food

The First Time I Made NiceCream

August 19, 2015 By Sarah Roe 1 Comment

Have you heard of NiceCream or Nice Cream? I started to see it on some of the raw food blogs I follow and figured I would try it out. Basically, it’s 100% healthy, dairy free ice cream.

STOP.

Before you start thinking “oh, so it’s going to taste like my front yard?” Let me tell you that is not the case! The entire concept is blended fruit so, it’s going to taste like fruit not grass or dirt. 🙂

Ok, this is the first time I ever made NiceCream. I’m going to share it with you and play with it some more this week so I can show off some better versions. But, it’s so good that I thought it was worth sharing now.

The base of it is frozen, blended bananas. That’s it. That’s your ice cream folks. Take ripe bananas, cut them into chunks and freeze them. Then, blend them into an ice cream consistency. You can add coconut milk, almond milk or any of those things to make it more smooth if you’d like but you really don’t need to add any juice, water or milk unless you want to do so.

After you blend your bananas, you can add any other type of fruit you’d like either frozen or not.

For the version in the picture, it is one layer of blended frozen bananas, one layer of blended frozen mango chunks followed by another layer of frozen bananas. The reason why I kept it mostly banana is because my husband loves bananas.

In a perfect world, those brown chunks you see in the picture would be chia seeds or flax seeds. However, since it turns out I am a human, those are actually chocolate chips. They’re organic though if that helps. 🙂

Today, I’m going to make a blackberry version. It’s like a smoothie without the juice if you’d like to think about it that way. The end result is an ice cream taste that will blow you away and if you’re having one of “those” days, you can eat the whole thing and still fit into your jeans tomorrow! WOOT!

31 Back to School Freezer Meals

March 12, 2015 By Sarah Roe Leave a Comment

Freezer cooking saves time and money…not to mention sanity. It’s easy to get started, simply gather a menu of meals for a week or even a month. Then, planning carefully, hit the store for all that you need. Spend one day cooking for the entire month, then the next time dinner rolls around, just grab a meal from the freezer and bake it. That’s it. Done.

You can freezer cook breakfast, lunch, dinner or even back to school meals for the kids! Don’t believe me? Check out Once a Month Mom’s 31 Back to School Freezer Meals! All can be prepared in advance and frozen for easy transfer to your child’s lunchbox. Take those lunches up a notch with this AMAZING list of meals!

Plan ahead and save yourself money and stress!

Frugal Recipe: Make Your Own Egg McMuffins & Freeze Them

March 7, 2015 By Sarah Roe 2 Comments

So, I have a confession. I love Egg McMuffins. Yep, I do. I especially love them when I leave my house at 4:45am for work and just have to get something to eat. I’ve noticed a few things though and one of those (aside from my pants getting tighter) is the price. The cost of an Egg McMuffin isn’t that much but it can add up over time if you are buying them on a regular basis…which I am not…but if I were or knew someone who was then I would know that the cost can add up.

Enter Pinterest.

I am rather proud of myself. In the last 2 days, I have made 3 frugal meals from ideas I saw onPinterest. I’m not a fan of cooking but I was completely enticed by amazing pictures and had to try a few recipes. I actually have 3 more I plan to cook by the end of the week. One of these great ideas were Egg McMuffins.

I bought all the ingredients for this recipe for $8. That means, I made 12 Egg McMuffins for only $8 rather than paying a little over $1 each for them at McDonald’s. If you hit the sales and coupons just right, you could make that price drop even lower. The recipe came from Macheesmo.com. (And, just a side note, the blogger mentioned that a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin contains 55 ingredients. You can make it at home with only 4 ingredients. Yeah, much better.)

The best part is that you can freeze these muffins too!

{Ingredients}

12 Eggs

12 English Muffins

12 slices of Canadian Bacon

2 Cups Shredded Cheese

{Directions}

Grease a muffin tin and place inside each holder one cracked egg.

Cook the eggs at 350 for 10-15 minutes. Make sure you grease those little muffin holders before you put the egg in or you will never get it out.

Split the English muffins and throw them in the oven too at the same time with the eggs. This will toast them nicely and get them ready for assembly.

Next, all you need to do is layer the cheese and Canadian bacon onto the muffins. I suppose you could put whatever you want on there but if you’re trying to stay with the same McDonald’s theme then use Canadian bacon and cheese.

And there you have it! It’s an Egg McMuffin folks! Ok, so it’s not quite as pretty but it does taste the same and it’s half the price plus, it’s homemade. You can’t beat it.

This is what Macheesemo says about freezing them:

“If you want to store these for later, stick all your sandwiches on a baking sheet and put them all in the freezer, uncovered and unwrapped. Leave them in there for about an hour. This will give them a chance to give off some moisture and also freeze a bit. If you were to wrap them up right away then there would be all kinds of liquid that would condense.

But don’t forget about them or they’ll get freezer burned. Pull them all out after an hour or two and wrap them individually in plastic wrap or foil and then store them in a freezer safe plastic bag. They will keep for a few weeks without a problem.”

She also says it’s best to heat them up by putting them in the oven, I zapped mine in the microwave for 45 seconds though because I don’t have time to cook in the mornings. It made it kinda hard, for sure the oven is best to reheat them. But, these just rock. So you might it either way! I now have 12 of these in my freezer for those early news mornings.

Enjoy the goodness!