How to Flash Freeze Berries One of the best ways to preserve the bounty of summer fruit is by flash freezing. This technique freezes the berries individually instead of bricks of rock hard fruit that are hard to identify, much less use, come January. Having sweet, frozen berries to use throughout the year in smoothies, milkshakes, pies, muffins, or coffee cake will make you feel so smart and prepared. Give your frugal self a pat on the back. Thankfully, flash freezing fruit is an incredibly simple process. First of all, wash, sort, and hull (remove the stems) the berries. Next, dry the berries. You want to get as much water off of Keep Reading

Iced Caramel Macchiato If there's one thing I'm truly committed to in life, it's a delicious espresso drink. While I spend my entire day avoiding food preparation, I will spend an hour making the perfect coffee drink (like an iced caramel macchiato), especially if I'm making it for someone else. The difficulty lies in making coffeehouse quality espresso at home. I completely REJECT the suggestion that floats around Pinterest on a daily basis that "strongly brewed" drip coffee can replace real espresso. Hog wash. So I resigned myself to the next best thing to properly brewed espresso shots: my iced latte recipe using cold-brewed coffee Keep Reading

The end of school and the beginning of summer is just around the corner for the Pacific Northwest and while this year is WEIRD, there is still a transition that will come with school work being behind us. Moving into the lazier days of summer may feel different than usual, but there will still be some sort of transition. I know that putting a little bit of work into planning out my family's summer routine before we're a few weeks in gets all of us headed in the right direction. A couple of years back, I started setting up simple systems to keep my house and people loosely organized which increased the chances of us going out and doing awesome Keep Reading

The Morning High-Five NOTE: This is a system that we've been using over the last few summers and it's worked really well. I know that most of us (and our kids) have been home for several weeks now and probably have some semblance of a routine going with school work. But I still feel that summer will require a reshuffling of routines and schedules AGAIN. Hopefully this helps you wrap your brain around what summer will look like for your family! I have a love/hate relationship with summer. I love that we're free to do what we want, but I strongly dislike that we always end up sitting around doing nothing. And there's nothing more annoying to me than Keep Reading

We have what many people would consider to be a large family. Seven people produces a whole lot of laundry, but we've come up with a few ways to not let laundry overtake our lives. Here are 7 big family laundry hacks that can work for a family of any size! 1. Use the Quick Wash setting on your machine. Unless you have the rare ultra-filthy load of clothes, you don't need to do the longer cycles. This will cut the wash time probably in half (depending on your machine) and you'll save on electricity. 2. Only wash full loads. Not only does it save you money on water and energy, but it saves you time. Add towels or sheets to a less-than-full Keep Reading