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This is a guest post by Katie who writes for one of our favorite blogs, Haute Apple Pie.  Check out their site for great money-saving recipes, tips to stay healthy, and other musings for the modern homemaker!

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With the shaky economic situation, everyone I know is still eliminating those “extra” costs and for people one of the first things to go is dining out with family and friends.  However, I've found that you don't necessarily have to give up the fun...or the food!  Instead of eating out, plan a special “date night in” or start a small dinner party group and rotate who hosts. Up the ante with restaurant-quality cuisine and you won't feel like you've missed a thing.

This Stuffed Chicken with Balsamic Reduction sounds and looks impressive but is much easier than it seems.  By using chicken, which is less expensive than a pricey steak, and common pantry ingredients, it's affordable as well. I served it with a box of store-bought roasted garlic pearl couscous and steamed broccoli.




Stuffed Chicken with Balsamic Reduction
1 pkg puff pastry sheets, thawed to room temp
4 chicken breasts
1 pkg baby portabella mushrooms, finely chopped
½ small onion, finely chopped
1 sprig rosemary, stripped
1 egg, beaten
Dijon mustard
salt, pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 400.  Wash and chop mushrooms.  Combine chopped onions and mushrooms with a little olive oil in a sauté pan.  Season with salt, pepper and rosemary and cook until tender.

Meanwhile, use a knife to butterfly each chicken breast by slitting it length-wise along its thicker side. Use a meat mallet or the bottom of a glass to pound the breast into a thin sheet, trying to keep it as intact as possible. Squeeze a strip of Dijon mustard along the middle of the breast and top with mushroom mixture. Roll chicken sheet around mixture.




Use a rolling pin to stretch out thawed puff pastry and slice pastry into four fat strips. Place each filled chicken on top of a puff pastry strip and wrap the pastry around it, tucking the ends under. Place in a glass baking pan and baste with egg wash to ensure a golden crust.  Bake for 30-35 minutes.  Use a meat thermometer or cut into one piece with a knife to check that the chicken is cooked, as oven times may vary slightly.

Tip:  Have extra pastry?  Slice thin strips and wrap them around the chicken bundles to create a pretty tie on the top.

Balsamic Reduction
½ C balsamic vinegar OR ¼ C balsamic vinegar and ¼ C port or red wine
2 Tbsp Dijon mustard

Reduction sounds fancy but that's literally all it is – a sauce that's been reduced and concentrated in flavor. Combine the ingredients in a small sauce pot over medium heat.  Simply let it simmer for 10-12 minutes, stirring occasionally until liquid reduces by about a third and the sauce thickens.

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Check out more of Haute Apple Pie's great recipes!

• Quick, Inexpensive, and Nutritious Recipes - Freezer Meatballs
  

Every family should have an emergency fund.  In fact, some financial planning gurus suggest that an emergency fund should contain 3-6 months of income.  

Why?  Stuff happens!  Cars break, furnaces break, dishwashers break – we are surrounded by convenience items that are pretty reliable, but there are just too many of them.  Additionally, people lose jobs even in good times, and anyone can get sick and miss work.  The bills don’t stop when the income stops.  

Credit cards are one way some people handle emergency expenses.  When something happened, you just put down the card and paid it back later.  

Unfortunately, as credit requirements have gotten tougher, that may not work.  Banks have become more willing to reduce lines of credit or cancel cards.  Even if you can get credit, it can be expensive.  

The cost of credit has been high for a long time.  Let’s do a quick example: 

• If you carry a balance of $5,000 and pay 2% interest each month, you are paying $100 a month without reducing your balance.
• That is $1200 a year.  
• If you keep doing that for 5 years, you have paid $6000 of interest for borrowing $5000. 
  

• In case you have a moment of feeling bad for banks taking “write-offs” on credit card loans, you might remember how much interest they earned before they couldn’t get all of the principal back.  
• In this example, if they only got half of the money back at the end of five years, the bank still received $8500 on a $5000 loan.  
• It takes some imagination to call that a loss! 
  

Over the past decade, many people have gotten rid of credit card debt by rolling it into a home mortgage or a home equity line of credit.  This makes sense from two points of view. 

• First, you can get a lower interest rate for a loan that is secured by your house.  
• Second, the interest paid can be deductible for tax purposes.  
• However, with the decline in home values, this option is not available for many people. 
  

Let’s look at the $5000 loan a different way.  Suppose we plan to pay back the loan over three years. 

• If we have to pay 2% interest per month, we will have to make payments of $196 at the end of each month to pay off the balance.  
• If we had saved enough in an emergency fund to “borrow” the money from our savings, the cost would have been much lower.  
• At current rates, you might only lose 1% interest on the funds you take from your account.  And that is an annual rate of interest, not a monthly rate!  
• At 1%, the payback would be only $141 a month or $55 a month less.  
• Over three years, that adds up to nearly $2000 of reduced costs.  
• That is assuming that you make every payment on time and don’t make any additional charges on the card.  
• The normal free interest if the balance is paid on time each month is lost while you are carrying a balance.  None of this happens if you use your emergency funds. 
  

Credit cards are a way of life today.  They are not all that expensive if you pay them off regularly.  But, using them as a substitute for having an emergency fund can be very expensive.  

If you are setting your sights on paying off your debt, don’t stop there. Keep going until you build up a fund to avoid getting back into debt in the future.  

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Featured Blogger Matt Easley is Vice President of Life Products at Allstate Life Insurance Company.  His views are his own and do not necessarily represent the positions, strategies, or opinions of Allstate.