Free NYC Crunch Membership

Ekk for NYC people and only first time guests of crunch, for a 150 recycle bank pts you can get a 14 day membership pass.  And its really easy now to earn those points just start by signing up My Referal Link and then you can goto Earn Points to see all the current ways to earn points.  Super easy and totally worth it! Crunch is a super expensive gym and they have really avant-garde classes and some gyms have steam rooms!!  A normal monthly membership is close to $200 so hurry!!

Freebies from Recycle Bank

OMG hurry it must be the back to school savings wave or something but they have super easy ways now to earn pts, I just spent like 15 minutes and earned over a 1000 pts !!!!!!! I'd take advantage of this asap because I just checked there rewards and they got way way better!!!!!!

My Referal Link

If you could use my referal link to sign up, use your real name though because you may want to get stuff mailed to you for some rewards.  Its a great site because it teaches you as well or you can just quickly go to earning pts. Like right now hurry and do their eco school promo link. 

Its super quick easy way to earn points, and if your new after you finish first screen you can go to "previous period or next period" to catch up and earn more points.

There so many awesome rewards right now, like free magazine subscriptions, gift cards etc.  

Kristen Bell is Hysterical and a Groupon user

I just had to post this .. I love Chelsey Lately and this Kristen Bell interview where she talks about Groupons was hysterical!!  It's good too know shes human like the rest of us.

Link to Funny Interview

Cheap Appetizer Curry Egg Potato on Saltine Crackers

A cheap, quick, easy, prepare mostly ahead appetizer is Curry Egg Potato Salad on Saltines.  In NYC you still can get a box which will have a hundred square crackers for $.99 at Cheap Jacks 99 Cent Store, and make about 40 of these with pantry like ingredients we all mostly carry.  The RECIPE .

All you do before serving is scoop the salad on a saltine cracker.

***A side note is too cut everything up smaller so it looks nicer on the cracker.  I also think square saltines are the best because your guests can easily grab up the appetizer vs toast or circle saltines.

And if its the summer and you have an abundance of Basil you can use it as a garnish that adds an amazing layer of flavor.

Serving Suggestion I would arrange in pentagon shape vs rows, because its easier to reach since corners won't be blocked.

Thai Basil Chicken with Chic Pea

One of my favorite Thai dishes and frugal dish to make is THAI BASIL CHICKEN. It's so easy and really adds a kick to my meal plan.  It's also a great way to use my summer Basil.  One thing I added to the traditional recipe is chic peas, it helps to stretch out my chicken to reduce the cost of this meal.

Ingredients

1.5 lb Chicken Breast or Chicken Thigh

1/2 cup of Basil (or two handfuls its too your taste)

1/2 cup of chic peas

2 TBS Thai Chilli Paste with Sweet Basil Leaves

2 TBS Thai Fish Sauce

Salt and Soy Sauce to taste

Optional: I added the last of my red bell pepper and green chilli pepper for heat and to sneak in some veggie

Lime Juice

Directions

1. Chop your chicken, excess veggies into bite size for faster cooking.
2. Oil up your work or pan, let it warm up on high heat and then toss your chicken in first to cook.  Stir around till chicken is almost cooked.  
3. Then add your Chilli Paste and stir until chicken is all cooked.
4. Then add your chic peas (and peppers if you have any) to the wok/pan, then the fish sauce and soy sauce.  Stir for 2-3 minutes, check the salt and spice level and adjust if necessary.  If its too spicy or salty if you have lime juice handy add and check levels again.  If you don't have lime, just add some water and turn heat down to low.  
5. Add half of your basil leaves and put lid and let simmer for about 3 minutes to allow flavors to combine.
6. Turn heat off and toss in the rest of your basil and stir for a minute.
7.  Serve with rice and ENJOY!!!

Note: Recipe easily serves 4 people.  This dish is one of the few that actually tastes really good with Brown Rice. It also freezes well.

****If you don't have Maesri's Chilli Paste with Thai Basil leaves.  You can substitute with plain Chinese Chilli paste, some grinded garlic and chopped basil leaves.

This is what it looks like inside the can and it lasts for a long time.

OTHER SERVING SUGGESTION

It's common to add a fried egg along with this dish and white rice.  You can cook it after the chicken, that way some of the lingering flavors of the dish can go to the egg.
Also, I would normally use chicken thigh but chicken breast is healthier and more often on sale in my area.

Curry Potato Egg Salad, Cheap and Easy

Gosh, as the hot summer drags on... I try to think of really easy and cold foods.  This Curry Egg Potato Salad is delish and so so cheap and easy to make.  Perfect to bring to a picnic, just tosh in your thermos/insulated food bag and go!

Ingredients

2 Potatos

2 Eggs

1/3-1/2 cup Mayo

2 TBS vinegar

2-3 TBS Curry Powder

1-2 chives or scallion or combo

Salt and Pepper to taste

Directions

Step 1

Fill pot with water and bring to boil.  Then put in your 2 potato and eggs.  Eggs should hard boil around 5-10 minutes under low heat, take them out when done.  Let Potatos cook longer till soft when you test with fork.

Step 2

While your waiting for the items in pot to cook, chop your scallion/chives.

Step 3

In a bowl, toss your scallion/ chives, mayo, curry powder, salt and pepper, vinegar and stir.  

Step 4

Once the potato's and eggs are cooked,  rinse in cold water, then peel and chop into small cubes.

Step 5

Comine all in bowl and mix.  If you are not ready to eat put in fridge.  As a side dish, this serves 4 people easily.

Best part is, your barely cooking and once its done, no more turning on the stove.  I'm always sneaking to the fridge to take another biteful :) 

Free Collage Photo Print from Walgreens

Now through Aug 21, you can get a free 8 x 10 collage photo print at Walgreens. Just order online with code GETONEFREE

You don't even need to enter your credit card info, just select pay at store and print out your receipt which shows you owe $0.00

Just remember if you want to maximize your collage space, to pre-edit the pictures your going to upload for the collage.

Rite Aid Look Ahead Aug 26 to Sept 1

While not a freebie, the cost would be $.99 after ups, with a limit of 2 so its a good way to roll over the ups you earned via prior weeks freebie madness.

Rite Aid Freebies look ahead Aug 19-25

I love back to school time, there's always cool deals.  And this coming Sunday is the start of  Rite Aid's freebies.  I especially plan on getting the free hand sanitizer (limit 4).

Again, no coupons required and its free only after UP Rewards.  So Rite Aid's plan is that you use as much out of pocket money as possible and reuse your ups on something regular priced or with higher profit margins.  Our goals should be using as little OPP as possible and reusing our ups on other sales so we can roll our ups.

Thank you Iheartriteaid.com for the scans!

Free Shutterfly Photobook from Coke Rewards

This August if you enter in 5 coke reward codes from actual soda packages or bottles. You get a FREE 8x8 Photobook from Shutterfly. It's pretty sweet deal, especially since you don't have to use your points to redeem.  The only catch is that you have to pay for shipping and handling, no way around it which is about $8.

Steps:
Enter in 5 codes before August ends.
You then goto your special offers and click on get Photobook for zero points.  Then you will be taken to page with your code and instructions! I pasted screen below along with my code, someone can have it since I don't need it. Just remember to redeem before 9/27/12 and enjoy!!1

Bacon Potato Pasta

I'm in an Italy nostalgia phase obviously, I miss the food a lot!!!! The best thing about their Pasta is the simplicity of the meals.  I remember having this amazon bacon pasta while I was there, everything was so fresh and it just made it the best food ever.  Anyways, I've been on a mission to recreate italian dishes and use my stockpile lately.  This is great for the days when you have left over bacon and potato.  For me I still have a batch of my free pasta, pasta sauce to go through as well as that huge sack of potato's I got in the last sale I posted about.  And while its not Italy Standard, its still yummi and super easy and cheap to make.




Ingredients
4-5 oz bacon ( used 1/3 of my pack) cut to bite sized
1 lb dried pasta ( i used a combo of leftover packs)
1 potato (peeled and cubed)
1 jar of alfredo sauce
salt and pepper to taste
Parmesan sprinkled to taste


Directions

Start cooking your pasta.  In the meantime, fry your bacon and mid way turn down heat and add in your potato.  You want to have the potato sorta fried in the bacon grease.  Then drain your cooked pasta. Toss pasta into pan with bacon and potato's stir and season.  Then lastly add in your alfredo sauce and stir till sauce warms up.  Then serve and sprinkly your parmesan cheese to taste. Enjoy.

Note: this should easily serve 4 people all at once.  And its not a heavy cheese sauce dish.

I personally separated the bacon/potato mix and the pasta and sauce to store in fridge because I am cooking just for myself.  So basically, to reheat I'd heat the bacon/potato mix first, then add pasta and lastly sauce. Then season.

And while, I used all my freebies from couponing its still cheap meal to make if you can get these items on sale.  I'd say you can still keep your serving cost to about $1 a serving.

Tip: Bacon Freezes super well.  I've had my bacon in my fridge from a breakfast sale from over a year ago and its still good.

$1 Jamba Juice Smoothie Sale!!!!

NO  Coupon required, but its only for CA, ID, NY and NJ!!!!!!!!

You can visit Link to make sure your store participates!!  Totally awesome if you work in city right next to one and can sneak out for your smoothie break :)

Basil Ice Cream Recipe - Easy

While visiting one of Romes famed Gelateria's near Piazza Navona in Italy, I discovered Basil Gelato.  There's had figs and fresh basil; it seems like a strange combination but it was amazing!  So as I deal with Basil growing season and I haven't been able to find any in NYC I've been on a mission to recreate that yummi Basil Gelato.

So when Breyer's went on sale for less then $2 a carton, I decided to experiment with the Butter Pecan flavor.

And it took me all the way back to Italy.  

Here's the recipe.

Ingredients 

6 Basil Leaves

1 serving of Breyer's Butter Pecan Ice Cream

Directions

Finely chop your basil leaves.  Mix into ice cream with fork.  And enjoy!

If you want to make this for party, where presentation is important.  Then you can use food processor to chop large batch of basil leaves.  And process ice cream as well to get Pecan's chopped a little.  Then put back into carton so the flavors can incorporate more.  And then serve when you need to. Add whole basil leaves for garnish.

Asian Style Pulled Pork Sandwich

I love how sometimes when you improvise you find an amazing new recipe and you save yourself the trouble of having to make a trip to grocery store for just one ingredient. I didn't have cabbage, fresh onions and carrots to make coleslaw the traditional accompaniment to pulled pork because I've been depending mostly on my prior batch cooking stash.  But luckly I had some asian Sour Cabbage.  As you can see, I only filled half my Sandwich with it because I wasn't sure how the taste was going to come out. But I loved it, its sweet and sour and so totally ASIAN style pulled pork.

Ekk and I'm not a huge meat eater these days as you can see I've never been one to have 1 inch think layers of meat in their sandwiches.  So the batch I made of pulled pork is gonna last me through a lot of sandwiches. Best part is I just when crazy at Cheap Jacks when they had their Pepperidge Farm whole wheat bread for $1.29 a loaf :)

I wonder how many sandwiches, I'll be able to make out of my batch??

Asian Style Pulled Pork

So today, tip always best to go to supermarket in AM there was this managers special on Pork Shoulder regular price $1.79 / lb reduced to $.88/ lb.  I totally grabbed it as I've been dying to try making pulled pork sandwiches.

Which is amazing price for meat although there is bone to consider.  Anyways, the minute I ran home I got out my Crockpot to make make pulled pork.  Problem was I didn't have any BBQ sauce or white vinegar left.  So I'd thought I'd improvise and make this an Asian Style Pulled Pork Recipe  since I did still have that  several bottles of Asian Plum Sauce I'd gotten for free during the epic Pathmark Triple Coupon event.  The vinegar is too take out the dead carcass smell when cooking so I subbed it with Red Wine Vinegar.

It turned out yummy so I'm sharing my recipe.

Asian Style Pulled Pork

Ingredients

2 1/2 lbs Pork Shoulder
1 Tbs Red Wine Vinegar
1 Tbs Sugar
1 Tbs Adobo
1 Tbs Ginger finely chopped
1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
4 oz of Plum Sauce
Salt to taste 

Directions

Put Pork in Crockpot, toss Red Wine Vinegar on top, season with salt, and sugar.  Then put ginger and garlic in any possible crevices.  The rub the Adobo on Pork Shoulder.  Finally dump on plum sauce.

Then cover Crockpot and cook on High for 4 hours or until meat easily pierces with fork. This is how mine looked when it was done.

Then shred meat with two forks. This is how much meat I had when I took out the bone.

Then take the juices left at the bottom of your Crockpot and pour over meat mixture.

And your done!!!!! Yummi and super easy to make not to mention frugal!!

I'm going to put the bones in my freezer for the next time I need to make Soup Stock.