durhamonthecheap

Sunday, December 30, 2012

So what does a bargain hunter want for Christmas? Violet Mints and some other presents!

Holidays are past us and as we get ready for 2013, I decided to write a short post on the things I got for Christmas. Besides doing improvements around the house, a good investment for anyone that owns a house and can find improvements that also serve as tax deductions, I managed to complete a graduate certificate program and my diploma should be in the mail as I write this post. Education is always a good investment and in my case, the employer is paying the tuition costs, which makes this an excellent deal and an investment in the future.

But of course like everyone else, a new floor and a degree do not make up for little material things that we want under the Christmas tree. I had a couple of these as well. My first treat was a wireless connection for my TV to now stream Amazon Instant Video, Netflix and Pandora. While I use Amazon and Pandora a lot, I am not a subscriber to Netflix because Amazon right now offers enough movies and TV shows that I really do not need Netflix. Eventually, I may subscribe to Netflix, but for now Midsomer Murders on Amazon are sufficiently entertaining to me.

The second treat were a package of Violet Mints. For those of you that have never tasted Violet Mints, let me tell you that in my opinion you are missing out on a delicacy. Violet is definitely an acquired flavor, but for me it is a special treat because good violet flavor in candy is hard to find. I grew up on violet flavored candy in Germany and I love the scent and the flavor of violets. While watching Upstairs Downstairs on PBS violet macaroons were mentioned and I developed a longing for violet flavored candy. Violet macaroons use essence of violet, which by all accounts is very difficult to obtain in the USA, but I will definitely keep an eye out of for that flavor because violet macaroons sound for me just about as good as anything cookie or food that I can imagine. I have had hazelnut and almond macaroons homemade and I can only imaging the airy lightness of macaroons, but with violet flavor and now I really, really badly want these macaroons.

To cover my violet hunger in the meantime, I came across these mints in the meantime. They are Chowards Violet Mints, available on amazon.com here and cost less than $20 for 24 packages. The company, C. Howard, also makes gum in violet flavor as well as some other flavors, such as spearmint. But I definitely only cared about the violet flavor. They mints arrived shortly before the holidays and after opening the package and experiencing the violet scent, I knew I had made a good choice. The website for the company is here. They do offer guava flavored mints, which sound good, but for now, I am in violet heaven and I will stay here for a while!

Below is an image of how the actual mints look like. While they seem pale and innocent, they are definitely bursting with true violet flavor that lasts a long time. The flavor is immediate, once you pop one in your mouth and continues, even if you are already done with the mint - which in my case is always a sad occasion (hence my interest in the gum). I am sitting right now typing away on this post and have a package of the mints in the room, which leaves me surrounded by the exquisite scent of violets - love it! If you are thinking now about getting some of these mints, I can only encourage you to give them a try.

So these are my Christmas presents - a lot of useful items, but also a little treat!

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Sunday eVic special - Harris Teeter 1Gal Milk only $2.77

Do NOT forget to stop by Harris Teeter tomorrow to get your eVIC specially prized milk. One Gallon of any HT storebrand milk is only $2.77. If the farm bill is not passed, milk could see a sharp increase in price. But even without the Farm Bill issue, $2.77 is a very good price for 1 Gallon of milk.

In case you are wondering, milk can be frozen. For freezing, skim milk or any milk with relatively low fat content works best. After freezing the milk, you can thaw it in the fridge and then use it like any fresh milk from the grocery store. So you can make use of the LIMIT 2 for this eVIC special. One tip, if you want to freeze milk, pour enough out of the gallon container to free up about 1 inch from the top to allow for expansion in volume during freezing. After the milk is thawed, shake it up to mix properly and use within a week or so.

Happy HT eVic shopping!

Friday, December 28, 2012

Bath & Body Works clearance - love this time of year!

This time of year is a good time for bargains. Stores are trying to sell a lot of seasonal items, food specials especially stocked for Christmas, decorations for inside and outside the house etc. But also items such as candles and soaps are being reduced for more than 50% because Pumpkin is considered too seasonal to be sold year round.

Bath & Body Works is one such store and earlier this week, they started their seasonal clearance. This semi-annual clearance means that you can get items for up to 75% off. The sale is still ongoing and you can find bargains for body lotion, candles, shampoo and many other items. The direct link to the sale listing is here.

With such prices, I cannot stay away and bought my supply of body lotion and three of my favorite candles at reduced prices.

So I got three huge three-wick candles in my favorite scent coconut lime verbena - I love that scent and have almost everything in that scent, including now finally candles. These were $10 each, reduced from $20.

The body lotions were all 75% reduced, including coconut vanilla body lotion and brown sugar fig. I also got a nice little gift set in Japanese Cherry Blossom, which I use to decorate the guest bathroom. This was was 25% off and with a coupon I spent $9 on it. The website indicates a total value of $33 for the items included in the set and the regular price was $19.50.

Overall, I am very happy with my order for around $44. I had a coupon for 20% and free shipping, which made the deals even better. But better than the prices is the fact that I can enjoy the scent of a Coconut Lime Verbena candle!

Bargain shopping: Manager's Special - That's why I love my Kroger store!

Today I decided on a whim to stop in at my Kroger store and see whether they had anything on sale. I am not talking about regular sales advertised in the circular, but unannounced deals called Manager's Specials. Manager's Specials are items that either need to be sold due to the expiration data approaching or items that Kroger does not longer want to carry and they need to clear shelves. If the latter is the case, you can find items that have expiration dates months in the future, making such items a wonderful bargain.

Today, I was really lucky and found a lot of items reduced and most of these items have expiration dates in May or June of next year - WONDERFUL!

Below is the picture of my haul - I spend around $25 for all items - not bad considering that the smaller yoghurt alone was supposed to be $1 each on sale and the crackers were around $5 each. Most of the items were about 25% of the original price, the carrot cake roll being the exception since it was only reduced by 50% (half-price is not bad either).

Some of the items I was particularly excited about are the capers. I bought three glasses of these after I have been circling them most of the winter. They were supposed to be more than $3 and I love making a sauce with real capers for my meatballs, but these tiny things are so darn expensive. Not today - three glasses will last me until summer.

Then the carrot cake roll - one of our favorite desserts and something that is fairly labor intensive to make at home. For $3.50 I could afford it and now dessert for the next days is set! What are start into 2013.

Then the Greek Yoghurt and especially in Mango Passionfruit flavor - my favorite kind. I am so happy and now the daily limit of ONE Greeek Yoghurt may actually get lifted.

Overall, everything I bought will get used in the household and seen as rare treats that are only bought on sale, not at regular prices. Making this shopping trip at Kroger at wonderful end to 2012 and (if some of it lasts until next year) an even better start of 2013.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Product review: Cafe Escapes Vanilla and Caramel coffee

I had received a sample pack from Cafe Escapes through their Facebook promotion and was quite excited to give their Vanilla Coffee and their Caramel Coffee a try since many people seemed to really like their coffee. I expected their coffee to be in line with the International Foods-type coffee since it had milk and sugar added already. But I was in a for a surprise.

So the coffee looked good and definitely emitted a caramel smell, but I was struck immediately by an overly sweet sensation. And one sip confirmed that while the intention for making this coffee may have been good, the product in my opinion was subpar. International Foods also has sugar and milk added to a powder and generated a sweetened milk-coffee when prepared. But Cafe Escapes was just too sweet and seemed to have in my opinion a very fattening and too rich consistency. I drank the cup, barely, but I figured I may as wall give the cup the benefit of the doubt and finish it to make sure that my impression was true. I then sampled the Vanilla Cafe later on and the impression was similar; the mix was too sweet and extremely rich - while not really tasting like coffee.

I rarely write bad reviews, but I am very disappointed with Cafe Escapes for their Caramel Coffee and Vanilla Coffee. I had hoped for a nice coffee flavor sweetened with caramel and some milk thrown in to soften the coffee taste. Similar for the Vanilla coffee; what I ended up with something that really did not resemble coffee anymore because I could not taste any coffee. This was almost like really sweet caramel or vanilla milk.

Cafe Escapes has other products and I am certainly willing to try additional flavors. But personally, I will not purchase these two flavors in the stores. I would be curious to hear what others think about these two specific Cafe Escapes flavors and, if possible, let me know how they compare to other Cafe Escapes products. Cafe Escapes has also hot chocolate as well as mochas - so it is possible that the remaining flavors have a more pronounced coffee influence and may be more to my liking.

For this product my ranking about 0 out of 5 starts - being that bad that I am not sure I will use the remaining two samples I have left over.

Bargain shopping - even at Harris Teeter it is possible!

So today after work I decided to go shopping at Harris Teeter because I had a couple of good coupons and I have found that going through the grocery store and planning a coupon hunting trip oddly enough relaxes me after work. I think the relaxation comes because I need to focus on something different than work, namely how to maximize the coupons that I have and combine them with specials at the grocery store.

The picture above shows the total haul for this trip. I got two packages of chicken hotdogs that were on clearance as BOGO for about $5.79. I liked chicken sausage; with my favorite chicken sausage of all time being a breakfast sausage that had blueberries in it. If I ever splurge on a meat grinder and sausage-making attachment for my Kitchenaid mixer, a blueberry breakfast chicken sausage will be on top of my list of recipes I need to figure out.

I also got a box of Cheez It. Here is picked the hot and spicy flavor because it goes well with the creamy cheeses that I like. I then ended up getting two bottles of water; one a sparkling water that I will use for making Italian lemonade with my Torani syrups. The second bottle is a fruit-flavored regular water from Deer Park. Lastly, I picked up two products by Charmin, a 4-pack of toilet paper and then a box of Charmin Freshmates, which I believe are fairly new addition to the Charmin line of products.

So how did the deals stack up?
The chicken sausage was BOGO (expiration date is late January 2013) for a savings of $5.79
Charmin toilet paper was on sale from $4.19 to 2.99
Charmin Freshmates - free with coupon and Charmin purchase - savings of $3.15
Cheez It - on sale and eVic special $3.75 down to $1.77 and I used a $1.50off coupon
sparkling water - free with register reward coupon - saved $1.19 (price rang up as $1.50) cost 31cents
Deer Park fruit water - free with register reward coupon - saved $1.19 (price rang $1.00) 19cents MM

I noticed as I was checking my receipt at the customer service counter that the cashier rang up the same coupon twice for the two different waters and that cost me 12 cents, which I would have saved otherwise. But since they are register reward coupons and I had gotten so much for free or reduced prices, I figured my donation to HT this time was the 12 cents. I really did not want to hold the line up any longer since I ended up with a very inexperienced cashier, who already made me and several people behind me wait for 10 minutes since no manage was to be found that could accept the coupons. While I like high value coupons, they usually require a manager overwrite and if a manager is busy doing other stuff, be ready for a long wait. I do not mind waiting, but today HT was extremely busy and the cashier was clearly just beyond the training stage and so I decided to forgo the 12 cents. (In addition, a friendly lady had donated her shopping kart with the quarter still in it last week at Aldi and made me an early Christmas present)

I could have waited around for double coupons, which I think will happen again in January sometime, but the items that I bought were on sale anyway and the eVic special for the Cheez It was too good to not combine with the Red Plum coupon. In addition, I did not know whether the chicken hotdogs would still be available in January, so I decided to use my coupons and make use of on sale merchandise.

Reviews of the chicken sausage to follow soon!

Book review: Fire Prophet by Jerel Law (Young Adult fiction)

Let me state first off, I rarely read young adult books, but this book had an interesting premise because it was classified as a young adult book with an action-filled story that still relayed some of the basic tenets of Christianity. So I figured that reading this book could be interesting. It ended up being interesting, but it was not my favorite read.

The story is quickly summarized as an adventure that picks teenage quarter angels against the forces of darkness or half-angels in this story. Half angels target quarterlings and in an earlier story, Jonah, his sister Eliza and his younger brother Jeremiah were explained as the offspring of a nephilim (half angel, which was their mother) and a human. In this story, after saving their mother in the earlier book, Jonah and Eliza are now being targeted by half angels and must use their newly found angelic and trained skills to fight of evil half angels.

While the book was an interesting read and definitely fast paced, while still providing insights into Christian tenets, the book is strongly relying on the earlier book in which the characters were introduced. In addition, this book references the earlier book both in facts as well as in events quite frequently and so to really appreciate this book and not having to deduce a lot, I would highly recommend that the first book be read prior to reading this follow up young adult novel.

Disclaimer: I was provided this book through booksneeze in exchange for an honest review. The opinions expressed in this book are solely my own and have not been influenced by the publisher or any third party.