Safeway Back to School Giveaway

 *Giveaway is now closed. Stay tuned for winner announcement!*

Safeway Stores (including Dominick's, Tom Thumb, Vons and Genuardi's) have always been committed to helping family's save money. Now, they are helping our local schools as well by bringing two different programs together to help consumers help their favorite local schools. Safeway's "2 Ways 2 Earn" combines the Box Tops For Education program with the "10% Goes Back to Schools" program.


Box Tops for Education also recently made it even easier to earn for your school by including 4 new brands of products: Progresso Soup, Totino's Pizza, Betty Crocker Cake Mixes and Gold Medal Flour!

We can help schools even further by looking for the "10% Goes Back to Schools" yellow school bus tags on over 2000 products sold at Safeway until Sept 14. When you purchase these participating products with your Safeway Club Card, Safeway will give 10% of the purchase price back to the school of your choice!



Here's how it works!

• Check your receipts from Aug 11-Sept 14. The total will be updated each time you shop.

• Beginning on Sept 18, a redemption code will be printed on the bottom of your receipt.

• Visit backtoschool.escrip.com before October 13 to choose your favorite participating local school. The enter your redemption code to make your donation!

 Super easy, right?! To learn more about these programs, visit 2ways2earn.com! Be sure to enter the Safeway Bonus Box Tops Sweepstakes for your chance to win 1,000 Box Tops for your local school while you're there too!

Safeway, General Mills and MyBlogSpark gave me the opportunity to try out the program by sending me a $25 Safeway gift card and a 50 Bonus Box Tops Certificate. The program really is just as easy as they say!

General Mills and the Safeway family of stores through MyBlogSpark want to give one of my readers a chance to earn some great rewards for their local participating school as well! They are offering one of my readers the same prize pack they sent me, a $25 Safeway giftcard and a 50 Bonus Box Tops Certificate to help you help the local school of your choice!


To Enter:

For your first (& mandatory) entry, tell me why you entered the Safeway Bonus Box Tops Sweepstakes and how winning & earning Box Tops For Education will benefit your favorite local school.

Bonus Entries: (Please leave a separate comment for each item you do.)

• Follow my blog on Google Friend Connect 
• Subscribe via email (be sure to confirm your subscription!)
• Tell me your favorite thing about Fall and Back to School

Giveaway is open to U.S. Residents and will end on Sept 14 at 5pm est. I will choose one winner via Random.org and contact the winner by email. (Please be sure to include your email address in your entries so I can contact you if you win!) The winner will have 48 hours to respond with their mailing address. Good luck!!

Disclosure: Safeway and General Mills, through MyBlogSpark, sent me a $25 Safeway gift card and a 50 Bonus Box Tops Certificate to try out their promotion. They are also supplying an identical prize pack to the winner of my giveaway. The opinions and views in this post, however, are mine and they have not been influenced or edited by Safeway, General Mills or MyBlogSpark.

C & PB Bananas

So here's that yummy recipe I was telling you about. I'm a camping cook novice. I've been camping many times before, but I was never in charge of any of the cooking. My dad and I went camping every summer, but we camped at a folk festival, so there were always plenty of food vendors to choose from. So camping this weekend was going to be a new cooking experience for me.

We planned on making chicken and veggie shish kabobs with teriyaki sauce (which turned out wonderfully!) and then we needed a dessert. The other couple we were camping with was planning burgers and s'mores one night, so I wanted a fun dessert that was different. Many of the recipes I found online involved either dutch ovens (which I don't have) or marshmallows. I didn't want to use marshmallows since we'd be having s'mores. In my search, I found many mentions of stuffed banana desserts that you wrap in foil and cook on the fire. All of the recipes I found involved marshmallows, so I decided to substitute peanut butter and we got C & PB Bananas!

You'll need:

• a banana for each person in your group (choose ripe ones, but not mushy-ripe)
• a bag of mini-chocolate chips (I used semi-sweet)
• creamy peanut butter (you can use crunchy too)
• aluminum foil
• a knife (can be plastic. no need to be too sharp)
• spoons for eating

 Peel the top peel section of a banana (cutting into the base of the stem on the bottom side of the banana will help you in just peeling the top piece). Once peeled back, slice lengthwise down the center of the banana. Spread peanut butter down the middle of the banana and sprinkle with chocolate chips. Re-cover with the top peel and wrap banana with foil. Repeat for each banana. Take your foil-wrapped bananas and put them in the fire (making sure that you can get them out again without burning yourself!) Cook for about 5-10min (or until insides of banana are warm and gooey.)  Enjoy with spoons!

**I also read that if the banana peel is black, then they're done. We didn't let ours get too too hot because we didn't know what would happen if it started to burn, but they was delicious regardless. The peanut butter and chocolate chips melted and the combination with the banana was super-tasty!

The meal that night was delicious! I admit, our friend Jessica did most of the actual kabob grilling, but I helped and they turned out to be so good! Our first camp-cooking experience was a success. And those bananas...yum! So good and really simple to prepare! I wish I had a picture of them for you, but we just dug right in without thinking. I hope you can imagine how delicious they looked and that if you try them, you enjoy them too!

Back from Vacay!

It's always nice to get away, even if it's just for a few days. Over the holiday weekend, we went camping with some friends up in the mountains of Pennsylvania. We had a wonderful time in the cool mountain air. We hiked down the Grand Canyon of PA (and back up, ugh! 1400 ft!), visited a small zoo and saw some really interesting animals, made S'mores and cooked stuffed bananas over the fire. (They were really delicious, by the way. I'll share the recipe soon!) It was very very cold at night, so we were pretty bundled, but that made the fire feel even better. We had a ton of fun playing games and chatting. It was a really nice campground too. If you're ever interested in camping up near the Grand Canyon of PA, check out the Stony Fork Campground. Really reasonable and very clean. They have flush toilets, hot showers, a pool, game room, a lake to fish in and much more. It was a really nice place to spend a few days. I really recommend it.

But now we're home and the unavoidable unpacking, laundry and putting away has to happen. That's the only part of vacation I don't like! I'll share pics and that recipe soon!

Operation Beautiful Winner!!

Congrats to Debbie for winning my Operation Beautiful Giveaway!

(Debbie, I've emailed you so check your inbox!)

Thanks for entering everyone!!

Happy Weekend!

I'm starting my weekend early. We're going camping up in the mountains and leaving early tomorrow. It's supposed to be a chilly weekend up there, so for us, this Labor Day weekend will really feel like the end of summer. I'm looking forward to it though. A little hiking, a campfire, sleeping under the stars. It's going to be really nice to have some peace and quiet. I won't have any way to get online up there so if you need to contact me, I'll get back to you as soon as I can. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend! Enjoy your picnics and barbecues!

Savor the Sweetness

This summer was full of sweet moments. And I don't just mean sugary sweet, although there was one coffee ice cream cone that I couldn't help but slow down and savor. It was on a pretzel cone and each lick got a little bit of sweet coffee ice cream and a little bit of salt from the cone. It was DELICIOUS! And then last month at a family party, I was holding my cousin's 17 month old son and he turned and kissed me right on the mouth. It was adorable and so so sweet! And when my boyfriend's cousin had her baby early in August, we went to visit and I held her when she was only 4 days old. She was so tiny and just so peaceful sleeping in my arms. It was definitely a moment that I stopped to savor the sweetness. There have been a bunch of moments where family and friends were together, for a birthday or a picnic, and I sat back to just enjoy being together. Soaking in how lucky we are to have each other.

Pepperidge Farms recently released their newest treat, the Strawberry Milano cookies. And to celebrate they have launched a new Milano Facebook page to encourage fans to share their "Milano Moments" and talk about those moments that require savoring the sweetness of life! You should go check it out! :)

They're also offering a $1 off coupon so you can try new Strawberry Milano cookies yourself!

I posted this post, working with the One2One Network and Pepperidge Farm. By participating, I am eligible to win a giftcard. The words and views stated here are mine and were not swayed by either One2One or Pepperidge Farm.

Happy September!

So September is here. It's a little sad because summer is over, but I'm excited about fall. I love the changing leaves and the crisp morning air. Time to pull out my wrap sweaters and get cozy with hot cider. I'm also looking forward to the arrival of ghosts and goblins with Halloween and then the family togetherness of Thanksgiving. I'm very ready for a change from these 90 degree days. I have a good feeling it's going to be a wonderful autumn!