Jill Cataldo's Super-Couponing

Here are your CVS/pharmacy deals...
View weekly ad | Load SavingStar ecoupons

Top deals:
FREE Mars singles, .57 VO5 haircare, .65 Duncan Hines brownie mix, $1 Revlon Colorsilk haircolor, $1.29 Cheerios, $1.43 Special K, $1.99 U by Kotex, $2.49 Depend, $8 Zyrtec

Here are your Walmart deals for the current week...

Top deals:
FREE Poise, .47 Ivory soap 3-packs, .74 French's mustard, .97 Bounce dryer sheets, .98 Vlasic pickles, $1.24 Cover Girl nail polish, $1.28 Breyers Real Fruit ice cream topping, $1.63 Suddenly Salad, $1.97 Maybelline Color Show nail polish

Here are your Dominick's deals for the current week...
View weekly ad | Load Dominick's Just For U ecoupons and Deal Match offers

Top deals:
.50 Yopa Greek yogurt, .84 Pillsbury Grands, .97 Kellogg's cereal, .99 Cool Whip, .99 Lucerne cream cheese, .99 Lucerne eggs, $1.16 Pop-Tarts, $1.38 Nabisco crackers, $1.50 Tradewinds tea, $1.75 Coke 12-packs, $1.97 Capri-Sun, $2.12 Domino sugar, $2.74 Johnsonville sausage, $2.99 MorningStar Farms

Here are your Schnucks deals for the current week... View weekly ad | Load "Schnupons" ecoupons

Top deals:
.39 Campbell's pork & beans, .89 Hunter hot dogs, $1 North Star pops$1.20 Lipton tea bags, $1.67 Twizzlers, $1.70 Smart Ones entrees, $1.88 Nabisco crackers, $2 Hellmann's mayonnaise and FREE Schnucks bread crumbs, $2.15 Domino sugar, $2.25 Johnsonville sausage, $5.09 Angel Soft bath tissue

Deals of the Week are now live! There are so many good deals this week - lots of freebies, and if you're a charcoal griller, you won't want to miss Walmart's crazy-good price on Kingsford charcoal this week too. (Hint: 30 pounds of Kingsford AND a bottle of KC Masterpiece for $6.98!)

This week's Sunday Chicago Tribune features THREE inserts: Two SmartSource (SS1 and SS2), and a RedPlum (RP). The Parade magazine also has a page with four Glade air freshener coupons and a $3 Probiotic Pearls coupon. And, my plastic wraparound bag that today's Trib came in has two $1 coupons inside for Advil and Children's Advil. Grab all of these if you're interested...

Blog Giveway! There are only TWO more days to enter to win one of three Good Cook batter bowls! Learn how you can win even more Good Cook goodies with their current Treasure Hunt contest.

Have a great week, and happy shopping!

Here are your Target deals for the current week...
View weekly ad | Print store coupons from Target.com

Top deals:
FREE women's flip flops, $1.04 Kool-Aid Jammers, $1.49 Banana Boat sunscreen, $1.65 Ben & Jerry's and Frutarre, $2.25 Breyer's ice cream, $3.16 Aveeno skincare, $4.99 Starbucks coffee

I've blogged about the truth behind the Walmart Challenge commercials before (see Where Walmart gets it wrong: The comparison-shopping challenge and Walmart's "Receipt Comparison" tool: Inaccurate and misleading.)

Today, Coupons In The News spoke with several of the "Walmart Moms" featured in these ads and learned that their appearances may have been incentivized and encouraged to tilt the challenge in favor of Walmart over the competing store:

Gretchen, who lives in Pennsylvania, was chosen for a Walmart ad in March of this year. Teandra, from New Mexico, shot her ad in April. Each had audition experiences similar to Laura and Joyce. But each ultimately found herself participating in a “savings contest” of sorts. When Gretchen went shopping at her local Weis grocery store, and Teandra went to Albertsons, each found herself shopping alongside another “real Mom”. Everyone was given an envelope of $250 in cash, and told to choose a few dozen items that they would typically purchase.

When they were done, and the prices of their items were compared with Walmart’s, the shopper who ended up saving the most at Walmart was selected to appear in a commercial, while the other Mom was sent home. Everyone got a $250 gift card for their trouble – so the total compensation package still equals $500 – but only the Mom who saved the most got to be on TV. In other words, only the Mom who bought things with the biggest price differential from one store to the next got her moment in the spotlight. So any Mom who might have purposely bought big-ticket items at the grocery store that weren’t on sale, that she knew would be cheaper at Walmart, had the best chance of getting on TV. Just as Schnucks had feared.

... the new “whoever saves more gets to be on TV” method of choosing participants does raise some questions. It lends legitimacy to Schnucks’ suspicion that Walmart “cherry-picked (participants’) receipts from among others in an effort to manufacture the largest price differential”.

Interesting - and as many of us on the blog have said, it would be extremely easy to tilt these ads in favor of either store, depending on what was purchased on which day.

Are you playing the Good Cook Touch Treasure Hunt online contest? This fun, search-for-clues for a chance to win $1000 worth of new cookware web game is still on through May 21st! And, if you haven't entered yet, I have my own blog giveaway that's running in conjunction with this contest. Enter to win one of four Good Cook Touch 2-Quart Batter Bowls!

As we're midway through this promotion, Good Cook sent over some more new Touch products for me to use and play with. My new favorite? The Good Cook Touch Citrus Zester. While I have several favorite recipes that call for citrus zest, I never actually had a tool designed specifically for this purpose. I have always used the edge of a knife. (Not optimal, I know.)

So, now that I have a tool specifically for zesting, I can share with you one of my favorite recipes for seafood! Many years ago, I took a seafood cooking class at Jewel-Osco (do you remember when they used to do those in-store classes?) I still have my recipe instruction sheet from this class, which was taught at the Algonquin Jewel-Osco by chef Kit Moss on February 11th, 1998! I know this because the recipe sheet contains all of that information, and the fact that it's been in my recipe file this long should be an indicator as to how much I like this dish. My own tweaking to this over the past 15 (!) years has been to add a tablespoon of sesame oil too, plus an extra tablespoon of honey -- both of which I'm noting here: