groceries

Frugal hack, frugal snack.

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Sometimes you just want a crunchy treat. Chips or pretzels come to mind, but have you noticed the prices lately?

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, a 16-ounce bag of potato chips now costs 47% more than it did five years ago. Here at Casa Frugal we have a frugal workaround: homemade croutons.

I started making them for salads, but often they would be gone before supper because DF favors them as a snack. And why not? They’re salty and crunchy and incredibly cheap. Croutons can be made while you’re roasting meat or baking a cake; if you’re not cooking, you can bake them in an air fryer or toaster oven.

I can get a loaf of day-old Italian bread for as little as 58 cents. That means almost a pound of snacking joy – and as the years have gone by, I’ve refined the technique. Here’s how we do it.

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Harvest home.

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For the past few weeks DF has been practicing the music for an ecumenical service that will take place near Thanksgiving. The song that sticks in my head most is “Harvest Home,” an 1844 hymn*. This quatrain in particular applies:

Come, ye thankful people, come

Raise the song of harvest home;

All is safely gathered in,

Ere the winter storms begin.

No storms yet, but it was 29 degrees when I got up the other day. We are thankful that all is safely gathered in.

It was a somewhat dismal summer for the second year in a row, and gardens were more than a month late in ripening. Some things didn’t produce well, or at all; for example, a local tree expert posted on Facebook that he didn’t get a single cherry from his five trees.

We didn’t get that many cherries ourselves: 28, to be exact. Then again, this is only the second year the tree’s been in the ground. Popular fruit-tree wisdom holds that “the first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps and the third year it leaps.” However, I can’t hope for too much in 2025 because a moose got into the yard last week. It harried all three of our fruit trees before DF could scare it off the property by banging a hammer on a shovel.

This isn’t the moose that got into the yard, but I bet he knows the one who did.

Fortunately, we’d already harvested the apples the previous week. Moose can be real jerks.

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Frugal hack: Grocery substitutions.

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I discovered a great frugal hack the other day while trying to use a “weekly digital deal” coupon at Fred Meyer. The store, which is part of the Kroger chain, offered six-packs of 16-ounce soft drinks* for $3.49.  

Some days I don’t drink soda at all, and some days I’ll have two. Lately I’ve bought bottles rather than cans, so I don’t have to drink an entire serving at once. Tightly capped, a Diet Pepsi will hold over until the next day.

When I see a price like this one, I limit out until the next big sale. Unfortunately, the store didn’t have any Diet Pepsi. It had every other Pepsi flavor imaginable (and some I don’t like to think about**), but not the one I wanted.

No Diet? No problem! I headed off to another Fred Meyer and found the same empty spot on the shelves. A grocery manager looked everywhere and sadly reported they, too, were out. Damn those weekend barbecues and salmon-fishing trips!

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Senior Tuesday takedown.

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The boneless/skinless chicken breasts featured at the supermarket entrance made me feel a little queasy today. Not because they looked bad; on the contrary, they looked fresh and appetizing. It was the $8.49-per-pound price tag that made me want to lie down with a cold cloth on my eyes. After all, it was Senior Tuesday and I’d hoped for some low prices to go with the extra 10% off store brands.

Good deals – really good deals – were about to be discovered, in two batches. That led DF and me to a new rule for bargain hunting, which I’ll explain below.

The total bill was $77.83 for a shopping trip that included 51 pounds of fresh meat, 23 cans of corned beef hash (more on that in a minute), salsa, sour cream, three pounds of bacon and a big bottle of creamer.

It was the meat that made us happiest, however. DF was so tickled by the markdowns that he added up the weights and noted the original prices vs. what we paid. Here’s how it all shook down:

  • Five pork roasts, ranging from 3¾ to 4½ pounds, for $1.06 each (96 cents after the senior discount)
  • Five whole chickens, two of them organic, averaging five pounds each, for 96 to 98 cents apiece (86 to 88 cents with discount)
  • Two packages of organic boneless/skinless chicken breasts, totaling 5.65 pounds, for $1.95 each ($1.69 with discount)
  • Five one-pound packages of Angus beef burgers with barbecue seasoning for 98 cents each (88 cents with discount)
  • Three pounds of bacon, which would normally total $18.87, for $12.02 thanks to store coupons

The 51 pounds of meat (excluding the bacon) would have originally cost $233.72. After the senior discount, we paid $17.97 for 51 pounds of animal protein.

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Always check the register receipt.

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Recently I wrote a piece about why you should always check the clearance section. The other day, DF and I were reminded why you should always check your register receipt, too.

While shopping on Senior Tuesday (10 percent off all Kroger brands), we noticed that boneless, skinless chicken breasts were on sale at an almost agreeable price. Since I wanted to try a new recipe (butter chicken in the slow cooker), we decided to spring for a package rather than buy a whole chicken and cut it up.

(Maybe not the most frugal move, but he recently had a major health issue and since then we have sweated far less small stuff. Besides, it would be loads cheaper than going to an Indian restaurant.)

Generally I do check the register receipt; in fact, I tend to watch items as they get rung up, to make sure that sale prices show up correctly. On that day, however, we were both a bit distracted. At one point he did glance at the electronic readout and said, “Wait – did that say 99 cents a pound? … No, I guess that was the discount per pound.”

When we got home I checked the receipt to see how much we’d saved overall – and noticed that the boneless, skinless chicken had indeed rung up at 99 cents a pound. D’oh!

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Moose in the curriculum.

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Some high-school biology classes require you to dissect a frog. In Alaska, the stakes — and the steaks — are a lot bigger.

The following video, shot at Chugiak High School, shows freshman science students field-dressing a bull moose. Well, mostly field-dressing it: The animal had already been gutted before being transported to the school. 

Warning: If you can’t stand the sight of a dissected frog, you might want to skip the video. It’s not gruesome — no guts, remember? — but it’s graphic.

Chugiak is an unincorporated community about 20 miles north of Anchorage. Technically it’s part of the municipality of Anchorage, but both it and nearby Eagle River have their own identities (and zip codes). One of the Chugiak High School’s science teachers decided to go beyond preserved (or plastic) frogs to teach, uh, gross anatomy.

 

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Life as a personal grocery shopper.

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We found chicken for less than 12 cents per pound yesterday, a discovery too good to keep to ourselves. Instead, I did what I always do: Texted my niece and my neighbor to see how many packages they might want. While I never wanted to be a personal grocery shopper, I can’t keep deals like that to myself.

Those poultry deals were five-pound-plus packages of chicken drumsticks for 64 cents, and boneless, skinless, organic chicken breasts (2½ to 2¾ pounds) for $1.28 apiece.

We left the store with a lot of chicken. It helped them, and it helped us reach our goal of getting a free turkey* through a store offer.

Sharing deals is a sort of frugal ministry for me. Maybe it could be for you, too.

I’m not saying you must do this every time you hit the store. Or maybe at all, if it doesn’t fit your current life. But given how expensive food is getting, think what a gift this could be to others. 

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Low- or no-spend February 2023, Weeks 2 and 3. (I’m back.)

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Running a little late, obviously. I was already a bit tardy with the low- or no-spend February challenge update when a stomach bug made me almost completely work-avoidant. Many quarts of hydration and loads of hours of sleep later, I am much healthier. But catching up on belated assignments meant missing a week.

While mildly ill, I was reminded yet again that sickness means either spending way too much (medical co-pays, prescriptions, special foods) or feeling too crummy to spend much at all.

This time around it was the latter, fortunately. I was also reminded that I live in a low-maintenance prepper paradise where just about anything I needed was already in hand (and likely bought on sale or at Costco). Powerade? We got it. Canned chicken soup? Ditto. Generic ibuprofen PM, so I could sleep for 12 hours at a stretch? You bet.

That sleep was some of the coziest ever, thanks to the brand-new-to-us down comforter  whose frugal purchase was detailed in the first roundup. Reading some of the comments on that piece, I was impressed by a couple of readers’ stirring tales of thrift.

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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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