* FOOD PORN!*

   Let me be the first one that admits that I am a big time foodie. A foodie, you know someone who is passionate about great food. I love gourmet ingredients put together skillfully into masterpieces to be savored and enjoyed. And looking on the internet and bookstores and gourmet grocery stores makes me believe that I am not the only one. Cookbooks top the charts of national best-sellers and food blogs are so successful that they make their owners into celebrities. Customers pay huge bucks for fancy salt or 2 truffles imported from this country or that. Let's face it, our society is obsessed with food. But on the other hand our society also chastises food obsessions. This creates a conflict where people want to talk and read and post about food, but they don't want to be seen as constantly thinking about food for the fear of having others criticize them. Enter "but it's OK, because it's healthy" trend.

All the things I am thankful for!

My lovely grandma

   Monday is Thanksgiving in Canada, a day for being thankful for all the things that we have. In today's culture being thankful is often overlooked. Ads on television and on the radio and in magazines focus on all the things that "everyone" still "doesn't have" or what they are lacking. "Get a big screen TV, because your neighbor has one", "drive a better car", "your house is too small", "last year phone model is outdated", "you must have the new game system to keep up with the Joneses" are some of the messages that everyone hears. It's hard to hear all those messages and still think that what you have is plenty good. Of course all those messages are not really meant to make you unhappy, they are just meant to make you go out and buy more things, be it new shoes or vacation time-shares.

   My grandma was born in Poland before WWII broke out. She, like many people in her generation, lived through really hard times. They lived through many hardships and often had to be more concerned with how to obtain the bare minimums needed for survival than having new TV or their house being too small. The benefit of that was that they learned to make do with what they had. If things got broken they didn't throw them out, they fixed it, If things got stained they were not replaced with brand new items but rather treated with stain remover and washed.

Money Wise Mondays - How not to cater to picky eaters.

Mmmm ... muffins

   Catering to picky eaters can be very expensive. Making a separate dish for every person in the house can add up to lots of money spent unnecessarily. The most frugal thing to do is to cook large nutritious meals at home that will feed the whole family, where buying in bulk can save money and time (and lets face time is money!) But what to do when you have one, or two or more people in your household that just won't eat what you make for them?
   Parents have to endure many things from their precious, little bundles of joy. We often get spit up on, peed on, we clean up throw-up, we wipe buts, we clean messes, but the worse one of all is hearing your preschooler announce "I hate broccoli, and tuna, and oranges, and .....I am not eating it!" We all have been there. Our family is no different. After many minutes, sometimes an hour or two, of cooking a nutritious meal for my family, the last thing I want to hear is "I'm not eating it!" To a parents, that statement is equivalent to treason