At Kroger I noticed that they are having a sale on Blue Bell ice cream. You can buy three gallons for just $10, for this week only.

This is a huge savings on the very best ice cream in the store. Normally they sell one gallon for $6- $7 per gallon. So to buy 3 gallons for $10 is a savings of about $11.

I barely have room in the freezer for 3 gallon containers, but I plan on making room somehow. This is too good a deal to not take advantage of it!

Here is the video I watched last January when everyone was planning SuperBowl parties.I found it on Youtube a few minutes ago.

The video shows you how to pull the bones out of a chicken wing cleanly and easily so you can dunk the meat in dipping sauce and eat it without worrying about the bones.

There was a video on Youtube that some guy made about the proper way to eat chicken wings. I watched it a long time ago, but I have to admit, it didn’t sink in. I guess because his technique was so very different from anything that I’ve ever tried.

So I’m cooking chicken wings tonight and I will enjoy eating them regardless of whether it is the proper way or not. But maybe I’ll cruise over to Youtube and see if I can find that video again before our fingers get all sticky.

This weekend was the final days of our county fair, but the weather has been so bad that I decided to not go. The heat is too much for me and the chance of thunderstorms has been forecast every day this past week. If I had known that it really would not rain today, I might have made an attempt. But I didn’t know and I didn’t want to risk it, so we stayed home.

We had a really nice day together doing little but some housework and cooking. My son sorted out all his toys and put them into different bins and boxes. He has a bin for dinosaurs, trucks, army men, Transformers and Legos. My daughter has a huge collection of dolls and we went through that together, cleaning them off and setting them up on the shelf in little social groupings. That was fun.

I started cooking a couple of new recipes for brisket, a couple of drop cookies and a lemon icebox pie. While cooking, I listened to some new music on the iPod. It was a nice, relaxed day and actually very productive. I feel blessed.

Usually I avoid the grocery stores on Saturdays. They are too crowded and it takes too long to get through the check out lines. But I found a couple of recipes that I want to try and don’t keep all those ingredients on hand, so I went to the store for a “few things.”

Of course, it never works out to be just a few things. I ended up with a whole basket of stuff. I think taking the kids with me to the store must add an extra 10 or 20 items to my basket. I know the bill is always higher at checkout. I can afford to buy plenty of groceries, but I do have a budget that I try to keep to, and taking the kids on a Saturday just blew that budget out for the month.

Cantalopes are at their peak now. The stores all have them on sale for under $2 a piece and they are ripe. I bought one at Publix and cut it up this morning. Wow! It was so juicy and sweet I ate half of it all by myself for breakfast. I cut the rest of it into little bite size pieces and put it in the refrigerator to chill. The kids will love to have this for an afternoon snack when they get home from school!

I know most people thing chili is a hearty winter dish, but I’ve been craving chili all day yesterday and it was the first thing on my mind this morning, too. Well, coffee was the very first thing on my mind this morning. Let’s be honest. Be while I was standing in the kitchen waiting on my coffee to brew, I noticed the crock pot on the counter and I decided to go ahead and make a pot of chili.

Tonight I will boil up some macaroni and since my daughter does not like spicy food, I will set aside a portion of the mac to add melted cheese for her. But my son and I will chow down tonight on chili mac!

Last year I had planted several tomato plants in containers and had a terrible problem. The issue was not with the fiberglass planters but with the tomato planters that I had bought from Home Depot.

I had no idea when I started this little container gardening project that the tomato plants were all shipped from a big nursery in New England in pots that had soil contaminated with a fungus. This fungus gave all the tomato plants bought from Home Depots, Lowes, K-Mart and Wal-Mart the blight last year.

I was so upset at losing all my plants to the blight that I threw them all away – even the fiber glass planters and stakes and everything. Now that I think about it, that was silly. I could have dumped out the soil and cleansed it with chemicals to kill the fungus and scrubbed out the planters. But I wasn’t thinking clearly when I was staring at the fungus all over my plants.

This year I bought one  fiberglass planter and one tomato plant from a local nursery. I hope that buying locally will avoid the fungus contamination issue. I won’t have a lot of tomatoes this year, but I hope that the few this one plant produces will be big and healthy.

Made the mistake of buying a big package of sliced roast beef at Sam’s Club for sandwiches at the Lake. After a couple of days in the refrigerator, that roast beef sure does stink up the kitchen. I guess it is the garlic or something that they use to flavor the roast beef, because I don’t notice the smell when I store left over roast that I’ve cooked myself. It stinks so bad that I threw it out, even though it was just opened yesterday and had 2 weeks to go on the expiration date.

A girlfriend told me about putting an open box of Arm and Hammer baking soda in the fridge, but I’ve always done that and evidently this smell is worse than what the baking soda can handle.

My sister told me this morning to soak a cotton ball in vanilla extract and put it in the back of the fridge, on the lowest shelf. I keep a big bottle of real vanilla on hand for making cookies, so I guess I will try that next.

My mom got a garbage disposal installed at our house when I was a kid, and I remember how excited she was to not have to sort the food scraps and garbage from the kitchen.

I remember one year we were having a big Thanksgiving dinner and someone put a dinner’s worth of potato peels down the sink. The garbage disposal totally choked on those and quite working, plugging up the sink at the worst possible time. My dad was on the phone begging for plumbers to come and fix our sink that afternoon, and no one would come.

I read online that you are supposed to pour a cup of boiling water down the drain once in a while to clean the blades. Then you are supposed to put citrus slices, like lemon or orange peels, down the disposal and grind them up to get rid of any odors.

I find that odd, as I often pour boiling water down the sink as I am draining the boiled potatoes or corn on the cob or other vegetables. Why would I boil a big pot of plain water and waste it?