Simple Trick To Save On Oven Energy Costs

Your oven can be an energy sucker and using it often increases your utility bills.  This simple trick will save you time and energy, both your energy and the energy costs required when using it.

Most people will use their oven several times a week and usually for about an hour at a time.
My trick is to cook several “long cook” items at once in the oven and use them over the next few days.

For example, right now I have a spaghetti squash for lunch, a roast beef for dinner and pork for another day all cooking in the oven at once (excuse my oven’s look, think of it as well used).

Separately these items each take about an hour or more to cook.  That is 3+ hours of your oven being on throughout the week.  Because I am cooking them all at once the time for the oven being on is reduced to 1.5 hours for all 3 items.

This will ensure I will save money on my utility bill and save time when it comes to preparing other meals as well. Because the items are already cooked, re-heating them on the stove top (or microwave if you use one) is minimal and you can easily transform the cooked items into other dishes that you would normally reserve for leftovers!  While saving 1.5 hours of your oven being on might not seem like much, but this is for one week.  Now think of it on a yearly basis and you can see how it can save on your energy costs!

Let me know if you try this trick and how it worked out for you!

Coupon Cooking - Creative Culinary Couponing

FYI this IS NOT A SPONSORED post, it's just something I came up with in hopes it can be helpful!

Relatively Easy Recipe

Over the last few weeks I have been on a mission to achieve some goals for this year. One of those goals is improvements around my house.  I am they type of person that saves up for a project.  Last year I saved up for a new roof on my house and wrote the cheque on completion of the project.  I know too many people who just buy now and pay on credit.  Let's just say for the most part that never ends well.  This year I have two home improvement ideas in mind, so that means I need to cut back a lot on my spending.

I have really taken to couponing! It started last summer and I have save a lot of cash that way. I try to only use coupons on products that I would normally buy or have wanted to try.  I never just go and buy something because I have a coupon for it.  

Last week I made a full meal with products that I had bought with coupons.

The Ingredients Included

1. Barilla Pasta that was on sale and I had a coupon, so I paid next to nothing for it
2. Maple Leaf Prime Chicken which you can see is regularly $10.94 but I had a $2 off coupon
3. Philly Cooking Creme which was on for $1.99 and I had a $1 off coupon (was wanting to try)
4. Sobey's vegetable mix which I received bonus Sobey's Points for

Plus I had enough Sobeys Club points saved up that I didn't really end up paying anything for these ingredients!

I have been wanting to try the Philly Cooking Creme and because I would end up getting it for 99 cents I figured this would be a great way to try it.  I wasn't sure how to use it so I went on their website and loosely followed their Creamy Chicken Florentine recipe. I tend to only cook with what I have so I change recipes around all the time.

• I started by boiling the pasta in a large pot Note* I always boil pasta longer than it says on the box so if you like a softer pasta like I do then make sure it has been cooking for quite a while before you continue on with the recipe.
• Normally I either boil or steam my chicken before using it in any recipe  but because I was already straying from the original recipe I didn't want to really mess it up, so I did fry the chicken in a large frying pan
• When the pasta was basically done cooking I added in close to half the bag of frozen vegetables (they are smaller bags than most store brand vegetable mixes)
• I let that come back to a boil
• When everything was cooked I poured/scraped the entire tub of Philly Cooking Creme into the frying pan
• Then ladled in some of the cooking water from the pasta pot into the frying pan with the chicken making sure to stir over a high heat to make a quick sauce.
• I drained the pasta/veggie mix and added it to the frying pan and kept stirring it so that the excess water would boil off and thicken the sauce a bit.

Here's the end result!

Note* I will make this again, but I will steam the chicken first before adding it to the frying pan.  It was a little dry because it didn't have time to absorb too much of the sauce,  That being said the left overs the next day had absorbed the sauce = YUM!