Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap

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Doing frugal posts this last bit has become a bit challenging for me as it seems saving money is becoming harder and harder in our current world conditions.  I know I'm not alone, far from it, in feeling that way.  I went shopping on Friday and my daughter got to deal with me being in near tears in frustration as I was trying to get a list of like 14 items and only about 3 of them were available.  After about the 8th item not being in stock, an empty cat food isle, no asparagus that was supposed to be on sale (no asparagus period, actually), no peanut safe ice cream to be had, products still out of stock for over a month straight now, no allergy meds for the son on the shelf at all (thank goodness for Amazon in this case, or I don't know what I'd do), and things...it was really not fun.  The rest of the items I had on my list I just had to kind of figure out other solutions for (if there were any solutions available) and nothing was cheap that I could actually get.  It was so frustrating and depressing.  My grocery bill has just about tripled now and that is WITH shopping sales and being super careful.  At least I was able to find vegetable oil at Fred Meyer this week.

My natural gas bill went up this month when it should have gone down as the worst part of winter temperatures is over.  Putting a quarter of a tank of gas in my truck actually hurt to do this week and it's just going to get worse.  This inflation spiral we are in, combined with EVERYTHING else, and I know I speak for all here, sucks. 

One of the big things that happened this week for me and in the not good department was the deli drawer in our fridge decided to self destruct.  It broke a runner on one side a while ago (since the fridge is probably about 20 years old, it shouldn't surprise me when these things happen, but it does), so I was keeping as little weight in it as possible to help keep it together, but this last week it broke the other side and the deli drawer was barely hanging onto the shelf suddenly when I went to close it.  I grabbed it to stop it from collapsing onto the shelf beneath it and yelled for my daughter to bring me my tool bag as I worked on unloading the deli drawer shelf with one hand while holding up the drawer with the other so it wouldn't start breaking other things in the fridge.  It was an interesting afternoon.  I finally figured out how to get the drawer off of the shelf so I could still use the shelf it was on (yay) and I then spent the entirety of that afternoon reorganizing and deep cleaning my fridge.  Which, if there was a silver lining to losing the drawer it was that I was able to get the deep cleaning of the fridge done as that was on my Spring cleaning/to do list.  I put everything I could that had been in the deli drawer into Gladware like containers and stacked them on one shelf in the fridge.  Not ideal, but it works and we can find everything, so I'll go with it.

So, let's get onto other things we've been up to around here.

1.  I decided it was time to crack open a bucket of wheat and grind some wheat flour.  I wanted to see how the hand grinder by itself worked (no motor or anything) and I wanted to start getting into practice of how to make flour (putting it through different sifters to sift out bran and how fine I wanted to grind the flour, etc) and use it in baking so that we could still get a decent result in our baked goods.  So, what I found was this.  I really need my husband to up his game on getting a motor mount made for the wheat grinder (it is able to be motorized, which is one of the reasons I bought my particular wheat grinder).  We downloaded the specs on what type of motor we would need and what pully and belt system the manufacturer stated to use and the rest is up to my husband who knows what he's doing *laugh*.

I've found that once you are in a rhythm you can grind all day long with a hand grinder, really, if you wanted to, but the volume of flour to work...it would be ridiculous trying to grind a week's worth of flour at one time with a hand grinder.  I'm starting to see why the term "the DAILY grind" came into being as it would take so long just to grind a day's worth of flour, that basically that was all people had time for.  The daughter and I (mainly me) ground wheat for an hour straight and we ended up with roughly three cups of wheat flour by the end of the process (after sieving out the coarsest of the bran and so forth so that the final baked goods wouldn't be too dense).  I have done that the last couple of weeks and been using the three cups of flour I make to pad out my bread flour and all purpose flour so that they'll last longer and also add some better nutrition to our diets.  I grind it directly into the Rubbermaid container seen above and then after sieving it I put it back into the container, put the lid on and put it in the fridge so that the nutritional value won't deteriorate so quickly over the course of the week.

2.  My kids really needed new Spring/Fall jackets as they had both grown so much.  We went to the used stores over the weekend and found several jackets for the daughter and a new rain jacket for the son (the daughter will just use the son's old rain jacket, if needed, until we can find her one that is more to her tastes).  The daughter really wanted a pink jacket, but couldn't find one in her size.  I got home and checked the size on a pink jacket I had bought for myself last year at a good price and realized that it would probably fit the daughter (I'm now the smallest person in the family as the daughter and son have grown so much and/or have a different build than I do) as I am always cold so I bought a jacket that I could layer under.  She tried it on and it fit her perfectly, so I just gave it to her.  She's super happy with it and I just pulled out my old jacket (I replaced it so I could get a jacket with a hood on it, but it still works fine) for myself.  My husband found several old jackets of his that the son could have and fit him well, so it all worked out for now without a ton of money being spent.

3.  The daughter outgrew her jeans, so when we went to the used store I found several pairs that would fit her with her current build (she's at those awkward build teen years) and she's super happy as the new jeans are comfy, fit her well and were in brand new condition at the used store (two pairs even still had the original price tags on them).  When we got home I had her pull out the pairs of jeans she had outgrown and I realized that they were in my size and they fit me fine.  So, I inherited a few pairs of jeans for later use.

4.  We watched a few movies for free on YouTube.

5.  I did my yearly donation of 1.00 to Rifftrax to support their yearly Kickstarter campaign.  For just 1.00 and showing support it helps to unlock certain stretch goals in their campaign every year, so for a 1.00 investment I'll be getting 10 free shorts (a 10.00 value) and a few other goals they opened to all backers during the campaign.  I feel for a 1.00 investment it is worth it for the laughter, which in the current world, I think we could all use more of.

6.  I had a problem with a Tillamook product.  I wrote them to just report the issue so they could check their equipment to make sure it was sealing things correctly, but not really wanting anything in return for it.  But, they did send me coupons as a thank you for reporting the issue and providing the product code and things and so they sent me enough coupons to replace the product I had reported about.  I was touched that they did that, honestly, as I know how tough things are for everyone (including farmers and the farmer co-ops), so I gratefully went and got a free block of cheese this weekend.

7.  I started to pop open some of my food storage to use up things that were getting near their use by dates.  I tried the Augason Farms Creamy Potato Soup (affiliate link) mix with dinner one night and with a bit of tweaking with some seasonings it was really good!  I was happy as it won't be too painful to eat *laugh*.  I also opened a thing of quick oats to make homemade oatmeal packets, which has been kind of fun to put together.  I bought some Augason Farms banana chips (affiliate link.  I linked to them as they are currently 9.98 for a number 10 can, but that changes quickly, so if they are expensive wait a while and put them in your cart to save for later.  Eventually they do go down to about 10.00 and that is when I would buy them) as part of my food storage and used those to make some chocolate almond butter (I just got some powdered chocolate Barney butter a while ago and used that in the packet) banana oatmeal packets and those were actually kind of tasty :).  

8.  I'm continuing the deep cleaning and organizing that comes with the Spring Cleaning bug.  I am actually really pleased with myself the last few years as I'm determined that if I buy something that I HAVE to have a place to put it and a purpose for it before I commit to buy it.  This has included walking away from things that in the past I probably would have bought and tried to find space for later, which just opens the door for frustration and in a lot of cases eventually re-donating to the used store later on when you realize that the thing you really wanted just wasn't going to work in your house.  

For instance when we went to the used store over the weekend I found a set of three stainless steel mixing bowls for cheap.  They were lightweight, decently big and deep.  I have been wanting to get bowls like this to use during canning season and things as it always seems like you never have enough bowls when you start projects like that.  The two smaller bowls I happily grabbed, but the biggest bowl was a really good price, but I was worried it was too big to fit in my cabinets (which, when I tried to put it with my other mixing bowls, I was right, it is too big).  My husband came up with the idea to store it on top of the kitchen cabinets and after thinking about it for a moment I knew where I could put it on the cabinets where it would work well, so I bought it and that is where it sits ready for canning season.

Meanwhile I found a bunch of Corelle plates and bowls that were in patterns I loved.  My husband asked me if I wanted them and I immediately shook my head and said, "No.  I have plenty of dishes to eat off of.  I don't need any more."  I didn't need them.  Sure, part of me wanted them.  But, we did not NEED them.  So, I walked away with no regrets.

9.  We took our cardboard to the recycling center over the weekend, which saved us a lot of money compared to throwing it in the landfill.

10.  I fixed a couple of blankets of my son's that had failed in the seams.

11.  Carrs offered me a coupon for a free bag of cheese, so I had my husband pick it up when he stopped off to get milk one night after work.  I was thrilled to get a freebie like that.

And, I'm going to end the post here as I need to my son some lunch before we get back to school work for the day (he needed a break, so I gave him one...the benefits of homeschool :).

How about you guys?  Still hanging in there?

Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap

I am FINALLY feeling like I'm getting caught up on things around here.  Mainly Spring cleaning types of things, but I still feel pretty accomplished all things considered.  

The last couple of weeks were really busy on top of cleaning and organizing.  We got my son in for a physical so he could get his medical forms in for Special Olympics.  Luckily, Special Olympics are a go for this summer, so we got all of the forms we needed to get in, in.  My husband worked out a temporary schedule change at work so he could take Alvah to swimming, which is great as my son refuses to work with anyone but my husband so far.  They had their first swimming training last Friday and Alvah had a blast, which was great to hear :).

I also had to get work samples together for the kids and get those into the home school for third quarter.  I always stress about doing it right and explaining to our contact teacher everything that is going on and what we have worked on for that particular quarter when I submit work samples, so it is actually quite a bit of work on my end.  Totally worth it though and I'm super happy to have those things done.

I've also started making phone calls and e-mailing people to try to get an idea of what I need to do to get Alvah ready for when he turns 18 (we have time, of course, but from what I understand it takes quite a while), so we'll have our ducks in a row to file for guardianship over him at 18 and other stuff.  It has so far been kind of frustrating as everyone I call tells me to call someone else, but I'll get there by being persistent.  I know THAT by experience.

Oh, on the Spring Cleaning front?  I bought this mop with some credit card rewards a while back and finally got it put together and we got to try it out over the weekend and it is AWESOME!  The best part, I think, is that you don't have to buy disposable heads for it.  It comes with three reusable ones that you can just throw into the laundry when you are done mopping.  We just mopped with some hot water with a little bit of soap added and the mop performed wonderfully.  I'm so thrilled as it makes it SO much easier to keep on top of mopping now!  No associate link there or anything.  I was just thrilled with the mop and wanted to share, especially with the reusable head feature as I know things can be hard to find anymore.

Okay, so let's get to other things I've been doing around here!

1.  I finally got one of the garbage cabinets I have put together and put into use (the black cabinet in the corner of the kitchen there).  Honestly, this took me a while to get up the gumption to do as I took one look at all of the parts (of which there were MANY) and the complete lack of good instructions and well put stickers to tell you what part was what and I just put the box of everything aside after taping it back up and decided to wait until I was in the mood to be frustrated *laugh*.

Luckily, my husband helped me with it after I was about 3/4 done with it and he was able to fix everything I managed to put on upside down or backward, which I am eternally grateful for.  I still have one more cabinet to put together that I THINK I know what I want to do with it and where to put it, but I'll wait until my husband can help me out and I can do it right the (hopefully) first time.

After the cabinet was put together I moved the breadbox to it and then moved the other cart I had in the corner and used it to set up my wheat grinder on.  I'm happy to finally have a good place to put the wheat grinder where it isn't going to nail the daughter in the arm as she walks by it all the time.  I am going to start grinding the wheat I have in the house and start adding the fresh flour to the the flour I have in my stores as I bake to help extend the pre-ground stuff from the store and add nutrition to my baked goods.  I'm hoping that between all of the family we can get enough wheat ground at one time to have enough for a week's baking that I can store in the fridge.  We'll see how long our arms hold out *laugh*.

2.  Now that the light is coming back and we are actually getting decently warm in the afternoons the kids and I have taken advantage of sunny days to go on walks, which has been good for all of us.

3.  One of the big tasks I've been up to is I have started taking a VERY detailed inventory of the foods I have in the house, including the freezers, pantry and long term food storage.  By doing it I have found holes that I wanted to fill and I found things that I thought I was nearly out of and I could avoid having to buy for that much longer.  Once I'm done writing it all down by hand I'm going to make a spreadsheet on my computer so I can hopefully keep track of everything in one place.  It's been a chore to be sure, but I'm really feeling good about the progress I'm making.

4.  I've been taking advantage of 5.00 Fridays at Carrs and I had to admit that is about the one time of the week where I go shopping.  When I saw chicken value packs for 5.00 each a few weeks back, I took the kids and we went to the store EARLY so I could get in on the sale.  I'm very glad I did it that way as I was able to get four value packs of chicken for cheap.  The chicken cabinet was not very well stocked, so I am glad I got there early and was able to get some.

I have also taken advantage of 5.00 Friday to get fruit.  Strawberries have been on sale 2 lbs for 5.00 on the Friday sale and cantaloupes have been on sale for 2.50 as well.  So, the daughter has been getting a huge kick out of eating fresh fruit again that doesn't revolve around apples.

5.  Carrs offered me a coupon for a free pizza, which I picked up and we had for dinner one night.

6.  When I saw what the price of corned beef was going for I dug around in my freezer and dug out every beef brisket roast I had.  I had bought a large beef brisket early last year with part of our tax return and cut it into decently big roasts, so I took them all out and made my own corned beef.  I took this recipe for the brine, but I didn't use the salt peter (don't have any) and used 1/2 cup of Morton's Quick Cure mix instead (I've had the Quick Cure for years).  I then added brine to all of the beef briskets in freezer bags and placed them in different containers to cure in the fridge.  My fridge was VERY full for the next 10 days (shot seen above), but the result was really yummy corned beef brisket.  We ate one roast and I took the others, drained off some of the brine from the roasts and refroze them to use for dinners later in the year.  To turn the roast pink as it cooked, I added the juice from a can of beets to the cooking liquid.  It worked great, didn't effect the flavor of the roast at all and also made it so we could avoid the red food dye in salt peter.  And I made the beets into German beetroot salad for a side with dinner the next night, so it all worked out well.  

I took some of the cabbage that I had blanched and froze from the garden and CSA box last year and added it to the corned beef the last hour of cooking in the slow cooker and it worked wonderfully.  And it saved me from looking all over the countryside for cabbage as this is like the ONE time of year that cabbage sells out at the store because it goes on sale for less than 1.00 per pound.

7.  I found a recipe for two ingredient biscuits that my daughter wanted to try.  It called for self rising flour and heavy cream to make the biscuits and that's it.  Well, being in the north and not the south, self rising flour wasn't readily available at the stores around here, so I looked online and made my own.  It worked rather well and resulted in some nice biscuits.  The nice part about the dough is that with the two ingredient biscuits is that you don't have to worry so much about overworking the dough like you do with other recipes.  It really helped to build my daughter's confidence knowing that she had a back up recipe for biscuits that she could make and not have fail.

And that, while kind of a short list, is where I'm going to call it good so the kids and I can go and take a walk.  How about you guys?  Been able to get stuff done or save money lately?

Corn Bread

I am definitely behind on blogging, so stick with me here.  I've been super busy and not writing a bunch of what I've been doing down on a list to share, so yeah....my bad.  I will share a list on Friday of some of the things I've been up to, but I'm determined to start getting some of the back log (which keeps getting longer) of blog posts up here.

First up is a recipe I've been meaning to share and it is for a recipe that pretty much every American has in their family recipes.  Cornbread.  I know a lot of people are probably not impressed *laugh* but I wanted to share this because for one, having corn meal in your food storage is a really good idea to help stretch your flour and other grains and two because this cornbread is light and fluffy, which I love about it.  Also, cornbread is actually surprisingly versatile.  We will eat it for dessert with honey, for breakfast with jam and butter, for a snack...heck I've been known to eat it with sausage gravy on top or some other savory thing that you'd normally reserve biscuits for.  So, when I started thinking of basic recipes to share, this one seemed like a good idea to me.

Now, there is one thing I want to recommend with corn bread recipes and it will probably get me some hate from coarse corn meal fans, but I really am not a huge fan of the crunch of coarse ground corn meal in my cornbread, so when I make this recipe I use this.  It is a polenta grind cornmeal, so it is super fine grind and I like it better in my corn bread (no associate link on that cornmeal by the way, I'm just sharing because that is what I buy).  But, if you prefer coarse corn meal, go for it.  The cornbread will still turn out super yummy either way.

So, onto the recipe!

Cornbread:

Ingredients:

• 1 Cup Yellow Corn Meal
• 1 Cup All Purpose Flour
• 2 to 4 TBS sugar (depending how sweet you like your cornbread)
• 1 TBS baking powder
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1 egg
• 1 cup milk

Directions:

1.  Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (375 if you are using a glass pan).  Grease an 8" square (or round...doesn't really matter) baking pan.

2.  In a large mixing bowl, sift together the cornmeal, flour, sugar, salt and baking powder (or you can just add all the ingredients and then whisk the dry ingredients together).  Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients.

3.  In a separate smaller bowl, combine egg, milk and oil and mix well.  

4.  Pour the wet ingredients into the well you created in the dry ingredients and stir together until combined  and the dry ingredients are moistened.  It takes about 15 to 20 strokes for me (do NOT over mix).  Pour the better into prepared pan.

5.  Bake 20 to 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the corn bread comes out clean.

We like to serve ours with spreadable/whipped honey and butter, but I've been known to eat it for breakfast with butter and jam on it :).

Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap (Times 3)

Delays in blogging again.  Darn it.  But, a lot has happened over the last three weeks, so let me catch you all up on the craziness that is our lives around here.

Well, the biggest thing that happened was probably that my son got his medication switched around to see if we could help him to sleep better.  His doctor, after a recommend from one of our blog readers about how her son was on Trazadone and really benefitted from it AND he was on a chewable pill versus a time release type of capsule.  So, we started him on Trazadone a few days after Valentine's Day.  And OY!  Well, first, Trazadone definitely does NOT help the son to sleep.  A half an hour after taking the beginning dose (which was the minimum for his weight) he went into super giggly, hyper and happy mode.  He'd finally crash around 3:00 am or so, but yeah taking the medication as a sleep aide definitely did NOT work.  BUT, and this is a big but, the medication really improved his mood during the day!  I was super happy with how his mood did during the day while on Trazadone.  He didn't need to take any Risperidone as the Trazadone built up in his system, which was really nice!  Unfortunately, after a few weeks of being on Trazadone and it building up in his system, he suddenly started acting like he was NOT feeling good and acted like he had a bad headache and things.  

So, after some debate, I decided to put him back on the Risperidone and the Clonodine like he has been on for years.  The nice part about doing all of this, though, is by being off of Risperidone for so long, it really seems like the son's system has reset.  The clonodine, which hasn't helped him sleep in a long while, is working like it did when we first started him on it and while the Risperidone doesn't seem to do much for his mood (not counting it out of the game yet, though, as the Trazadone is still working it's way out of his system) it does seem to help him get to sleep at night.  So, at least he's finally getting some sleep, and as a result, so am I.  Which is wonderful, I have to say.

So, the second bit of craziness that happened was that we became the owners of a LOT of cases of "past the use by date" french fries.  The people who were trying to get rid of them had tried to donate them to the food bank and other places, but they were too far out of date to be accepted anywhere.  And there were a ton of them.  We were happy to accept the French fries as French fries are one of the son's staple foods and were getting harder and harder to find at the stores of late, so we scrambled to make sure that the French fries didn't go to waste.  I was so grateful that I had canned so many things that had been in the freezers as I shoved french fries into every available spot to keep them frozen until we could come up with a better system in which to store them and we still had to put a bunch into a big container and bury it in the snow outside until we could get another freezer.  Unfortunately, freezers aren't exactly a dime a dozen right now.  I finally found one at Lowes.  I paid more than I wanted to for it, but luckily I had held some money back from our tax return to put toward bills, so while I had to put it onto my husband's credit card we just paid off, at least I'll be able to pay off about 2/3 of it before it starts to accumulate tons of interest.  And at least Lowes delivered the freezer, so my husband didn't need to kill himself trying to get it in and out of the truck.  Did we get enough free food to pay for the freezer?  Yeah, probably not, although the French fries did fill it up pretty full.  But, at least we have French fries for quite a while (which will keep me out of the stores) and we know we'll have the fries available.  With the current world situation, the security is worth a LOT in my mind.

The one thing I did buy and put into the freezer once we had it was a turkey for Thanksgiving.  Our store had a couple in stock, so I bought one of them.  With the way the avian flu is ripping through chicken coops across the world at the moment (among other birds) I'm worried turkeys may very well not available come November.  At least I know where I can source local eggs if we need them (NOT cheap, but better than nothing) and I am hoping to get a bit more chicken to put into the freezer to store for long term use, but we'll see how that goes as my budget just keeps getting tighter, along with everyone else's.

1.  Someone asked me how the situation at our stores are going up here with everything that is going on.  Well, pretty much everything that I can find has gone up 1.00 in price at least, which adds up fast when you are trying to shop.  And stock on items, like everywhere, is sporadic at best.  I ended up ordering cat food from Amazon when it was in stock (which that is hit or miss now too) because I had to.  This is a shot I took of the dog food side of the isle (someone was on the cat food side desperately trying to scab together enough things so her cats could eat and I didn't want to invade her privacy) as it pretty much shows how bare the pet food isles are right now.

I am glad that my mom taught me to buy ahead at times like this.  

2.  I took a very tough cut of meat beef roast out of the freezer.  Instead of turning it into a pot roast, I instead roasted it in the oven until rare.  I then let it cool and put it in the fridge.  The next day I took out the meat slicer and sliced the meat super thin.  I then made two loaves of French bread and we used one loaf to turn the meat into French dips for dinner that night.  My husband has since taken roast beef sandwiches to work for lunch the last couple of days, using the home made french bread with the thin sliced meat , which has been great as not only was it a super effective use of a tough cut of meat (luckily if you slice it really thin across the grain the tough meat gets tender and easy to eat), but it gives him a nice, and tasty lunch, that is easy to put together.  I'm going to use the rest of the thin cut meat for dinner tonight to make Korean style BBQ beef to go over rice and I think it'll be tasty!

3.  Valentine's Day went...well interesting.  We had the Valentine's Day dinner I had planned over the weekend as I knew my husband was scheduled to work on Monday.  The fondue was a really fun change of pace and my daughter even liked it.  I ended up using some stale home made bread to dip and then I cooked up the few beef fillet steaks I'd gotten with my meat package last year.  I sliced up an apple and then bought a few fruit bowls to get some fresh fruit into our diet as I had a personalized price on them which made them decently cost effective (I got a bowl of grapes and a bowl of strawberries.  Those were good dipped in the cheese!).  We all stuffed ourselves and it was a super yummy dinner.  I even made a vanilla cake for dessert and we used some of the fresh strawberries and macerated them in sugar earlier in the day so we could have strawberry shortcake for dessert.

We actually spent Valentine's Day itself going to our bank in horrible weather.  Luckily, my husband came home early so we could go the appointment as the highway was a horrible mess and everything was at a dead standstill for hours that evening right when he would have had to be commuting, so that worked out alright.  We finally got in for our appointment (why, I ask, do they insist that you schedule appointments online if they are going to make you wait for over 1/2 an hour anyway?).  I was nervous about the Federal Reserve raising interest rates as our home equity loan is variable interest.  We do have the power to lock it in at a fixed rate, however, when we choose.  Luckily, after the meeting, I felt a bit better about leaving it alone for now as she gave us a bunch of advice about what to watch for on our end for increasing interest rates and she also gave us her card so we can call and/or e-mail her if we suddenly feel the need to lock in what we have on our home equity loan at any given time.  

4.  The daughter had a okay birthday overall.  Once again, the weather was just awful that day, so some people we had invited over didn't make it.  But, my in-laws did show up to wish her a happy birthday so she was content.  I gave the daughter a few fairy figures we had found earlier at one of the used stores.  She fell in love with them when we were there so I had bought them on the sly and hid them.  She was super thrilled to get them.  

5.  Got some of my bills for next month in and was happy to see that my electric bill and my gas bill had gone down.  I've been carefully putting the heat, both electric and gas, down at night to not only keep us all comfortable (at the moment we are having what I like to call "false Spring" as the temps are going up into the upper 30's during the day and we are even supposed to hit 40 this weekend.  It leads to a lot of ice as the temps plunge below freezing as soon as the sun starts to go down, but it has led to me being able to turn down the heat, so I'm happy with that aspect of it.  With the rising cost of everything, any little bit you can do to save money is definitely welcome.  My heart goes out to those of you in the UK right now as I've been keeping tabs (hard core) on world events and I know the energy crisis the UK is going through right now.  You are all in my prayers, as are so many others.

6.  Despite getting curve balls thrown our way this month, I did manage to get a decent amount of my Monthly Goals done so far.  I feel pretty good about that.

7.  The windstorm we had earlier in the year managed to take out one of our garbage cans.  We didn't realize it right away as my husband had to chase it into our woods one day, but thought it had survived okay.  Turns out it didn't and developed huge cracks all over it from the beating it took.  So, we went to the home improvement warehouses to try and find a replacement.  We found the spot outside where the garbage cans we have been buying the last five years normally sat, but the home was empty.  We like the trashcans as they are decently heavy duty built (Rubbermaid), but also they are normally a lot cheaper than other trash cans of the same quality.  We grumpily grabbed another type of garbage can as we really were in need of a new one, but my husband decided that we should go around the store really fast and see if we could find the trashcans somewhere else.  Luckily his plan worked!  We found some up in the front of the store where they were setting up some Spring products, so we were able to get the type of trashcan we actually wanted and saved 15.00 compared to buying the other type.

8.  I received a replacement credit card in the mail as my old one had expired.  I used the opportunity to figure out if I had any reoccurring charges on the card and chose to switch as many as I could to another form of payment or to cancel them completely.  I had forgotten that I had to switch a few charges over to my credit card when my check card got hacked last time so that we could get the items we needed and I forgot to switch them back when my new check card had come in.  By doing it this way I was able to stop 12.00 worth of charges going directly onto my credit card every month, which might not seem like much, but it will save me from those charges accumulating interest onto the card over time.   I am working hard to pay off debt as much as I can this year and stopping further charges onto my credit card will definitely help that.

9.  I mended my son's weighted blanket.  He's taken to chewing the corners and it had developed a hole and the plastic weighted beads were leaking out.   I darned the hole in record time and voila no more leaking beads.

And there you are folks.  Some of the things that have happened and such the last three weeks.  How have you all been?  

Monthly Goals Update: February, 2022

Here's something I haven't done in years:  A monthly goal update!

When it comes to monthly goals, I'm a week down on time and didn't get QUITE as much done as I'd hoped to get done.  Life gets in the way, as they say.  But, I did check a few things off of my list, so let's get to those!

1.  I canned some beans!

Okay, so I canned what Adzuki beans I had (1 lb) and it ended up being exactly four pints.  But, overall, I was happy to get that done as pressure canning things for 75 minutes...it takes a while *laugh*.

I'm hoping to work on getting some other types of beans canned this week, such as pinto and black beans, but we'll see how far I get.

2.  I canned the frozen cranberries!

I made the cranberries into "Cranberry Orange Relish" which really was just a fancy way of saying cranberry orange sauce, but that's okay.  This recipe actually ended up being tasty and a bit different.  I normally would just can plain cranberry sauce if I had cranberries left over that I had to use up.  But, I also had an orange in the fridge that I wanted to use up.  So, I took the zest from the orange and then cut the orange up and the daughter and I split the orange segments for a snack while I was waiting for the canner to heat up.

I was even able to use a couple of tablespoons of the ginormous bottle of rum we have in the recipe.  The alcohol cooked out quickly and I have to say if I had to do it again I doubt I would use the alcohol at all.  It really didn't add anything to the recipe, I feel.  The cranberry orange flavor kind of overpowered anything the rum might have added to the flavor.

I used this recipe, but I halved it as I only had one bag of cranberries to use up (although I did keep the zest of one orange instead of doing a half...it lent a very nice orange flavor to the sauce).  It worked well and I ended up with four 8 oz. jelly jars full of the cranberry orange sauce to use with various meat dishes later on :).

3.  I started to budget out for the Subscribe and Save order.

We were paid last week and I made sure to put 1/2 of the Subscribe and Save order budget into a separate spot so that I'd have it for when I needed it later.

4.  I started to reorganize the pantry to accommodate new food storage.

I started to empty out the one set of pantry shelves that doesn't hold canning racks and the plan is to start reorganizing things so that everything I make will fit in the pantry well and be SEEN so that nothing goes to waste.  We'll see how well that works out.

This week's goals:

1.  Reorganize the fridge freezer to see if I can fit the ice cream bowl in it in preparation for making home made ice cream for daughter's birthday.

2.  Make plan for Valentine's Day and figure out what we are going to dip in the fondue and what treats we will make for it.

3.  Try to fix work outfit for son.

4.  Can more beans.

5.  Make sugar cookie dough and freeze.

6.  Continue to work on pantry and get things put away.

7.  Reorganize the son's room (I'll talk more on that necessity later).

 And there you go folks.  Some of the things I've gotten done and the goals I would like to accomplish this week.  Hope things are going well for you as well!

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?  

Monthly Goals: February, 2022

Originally I was going to do two months at a time when it came to goals and do a "January/February Goals" type of post, but January just flew by, it seemed, and here I am starting to draft this post on the last day of January, soooooo I guess February goals will get its own post after all *laugh*.

For me this is traditionally the worst part of winter to get through.  The sun is coming back slowly but surely, which is good, but a lot of times it is overcast so you don't see much of the sun when it does pop its head over the horizon and we are only regaining light by like 2 to 4 minute increments per day this time of year.  It can still get decently cold (we are at a whopping -4 F at the moment and it is after 10 am Alaska time) and we usually expect to be buried in snow come March.  So, basically you know the Christmas holidays are over, so the Christmas lights (which help to light up the house and your mood) are put away, Spring is still a long way off and it can really start to feel like everything is a slog.  You get really tired all of the time (good old vitamin D deficiency), don't feel like doing much and can really start to suffer from SAD (Seasonal depression) if you aren't careful.  So, for me, this is the time of year I really start to try and stay as busy as I possibly can to help combat the doldrums.  Staying active really helps  to make this time of year go quicker and feeling like I'm getting things done helps me to feel good.

So, speaking of getting things done, let's get to my list for February!

Canning Goals:

1.  Can some beans.  

I know that sounds like a kind of vague goal, but I have at least four different types of beans in the house, so I want to make sure I start to get those canned up to use in dishes around the house.  I have tons of beans in food storage, so I really want to make a point this year of starting to use some of them more.  If I can keep rotating out jars as I run out (like make 4 cans of black beans and when those cans are gone immediately refill those four jars with more black beans to use later), I think it will really help me to streamline things and make me more motivated to use up some of my dried beans :).

2.  Can frozen cranberries.  

I think I'm going to take my frozen cranberries and make a cranberry orange relish/sauce from them from a recipe I found online.  It looks good and I think will help me be at a good start with the cranberry sauce to make some really nice sauces for chicken and things with it later in the year.

3.  Make and can applesauce

I'm really not sure if I'll get to canning this or freezing it and canning it later.  I got a really good price on apples earlier in January (they were 1.00 per pound on 5.00 Friday), so I had my husband pick up a ton of them so that I could make them into applesauce.  So far they are keeping just fine in the fridge, but I want to make sure they get processed before they go bad on me.  Since we are running low on applesauce, I am thinking this will be a good idea to use some of the apples :).

General Goals (basically I'm just lumping all the other goals together):

1.  Get the son his physical for Special Olympics so we can sign him up for swimming this year.

Last year swimming was cancelled for a good portion of the season due to restrictions, so I'm hoping this year will go well and it will be worth getting him his physical for it.

2.  Save money out of paychecks to pay for Subscribe and Save order at end of the month.

I had to order some things in bulk from Amazon for February that I can't find locally at the moment or are so darned expensive locally that it is worth my while to get them from Amazon instead.  But, while I'll save money getting things in bulk, I still have to pony up the bucks to pay for the bulk orders by the end of February, so I've got two pay periods to work it out or start to cut back my order from them.  Since I have things like laundry detergent on that order, I really don't want to have to cut down my order much, so we'll see how I do on saving the money to pay for it.

3.  Start to reorganize pantry to accommodate new jars of canned food.

I want to make sure that I can still find and get to things decently easily, so I'm still debating on the best way to do that at the moment.  For now, the boxes of jars of food that I've made are sitting down in the den ready and waiting for me to put them away.

4.  Make and freeze sugar cookie dough.  I want to make a nice versatile dough I can turn into different types of cookies and sugar cookie dough is one of the best for that purpose so I want to make some to have ready to go in the freezer.

5.  Find room in freezer for ice cream bowl so that I can make ice cream for daughter's birthday in February :).

6.  Make and freeze some waffles and the rest of the Swedish pancakes.

7.  Make and freeze some extra bread for Valentine's Day.  I decided I was going to make cheese fondue for Valentine's, so I want to make sure I start to put up different things for dipping :).

8.  Make some turtles (the candy) for Valentine's Day as well as a few more different types of chocolates.  I'm thinking of making some chocolate truffles for my husband for Valentine's this year.  I haven't made them for my husband since our first year of marriage, so I think it might be fun :).

9.  Fix work jumpsuit for the son.  The suit is my husband's old one from when he was a teenager but it has a big rip in the Carhart material.  We tried it on my son and it fits him perfectly, so I want to fix it so he has something cool to wear to match his dad when he goes and hangs out in the garage with him :).

10.  Sew handkerchiefs.  This was SUPPOSED to be my husband's Christmas gift, but when the family got sick, it got sidelined, so I want to make sure I get that done for him.  Late is better than never.

And there you go folks.  I have other things I want to get done (organizing and such), but I'm going to count these goals as my main ones I want to accomplish, so I'll leave the written list here :).  How about you?  Got things you want to get done in February?