From: lora
when I make donuts from refrigerator biscuits I
use the top of a 2 liter soda bottle for cutting
the donut holes, it is perfect size and the fried
donut holes are perfect size.

Here’s the recipe in Dining On A Dime.

Refrigerator Donuts

1 can refrigerator biscuits    powdered sugar or
oil for frying       cinnamon and sugar

Punch a hole in the center of each biscuit. Fry in hot oil until donut puffs and is golden brown. Turn and fry the other side.  Drain on a paper towel. In a paper sack, put about 1 cup of powdered sugar or 1 cup granulated sugar and 1 teaspoon cinnamon.  Drop donuts into bag and toss until coated. Serve warm. Makes 10 donuts.
*A 1-inch-diameter piece of clean metal pipe cut down to 3 inches is a good donut hole punch.
* The powdered sugar or cinnamon and sugar may be saved to use again.

I have to say these sounds so yummy! I can’t wait to try them! Tawra

From: Teresa
I have a frugal recipe for biscuits (and my
family likes them better than any others I have
tried.
Super Easy Biscuits

1 cup whipping cream (not heavy)
2 cups self-rising flour (I use White Lily)

Preheat oven to 500°F.
Spray baking dish with cooking spray (like Pam)
Mix just until blended (not too much). Turn the
dough out on a flour dusted surface and knead 4
or 5 times. Roll dough out then cut into
biscuits. Place in the sprayed pan and bake at
500°F for 7 to 10 minutes (depending on your
oven.) These are so fluffy and moist!
These biscuits rise ALOT, so don’t make them too
big. We make these in a Dutch oven over coals
when camping.

Breakfast Casserole
(Pizza)

Biscuit Dough from above
Your amount of bacon, sausage or ham
8 to 10 eggs
2 or 3 cups shredded cheese (pizza-mix cheese is
good)
Cooking spray

Cook the meat
Scramble eggs
Spray casserole dish with cooking spray
(I line the pan with aluminum foil, then spray it)

Make biscuit dough as above but instead of
cutting, roll it out to fit a 9 x 13 casserole
dish.  (fold into thirds to transfer it to dish)
Place in dish. Spread a thin layer of butter or
margarine over dough.
Cover with scrambled eggs, crumble meat on top,
then sprinkle shredded cheese over the whole
thing.Place in 500°F oven for 7 to 10 minutes
(just to bake the biscuit dough.)

Experiment with this, we like more eggs than meat
in this, you make like it better the other way
around.

From:  Betty
It is time for the renewal on our house
insurance,and my husband says to leave it alone
but, I think we can get more for our money with a
better price but, I don’t no how to do this can
you please help me.

All I do is just call 4-5 different insurance companies and ask for rates. Then I compare and choose the one that is the least expensive.  You will need to find out from your insurance company first what your rate is, the deductible and how much coverage you have. Then you can get an accurate comparison. Tawra

One of the main ways I save on groceries is something every one has done since shopping was invented and that is making the most of things which are on sale. Now I know the first thing you all are thinking is “I know buying on sale saves me money so I don’t need to read this.” But stay with me for a moment.

What I want to do today is to help you get more ideas on how to get the most use of your sale items mainly in the area of groceries.

Last week they had half gallons of chocolate milk on sale for $1.00. That is a really good deal if you consider how much it would cost you to use regular milk and mix it with Nestle’s or Hershey’s syrup. Something like this would be good to stock up on especially since you can freeze it (shake it well when you thaw it). Now so far all I have said is pretty obvious but let me take you a little farther and help you think out of the box.

I don’t drink a lot of chocolate milk which might be the case for many of you so at first you think this really isn’t a good deal for you and your family but let’s look at it and see if you could still make it work for you.

1. If you like cocoa it would be great to use hot with marshmallows or served at a holiday get together.

2. Use for making chocolate pudding one night by replacing regular milk with the chocolate milk.

3. Turn your regular bread pudding recipe (or use the one in Dining on a Dime) and kick it up a notch by replacing the regular milk with the chocolate and adding some chocolate chips.

4. If you find it on sale in the summer make Pudding Pops (also found in Dining..). You just add 1 small pkg. of chocolate pudding to 3 cups of the milk and freeze for extra fudgy popsicles.

5. Replace the regular milk in any chocolate recipe you are making like chocolate cake, cookies, frosting with the chocolate milk.

6. If your love cereal like Cocoa Puffs use the chocolate milk when they eat those. The milk turns chocolaty anyway.

What it amounts to is you are replacing your more expensive regular milk when you can with the cheaper chocolate milk. Now don’t have a heart attack over serving your family chocolate milk. It really won’t hurt to do it for a week or so.

The main point I want to get you to see is to look at the regular things you see on sale all the time in a different light and think how can I use them in a different way or can they be preserved.

Jill

P.S. I just told my mom about my good buy and she said they like to pour a glass of chocolate milk and add a dollop of ice cream to it. She said it tastes just like a Wendy’s frosty. You might like to try it.

This week we have a wonderful e-book featured called Cooking Up Some Dough. It gives all the ins and outs of selling your baked goods to earn extra money for the holidays.

Mom has done this for years and I was so excited to see this great e-book give all the info. in one place that’s needed to do this.

For the last 20 years mom has made these cute gingerbread men for Christmas. She just sells them to friends and family but has made up to 600 dozen of the littles in November and December. She packages them by the dozen in cellophane bags tied with a piece of red curly ribbon.

A few years ago she came up with the big ones (at the top). They are about 12 inches tall and the kids just loved them. She gives one to each of the grandkids each Thanksgiving and most of it’s gone by the next morning! LOL

The best part is they taste even better than they look! She found a great recipe years ago in an old cookbook and has used it ever since. (Sorry, we can’t give it out. When we are done with the book business we will go into the gingerbread men business.

If you want to earn some extra cash with your favorite recipes be sure to check out this week’s featured e-book Cooking Up Some Dough.! Until Nov. 14th you can get it 40% off if you use the coupon code LOAD when you order. You will also get our special e-book Gifts in A Jar if you order before then too so hurry over today and get your copy!

Tawra

Here is the 4th part in our How to self publish a book. Check here for Part 1 and part 2 and part 3.

Update 2009

We took back Dining On A Dime from the publisher in 2008 and are self-publishing again. To date we have sold around 200,000 Dining on a Dimes. We still have yet to make any amount of decent money. Mike is working 2 part time jobs on the side as well as working at home on Living On A Dime.

You can make good money running websites and selling books. But it is work and a lot of hard work. I didn’t post above the steps we take to sell books so I will briefly outline it here.

You need a website with information for people to come to. It needs to be good, useful information and not just a sales page. We do that with articles and recipes.

Then you need to get people to your website. We do that by writing articles for other websites and blogs to use, we send out press releases to newspapers, magazine and TV who then interview us. This is something that has to be done constantly. With media interviews we do get some people but it’s not the huge amount most think. When we were in Family Circle we got around 1,000 extra hits on the website and 16 sales of books. It’s not much at all but all of it together does add up and help.

We also run the free newsletter to keep people interested in us and our products.

You have to also be willing to send out a LOT of free review copies to the media. We sent out over 400 on our first printing and have sent out around 1,000 total. Besides the work involved that is $20,000 worth of product not to mention postage and packaging. People will need to see your product in order to review it and sell it.

Customer service. We spend HOURS on customer service. People lose links to e-books, the Post Office destroys their package and we have to send another, they have the wrong address on their order and they don’t get the package, they are mad about something we wrote, they don’t understand something etc. We also spend a lot of time just blocking the Google Ads on our site are Inappropriate and not going to rip off our customers. We currently spend 50% of our time just dealing with customer service issues. Another 25% is spent on bookkeeping.

At this time we have decided that mom and I are going to cut way back on the amount of work we are doing. We were spending most of our time writing new material for the blog and new e-books and Mike is doing all the customer service, computer and website work. We are also seriously considering not re-printing Dining On A Dime when this batch runs out.

We did figure last year that we earned about $4/hour so we really need to change the way the business is run. (Basically Mike earned the money and Mom and I just work for free for the fun of it.)

(That is why I know people wonder why I don’t have a large income with all the money we are making on the book (I still live off about $600 a month) but we really aren’t making enough to even sneeze at. Jill)

So the moral of this long story is, make sure that you learn how to market and do an LOT of it! Writing a book is the easy part, it’s selling it that’s the hard part!

If you have any questions feel free to ask and I will try and answer them.

Tawra

Free Offer: Fun with Fabric Dye eBook from Tulip
Fashion and Home Decor Craft Projects including:
• Batik Fabric Dye Technique (pg. 15)
• Crochet Rainbow Top (pg. 29)
• Ombre Fashion Curtains (pg. 51)
• BONUS: “Tie-Dye” Ceramics (pg. 78)
• Many other ideas!
You can get this eBook free here.

Free Offer: Creative Ideas for the Holiday Home
eBook from Creative Home Arts Club

Holiday Decorating Projects and Gifts including:

* Witch Boots Pillow (pg. 6)
* Metallic Leaves Wreath (pg. 18)
* Stacked Christmas Trays (pg. 46)
* Satin Tucked Ornaments (pg. 55)
* Many other ideas!

You can get this eBook free here.

How-to Guides and Easy Sewing Patterns Including:

How to Choose the Right Sewing Needle (pg. 6)
Ribbon Stripe Bag (pg. 16)
Easy Felt Pillows (pg. 30)
Scrap Fabric Apron (pg. 38)
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You can get this eBook free here.

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Decorating Ideas and Clothing Patterns Including:

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Embellished Pillows (pg. 29)
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Many other ideas!
You can get this eBook free here.

From: Linda
I loved your breakfast menu tips in today’s
e-mail.  I had forgotten I used to make breakfast
sandwiches.  Whenever I made baking powder
biscuits(for chicken & biscuits, shortcake etc) I
made a double batch.  I fried an egg for each one,
added a slice of cheese, wrapped them in plastic
wrap and froze each individually. We zapped them
in the micro l or 2 minutes right out of the
freezer(can’t remember how long exactly). Thanks
for reminding me of a quick tasty breakfast.
Don’t know why I’ve forgotten about making them!

If you are signed up to receive our newsletters and they just stopped coming please let us know.
For some reason our newsletter company just bounces people’s newsletters and then unsubscribes them. We don’t know about it until someone says they haven’t received it for awhile.

WE WILL LET YOU KNOW if you we ever decide to stop doing the newsletter. If you are missing some please let us know and we will get you signed back up or you can do it yourself here.

The problem seems to be the worst with hotmail, aol, yahoo and frontier net.

You can see past newsletter here if you are missing some.

We are sorry about this. Mike has spent days to get it resolved and we have yet to get them to fix it.

Tawra

ere is the 3rd part in our How to self publish a book. Check here for Part One and Two.

How long did it take you to gather all the material?

50 years. We used several recipes from my grandmother and great-grandmother along with mine and mom’s recipes and tips. It took about 2 years to get them all together in a book.

The gathering of the material was the easy part. It was the organizing of it and type setting etc. that was hard. You have to make sure all the meat recipes go together and what about that meat and pasta recipe? Does it go under main dishes or pasta? Then what to do when you have a big whole at the end of the page or a recipe doesn’t fit on a page?

We then spent ages on trying to get the index written. We didn’t just slap Caramel Apples under caramel apples but had to make sure it got under apples too. That is one of the reasons I think our book is easy for people to use but all those things take hours of extra work and those are the things they never tell you about.

Jill

What was the thing that lit the fire under you to continue to pursue writing when road blocks came up.

I feel that this is a true calling from God for me to help others. I wouldn’t still be doing it if I didn’t have constant confirmation from Him that this is what I’m supposed to be doing.

While we were writing it I was just going to quit one night because it was so hard doing it all ourselves. (Mike was working 100 miles from home and only home on the weekends and I had 2 kids (6 months and 20 months) plus CFS.) I received a Word from Him to keep going so I did and we got it done.

MANY times since then I have thought about quitting. Whenever I do I pray and ask if I am supposed to stop and EVERY TIME I get a verse from the Bible that tells me to keep going on and He will do the work I can’t.

The time before last that I thought of quitting about 2 months ago (this was before the publisher got the order for 103,000 books) and I asked if I should keep going he gave me the verse “if you will persevere I will reward you”.

The next day in the mail came a poster that said “Never Give Up”
with a person hanging onto the side of a mountain at the top. I knew that I was supposed to keep going. That poster is now hanging on our office door!

The last time I wanted to quit (about 3 weeks ago), I found out some really stupid mistakes I made in the contract with my publisher and learned some not so great things about them. I was talking to the lawyer until 10 that night.

After I got off the phone I just started bawling and told Mike “I am so sorry I got us into this mess. We have 6,000 books sitting in the garage that we can’t sell, working hard and long hours on this without seeing any money from it.” He finally got me calmed down and we were able to sleep that night.

That next morning I was wondering again if I should keep going on and I sat down to do my Bible study and the very first verse was
Psl 37:7-9
7 “Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him;
do not fret when men succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes.
8 Refrain from anger and turn from wrath;
do not fret-it leads only to evil.
9 For evil men will be cut off, but those who hope in the LORD will inherit the land.

I knew again that I was supposed to just be still and wait. 6 hours later we got the phone call from the publisher that they got the order for 103,000 books.

Knowing what you, and your Mom did behind the scenes is more what I’m wondering. Personal experiences. Do either of you have a degree in writing?

No mom was a SAHM and I went to tech school for horticulture. I just felt like writing a book, did it and dragged the rest of the family right in along behind me! LOL

How did you find out exactly how to construct a professional looking book?

We looked at how other books looked, found some we liked and then just tried to make it look like that but our own style.

The book has had 3 different covers now. Basically we just learned as we went.

Most people think it is so simple to write a book and so did we but we found little things can take hours and even days of work. For example with each book cover we can spend hours discussing what color just to make “the lady’s” dress and does it clash with her blouse. Now does the color on the shoes look right and does it all match the background color. And speaking of background color does it catch people’s attention does the spine of the book grab people’s attention and what color should the words be…. I think you get my drift. You see there are hours of behind the scenes of things that go on just for the cover let alone the book and the website. All of which we have to do the same type of thing for.

Jill

Thanks so much for elaborating on the ins and outs of self publishing, and signing with a publisher. Anne

I am happy to share our experiences. If nothing else just so people understand that it isn’t even close to being as easy as it sounds. That even if Oprah does call, which they did call us (twice and Dr. Phil once), it doesn’t mean you will get on and sell thousands of books. (They said our story was great but that people wouldn’t want to do what we did to get out of debt.) Looking back we see that if I would have gotten on the show we wouldn’t have been able to handle to orders or the work load it would have caused.

Having said all that. If God wasn’t in all of this, we would be nowhere today. It’s only through Him that we could have done this because I had no clue, not to mention I am horrible with grammar and still burn things!! LOL

Check back next week for part 4!

Tawra