The easiest gardening win to save on your next grocery trip

Here in the frenzy, we love the idea of growing our own food. We also love the idea of peaceful and relaxing evenings and weekends. Or at least an occasional moment of solitude somewhere other than in the bathroom with a toddler standing outside the door to monitor your progress...

Still we take what we can get. So the easiest thing to grow yourself rather than buying at the grocery store are fresh herbs. Now I know most of us don't pick up fresh herbs every week while shopping. But there are a few occasions that you need them. And it's $2 to $3 dollars to pick up something each time when you could spend $10 at a garden center to get a lifetime supply, assuming you have a yard you can find somewhere to stick in a few plants. Plus adding more fresh herbs to your cooking could help you want to eat at home more often.

The other thing we love about having fresh herbs growing in our yard is that we don't have to bring home yet another plastic clam shell container and throw it away. So for an easy gardening win and an easy environmental win, stick a few herb plants around the yard. It may just be a gateway for going further down the rabbit hole of gardening to help your budget and your health.

Instant Pot yogurt - failure and success

Here in the frenzy, we sometimes learn from failure. And sometimes I just make a slightly different mistake on the second attempt. So I previously discussed that I ended up making two changes to my yogurt routine at once, and thus was unable to isolate which was the cause of failure. I decided to avoid too much of a blow-by-blow by doing two more rounds of yogurt so I could actually post something that has a chance of being useful. To recap a bit, I got this heritage yogurt starter: The package comes with two packets of dried granules that look like the bread yeast packets that you put in the freezer. I followed the included instructions to heat the milk, cool it to 110 degrees Fahrenheit and then add the packet. If you read carefully, it also comes with the disclaimer that this may not produce a firm yogurt the first time around but that the second time you use a starter to make yogurt the bacteria would become substantial enough to make yogurt. I decided to hedge my be

Instant Pot as an alternative to a rice maker?

Here in the frenzy, we love using rice. There is nothing that makes a meal like putting rice under and combination of random ingredients from the fridge. (Let's see... blue cheese... watermelon... tuna fish... over rice. Got dinner!) So we have a dedicated rice maker that we've used for several years. But is that the best way to supply our rice for those quick and easy meals? Since we joined the cult of Instant Pot, we've been exploring it's functionality. Since one of the 10 functions is making rice, we pulled it out and made some rice. It worked just fine. I'm not a rice aficionado, so if you can wax poetic about the perfectly prepared rice for hours then YMMV , but to me I had perfectly acceptable white rice out of the Instant Pot. Saving kitchen space I like the Instant Pot's flexibility. I decided to buy an Instant Pot rather than buying a dedicated yogurt maker . But now that I've already purchase the thing, I might as well work out al

We didn't buy a diamond ring and it wasn't about saving money

Early before the coalescence of the frenzy, we had started to form our family values. One of our now well-established family values is that we try to minimize harm caused by what we buy. We don't always succeed but there is one thing we avoided from the very beginning because of the incredible damage it has done around the globe. Buying a diamond ring. This was particularly my hang up perhaps caused by Leonardo DiCaprio's attempt at a South African accent . I would not spend money on a diamond ring. But I also didn't want to seem cheap to my soon to be bride, which was entirely in my head and had nothing to do with what she thought of me. So I started the delicate dance of figuring out if we were in the 100 percent getting married camp while bringing up my ethical dilemma. Luckily, I was not left wanting for clues on this one. It was made very clear that we were indeed in camp and that we should get started on pitching the tent before midnight. I got lucky bec

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