Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap

Man, I'm depressed still not being able to write "And Garden Update" on that subject line. 

Once again this post is late.  The kids were off Friday (four day weekend for them) and my time was taken up most of Friday and Saturday cleaning the house in between just trying to find ENERGY to clean the house and getting together a mini-party for my son's birthday together for last night since his birthday is next week and my mother-in-law wanted to come over to celebrate with us (which was fun :). 

It's been hard to get energy to do much lately.  This cold really knocks the energy out of you.  Even the son, who normally doesn't sit still for much, ends up running around and taking a lot of breaks as he's getting over this thing.  Today I'm actively fighting falling asleep on my feet I'm so tired.  Not a great way to start off a day where you wanted to get baking done and be somewhat productive.  At least the kids are off of everything tomorrow as well so I can try and get my baking done then, I suppose.  I am working on goals and shopping goals for the month and will post them as soon as I'm done with them...I've been so tired it's been hard to think, so that doesn't help with figuring out what you need to get done in the month ahead.

Anyway, let's get onto the week on the money saving front!

1.   We had nice weather one day last week so I ran over to my mother-in-law's when she told me she had more raspberries ripe.  I got to visit for a bit and then picked over her raspberry bushes.  I'm glad I did it then as with how bad the rain has been it allowed me to pick them without getting soaked and help to stave off the cold getting worse.

I also went around the yard and picked the few raspberries my bushes were still producing.  The wild raspberries are definitely at the end of their production cycle for the year and are starting to die off around the yard on the berry end. 

While out I also forced myself (lack of energy) to harvest rose hips Friday because when I looked at the rose hips as I was harvesting the raspberries I realized that they were definitely ripe and mushy.  If I waited much longer to harvest they would start falling off of the bush and I'd be searching around for bug ridden ground fruit, which was definitely NOT ideal.   I'm a member of a bunch of berry picking groups for my local area on Facebook and they kept saying NOT to harvest rose hips until after the first frost.  Honestly I think they are going to be REALLY disappointed in the rose hips if they wait that long this year as I doubt there will be any worth picking on the bushes by that point.  I've gotten probably four cups of rose hips harvested (the wild rose bushes up here produce small hips) and I really am not sure if I'm going to to get much more than that this year.  They are so bug eaten and some of them are just plain rotten from all of the rain.  Bright side, though, is that I should be able to make the hips into a nice flavorful juice and then turn it into jelly if nothing else.  Rose hips are actually really good for you, including having really high levels of vitamin C, so the jelly will definitely be welcome this winter.

I also harvested some raspberry leaves while out and about to turn into raspberry leaf tea.  I dehydrated them and what was left of my herbs from my Aerogarden Friday as well.   I need to bag that all up today (wasn't up to it yesterday).  Some of my foraging efforts are seen up top there.

2.  I took the cabbage my neighbor gave me and combined it with the cabbage I already had and jarred up sauerkraut to ferment.  Now I get to impatiently wait a month or so *laugh*.

3.  Grocery shopping went well this week.  Carrs had some super sales on some things so I ran in and got their loss leader items.  I stuck to my list and got out for a little over 50.00 and that was after buying cat litter, cat food and other satellite items as well.  I saved nearly 70% off of regular prices by stacking coupons and sales.  Got to love it when things go that way.

4.  I spent a good portion of the week salvaging the garden and preserving what was left after moose got done with it.

5.  My husband had saved up gift cards to our local sporting goods store as his mom gives him a gift card for Father's Day and his birthday every year.  We went last night as a "fun outing" for the son as a mini-birthday gift (he LOVES playing in the tents they have set up in the store) and I ended up stealing some of my husband's gift cards to buy canning jars.  I got the last flat of pint jars they had on the shelves and a flat of 8 oz jelly jars as well to help get some canning done.  We paid for those and a small thing my husband found he wanted with a few of the giftcards he'd accumulated.  I felt kind of bad using his gift cards to pay for canning jars, but he just kind of shrugged it off and said I was using them to help feed him so he wasn't complaining.  I love that man.

6.  When I picked up my son's birthday gift online (I got him a full body sock...think of a kid looking like Gumby shoved into a stretchy suit) and when I ordered it I added a few add on items that we needed so I wouldn't have to put together a 25.00 order later on to get them.  I got my husband a back up oil filter for his truck and also got a small skein of yellow cotton yarn (it was a dollar and some change) to make myself a new pot holder for the kitchen.

7.  One of the disadvantages of being sick was that while I'm only getting two eggs a day (sometimes...one of the hens that is laying right now lays sporadic as I think she's older than the other two), being sick and out of it for two weeks and taking care of sick kids and husband for another two... you end up with a lot of eggs.  I also still have heavy cream left from when I bought it on a super good deal at Carrs when they gave me a super low personalized price on the stuff (turns out when the husband and kids are sick they don't want to eat ice cream and we now have about a gallon and a half of the stuff in the freezer), so I tried to think of things to do with eggs and cream.  I gave a few eggs to my mother-in-law when she was over last night and then took another dozen and decided to make Alton Brown's recipe for aged eggnog out of them and a pint of the cream.  The eggnog is actually supposed to age for a few months to mellow out the alcohol in it and give it a better flavor, so he recommended starting it last month for Christmastime.  So, I was a bit late on getting some started.  I used up pretty much every bit of hard alcohol we had in the house to get it done, which luckily a friend of mine who was moving gave us a bottle of rum and a half bottle of bourbon before she left state as she didn't want to worry about taking it across the border and stuff, so I had enough alcohol to get it done.  Really, that bottle of rum was used to steep vanilla extract and make eggnog...I think that Pam would be happy with that *laugh*.  And hey, I can convince myself that I am preserving a dozen eggs for future use this way ;).

The nicest part of the aged eggnog is that it doesn't go bad (so long as you keep it refrigerated anyway).  People actually will age it for a year before consuming it, which honestly we drink so little around here that it can take us a good six months to drink a recipe of the stuff, so I'm glad that it stays good. 

8.  My husband brought the HUGE amount of cardboard we had accumulated over the last...goodness knows how long...to the recycling center yesterday.  In lieu of giving them a donation (which is all they ask for when you bring your recycling in) he instead looked at some electrical work they needed to have done and gave them his input.  He's done work for them in the past, so he was happy to help them out and get rid of the cardboard which would have cost us a goodly amount of money to throw away at the dump.

And yeah, that's all I can think of right now that went on this week.  How about you?  How did your week go?