Aldi’s had some really great sales today. Pie crusts were only .29 cents (that’s twenty nine cents!). Rolls of chopped sausage (which are perfect in soups, stews or pasta sauce) was only .49 cents a pound (that’s forty nine cents for sixteen ounces!) And the American all-time favorite of mac & cheese was only .34 cents a box (that’s thirty four cents). Needless to say, I stocked up for the next year at these prices. The pork and pie crusts freeze extremely well. The pie crusts will come in handy this summer when my peach tree blooms and produces. The pork will work out well on Sunday when we prepare our pasta sauce. I’ve got a few new mac & cheese inflation recipes (click here) I’d like to try (like adding chopped meat and making a casserole out of it).

In any event, I got some really great food items for only pennies.

I saw this great video on making my favorite soup, Classic Italian Wedding Soup, (click here for the video) and when I realized I had all of the ingredients, I cooked up a huge batch of my most fave soup. I had two beef rib bones and one chicken backbone in my freezer that made the most perfect broth base for the soup. (refrigerate the soup overnight so that you can separate the fat out of the broth). I had a half-bag of organic kale still sitting in my freezer, so I used that up. The best part was that I had all that on-sale chopped beef nicely stored away in my freezer, which made the near perfect soup meatballs. (Side Note: Do I sound like I love, love, love this soup? Well, I do!!)

The soup is perfect for these extremely cold winter days and nights. And still perfect much more for ladling the soup into containers and stored in my freezer for future use. I serve the soup with or without grated parmesan cheese topping.

The beater part on my vacuum stopped working this week. Normally, I could have gotten on Amazon and just ordered another one. The model I use is only $35 and I’ve been using it for a year and a half. Most of my home has wood floors and area rugs. So, I need a light vacuum that does both wood floors (without leaving scratches) and a beater brush to do the area rugs. Most models are very expensive but I think I lucked out with this Eureka. The dust bin is easy to clean and replacement bins are easily available.

With the higher costs for almost everything today, I asked my husband if he could just take a look at the beater brush part and maybe fix it or adjust it or whatever just to get it to continue working. He opened up the mechanism. Noted that it needed a new belt but after searching on the internet, the belt has been discontinued. Oh well. Hubby put the vacuum back together for now and I guess I’ll keep on using it till the vacuum officially goes kaput!

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