Baking Soda Mason Jar Shaker

Baking soda is one of the hardest working ingredients in my house. I have a box in the pantry for baking and cooking. I also have one box of baking soda in the freezer and one in the refrigerator to deodorize them. I hate a stinky fridge!

I change the boxes in the refrigerator and freezer every 30 days or so – mostly or so. Not out of laziness but out of eventually-shoved-in-the-back-of-the-fridge forgetfulness. Oops.

To make my life easier because you know I’m all about easy (oh my! That doesn’t sound very good) and to keep the open box of baking soda from spilling because I’m all about klutzy too, I made a baking soda shaker from a mason jar.

I cut the netting from a bag of fresh garlic to fit inside a Mason jar ring. I filled the jar with baking soda and screwed the DIY shaker top onto the jar.

Crockpot Cincinnati Style Chili Recipe

Ohio is weird. You can drive from the top to the bottom of the state in a couple of hours but there some things that only live in the northern or southern part of the state like Cincinnati style chili.

 

I have to skip the shredded cheddar cheese you usually find on top because I' can't eat dairy 

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After I moved past the Ohio Line of Demarcation (Columbus) my new friends were aghast I didn’t know what it was and insisted we immediately go to a Skyline Chili (one of the two chains that sell Cincinnati style chili. Gold Star Chili is the other. Both are good.)

Giant Goat Cheese Giveaway!

I might have been a mouse in a former life.

I miss cheese. I haven’t found a good lactose free substitute.

Since I can’t give up cheese entirely, I try to eat only well made and unusual flavors of cheese. My taste buds love the treat, I get my cheese fix, and it does not happen often enough (no longer several times a day) to mess with my stomach.

That means I can still enjoy pizza, my go to I don’t feel like cooking/I don’t know what to make/we have to clean out the fridge/I want something quick and easy meal. Although now our pizzas look a little more like this: Montchevre  Bucheron goat cheese, shrimp, and sun dried tomatoes pizza on a whole wheat pizza crust.

My apologies for the Instagram photo. I didn’t have time to grab the camera
 because we dove into the pizza as soon as it came out of the oven! 

This may look and taste like a very expensive pizza but it isn’t. I made the whole wheat pizza crust in the bread maker (get my whole wheat pizza crust recipe here.) I dried last summer’s garden tomatoes in dehydrator as well as the basil. I usually have Aldi frozen shrimp in the freezer. That leaves just the cost of the cheese, which I can put the money I saved on the rest of the ingredients toward the goat cheese.

12 Things I Do Not Buy

 Sometimes saving money is not about what you buy on sale but what you don’t buy at all.

Now I’m not speaking as a super money saving expert on a mountaintop because I’m just as guilty as anyone else who ran to the store to buy two things and came out with a cartful of stuff because it was on sale – oopsie.

The light bulb went off when I decluttered and organized the basement of our old place. Most of the Donate Pile was stuff I bought on sale because I thought I was saving money at the time – oopsie again.

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That’s when I started to use my lazy ways to save money. I stopped buying items even if they were on sale because I gave up using it, found a reusable for a disposable, or repurposed something to take its place.

12 Things I Do Not Spend Money On