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Frugal Friday

Welcome back to Frugal Friday! This is a weekly forum post to encourage people to share tips on saving money, especially but not only by doing stuff yourself. A new post will be going up every Friday, and will remain active until the next one goes up. Contributions will be moderated, of course, and I have some simple rules to offer, which may change as we proceed.

Rule #1: this is a place for polite, friendly conversations about how to save money in difficult times. It's not a place to post news, views, rants, or emotional outbursts about the reasons why the times are difficult and saving money is necessary. Nor is it a place to use a money saving tip to smuggle in news, views, etc. I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #2: this is not a place for you to sell goods or services, period. Here again, I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #3: please keep it to one tip per person per week. Data dumps are tedious for me to moderate and also for readers to use. If you have lots of tips, great -- post one per week. This is an ongoing project. If you want to comment on someone else's tip, that's welcome, but again, don't use that as an excuse to post a second, unrelated tip of your own.

Rule #4: please keep your contributions reasonably short -- say, 500 words or less. If you have something longer to say, please post it elsewhere -- a free Dreamwidth account is one option -- and simply put a link here. Teal deer comments won't be put through.

Rule #5: please give your tip a heading that explains briefly what it's about. Homemade Chicken Soup, Garden Containers, Cheap Attic Insulation, and Vinegar Cleans Windows are good examples of headings. That way people can find the things that are relevant for them. If you don't put a heading on your tip it will be deleted.

Rule #6: don't post anything that would amount to advocating criminal activity. Any such suggestions will not be put through.

With that said, have at it!

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Can you sew one of these by hand? I’ve never been able to master the sewing machine. [blush]

—Princess Cutekitten

AbeBooks is another good one for used books.

- Cicada Grove

A big hit for us was sewn "paper-towels." These were soft cloth sewn to rough cloth with a couple snaps on each end allowing them to be connected together into a roll.

Another is bees-wrap, wax covered cloth that is used for food wrapping (a more sustainable cling-wrap.)

You can make each of these with cute or personalized cloth for the recipient.

I used to make my own hot chocolate, using milk, Hershey's cocoa powder, sugar, vanilla extract, cinnamon and nutmeg. I don't know if it is cheaper than store-bought mix, but I liked it better. For one serving:

1) Fill your cocoa cup or mug with milk. This will be the quantity of cocoa you make.
2) Pour the milk out into a saucepan.
3) Add the sugar (or other sweetener) and stir to mix/dissolve.
4) Drop a teaspoon of the cocoa powder on top of the milk, then dust the cocoa powder with the cinnamon and nutmeg.
5) Turn on the stove burner. DO NOT STIR YET.
6) As the milk warms up, the cocoa powder wets and sinks into it. Once the cocoa powder has wetted and is sinking in, THEN is the time to gently stir. This way it mixes well into the milk without forming lumps.

Enjoy!

- Cicada Grove

Inspired by JMG's description of haybox cooking, I have hit on the technique of putting the dish to be baked into the oven while the oven is cold, then "preheating" the oven to temperature with the food already in it.
By the time the oven has "finished preheating" I am already smelling cooking smells from the food.

Once "bake time" (at the "baking temperature") is done, turn off the oven and leave the food in there until the oven is cool (can be an hour or more). No peeking! Don't open the door! You'll lose that precious heat.

An example result: Jiffy Cornbread calls for preheating the oven to 400 deg F, then a bake time of 20-25 minutes. Using the above technique, after the oven reached temperature, I baked the cornbread at 400 deg for 10 minutes, then turned the oven off and let it cool for an hour. The cornbread was a little "better-done" than with the traditional technique!

You will of course have to experiment to determine the new "bake time" for various things. Also, while this method is safe for vegetables and grain-based foods, I can't speak to food safety for meats. You might want to test the technique with a meat thermometer to make sure the meat gets to the temperature it's supposed to.

- Cicada Grove

I'd welcome a recipe for that braided Scandinavian fruit bread if you have it handy.

A number of years back I got extremely annoyed about the ridiculous black Friday phenomenon and the wife and I decided we would have a "No Spend November" instead as a middle finger to the rampant material culture. We have done this many times in November as well as in other months. Plot out things you will need for the month such as groceries and pay your bills early or make a singular exception for your rent etc and then simply commit to spending nothing for the entire month. Make no exceptions, pack your lunch for work, don't stop for a coffee, put that project off or improvise, do what you need to do to spend nothing.

While the original impetus for No Spend November was disgust for our materialistic culture, we have also used it when we were not quite going to hit a yearly financial goal as a way to have a one-off spending reduction. There are many things that you might not be ready to give up (especially those micro-purchases) but putting them off for a month can have you getting a substantial little cash bump without feeling like you have to give up buying books or a coffee or whatever for the rest of your life. Plus, you can stick it to the man where it really hurts!

HV

All of that sounds great. I can attest that exercising at home is a great way to do it. I got a book about body-weight exercises called You Are Your Own Gym. Between a chinup bar and an interval timer, I think I have invested about $50 in exercise equipment, and I exercise at home. No travel, any time I feel like it, and completely free. I can even do it in hotel rooms if I am traveling. As you mention, there are also advantages over using the machines, like having a more natural range of motion.

Thanks for this tip! I will try it.

I mentioned the idea to my wife, she's already using much less shampoo but she finds she needs to use conditioner, otherwise her hair is too tangled to brush. Does this eventually become easier as your hair gets more healthy?

Also, hairdressers will want to wash your hair and use shampoo. If you use a hairdresser, do you just avoid the wash?

Thanks for this tip! Have you tried using Sodium Percarbonate with material made from animal products? Doesn't it damage wool, for example?

Is it an issue for the surrounding environment if it goes out in your gray water system?

Thank you for this tip! I was thinking of trying something like this, so I'll give it a shot, too!

Never mind - in the doc you linked to, I see that it addresses both my questions. Namely, 1) it is safe for the environment and 2) don't use it with silk or wool.

Thank you for this, I have bookmarked it. We're already doing some of what you suggested but there's always room to improve.

I agree. No need for added plumbing. Get a travel bidet for under 10 bucks even.

And those things last literally forever too, if you keep them in a cool dry place. Any recipe that calls for pumpkin, you can use them in.

Tea leaves, after you brew them, still have flavour and caffeine. Brew them again! Enjoy the weaker tea knowing your habit now costs half as much.

Note that this works much better with black tea than green, though some green teas hold up.

Also it only works if you don't overbrew your tea in the first place. If you're the sort to leave a teabag in a mug while you drink, there won't be any goodness left in those leaves, and you probably aren't allowed in Japan.

Between 2005 and 2010-ish, as part of my studies for a horticultural course, I wrote a lot of articles about many aspects of gardening and put them online.

Here are some of them -

Collecting and saving tomato seeds - without them turning into a solid lump that you can't separate
http://wildchicken.com/nature/garden/ga016_collecting_tomato_seeds.htm

Collecting, drying and storing your own seeds
http://wildchicken.com/nature/garden/ga014_collecting_drying_storing_seed.htm

Garden Articles List
http://wildchicken.com/nature/garden/ga000_garden_article_list.htm

Garden Plant Information - this is about ornamental plants, because frugality is also about creating beauty on the cheap and improving one's home environment is part of that.
http://wildchicken.com/nature/garden/nature_200_plant_info.htm

There is a lot there, I'd forgotten just how much, but I hope it will be of use to people.

N.B. this is now an old site and won't display on mobile devices, but will display on laptops or PC.

I used to make loaves of a Norwegian Christmas bread called"julekake" for gifts. From memory, ingredients are flour, butter, milk, sugar, yeast, plumped dried fruit, and the key flavoring is cardamom. Glaze braided loaves with a bit of almond or vanilla icing.

It was always a big hit.

Do you have thought about use a dish filled of usual water ?

I second that question. I have the opposite problem-- where oil is concerned, I only need to wash my hair about once a week, but to avoid scalp issues, it ends up being twice. Doesn't actually matter what it looks like-- nobody sees it outside my house-- but itchy scalp is not OK. So if there's a solution-- do tell!

Hah! Yes, that is absolutely our household. Books? What? You mean you have to budget those?

It helps to keep a list, and delay purchases-- a book waiting period. "I really want this book!" becomes "I'll put this book on the list!" and then, I take my list, compare it to the library catalog, and figure out what I can read for free. Then whatever's left on the list can sit and marinate for a while. Often, after a couple months, I'll read reviews that change my mind, or it just doesn't seem that urgent anymore, or I found it on archive.org, read part of it, and decided it wasn't what I wanted anyway. This cuts down on regrettable acquisitions.

Oh, is THAT how you avoid splotchy squashes? This has been driving me batty with pumpkins-- they get little mildewy patches where they sit on the ground. It doesn't seem to harm them, but it is ugly, and I don't like to gift those. With my most recent set, I'm experimenting with setting them up on bundles of twigs, but don't know yet if this'll work.

...and just to add a wee bit to this recommendation: squashes of all sorts are easy to grow, tasty, and prolific! The trick is to find what likes to grow *in your area*. If you live in the eastern US, or especially in the southeast, and you haven't tried them yet, try growing Seminole pumpkins! They are a native landrace pumpkin-- meaning they still have a lot of genetic variation, so you get a large variety of sizes and shapes: smooth, ridged, squat, round, and even some with a little bit of a neck on them. Mine have come out anywhere from softball sized to around four pounds, and with better soil they can get almost twice that big. They are very tasty, amazingly bug resistant (the vines root at every node, so by the time the vine borers get the oldest part of the vine, there are so many other roots going that it doesn't die). They're delicious. And best of all: they are fantastic storage vegetables and many will last on the shelf for six months or a year-- basically, you check them every week, and if you see any mushy spots, you cook that one *today*. Current record-holder lasted 2 years! If you save a few until the following spring, this saves the trouble of retting and drying the seeds-- you just crack a fresh one open when you're ready to plant more!

Pour-over coffee

If you like coffee, consider switching to the pour-over method. All you need is a coffee cup, a kettle for boiling water, a pour-over funnel, and possibly disposable paper filters (depending on the model you choose).

Pros:
- Inexpensive. The funnel I bought is made of sturdy glass and plastic, for under $20 a few years ago.
- The equipment takes up no space on your kitchen counter.
- Easy to clean. Every electric pot I ever owned eventually grew pink mildew inside the tubes despite regular cleaning with vinegar. The mildew made the coffee taste bad so I bought a new coffee maker every few years. But the glass/plastic funnel is very easy to clean.
- If the power goes out, you can still make coffee (assuming you have a propane/gas/wood stove or other way to boil water).

Cons:
- This method only makes one cup at a time, so maybe it is not ideal for a large family.
- It takes practice to make a good cup of coffee this way. I learned how to do it from videos online. It also took some experimentation to figure out which brands of coffee work better for this method (related to how finely/coursely the coffee is ground).
- The paper filters designed by the manufacturer of the funnel can be expensive. Generic filters bought at a discount store work, but not as well as the brand name ones. Probably by design. Some funnels are designed to work without paper filters.
- It takes a couple minutes of light work to make a cup of coffee, rather than pressing a button and walking away.

There was a learning curve...I made some terrible cups of coffee while learning the new method. But I'll never go back to electric coffee makers.

I would also add betterworldbooks.com to this list. Shipping takes a bit of time, but I found a number of hard to find used books here for such a good deal that with shipping it was far cheaper than anywhere else. YMMV. They also donate a book for every purchase, if that's something that appeals to you.

Bibliophilia is a blessing and a curse...

Regards,
Bert

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Frugal Friday

Re: Energy Saving Cooking -The Wonderbag

Re: Save Money on Alibris.com

Re: The Gifting Season Approaches...

Re: Stock Up on Cheap Meals

Also Use The Preheat and Cooldown Stages Of Your Oven To Cook

Re: The Gifting Season Approaches...

no subject

Re: At-Home Exercise and Injury Prevention

Re: Are you using too much soap?

Re: alternate to laundry soap and other cleaners

Re: growing annual herbs as perennials

Re: alternate to laundry soap and other cleaners

Re: On Prolonging the Life of your Septic System

Re: Get a bidet

Re: Butternut Squash - easy to grow, pest resistant, can store for a long time

Double brewing tea

Seeds, seed saving and the vegetable garden

Re: The Gifting Season Approaches...

Re: Distilled water

Re: Are you using too much soap?

Re: Purposely look at what you won't look at...

Re: Butternut Squash - easy to grow, pest resistant, can store for a long time

Re: Butternut Squash - easy to grow, pest resistant, can store for a long time

Pour-over coffee

Re: Save Money on Alibris.com