Ashleycl's Blog

AshleyCL Blog Post: Money Saving Tips For Your Kitchen http://blog.ashleychenlopez.com/?p=36

Being a mother of a 15 months old baby, I prefer to cook by myself for my daughter,  rather than buying those commercial baby foods. By doing this, I am serving healthier food and saving more money.

Talking about saving money, I gathered a couple of other money saving tips which I am trying to practice in my everyday life to share with everyone. If you have any other tips, please leave your comments.

• Plan your weekly menu before you go shopping. OK, it’s not as much fun as impulse buying, but it DOES prevent waste because you’ll already have a purpose in mind for every ingredient you purchase. (I have been doing this for a few months now. It helps me to have fresh food every week, and of course it saves money too.)
• Don’t buy pre-prepared/pre-cut vegetables or fruits. Not only are they more expensive than ‘whole’ produce items, they often begin to decline in nutritional value as soon as they’re cut AND they won’t last as long when you get them home. To save time, prep your own veggies in large batches using a food processor and store them in portions in the freezer for future use. (It works well if you have time to cut them, which in my case, as a stay at home mom I do have plenty of time to do so.)
• Buy legumes like split peas and garbanzo beans in their dried form rather than canned. Not only are they cheaper, you also won’t need to worry about whether or not extra salt has been added. （Not only saves you money, but also healthier!)
• If you buy too many fresh herbs, chop them, place them in a zip top bag and freeze them for future use. Better still, grow your own herbs if the climate is right in your corner of the world! (I plant some herbs one week ago. Let’s see how it goes.)
• Keep vegetable scraps for making vegetable stock. We save everything – the outer leaves of cauliflower, for example, the cauliflower stem, the woody, tough ends of asparagus…. just toss them in a bag in the freezer and wait until you have enough to create a stock that will tasteinfinitely better than the commercial kind! (Have not tried this one yet.)
• Use up leftover cooked vegetables by pureeing them with cream cheese to make a dip. (Good idea, will try soon)
• Don’t buy grated cheese – grate your own. It’s really worth splashing out on a decent food processor with a grating attachment, which makes it possible to grate a whole block of cheese in mere seconds! (Totally agree)
• Label EVERYTHING you put in your freezer, with the date and what it contains. Otherwise, you may end up throwing away perfectly good food because – a) You can’t identify it! or b) You don’t know how long it’s been there! (By making a menu for the whole week before going to the supermarket, I don’t have much in my freezer anymore.)
• When making meat sauces, substitute some of the meat for finely chopped veggies or tofu. Not just cheaper, but nutritious too!
• If you cook chicken, turkey, or any joint of meat containing the bone, use the carcass or bones to make stock before tossing the bones away.
• Buying cut-up chicken pieces can be costly. It might be cheaper to buy a whole chicken and cut it up yourself. (Suounds easy, but I don’t think I have the skill to do it)
• Grind your own meat to make burgers etc with a good, old-fashioned manual Meat Grinder.
• Make the most of everything you cook. For example, roast a couple of chickens in one go – have roast chicken for dinner that evening, set some aside for a chicken salad the next day, chop some up and freeze in small portions for future meals (such as stews or soup) and slice the rest in freeze in separate servings for sandwich fillings (cheaper than buying pre-sliced meat from the store).
• If you’re going to be using the oven for an extended period of time, then decide if there’s anything extra you can put in it to make the most of the heat! For example, if you’re roasting a piece of meat, why not pop in a few sweet potatoes or a couple of apples wrapped in foil, so you have some extra baby food on hand!
• Check out your local ethnic grocery stores. You may be quite surprised at just how much cheaper many items are compared to ‘mainstream’ supermarkets.
• Make your own yogurt, which is often cheaper than buying the commercial variety. (My hubby loves my yogurt!)
• Whenever you freeze ANYTHING, remember to freeze it in small portions. You are much more likely to use them up.
• Shop from bulk bins wherever possible – better for your pocket AND better for the environment. There’s just one caveat, though – do ensure that the food in the bins is properly covered and that the store is sufficiently busy to ensure that the stock is regularly rotated, otherwise the food may be stale.

AshleyCL Blog Post: Social Media Mistakes to Avoid http://cli.gs/r0V4H

Do you have a Facebook or Twitter account? Do you check them every day or even every hour? Do you update them often? Then you should take a look this:

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, blogging… Most of us make use of social media every day. Sometimes, our interactions extend beyond the personal and into the workplace, and that can be a bad move! Yes, social media can play a positive role at your company, but we’ve got six mistakes that can spell trouble.

Having a public profile. This is many people’s first mistake: making their profile so accessible that anyone can easily find them. It is recommended you keep your profile private (or at least make use of Facebook’s various privacy settings), and only accept friend requests of people whom you don’t mind following you.

Being active during office hours. If you sit in front of a computer all day that has Internet access, it can be very tempting to check and update your Twitter and Facebook pages. However, unless your job requires you to interact with social media on a daily basis, it’s best you do so after five o’clock. After all, you never know who’s reading your two o’clock tweet when you’re supposed to be hard at work!

Posting compromising photos of yourself online. In the same vein that you don’t know who’s reading your status updates, you never know who’s viewing your photos, either. That Friday you called in “sick”? Well, those photos of you enjoying the warm weekday out with friends can come back to haunt you if ever a colleague or superior stumbles upon them. And that photo of you having too much of a good time on Saturday night? Even if you didn’t post it on Facebook, maybe one of your friends did, and who knows whom she’s friends with or what her privacy settings are! So be sure to not tag yourself in any such photos, and ask friends to remove any pictures of you that you’re not comfortable with… or just untag yourself from them.

Updating your Facebook status with work woes. We all have rough days at work, and often want to vent to anyone who’ll listen. However, Twitter isn’t exactly the best forum to go on about how much you hate your boss…

Having one account for both work and play. So you have a Twitter and/or Facebook account that colleagues and clients follow you on… as do all your friends. This can be a tricky situation, but that can be easily rectified by either being more aware of what you post (which we highly suggest), or by having two accounts: one personal, and one more work-friendly. Also, if you are on the lookout for another job or want to build and expand your own brand, it’s best to have a separate account that no one at work knows of.

Not being aware of the effects social media can have on your career. Some people may think a compromising photo or a negative status update isn’t the end of the world, and that there won’t be any immediate ramifications. However, the online world is vast, so photos can follow you wherever you go for years to come. Any future employers can stumble upon something incriminating with just a quick Google search if you don’t stop it ahead of time!

Source from http://www.divine.ca

Sex or Facebook? It is a tough question! Would You Stop Sex to Check a Facebook Message? | LimeLife: http://bit.ly/d0pd1Y via @addthis