Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap

 When it came to money saving things this week, I actually did pretty well!  So, let's get to it!

1.  I wanted to have hamburgers one evening this week, but we didn't have any hamburger buns.  I stopped buying them and am just buying the squishy store bread loaves instead as my son will eat those too and that way I don't have to buy squishy bread and hotdog and hamburger buns, instead I am letting the cheap store bread multi-task as hotdog and hamburger buns.  Things are just getting too expensive NOT to cut back on things like that.  Anyway, my husband was really wanting to eat the burgers on hamburger buns, so for about the 18th bazillionth time I tried to make hamburger buns.  I took my favorite bread in an hour recipe and split it in half as normal (it normally makes two loaves of bread at a time) and shaped half of it into hamburger buns.  I then put an egg wash on top and sprinkled the buns with sesame seeds (also I have started adding 2 TBS of dehydrated milk powder to the flour mix when I make the bread...it gives the bread a wonderfully light crumb to it :) and put it into the oven for 20 minutes.  And they came out PERFECT!!!  I am so proud of myself that hamburger buns finally worked for me *laugh*.

And yes, I was so proud I took pictures of the buns when I put them on the cooling rack and I MIGHT have sent said picture to a bunch of different people *laugh*.

2.  My daughter wanted to get some crafting supplies for a project and we all desperately needed to get out of the house (in all honesty), so we took a trip to Michaels and let Alvah run around with his dad while I tried to figure out what the daughter was planning for her craft project and what materials she might need.  She finally settled on a multi-pack of glitter to get herself started.  She paid for her stuff with a gift card she'd gotten for Christmas, so it didn't cost anything out of pocket.  It amazes me how frugal that child is.  She's still got money left on her gift card from her birthday LAST year and is carefully planning what she might want to use up the money with in the future.

3.  I gave my husband and daughter haircuts.  I started using this (no associate links, just sharing) when I'd give my husband a haircut during quarantine back in 2020 and it has done wonders when he wants a haircut but doesn't want to spend the money to go to a barber.  It doesn't give him that spit and polished look that a barber gives him, but I can give him a decent trim now and make him look neat and clean again, which is really all he wants anyway.

Now that the daughter is going through teenage changes, we've found that her hair is growing out curlier and curlier.  So far her hair is thick enough that she just has a natural wave to her hair, but when I cut her split ends off of her hair she is a bit freaked that her ends are curling up on her.  Curly hair runs on my husband's side of the family, but not mine, so I'm clueless on wavy/curly hair.  So, this is turning into a learning curve for her and me *laugh*.  I feel kind of bad for her as she actually loves having straight hair (I would have loved to have had ANY wave to my hair at all as a kid in comparison...hairspray falls out of my hair within an hour, perms would fall out of my hair within a few weeks...it was sad.  I still have flat as a board hair, but I have learned to accept and like it over the years) and she really doesn't like the curly cues she has for bangs right now as her hair naturally breaks off and grows out.  I think they are cute.  Her, not so much *laugh*.

4.  I was digging through the freezer and found some rhubarb from last summer that I really needed to use up and while looking in the fridge I found 3 oranges left from Christmas that were still good, but did need to be used.  I was flipping through my Ball Home Preserving book and found a recipe for "Rhubarb Orange Jam" which sounded intriguing as it used the orange peel from one orange and you cut it into small slices and put it in the jam as well as the juice from the oranges.  I wasn't sure if you were supposed to use the pith from the peel or not, so I decided to just use the zest part and carefully peeled the orange and sliced the good part of the peel into small slices like the instructions said and made the jam.  It called for EXACTLY how much rhubarb I had in the freezer (5 cups), sugar, pectin and 2 oranges, so I was happy as it used up things that I wanted to use up (and rhubarb in jam I was doubly down with as I like rhubarb).  I was really thrilled when I tried a bit of the jam that had fallen from the ladle when I was filling the jars after it had cooled and found that the jam tastes like orange marmalade!!!  I LOVE marmalade, so it was an awesome recipe experiment for me!  I have a huge rhubarb plant now and have a ton of rhubarb to find uses for during the summer, so I was happy as a clam to add this to my recipe list.  You can find the recipe here on the Bernardin Canadian site if you are curious :).

I even put "Rhubarb Orange Marmalade" on the labels because it tastes like marmalade to me.

By the way, I know that I've read that pectin will stop working over time, so I was worried about mine as it is at least four years old now (I bought bulk pectin as I was canning more jams and jellies back then and I just haven't gone through it all over the years) and I am pleased to say my pectin worked just fine when I used it in this recipe.

5.  I had some onions that were going to sprout or potentially go bad on me if I didn't use them (which stank as they were actually recently bought) and while cruising around online I found some recipes, including one by Ball, for French Onion Soup that you could can.  I loved the idea of canning some up to use up my onions as I love French Onion soup and it seems like restaurants don't serve it anymore (I'm looking at you Red Robin).  So, I canned some up to make a quick side of French Onion Soup with dinner some nights.  It tasted awesome before it went into the jars, so I was happy.  I ended up using the Ball recipe (you can Google it if interested), but ended up using white wine instead of red because that is what I had.  And my first foray into pressure canning for this year began *laugh*.

6.  I also found what was left of the turkey carcass from Thanksgiving, so I made turkey stock out of it.  I then combined it with the giblet stock I made during Thanksgiving last year and canned it all.  It tastes AWESOME and I am so glad that I pressure canned it for ease of use later.  And double bonus by doing it is that I'm freeing up freezer space!

7.  I mended my sweater that my cat managed to snag by pulling out my crochet hooks and getting to work.  I then thought how much fun it would be to knit a scarf for fun this winter...until I looked at the price on yarn and stuff and just decided I didn't need to knit anything that badly *laugh*.

8.  I mended a work shirt of my husband's.  He'd accidently caught and torn the seam of the shirt's pocket.  Since he keeps his reading glasses in his shirt pocket, he asked me to mend it right away, but was worried I wouldn't get to it right away.  Ten minutes later and he had his shirt back all mended as it was a relatively easy fix.

9.  I was watching some YouTube videos where they were baking and/or cooking different recipes from Pinterest or from different sites (like one YouTuber I follow is cooking Ree Drummond recipes and trying them out on her family).  I found a few that intrigued me (like I found a German cookie recipe I want to try) and bookmarked them to make hopefully soon.

10.  I needed to order some things and was able to use free shipping codes to get free delivery of the items I needed.  I ALWAYS get a kick out of free delivery once I moved to Alaska *laugh*.

11.  I found a few things in the pantry and freezer that needed to be used up, so we ate those items the last few weeks.  A few items had gotten their vacuum seal compromised and had some freezer burn, but I managed (by some creative uses of marinades) to cook them in such a way that they didn't taste like freezer.

And there you go folks.  Some of the ways I saved money last week.  How about you?