Fresh From the Oven

I'm hoping to spend much of today baking. It's been a long time since I did very much of it and I have been feeling the absence of bread and cookies and brownies from our lives. On the docket for today: rosemary and cheddar cheese quick bread, a batch of cookies, and possibly some brownies. I'm also tempted to give another chance to No-Knead Bread, which turned into nothing but a hard, sour lump when I exchanged the all-purpose flour for whole-wheat, but would perhaps be better if I actually, oh, followed the recipe. Thousands of bloggers can't be wrong, right?

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that this is an especially great week for CVS. Go see Moneysaving Mom and she'll tell ya what you need to know. I went yesterday and bought five tubes (the max) of Lipsyn all-natural lip ointment for $2.99 apiece, received $2.99 in ECB back for each one (total of $14.95), and used the $5/$15 coupon to make these more than free. My total ended up below zero after using a couple of ECB I needed to roll over as they were reaching their expiration date, so I threw in a bag of Sour Patch Kids--coincidentally the cheapest candy they have, at $.79, as well as my very favorite. Out of pocket: $.74 and $15 ECB. I got back $14.95, the Lipsyn of course, and $10 ECB from an online survey I took awhile back.

This morning I went back with a fresh copy of the $5/$15 coupon and made good on the Downy and Swiffer deals. These are things that are nice to have in our household, but which I usually won't pay full price for. Luckily there is a decent (though not amazing) deal which dropped the cost of two boxes of dryer sheets and two boxes of Swiffer cloths from $23 to $16 after ECBs, which became $11 with the coupon, and once again went negative by using up some ECB from yesterday. I added on two bags of my favorite filler (see above) and ended up paying $.60 out of pocket. I only got back $7 ECB after spending more than $10, so once again it wasn't a stellar deal, but it did result in a cheap stash of some things that we will actually use. I was planning to do the free-after-ECB-and-better-after-coupon deal on CVS-brand Vitamin C, but so far my CVS has been out. Maybe I'll try a different one later in the day.

It pains me to see the excellent deals that are always going on for toothpaste, since we don't use it anymore, but I'm doing my best to not accumulate things that we won't actually use, and since we already have 10 tubes of toothpaste languishing in a closet, it definitely fits that bill. I suppose I could find a place to donate them to, and then in weeks like this, use them to generate a little ECB overage. We'll see.