Last Week's Thrifty Moves

Sunday morning I gave my youngest daughter a haircut, cutting off 6 inches!  She still has plenty left, but all of a sudden she really looks like a 14 year old to me (sigh).  Amazing what a new haircut can do.

Despite the gray skies and wind I was in a mood for a nice long walk.  My youngest joined me and we ended up taking my daypack and walking to Albertsons to pick up cheese, green onions and mushrooms that were on sale.  We put the groceries in my pack and walked back.  Saved some gas and got some exercise.

I removed the rest of the meat from the bones and put the turkey carcass into my large slow cooker with onion, carrots and celery stalks and allowed it to cook for 6 hours.  Then I removed the bones and veggies and strained the broth into my largest mixing bowl.  I put it in the refrigerator overnight to cool and allow the fat to come to the top and solidify.  Then next day I skimmed off the fat and put it into freezer containers.  Now we have plenty of good broth for soups and recipes.

Monday my oldest had a robotics meeting at BSU so I dropped her off and did some grocery shopping while I waited to pick her up.  Since Amazon has bought Whole Foods I wanted to check it out and see if the prices are really lower.  I think they are, but still above my pay grade I'm afraid.

From Trader Joe's

I decided to stick to my usual stores and headed over to Trader Joe's to pick up produce.  I also want to try some more of their meats and other things so went ahead, since I was there and did some December grocery shopping.  In addition to the produce I typically buy, I picked up a few new things to try as well as frozen raspberries, some nuts and whole wheat flour.

I finished up my November shopping at Winco and by the time I loaded my groceries into the car it was time to pick up the girl.

Winco haul - the Braeburn apples are fantastic!

Wednesday I dropped her off again and since it was an extended meeting  the youngest and I went home to rake up the yard (in the dark) and fill up our neighbor's compost bin once again.  We got that set at the curb with all of the trash and recycling.  It is really nice how the three of us neighbors have figured out a way to get all the leaves composted one way or another.

After work on Friday the girls went next door to our elderly neighbor's house and raked up another big pile of leaves.  They stuffed her compost bin as full as they could get it.  While they worked on that I raked up the last of our leaves from the front yard, mulched them and filled our blue trash can back up.  I also spread some more mulched leaves in the chicken's pen area.  Then I burned some sticks and twigs in our fire pot in the backyard and added my shreddables to it as well.

I added water to my dishsoap bottle to get every last drop
and washed dishes for another week!

Other than the grocery shopping I did on Monday I spent no other money.  That made me quite happy.

We continued with our freezer clean up as far as meals went.  I'll be going into more detail about that on Wednesday.  Lots of really good stuff!

I washed out a two gallon Ziploc bag to reuse.

How do you like my dishsoap upgrade?
I had ordered the lid & pump kit from eBay quite some time ago
and just used my own pint sized canning jar

I composted coffee grounds, tea bags, banana peels, onion skins and egg shells.  A couple weeks ago I had filled up the one half of the compost bin so it was heaped.  When I went out there on Friday it had reduced itself to 3/4 full already.  I was pretty impressed.

I gave the hens lots of produce scraps and some stale bread.

How was your thrifty week?