I love when readers shoot me emails with great tips. Some even write articles on topics that they’re passionate about. Like Henry, who lives in Woodbury and works for Northwest Airlines. “I enjoy cooking and finding creative and inexpensive ways to spice up everyday dishes.  And when that fails, I open a bottle of wine and it makes it all good.”
Here is his tip for saving money on preparing meals. I hope you’ll share your own tricks too.

Every day it seems like the stock market is heading in the wrong direction. I even stopped looking at my 401K because it only mockingly informs me that retirement is getting further and further away. And like most families, I too am cutting back on as many expenses as I can, and one way I found is to look within my kitchen cupboard to lower my food bill. 

The previous night I had made an entire ham. Although it was a great meal as well as an economical lunch the next day, I was not sure that I could take having ham one more time without repackaging it into something a little different. But what could I possibly do with it?

I decided to see what the Internet had to offer, so I Googled “leftover ham” and in .24 seconds I had 283,000 results at my finger tips. I scanned through the results taking into consideration what ingredients I had in my kitchen as well as what would be simple to make.

Since then I have used Google several times to piece together a meal with ingredients that I already had in my kitchen. Sometimes I have to venture to the store to pick up a few things. Sometimes the meals are good and sometimes they are not so good, but in either case it saves a little money and gets my culinary juices flowing. By simply searching for ingredients that I had in my cupboard, I have been able to prepare inexpensive dinner alternatives.

No more do I open the cupboard and stare into the abyss of cans, boxes, and jars wondering what I can make for a meal. Now I let Google help me plan mealtime.

On the scale of importance, most brides will tell you that their wedding dress ranks pretty high, if not at the top.

When I was dress-shopping, I didn’t see the logic in spending a mortgage payment’s worth of money on a dress I’d wear for a few hours. I kept myself from getting tempted to spend more than my budget and firmly told the person helping me at the bridal store that I didn’t even want to try on the expensive dresses.

It took a long time to find “THE” dress. When it finally arrived, the sizing of the dress was WAY off. We shipped the dress back to the manufacturer, hoping that it was defective and the new one would arrive and fit perfect. Nope. Same problem. By this time, I didn’t feel comfortable starting the dress search over, so we ordered another dress, only 8 sizes larger than my actual dress size.

When that dress arrived, it fit where it didn’t fit before, but would have to be taken in everywhere else. I accepted that I was finally being punished by the bridal Gods for being cheap, and I’d have to shell out the cash for some major alterations.

Then I’m standing in front of the mirror in my wedding dress, with 3 months until the wedding, and I notice something awful. I could see right through the fabric of the dress! I tell myself, “Take a deep breath Aimee, don’t be a bridezilla … I’m sure a lot of brides have see-through wedding dresses… right?” Then I snap out of it and realize that although I didn’t drop a grand on the dress, I spent plenty and deserved a dress that covered me up.

As most things do with a wedding, everything turned out OK. The bridal store relined the entire dress for next to nothing and it’s no longer R-rated. The fact that I paid almost as much for alterations as I did for the dress will probably gnaw at me until I get into the dress on my wedding day. After that, it will just be one of those hilarious wedding dress-gone-wrong stories.

Hello, Aimee Blanchette here filling in for Kara who is in L.A. with her family for a wedding. Peak wedding season is officially upon us.

I contributed to KaBlog several months ago when I was in the early stages of planning my own wedding. Now I have just two months to go before the BIG DAY. The invitations have been sent and a few nights ago we finished bottling our second batch of wedding wine … yes, wedding wine.

Among all the other things on our plate, we somehow managed to talk ourselves into making our own wine to serve at the wedding. Here me out, though: doing so saved us money, we had fun together, the wine tastes darn good AND it fits our overall “theme” for a homemade wedding.

The idea came about when my future father-in-law (an avid home-brewer) offered to brew the beer for the wedding (he just finished his seventh batch of wedding brew). For a long time, I’d wanted to try making wine, but the whole process was really daunting. Would I have to ship in grapes, stomp them with my feet and let them age in oak barrels?

I looked into the process, talked to some people at the local wine/brew stores and realized I could make a high-quality wine for about the same cost of a bunch of “Three-Buck-Chuck.”

The process is actually pretty fool-proof IF you follow the instructions provided with the wine ingredient kit. There are a few places in the Twin Cities where you can find everything you’ll need to make wine from beginning to end. Northern Brewer is in St. Paul and Brew & Grow is in Spring Lake Park.

A basic wine-making kit costs $100 and includes all of the supplies you’ll need, minus the bottles and corks. We didn’t have to buy this kit, because we already had a beer-making kit, which includes many of the necessary supplies. We only had to supplement the beer-making kit with a few items.

Here’s a breadkdown of the estimated cost-savings:
Supplies (tools, cleaners and sanitizers, and corks) = $65
Recycled bottles = free
Wine ingredient kits = $225 for three kits

Total = $290

Each wine ingredient kit (which includes a juice concentrate, not grapes) costs between $55 and $165. Each kit makes 6 gallons of wine, or 30 bottles.

We made 90 bottles of wine for $290, or $3.22 per bottle. It was a lot of work, but totally worth it and it saved us a ton of money. If you are planning to make wine for your own wedding, start early. The earlier the better. We started the process about six months ago.

So readers, what lengths have you gone to save money for your wedding (or any other big event) and was it worth it? Later today, I have a story to share about how trying to be thrifty, or shall I say … cheap, backfired BIG TIME. And it has to do with my wedding dress.

One of my colleagues recently stopped me in the hall to ask about a rumour he’d heard about my wedding. He wanted to know if I was really buying everything for the wedding on eBay. I had to laugh, because it’s actually not too far from the truth. Except I prefer Craigslist and Freecycle.

We want

Note: It’s all about weddings this week on Ka-Blog. Business writer and bride-to-be Aimee Blanchette is filling in for Kara, who’s away at a wedding.

As soon as I got engaged six months ago I embraced the