Financial Fun

During the month of February I did a trial run of two different budgeting apps. One was "Mint" and the other "You Need a Budget". Mint is a free app that is associated with Turbo Tax and uses the same login information. YNAB is a fee based app that costs about $85 a year. I utilized their free trial option. I can see how You Need a Budget might be a little more user friendly in some aspects, however there was not enough of a difference in what it offered us that it justified the cost. So, we are going to continue using Mint. I actually preferred Mint because it synced with out accounts faster and updated faster. It was easier to stay on top of everything as a result. I also really liked the ability to do a much of it on my smart phone, though some aspects could only be modified or done on my laptop application. If you are looking for something to help you budget, give it a month and see what you think.

Satisfying All Around...Another Food Edition.

I'm not going to lie. It's never fun to try a new recipe and have it bomb. Or have someone, ehem... unwilling to even try it. Today I tried a new Pinterest recipe for pork chops and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and I even had to do some modifications for lack of ingredients.

Baked Pork Chops I modified it by adding a few dashes of Tabasco to the egg mix. I also didn't have any seasoning salt so I rubbed some cajun seasoning in... and it wasn't spicy in the end. Just flavorful. I also tried carmelizing some onions with the pork chops and then adding them to the gravy mix. I doubled the sauce mixture and when I didn't have another can of cream of mushroom, I used this recipe on Pinterest to make a substitute (with garlic, but not the mushrooms). Instead of baking the pork chops as long as it said, I modified that by baking for 45 minutes, adding the sauce and making for another 30-40 minutes.

Last week I tried a recipe for Garlic Herb French Bread and it was so good that I nearly ate the entire loaf myself...  On Tuesday, I made it a second time in a week to go with spaghetti. Not only was it super flavorful... but I tried a method of getting my bread to rise using an oven and also tried braiding my loaf.

To satisfy my sweet tooth I tried this Caramel Crispix recipe using up some rice chex and wheat chex. I had the equivalent of one box so I halved the recipe and it worked just fine. I'm not sure how a person could screw this up. Yum.

The only recipes I tried that weren't quite "wins" were the ones for bok choy. This is something I've never cooked before and I wasn't quite sure what to do. I opted for splitting the bok choy and trying two different sauces to see which flavor and method I prefered. What I learned was that both flavors were great and neither prep method was quite what I wanted it to be. I think I needed baby bok choy and I had the full size stuff. I should have chopped it up I think. Instead I tried an oven method and a frying method and neither yielded a result that resembled the picture... either I didn't cook it long enough or at the right temp or perhaps I'm just not sure what the texture should be when cooked.

The spicy roasted bok choy was indeed quite spicy, but I love spicy so I thought it was pretty awesome.

Baby Bok Choy with Sweet and Tangy Sauce might suit the masses more. It was tangy and  not at all spicy, but quite nice.

Next up... I plan to make Crème Brûlée. I have tried this recipe when a friend made it and served it at our wine club. I'm determined to try it myself. Yum. It was so very dangerously delicious. I'll update one I've actually conquered this one!