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Getting online recipes in line – finally

Most people who cook today in the technological world we live in, get recipes online.  It is convenient and people post how they liked the dish, whether it is too spicy or bland and how easy it was to make.  People also list additions, subtractions or problems that they had with the recipe which can save you a lot of time and energy when making it for the first time.

I usually print the recipe to put into my recipe holder and at the same time, I copy and paste the recipe into an e-mail that I send to myself.  It is important that you don’t just e-mail the link to the recipe.  A lot of websites that provide recipes give you an option to do this but a lot of them do not allow permanent access to their recipes.  Instead, they are just available for a period of time.  I keep a folder in my e-mail marked recipes and I always put the recipe title on the subject line.  I have found this to be very useful for many reasons. 

If something happens to the printed recipe, you always have a copy to refer to and reprint.   Also, if anyone wants a copy of your recipe, you can just e-mail it or print it for them on the spot.  If you put all your recipes in a folder in your e-mail, you can use the search function on your e-mail to find a recipe quickly. 

I hope that you will incorporate my technique of e-mailing your online recipes to yourself and keeping an e-mail folder for them.  I think you will find it to save a lot of time, energy and unneeded searching when you need to get down to the business of cooking.

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Get your Groupon Coupon!

My favorite fairly new discount website is groupon.com.  This website offers discounts of usually a minumim of 50% off of the value of the daily offer.  How it works is that there is a daily coupon for a local business such as a local restaurant, wine bar, tour, museum, experience or merchandise in Seattle.  The offer will be for $40 worth of food or merchandise at the discounted price of $20.  Then, if enough people buy the groupon, then the deal goes through and you get your discount.  You then get your certificate e-mailed to you and you just print it to take with you and enjoy your discount.  You do have to check to make sure that follow any restrictions.  You may need reservations or there may be a restriction that you can’t use it on Valentine’s Day.  However, in my experience, I have not seen a lot of restrictions for the groupons.

Groupon offers daily coupons in many major cities.  You can look up any city you like such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. or San Francisco and they will have a deal of the day as well.  If you are travelling, it is nice to watch the groupon offers for that city for a few weeks so you can see if they offer anything that you might want to do while you are visiting.  I recently did this on a trip to New York City.  I got $60 worth of food for $30 in a restaurant I probably would have never found and it was the best meal of our entire trip.  Groupon also offers tourist type activities such as discounts on local attractions.  You might be able to get a tour or museum ticket that you were going to buy anyway but you can get for half-price.  You can also become a tourist in your own city by taking a tour that maybe you have been meaning to do but haven’t gotten around to it.  If you can do it at half-price, it would make it all the easier to go.

You can sign up on the groupon website to get a daily e-mail of the deal of the day.  It just takes a few seconds to glance at the e-mail and see if it is something your interested in or not.  The groupon usually expires at the end of the day unless there is limited availability and it sells out.  I have only seen that a few times.  So by all means, get your groupon!