If you enjoy gardening, this is the time of year when you start dreaming of warmer days, drooling over seed packets, and plotting where to grow everything. You might soon begin keeping an eye on your local garden center to see when they put out the first seedlings of the season, including more cold-hardy flowers…
Macaroni and cheese is one of the ultimate comfort foods. Almost everyone likes it, whether it’s homemade or from a store’s deli area, or from a box off the shelf. You may not think of a dollar store as a place to buy boxed mac and cheese, but some dollar stores do carry their own…
Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats is one of my favorite breakfast cereals. I especially like strawberry frosted shredded wheat, and I often buy a generic brand at my local Aldi grocery stores. However, Aldi has not always stocked the strawberry variety lately in my local stores, usually only stocking regular shredded wheat. So when I spotted frosted…
Girl Scout cookies are some of my favorite kinds of cookies. Thin Mints. Samoas or Caramel deLites. Do-si-dos or Peanut Butter Sandwiches. Trefoils or Shortbread. S’mores. They’re all good. I was a Girl Scout for much of my childhood, and for a couple of years I also volunteered as a troop co-leader for my daughter,…
Dollar General sells some surprisingly good and inexpensive foods under its Clover Valley private label. The store carries several types of macaroni and cheese that rival name-brand Kraft. They also sell some decent breakfast cereals. So I decided recently to try Dollar General’s own take on ranch dressing. Ranch dressing is a staple in just…
Laundry is one of those necessary evils in life. Few people actually enjoy doing laundry, or putting away the laundry after it’s been washed, but it’s something we all have to do. One way to feel better about doing the laundry is to get a good deal on laundry supplies such as detergent. If you…
Have you ever had a craving for Girl Scout cookies when it wasn’t Girl Scout cookie season? If your supply of Thin Mints has run out, you might turn to Keebler Grasshopper cookies, which are sold at most major grocery stores. Or you might run out to your local dollar store for the chocolatey, minty…
Boxed macaroni and cheese is one of the ultimate convenience foods. It’s fairly inexpensive and shelf stable, so it lasts a long time in the pantry, and it’s easy to make even if you don’t have much in the way of cooking skills. There are usually two kinds of boxed mac and cheeses. First, there…
When an old secondhand clock on my living room wall stopped working recently, I decided to see what wall clock options some of my local dollar stores had. I didn’t have the highest hopes of finding something suitable for a living room. I thought I’d mostly find cheap-looking plastic wall clocks like what you might…
While I prefer to make homemade chili, there are times when I appreciate the convenience of chili in a can. Canned chili is good for camping trips or for keeping in an emergency food stash. It also works well if I want to make chili cheese dogs and need a smaller amount of chili rather…