Fairytale festival and couponing

We had a fun Saturday this past weekend. Rebekah's school had a Fairytale Festival with all kinds of booths and if you pre-ordered the tickets you could get a roll of 100 for $20 and raffle tickets 6/$5. I figured for a couple hours worth of entertainment and a meal for each of us $25 was well worth it. The first thing Rebekah and Isaac wanted to do was get their faces painted (Rebekah got a dolphin and Isaac a balloon) and the pony ride. I'm so sad I forgot my camera because it was really cute. They had never done it before and were so excited. Rebekah got to pick six baskets to put her six tickets towards and you'll never believe it, but she actually won a huge gift basket filled with arts and crafts things! That was the only picture I got when we got home. And those are the highlights of the day. And the latest with me is that I'm trying to start couponing. Yes, I've been using coupons to help me cut my grocery bill almost in half most of the time already, but I think I'm going to be a little more aggressive about it. My neighbor is going to try and do it too so that we can stock up on certain things when they are on sale and we have coupons. She emailed me a great website that I posted a link to on my sidebar, and from that I've gotten some great ideas on how to save money by couponing and $5 dinners. I always have trouble with recipe sites because I have stipulations as to whether on not I'll use a recipe. They are: #1 it must be able to be made cheaply (my idea of cheap, not someone else's), #2 it must have a minimal amount of ingredients (otherwise it gets too expensive and timely to make), #3 it must not take more than 45 minutes to prep and cook (less time is even better), and #4 it has to be something my family will eat, but still be reasonably healthy!

So far the recipes I've tried have been pretty good. In fact my success story is that I made a potato spinach casserole with honey glazed carrots (hoping to entice my kids to eat carrots) and instead I actually got Rebekah to eat spinach! I guess the starch from the potatoes, and the cheese on top covered up the taste enough that she'd actually eat it. The only addition to the recipe I did was use margarine instead of olive oil as I don't have any and sprinkled garlic salt in it to add a little more flavor so it wasn't so bland, and it was actually pretty filling and tasty. The best part, with the sales last week (carrots 1lb/$.59, potatoes 4lb/$.97, frozen spinach 1lb/$.99, and cheese 1lb/$1, plus cantelope on the side one for $1) it was extremely inexpensive. I've been trying to incorporate at least one vegetarian meal a week to my monthly menu (hard to do when you have extremely picky fruit and veggie eaters) and so far it looks like three cheese stuffed shells (one of my staples already) and this will be two of them. Any more ideas let me know as I'm still hunting for a couple more!