frugal hacks

Low- or no-spend February 2023: Week 1.

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(Surviving and Thriving has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Surviving and Thriving and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Opinions, reviews, analyses and recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.) Let me say this upfront: I spent money. Before you … Read more

Pinto bread: A weekly beans story.

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Earlier this month I mentioned a frugal challenge called “weekly beans.” DF and I have vowed to make beans the focus of at least one meal a week. In part that’s because of inflation, which is scaring our frugal pants off right now. Mostly, though, it’s because we have so many beans in storage.

Sure, they’ll keep indefinitely (or what passes for indefinitely at our ages). But why have them, so why not eat them? Especially since they were bought at a lower price than they go for now, and since they’re good for us, and since they’re so darned tasty?

The week after that post we used the seasoned black beans from the freezer for rice bowls and burritos. The last few spoons of beans went into a soup made from boiling bag broth, to add some additional heft (and nutrition) to the carrots, potatoes, onions and homegrown celery.

Last week I announced that I would cook a few cups of pinto beans. Most would go into the freezer for future chili. But some would go into a recipe that I couldn’t get out of my brain: pinto bean bread.

Once I saw that, I couldn’t un-see it. The same is true of things like ketchup cookies and Kool-Aid pickles. It isn’t just a good idea to try these things. It’s the law.

Pinto bean bread isn’t a new thing, but it was certainly new to me. This particular recipe came from a blog called A Farm Girl in the Making. The blogger, Ann Accetta-Scott, called it a “stick-to-your-bones and fill you up kinda recipe.”

She’s not wrong.

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The birthday pear fiasco. (Free recipe inside!)

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Every year my daughter sends me a box of Harry & David pears for my birthday. The sweetness and juiciness of this fruit defies description. I look forward to them every year because you just can’t get pears like this in Anchorage. This year’s delivery was a little different, because the pears were delivered…frozen.

Not because they sat all day on the temps-in-the-teens porch, either. The delivery guy put the box directly into my hands. But when I opened up the gift, I found a batch of pearsicles.

Somewhere along the way, the fruit had encountered too-low temperatures – and there’s plenty of those on the Last Frontier. That’s never happened before with a Harry & David’s delivery.

As any savvy consumer would do, I phoned the company. Listened to the apologies, accepted a new delivery date for a new box of fruit.

And as any good frugalist would do, I wondered if I could salvage the old box. So I sliced one open and took a tentative nibble: hard and not sweet at all. Not surprising, since pears are picked under-ripe and allowed to develop to their full potential when customers want them.

While putting the pear’s core into the boiling bag, I decided that the rest of the fruit would not follow. I invented a new dessert* instead.

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Soup of the evening.

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DF was an alchemist this morning. Pulling containers and bags of stuff from the fridge and freezer, he filled the crockpot with:

Two kinds of broth (chicken-vegetable and seasoned pinto bean)

The drippings from a chicken he’d cooked on the Weber

Leftover pork loin (bought deeply discounted, of course)

Chopped-up garlic scapes (from the 2022 garden)

Diced onions

A handful of red and yellow pepper chunks (from the produce section’s “ugly but still good” shelf and cut up to freeze)

Homegrown celery (frozen), carrots and potatoes

The slow cooker began to emit a marvelously savory aroma as the day wore on. A little after 5 p.m., DF sliced up some of his easy rustic bread and announced that dinner was served. Outside it was 13 degrees and snowy, but indoors it was all warmth, comfort, and food that was prepared and shared with love.

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Extreme frugality: Deal eyes.

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The first Tuesday of every month is a standing date for DF and me: “Senior Day,” when folks over the age of 55 get 10 percent off all Kroger brands. In keeping with our extreme frugality ethos, we cruised the entire store to look for special deals.

And boy, did we find one. The price was so startling that we did double and then triple takes: 1½-pound boxes of Kroger breakfast sausage links for 49 cents.

What made the deal extra-surprising is that the 1½-pound boxes of Kroger breakfast sausages right next to them cost $4.99 each. Examining the extreme-frugality version, we saw the reason for the startling differences in price: The cheaper sausage needed to be used or frozen that very day.

Fortunately, we now have two freezers: My niece replaced her 5-cubic-foot model with a much bigger deep-freeze, and gave us the old one. DF and one of his sons had picked it up just two days before.

So we bought a lot of sausage, including five boxes for my niece and her kids. This being Senior Day and the sausage being a Kroger product, we even got an additional discount. (Sort of. More on this below.)

The moral of the story: If you want to practice extreme frugality, you need to develop what I call “deal eyes.”

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Life hack: Baking soda as oven cleaner.

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While baking pie* recently I smelled something burning. My initial thought was that bits of crust had fallen onto the cookie sheet under the pie tins. Nope. The smell was from the floor of the oven, where a now-carbonized remnant of a previous meal** continued to smolder. Time for some oven cleaner.

DF offered to take care of it. I agreed, and suggested a very simple way to do this. No need for a commercial cleanser or the oven-cleaning cycle as long as we had baking soda on hand.

He was unfamiliar with this particular life hack, so I explained it to him:

  • Cover the burned-on stuff completely with baking soda.
  • Sprinkle water atop the soda until it’s fairly damp (but not soupy).
  • Let it sit for a bunch of hours (for me, that’s usually overnight).
  • Wipe it up.
  • Rinse thoroughly.

Easy on, easy off*** – could it really be that simple? 

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Anatomy of a frugal freezer.

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Recently I did an article called “Anatomy of a frugal meal,” in which I detailed the various hacks that went into producing a last-minute meal that was both cheap and delicious. The reaction was so positive that I decided follow-up pieces might be in order.

The first idea came when I opened the freezer and realized how many things were engineered into that relatively small space. To be clear: This is the freezer atop our fridge, not the chest freezer. (But that one’s pretty full as well.)

As you’ll soon see, the fridge freezer has both good deals and odd stuff. Yet each item represents the best use of our food dollars, whether that’s growing it, buying it on sale or getting maximum use out of every bit of nutrition.

About that last: In a piece called “Extreme frugality: Use all the bits,” I pointed out that the price of eating hasn’t been this high for 10 years.

“Extreme frugality may become a necessity, if it isn’t already. So why not work to get as much out of every food item you buy? (As) the per-plate price of food continues to climb, remember that preventing food waste helps make your groceries more cost-effective.”

Our freezer is crammed with cost-effective (and sometimes free) items that keep costs down and mealtimes delightful. Have a peek inside.

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How I got $50 worth of free food.

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Like many of you, I’m very nervous about fast-rising food prices. That’s why I was thrilled to get $50 worth of free food recently.

It was pretty simple: I cashed in some rewards program points for a $25 Kroger gift card and a $25 Safeway gift card. And I can’t truly explain just how happy that made me.

It felt a bit silly, to be honest. After all, the cupboard was by no means bare and I had money in my checking account. No one would have gone hungry had I not cashed in; as the king and queen of the stealth stock-up, DF and I are good for the basics. (So many basics.)

Fresh fruit and certain vegetables, though, and eggs, and milk for my oatmeal and to use for making yogurt? Those kinds of things need to be bought regularly. Hence the gift cards.

Flashing this scrip at the cash register felt great. Instead of spending money on the fresh stuff, I’d be sending those food dollars to the account where I keep my saved savings.

But I’m not writing about this to brag. I’m writing it to suggest that those of you with smartphones download some shopping apps and start earning. And if you’ve got a credit card that isn’t a rewards card, consider shopping for a new one.

Rewards points matter. My $50 head start at the grocery store says so.

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Anatomy of a frugal meal.

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It was close to suppertime, and no supper was in sight. We had three or four ounces of leftover pork tenderloin, bought deeply discounted and frozen until needed. I thought to slice it thinly, cook some rice and steam some peas from last year’s garden.

That would have been okay, but dull. Instead, I started pulling things out of the freezer:

A bag of chopped celery, also from last year’s garden

A bag of chopped red and yellow peppers, bought from the produce manager’s “ugly but still good” shelf

A bag of chopped onions – DF recently noticed an onion was starting to rot, so he cut and froze the still-good parts

A bit of turkey fat, from a bird we cooked a couple months ago; we save the fat from all pan juices, for cooking vegetables and making white sauce

Next, I put on a pot of rice (bought by the 50-pound bag at Costco) and melted the turkey fat, announcing that I planned to caramelize the vegetables and then add the diced tenderloin and some kind of sauce. DF diced the meat, then thinly sliced some carrots while I considered potential sauce ingredients.

What immediately jumped to mind was a bottle of General Tso’s sauce that I’d gotten free from our neighborhood’s Buy Nothing Facebook group. I poured maybe four tablespoons into a glass measuring cup, along with some rice vinegar (from an ancient bottle lurking in the lazy Susan) and a shake of powdered garlic (another Costco buy).

The slowly cooking onions, peppers, celery and carrot were making the kitchen smell divine. Maybe this olfactory distraction was what caused me to overdo the vinegar somewhat. It didn’t quite drown out the General Tso’s, but it didn’t do the sauce any favors, either. A few splashes from a jug of Langer’s pineapple-orange-guava juice (bought on sale, with a coupon) brought the vinegar into line and added a sweet hint of citrus.

Just typing this is making my mouth water. How about yours? 

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“Stealth stock-up”: A budget saver.

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Food prices rose 8.8 percent between March 2021 and March 2022 – and the latest wrinkle is a mix of labor issues and “idle trains,” according to Reuters.

One way to fight food inflation is to stock your pantry and freezer with the most affordable food you can find today, before prices go up tomorrow.

Not everyone can afford to buy a side of beef or 50 pounds of pinto beans all at once.  But a tactic I call “stealth stock-up” just might save your food budget.

It’s pretty simple: Watch the sales flyers, and when your favorite brand** of pasta or cereal or tuna goes on sale, buy two instead of one. Buy three, if you can swing it.

That’s not to say you can’t also stock up on non-sale items, especially if they’ve been hard to get due to supply-chain issues. But the idea is to stretch available dollars and stash as much food as you can. Sale prices let you do both.

Already shopping this way? That doesn’t surprise me, since frugal people tend to read this site. It just makes sense to pay less.

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