Monday, October 29, 2012

Living Frugally

We're trying to cut our expenses, so we can get out of debt and start some savings. In the spirit of frugalness, I've been doing all sorts of money saving activities.

First, I've been making our own bread, well, until my bread maker conked out on me. Right after I threw out the sourdough starter, of course. Then, since we eat quite a few beans and bean products, instead of buying cans of beans, I bought dried beans in bulk on amazon, and have been cooking beans everyday in my slow cooker for the past five days. I figured that I'll save around $150 over the course of the beans' life. That adds up to quite a significant savings! I also want to avoid cans because of the BPA in the lining, I don't want to put that into any of our bodies. SO between trying to save money and cut out icky chemicals, I have my work cut out for me *grin*. I made my own "bisquick" mix today, it only took about 3 minutes.

I've also been reworking our leftovers into new meals. Like on Saturday I made baked potatoes with "cheezee" sauce and broccoli,so Sunday I took the potatoes, cubed them, tossed them with some frozen broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, carrots and squash and roasted them. Then today, I took what was leftover from that, seperated out the potatoes and blended them with some soy milk, mixed it all back together, heated it through and - waalaa! - potato-vegetable soup.

Then, I'm going to use all our boxes left from the move to make different decorations and artwork to put up around the house.

Basically, I'm just trying to look at things we don't use on an everyday basis and see how I can rework them into something we need and would use more often. And eliminate as much waste as possible. It's a good exercise for all of us in being content with what we have and creativity.

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