Minimizing how often I need to go grocery shopping

I try to have us eat as many meals as possible at home. Home cooking (at least, my home cooking) is far healthier than eating at restaurants, not to mention more convenient and cheaper. Of course, you also need to consider the time you spend grocery shopping. I don't particularly enjoy that, so I like to buy items that are nutritious, and stay fresh for a long time.

I collect tasty, healthy recipes for things that don't require a lot of fresh ingredients. For example, 3 bean salad made of various types of canned beans. The only fresh ingredients are onions and parsley. Onions last a very long time in the fridge, so you'd only need to buy the parsley fresh.

Or my corn and black bean salad. Very yummy, the only fresh ingredients it requires are onion and cilantro.

Cabbage, in the form of cole slaw, is great. Delicious, healthy, everyone loves it, and cabbage lasts for weeks in the fridge - unlike green salad, which lasts a few days.

Cauliflower is another very healthy vegetable, and a good keeper in the fridge. Lasts a couple weeks at the least.

Let's not forget carrots! They last forever as well. Need some more carrot recipes. I do have some carrot slaw recipes that are great.

I could use some more tips for keeping cilantro and parsley fresh in the fridge, though. These are some very useful herbs, but they have a tendancy to go all brown and mushy in my fridge.

Tracking finances on Yodlee

I found out a few months ago about a website called Yodlee (the actual URL is moneycenter.yodlee.com). It's site that can aggregate all your finances in one place. Basically you give them ALL your financial information (credit card, bank, mutual funds, etc) and they will download information for you, so you can click one "update all accounts" button, and get your transaction history, net worth, recent expenditures, and so on.

Giving a third party the password to all your accounts is probably a big leap of faith for many people. But I trust online security more than I do credit card security at your average restaurant. And the only time I've ever had a fraudulent transaction on my credit card, it was a local thing, not something that happened online.

Using this website has simplified my life tremendously. Before, I had a monthly routine of putting all my transaction into Microsoft Money, categorizing them, checking the Microsoft Money totals against the financial institution. I had a whole list of steps that I had to go through before I could check off the "did MS Money" task from my to-do list. Frequently I procrastinated because it was so tedious. This made things more difficult for myself down the line.

Now things are much simplier. I just login to Yodlee, update all my accounts (by pressing one button), and check recent transaction to make sure they're all kosher. Of course, there's not nearly as many bells and whistles as I had with Microsoft Money, but there's also not nearly as much work, nor as many opportunities for error.

All in all, I consider this a great leap forward in simplifying my life financially.