I love my Walgreens trips! 2-14-12

Went to Walgreens today to do a register reward purchase and boy did I do well! Here’s how it went and what I bought:

3 Vicks Naturfusion’s on sale for $5.99 – 3 P&G insert coupons worth $3 each
3 Puffs with Lotion $.99 ea – 1 P&G insert coupon for $.25
2 bags Girhadelli chocolates for my daughters for V-day at 2 for $7
$27.94 – $9.25 in P&G coupons
also used $8 register reward from my blink tears and $5 register reward from my Alkeselzter and paid

$5.69 out of my pocket AND got back $5 in register rewards for buying the P&G items

With the register reward I got back I actually bought it all for $.69 I LOVE MY COUPONS!!!!!!!!!!!

Coupons and The Internet

For those of you that don’t want to order more than one newspaper I do have a recommendation.

Get one newspaper, find out if there are any coupons for items that you use a lot. My example is I use a good bit of dog food, therefore, I order units (there are usually 10 to 20 coupons per unit) of coupons from Top Rated sellers off Ebay. I try to only order from top rated sellers and I always use the Buy It Now option as I do not like to wait to see if I won the bidding process. I just can’t stand to waste the time AND if a sale comes up while the bidding process is open then you just missed out.

Search Ebay for coupons and take a wide-eyed look at what’s available. You are paying the clipping servers for their time in cutting these out for you and when there are a lot of coupons to be clipped it can be worth your while. I bought 10 coupons for Ben-Gay the large ultra strength tube and they were worth $5 each towards the end of last year. I used some locally to me at my walmart and took the rest on vacation to see my parents. They use this stuff heavily as well. Since I had already fully stocked my own household  on this item I used the remaining coupons and bought some for them to keep. Now the jumbo tube I bought sells for $6.83 so 10 tubes would have cost me $68.30 plus tax but buying the coupons cost me $4.66 but saved me $50.00 so if you take the total cost and include all my expenses I paid $1.83 per tube add in the $4.66 making each tube $2.30 but overall I saved a total of $45.30 even with purchasing the coupons online. That is a huge savings.

Kroger Sale 2-8-12 and Receipe

Whaaahooo…one of my favorite items is one sale at Kroger. I will be ad matching it at Walmart.

Asparagus is $.99 per lb now here’s one of our favorite dishes to use it in:

Pasta (just about any type will do – I use what’s on hand and I keep plenty stocked) 1 lb
1 bunch Asparagus
1 8 oz block smoked swiss/guyere cheese cut into small cubes
1 small bag of frozen peas
1 thick slice of ham (if I don’t have any leftover ham I will go to the deli and get any smoked ham and have them cut it on their thickest slice)

Cook pasta until ad dente (just follow the directions and make sure and take a test bite so you don’t over-cook it) pull pasta out of water and put into very large ceramic bowl and cover with foil to keep warm and put cheese cubes over pasta to melt while doing the rest, DO NOT DRAIN OR THROW OUT PASTA WATER, snap the ends off the asparagus then cut into bite sized pieces put the asparagus AND the frozen peas into the pasta water. Cook 4 1/2 to 5 minutes but not more than that or you ruin the asparagus. Now just BEFORE you put the veggies in to boil and lightly cook cut your ham into bite sized cubes and either heat up by sauteing or microwaving. Combine asparagus, peas and ham with pasta and if needed in small ladle amounts add in some of the pasta water to thin out the cheese a little to make it easier to work with the whole dish. Serve and enjoy.

 

Purina Alpo Review

Since I’m a couponer I decided to try a little something different on my beloved pooches and see how they liked it.

We bought Purina’s Dog Chow for our 3 1/2 year old golden retriever and 10 cans of the chunky meaty food to mix with it.

The first two nights went well and she ate with gusto and seemed to enjoy it. By the third night we noticed a little something different in her. She had just eaten her dinner and it had been about 20 minutes and she was just going crazy in our living room. We watched her and finally my husband and I both said ‘what’s wrong with her’?

It was at that point that I realized that she was acting like a child who can’t handle lots of sugar. It was like she was on a sugar high and she had developed a rash as well and could not stop scratching.

I went to the store and got her the other brand we have always fed our dogs and put her back on her regular diet and had to treat the rash and give her benadryl to counter the effects and now she’s back to normal.

Lesson learned, I (like an idiot) did not check the ingredient contents on the package of the Dog Chow. Now ingredients on anything are required by law to be listed by highest content to lowest. So when you see something and the first item on the list says for example ‘whole grain corn meal’ then the product is primarily comprised of that item and so on. Dog Chow has corn gluten meal listed as the third item on the bag. That means it’s full of sugar that our dog can not handle it.

We are back to our regular brand and maybe we’ll try something new again but next time we will be checking the labels before we buy so we make sure that ingredient is not listed at least so high on content.

What else does sugar do for your dog? It makes them fat and it’s harder to get the weight off your dog than it is to get it off your own body.

Foodtown match at Walmart 1-31-12

I had a few coupons that I did need to use and use the items all the time so I did a last minute ad match on Foodtown’s ad at Walmart tonight and here’s how it went:

2 Cascade trial sizes $.97 ea – 2 q’s for $.25 ea
2 Always Infinity 16ct $4.18 ea – 2 q’s for $2 ea
2 Colgate 6.4oz Foodtown ad match for $.99 (walmart’s price was $1.50) – 2 q’s for $.50 ea
4 French’s 14oz mustard Foodtown ad match for $.88 (walmart’s price 1.88) – 2 q’s for $.30 ea
1 gal milk $3.48
TOTAL BEFORE COUPONS $19.28

SAVED $6.10 in coupons and $5.02 in ad matching

PAID $13.18 plus tax