Frugal Living in Thrift City

One Chicken, Two Pots

2010-10-18T07:28:00.000-07:00

Did you know you could make your chicken work twice? You can -- and so can ribs, or any roast with bones. After you cook the roast and eat it, save the bones. Just keep a gallon plastic bag in the freezer, and throw the bones in there after each meal. When the bag is full, empty it into a slow cooker, and add

one onion, cut in 1/8s
2 carrots, cut into cube-ish chunks
2 celery ribs, cut into large chunks
a couple of bay leaves
6 peppercorns
parsley if you have it
1T of white vinegar
water to fill the pot (about a gallon)

Cook this on low for 6 - 8 hours, or till it looks and smells like chicken broth. (The vinegar is in there to leach the calcium and gelatin from the bones -- you won't taste it, and it makes for a wonderfully rich stock.) Free soup!

Love means never... having to feel pain?

2010-10-16T07:59:00.000-07:00

Intense feelings of love use the same parts of the brain that pain uses. So preliminary research shows that when you're feeling madly in love, you are less likely to feel physical pain.

Love takes up where pain leaves off, brain study shows

Maybe this is why a break up hurts so much? Because you're now feeling pain you haven't felt in a while?

The study also shows that distraction alleviates pain, too. This is something you can use. Next time you feel pain, enumerate sports that don't use balls -- or think of your favorite food, or your happy place.

Fruit for the picking

2010-10-15T07:31:00.000-07:00

If you walk your neighborhood regularly, you'll begin to notice fruit trees in people's yards. When it comes harvest time, you'll notice that many folks don't bother to harvest what's literally in their own front yards.

If you ask, most homeowners will let you pick from their trees. I've picked apples (for eating, pies, crisps, cobblers and apple butter), lemons (for juice), oranges (for eating and marmalade) and grapefruit (for eating and juice). Carry a folded up plastic bag, the kind you get from the grocery store, with you at all times!

A few weeks ago, I did this, and got enough apples to make a quart and a half of apple butter -- probably 10 - 15 pounds. Here's the recipe.

Wouldn't you rather walk out doors than in a gym?

2010-10-14T06:58:00.000-07:00

The standard recommendation is to walk at least 30 minutes a day. But walking, done right, is thrifty as well as good exercise.

I walk just about daily -- and many of my walks are for errands. By combining my exercise with my errands, I save time as well as money. I walk to

the grocery store (actually several, depending on what I want)
the bank (for deposits, mostly, like any good saver)
the library (check the library before you buy a book)
the drugstore

And if that were all I needed at the gym, I'd save on gym membership, as well. All you need is the occasional pair of sneakers.

A further benefit of walking is that you get to know the neighborhood and perhaps even your neighbors. More about that, and how that can help you be thrifty, tomorrow!

Pointing towards Reincarnation

2010-07-13T08:25:00.000-07:00

The notion of a soul reincarnating goes a long way towards explaining this:

Mind - Accepting That Good Parents May Plant Bad Seeds - NYTimes.com

The Old New England Motto

2010-07-06T09:57:00.000-07:00

Use it up

Make it last

Make it do, or

Do without.

I am NOT big on doing without, but I have learned a lot about the other three over the years. Some of this was because I was being a good doobie, but more of it, let's be honest, was because I can't stand wasting money, or because money was so tight that I hadn't a penny to spare.

My mother's mother was famous for her money saving ways. She steered her family through the Great Depression so that my mother doesn't really remember any privation. Of course, Grandma made all of Mom's clothes and did all the cooking. Grandpa had a vegetable garden in suburban New Jersey. (The reason it's called the Garden State is that there were so many back yard gardens.) My mother still uses her tea bags twice, and cuts the ends off almost used tubes of skin cream so she can get the last bit that gravity won't feed out the tube mouth, even when it rests at the bottom for quite a while. You'd be surprised how much gunk is still in there!

I am my grandmother's granddaughter.

One summer when I was in college, I dropped out of summer school and got a job waitressing on Cape Cod. The first place I worked was a brand new, high end restaurant. The good news was that they were willing to take on someone with no experience. The bad news was that there was so little business that tips were almost nil. And servers wages, by law in Massachusetts, were less than minimum wage -- $1.32/hour, when minimum was $2.75. So 30 hours garnered me $39.60/week, before taxes, which left me about $36/week after taxes, plus whatever tips. My weekly rent in a shared house was $20. That left me $16 for food, gas and entertainment. And I only got paid for the first week at the end of the second week, which meant that for the first 2 weeks, I survived on those meager tips.

I remember going to the grocery store with last night's tips, and deciding what I could buy that day for food. One day I bought a pound of coffee. That was it! But I could get away with coffee in the morning and the meal they fed us at the restaurant. I really hate black coffee, so the next day, I went back and bought a pound of sugar. The day after that, I bought bread and eggs.

I've carried that lesson throughout my life. I want to share what I'm doing, and have done, and what I'm learning, as we all journey to energy and food independence. My idea here is that small savings add up over time, and over many families. The challenge, as always, is to spend only what I have to, without feeling deprived.