Frugal Friday

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Tiger and I enjoyed a glorious afternoon outside on Tuesday.

My apologies for the lack of posts yesterday and the late post today.  It's been a very crazy couple of days!  I had decided that I was going to schedule everything yesterday, and get it all over with at once.  So, not only did I go to work, I got my hair cut, went to the dentist, saw a Personal Trainer (Who's taking over now that I am finished with Physical Therapy.  I feel I can be stronger, and a Trainer will help me get there.)  AND, we're leaving this afternoon to go visit oldest son.... And we needed to do laundry and pack last night.  Very, very long day!  I have links to a couple of recipes - which I've scheduled to be posted tomorrow.  If you click on them today, they might come through as active links... I'm not certain.  I don't know how Bloggers' Algorithms work in that situation.  I guess we'll find out, won't we?

I've been working on my stories from teaching.  I don't know if I'll get them all into a finished book by the end of the month, but I've had a blast revisiting old stories.  When I was teaching, I kept a journal of the things that the kids said and did.  Going back and re-reading the stories has been great.  Some of the stories will never make a book, though.  What's really funny is realizing that the kids I taught when I first started teaching are now in their 30's.  Not quite so little anymore!  


Discounted Produce Rack  $5

Have you ever checked out the discounted produce rack at your local grocery store?  The produce on this rack is all edible and safe to eat, but it's not "perfect".  Our society tends to only want "perfect" food.  Much of the waste that occurs in the grocery industry occurs because perfectly good, not aesthetically pleasing produce is thrown away.  Grocers have recently begun putting this produce out on racks at a deeply discounted rate.  I heavily frequent this rack.  The produce is either eaten within a day or two, or else I freeze it for later.  (If I could eat wheat based bread, I would be cleaning up on rolls and bread in the day old racks.)

2.5 pounds over-ripe bananas                 $1
5 Bartlett Pears that were dented            $1
2 big Portabella Mushrooms                   $1
3 Green Peppers that were turning red   $1
1 pound Kale  (that's a lot of kale)          $1

Hotel Deal

This sounds ridiculous, I know. We are headed up to visit oldest son this weekend.  We used E-Bates to book the hotel, and have signed up for the bonus points program.  We will be earning a little cash back on the hotel stay, and the nights we spend this weekend will be added to the total towards a free night's stay.  (Plus, we get to see the oldest kid!  That's the BEST part about this weekend!)


Cook Once, Eat Twice (or more)

Pork Roast, coated with Zesty Lemon spices.

I made a pork roast on Sunday.  I baked it in the oven in a cast iron skillet, and let me tell you, that was an amazing roast!  We had well over half of the roast left, and I knew then that we would have a couple of meals!
We had two extra meals from that roast, for a total of 3 meals.

Pork Fried Rice

Roasted Cuban Pork Sandwiches




Electricity Hogs

Now that the kids are all out of the house, we've been attempting to track down the biggest electricity hogs in our house.  A couple of years back, we switched our lights to LED's, which took our monthly electricity usage down. We turned our water heater down, and we dry many of our clothes outside.

But we still have several things in the house that have been keeping our bill up.  This month, we've been going after the "phantom" energy hogs.  Turns out that the television is a pretty big hog.  We keep the television, DVD player, etc, plugged into a power strip.  This month, we started turning the power strip off when we go to bed at night, and turning it on if we sit down to watch tv after dinner.  Turns out that having that power strip - and all of those appliances that depend upon the "instant on" feature for us to use our remotes - use much more energy than we had thought.  I've been following our energy report online, and while I don't yet know the final total for this month's electricity usage, I can already see that we are using less energy now than we were this time last year.

You know, every little bit helps when you're saving money.  I'm beginning to suspect that this might be more than "a little bit" by the time we add up the savings over the course of a year.

Grocery Stores

Remember when I told you a couple of weeks ago that we'd had a new Super Walmart open in town?  Well, our existing grocery stores decided to fight back this week, and they sent out some pretty nice coupons.  I'm plotting my trips carefully.  I'm going to focus on buying stuff non-perishable items.  I can always use razors, shampoo, deodorant, etc, and it will be nice to get an extra discount on those items!