrone Soup (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

Here at the Frugal Follies household, we've been trying to cut back on carbohydrate foods.  That's really a challenge when you're trying to save money as well!

A few nights ago, I made a tossed salad with leftover chicken, but it didn't seem like enough for a dinner.  I remembered that I had homemade chicken stock in the fridge, which I had made a few days earlier.  I combined the stock with canned tomatoes and kidney beans, vegetables, and just a small amount of veggie macaroni to make a yummy, quick minestrone soup!

Here's the recipe:

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Banana-Apple Bread (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

It's fall here in South Florida.  That means that it gets into the 70s at night, but it's still in the high 80s during the day.  Not exactly the kind of crisp weather you hope for fall.

But what we do have that is crisp is apples!  Okay, they don't grow here, but we get them nonetheless!  Here's a favorite frugal, fun food with apples - banana-apple bread!

Here's the recipe:

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Chicken, Beans, and Pasta (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

Here's a typical weeknight recipe for us.  My kids aren't fans of the spiciness, so I make extra chicken for them, sauteing it with the chicken used for this recipe.  I also make extra pasta and a salad for them.  They're happy, and there's also leftovers of this dish for our lunches the next day!

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Fall Pumpkin Muffins (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

These recipes are also listed at these wonderful linkup parties - thank you to all the hosts for allowing me to link up!

It's officially fall in a couple days, but it seems like it's been fall for a while, given all the pumpkin-flavored foods out there!  Pumpkin lattes, pumpkin doughnuts, pumpkin cheesecake - it seems like if there's a food, someone will add pumpkin to it in the fall!

So I'm going along with that trend - here's my recipe for pumpkin corn muffins!

Here's the recipe:

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Lasagna Rolls (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

These recipes are also listed at these wonderful linkup parties - thank you to all the hosts for allowing me to link up!

Here's one of my favorite dishes to make ahead! I've been very busy with school starting and my three kids going to three schools, three sets of activities, and so on.  So cooking dinner early in the day and then heating it up later has been an important strategy to make sure dinner is on the table at a reasonable hour - and without me being too exhausted to cook!

Here's the recipe:

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Crockpot Pot Roast (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

These recipes are also listed at these wonderful linkup parties - thank you to all the hosts for allowing me to link up!

I don't make beef all that much, other than ground beef dishes like meatballs.  But when I do, I try to make it it economically!

Here's a recipe of mine for cooking a pot roast in the crockpot or slow cooker.  It comes out nice and juicy this way!

Here's the recipe:

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Biscuit Mini Pizzas (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

These recipes are also listed at these wonderful linkup parties - thank you to all the hosts for allowing me to link up!

One important frugal skill is to be able to use items that you already have in a way that they weren't originally intended.  That way, you don't have to go out and buy something new.

For instance, I purchased several Grands biscuits on sale with coupons a few weeks ago and got them all for free!  But we don't eat biscuits a lot at dinner.

So, I decided to use the biscuits as a base for pizza! I got this idea from a child's cookbook, I have to admit. I didn't really use measurements - add as much or as little of the toppings as you want!

Here's the recipe:

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Honey Cake (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

These recipes are also listed at these wonderful linkup parties - thank you to all the hosts for allowing me to link up!

The Jewish holidays are coming up, which means it's time to make some honey cake!

This is my mom's recipe. She makes it in a 9x13 pan, but I decided to use a 9x5 loaf pan instead, and serve it as slices instead of squares. Works either way!

From a frugal perspective, if you don't have all the spices listed, don't worry about it; just leave one or two of them out. It will still be tasty. And save some leftover coffee for this recipe! You can freeze leftover coffee in ice trays, then defrost the coffee ice cubes in the microwave.

Here's the recipe:

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Chicken Basquaise with Carbonell Spanish Olive Oil (Frugal Food Thursday)

Thanks to Carbonell for providing the olive oil for this recipe!

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

These recipes are also listed at these wonderful linkup parties - thank you to all the hosts for allowing me to link up!

Earlier this week, I made one of my regular dinners, Chicken Basquaise.  But I put a special spin on it - I used Carbonell Spanish Olive Oil!

Much like Spanish wine, Spanish olive oil offers a distinctively different flavor that liberates meat, fish and vegetable dishes from the confines of traditional, expected taste. Carbonell olive oil, since 1866, is only produced and bottled in Spain. Its quality and tradition have made it one of the preferred brands all over the world.  Carbonell Extra Virgin olive oil has an intense flavor that is delicious in salads or as a base for dips, dressings and as a seasoning in many dishes.

The olive oil gave a really authentic and special taste to my ordinary dish!

Here's how I made it:

First, I sauteed onions, celery, and peppers in the Carbonell olive oil:

I removed the vegetables and placed them in a bowl.  I added more olive oil and sauteed the chicken in the same pan.

Once the chicken was fully cooked, I put the vegetables back in the pan and added a can of crushed tomatoes.  I then added some hot sauce and oregano.  I covered the pan and simmered the dish for about ten minutes.

I stirred in some more olive oil for extra flavor, and then I served the Chicken Basquaise over arborio rice, as shown at the top of this post.

The Carbonell olive oil made this ordinary weekday dish very special!  What dishes that you make would be even better with Carbonell olive oil?

Here's my recipe:

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Black Bottoms (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

These recipes are also listed at these wonderful linkup parties - thank you to all the hosts for allowing me to link up!

Here's another baking recipe that my kids love to make! Black Bottoms have a bottom layer of cake and a top layer of cheesecake with chocolate chips. They always disappear almost as soon as I make them!

Here's the recipe:

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Raspberry Banana Bread (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

These recipes are also listed at these wonderful linkup parties - thank you to all the hosts for allowing me to link up!

During the summer, I love to cook with my kids! They especially like to bake - cookies and cakes and such.

Here's an easy recipe for banana bread - it's great for using up all those bananas that are turning brown. It also uses frozen raspberries, which occasionally go on sale at Publix. Watch for a sale, then stock up!

Here's the recipe:

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