Abundance on a Dime

RECIPE: Pumpkin Gingerbread

2012-01-25T22:31:00.001-05:00

There seems to be an endless supply of pumpkin puree in our freezer right now, so I'm always on the lookout for a new way to use it up. We are all big fans of gingerbread, so I decided to try adding some pumpkin into the mix. It was a big hit with my gang ! Due to the spiciness of the cake, the pumpkin taste is not overly strong, so I think even people who don't particularly care for pumpkin would still like this!

Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp cloves
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 cup melted butter
1/4 cup molasses
1 egg
1 cup pumpkin puree

Instructions:
In a medium bowl, combine the flour, sugars, baking soda and spices. In a small bowl, combine the butter, molasses, egg and pumpkin puree. Gently stir the pumpkin mixture into the flour mixture just until combined. Pour into a greased 9" square pan and bake at 350F for 40-45 minutes or until top springs back when lightly touched.

Enjoy warm or cold, preferably with whipped cream, ice cream, or custard on top :)

I shared this recipe at Full Plate Thursday and the GCC Recipe Swap.

And the Winners Are...

2012-01-24T14:21:00.000-05:00

Thanks to everyone who entered the giveaway for a chance at one of two copies of my cookbook. I enlisted the help of my boys in drawing the winning entries earlier today, and it's time to announce the lucky winners:

Janet S.

(who left her comment on my Facebook page)

and

Karin in BC

Congratulations, ladies! I will be emailing both of you to let you know you have won.

And for those of you who didn't win, and are thinking about purchasing a copy:

1. Remember that if you have enough Swagbucks you can still get it for free with Amazon gift certificates :)

2. My publisher has finally set the date for the "official" launch, which will be on February 15th. If you purchase the book on this day, you will receive an assortment of free bonus gifts, and will help me in my goal to get to the top of the list in the cookbook category that day.

Weekly Menu Retrospective #56 and Last Chance to Enter My Giveaway!

2012-01-23T07:31:00.002-05:00

Dinners:

Monday: Macaroni and cheese (p.174), peas and carrots

Tuesday: Tex-Mex Shepherd's Pie (p. 173)

Wednesday: Leftover Buffet

Thursday: Thai-Style Peanutty Pasta (p.147)

Friday: Cabbage & Beef Soup (p.167), avocado corn muffins

Saturday: Leftover Buffet Part II

Sunday: Fish au Gratin (p. 190) with Honey-Orange Roasted Root Vegetables (p. 202), Pumpkin gingerbread with whipped cream (recipe coming soon!)

Snacks & Sides: fresh pineapple, apples, bananas, clementines, Roasted Chickpeas, stovetop popcorn

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.

If you'd like a whole book filled with 125+ family-friendly, money-saving recipes like the ones on my blog, be sure to enter my giveaway to win your very own copy of Cheap Appétit. Today is the last day to enter!

Library Corner #1

2012-01-21T11:02:00.000-05:00

Photo: Surachai/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

One of the resources I most cherish in my frugal life is living a five minute walk from our neighbourhood branch of one of the top libraries in Canada. We are there so often I sometimes think it's our second home, and the library staff know all four members of my family on a first name basis. We might even get a bit of extra special service since some of the staff has known us since before I gave birth to my babies and has watched them grow up (the fact that I bring them a plate of homemade cookies every Christmas might sway things in our favor, too!).

I recently realized that even though I'm an avid (some would say bordering on obsessive) reader, I rarely share anything book-related (aside from an odd review) here on my blog. Since I know reading is a popular activity with many of my fellow frugalistas (we all love our libraries, don't we?) I thought it might be fun to share what I've been reading once in a while, and you can let me know what books you've recently enjoyed, too! Since we are a cable-free household, we borrow a lot of DVDs from our library, too and I'll post some of our favourite DVD picks as well.

So, without further ado, here are a few things I've enjoyed from the library of late:

1. The Help by Kathryn Stockett

I'm sure almost all of you have heard of this book, which has gotten a ton of buzz, has been on all the bestseller and recommended reading lists, and has now been made into a movie (which I haven't seen yet). I finally got around to reading it and am glad that I did. I found it to be well written, although a very difficult read at times because of the subject matter. I still find it hard to believe that racial segregation existed in North America such a short time ago - I'm not quite old enough to have been alive then, but it was just barely outside of my lifetime that these events occurred. I think almost anyone would find this to be a worthwhile read.

2. The Writing Class by Jincy Willett

I'd never heard of this novel or its author before and I happened to stumble across this one when browsing the "recently returned" shelf at the library. The main character teaches a college extension writing course, and the story starts out revolving around the class and its students and eventually turns into a murder mystery. It's written in a humorous and somewhat literary style. I've taken a few adult education writing classes at my local university, and I thought this was a very cleverly done story with some pithy observations about class dynamics and human nature in general. If you enjoy writing, have ever taken a writing class, or just prefer your murder mysteries with a good dose of humour on the side, you should enjoy this book.

3. Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin

Yet another fiction pick (I've been on a bit of a novel bender lately!). This is the story of Angel Tungaraza, a Tanzanian living with her husband and grandchildren in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide. I'm only part way through this book, but really enjoying it. Although it covers some difficult subject matter, it is also about the joys and challenges of everyday life and is written in a light and hopeful style. It also provides a glimpse into what life is like in modern day Rwanda. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who's a fan of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith.

4. Chuck (TV series)

This show was recommended to me by a few different friends and we finally got around to checking it out. I'm so glad we did! It's a comedy-drama of the "goofy spy" variety and it usually has us in stitches. It takes some great jabs at big-box-store culture as well, as the main character works at "Buy More" (a spoof on Best Buy) and there are frequent references to "Large Mart" (I don't think I need to tell you what chain they're referring to there ::grin::). We're about half way through the first season and I suspect we'll be making our way through all five seasons.

Have you borrowed anything great from your library lately? Please share!

The Frugal Fixer-Upper: Front Entranceway Makeover, Part 2

2012-01-18T11:35:00.000-05:00

I mentioned earlier this month that our big goal for this year was to focus on long-overdo home improvement projects. We haven't wasted any time getting started on this goal, and we've been diligently working away at the next stage of our front entranceway makeover since a few days before 2012 even arrived!

For the last three weeks or so, our lives have been filled with taping, plastering, sanding and painting - and I am SO thrilled about how it's coming together. It's looking even better than I'd hoped. I just can't wait to do the final "unveiling" of the finished reno - but unfortunately, we're not quite ready for that yet!

Since I just have to share *something*, I figured I might as well post some of the "before" and "during" pictures and hopefully you'll be as eager to see the "after" pictures as I am to share them.

If you missed part 1 of this series, you might want to go take a peek to see how things looked when we started out.

Brace yourself, some of these photos are pretty scary :)

This first one actually doesn't look *too* bad, but I'm sure you'll appreciate the difference in the "after" photos!

This next picture is just to the side of the front door:

Here's what that area looked like once we moved all the "stuff" out of the way (YIKES!!):

When we moved into the house, there was a closet in the area where all the (horrible) wallpaper is. It was not original to the house; the previous owners had built it in and it was just a VERY BAD IDEA. The closet took up a huge amount of the entranceway, covered over one of the door sidelights, and was so poorly designed that it was only big enough to hold a few coats despite the amount of space it took up. Not to mention the fact that they also ripped out the original banister on the stairs to make room for this monstrosity (replacing the banister was part 1 of this reno). My husband whipped out his crowbar and ripped that sucker out so fast I don't even have a "before" picture of it :)

Frighteningly enough, this isn't even anywhere close to the most hideous wallpaper in the house:

Bye-bye wallpaper:

Once we tore down the closet, we were also left with this attractive hole in the ceiling:

Thank goodness my husband got some good practice taping and plastering when we fixed up our side entrance because he sure had to do a lot of it during the course of this reno.

Goodbye, hole in ceiling:

A few corners also needed taping and plastering, plus there were plenty of other places in our old plaster walls that needed repairing:

The hideous grey-purple you see in this next photo is the colour we've been living with on the walls since we moved in - ugh!!! It actually looks worse in real life than it does in the picture :)

Looking at these pictures now, I think I've already forgotten just how terrible this area used to look and I can't believe how transformed it is! We've got the walls and ceiling all painted now, but are still working on the baseboards and door frames. We also have one more big project to complete before this reno is finished - a built-in coat locker on the wall where the shoe cabinet and coat hooks used to be. That might still be a couple weeks away from getting done, as we need to wait for our carpenter neighbour to be available to help my husband with that piece. I'm hoping to be able to show at least *some* of the after pics next week, so stay tuned!

Weekly Menu Retrospective #55 and Giveaway Reminder

2012-01-16T09:29:00.000-05:00

Welcome to my weekly roundup of the past week's eats. I prefer to report what we ate in the last week, rather than what we're planning to eat in the coming week. Why? The reason is pretty simple: although I usually have a general idea of what we're going to eat in the next week or so, life often unfolds a little differently than planned, and I adjust my menu plan on a near-daily basis to accommodate leftovers and other not-possible-to-plan-ahead circumstances. I find this is the easiest way to ensure that I minimize our family's food waste. I'm also willing to admit that I'm a rather spontaneous cook, given to preparing foods that strike me as the most appealing thing to eat right here and now!

BOOK UPDATE: My book, Cheap Appétit : The Complete Guide to Feeding Your Family for Less Than $400 a Month (While Eating Better Than You Ever Thought Possible) IS NOW AVAILABLE on Amazon (Amazon.com, Amazon.ca and Amazon UK) and Barnes and Noble. I've started putting page references to recipes that are in the book in my menu plans so you can locate them quickly. For more details about the book, go here.

Breakfasts: Orange Pineapple Muffins (p.100), Baked Oatmeal (p. 91), bagels, apple pancakes

Lunches: leftovers, sandwiches

Dinners:

Monday: Cheesy Mac and Beef Skillet (p. 148)

Tuesday: Chicken Enchiladas (p. 127), Colourful Cabbage Salad (p. 207)

Wednesday: Bagel "Egg Puffs" (a quiche-like topping baked on top of the bagel)

Thursday: Pizza, leftover cabbage salad

Friday: Meatless version of Southwestern Beef and Pasta Soup (p.166)

Saturday: Pork with apples, onions and cabbage, Coconut Rice (p. 199)

Sunday: Roast chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, peas and carrots, Apple Crisp (p. 220)

If you'd like a whole book filled with 125+ family-friendly, money-saving recipes like the ones on my blog, be sure to enter my giveaway to win your very own copy of Cheap Appétit!

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.

R.I.P., My Faithful Friends

2012-01-14T08:10:00.001-05:00

In a society where products seem largely designed to break down less than a year after purchase, it's increasingly rare to have a long-standing relationship with most of your "stuff".

That makes it doubly heartrending that I need to say goodbye to not one, but two of my hardest working and long lasting possessions:

#1: My Hiking Boots:

I'm sure that at least one of my kids was still in diapers when I bought these boots. The youngest is now 12, so I'd say these boots are somewhere between 10 and 12 years old. They are perfectly broken in, and have carried me in comfort through countless kilometres of tromping through the woods and trudging through the city streets running errands on foot. Unfortunately, they have suffered a fatal injury that my local shoe repair guy deemed unfixable. I know they look fine from the top - it's the heel and sole of one of them that's wrecked. You can't tell from a quick look at it, as my husband rubber cemented it back together after the shoe repair guy handed down the death sentence in an attempt to make them barely functional until I can find a replacement pair.

I'm really going to miss these boots. I knew they probably didn't have too much life left in them, but I thought I was going to get 1-2 seasons more out of them, otherwise I would have started searching for a new pair much sooner. It's going to be hard to replace these old friends!

#2: Our Blender:

This humble machine has lasted us nearly 20 years, withstanding all manner of abuse by both of my smoothie-obsessed kids, not to mention the many batches of soup it's pureed in the last 2 decades. I remember buying this blender with my husband when we first moved in together during our college/university days, paying for it entirely with Canadian Tire Money we'd stashed away (for all you non-Canadians, Canadian Tire is a national hardware store chain, and they give you a percentage of each purchase back in Canadian Tire "money", which you can then use to buy whatever you'd like!). Amazingly, it's not the motor that's shot - it's the glass carafe, which has several chinks out of it, plus it's not sealing properly and liquids are leaking out the bottom. We've replaced a couple of different parts over the years to extend its lifespan, but at this point I think the motor's days are numbered and it's really not worth it to replace all the other parts that need replacing.
Of course, I'm even more bummed that both of these hard working objects decided to call it kaput during our No-Spend Month. In fact, remembering the crazy week we had during our last No-Spend Month back in October, I'm beginning to wonder at the wisdom of declaring No-Spend Months! I think I'm probably just more acutely aware of extra, unexpected expenses during these months, as I'm sure they happen during the rest of the year, too.

I may not end up replacing either the boots or the blender until my No-Spend month is over, unless I find a fabulous deal on a suitable replacement before then.

In an age of planned obsolescence, I honour both of these items for serving me so long and so well.

Farewell, friends! May I find worthy successors for both of you.

Help Me Spread the Word About My Book - and WIN A COPY for Yourself

2012-01-11T10:18:00.000-05:00

I need a little help from you - and in exchange I'm giving you the chance to win one of two copies of my new book, Cheap Appétit: The Complete Guide to Feeding Your Family for Less Than $400 a Month (While Eating Better Than You Ever Thought Possible). I made half a dozen recipes from the book just yesterday - I really do consider the 125+ recipes in the book indispensible in my kitchen, and I hope they will be in yours, too!

If you would like a chance to win a copy, do any of the following:

1. "Like" Cheap Appétit on Facebook (1 entry).

2. Share a link to the book listing (Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon UK or Barnes and Noble) and/or the book page on my blog on Twitter, Facebook or other social media (1 entry for each place you share it).

3. Share a link to any of the listings and/or the book page on your blog (1 entry).

4. Recommend the book for purchase at your library (3 entries). You'll need the book's ISBN number to do this, it's ISBN-10: 0982780397 or ISBN-13: 978-0982780398 depending on which one they want.

5. If you already have a copy of the book, write a review on Amazon (3 entries). Wouldn't it be nice to win another copy to give away to a friend or relative that could really use it?

6. Share a link to this giveaway post on Facebook, Twitter, your blog, or other social media (1 entry for each place you share it).

Be sure to leave a comment letting me know which of the above activities you've completed, along with your email address so I know how to contact you if you've won.

You have until Monday, January 23nd at midnight EST to enter and I will announce the winner Tuesday January 24th!

This contest is open to all residents of Canada and the continental US (sorry, international readers!). I will be drawing the names the good old-fashioned way by pulling them out of a hat (the random number generator is just no fun!).

Thanks for your help, and good luck!

Weekly Menu Retrospective #54 + Upcoming Giveaway

2012-01-09T09:14:00.001-05:00

Dinners:

Monday: Macaroni & Cheese with Ham and Peas (p.174)

Tuesday: Big Batch of Black Bean Chili (p. 160)

Wednesday: Spinach, Bacon and Cheese Egg Puff (p.181)

Thursday: Turkey Casserole (based loosely on my Turkey Pot Pie recipe, p. 175, with a mashed potato topping)

Friday: Spaghetti

Saturday: Make-It-Your-Way Potato Hash (p. 140)

Sunday: Pork & Apple Stew (p.156)

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com. And come back on Wednesday to find out how you can win your very own copy of Cheap Appétit!

15 of My Favourite Posts from 2011 That You Might Have Missed

2012-01-06T12:47:00.001-05:00

Photo: anat_tikker/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I've had a lot of new readers join me over the past few months, so I thought I'd take a minute to highlight what I feel are some of my most useful posts from 2011 so you can catch up on anything interesting you may have missed! As I took a look back on the year, I discovered several posts that even *I'd* forgotten that I'd written, so even my most loyal readers may find something here that they didn't catch the first time around :)

Why It's Worth It to Bake Your Own Bread

How to Make Your Own Menstrual Pads in 5 Minutes

5 Ways Decluttering Saves You Money

Beat the End-of Winter-Blahs with a Do-It-Yourself Spa Night

Energy Medicine: Frugal and "Green" Self Health Care

5 Ways to Save Money on Fruits and Vegetables

Six Natural and Cheap Ways to Freshen Up Your Home

A RE-USE IT PROJECT: Hockey Stick Muskoka Chair

Fresh, Local Food for Free: Starting a Produce Cooperative

My Successful Soapnuts Experiment

Five Ways Having Money Can Save You Money

Clean, Green - and Cheap?!?

The (Sorta) Secret Second Lives of My Stuff

Make Your Own All-Natural Lip Balm for Less Than 25 Cents a Tin

Happy Reading!!

Accomplishments, Goals and Another No-Spend Month

2012-01-03T12:23:00.001-05:00

Photo: Nutdanai Apikhomboonwaroot/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I guess it's finally time for me to admit that the holidays are over and a new year has begun! 2011 was a *very* busy year at our house, and I promised myself that I'd take a bit of quiet time after Christmas before jumping back into the rhythm of my usual routine.

In 2010, I shared my top five frugal successes of the year, and I wanted to do a similar look back on 2011 to see what I'd achieved in the past 12 months. As I took a look back, I realized that our family accomplished much more than I'd realized in one short year:

1. Paying off our last credit card balance: Yes, it's a bit embarrassing to admit, but we did have an outstanding credit card balance we've been working on paying off. Rest assured that we didn't run it up on big screen TVs or other frivolous purchases. Let's just say we were in a really tight spot financially a while back, and had some expenses we had no other way of dealing with at the time. It took a good deal of discipline to finish paying off the balance, but we did it!

2. Writing a book: I finished my book, Cheap Appétit: The Complete Guide to Feeding Your Family for Less Than $400 a Month (While Eating Better Than You Ever Thought Possible), which I actually started back in 2010. Writing a book is a long and sometimes very frustrating process, and I have to admit there were more than a few times I just wanted to chuck the whole thing out the window! So I'm thrilled it's finally here - a real, live book at last! While this is a satisfying accomplishment for me personally, book sales will also provide a source of passive income for our family.

3. Paying cash for a couple of large purchases: We made a couple of major purchases in cash in 2011 and receiving substantial discounts for doing so, saving us several hundred dollars.

4. Discovering soapnuts: I wrote about this inexpensive, eco-friendly and effective alternative to laundry soap here. I'm so glad I decided to give soapnuts a try - they are quite possibly the best thing that's ever happened to my laundry!

5. Making my own lip balm and hard lotion: One of my goals for 2011 was to continue finding homemade and inexpensive solutions for more of my personal care products. I'm very satisfied with the homemade lip balm and hard lotion I made a few weeks back (instructions here). Hurray for adding two more low-cost and effective personal care products to my repertoire!

Goals for 2012:

I'm not one for setting New Year's Resolutions as I don't think they're effective. What I prefer to do is to pick one big thing to focus on for the year, and doing as much as I can on a daily or weekly basis (depending on the type of goal) to bring myself closer to achieving it. Last year, my big goal was to finish writing my book, which I managed to squeak out with a couple of weeks to spare at the end of the year! This year, my husband and I have decided to focus on working on our house. We've lived in this house for eight and a half years now, and while we knew it was a fixer-upper when we bought it, we'd like to tip the balance so it starts feeling less fixer and more upper! We did do some work on the house in 2011, including installing a banister in the front hall and continuing to work on improvements to the backyard. We're currently at work on the next round of renos in the front hall, so I hope to be able to share updates on that area later this month! If you want to see the complete list of our DIY projects, check out my Domestic Arts & DIY page for links to all the relevant posts.

January = No-Spend Month

I did a fairly successful No-Spend Month back in October, and I've declared January another No-Spend Month to kick off the new year. After the relative indulgence of the holiday season, I'm more than ready for a break and look forward to a month of buying as little as possible! I'm going to try and keep grocery spending as well as general household purchases to a minimum. We kicked things off with a $55 grocery bill this week (not bad as we didn't buy groceries the week between Christmas and New Years!), which was further reduced to $30 as we had a $25 gift card we received from a generous neighbour over the holidays. My husband has also accumulated $20 worth of free gas (through the "rewards" program of the gas station he frequents) and we have another $20 gift certificate for a local grocery store on the way (received through redeeming Air Miles). We will need to purchase some supplies to complete the front entranceway project, so I'm excluding those expenses from the "no-spend" challenge as we need to get this reno complete ASAP. I'm hoping that our lack of spending in other areas will offset the costs of completing this DIY project!

Book Update:

Before I sign off this post, I'd just like to give a quick update about my book! It's now available for purchase on the following sites:

Amazon.com: click here
Amazon.ca: click here
Amazon.co.uk: click here
Barnes and Noble: click here

I'd also like to ask a favour of those of you who do purchase the book (or have already done so). If you enjoy the book and find it useful, it would mean a lot to me if you would review it on Amazon. It doesn't have to be long and involved - a couple of sentences and a star rating would be really valuable! (A note about the Canadian listing - it says it will ship in 1-2 months, which is definitely not the case - it should read 1-2 days and we're working on getting that fixed!). We're going to be doing the big "official" launch for the book in a few weeks, and having some positive reviews online will help make the launch more successful.

What are your favourite accomplishments of 2011?

Do you have big plans for 2012?

My Favourite Holiday Pie

2011-12-22T08:00:00.004-05:00

I know most families have a "must have" dessert that absolutely needs to grace their Christmas table to make the holiday complete. For many of us, it's a pie that fits into this category, and it's no different at my house. I first made this Cranberry-Apple Pie several years ago and it was such a huge hit with everyone it's now our traditional holiday dessert. It's such a festive colour and a perfect blend of sweet and tart - the ideal combination to finish off Christmas dinner!

Cranberry-Apple Pie

Pastry dough for a double crust, 9" pie

1 1/2 cups cranberries (fresh or frozen)
1 1/2 cups chopped, peeled apple
1 cup raisins
1/4 cup butter
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
pinch of salt
3/4 cup water, divided
1 tbsp cornstarch
1 tsp rum extract (optional)

Instructions:
In a medium saucepan, combine the cranberries, apple, raisins, butter, sugars, cinnamon, nutmeg and 1/2 cup water. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for about 10-15 minutes (until cranberries burst). Combine cornstarch and remaining 1/4 cup water; add to saucepan and cook, stirring constantly, until filling is thickened. Remove from heat and add rum extract (if using).

Roll out half of the pastry dough and fit into a 9" pie plate, leaving extra pastry around edges of plate. Add filling. Use remaining pastry dough to make a lattice topping (instructions here if you need them!).

Bake pie at 400F for 40-45 minutes or until golden brown. I like to give this at least an hour to cool before serving so it's not too runny. Serve topped with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

I shared this recipe at Full Plate Thursday.

Looking for more great recipes? Check out my recipe index (scroll down the page a bit to get to it) and my brand new book!

My Christmas Gift Plans This Year

2011-12-17T12:16:00.002-05:00

It's just over a week until Christmas - which seems to be the point every year where I wonder if I have everything I need to "pull it all together" gift-wise for the season.

So I thought I might as well share my gift plans for this year - it will help me sort out how well prepared I am (or not), and perhaps give you some last minute ideas as well!

WARNING: GIFT SPOILERS AHEAD! If you're on my gift list, please stop reading NOW :)

Hubby is getting a dress watch (which is not a surprise as he helped me pick it out!) and a 10 class pass for my hot yoga studio (he has come with me a few times in the past and hinted more than once that he might like to come with me occasionally).

My 14 year old son is getting a Nerf gun and a pair of slippers (two items he specifically requested).

My 12 year old son will also find a Nerf gun under the tree, plus a toque with his hockey team's crest on it (again, both items were specific requests). Extra bonus: the hat is made by a local company that is owned by a family in our neighbourhood!

Both boys will also find a new pair of gloves under the tree, which they did not request but definitely need!

In addition to the above, I'm going to be making up a "gift certificate" for a family night out (dinner and a movie). We rarely eat out *or* see movies in the theatre, so this will be a special treat (my kids still talk about the last time we did a whole dinner-and-a-movie evening as a family, which was several years ago!)

Stockings:

We all love our stockings around here! One year when things were really tight, my hubby and I decided not to do stockings for each other - and we really missed them. So I don't think we will try skipping them again :)

For the boys: mini-flashlights (for camping), some of my homemade lip balm, $5 gift cards for Tim Hortons (we have one in our neighbourhood and they love to go there with their friends), vouchers for tickets to a Hamilton Bulldogs (AHL) game (my husband got these for free!), plus assorted candy (some will be homemade, and some will be leftovers from what we bought to fill their Advent calendar). I also have a deck of "Things Every Teen Should Know" cards for my older son and a stocking-sized book of challenging mazes for my younger son, both of which I picked up at yard sales this summer. It's a tradition in our family that an apple and a couple of clementines go in the very bottom of the stocking, so that should just about fill them! Santa will also be leaving each of them a book beside their stocking (both of which were yard sale finds).

For hubby: He will also find lip balm and homemade candies in his stocking, plus the "His" soap from The Guelph Soap Company (which is made less than an hour away from me). I still need to track down a few other things for him - he's pretty well stocked up on toiletries so I'll need to get creative - suggestions welcome :)

My sisters-in-law are getting my homemade lip balm. Last year I gave them all a little pampering gift of some homemade cleansing grains, and I want to make it a new tradition to give them a little nurturing treat every year (we don't officially exchange gifts, so I want to keep it small!). I am going to have them all packaged up fancy with cellophane and ribbon like the one in the picture in the bottom right corner. Doesn't that look like an elegant little gift for 25 cents?

My dad and grandmother will both be receiving photo calendars that I bought through an excellent deal on Groupon (I got two high quality calendars for a total of $20, including shipping!). They will also be getting copies of my book, of course :) I have been making each of them a gift basket of baked goodies and canned goods for years and years, so this year will be no different in that regard (the top right photo shows one of the baskets from a couple of years ago). This year's baskets - which are usually repurposed clementine orange crates - will include Sweet Potato Pound Cake, Cran-Raspberry Jam, dill pickles, sweet pickles, salsa, Candied Peanuts, Coconut Neapolitan Candy and Christmas Granola.

Most of my friends and I don't exchange gifts through mutual agreement - we'd rather just enjoy each others' company, and relax with some cookies and hot beverages! We also stopped buying gifts for our nieces and nephews a couple of years ago since we all felt the kids already got way too much "stuff" and we didn't need to add more. Since we've scaled down the gifting, I've noticed that our gatherings feel more relaxed and enjoyable without the present-opening frenzy - and the cousins have plenty of fun just spending time together.

I do have one close friend that I've maintained a gifting tradition with, and we also buy gifts for each others' kids as well. I always do up a big food basket for her and her family, and usually give her a modest personal gift or two. This year, it will be my book plus a basket of assorted personal care goodies - some Apricot Citrus soap from the Guelph Soap Company, plus homemade lavender-grapefruit sugar scrub and a little sample size of my homemade deodorant (which I'll also do in the lavender-grapefruit scent). For her kids, I have some good hardcover books plus some Christmas activity and colouring books.

Wow, I think I am actually almost ready for Christmas - I still have a couple of things to whip up in the kitchen, and I haven't started wrapping yet, but I definitely won't be running around in a last minute shopping frenzy!

If you still need a few ideas for easy and inexpensive gifts, check out my Ten Quick and Easy Homemade Christmas Gift Ideas. And my book is now available on Amazon.com (still waiting for it to go up on Amazon.ca - sorry, fellow Canadians, I'll keep you posted!)

Are you "ready" for Christmas? What's going under your tree this year?

My Book Is Here!!

2011-12-13T11:25:00.003-05:00

The moment I've been waiting a LOOONG time for is finally here - I have an actual, honest-to-goodness real live copy of my book!

This is the proof copy, which means it's not for sale quite yet - but it will be VERY SOON! As long as I don't find any major errors in the proof that need changing, it should be listed on Amazon by the middle of next week at the latest - just squeaking in for the get-it-shipped-before-Christmas deadline (in the U.S., anyway!). My husband has already given it a look through and didn't find anything amiss, so keep your fingers crossed :)

I'll be sure to let you know when it's available, and update the Cheap Appétit page here on the blog with links to all the relevant Amazon pages (it will be listed on .com, .ca., and also .gb and .austr I think!).

Writing a book has been a lifelong dream of mine, and I still can't quite believe I've actually done it. I've written newsletters, op-ed pieces, tons of blog posts and other assorted articles, but nothing else has come close to seeing a whole book with my name on the cover!

Guess what everyone in my family is getting for Christmas this year :)

Weekly Menu Retrospective #53

2011-12-12T09:35:00.002-05:00

Welcome to my weekly roundup of the past week's eats. I prefer to report what we ate in the last week, rather than what we're planning to eat in the coming week. Why? The reason is pretty simple: although I usually have a general idea of what we're going to eat in the next week or so, life often unfolds a little differently than planned, and I adjust my menu plan on a near-daily basis to accommodate leftovers and other not-possible-to-plan-ahead circumstances. I find this is the easiest way to ensure that I minimize our family's food waste. I'm also willing to admit that I'm a rather spontaneous cook, given to preparing foods that strike me as the most appealing thing to eat right here and now!

BOOK UPDATE: My book, Cheap Appétit : The Complete Guide to Feeding Your Family for Less Than $400 a Month (While Eating Better Than You Ever Thought Possible) has finally gone to press. I still don't have an exact date when it will be available for purchase, so stay tuned - you'll know as soon as I do! I've started putting page references to recipes that are in the book in my menu plans so you'll know where to find them once it's released :) For more details about the book, go here.

Monday: Indian-Spiced Honey Garlic Chicken (p. 188 Cheap Appétit), Coconut Rice (p. 199 Cheap Appétit), peas and carrots

Tuesday: Sausage and White Bean Casserole, broccoli

Wednesday: Everything-But-the-Kitchen-Sink Lentil Soup (p. 162 Cheap Appétit)

Thursday: Leftover Buffet for kids (hubby and I out at his work Christmas party)

Friday: Bacon, Egg and Potato Hash (a variation of Make-It-Your-Way Potato Hash, p.140 Cheap Appétit)

Saturday: Spaghetti with Creamy Tomato Vegetable Sauce

Sunday: Crispy Pork Cutlets with Milk Gravy (variation of Crispy Parmesan Chicken with Milk Gravy, p. 186 Cheap Appétit), mashed potatoes, green beans and carrots, assorted Christmas cookie platter

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com

My $10 Holiday Outfit

2011-12-10T10:36:00.000-05:00

My husband started working at a new company this past January, and as it turns out they hold a pretty fancy Christmas party for their employees and spouses. I haven't had to get really dressed up for the holidays in a number of years, so I was scrambling to put together an outfit that would be suitable for this occasion without spending a lot (since we've already busted our clothing budget for this year!)

I didn't even have a pair of high heels that fit me, since my feet stretched out and gained a size after I had my younger son (the fact that he's now twelve years old gives you an idea how often I get really dressed up - nope, not even a wedding in our family in all that time!)

Thankfully, Value Village saved the day by having a 50% Off Day at the end of November. We decided to go to the store that's located in a more affluent neighbourhood as I figured I'd have better luck finding "fancy" clothes there.

I got *really* lucky and found a pair of black patent leather Rockport heels that fit me perfectly for just $6.50. I also found a black and silver top to pair with the black velvet skirt I already own for another $3.00. I added my "good" pair of dressy silver earrings to finish off the outfit.

Total cost to put this outfit together: $9.50.

The party was on Thursday night (and it was really quite fabulous!). No, I certainly didn't win the "best dressed" award, but I certainly didn't come close to winning the fashion booby prize, either (ladies, please don't wear strapless, low cut dresses to a WORK Christmas party!!). There was actually a pretty wide mix of styles and levels of dressiness at the party, so I blended in pretty well :)

You may or may not like my holiday style, but that's not really the point. With a little creativity and resourcefulness, I think it's possible to put together whatever look you're going for, very inexpensively.

For many of us, holiday outfits are worn so infrequently that I just don't think they're worth spending a lot of money on. In fact, I may just try holding a holiday clothing swap with a few friends next season, so I have something new to wear to next year's party!

How do you do "holiday fashion" on a small budget?

RECIPE: Sausage and White Bean Casserole

2011-12-08T10:17:00.003-05:00

I don't know about you, but at this time of year when the days are dark and chilly and filled with a million and one holiday-related activities, a comforting home-cooked casserole is just what I need at the end of the day.

I created this Sausage and White Bean Casserole when I was fiddling around with ingredients I had on hand earlier this week. It tasted even better than I expected and was a huge hit with my family. I think even reluctant legume eaters would enjoy this dish, as it doesn't taste "beany" at all, just creamy and flavourful! It would be great to tote along to any holiday gathering.

Ingredients:

6 Italian-style sausages, cooked and diced

3 cups cooked white beans (or two cans, rinsed and drained)
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 red pepper, diced
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp flour
1 cup chicken stock
1 cup milk
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1/4 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp dry mustard
3/4 cup bread crumbs
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
2-3 tbsp olive oil or melted butter

Instructions:
In a medium saucepan, saute the onion, garlic and red pepper in butter until soft. Sprinkle flour over vegetables and stir until well coated with fat. Slowly add the stock, stirring contantly. Add the milk and continue stirring until sauce thickens.

Add oregano, salt, pepper, paprika, dry mustard, beans and sausage. Pour into an 11 x 7 inch baking dish.

In a small bowl, combine the bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese. Add the olive oil or butter and stir until crumbs are evenly coated. Sprinkle evenly over top of casserole.

Bake at 375F for 25-30 minutes or until hot and bubbly and golden brown on top.

Serves 6.
I shared this recipe at Full Plate Thursday and Frugal Food Thursday.

Welcome, Simple Organized Living Readers!

2011-12-06T09:00:00.006-05:00

Me and my hubby back in 1997 with our less-than-a-day old son Noah

Today I have a guest post on Ten Breastfeeding Tips for New Moms over at Simple Organized Living.

I wanted to give a big welcome to all of Andrea's readers who have come to visit me for the first time. I hope you'll stick around so we can get to know each other better! If you want to learn a bit more about who I am and what I blog about, check my about page.

Some posts I think you might find particularly useful right now:

Ten Quick and Easy Homemade Gift Ideas
Seven Natural (and Cheap!) Ways to Calm a Cold
Six Natural and Cheap Ways to Freshen Up Your Home (if you're having lots of guests this holiday season!)

If you're looking for ideas on how to "do Christmas" on a tight budget, check out my Christmas on a Dime page, as well as my Thrifting & Gifting page for further ideas on how to give great gifts without spending much money.

Finally, if you're searching for frugal, family-friendly recipes, please take a stop by my Food page (scroll down to the bottom for an index of all the recipes on the site). I also have a book coming out very soon (sometime in the next few weeks!) called Cheap Appétit: The Complete Guide to Feeding Your Family for Less Than $400 a Month (While Eating Better Than You Ever Thought Possible). You can read more details about the book here, and be sure to come back in January when I'll be giving away a few copies!

I hope you've enjoyed your visit to Abundance on a Dime and that you'll want to stay in touch. You can sign up in the sidebar on the right to get email updates every time I write a new post. I'm also on Twitter and Facebook if you want to connect there.

Thanks for stopping by and I wish you a wonderful holiday season!

Weekly Menu Retrospective #52

2011-12-05T09:47:00.000-05:00

Welcome to my weekly roundup of the past week's eats. I prefer to report what we ate in the last week, rather than what we're planning to eat in the coming week. Why? The reason is pretty simple: although I usually have a general idea of what we're going to eat in the next week or so, life often unfolds a little differently than planned, and I adjust my menu plan on a near-daily basis to accommodate leftovers and other not-possible-to-plan-ahead circumstances. I find this is the easiest way to ensure that I minimize our family's food waste. I'm also willing to admit that I'm a rather spontaneous cook, given to preparing foods that strike me as the most appealing thing to eat right here and now!

BOOK UPDATE: My book, Cheap Appétit : The Complete Guide to Feeding Your Family for Less Than $400 a Month (While Eating Better Than You Ever Thought Possible) went to press the week before last. I still don't have an exact date when it will be available for purchase, so stay tuned - you'll know as soon as I do! I've started putting page references to recipes that are in the book in my menu plans so you'll know where to find them once it's released :) For more details about the book, go here.

Monday: Apple & Bacon Baked Beans (p. 177 Cheap Appétit) , honey roasted carrots, fresh baked bread (from Whole Wheat Refrigerator Bread Dough, p. 239 Cheap Appétit)

Tuesday: Spicy Peanut and Tomato Soup (p. 163 Cheap Appétit), cornbread (p. 212 Cheap Appétit)

Wednesday: Toad-in-the-Hole (p. 180 Cheap Appétit), peas, leftover carrots

Thursday: Cheesy Mac and Beef Skillet (p. 148 Cheap Appétit)

Friday: Leftover Buffet

Saturday: Spaghetti

Sunday: Pork and Apple Stew (p. 156 Cheap Appétit), freshly baked bread (from refrigerator dough)

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com

A Handful of Holiday Thoughts

2011-12-03T12:40:00.000-05:00

Image by digitalart/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

My husband has very kindly passed his cold on to me (that's the spirit of holiday giving!) and due to my congested head it seems I'm incapable of forming a long enough string of coherent thoughts to write a whole post on one topic. So I'm just going to toss out a few random tidbits that might prove useful in planning your festivities.

1. Christmas Eve is THREE WEEKS FROM TODAY. Despite the fact that I'm way behind my usual schedule in terms of Christmas preparation, I shall NOT panic. I will NOT try to accomplish some superhuman list of activities in the next 21 days. I will do the things that are most important to me and my family, and let the rest fall by the wayside. I really like what Sarah over at Clover Lane has to say about just saying no to the Christmas craziness.

2. I am going to start baking cookies this weekend. Cookies are one of the things that are very important to Christmas around here. If you are planning to do cutout cookies with your kids (or someone else's), I cannot recommend these White Velvet Cutouts highly enough. The dough is incredibly forgiving; it doesn't crumble or dry out so it's perfect for kids to work with - and it makes great tasting cookies! Other favourites in our house are Cookie Jar Gingersnaps (I use 1/2 cup butter and 1/4 cup of coconut oil in place of the shortening, and a full tablespoon of ginger), Magic Cookie Bars (I make my own condensed milk for use in this recipe), Eggnog Thumbprints, Whipped Shortbread and my mom's fruitcake cookies - which are a really unique cookie and an old family recipe that I just might get around to sharing here!

3. If you're looking for some clutter-free gift ideas, Angela over at My Year Without Spending has a great post on Experiential Gift Ideas.

4. If you could use a good laugh, Kristen over at The Frugal Girl shares 10 Ways to Have a Disastrously Spendy Christmas. I know none of you will be doing anything on that list. right?

5. If you're looking for some more quick, homemade personal-care type products to pair up with the lip balm and hard lotion I shared last week, head over to Crunchy Betty for over 20 great ideas.

Do you have a quick holiday-related tip to share with us?

Weekly Menu Retrospective #51

2011-11-28T09:20:00.000-05:00

Dinners:

Monday: Creamy Tuna Pasta with Peas & Carrots (p. 146 Cheap Appétit)

Tuesday: Potato, Cheddar & Bacon Soup (p. 165 Cheap Appétit), tossed salad

Wednesday: Smothered Meatballs (p. 143 Cheap Appétit), rice, green beans

Thursday: Chicken Paprika (p. 185 Cheap Appétit), mashed potatoes, peas and carrots

Friday: Pork Fried Rice (p. 139 Cheap Appétit)

Saturday: Everything-But-The-Kitchen-Sink Lentil Soup (p. 162 Cheap Appétit)

Sunday: Tex-Mex Shepherd's Pie (p. 173 Cheap Appétit), Apple Butterscotch Blondies (I halved this recipe and baked it in an 8 x 8" dish)

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.

Ten Quick & Easy Homemade Christmas Gift Ideas

2011-11-26T10:59:00.001-05:00

Photo by Suat Eman/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It's already less than a month until Christmas - can you believe it? I thought it was about time I shared some of my favourite quick and easy homemade gifts; the ones I rely on year after year whenever I need to pull something together at the last minute. They are sure to please just about anyone on your gift list!

Food:

Candied Peanuts

"Puppy Chow" (for people!)

Homemade Bread

Food Theme Basket Ideas

Christmas Granola

Cracker Toffee and Chocolate Bark

Personal Care:

Lip Balm and Hard Lotion: The newest addition to my homemade gift arsenal; I gave some to a friend yesterday and she was very impressed with it!

Winter Daily Facial Scrub: I gave this to my sisters-in-law last year and it was a huge hit! I make mine with just the rice flour, oats, and coconut and toss in the chamomile and/or calendula if I have some on hand. I like to add grapefruit essential oil to mine, but it's great even without any essential oils added.

Milk Bath: I don't think much could be simpler than this one! Combine equal amounts of dry milk powder and baking soda. Add essential oils if desired. Give with instructions to add one cup to running bath water. (I use this all the time myself; it's a great skin softener).

Do you have any tried-and-true simple homemade gift ideas to share?

Make Your Own All-Natural Lip Balm for Less Than 25 Cents a Tin!

2011-11-23T12:17:00.001-05:00

Everything you need to make your own lip balm and hard lotion

Every once in a while I try out something new that really rocks my world. This weekend I had such an experience when I made my own lip balm for the first time. It was actually a side project of making my own hard lotion, which I have been promising to make for quite some time now. I finally got around to it, and I am beyond thrilled with the results!

This project is great on just about every level: it uses only 3-4 ingredients (depending on whether or not you add essential oils), it's very simple to do, and you get a whole whack of high quality, natural moisturizing products for less than ten bucks. I hope you can understand how exciting this is for someone who lives in a part of the world where winter can be very long, cold and punishing to your skin :) And I can promise you, you will never go back to one of those nasty petroleum-based balms or fork over a ridiculous amount of money for a natural balm again after you've tried out this stuff.

What you'll need to make your lip balm and hard lotion:

(My recipe is adapted from the one on the MadeOn Skin Care Products site)

Coconut oil
Cocoa butter (the pure stuff, not a cocoa butter lotion)
Beeswax
Essential oil of choice (optional)

Some type of double-boiler system (I used a small stainless steel bowl inside a small pot)
A kitchen scale to weight out the ingredients
Molds for the hard lotion and tins or small containers for the lip balm

In my area, coconut oil is easy to find and beeswax is available at the health food store. The pure cocoa butter is the most difficult item to track down (I got mine at Well.ca).

As far as the molds go, I used an ice cube tray for the hard lotion and reused a bunch of old lip balm containers plus a few other small containers I had around the house for the lip balm. To reuse old lip balm containers, wipe out any residue with a paper towel, then boil the containers for several minutes - this will help melt any remaining residue off and make sure there aren't any bacteria lurking around in there. Wipe dry thoroughly with a clean paper towel and they're ready to refill!

What you do:

Weight out equal proportions of the coconut oil, cocoa butter and beeswax (I used 4 ounces of each for the batch I made).

Melt the beeswax in the double boiler (This step took quite a while as I had a big hunk of beeswax to melt; you can grate it if you have a separate grater you won't use for anything else as you'll never get it all off, or buy beeswax pellets rather than the solid block).

Once the beeswax is melted, stir in the coconut oil and cocoa butter; they will melt pretty quickly.

Quickly pour the hot mixture into your hard lotion molds, leaving about 1/4 of the batch behind for lip balm (I think I probably used a bit less than 1/4 of the batch for the balm, but just eyeball it - you really don't need much to make a lot of balm!) Let the hard lotion set up for a couple of hours before removing it from the molds.

To the remaining mixture, add a bit more coconut oil (I tossed in a fairly large spoonful). This will make the lip balm a bit softer so it's easier to apply. Put the mixture back over the double boiler for a minute to get the coconut oil melted in and keep the mixture hot so it doesn't start setting up on you while you're pouring out the lip balm. Remove from the heat and stir in 15-20 drops of essential oil (I used peppermint, which gives the balm an addictive mint-with-a-hint-of-cocoa flavour).

Quickly pour the balm mixture into your tins or containers.

This is what I had when I was done:

14 hard lotion mini-bars plus the equivalent of about 12-13 commercial-sized tins of lip balm (I have 10 containers of balm, but some of them are significantly larger than typical commercially available ones).

Note: My hard lotion popped out of the ice cube tray quite easily, but if you have trouble getting yours out of your mold, try putting it in the freezer for a few minutes as I've heard that helps it come out easier.

I calculated that it cost me just under $10 to make this entire batch of lotion and balm. Since I used less than 1/4 of the batch for the lip balm, that means I got 12-13 lip balms for less than $2.50, or about 19 to 21 cents a tin - for the best lip balm I have EVER tried!

Hard lotion bars in a fancy dish for my bathroom counter

For those of you who aren't familiar with hard lotion, the way you use it is to rub the bar over your skin. Your body heat will cause it to slowly melt, leaving a light oily coating on your skin which will absorb in fairly quickly. My husband, who has always found regular lotion too greasy, loves this stuff and may actually NOT have chapped, flaky hands for the first winter in forever this year. The mild cocoa-honey scent makes it perfect for a unisex family-use household product, too.

Not only will my lips and hands be super-happy all winter, several of my balms and hard lotion bars will be Christmas gifts this year, too. If you look closely at the photo above, you can see the container in the top right hand corner has a silver snowflake sticker on it - which is how I will decorate them for giving.

So, have I convinced you to give this a try, too? I'm willing to bet you'll be as hooked as I am on this homemade balm!

Weekly Menu Retrospective #50

2011-11-14T09:30:00.004-05:00

I have some exciting news! My book, Cheap Appétit : The Complete Guide to Feeding Your Family for Less Than $400 a Month (While Eating Better Than You Ever Thought Possible) is going to be coming out very soon! I still don't have an exact date, but it should be sometime right after American Thanksgiving. I'm going to start putting page references to recipes that are in the book in my menu plans so you'll know where to find them once it's released :)

Breakfasts: bagels with cream cheese, peanut butter toast, waffles, banana blueberry muffins (a variation of the Banana Oatmeal Muffins, p. 96 Cheap Appétit)

Lunches: grilled cheese, Toad-in-the-Hole (p. 180 Cheap Appétit), sandwiches, leftovers, Pizza (p. 133 Cheap Appétit)

Dinners:

Monday: Potato, Bacon & Egg Hash (a variation of Make-It-Your-Way Potato Hash, p. 140 Cheap Appétit)

Tuesday: Pork & Apple Stew (p. 156 Cheap Appétit)

Wednesday: Everything-But-the-Kitchen-Sink Lentil Soup (p. 162 Cheap Appétit), Garlic & Cheese Biscuits (p. 213 Cheap Appétit)

Thursday: Indian-Spiced Honey Garlic Chicken (p. 188 Cheap Appétit), Coconut Rice (p. 199 Cheap Appétit), carrots

Friday: Leftover Buffet

Saturday: Spaghetti with Creamy Tomato-Vegetable Sauce

Sunday: Roast chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, carrots, peas, Chocolate Mousse in a Minute

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.

The (Sorta) Secret Second Lives of My Stuff

2011-11-10T10:53:00.000-05:00

Photo by digitalart/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It's standard operating procedure for us frugal types to reuse things as many times as possible - it's an ingrained part of our lifestyle! While we often reuse items for their original purpose (e.g. hand-me-down clothes, washing and reusing baggies), I tend to get more of a kick out of the times we use things for an entirely different purpose the second (or third, or fourth) time around.

Some examples that come to mind:

1. Our jack-o'-lantern: Obviously, its first life was as a Halloween decoration. While most people simply discard their pumpkins once trick-or-treating is over, we bake ours up and make pumpkin puree.

2. My husband's hockey stick Muskoka chair: Assembled from busted hockey sticks and an old futon frame, this project gets top marks for ingenious use of scrap materials!

3. Random clothing reuses: Our clothes tend to go through several lifecycle stages; first they're "good" clothes, then once they get too rough around the edges, they become work clothes (for messy jobs like painting) or play clothes for the kids. Many times pants that are worn out at the cuffs or ripped at the knees become shorts. After that, things start to get more interesting. Really worn out stuff becomes rags, T-shirts may become T-shirt yarn, and old wool sweaters can be felted to make a variety of items. I even made my no-sew menstrual pads from an old polar fleece top and some old washcloths. My sewing skills are pretty limited, but if I was a bit more competent, I'd make quilts with old clothing scraps, too!

4. Assorted food scraps: I try to keep our food waste as close to zero as possible. This often involves recycling little bits of leftovers into a variety of new food forms. My Everything-But-The-Kitchen-Sink Lentil Soup comes in handy for using up a wide variety of items. And the inedible food bits get tossed into the compost bin and reused in our garden. I also sprinkle coffee grounds around my acid-loving plants such as the rhododendron, or use them to whip up some Mocha-Frappuccino Face Mask for a little spa treatment!

5. The wooden planter boxes on our deck: These were built using scavenged wooden pallets (a great free source of wood!).

Does your stuff have a secret second life, too? I'd love to hear some of the clever ways you reuse your household goods.

Weekly Menu Retrospective #49

2011-11-07T08:51:00.000-05:00

Dinners:

Monday: grilled cheese (quick dinner for Halloween night!)

Tuesday: Everything-But-the-Kitchen-Sink Lentil Soup

Wednesday: Sausage and Apple Saute

Thursday: Lemony Chicken & Spinach Pasta

Friday: Sloppy Joes, carrot sticks, chocolate chip squares (birthday dinner requested by my son)

Saturday: Leftover Buffet

Sunday: Baked Pasta, tossed salad, Pull-apart Garlic & Parmesan Breadsticks, apple crisp

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com

A Look Back at My "No Spend" Month

2011-11-05T10:58:00.001-04:00

At the beginning of October, I issued a "No Spend" Challenge for the month. My plan was to buy nothing except the absolute necessities for the entire month, and to keep my grocery bill below $325 as we'd gone over our grocery budget the last couple months prior (mostly due to purchasing surplus in-season produce for canning and freezing).

I'd planned to give you an update on this a bit sooner, but what can I say? I feel like I'm a bit behind in just about every area of my life right now! So, here's how it went:

Our grocery bill came in at $312.61 for the month, so we squeaked in at $12.39 under my goal. YAY!!

I had identified a few items that we would probably need to buy in October: a winter coat for my older son, winter gloves for both boys, Halloween treats, a birthday gift for my older son, and some coconut oil.

My husband found a great winter coat for my son at Value Village for $11.54 (I was *very* happy about that, as I was beginning to think we were going to have to break down and buy him a brand new one, which would have cost a heck of a lot more!). We didn't end up purchasing my son's birthday gift until the beginning of November (his birthday was yesterday, so yes, it was a bit on the last-minute side). We also didn't get around to buying winter gloves yet as it's been a relatively mild fall so far. We spent $33.31 on Halloween candy and $6.99 on coconut oil.

So far, so good, right? Well, we also had a few unexpected expenses thrown into the mix. Hubby had to go stock up on wood screws to fix my younger son's bed when it broke ($7.45), and he bought two new inner tubes for his bike after he got a flat ($22.58). We also needed some new bungee cords ($10.16 for a multi-pack) and I forgot to bring my yoga mat to class one day and needed to rent one ($2). My husband and son both needed new hockey water bottles ($6.76) and we splurged on a top hat at Dollarama for my younger son's hobo costume ($2.26).

That brings the grand total for our "no spend" month to $103.05. It's not quite "nothing", but it's a heck of a lot less than we've been spending on miscellaneous expenses the past few months.

I think I might just have to have another "No Spend" month in January! Maybe some of you will care to join me?

Happy Halloween!

2011-10-31T10:25:00.000-04:00

Hi gang! I know I've been missing in action for the last week or so and just wanted to pop in and wish you all a Happy Halloween.

Don't worry, everything is fine, just a lot on the chaotic side around here. I've been spending a ridiculous amount of time putting the finishing touches on my book manuscript, which WILL be going to press sometime very, very, soon (and you'll definitely hear about it when it does!)

So have a very spooky day and I'll be back "for real" sometime later this week.

Clean, Green - and Cheap?!?

2011-10-22T11:53:00.000-04:00

I've been using non-toxic cleaning products since long before it was the "in" thing to do, but for some reason it wasn't until much more recently that I became aware of all the nasty things that might be lurking in my personal care products. Over the last couple of years, I've gradually been phasing out products that are less than friendly and replacing them with safer choices. I've found this to be a somewhat daunting task for a variety of reasons. Many of these safer products are astronomically expensive compared to "mainstream" products, making it a bit difficult to wiggle them into a modest budget. To make matters even more confusing, a lot of those more expensive products that are labeled "natural" and/or "organic" are not any safer than the mainstream stuff - they still have many of the same harmful chemicals in them! And finally, some of the natural products leave a lot to be desired in the performance department - and if they're not effective, I'm certainly not paying a premium price for them!

I eventually came up with a set of criteria for my "ideal" products:

-rated between 0 and 2 on the Skin Deep Database. This is an excellent, free online resource which allows you to look up over 69,000 personal care products and get a rating from 0-10 of their safety (0-2 is their "low risk" rating).

-Canadian made

-not tested on animals

-manufacturer has signed the Compact for Safe Cosmetics

-product performs well for its intended use

-it's affordable enough for my family to use on a regular basis

Ultimately, I would love the product to meet ALL of the criteria, but that hasn't always been possible so far! The Skin Deep rating, price and performance are my biggest priorities, and after that I try to find a product that will fulfill as many of the remaining criteria as possible.

Before I share the specifics of the products I'm currently using, I'll share my 3 main strategies for keeping costs down:

1. Eliminate as many products as possible from your regimen: Because my personal care routines are pretty simple, I use only a small number of products, which helps keep expenses (and bathroom clutter) to a minimum.

2. Look for homemade options first: I have been successful in making several of my own products, all of which are extremely inexpensive compared to commercial products. They all work great, and I can customized them to exactly meet my own needs and preferences.

3. Buy in bulk where possible. Once you've found a product you love, buying it in the largest size available will often yield substantial savings (sometimes reducing the cost by 50% or more).

I also have a little opportunity for my readers to save some money at Well.ca. You'll notice I've linked to them a few times further on in the post (those are NOT affiliate links). They are a great online Canadian company, and have a HUGE selection of natural products, as well as offering free shipping anywhere in Canada with no minimum purchase. I have a coupon code I can offer you for $10 off a $40 purchase if you're a new customer. It's not supposed to be posted on public sites, so if you'd like the code just email me at abundanceonadime AT gmail DOT com and I'll happily send it to you!

So, without further ado, here are my current favourite all-natural personal care products:

Liquid hand soap: Nature Clean Citrus Liquid Soap. I totally love this stuff! Not only does it have a great clean citrusy scent, it meets every single one of my criteria, making it about as perfect as a product can get. It's also supposed to be available in a 3 litre refill jug, which would help reduce the cost and packaging, but so far I've yet to track it down anywhere I shop.

Bar Soap: Guelph Soap Company Eucalyptus and Mint Bar Soap. This soap is made less than an hour away from me and it's a great bargain for a natural soap! I've seen many natural bar soaps priced from $5-7 a bar, which is just not realistic for my family's budget. I purchased this soap for $1.59 a bar (you have to buy a pack of six to get it at this price, but it's worth it!). My husband and I both use it for shaving. It has a rich, creamy lather and doesn't dry out my skin. It's also a nice solid bar which doesn't melt away to nothing like a lot of other soaps do.

Body wash: I've been using Nature Clean Body Wash which I received as a gift. It's a pretty good product as far as meeting my criteria, but I've been underwhelmed by the scent. I'm planning to switch to Dr. Bronner's Organic Citrus Liquid Soap when I run out of my current body wash. As an added bonus, it's an extremely versatile product; I've been using their peppermint liquid soap in my homemade cleaning products as well as for handwashing and pretreating laundry.

Facial cleanser: I make my own "cleansing grains" (pictured in the glass dish above) using my adaptation of Crunchy Betty's winter face scrub. I make it with just the rice flour, oats and coconut with whatever essential oils I feel like adding (my current favourite is grapefruit) and I'll add calendula and/or chamomile if I happen to have some around. I've been using this for about a year now, and my skin has been wonderfully soft ever since (I gave it to my sisters-in-law for Christmas last year, and they all raved about it!)

Moisturizer: I use coconut oil on my face and body. People with less mature skin than I might find it a bit heavy, in which case grapeseed oil might be a better option. I've been looking in vain for a good affordable heavy-duty hand moisturizer for the winter months and I'm planning to try my hand at making some hard lotion any time now (I'll report back on how it goes!)

Deodorant: My husband and I have been using this homemade deodorant for about a year and a half now and we both love it. I like to add some essential oils to give it a pleasing scent - equal parts lavender and grapefruit for me, tea tree and peppermint for hubby. Our two boys have started using it too, now that they're old enough to need it!

My two remaining holdouts are toothpaste and shampoo/conditioner. I have really sensitive teeth and haven't found anything that works as good as the toothpaste I've been using since I was a kid. And I have a hard time finding hair care products that work well for my thick, curly, frizz-prone hair (I've tried the no 'poo thing with little success). I have my eye on the Yes to Carrots line as a possibility when I've used up my current shampoo stash.

Do you have some favourite personal care products or recipes to recommend? Please share in the comments!

Our Annual Apple Picking Expedition

2011-10-19T10:16:00.001-04:00

On Monday, we made our annual jaunt to Myers Apple Farm. We've been going there for what must be getting close to a decade now, and the fall season would just not be complete for our family without an apple picking adventure! We love this farm because they have a great selection of apples, as well as a small petting zoo, a corral full of horses and other goodies such as pumpkins and cut flowers. And I love it even more because they have not gone hyper-commercial like a lot of the other farms around here, which charge an admission fee and have a more carnival-like atmosphere. We're fortunate that although we live right smack in the middle of a dense urban area (a city of half a million) the apple farm is just a short 15-20 minute drive away.

Unfortunately, I had "camnesia" for our latest excursion (and apparently I was similarly afflicted last year, as I don't have any photos of that occasion, either). So I'll share a few photos from 2-3 years back (I cannot believe how much younger my kids looked back then!)

My younger son Nathan enjoying a freshly picked apple, Fall 2009

My hubby Joe and older son Noah, picking apples in fall 2009

Family photo amongst the pumpkins, October 2008

One of our classic family photos: Noah the Horse-Headed Boy

(this was *not* taken intentionally - the horse moved just as I snapped the shot, which makes it even funnier!)

And I just love this sign, posted at the entrance to the farm:

Empires are our favourite apple variety. I think they're the perfect mix of slightly tart with just the right sweetness, and they're nice and crisp. Last year, much to our disappointment, the farm had a severe shortage of Empires, as they were hit with a May frost just when the buds were forming. We got the last half bushel of apples they had last year and weren't actually able to pick any apples because there weren't any left on the trees. This year, happily, there was a bumper crop of Empires and we were able to pick a full bushel, despite the fact that we went up a couple weeks later than we usually do.

Newly fortified with our bushel of fresh-off-the-tree Empires, we'll have a good supply to make all my favourite apple dishes! I've shared a couple previously here on the blog:

Upside Down Apple Oven Pancake
Pork & Apple Stew
Baked Oatmeal

And there are a bunch more in my upcoming book, Cheap Appetit (which really will be coming out sometime soon - there have been quite a few delays, but it will definitely be available well before Christmas!)

Apple Crisp
Morning Glory Muffins
Sausage and Apple Saute
Apple & Bacon Baked Beans
Carrot & Apple Salad
Apple Raspberry Squares

Do you go apple picking? What's your favourite apple variety? Do you have a favourite apple recipe to share?

Weekly Menu Retrospective #48

2011-10-17T09:42:00.000-04:00

Dinners:

Monday: "Turkey overs" (Thanksgiving dinner leftovers)

Tuesday: Macaroni & Cheese with Ham and Peas

Wednesday: Cabbage & Beef soup, cornbread

Thursday: Chicken & Vegetable Coconut Curry

Friday: leftover soup and cornbread

Saturday: Bacon, egg, and potato hash

Sunday: Smothered pork (this recipe using pork chops instead of meatballs), peas and carrots, rice, apple crisp

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.

Five Ways Having Money Can Save You Money

2011-10-15T11:26:00.000-04:00

Photo by Graur Codrin/Freedigitalphotos.net

When your budget is particularly tight, it can be hard to build up savings. I know, I've been there! But I'd have to say that, right after paying off debts, building savings is the second most important thing you can do to gain more control of your finances. Having extra money in the bank will not only let you sleep better at night, it can actually help you to save even more money, thus allowing you to contribute even more to your savings account. Even if you have to start by saving a very small amount each week, it's worth it to make it a habit, and it will always pay off in the long term.

Here are five ways having extra money will help you save even more:

1. Paying in full for large purchases upfront can result in substantial discounts:
As I've alluded to previously, my husband has been in the process of getting a dental bridge made at a nearby university's dental school. Getting the work done at the dental school rather than at a dentist's has already saved us a HUGE amount of money (in the thousands) but we had an opportunity to save even more when we paid for the lab fees in full immediately, rather than putting them on a payment plan. We were offered a 20% discount, which on the $1600 bill amounted to a savings of $320. In the past, other businesses have offered us discounts for paying in cash. It can't hurt to ask, and you may save yourself a large chunk of change!

2. You can take advantage of great deals and buy things BEFORE you need them

The worst time to shop for something is when you needed it yesterday! By having extra cash on hand, you can more easily plan for your needs in advance, and purchase items when you find a terrific sale. You can also afford to buy items in bulk, which often results in a large savings. Having the ability to buy in large quantities when staple items like food, personal care and cleaning products are at their rock-bottom price means you can avoid having to pay full price for household necessities.

3. You can take care of little problems before they become big problems

Getting repairs done as soon as you notice they're needed will usually stop them from becoming much bigger, more expensive problems. Ignoring that funny noise your car's making because you don't have the money to pay the mechanic will usually end up costing you much more in the long run.

4. You can more easily cope with unexpected expenses

Life happens, and even those of us who try our best to plan ahead will likely be hit with some type of unexpected expense at one time or another. Appliances sometimes die without much warning, and a sudden death or illness in the family might require a flight across the country. Having a cash reserve to draw from when these type of expenses crop up means that you can avoid putting them on credit cards and accruing huge interest fees.

5. You can buy larger-ticket items secondhand

If you want to buy things secondhand from private sellers, you usually need to have cash on hand to do it (unless you're buying online on a site like eBay). Shopping locally for larger ticket items like appliances and cars will require the ability to pay in cash. When our washing machine died this summer, we were able to replace it within a couple of days by making a cash purchase of a 2 yr old machine in pristine condition, from a private seller we'd located on Kijiji. If we didn't have the cash on hand, we'd have had to buy retail *and* slap it on a credit card, both of which would have meant we'd have paid a lot more to replace our washing machine.

Can you think of any more ways having money helps you save even more?

RECIPE: Black Bean Chili

2011-10-12T10:46:00.001-04:00

We recently enjoyed a week of summer-like weather here in Southern Ontario (our Thanksgiving weekend was apparently the nicest weather we've had for that holiday in 50 years!) Today the weather's snapped back to more typical fall temperatures, and there's a lot of rain in the forecast for the next several days. In other words, it's perfect soup and stew weather!

One of our favourite meals in the cooler months is Black Bean Chili. In fact, I make this so often I can't quite believe I haven't shared the recipe here yet, but somehow I've never gotten around to it!

This recipe is easy to customize to your own family's preferences. It can be made vegetarian by omitting the ground beef, and the level of spiciness can be controlled by adjusting the amount of chili powder. If you prefer more tomato texture, you can use a 28 can of diced tomatoes plus 2-3 tbsp tomato paste in place of the crushed tomatoes (you will probably need to add less water as well).

Ingredients:

1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 medium red pepper, diced
1-2 tbsp olive oil
3/4 -1 lb ground beef
3 cups cooked black beans
1 cup crushed tomatoes
1 cup water
12 oz can of corn, drained
1 tsp cumin
2-3 tsp chili powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper

grated cheddar cheese, sour cream and chopped avocado for topping (optional)

Instructions:

In a large, heavy bottomed-saucepan or deep skillet, saute onion, garlic and red pepper in olive oil until they start to soften. Add ground beef and cook until no trace of pink remains.

Add black beans, tomatoes, water, corn, cumin, chili powder, salt and pepper. Simmer for 20-30 minutes, adding more tomatoes and/or water as needed to get desired consistency.

Ladle into bowls and top with cheese, sour cream and/or avocado as desired.

Serves 6-8.

I shared this recipe at Full Plate Thursday.

Keeping Your Frugal Flow Even When Life Gets Frantic

2011-10-07T12:13:00.000-04:00

Photo by Evgeni Dinev/Freedigitalphotos.net

It's been quite a crazy week chez McLaughlin:

1. On the weekend my younger son's bed decided to collapse (one of the steel supports for the wooden slats under the mattress collapsed, thankfully NOT while he was on it!)

2. On Tuesday, my husband went out for "a quick bike ride" before dinner - and was still not home an hour after he should have been! He had gotten a flat he wasn't able to fix about 15 km from home and I ended up needing to go rescue him, driving through a fairly high-traffic area during rush hour (which, since I rarely drive, was extremely stressful for me!)

3. On Wednesday, I came home from the library in the middle of the afternoon to find my 86-year-old grandmother in my living room (the kids had let her in the house). Since she doesn't drive and has never come to visit me all on her own before, this was a bit of a shock (she took a bus and a taxi to get here from my hometown about half an hour away from the city). After she'd gone to all that trouble to get here, I couldn't very well send her home on the next bus out of town! So I invited her for dinner and arranged for my hubby to drive her home later that evening. We had a very nice visit, but it sure threw my plans for the day right out the window.

4. On Thursday, my husband had to drive to London (Ontario, not England!) to spend a full day at the dental college there where they are working on making him a bridge. This is going to save us a lot of money, but the appointments tend to be made on fairly short notice (last time he had less than 12 hours notice; this time it was a few days). This disrupted the day's plans as, since we only have one vehicle, I now had to bike my kids the 5-6 km to the karate studio where our homeschooling group meets every Thursday for drama and crafts. Thankfully, the weather was lovely, but I did have to reschedule an appointment so I could have enough time to get home after dropping them off.

Needless to say, it's felt like somewhat of a chaotic week! And despite our normal schedule being disrupted at just about every turn, our frugal habits remained well in place:

-we didn't run out and buy my son a new (or even secondhand) bed when it broke. He slept on an air mattress for a few days until my husband had time to properly fix the one we had - it's now sturdier than ever!

-even though it was close to 7 p.m. by the time I got my husband and his disabled bike back home on Tuesday night (and we were both pretty worn out at that point) we didn't resort to fast food for dinner - instead I quickly whipped up my Cheesy Mac & Beef Skillet, which takes very little time and even less effort (and uses staple ingredients we always have on hand)

-I was able to invite my grandmother to stay for dinner on the spur of the moment, and adjust our meal plans to accommodate her tastes while still making good use of the foods that most urgently needed eating up

-because my kids are used to walking and biking places rather than being driven everywhere, they were easily able to ride 5-6 km with me to get to their Thursday activities. Yes, we could have taken the bus, but the service to that part of town isn't very good, and it would have taken several times longer for me to drop them off there and get myself back (plus we saved several dollars in bus fare and got some exercise to boot).

Sometimes it DOES take a little more effort to make frugal choices when life takes its unexpected twists and turns. But the more firmly ingrained your frugal habits are, the easier it is to stick with them even when the going gets a little bit rough. It's nice to know that even though life threw us a few curve balls this week, we still came up swinging for Team Frugalista full force!

Hopefully life will settle down a bit now, as I have a lot of prep work to do for this weekend's Thanksgiving dinner.

Weekly Menu Retrospective #47

2011-10-03T10:00:00.000-04:00

Dinners:

Monday: Black Bean Chili

Tuesday: Fish au Gratin, rice, broccoli and carrots

Wednesday: Swiss chard, bacon and mozzarella quiche

Thursday: Lasagna, peas, brownies (birthday dinner as requested by my younger son!)

Friday: Pork fried rice

Saturday: Lentil soup, cornbread

Sunday: Pork roast, carrots in orange sauce, twice baked potatoes, apple crisp

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.

October "No Spend" Challenge

2011-10-01T06:00:00.000-04:00

Image by Ambro/freedigitalphotos.net

Despite my hubby's vigilance saving us $100 at the auto service department, it seems like we've been going through money hand over fist these last few months. We busted our typical clothing budget, and got ourselves a new front hall banister and a patio in the backyard. We bought a new washing machine (secondhand on Kijiji) when our (really, really) old one died and took a couple of camping trips this summer. My younger son needed to replace almost all of his hockey equipment because it was outgrown or worn out (which cost us over 200 bucks even though we bought most of it used!) We've even gone over our usual grocery and gas budgets these last couple months, for crying out loud!

Now, all things considered, this is not entirely a bad thing. We did some long-awaited renovations to our home, had some great family vacation time, and replaced household items and sports equipment that needed replacing. We had more than enough money in the bank to do all of these things, and still have enough left to pay cash to replace our 40-year-old furnace next month (another long-awaited item on our "to-do" list).

Still, being the frugal type of person that I am, I feel a need to take a little break from spending for a while. So, I'm declaring October a "no spend" month and am going to make an effort to buy nothing but the bare necessities this month. Right now, aside from the aforementioned furnace, the only things (other than food) that I know we will need to buy are a winter coat for my older son, winter gloves for both boys, some Halloween treats, and a birthday gift (also for my older son, who will turn 14 on November 4th). I also need to stock up on coconut oil to try my hand at making some hard lotion (I was planning to go buy this today, before the challenge started, but didn't have a chance to get to it).

I'm also hoping to spend less than $325 on groceries this month. Our average grocery bill over the course of the year is around $350 per month, but it's typically much higher in the summer months as we are buying lots of seasonal produce to can and freeze. So, since we have a pretty well-stocked pantry and freezer, I'm planning to eat strategically this month and minimize our grocery purchases.

I'm really looking forward to a month that involves a lot less running around and buying stuff than we've been doing of late.

Anyone else care to join me in the October "no spend" challenge?

Paying Attention Can Really Pay Off!

2011-09-28T11:16:00.000-04:00

Photo by Ambro/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Sometimes it seems like saving money involves a lot of work: canning, hanging laundry, cooking from scratch, mending clothes, etc. So it's nice to know that sometimes you can save a significant chunk of change just by paying attention!

We saved $100 last week thanks to my husband's vigilance at the auto service department of our van's dealership. Our van, which we purchased used 2 years ago, was still under the original factory warranty for 100,000 km or five years, whichever came first. We had not quite hit the 100,000 mark, but the van had officially turned five at the end of August. When we bought the van, we opted to purchase an extended warranty for an additional three years (for most types of products, extended warranties are NOT worth it, but given the ridiculously high costs of getting modern vehicles repaired, we feel in this case it will be worthwhile). So, since the original warranty has expired, we are now covered under the extended warranty, which has a $100 deductible.

Hubby took the van in last week to have some warranty-covered parts replaced, and because we were now under the extended warranty, they were going to charge us the $100 deductible. However, we had originally brought the van in to have this work done back in August, and they had been unable to complete the work because they had ordered the wrong replacement parts. The van was still covered under the original factory warranty at that point, and when Joe pointed this out to the staff at the auto service department, stating that the work would have been done at that time if it wasn't for the dealership's error in ordering the wrong parts, they agreed that it should be covered under the original warranty and we were NOT charged the $100 deductible.

That sure was an easy way to save $100 just by paying attention to the details!

(As an aside, one of the things that needed replacing was the passenger seat, because of a faulty airbag sensor. If we had to pay to have it replaced, it would have been $1800! Because cars are so sophisticated now, seemingly "small" problems can often be very expensive for parts and/or labour - one reason we opted for the extended warranty).

Have you ever saved an impressive amount of money in a similar fashion? If so, please tell us all about it in the comments!

Weekly Menu Retrospective #46

2011-09-26T09:06:00.000-04:00

Dinners:

Monday: cabbage and beef soup, cornbread

Tuesday: Lime & Garlic Chicken, oven fries, bacon, broccoli and cheddar salad

Wednesday: Creamy Lemon Garlic Pasta with Bacon & Peas (a slight variation on this recipe)

Thursday: Barbecued pork chops, coconut rice, carrots

Friday: Potato, Sausage and Egg Hash

Saturday: Black Bean Chili

Sunday: Hamburgers, potato salad, creamy cucumber salad, cherry clafouti

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.

Fall & Winter Clothes Shopping Extravaganza

2011-09-21T11:19:00.000-04:00

I mentioned a few posts back that we'd done our major fall and winter clothes shopping expedition and I promised I would fill you in with the details soon, so here, at last, is the lowdown on our clothing purchases.

The bulk of our purchases were made at a 50% off day at Value Village:

4 long sleeve shirts and a turtleneck (3 for my younger son, one shirt and the turtleneck for my older son)

slightly dressy top for me

Black turtleneck sweater for me

5 pairs of pants for my older son

On the same trip, we also got a pair of sneakers for each boy (not pictured as they happened to be off wearing them during my photo taking session). Miraculously, we found a pair of brand-new looking Airwalk sneakers that perfectly fit my younger son (he had been determined that he absolutely wanted this brand of sneakers, which are very popular with the boys in his social circle). For my older son, we found a pair of New Balance sneakers in excellent condition.

My younger son desperately needed pants, and unfortunately we weren't able to find anything that fit him at our Value Village trip. We ended up going to Walmart and buying what I think might be his first ever pairs of brand new pants :) Since he is now fitting into mens' sized pants, the prices at Value Village are not always that great of a deal compared to the sale prices at Walmart. The pants we were looking at at VV were priced about $10-12 each, and some of them weren't even in that great of condition. We ended up getting Nathan 2 pairs of brand new jeans on sale for $15 each. They were the exact style he wanted and fit him well, so I feel it was definitely worth the extra couple of bucks per pair.

We ended up going back to Value Village a few days after the 50% off sale to see if we could find any more pants (the racks tend to be better stocked when it's not a sale day!)

We did find Nathan one more pair of pants; they will need hemming length-wise but otherwise fit him well.

We were also on the lookout for winter jackets as both my boys have outgrown the ones they've been wearing for the past 2-3 years. We checked out the jacket selection on 50% off day and I thought it was curious that there weren't any winter jackets on the racks. When we went back a few days later, there was a rack full of winter jackets, so apparently they don't put out winter outerwear for the sale. I thought that was a little sneaky of them, but we did find a good jacket for Nathan during our second visit:

I am really pleased with this find as it appears to be a good quality jacket and it has a METAL ZIPPER!! I can't tell you how thrilled I am about THAT, as I've had way too many plastic zippers break on my boys' winter coats over the years when the coat otherwise had lots of life left in it.

We spent a total of $85.59 between the two Value Village trips, and another $33.90 on two pairs of jeans plus a belt for Nathan. We spent another $49.72 stocking up on sale-priced socks and undies for everyone, plus a clearance pair of sandals for my older son Noah as the flip flops he'd started the summer with suffered a fatal breakdown.

That brings the grand total for our fall and winter clothes shopping spree to $169.21. I think the only items we are still in need of are a winter coat for Noah and winter gloves for both boys.

So far this year, we've spent $525.13 on clothing.

Other than the aforementioned coat and gloves, I don't foresee that we'll need to buy much more prior to the end of the year. Still, we are going to be significantly over our typical clothing budget of $300 per year. Now that the boys are getting bigger, it's getting more difficult to always find suitable second-hand options for them. They are also both at rapid-growth stages, so they had outgrown most of the clothes they wore last year.

I'm curious to know how much other frugal-minded families spent per year on clothing, especially if you have teenage boys. How much does your family spent on clothing annually?

My Successful Soapnuts Experiment

2011-09-19T11:53:00.001-04:00

Image by Carlos Porto/freedigitalphotos.net

I first heard about soapnuts earlier this year and was fascinated - washing your laundry with the fruit of a tree sounded very natural and all, but I was concerned it wouldn't be an effective enough cleaning option for dealing with my stinky loads of boy-laundry washed in cold, hard water.

One of my friends knew I was interested in trying them out and gave me a small bag of soapnuts as part of my birthday present at the end of May. I started using them in June after my batch of homemade laundry detergent was used up, and after a good solid three months of use, I can officially say that I have been very pleased with the results!

My clothes are at least as clean as they were with the homemade detergent - probably cleaner. And the added bonus is that the soapnuts seem to have a fabric softening effect - I definitely notice a difference in the feel of our cotton T-shirts.

For those unfamiliar with soapnuts, they are kind of like a hard, sticky berry. They usually come with a little cotton bag, and you put 4-6 of them in the bag and throw it in the bottom of the washing machine when you start your load of laundry. The soapnuts contain saponins which are a natural surfactant that will clean your clothes. The same batch of soapnuts can be used for 3-4 loads, then most of the saponins are used up and you need to start with a new bunch (I suspect I've done up to 6 loads of laundry using the same batch, as I've been known to lose count of how many loads I've done with the current batch!)

After a bit of experimentation, this is my new laundry washing "formula":

-if using a fresh batch of soapnuts, soak them in boiling water for a few minutes before starting laundry (I do this because I wash in cold water, and I've heard this helps "activate" them so they will be effective in the cold water)

-for each load, use 4 soapnuts plus about 5 drops of lemon essential oil added to the little cotton bag with the soapnuts, plus about 1/4 cup of borax

That's it! I am really pleased with this method of doing laundry. The soapnuts are not only a 100% natural product, they are also a Fair Trade product, and when you're done with them they can be tossed right into your compost bin. They are also quite reasonably priced when purchased in bulk: the best price I have found so far from a Canadian source is at Grassroots - $25.99 for 1 kg, which will do over 200 loads of laundry and last me over a year. In the U.S., Mountain Rose Herbs seems to have very good prices (although I'm not sure what the current price is as they're out of stock right now and the price isn't listed).

(No, those are NOT affiliate links - I just really like soapnuts and these are two of the best places I know of to get them!)

Have you used soapnuts? If so, have you been pleased with the results? If not, have I convinced you to give them a try?

Yard Sale Report for September 10th, 2011

2011-09-10T14:13:00.000-04:00

I know it's been a while since I've done my typical Saturday yard sale report. I've been out making the rounds, I just haven't found anything lately and given how busy I've been, I haven't bothered to post my reports of empty-handedness.

Today was a particularly fine day for yard sale shopping. It's warm and sunny (after a week of rain) and there were quite a number of sales to investigate since there's a street festival going on in a nearby area of the city and lots of people decided to piggyback off of it and run yard sales this morning.

I was out hunting down bargains for most of the morning and came home with the following:

Two small zippered toiletry bags for my boys to use for camping trips and sleepovers, which I purchased along with a Klutz book on paper quilling ( brand new, never used with the original $24.99 price tag still on it) for $1.00 total! The book will be going into my gift cupboard for one of the girls on my gift-giving list.

I got the two packages of small Christmas gift bags for 25 cents each (I use a ton of these for food gifts), and 4 sets of 12 seasonal note cards (one for each season) along with an Anna Nalick CD (in the next photo) for $7.00. I've been intending to start writing more letters again (they are so much more fun than email!) so having the note cards handy should help me to actually make that happen.

I finished off the morning with a couple of other finds: the basket was 25 cents and will go into my general basket stash (it may end up getting used for a gift basket). The (hardcover) book was $2.00 and is for my older son (it's the sequel to a book I just handed him to read last week!) The glass pitcher was in a free pile just down the road from a yard sale and I couldn't resist it :)

Grand total for the week: $10.75 for 13 items, or 83 cents an item.

Did you find any great bargains this weekend?

A Sea of Salsa

2011-09-06T11:59:00.000-04:00

Salsa is one of our favourite things to can - cracking a jar open in the dead of winter allows you to inhale the smell of midsummer (and of course, taste it, too!) Canning salsa usually involves one really long, hot and sweaty afternoon in the kitchen. This year, it was still a long afternoon - just not so hot and sweaty. After a few days of swelteringly hot and humid weather, the temperature did a sudden nosedive and the high yesterday was about 18 degrees Celsius - which gave us the perfect opportunity to get our salsa made without feeling like we were going to pass out from the heat.

We ended up with just under 12 litres of salsa from our afternoon of effort (which involved peeling and chopping 20 lbs of tomatoes, along with a plethora of red peppers, jalapenos, and onions). The recipe we use is the Picante Salsa recipe from Jean Pare's Company's Coming: Preserves book (you can find the uncredited recipe online here. We make 2 double batches to get 12 litres, which usually doesn't quite last us all year, but it's about as much salsa as I can handle canning in one day!

We are way off our usual canning schedule this year; we didn't get to any pickles in August, and I don't know whether I'll still be able to track down any pickling cucumbers at this point in the season. I'm hoping to get around to making some grape jam in the next day or two since my neighbour very kindly brought me over a whole grocery bag full of Concord grapes that grew over on his rental property. I've never made grape jam before, so we'll have to see how it turns out.

Have you been canning (a lot or a little) this year? What are your favourite things to can?

One. Tired. Frugalista.

2011-08-31T15:46:00.000-04:00

I'm starting to wonder what happened to those supposedly long and lazy days of summer. In the last month or so since we got back from our camping trip, it seems like we've been going full tilt on any number of projects:

Getting a patio built in the corner of our yard. This involved digging a 10 by 12 foot hole that was 6 inches deep, filling it with a 2 inch layer of gravel, a 2 inch layer of screenings (really fine gravel), installing the metal edging around the sides, and then laying the bricks on top (you can see the before shots of this area of the yard here). There is still more work to be done to finish this off properly (sand-setting the brick and landscaping the beds around the side) so hopefully I'll have another update on this project before the snow flies!

Refurbishing our Muskoka chairs on the front porch; they were in pretty desperate need of a new coat of paint. My hubby had built the footstools a couple of years ago, but never got around to painting them, so I spent a long day wood filling, sanding, priming and painting. The results are worth all that effort though, since it looks like we got brand new furniture for our front porch (the Muskoka chairs are nearly 13 years old now and still going strong).

Running a produce cooperative; this photo is from our August 20th exchange where we had offerings of Swiss chard, beans, peppers (red, sweet banana and hot), zucchini, cucumbers, rhubarb, carrots, green onions, lots o' tomatoes (beefsteak, Lemon Boy, yellow pear), parsley, sage, rosemary, dill and mint - all FRESH, LOCAL and FREE!

Keeping the veggie garden under control; the peppers are really starting to ripen fast with the colder nights we've been having! I'm going to slice and chop some of them for the freezer - being able to toss red peppers into a stew or stir fry in the middle of winter is such a treat.

Freshening up the flowerbed alongside our front walkway by transplanting a shrub and some perennial geranium, and popping in some mums for late summer/fall colour.

Add to that painting the front hall banister (I just now realized I still don't have a post-paint job photo of it!), various smaller projects (like reknitting the cotton bath mat that suffered a fatal injury in the wash - you can see it in a heap in the Muskoka chair photo), getting the kids registered for all their fall activities, and a trip to Value Village on 50% off day (more about that later), and you have a recipe for exhaustion.

I'd like to say things are going to slow down here for a while, but it doesn't look that way for the foreseeable future. We need to get a lot of canning done, as we're behind our usual schedule due to all the aforementioned projects we've been working on! We also need to get organized for the mid-September camping trip we're planning (which should hopefully be a nice restful week once we actually get there). Plus there will be the usual increase in busy-ness that comes with fall and a return to lots of different scheduled activities.

Has your summer been long and leisurely, or filled with lots of projects like ours?

Weekly Menu Retrospective #45

2011-08-22T09:31:00.001-04:00

Dinners:

Monday: Sausages, potatoes in a spicy tomato sauce, peas and carrots

Tuesday: Cheeseburger pockets (a kind of homemade pizza pocket using refrigerator bread dough), carrot sticks

Wednesday: Ate out at my niece's birthday party

Thursday: Lemon Chicken Pasta with Broccoli and Carrots (a variation on this recipe)

Friday: Leftover Buffet

Saturday: Pork Fried Rice

Sunday: Cabbage & Beef Soup, cornbread, Peach & Blueberry Clafouti

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.

Budget Backyard Transformation, Part 1

2011-08-17T12:22:00.000-04:00

Since we got back from our camping trip just under a month ago, we've been working away on a bunch of household projects that have been on our "to-do" list for what seems like forever. I shared a progress report on our front entranceway makeover a couple of weeks ago. Since then we've turned our attention to our backyard, as there is some major work we want to get done there before the warm weather departs for the year!

We actually began in late spring by sprucing up this area alongside our patio, which could best be described as an eyesore:

That's our brand-new-this-year (and not yet installed) rain barrel lurking over in the left hand corner. Since I'm forever conspiring to find a few more inches of sunny garden space to grow more veggies, I asked my handyman hubby to build a raised bed in this long-neglected space.

Here's what it looks like now:

My killer zucchini plant is currently dominating the space! I transplanted my strawberry plants from another section of the garden to this raised bed (they're on the far side of the zucchini, closer to the rain barrel). I'm planning to plant some taller sun loving perennials around the base of the rain barrel next spring to brighten up that area a bit (hopefully I'll be able to swap plants with some of my neighbours). It definitely looks a lot nicer than when we started!

The rain barrel cost us $50 and other than a couple bags of soil and compost for the raised bed, I don't think we purchased anything else (the wood for the raised bed was all pieces we had lying around from other projects). So, the total for this part of the yard was under $60.

For the last couple of weeks, our attention has been focused on the back third of our yard, which has been in a really sad state for the entire time we've lived here. Joe had built a playhouse structure for the boys the spring after we moved here, so that's been up for the last seven years. The kids, along with their neighbourhood friends, got a ton of use out of the playhouse over the years, but its time has now passed. My much larger, about-to-turn-12-and-14-this-fall-and-too-sophisticated-for-a-playhouse boys, are ready to move on. So we decided to tear down the structure and build a patio in the corner where it stood. This is a nice shady corner of the yard, so the patio will be comfortable at just about any time of the day, as opposed to the slice of patio over by the raised bed, which is inferno-like by 10 a.m. most days in the summer.

The "before" shots:

This ginormous weed-and-junk pile is where a decrepit garage once stood. It was well on its way to falling over when we bought the place, and we tore it down soon after we got here. Unfortunately, we haven't gotten around to dealing with this increasingly alarming-looking corner until now. We also needed to remove the tree stump you can see in the back left corner before implementing our current yard transformation plans.

The playhouse, halfway down

Here's what things look like after hauling a lot of wood and weeds out of the area:

Oh, and note the absence of the stump! It was located roughly in the middle of this photo. Joe was planning to rent a chainsaw and take it out himself. As luck would have it, our next door neighbour hired a guy to come remove some dead branches from one of his trees. When we saw him out there chainsawing away, we decided to ask him how much he'd charge us to remove the stump. He was asking only $40 which was an incredible bargain, since he hauled the thing away, too! Those last two corner posts are now down and we're waiting on the call-before-you-dig people to come out and make sure we're not going to hit anything important when we excavate the area for the patio. The brick we'll be using for the patio was all gathered for free from several sources. For the last couple of years, we've been seeking out the same interlocking brick that was used for the patio area and walkway we already have in the backyard and have finally amassed enough to proceed with the 10-by-12 foot patio we have planned. Once the patio is built, Joe will built a shed to the right of it, using much of the wood from the playhouse.

We hope to make some significant progress on this project in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned for the next update!

Weekly Menu Retrospective #44

2011-08-15T09:54:00.000-04:00

Dinners:

Monday: Sausage and Swiss Chard Quiche (I tossed some leftover sauteed green beans and tomatoes from Sunday's dinner in there too - chard, beans and tomatoes all free from my produce cooperative)

Tuesday: Peach & Salsa Baked Beans

Wednesday: Bacon, Egg and Potato Hash

Thursday: Spaghetti with creamy vegetable-tomato sauce

Friday: Fish & chips (we ate out for the first time in over a year on the way home from the beach - the kids were thrilled!)

Saturday: Black Bean Chili

Sunday: Barbecued pork chops, creamy cucumber salad, corn on the cob, chocolate zucchini cake

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.

Yard Sale Report for August 13, 2011

2011-08-13T13:47:00.000-04:00

All of you regular readers of my yard sale reports will probably remember that I struck out last week. Fear not, this week I got my yard sale karma back and came home far from empty handed!

My first find of the morning was these old-fashioned prints of ads for Mennen's "toilet powder" and Pears soap. They are printed onto metal rather than paper and will be perfect in my bathroom (I've been looking for decorative items for my bathroom wall for the last 5 years since we redid it - I never dreamed it was going to take me this long to find something suitable!) I paid $3 for the large one and $2 for the small one.

The two pairs of pants are for my hubby, who seems to have a special knack for getting stains on light-coloured clothing! I hope they're going to fit him - I decided to take a chance since they were $2 each and are good quality pants (one pair is Tilley brand). He hasn't been around since I got back to try them on, so I have my fingers crossed :)

Later on in my travels, I found a few more treasures. The set of stainless steel stacking mugs was $3 and will be perfect to add to our camping equipment stash. I got the ladybug garden ornaments at the same sale ($5 for the set) and the mesh strainer and tea ball got tossed in for free. I didn't notice til I got home that one of the ladybugs is missing an antenna. I'm wondering if it got broken off in my bike pannier on the way home, as normally I'm pretty good about noticing those sorts of things - I'll go rummage around in the bottom of the bag and see if I can find it later on. My last find for the day was a CD of relaxing classical music for $2 (good to throw in the CD player on days when my nerves are a bit shot!)

Grand total for the day: $21 for 11 items, or $1.91 an item

(counting the mug set as one item)

Did you find any great bargains this weekend?

RECIPE: Peach & Salsa Baked Beans

2011-08-11T10:51:00.004-04:00

Photo by Suat Eman/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

My family loves baked beans and I'm sure glad they do! They are such a simple, filling and inexpensive meal. I'm always looking for a new "twist" on the standard to keep things interesting.

I make an apple and bacon baked bean dish in the winter. Now that peaches are in season, I was inspired to do a summery version of that recipe, and Peach & Salsa Baked Beans was born. They were a big hit around here, so I hope your family will love them, too!

Note: This recipe calls for 6 cups of cooked white beans. I cook large quantities of dried beans and then freeze them in 1 1/2 cup portions, as that's roughly the amount in one can of drained beans. Using cooked-from-dried beans is much cheaper than buying canned, but if you don't have any cooked beans on hand, you can use 4 cans of drained white beans instead.

Ingredients:

6 cups cooked white beans (such as navy beans)
8 slices bacon
2 medium onions, coarsely chopped
4-6 peaches, peeled and chopped
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp dry mustard powder
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup molasses
3/4 cup salsa
1/4 cup ketchup

Instructions:
Place the beans in a large casserole or bean pot. Cook the bacon until crisp, reserving drippings. Saute the onion in the bacon drippings until it starts to soften; add peaches and cook about 5 minutes or until very tender.

In a medium bowl, combine Worcestershire sauce, mustard powder, salt, pepper, brown sugar, molasses, salsa and ketchup. Crumble bacon and add to mixture, then stir in peaches and onions. Pour over beans, stirring gently until well combined. Add 1-2 cups of water, to just barely cover beans (amount of water will depend on size and shape of baking dish you're using). Stir again to blend water into sauce.

Bake at 375F for 1 1/2-2 hrs or until sauce has thickened and a crust has formed on top of beans.

Makes 6-8 servings.

I shard this recipe at Recipe Swap Thursday, Full Plate Thursday, Frugal Food Thursday, Fat Camp Friday and Friday Favorites.

Weekly Menu Retrospective #43

2011-08-08T09:30:00.000-04:00

Dinners:

Monday: Spaghetti with vegetables and creamy tomato sauce

Tuesday: Pork fried rice

Wednesday: Thai-Style Peanutty Pasta

Thursday: Hamburgers, corn on the cob, lemon blueberry polenta cake

Friday: Black bean chili

Saturday: Leftover Buffet

Sunday: Lemon and Garlic Chicken, potato salad, green beans sauteed with cherry tomatoes

Snacks & Sides: popcorn, cherries, cantaloupe, grapes, peaches, bananas

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.

Yard Sale Report for August 6th, 2011

2011-08-06T17:58:00.000-04:00

Today's yard sale experience can be summed up in one word:

STRIKEOUT!

I had only two yard sales on my list when I headed out this morning, and managed to find two more along the way. Unfortunately, I didn't find anything worth purchasing at any of them, so I came home empty handed - I think that may be the first time that's happened this season.

Hopefully, I'll have better luck next week!

Did you find anything great this weekend? Please tell me all about it!

Green Beans and Tomatoes and Zucchini, Oh My!

2011-08-03T10:59:00.000-04:00

It's been a challenging year weather-wise for gardening: first we had an exceptionally cold, wet spring, then Mother Nature did an abrupt about-face and it's been extremely hot and dry since June. I don't think my poor veggie plants knew quite what to do with themselves!

Despite these weather-related challenges, the garden eventually rallied back and we've had a reasonably decent harvest in the past few weeks.

The green beans (as always) were dependable and I had beans, beans, and more beans for a couple of weeks there:

Now the green beans are starting to peter out (I just did a second planting of them late last week, so hopefully I'll get another good harvest in a few weeks' time) and the tomatoes and zucchini are starting to kick into high gear:

Our cherry tomatoes and yellow pear tomatoes (hubby's favourite) are doing well. Unfortunately, the romas are not; many of the tomatoes have blossom rot and I'm wondering if we're going to have any edible harvest at all from those plants. The baby tiger zucchini is a variety I'm growing for the first time this year - aren't they pretty? So far the zucchini plant seems to be holding up pretty well against the heat, and it's setting a bunch more itty bitty zucchinis, so hopefully I'll get a good yield from that plant by the end of the season.

The pepper plants seem to have recovered nicely, too. They were looking totally pathetic earlier in the season, but since the heat kicked in they appear to be enjoying life a lot more. The hot pepper plants have started producing, and my Gypsy sweet peppers are cranking it into high gear. There are a lot of peppers on the plants, I just have to wait for them to turn red now (it's definitely worth the wait - they are the sweetest red peppers I've ever tasted!)

What's growing in your garden right now?

July Food Stamp Challenge: It's a Wrap!

2011-08-01T17:26:00.000-04:00

Photo by Grant Cochrane/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

As today is the first day of August, that means the July Food Stamp Challenge is officially over. In my last post, I mentioned that we'd spent $393.83 as of July 25th.

Since then, we've spent another $6.28 on milk and eggs, bringing our grand total for the month to $400.11, just a hair under the $404 goal for the month.

All things considered, I'm impressed we pulled it off. And I still have a freezer loaded with cherries, pork tenderloin, turkey and a few other goodies that were purchased but not consumed in July.

I'm also fully aware that if I really needed to, I *could* have spent more than I did, as there was money available to do so. There have been times in my life when I absolutely HAD to make the money go as far as it could, as there wasn't any more when it ran out. Knowing you have a bit of a financial cushion makes the "challenge" of a small grocery budget a whole lot less stressful. I'm fully aware that there are many families out there who have to live within the constraints of a minuscule food budget each and every month, whether they like it or not...and I appreciate each and every dollar I have to spend on food, along with all the food skills I have that allow me to stretch those dollars pretty far while still feeding my family well.

Yard Sale Report for July 29th, 2011

2011-07-30T12:32:00.000-04:00

Things were pretty slow in yard sale land today, as I expected they might be, since it's a long weekend. I had only four sales on my list to check out today, one of which turned out not to be running when I went by. I did find another unadvertised one along the way to investigate, though!

Despite it being a slow morning for sales, I did come home with a few things:

A decent quality backpack for $1.00 (I pick these up when I see them for cheap enough as my older son has an uncanny ability to destroy them), two heavy-duty 9" Wilton cake pans for 50 cents, and an oil cruet for 25 cents. There's a similar set of cake pans on Amazon for just under $15, and I've often seen this type of oil cruet selling for $8-$10 (although I've never been able to figure out why they're so expensive!) so I was quite pleased with these finds.

Grand total for the day: $1.75 for 4 items, or 44 cents an item

Did you find any great bargains this weekend?

The Frugal Fixer-Upper: Front Entranceway Makeover

2011-07-28T12:48:00.000-04:00

Photo by digitalart/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Eight years ago, we were ambitious (or insane) enough to buy a 2 1/2 story, double brick house built in 1925. While structurally sound, the house was your basic cosmetic nightmare. The previous owners had lived here for 48 years and were in their eighties when they sold the place to us. We already lived in the area (just down the street, actually!) and knew that we wanted to stay in the area permanently as it's a fantastic neighbourhood (the first planned community in Canada, with just about everything you need within walking distance). This house had significantly more space than our previous 1 1/2 story home, with two features we'd always wanted: a large front porch and a usable attic space (which we claimed for our bedroom).

The price was definitely right, but in some ways I'm not sure we quite knew what we were getting ourselves into. We never would have bought a fixer-upper if we weren't prepared to do much of the needed work ourselves. Thankfully we'd gotten a good bit of experience fixing things up in our previous home; however this house definitely needed a LOT more help!

While we didn't waste any time starting to make improvements once we took possession of the house, we have lived with an unsightly front entrance since we moved in and are finally getting around to sprucing up this part of the house.

Here's what it looked like when we arrived:

Mustard yellow carpeting on the stairs and in the front hallway, with hideous peeling linoleum in the area immediately inside the front door. When we ripped off the carpet, this is what the stairs looked like underneath:

Niiiice!!!

My husband refinished the steps not long after we moved in, as well as ripping out a closet the previous owners had built in the entranceway that covered over one of the front door sidelights and took up way too much space while only holding about 3 or 4 coats. Thankfully the hardwood on the rest of the floors was in good condition after we scraped the disintegrated under padding off of it.

Before we could make any more significant improvements to this area, we wanted to install a banister on the stairs (the previous owners had ripped it out when they built the closet). This would allow us to remove the wall-mounted handrail, repair the plaster walls, and paint the whole area a much more attractive colour than its current purple-grey (ugh!) Unfortunately, the banister was by far the most expensive part of this project, and other things have taken priority for our financial resources up until now.

So, we had lived with it looking like this for the past several years:

Which, while still a dramatic improvement from when we arrived, was not quite the vision we had (this area looks a whole lot better than the area over by where the closet was, but that will be a whole other post!)

Yesterday, we finally got ourselves a banister. We had been looking around at the Habitat for Humanity Restore and other similar places in town to see if we could find suitable used materials for this project, but ended up needing to purchase everything new (except the small pieces of wood used to make the post caps). We also decided to hire some help to make sure the banister was built properly. This is only the second time we've hired someone to do work on this house (the previous time was to redo the roof). We hired our neighbour who's a professional carpenter to help my husband build the banister and make sure everything got done right the first time around! He gave us a bit of a discount on his usual rate and was willing to have Joe work alongside him, reducing the total number of hours needed to complete the project. They started work at 8:30 in the morning, and by 3:30 we had this:

It still needs to be primed and painted, but it's there! It's incredible what a difference it makes to the feel of the whole entranceway Once the painting is done, we'll take down the handrail you can see running down the other side of the stairs and start working on repairing the walls in preparation for painting them.

The cost for this project was $245.67 for materials plus $175 for labour (which I believe was worth every penny - the whole thing went together smoothly and precisely because of our neighbour's expertise, and it's rock-solid). If Joe didn't have the woodworking skills to work alongside our neighbour, the labour costs would have been significantly higher.

We already have the primer and paint left over from other projects, so there shouldn't be any further costs to finish it off. That brings the grand total to $420.67. It's a fairly large chunk of money, but this banister will last as long as the house does, so we feel it was a worthwhile investment.

Next up for this area: wall repair and painting.

Anyone else out there renovating an old house on a small budget? I'd love to hear from you!

July Food Stamp Challenge: (Overdue) Update #2

2011-07-25T20:56:00.000-04:00

Photo by Grant Cochrane/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I truly, honestly intended to post more regularly about the Food Stamp Challenge. However, as so often happens, life got in the way of my plans. Between taking a (cyber-free) week off to go camping with my family, dealing with the chaos pre-and post-vacation (including large mountains of laundry - line-dried of course ::grin::), running the produce cooperative, working with my publisher on finishing up the editing and layout for my book, tending to my garden, and keeping everyone fed, I haven't had much time for blogging lately.

In fact, blogging isn't the only thing that fell by the wayside in the last couple of weeks. I confess that my food budget really got away from me this month. I usually keep much closer tabs on how much we've spent as we go along, but this month I didn't get around to tallying things up since my last report nearly 3 weeks ago. Yikes! Thankfully the online budgeting system I use keeps good track of our expenses, so all I needed to do was log in, check to make sure the entries were categorized correctly, then hold my breath while I checked out the total for "groceries".

As it turns out, as of today we've spent $393.83 on food so far this month. That only leaves us $10.17 for the remaining six days of the month. Since we've already done our major food shopping for this week, that actually seems quite doable. We'll probably need to pick up a 4L bag of milk ($4.19) but that should be about it.

I'm pleasantly surprised that we've been able to come in under the $404 goal for the month. As I mentioned in my previous Food Stamp Challenge post, July tends to be one of the most expensive months of the year for us, grocery-wise, and although our average food bill is around $350 per month, July's is usually over $400 because we are stockpiling seasonal produce for freezing and canning. We bought quite a lot of food this month that will be consumed sometime in the future (like the $36 worth of strawberries at the PYO farm, most of which was either frozen or made into jam, the $30 pail of Ontario sweet cherries that I portioned and froze, and the big $12 hunk of sale-priced pork tenderloin that I bought and froze for a party we're hosting in August). We also spent MUCH more than we typically do on junk food (in an average month we spend almost nothing) since we were away on our major family vacation for the year and a camping trip wouldn't be a camping trip without s'mores and potato chips. In addition, we spent more on bread, eggs, and dairy products than we usually do, since we purchased some of those items midway through our trip at a small grocery store up north near our campground, where the prices were significantly higher than the best price we can get in the city.

All things considered, I think we ended up doing much better than I expected! I will post a final update at the end of the month so you can find out whether we stayed below our goal or not :)

Yard Sale Report for July 23rd, 2011

2011-07-23T18:12:00.000-04:00

Whew - here at long last is my Saturday yard sale report. Between a morning out treasure hunting, running today's produce cooperative exchange, getting some laundry on the line and squeezing in a trip to the pool to cool down and a last minute dash to the library before it closed, today didn't leave any time for blogging until right now!

It was *almost* too hot to go out riding around on my bike checking out yard sales today...but not quite! Surprisingly, given the heat and the fact that it's prime vacation season, there were a good 8 or 10 sales running in my area.

Here's what I found:

3 kids' books for $2.00 total, a funky stainless steel stacking canister set which I bought at the same sale as the Stargate DVD for $3.00 total (I'm thinking the canister will be awesome for camping, we'll probably cover over the coffee/tea/cocoa labels with homemade ones for whatever we decide to stock it with; we've been planning to start watching the Stargate series on DVD but I wanted to see the movie first - our library didn't have it so I figured I might as well grab it when I saw it this morning). I really liked the pattern on this glass vase so I couldn't resist it for $1.00 (most of the time I use Mason jars for vases, lol). The church I bought the vase at was giving away those cool cloth drawstring bags for free and I'm sure they'll come in handy for a variety of uses.

My big find of the morning was this twin comforter with matching pillowcase that I picked up for $8.00. It's in really good condition and I was pretty sure my 13 yr old would like it. New bedding for him has been on my "to buy" list for a while so I was pretty excited to stumble on this ensemble. The timing of this find was perfect as a local department store is having a clearance sale on bedding this week and I was thinking of checking it out as I've hunted around for ages without finding anything suitable. He was quite impressed with my find, by the way, so score one for mom's thrifting skills (I figure it never hurts to impress your teenagers with your frugal abilities!)

Grand total for the day: $14.00 for 9 items or 1.56 an item

Did you find any great bargains this weekend?

Yard Sale Report for July 9th, 2011

2011-07-09T15:04:00.000-04:00

It was yard sale central in my part of the city this week! I hit about a dozen sales before calling it a day. Although I had great fun browsing, I didn't find a whole lot of interest to me. I did end up coming home with a few items:

I found a single enamel camping plate that exactly matches our set of camping bowls. It was marked $2.00 but I offered $1.00 and got it for that amount. My next find of the morning was a pair of sport sandals for my hubby in brand new condition. I paid $2.00 for them and they fit him perfectly (he's very pleased as his current pair is starting to wear out). At the same sale, I found the set of cat dishes , which I'm sure my cat won't particularly care about, but I'll be happy to replace her current plastic dishes with these ceramic ones. I paid $1.00 for the set. My final purchase of the morning was a couple of CDs (Fleetwood Mac and The Spoons) for $2.00.

Grand total for the day: 6.00 for 6 items, or $1.00 per item.

Did you find anything great this weekend?

July Food Stamp Challenge: Update #1

2011-07-06T10:53:00.001-04:00

Photo by Grant Cochrane/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Katie over at The Non-Consumer Advocate is running a Food Stamp Challenge this month, wherein her readers attempt to feed their families on the amount they would obtain if they were on food stamps. I think it's important to discuss hunger and food security issues; it's really a silent epidemic in our society and I'm pretty sure the average middle- or upper- class family really has no idea how widespread hunger problems are. In the spring, there was a front page, above-the-fold article in my local newspaper dedicated to the hunger problem in my city. Hunger was declared to be the #1 social problem here, and food banks ran out of food earlier in the year than they ever have in the past. Here in Canada, we don't have any type of program like the food stamp program in the U.S., so for people who have little or no money for food, food banks are the only formal social support that's available to them.

So, when Katie issued her challenge, I felt moved to participate. For our family of four, the amount of money we'd be allocated for food stamps would be about $404 (as I understand it, there are factors which could make families eligible for more or less than this, but I'll go with this figure.) Since I'm about to get a book published on how to feed your family for less than $400 per month, you'd think this would hardly be a challenge for our family! However, there are a couple of factors that will make it a bit trickier than you might expect for a family that's used to eating on the cheap:

1. Although we spent an average of just under $350 per month on food in the six month period from June 1st to November 30th in 2010, July is our highest spending month foodwise for the entire year, as we are purchasing lots of in-season fruit to can and freeze for the rest of the year. Last July we spent just under $430, or $70 over our monthly average. In the winter months, our food costs tend to be much lower, as we're eating all the food we stockpiled during the growing season.

2. We're going on our major summer camping trip this month, and I tend to buy a few more convenience foods than I normally would to make camping meal prep a bit simpler. I also buy bread and hamburger/hotdog buns, which I normally make myself for a fraction of the cost of store bought. The store bought ones will keep for significantly longer than my homemade goodies while we're out in the woods.

Thankfully, I do have a resource that will hopefully help to mitigate some of these costs - the produce cooperative I started earlier this year. This twice-a-month free exchange of local produce between backyard gardeners in my neighbourhood should provide some extra no-cost produce for my family to enjoy and help reduce the amount we're spending on fruits and vegetables at the store.

So far this month, we've spent the following on food and food-related items:

$36.00 on 18 quarts of strawberries at the Pick-Your-Own farm
$4.40 on zip-top freezer bags (since we reuse these things until they fall apart, I usually buy them only once a year or less - just figures I'd need to buy them this month!!)
$1.79 half a dozen whole wheat panini rolls off the reduced rack (because I hadn't gotten around to making bread dough)
$4.19 for 4 litres of milk
$0.98 on two cans of frozen lemonade concentrate (on sale, one is for our on-the-way-to-camping picnic)
$2.98 on 2 500 mL tubs of sour cream (on sale)
$3.97 for 10 lbs of potatoes
$10.00 for a 500 g pkg of Parmesan cheese
$1.26 for two packages of Chapman's frozen treats (ice cream bars and Drumstick-style cones) - they were on sale for half price and I had a $5.00 off manufacturer's coupon
$5.88 for 4 cans of frozen orange juice concentrate
$3.98 for 2 pkg of 6 bagels (whole wheat cinnamon raisin) on sale
$12.26 for just under 7 lbs of boneless pork loin on sale (this went in the freezer and will probably not be eaten this month - I think I'm going to save it for the party we're hosting in August)
$3.77 for 3 lb of blueberries

Total to date: $91.46

We've also been eating a lot of free-from-the-garden greens, as well as enjoying some other greens and herbs courtesy of the West Hamilton Produce Cooperative.

All in all, I guess we're off to a pretty good start for the Food Stamp Challenge!

Weekly Menu Retrospective #42

2011-07-04T09:16:00.000-04:00

Dinners:

Monday: Choice of leftover spaghetti or hotdogs, sliced raw veggies, raspberry smoothies

Tuesday: Barbecued pork chops, lemon and dill potato salad, tossed salad (greens from garden)

Wednesday: Spicy Black Bean Bake

Thursday: Thai-Style Peanutty Pasta

Friday: Hamburgers, oven fries, ice cream

Saturday: Leftover Black Bean Bake

Sunday: Barbecued pork chops, pasta salad, tossed salad (greens from garden), blueberry-raspberry crostata

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.

Yard Sale Report for July 2nd, 2011: Holiday Weekend Edition

2011-07-02T13:09:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was Canada Day, making this the first long weekend of the summer. Some years there seem to be a lot of yard sales on long weekends, and some years there is very little going on. This year turned out to be the latter - only two yard sales in my area to check out. I was pretty tired from picking 18 quarts of strawberries and making 3 batches of jam yesterday, so I almost didn't mind that there was not an extensive list of sales to visit this morning!

I came home with two purchases, one from each sale:

A basket for 50 cents, and a wooden bowl for $5.00. Normally I would have haggled over the bowl price, but it was a fundraiser sale and I don't dicker at those. It appears to be a fairly good quality bowl, too, so I don't think it was such a bad deal :)

Grand total for the day: $5.50 for 2 items, or $2.75 per item.

Are long weekends quiet or busy for yard sales in your area?

Fresh, Local Food for Free: Starting a Produce Cooperative

2011-06-29T10:32:00.000-04:00

You all know how much I love free stuff, right? And how much I love food? Well then, in my world it can't get much better than getting free food - especially when it's fresh and local!

That is exactly what's happening in my neighbourhood with the advent of the West Hamilton Produce Cooperative. I got the idea to start this group after Angela Barton shared her experience as a member of the Hillside Produce Cooperative on her blog last year. I was so smitten with the idea that I knew I had to give it a shot in my own area.

Last Saturday, the West Hamilton Produce Cooperative held its first exchange and in my opinion it was a great success. We have over 20 members signed on to the group thus far, and about half a dozen participated in the first exchange (we had a really cold, wet spring so a lot of people's gardens aren't producing much yet).

The offerings included:

Cilantro, dill, spearmint, peppermint, chives, garlic chives, oregano, lettuce, arugula, two kinds of basil, lovage, parsley, sage, thyme, summer savory, lemon balm, rhubarb and a variety of ornamental plants (echinacea, coral bells, daisy, black eyed susan).

I was very impressed with the quality, quantity and variety of items participants contributed to the group. It took me about an hour to sort through everything and distribute the goods evenly amongst the members' bags. When they were all packed up and ready to go, it looked like everyone had just hit up the local farmers' market - but instead, all the food was FREE! It reminded me a lot of picking up my share back when I belonged to a CSA. You never knew exactly what you were going to get, but you knew it would be fresh and local.

The co-op really didn't take that much work to get up and running. I'm excited to see what types of offerings we get as the season progresses. It's pretty cool to enjoy another member's lettuce and know someone else is getting to feast on my arugula! Plus, I've enjoyed the opportunity to meet other enthusiastic backyard veggie gardeners in my neighbourhood. Not to mention the fact that I don't have to spend as much money on produce at the grocery store.

If you're interested in starting a produce cooperative in your area, Hynden Walch (the founder of the Hillside Produce Cooperative) wrote an article sharing her experience starting her group.

Weekly Menu Retrospective #41

2011-06-27T09:02:00.000-04:00

Dinners:

Monday: Barbecued chicken, coconut rice, tossed salad

Tuesday: Sausage & cheddar pasta salad, Build a Cucumber & Bean Salad (with chickpeas and feta)

Wednesday: Potato, Bacon & Egg Hash

Thursday: Leftover chicken, sauteed asparagus, honey roasted carrots, garlic and cheddar biscuits, strawberries (the local ones are finally here - hurray!)

Friday: Spaghetti, leftover carrots and biscuits

Saturday: Leftover Buffet

Sunday: Buttermilk & Herb Chicken, hush puppies, tossed salad, butter tart squares

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.

Yard Sale Report for June 25th, 2011

2011-06-25T16:03:00.000-04:00

Another overcast Saturday..but lots of yard sales to check out! I think everyone's given up on waiting for the perfect Saturday weather-wise and decided to take there chances. There were several street sales in my area so I didn't have to do a lot of riding to check out a lot of merchandise (which I appreciated, as I really haven't gotten enough sleep this week).

Here's what I found on my morning's travels:

At the first street sale I picked up a wicker hamper for 50 cents.It was going cheap due to a broken closure. I might take the lid off and use it as a drawer-style basket, or save it for a future gift basket and use the closure openings for ribbon ties...we'll see :)

At the next street sale, I bought a hardcover nature book/sorting and matching game that's going in my gift cupboard (25 cents) and a book called "Dish" by Marion Kane (a popular Canadian food writer) for 50 cents.

Later in the morning, I found these cute insect tea light holders (perfect for my front porch!) and got both for $1.50; a handmade journal still in the shrink wrap for $1.00 and a belt for my younger son (in a free pile!)

On my way home, I stumbled on an unadvertised sale and bought a flowering shrub (not sure what kind) for $3.00 and a begonia for 50 cents (I forgot to include them in the photo).

Grand total for the day: $7.25 for 9 items, or 81 cents an item.

Did you find any great bargains this weekend?

Kickoff to Summer: An Inspirational Link Roundup

2011-06-22T11:41:00.000-04:00

As of yesterday, it's officially summer - YAY! My garden is even getting into the act and finally growing up a storm now that we've had some consistently warmer temperatures and not so much rain.

To kick off the start of my favourite season, I thought I'd highlight some of my favourite posts from last summer. I hope you'll bookmark this page so you can refer back to it during these next few warm and (hopefully) sunny months!

To start things off, I'll point you to my musings on my favourite Simple Summer Pleasures.

If you want some motivation to get out there on the yard sale circuit, take a peek inside my gift cupboard.

Need a little inspiration out in the garden? Check out our $75 Deck Makeover (this year I'll be chronicling the overhaul of a major part of our backyard; the first installment will be coming soon!). If you're still struggling with veggie gardening in an urban environment, Incredible Edibles may be just the resource you're looking for. And if, like me, you have way more mint in your garden than you know what to do with, Making the Most of...Mint should give you plenty of new ways to use this proliferative herb!

Summer Eating:

If you missed my earlier roundup of warm weather salads, you'll want to head over and check out this list of some of our favourite summer side dishes.

Some other tried-and-true savoury summer dishes at our house are Stuffed Jalapenos, Pulled Pork Sandwiches, and Thai-Style Peanutty Pasta.

Of course, it wouldn't be summer without a few sweet, fruity treats! Raspberry Cream Cheese Squares and Lemon Blueberry Polenta Cake travel well for potlucks and picnics. Peach Clafouti is an easy-to-throw-together dessert that lends itself to variations with a variety of summer fruit. And if you have that age-old gardener's dilemma of way too much zucchini, Chocolate Zucchini Muffins are a tasty way to use up some of the surplus!

I know I'm looking forward to a couple of months of warm weather, outdoor activity and lots of delicious meals featuring fresh, seasonal produce. I hope you'll stick around and join me in celebrating all the pleasures summer has to offer.

Yard Sale Report for June 18th, 2011

2011-06-18T13:56:00.000-04:00

Finally! A clear and sunny Saturday morning. Much to my chagrin, there were not a lot of yard sale listings in my area to go along with the fabulous weather. I think it's rained too many Saturdays in a row and people have all but given up trying to hold a successful yard sale. I did have 5 yard sales on my list to check out; I stumbled on another one during my travels, hitting half a dozen in total. Only two of the sales had anything of interest to me:

I picked up this copy of The Gourmet Cookbook for $3.00 (it's listed for $31.47 on Amazon.ca) at the first yard sale I hit. The yoga pants were $3.00 and the Inukshuk earrings plus the windchimes (below) were another $10.00. That's a bit more than I would usually pay, but the windchimes were new-in-the-box and the earrings are going into my gift cupboard for my niece's birthday, so I sucked it up a bit and paid a little more than my cheapskate self will usually consider :)

Grand total for the day: $16.00 for 4 items, or $4.00 per item (significantly higher than my usual per-item cost, but I figure the retail value of today's purchases to be around $85 before taxes, so I think I still did okay!)

Did you find any great deals this weekend?

RECIPE: Chocolate Peanut Granola

2011-06-15T08:45:00.001-04:00

Homemade granola is one of the more popular breakfast items around here. It's such a staple food that I'm usually whipping up a batch once every week or two. Although the basic recipe is quite versatile and lends itself to lots of variations, I felt like trying out something a bit different the last time I needed to replenish the granola jar. This Chocolate Peanut Granola is a decadent twist on our standard granola recipe. Although it's a real kid-pleaser (the milk turns nice and chocolaty just like when I ate my Cocoa Puffs back in the '70s), it doesn't have any more sugar than our usual version. It tastes a lot like those popular no-bake drop cookies (without all the butter).

I'm sure any of the chocoholics in your life would be thrilled to receive some Chocolate Peanut Granola as a gift (the perfect excuse to start the day with a chocolate fix).

Ingredients:

5 cups rolled oats
1 cup coconut
1 cup chopped peanuts
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup honey
1/3 cup canola or vegetable oil
1/3 cup cocoa
1 tsp vanilla

Instructions:
In a large mixing bowl, combine the oats, coconut and peanuts. In a small saucepan, combine the brown sugar, honey, oil and cocoa. Heat gently and stir until thoroughly combined. Remove from heat and add vanilla. Pour chocolate mixture over oat mixture and stir until oats are evenly coated. Spread on a rimmed cookie sheet and bake at 300F for 30 minutes or until golden, stirring every 10 minutes. Let cool, then transfer to storage container.

Weekly Menu Retrospective #40

2011-06-13T09:05:00.001-04:00

Dinners:

Monday: Hummus Hoagies (hummus on a whole wheat hot dog bun with sauteed zucchini and red pepper), pasta salad

Tuesday: Hamburgers, oven fries, tossed salad

Wednesday: Build a Cucumber and Bean Salad (made with black beans, salsa, and southwestern spices), toasted buns, fruit

Thursday: Sausage on a bun, sauteed onions, potato salad, leftover bean salad

Friday: Spaghetti with Creamy Rose Meat Sauce

Saturday: leftover spaghetti (I was on my own for dinner!)

Sunday: Country-Style Turkey Casserole, tossed salad, butterscotch pudding

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.

Yard Sale Report for June 11th, 2011

2011-06-11T11:24:00.000-04:00

Today's report will be short and not-so-sweet: STRIKEOUT!!

Yup, I came home empty-handed for the first time this season. Of course, that's totally preferable to spending money on a bunch of junk I don't really need and won't use...but it always feels a bit disappointing when I don't come home with a fun find or two (after all, yard sale season is pretty short here in Southern Ontario!)

I'm sure my lack of luck was at least partly due to the weather: last night's forecast indicated a 90% chance of rain this morning so a lot of people decided not to risk it and canceled their yard sales at the last minute. There was supposed to be a street sale in my neighbourhood today but it wasn't running (and ironically, as of 11:20 a.m., it still hasn't rained yet).

I'm hoping Saturdays start having a lot more sunshine in the near future!

How Is Your Garden Growing?

2011-06-08T11:37:00.001-04:00

Today it's supposed to get up to 33 degrees Celsius (it's already 25 at 10 a.m.). After the cold, rainy spring we've had, some warmer weather is more than welcome (although today will be a little on the hot side for my taste!)

I'm sure no one is looking forward to the arrival of real summer weather more than the plants in my veggie garden. They've been valiantly struggling along, surviving cool temperatures, high winds, and nearly half a dozen heavy rainstorms in the past couple of weeks. Despite all the adverse conditions Mother Nature has doled out, it looks like just about everything's going to pull through, although harvest dates may be a little later than usual this year.

My strawberries look happy in their new raised bed home. The raspberry patch was encroaching on their former garden space, and since I wanted to encourage further raspberry growth (you can never have too many raspberries, can you?) I got my hubby to build me a raised bed off our patio so the strawberries could have their own special space in the garden.

The parsley, basil and purple basil all look to be growing well. Behind the herbs are my arugula and spinach, which have been straggling along but are finally looking like I might be able to harvest them someday!

This bed has oregano, mint and garlic chives, which are all growing robustly. I just transplanted the oregano this spring (it was over by the old strawberry patch getting choked out by the raspberries). It's definitely thriving in its new home. If you look closely, you can see the purple leaves of a few lettuce plants just forming beside the chives.

These are my pepper plants, which, frankly, don't seem too thrilled about life right now. I'm hoping a few days of heat will perk them up. The plants closer to the bottom of the photo are jalapenos; the ones on top are sweet red peppers, the Gypsy variety that's my favourite. I have more pepper plants in my other raised bed (behind the arugula and spinach), including a yellow sweet banana pepper.

This is one of my Roma tomato plants in a raised bed (I have 4 Roma plants in there, plus two more seedlings that we're building planters for right now)

This is one of my cherry tomato plants (Sweet Million variety). It's been growing like gangbusters ever since I brought it home (I swear it practically doubled in size in the 48 hrs after I planted it!) I have 3 of these plants, plus 3 yellow pear tomato plants (my husband's favourite) in various pots and planters in sunny spots on our patio and deck.

My raspberries are starting to flower! All four of us consider raspberries just about the best summer treat going, so I've been thrilled that the 3 raspberry canes I planted about 3 years ago have spread to cover an approximately 12 foot by 4 foot area of my garden. Go raspberries!

I also planted some zucchini in the same bed as the strawberries - it hasn't germinated yet, thus no photo. I haven't planted my green beans yet, either. I'm determined to get to it in the next day or two - fresh-from-the-garden green beans are my favourite summer vegetable.

What's growing in your garden?

Weekly Menu Retrospective #39

2011-06-06T09:28:00.000-04:00

Dinners:

Monday: Leftover Buffet

Tuesday: Barbecued pork chops, potato salad, roasted asparagus

Wednesday: Pork fried rice (yup, pork two nights in a row - the first package labelled "pork chops" that I thawed was actually pork chunks, and since I thawed it I had to cook it!)

Thursday: Macaroni and cheese, peas and carrots

Friday: Italian meatball subs, tossed salad

Saturday: Spicy Peanut & Tomato Soup, cornbread

Sunday: Lemon Garlic Chicken, coconut rice, sauteed asparagus

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.

Yard Sale Report for June 4th, 2011

2011-06-04T11:58:00.002-04:00

Today was a very disappointing day in yard sale world. There were two really big sales going on in my area - a fundraiser for a church in a grocery store parking lot in my neighbourhood, and a huge street sale that's an annual event at which I always find a few great deals. I was so looking forward to a morning of rummaging through boxes looking for treasure, and the weather ruined it all - a severe thunderstorm swept in and rained everyone out. The real bummer of it all is that the weather was gorgeous yesterday and it's supposed to be sunny and clear tomorrow as well!

I did manage to find a couple of things before I got soaked in the rain: a T-shirt for my husband ($1.50), a pair of cargo shorts that I thought would fit my husband but were a bit too tight, so now they'll go in the pile of stuff for next year for one of my boys ($1.50), and a pair of earrings that are so delicate it's pointless for me to even try to photograph them ($1.00).

Grand total for the day: $4.00 for 3 items, or $1.33 an item.

Here's to better luck (and weather) next weekend!

RECIPE ROUNDUP: Rhubarb

2011-06-01T10:49:00.001-04:00

Rhubarb belongs to one of the frugalista's favourite categories of food: hard-to-kill perennial. That means that once you've planted it, you'll probably have some forevermore. No matter what you do to it, it just keeps coming back, year after year. Even if you don't have your own rhubarb patch, chances are someone close to you does - and is eager to get rid of some of their surplus. I planted rhubarb in my garden a couple of years ago, so it's still getting itself established. Luckily for me, my neighbour has a well-established patch that produces a bounteous crop every year (even during the exceptionally cold, wet spring we just experienced). So, yesterday afternoon, I had this much rhubarb to wrestle with:

Fortunately, rhubarb freezes exceptionally well, so my younger son and I got to work washing, chopping and bagging this mountain of free food.

Of course, that led me to start thinking about all the things I could do with that much rhubarb. I think it's an extremely undervalued food and lots of people don't really know what to do with it. Since it's one of the foods you're most likely to receive an armload of for free, I thought it must be time to do a roundup of some good rhubarb recipes!

Rhubarb Streusel Muffins are a staple food at our house.

I made this Rhubarb and Raspberry Crostata for my birthday dinner last weekend (I still had some of last year's rhubarb left in the freezer). It was a big hit and I think you could come up with a lot of variations from this basic recipe. The filling would be delicious served over ice cream or sponge cake instead of baking it in the crostata crust (for days when it's too hot to turn on the oven!)

I'm extremely fond of the classic strawberry-rhubarb combo, so I'm going to give this Strawberry Rhubarb Compote a try.

I came across a recipe for Roasted Rhubarb and was fascinated - it has never occurred to me to try roasting rhubarb. I saved a few juicy looking stalks to use in this recipe.

Rhubarb can even be used to make some tasty beverages - as soon as our local strawberries are available (in about 3 weeks or so) I'm going to be brewing up a batch of this Strawberry-Rhubarb Lemonade (scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the recipe).

I have yet to find a recipe for Strawberry Rhubarb Jam that I'm happy with, so if you happen to have a tried-and-true one, I would be thrilled if you would pass it along (I'm looking for a cooked jam that can be canned, not a freezer jam).

Do you have a favourite rhubarb recipe? If so, please share it with us below!

Weekly Menu Retrospective #38

2011-05-30T09:26:00.001-04:00

Dinners:

Monday: hamburgers (on homemade buns using refrigerator dough), broccoli, bacon & cheddar salad, potato salad

Tuesday: Leftover Buffet

Wednesday: Cheesy Mac & Beef Skillet

Thursday: Fish Au Gratin, rice, broccoli & carrots

Friday: Perogies with bacon & onions, carrot sticks

Saturday: Black bean chili

Sunday: Lasagna, roast chicken, salad, rolls, Black Forest cake, Rhubarb-Raspberry Crostata (this was my birthday dinner and my dad brought in most of the food so I didn't have to cook - my grandma made the cake and I made the crostata).

For more great meal ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.

P.S. Readers, I need your help! If you've made some of the recipes on this blog, I'm looking for "reviews" for the back cover of my upcoming book. Please check out all the details here.

Yard Sale Report for May 28th, 2011 (40th Birthday Edition)

2011-05-28T14:21:00.000-04:00

Yes, it's my 40th birthday today...and I still got out of bed to go yard sale shopping. That's all part of the fun of having your birthday fall on a Saturday, I suppose! And since it's one of my favourite pastimes anyway, what better way to spend the morning on my birthday?

The weather was looking a bit dodgy, but the rain held off and I came home with a pretty big haul of stuff (mostly for myself, which seems fitting since it *is* my birthday and all!)

Here are the goods:

Half a dozen vintage tins (Dr. Oetker's, Maxwell House and Bailey's), a corkscrew (backup one in case our present one meets the same untimely fate the last one did), a silicon basting brush, and two baskets, all for $5.00. The tins will decorate the open shelves above my kitchen cupboards (while storing less-than-attractive supplies) and the baskets may be used for gift baskets if I don't find another use for them around the house.

Next up: a dragonfly journal for 50 cents (I keep a stash of journals in my gift cupboard, but this one's for my own personal use!), 3 Christmas tins, a basket, and a Fossil watch with gift tin for $1.25! I really needed a dress watch so this was a perfect find for my birthday. The tins and basket will go in my gift wrapping stash.

I got all of the above items at the same yard sale: a cat-shaped tin (that will be perfect for "wrapping" one of my niece's birthday gifts!), a wide-tooth comb still in the original packaging (for my son, so he can stop stealing mine!), a still-in-the-shrink-wrap box of stationery, a Pyrex dish that's the perfect size for my toaster oven, a makeup bag and three pairs of earrings (one with matching necklace!). I paid $2.50 for the lot!

Grand total for the day: $9.25 for 25 items, or 37 cents an item!!

Readers, I Need Your Help!

2011-05-27T11:48:00.000-04:00

First, I have a confession to make: I've been keeping a secret from you. But I promise you're going to like it! I've been busily working away on writing a book, and it's going to be published very soon.

Cheap Appétit: The Complete Guide to Feeding Your Family for Less Than $400 a Month (While Eating Better Than You Ever Thought Possible) will be released somewhere around the end of June - the exact date is still up in the air as we pull all the final bits and pieces together that are required to launch a book into the world.

And that is where you, dear readers, come in! We're working on the back cover design right now, and we would love to feature some testimonials from real live moms just like you. I have some specific recipes that I'd like to have "endorsements" for and I'm hoping to get your help. If you've made any of the following recipes and they have been a hit with your family, I'd love to include your feedback on my book cover. We won't use your full name, just initials and city (e.g. M.R. in Edmonton). If you're a blogger and would like your full name and blog URL included, I think we should be able to do that (although I would need to check with my publisher about that).

So, without further ado, here are the recipes on my "wishlist":

Aloha Muffins
Chocolate Zucchini Muffins
Granola
Lemon Blueberry Polenta Cake
Pork and Apple Stew
Old-Fashioned Butterscotch Pudding
Lemony Chicken & Spinach Pasta
Upside-Down Apple Oven Pancake
Southwestern-Spiced Barley & Vegetable Salad
Build a Cucumber and Bean Salad
Chicken Enchiladas
Spicy Peanut & Tomato Soup
Baked Pasta
Raspberry Cream Cheese Squares
Thai-Style Peanutty Pasta
Chicken & Vegetable Coconut Curry

I would need your "review" as soon as possible - within the next couple of weeks or so. You can either leave it for me as a comment on this post, comment on the original recipe post, or email it to me directly at karen_mclaughlinATcogecoDOTca (if you don't hear back from me within 24 hrs, your email got lost in cyberspace so please try again). I look forward to hearing from you!

A RE-USE IT PROJECT: Hockey Stick Muskoka Chair

2011-05-24T12:05:00.000-04:00

You just know you're married to an All-Canadian Hoser Hockey Jock when he spends the Victoria Day weekend building a Muskoka chair out of hockey sticks (for all my American readers, the Muskoka chair is the Canadian cousin of the Adirondack).

I do have to give him credit, this was a great re-use project; he didn't have to purchase a single item to make this chair. He says the original inspiration for the chair came one night when he broke his goalie stick during a game. He looked at the no-longer-useful-for-hockey stick and thought "hey, this is some really good wood - what can I do with it?" He then came home and saw the Muskoka chairs sitting on our front porch (that he built well over a decade ago) and went "Hmmmm - hockey stick Muskoka chair?" and a plan began to take shape. Once he got the idea, he also found other hockey-obsessed guys who'd done the same thing on the internet :) This site has a good materials list, but you need to purchase the actual plans. If you're an experienced builder, you can adapt any basic Muskoka or Adirondack chair pattern to work with this idea.

To make the chair as shown, my husband used about 20 broken hockey sticks (including 2 goalie sticks for the arms). He started scrounging around local arenas looking for busted sticks, and did come up with a few. He really hit the "mother lode", though, when our next door neighbour found out what he was doing and mentioned she had a friend in Brantford (about 30 min away) that built hockey stick furniture and who usually had more busted hockey sticks than they could use. When he contacted this fellow hockey-stick-furniture-building aficionado, he discovered that it was none other than Walter Gretzky (that would be Wayne Gretzky's father for the completely hockey-clueless) who went around gathering up expired hockey sticks and bringing them to this guy! So a good portion of the sticks in this chair came to us courtesy of Walter :)

Busted hockey sticks awaiting a new life

Additional materials used for the chair include about 14 feet of 1 x 4 (from an old wooden futon frame), about 8 feet of 2 x 6 (pulled from a dumpster) and 80 #8 x 1 1/2" wood screws plus 8 #8 x 2" wood screws (these were all in our basic "screw stash", most pulled from disassembling other no-longer useful wood items like the futon frame). You'll also need some urethane for clear-coating the completed chair (this step hasn't been done yet on the chair in the picture). Make sure you get clear-coat that's rated for outdoor use.

Putting the seat together

Getting the angles for the legs just right is really important!

Ready to start putting the back together.

The back in progress - probably the fiddliest part of the project.

I love projects like this where you end up with a completely functional, unique product, built completely from stuff that most people would have thrown in the trash!

Have you completed any great "reuse it" projects lately? If so, please share!

Yard Sale Report for May 21, 2011

2011-05-21T14:32:00.000-04:00

It's the Victoria Day long weekend here in Canada, and the first really sunny, warm and gorgeous Saturday we've had all spring. It seemed like everyone who didn't head up north for the weekend decided it would be a great day to put all their junk out on the driveway and see what they could get rid of! I started out with half a dozen advertised sales on my list, and must have hit at least that many unadvertised sales along the way in my travels.

Not only did I get to enjoy a pleasant ride in beautiful weather, I came home with a few useful items:

5 nonfiction books for the kids ($1.25), a "Things Teens Should Know" card deck (50 cents) and a cutlery tray ($1.00). My younger son has a new interest in learning French, so I was pleased to find 3 French books for him. Our current cutlery tray used to be my husband's mother's (she passed away 20 years ago, before we were even married).It's pretty gross and not very sturdy, so I'll be happy to put this replacement to good use!

A new backpack for my older son ($1.00), a stainless steel water bottle ($1.00), a stainless steel travel mug ($1.50) , a Christmas gift box (heavy, sturdy cardboard) (25 cents), and a glass mixing bowl with 3 sets of measuring spoons (50 cents). The backpack find was very convenient as my son's present backpack just fell apart (the whole bottom came out) and while I *might* be able to fix it, I'm not sure how sturdy it will be for carrying the heavy loads he often totes around. I'm tucking the water bottle away as a backup replacement in case we lose one (we currently have one apiece). We seem to never have a complete set of measuring spoons around here (someone who shall remain nameless forgets to close the door on the little compartment that holds the small items in place in the dishwasher before running it, and countless measuring spoons have escaped and melted in the bottom of the dishwasher.) Someday I hope to find a good stainless steel set; these will do in the meantime!

I also found a pair of Adidas sneakers in excellent, condition for my husband ($2.00) that I forgot to include in the photos (he was too busy trying them on, lol!)

Grand total: $9.00 for 16 items, or 56 cents an item.

Did you find any great bargains this weekend?

Thrift Store Clothes Shopping Extravaganza

2011-05-18T12:53:00.000-04:00

I didn't have a chance to go yard sale shopping last weekend as we had family commitments on Saturday morning; there wasn't much going on anyway in the yard sale department as the weather's been so rainy people aren't willing to chance putting their stuff out on the lawn!

Fortunately, we were able to do some serious thrift store shopping this week as Value Village had a 50% off day on Monday and I also hit the Salvation Army thrift store when I was down in that part of the city at the end of last week.

Here is everything we found:

At the Salvation Army:

2 pairs of boxer briefs and a pair of boxers for my boys (I know some of you are thinking "ew, second hand *underwear*?!? - don't worry, they still had the original tags on!!)

A swimsuit for my 13 yr old son

A pair of long shorts for my 11 year old son

A good quality dress shirt for my 13 yr old son

I also got a pair of Reebok spandex exercise shorts for myself that looked like they'd never been worn, apparently I forgot to take a picture of them, though!.

Total spent at Salvation Army: $14.91

At Value Village:

Two hoodies for my 11 year old son

Two button-down shirts - short sleeve for the 13 yr old, long sleeve for the 11 yr old

7 T-shirts - a plain black one for me; the rest for the boys

3 swimsuits for the boys

6 pairs of shorts - 3 for each kid

6 pairs of footwear: sneakers for both boys and hubby (all Reebok/Nike), a pair of sandals for hubby, flip-flops for the 13 yr old, and (most exciting) a pair of black Mary Janes for me - I've been looking for a suitable pair for what seems like forever and these fit my size 9 1/2 feet perfectly and look practically brand new!

Total for Value Village: $87.84

Grand total: $102.75 for 33 items or an average of $3.11 an item.

Thankfully I think we now all have just about everything we need for spring and summer so we won't have to go clothes shopping again until fall!

Weekly Menu Retrospective #37

2011-05-16T09:47:00.000-04:00

Breakfasts: rhubarb streusel muffins, granola, peanut butter toast, pancakes, pumpkin chocolate chip muffins (subbed pumpkin for the mashed banana in this recipe)

Lunches: sandwiches, pizza, leftovers

Dinners:

Monday: Apple & Bacon Baked Beans, chickpea & red pepper salad, pasta salad

Tuesday: barbecued pork chops, macaroni & cheese, fresh pineapple

Wednesday: black bean chili, cornbread

Thursday: Spicy Peanut & Tomato Soup, leftover cornbread

Friday: Lemon Garlic Chicken, Southwestern Spiced Barley & Vegetable Salad, roasted asparagus

Saturday: Leftover Buffet

Sunday: Turkey casserole, beef and cheddar pinwheels (made similar to these), spinach and orange salad, Lemon Raspberry Polenta Cake

For more great meal ideas, visit Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.