After hav­ing Mujadara many times at local Mid­dle East­ern, par­tic­u­larly Lebanese, restau­rants my hus­band set off to learn how to make it him­self. It has since become one of our go to din­ners. It’s sim­ple, easy and trans­ports you to a far off land in one taste of this dish. I can feel the desert heat, smells the scents of spice mar­kets and hear the sounds of peo­ple walk­ing around through­out these lands that fil­ter through with each bite.

What you need

1 Cup Lentils
1 Cup Rice
3 1/2 Cups Water
4 Onions
1 Tea­spoon Cumin
1 Tea­spoon Salt
1/2 Tea­spoon Pep­per
2 Table­spoons Veg­etable Oil

How to put it together

Slice the onions. The onions should be sliced long, so they look like a rain­bow ver­sus diced into small pieces.

Heat pot on med-high heat. Add 1 Table­spoon of Veg­etable Oil and 1/2 an onion. Cook until onion is caramelized.

Add lentils, water, salt and pep­per. Bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat and sim­mer for 20 minutes.

After 20 min­utes, add rice and 1 Tea­spoon Cumin. Cover and sim­mer for addi­tional 20 minutes.

Heat a fry­ing pan over med-high heat. Add the remain­ing 1 Table­spoon of Veg­etable Oil and remain­ing onions. Cook until fully caramelized and blackened.

Also, he used green lentils & yel­low onions for this dish.

We usu­ally serve our Mujadara with hum­mus & pita. Let me tell you it goes fast. And it is a great meal to have when you are look­ing for some­thing meat­less, easy, and delicious.

Are the any Mid­dle East­ern or Lebanese dishes that you enjoy?

Tech­no­rati Tags: fru­gal, lentils, meat­less, mid­dle east­ern, recipe, sim­ple recipes, vegan, veg­gie

Like every­one these days we’ve been find­ing ways to save money. There are some­times easy ways we’ve found to help us save money. And we didn’t need to go liv­ing off the grid to do it, they were sim­ple changes.

1. Cook­ing on a Bud­get: When I wrote the post about Cook­ing on a Bud­get I did so because I believe it is the eas­i­est way to save money & the fastest way to spend it when you aren’t pay­ing atten­tion. Food can really eat up more of your money that you think it will. When we didn’t go in with a plan, bud­get, and cook more at home we spent tons of extra money. I swear we spent just as much if not more money BEFORE we had kids as we do now that we are a fam­ily of 6. Before we bought lots of frozen meals, didn’t plan or bud­get, & we ate out more. Chang­ing those habits alone was a mas­sive cost savings.

2. Util­ity Bud­get Plans: We real­ized that we had months were some util­i­ties were higher and oth­ers were very low or nonex­is­tent. We called & found out we could do a bud­get plan. This means we pay the same amount of money EVERY month & we know exactly how much to bud­get. If you aren’t able to do a bud­get plan with the com­pany, then cre­ate your own bud­get plan & stick to it. Fac­tor in pay­ing the same amount every month & pay it.

3. Turn down the ther­mo­stat: OK, I know every­one says to do this, but seri­ously it can add up. We just turned it down by 3 degrees and we are still com­fort­able. No one is freez­ing his or her tushie off & we save money on our bill.

4. Turn off the TV: Not only does the TV use extra energy and that WILL add up on the elec­tric bill increas­ing your util­ity costs but it also is a time sucker. Turn­ing it off a few hours a day gives you more time to do things (like cook at home, read a book, get out­side to enjoy some fresh air) and it saves money.

5. Check out your local libraries: I use to spend SO much money on books. Now I make use of the local libraries & don’t spend a penny. Our libraries also allow you to use your card at a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent pub­lic libraries. It’s great for the kids and cre­at­ing a day out as well. Just make sure you are turn­ing the books back in on time.

6. Drink Water: When you drink water more often you save money on filler drinks like soda/pop and you get to see if you are really hun­gry or if you are eat­ing out of bore­dom sav­ing money on extra food. It also helps you feel bet­ter to rehy­drate & you might lose a few extra pounds that those drinks are adding on.

7. Can­cel any unused mem­ber­ships and extra ser­vices: If you are one of those folks who has a mem­ber­ship that is going to waste to the gym or some other ser­vice then can­cel it. We had a ser­vice that was auto­mat­i­cally billed and it was to have a debit card. But it was an account we don’t use, it’s only a sav­ings, while it was a small fee a month it added up over the course of a year. Can­cel­ing that fee saved money that can now stay in our savings.

8. Dis­tin­guish a need from a want: Prob­a­bly the hard­est thing in our mate­ri­al­is­tic cul­ture. I know I strug­gle with this but tak­ing an extra two min­utes can make a HUGE dif­fer­ence. Ask your­self if you need what you are buy­ing? Do you already have some­thing that would work? Could you wait to buy it and come back a week later? (often you’ll find that you don’t even want it a week later). It helps with impulse want buys to do this, Tar­get & Costco were my places that I had the worse time with. I would see some­thing, think it was a need when really it was a want. For Hubby it’s Home Depot, we all have our weak spots.

9. Shop with a list: We use this when shop­ping for gro­ceries and any­thing else now. It is another tool to dis­tin­guish a need from a want & keep us on track. It only takes a few sec­onds to make a list but it can save hours of worry over a bill or short­age on cash later in the month.

10. Use Cash: A good way to save money because when you have cash, actual paper money in hand, you spend less. Hand­ing over cold hard cash for pur­chases makes us think about the pur­chase more and we are more likely to shop within our means. Debit cards, even though they come out of our bank accounts, don’t have the same out­come for us. I know that for Hubby he didn’t think about the lit­tle pur­chases on that debit card (that add up!) but with cash in hand he does. We also think more about big pur­chases if we are using cash ver­sus credit or even a debit card.

What easy ways do you save money?

Tech­no­rati Tags: bud­get, finance, fru­gal, money, save

I am start­ing to fig­ure out to edit pho­tos for this blog and just because I’d like to have more pol­ished pho­tos of our fam­ily mem­o­ries. I don’t have the abil­ity to buy a pro­gram to edit pho­tos right now. I would love to get Adobe Pho­to­shop and learn it in more detail. I have putzed around with Pho­to­Shop in the past but never gone in depth with it. But as of now I’m learn­ing on a free pro­gram until I fin­ish sav­ing for PhotoShop.

We also don’t have a fancy cam­era. It would be AWESOME to get one like one of the many Nikon dig­i­tal SLR cam­eras that I’ve been drool­ing over (seri­ously DROOLING–Costco is going to ban me from the cam­era sec­tion). BUT cur­rently we have a basic dig­i­tal cam­era, I believe the pic­ture I’ve been edit­ing is with the cur­rent Canon Pow­er­Shot A530 we use. No fancy addi­tional gad­gets with it.

Any­way after play­ing around a bit I highly rec­om­mend giv­ing Paint.Net a try if you are look­ing for a way to edit pho­tos. It is designed for Win­dows 7, Win­dows XP, or Win­dows Vista (SP2 or newer) or a Win­dows server (2003 SP1 or newer). And while it is lim­ited in com­par­i­son to Adobe’s Pho­to­Shop, it’s still a pretty good pro­gram for free.

I decided to post it because I thought that it could be good for some of you who are look­ing for a fru­gal way to learn photo editing.

Reminder that I’ve ONLY been play­ing with it a LITTLE AND I ONLY have a basic dig­i­tal cam­era. I AM NOT A PRO. In fact, I am sure oth­ers when look­ing at these ini­tial attempts will think I could have done a lit­tle a lot bet­ter. I don’t dis­agree because I AM STILL LEARNING!

Here is an orig­i­nal photo from when we took a fam­ily vaca­tion 2 years ago. We went up to the north of our state. It is beau­ti­ful there. We took a few pic­tures that were scenic. I decided to play around with a photo that I loved because it has a beau­ti­ful scenery and sim­ple farm in the shot. You all know how I love the sim­ple life fan­tasy, even though I’m a city girl.

Then I played around a lit­tle with con­trast, sharp­en­ing, and bright­en­ing the photo. I did crop it and straight­ened it. I wanted to try to make the pic­ture pop. The shot then looked like this:

After that I took the photo and played with the sepia func­tion. I wanted a feel of a news­pa­per photo, from the turn of the cen­tury, that had aged. Cap­tur­ing how the world has changed. That adjust­ment turned out like this:

I’m only begin­ning to fig­ure out how to use the pro­gram and I’m really impressed with what it can do for free. And so I wanted to pass on the infor­ma­tion to any­one out there who is inter­ested in edit­ing pho­tos but may be cash strapped. I plan to adjust some of the fam­ily pho­tos we have too. I’m look­ing for­ward to hon­ing my cre­ative skills.

Tech­no­rati Tags: edit­ing pho­tos, fru­gal, paint.net, pho­tos, pho­to­shop