First Frugal Week October 2017

Sunday

Chicken Pot Pie

We stayed home on Sunday and spent no money. I made a Chicken Pot Pie for dinner again as my daughter requested another one, the second one I made in less than a week. 

I also made a large bowl of pasta salad and divided that into 16 different containers for lunches this week. I also made a double batch of homemade granola bars. I used up the last of a bag of chocolate chips that was lingering in the pantry and also the last of my honey, so I will need to replace the honey soon. 

Monday

Salmon Patties

Dressing

Green Beans with Onions

No work on Monday for me, so I stayed home and spent no money, but spent time doing frugal things instead. I've been wanting to inventory my pantry and in my head I've been thinking of things I could use so that my grocery budget will be lower this month. 

I have some Pepperidge Farm herb dressing mix, but thought I don't have chicken broth, but I do have chicken bouillon, so I could use that and make do. Same with the onion soup mix, I can come up with something to make do for that as well, so that's what I did. 

"A thrifty housewife is better than a great income." 

 Charles Spurgeon

Tuesday

15 Bean Cajun Soup Beans

Cornbread

Thankfully, on Tuesday I received a call to sub. I’d already put on soup beans to soak on Monday night, so all I had to do was put them in the Instapot on Tuesday morning along with an onion and seasonings and dinner was ready when I got back home that afternoon.

I was grateful for the sub job because my Thursday job was cancelled. 

Wednesday

15 Bean Cajun Soup

Cornbread

I made enough of this soup to have it for dinner a second night.

  

I went to Walmart for a few things and found 3 boxes of Lime Jell-O on clearance for 50 cents each and 3 bottles of chili powder for $1.04, which was nice since I was out of chili powder. 

One of the reasons I went to Walmart was to buy some Rayovac batteries. This is for the Swagbucks deal that is currently going on and I also needed some batteries for two weather clocks in the house.

Thursday

Bean & Cheese Enchiladas

Mexican Rice

I picked up a prescription for Montelukast for my daughter at Publix, which offers this prescription for free. I also picked up a prescription for myself and a free bottle of water.

We received a free calendar in the mail from Colonial Williamsburg. The calendar is nice enough to give as a Christmas present.  

Friday

I worked today and packed my lunch. We ended up having grilled chicken for dinner tonight.  

On Saturday we went to the library. Our Internet is down at home, so we made a day of it there to catch up on my daughter’s schoolwork and my blog.

I brought us lunch since we were there a while. I brought peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, using up some jelly packets we had, oranges, the last two bowls of pasta salad, and some homemade granola bars and water to drink. 

Other Frugal Things This Week

While I was recently inventorying my pantry, I noted that we had three cans of beets. It’s easy enough to turn canned beets into pickled beets, which is what we really like more than canned beats.

The recipe is simple, take one can of beets, one small onion, sliced, a half cup of vinegar, three tablespoons sugar, and three whole cloves. Bring all ingredients to a boil, remove from heat and cool. Then chill for at least four hours.

Making your own pickled beets from canned is much cheaper than buying pickled beets for consumption. 

I cleaned up the spice section of my pantry and combined some spices where I had duplicate bottles. If I'm buying spices and it's one I use regularly, I buy more than one bottle. Then, when one bottle gets low I can usually make one bottle out of the two. I was able to empty these six bottles. 

I also found a honey bear that was about half full. I thought I was out of honey, but did find this little bit. I placed it next to our tea center to use it up and have already used some of it this morning in my tea. 

We watched reruns of Downtown Abbey this week, which we borrowed from the library, so free entertainment and no money spent there. 

 Since our Internet is down at home I will only be posting sporadically. The technician is supposed to come on Wednesday to fix it, so I may or may not be posting much until then. I hope you all have a great frugal week.

Belinda~ Living within our Means ~