Here’s an exciting new giveaway that just opened it’s doors – The Great Cookbook Giveaway by Willie Crawford and 460 other great cooks.

This is exciting news – the amount of products being given away is incredible – and they are all FREE!

Get your own free cookbooks and more!

As part of this event, a lot of  really good cooks have gotten into the holiday spirit and are giving away some of their best cookbooks.

What’s the catch?

The thing is there really is no catch. This is an event that makes it so easy to just login and download a whole host of top quality cookbooks and cooking related gifts.

Sure, not all the gifts being given away are great, but I’ve personally gone through the lot and there’s are some real ‘gems’ inside. Some of these products are the type of products that just last month you may have said to yourself: ‘Wow that looks an excellent product but I just can’t afford to buy it’.

Well now you don’t have to

Included is a guide that Nicole and I created for YummyPLR that tells you how you can create a new cookbook every month and sell it online! “Create a Recipe Empire: How to Compile a Cookbook Each & Every Month”

There’s also this exact guide from JustAddSweat.com that takes you step-by-step through the process of setting up a Recipe Blog.

A word of warning: This is a proper example of a limited time only event. The downloads are available until December 16th.

So take advantage now and download a fantastic selection of high-value gift products, you won’t want to miss out.

Click Right Here to Sign Up for the Freebies from the Great Cookbook Giveaway

The combined value of the entire product download list is… wait for it… $14,518.55!! Remember, they will only be online for a limited time, so secure your free gifts package now, before it’s too late.

If you’re like most families, you all have such busy lives that sometimes it’s tough to connect. It seems impossible to get EVERYTHING done and have QUALITY time together.

And if you’re like many busy moms, you probably constantly find yourself saying, “…as soon as I’m finished” or “maybe later…”

Well, later might just be too late. Don’t let another day pass by like this.

If you’re ready to find easy solutions to organizing your life to have more time together, I recommend picking up a copy of the “Real Life Guidance to Finding More Family Time” report.

This report was created by Certified Life Coach, Aurelia Williams, and is just what you need to get things back on track. The report gives you practical solutions for:

- Being realistic in your family goals
- How to find balance between your work and life
- Organizing your life to find more time
- Routine and scheduling tips even the most spontaneous families can get into
- Plenty of activity ideas (never say there’s nothing to do!)

This 20-page report is perfect for the busy mom who needs QUICK and EASY help to finding that precious time with family. It’s also available instantly, so even if it’s the middle of the night while everyone else in the sleep, you can all wake up with a plan to reconnect as a family.

Learn more and grab your guide by clicking here.

I made our first beef stew for the season last week since it was finally getting cool enough to enjoy it and boy was it good. Last week I shared with you how soups and stews make perfect winter meals. After the long summer months, I forget how good those types of meals are. Today I thought I’d give you two of my favorite crock pot beef stew recipes. I do a lot of crockpot cooking and even wrote an ebook on the topic.

The first is a very traditional beef stew recipe. The second includes some v8 juice (of course you can substitute your favorite tomato juice) which gives it a nice tangy flavor. We like both of them and usually rotate between the two.

Just bake up a batch of homemade bread or some biscuits for a hardy fall or winter meal.

Traditional Crock Pot Beef Stew

• 2 lbs. cubed stew meat
• 1/4 c. flour
• 1 1/2 tsp. salt
• Dash pepper
• 1 1/2 c. beef broth
• 1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 tsp. paprika
• 4 carrots (sliced)
• 3 potatoes (diced)
• 2 onion (chopped)

Put meat in crockpot. Mix together flour, salt, pepper. Pour over meat, stir to coat all pieces. Add remaining ingredients; stir to mix well. Cover and cook on low 10-12 hours, or on high 5-6 hours.

V8 Juice Beef Stew For The Crockpot

• 1 lb. beef stew
• 7-9 sm.-med. potatoes, chopped
• 2 med. onions, chopped
• 2 stalks celery, diced
• 2 (12 oz.) cans V-8 juice
• 2 c. water
• 1 tsp. sugar
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. pepper

Flour beef and brown in small amount of oil until done. Drain on paper towel. Peel and chop potatoes and onions and layer with celery in crockpot. Add beef, V-8 juice, water, sugar, salt and pepper. Cook on low 8-10 hours. This is great for those Mom’s who work outside the home.

Susanne – The Hillbilly Housewife
http://www.HillbillyHousewife.com

P.S. If you’re interested in crockpot cooking, I’d like to invite you to order my Crockpot Cooking Made Simple ebook today. 20% of my profits in October will be donated to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Last week, Nicole and I launched our newest PLR baby, MomPLR.

One of the offers we’ve sent to our members is a mini pack of free Halloween PLR Articles. If you haven’t already signed up to receive the special offers and freebies from MomPLR, you can still get your hands on the free articles. We thought we’d share these to give you a glimpse into what it is the site offers.

Grab Your Free Articles Here

While you’re there – don’t forget to sign up to receive other offers from us in the future (It’s Free).

One of the things I like best about this time of the year is that it’s finally cool enough to enjoy soups and stews. They make wonderful frugal meals and are perfect for work at home moms.

Add a bunch of flavorful ingredients to a pot and simmer it all day while you work, stopping by occasionally to stir the pot and you have a delicious homemade soup or stew ready when dinnertime rolls around. Bake up a batch of homemade biscuits or cornbread and you have a hardy winter meal.

I also like the scalability of soups and stews. You can easily make a large double batch and serve some for lunch the next day, freezer it for next month, or turn it into a different meal.

I made a big batch of beef stew yesterday. We had it with homemade rolls for dinner. Tonight I poured the rest of the stew in a baking dish, made some drop biscuit dough, spooned it on top of the stew mixture and baked it until the topic was nice and golden brown.

Here are a few of my favorite soup and stew recipes:

Chicken And Dumplings

This is one of my favorite comfort foods. It takes a bit of time to make a good pot of chicken and dumplings, but it’s well worth the effort and you can feed a small army with it (or enjoy leftovers).

Bean and Bacon Soup

This is a hardy white been soup, perfect to get the chill out ofter spending some time in the cold fall or winter air. Serve it with your favorite sandwich for a hearty lunch or dinner.

Crockpot Beef and Vegetable Soup

Beef and vegetable soup is my husband’s favorite comfort food. I serve it with warm cornbread and he’s in haven. I make this either in a large stock pot or the crockpot depending on how early in the day I remember to start it. The longer it simmers the better.

Split Pea Soup

This soup is very frugal and very hardy. I usually have some homemade bread baking in the breadmaker while the soup cooks up.

How about you? I’m sure you cook plenty of soups and stews this time of the year. What are your favorites? Please take a minute to share your favorite recipe below.

Susanne – The Hillbilly Housewife
http://www.HillbillyHousewife.com

P.S. If you’re interested in Freezer cooking, I’d like to invite you to order my Freezer Cooking Made Simple ebook today. 20% of my profits in October will be donated to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

PLR Club!

For those of you who use PLR in your business, on your blog or anywhere else. And, if you target moms and aren’t using PLR – definitely read on!

As you may or may not know, I co-own a PLR site with Nicole Dean where we sell PLR recipes and cooking articles. YummyPLR is a year and a half old this month as a matter of fact. (I will never forget this project because it was my first online project other than services and we released it the same month BabyGirl was born – just a few days before to be exact). That site will always be my baby and Nicole and I both are VERY proud of it.

You may have heard us talking about some of our new projects recently, especially if you follow us on Twitter or hang out in some of our other favorite places online. Today marks the opening of one of the many projects we’ve got lined up for this year and beyond. Nicole actually just released one of her own which I’ll be talking more about next week, but if you want to check it out now you can see it here.

Due to the success of Yummy, coupled with the demand for more quality PLR content from our members there and at EasyPLR (Nicole’s own PLR site), we decided to start our own little PLR family and our first addition happened today!

We are happy as clams because we’ve just given birth (in a matter of speaking) to our second PLR baby. And this one’s a definite labor of love for both of us, as it’s taken us quite some time to get it just right! Without further ado….

We Introduce to You, YummyPLR’s Newest Sibling (maybe it should be the parent and Nik and I be grandparents, hu?) ;0)

Isn’t she just adorable? ;0)

MomPLR.com was created specifically for mom bloggers who want to continue giving their readers quality content but want (or need) a break from having to come up with topics and the content itself every day.

Here’s the scoop:

1. It’s a PLR Club that costs nothing to join.
2. Members get access to quality PLR written BY moms FOR moms.
3. Club members will be the first to know about free PLR from us as well as other top-quality PLR providers who have received our stamp of approval (we like to call this our Pickiness Stamp).

You’ll get all of that and more, including more tips for making the most of your PLR and making money with it, when you join our free MomPLR Club!

And, you can do that right here => PLR for Mommy Bloggers

See ya inside!

It’s Friday (at least for a couple more hours) and time for another Frugal post from Susanne – The Hillbilly Housewife.

I’ve had one of those days … I’m sure you can relate. What should have been a quick little project dragged on and on and took a good 6 hours longer than I expected it to take. Which also explains why I’m just now writing today’s blog post here on “They Call Me Wahmmy”. Thankfully Arika is a great friend and I’m sure she’ll forgive me

Working from home, I don’t have to tell you that quite a few days each month (and sometimes a week) end up the way mine does and one think that keeps me sane and helps me still find time for my family is to plan my meals ahead of time. I’ve gotta tell ya … without my plan there is no way I could have made dinner tonight.

Let’s talk for a second about how meal planning can help us WAHMs during our busy work weeks (which are usually Monday – Sunday).Then I’ll walk you through how I make my weekly meal plans.

Meal Planning Saves Time

When I plan my meals ahead of time, I only head to the store once a week to get everything I need. I noticed that I spent a lot less time in the store when I’m “on a mission” to just find everything on my list.

It also saves me time each night because I know exactly what I’m going to cook and what I need to do to get started. No more standing in front of the fridge and pantry trying to figure out what I could possibly make for dinner. I have my plan and am ready to cook.

Meal Planning Saves Money

We save quite a bit on groceries since I started menu planning.  There are two reasons – having my grocery list keeps me from making impulse buys on stuff we don’t really need. We also use up (almost) all the food I buy and there’s a lot less that gets thrown out because it goes bad before we have a chance to eat it.

Ready to give meal planning a try? Here’s how I do it:

I sit down on Sunday night and come up with 7 dinners for the week. I usually include 1 freezer meal and 1 crockpot meal. If I think we’ll likely have quite a few leftovers I also declare one night later in the week leftover night where we just heat up everything that’s hanging out in the fridge and serve it buffet style.

Next I get my recipes out as needed and write down any ingredients I need to buy. I usually categorize the items by section in the grocery store (i.e. all meat together, all dairy, all canned goods etc.) so I don’t have to run back and forth through the store as I shop.

I also keep a master list of the meals for the week on my fridge and the recipes I’ll need close by. It makes it easy for me, but also comes in handy when I’m stuck running errands or am trying to finish up a project and hubby starts dinner.

I usually just plan on a week by week basis. Here are some other options:

Plan dinner the night before. It’s a great way to get your feet wet, but not very convenient for the long run.

Plan two weeks at a time.

Plan a month at a time. You can try to get most of your groceries in just one huge shopping trip per month, but I would recommend getting perishables like produce, meat etc. fresh on a weekly basis.

I hope you take the time to make a weekly meal plan and see if this works for your family. It takes a little getting used to at first, but I promise it is well worth the effort and it’ll get easier the more you plan.

That’s it for this week. I’ll be back next week with some more frugal cooking tips. If you’re interested in meal planning, I’d like to invite you to order my Meal Planning Made Simple ebook today. 20% of my profits in October will be donated to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Susanne – The Hillbilly Housewife
http://www.HillbillyHousewife.com

P.S. I’d love to hear your thoughts on meal planning. Is this something you do regularly? What’s your preferred method of meal planning?