cheerfully living on less

Yesterday I:

-made a batch of homemade yogurt.

This stuff costs less than $1 per quart, which makes it a total bargain.

-used my honey-glazed roll recipe to make some big sandwich buns.

Making loaves of plain bread from scratch saves money, but the savings are much more impressive when you start making things like buns, English muffins, and cinnamon rolls at home.

Also?

Buns made from that recipe are really soft and delicious and you get to eat them fresh from the oven, which is most marvelous.

(I leave off the glaze when I make buns instead of rolls and I usually double the honey to make up for the lack of sweetness from the glaze.)

-packed reusable dishes and containers for a picnic lunch.

Not only are they green and frugal, they’re also much more lovely than their disposable counterparts (which is something I find to be true on a regular basis.)

-made a menu plan for the next two weeks.

I don’t like menu-planning, but it saves me so much money and time, I carry on pretty faithfully with it.  When I go without a plan, we don’t eat nearly as healthfully, I spend way too much time stressing about what to make for dinner, and my grocery shopping is really haphazard.

-helped Joshua look on eBay for a replacement camera battery charger.

We own a total of four Canon cameras, but sadly, none of my battery chargers work for his battery.  And since his charger hasn’t turned up for weeks (we’ll probably find it when we declutter his room this summer!), he’s going to buy a new one.

He was looking on Amazon, but I helped him find one that looks really promising on eBay, and we’re hoping the bid stays nice and low.

-mixed up a batch of my very favorite super-clumpy granola.

I have discovered that it still tastes really good if you halve the brown sugar, but it definitely doesn’t stick together quite as well that way.  It’s still very crispy, though, which is how I like my granola.

That photo is from last summer, and it’s making me very hungry for fresh, local peaches.

-made an easy dinner that used up lots of odds and ends from my fridge.

I pulled out the last of the Easter ham from my freezer, sliced it up thinly, and we made sandwiches, using the buns I made.  I also sliced up carrots and cucumbers to eat raw (I had so many of those in my fridge.) and I made a fruit salad that used up almost every last bit of fruit I had.

Fruit salad is great to make when you’ve got small amounts of all sorts of fruit.  When you mix it all together and add some lime, lemon, or orange juice to brighten up the flavors, it doesn’t look at all like you’re cleaning out the fridge.

Oh, and keeping some frozen or canned fruit around is really helpful for those times when you need a bit of something to round out the salad (canned or slightly thawed frozen peaches are great for this.)

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Did you do anything frugal yesterday?  Share!

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Joshua’s 365 post: I’m back!

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You know the drill…a post full of random bits of things that don’t go together.

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I’m really happy that all of my tulips from Aldi came up.

I am not happy that the surround-the-bulbs-with-crushed-glass trick failed to deter the voles, and that all of the tulips except for those in pots are now dead.

At least I took a picture before they were eaten.

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I’ve been thinking about how grateful I am for the grace my kids show me.  Sometimes, I have a really hard time seeing anything but my mothering faults, but the four cards I got on Mother’s Day all said very lovely things, which I think were quite sincere.

I know good and well that I am not the world’s best mom, but I’m glad my kids somehow see me that way!
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I can’t manage to save every cute/hilarious paper thing my kids produce, so sometimes I just take a photo and then recycle the item.  Saves space and costs nothing!

I liked this exchange between Sonia and Zoe because of the juxtaposition of colloquial and formal language.

They’ve been writing fortunes (like you’d get in fortune cookies), and I’m hoping this one was meant for me.

(I think the other one says, “You will have a good time at the pool.”)

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On the food waste front, I recently rescued some wrinkly potatoes by making a half recipe of scalloped potatoes.

And when we had many bananas ripen all at once, I did a little preemptive food waste fighting by cutting them into chunks and topping them with peanut butter.  My kids love this and they can down a lot of bananas this way.

I could have let them go until they were overripe and then made banana bread or banana chocolate chip muffins, but this was significantly easier.  And faster.

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You know I’m a big fan of hand-me-downs.

Well, I saved all of my very-loved childhood dolls, thinking that one day my then-hypothetical children would play with them. How fun to hand down your toys to your children, right?

Given that I have three girls, you’d have thought my dolls would be very popular. But somehow, none of the girls have been interested in playing with dolls.

Last week, though, Sonia and Zoe got inspired, and so my Fisher Price My Friend dolls have gotten some love.

I suppose these are considered to be vintage by now.

Oh, man.  I just looked it up on eBay, and yep, everyone’s calling them vintage.  Dear me.

At any rate, I’m glad my beloved (vintage) dolls are being played with.

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Signs of a good meal to come (in my opinion): Chopped onions and cilantro.

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