Happy Monday, my frugal friends! Today we feature a post from our blogging pal Cameron over at Thrift Hounds. Cameron shares on his blog funny and inventive ways to save money and live frugally. And as a bonus, his wife has an awesome food blog. 🙂
There’s probably still a snowstorm or two on the horizon here where I live in Denver before summer arrives, and yet I – like you, maybe – am already already obsessing over how to coax as many pounds of tomatoes as possible out of my beloved tomato plants this year.
Tomatoes, like zucchinis, have the reputation of surprising gardeners with more produce than you thought possible (to the point where you start bribing reluctant coworkers to take them off of your hands).
In fact, most gardeners are ecstatic to get 10 or 15 pounds of fruit out of each plant.
But with some careful planning and maintenance, you can push your plants to produce up two or three times that amount. Read more
Pumpkin Bread with Caramel Glaze – AND some Superbowl Recipes!
You just can’t beat the church cookbook when it comes to searching for the best recipes. We have two of them, and they’re our go-to books when we’re looking for something new, delicious, exciting or comforting. This week it was Pumpkin Bread with Caramel Glaze. And can I just say “O. M. G!”? This bread ranks right up on the top of my fave bread recipes list, right along with my Great Grandma’s Banana Bread recipe.
The bread itself calls for what seems like a lot of sugar, but it isn’t too terribly sweet, and so the glaze is a wonderful addition. And, like all good Scandinavians, we add a generous dollop of smor (Norwegian for butter, pronounced “smurrr” with rolled r’s) on all of our baked breads. The addition of butter officially puts this bread in the “heavenly” category. 🙂
As far as serving suggestions, it would make a great bread to serve at a brunch, an afternoon tea party or any kind of a potluck. We like it served warm best, but even at room temperature, it’s an absolutely delightful bread. Read more
Gardening for self-sufficiency is different than gardening for fun. When we lived back in the suburbs, we had a small 10×15 or so garden plot, and each year we’d sit down and talk about what “fun” types of things we’d attempt to grow for the year. Preservation had that same “fun” theme, as we’d can pickles for the purpose of always having one of our favorite foods around, and we tried freezing green beans simply because we wanted to learn the process.
However, one of our goals in ditching suburbia for the sake of country living was that we wanted to begin to really turn our garden into a serious source of food for our family of six. What started out as a fun hobby is slowly becoming a vital source of food for the entire year. As such, the gardening we do now is vastly different than the gardening we did back in the suburbs. Read more
Tomorrow is Christmas cookie baking day in the Frugal Farmer household – a day when we make all of our tried and true favorite Christmas treats to devour with semi-reckless abandon and to share liberally with others. As I’ve mentioned in other recipes, a dear old friend that I worked with years ago gave me her decades-old cookie recipes, and we use those blessed recipes to this day. Read more
Earlier last month I talked about how we feed our family of six on $400-$450 a month, yet we still manage to eat organic food for much of our diets. Regardless of what the critics and naysayers tell us, healthy food does not need to be expensive. In fact, if you know a few hidden secrets you can feed yourself and your whole family with healthy products and still keep your food budget low. I talked last week about the benefits of organic foods, and how we eat organic foods for a decent part of our diet, and manage to do so inexpensively compared to what most people spend on their grocery budget without buying organic. Today, in order to give you more insight on how to feed your family a healthy diet I’m sharing five great places where you can get healthy food for yourself and/or your family without going over the grocery budget. Read more
When working to eat healthy and still feed your family for less, it’s important to get creative and work to find ways to serve meals that everyone loves and do so in a way that fits in with your family’s targeted food budget. One of the ways we do this in The Frugal Farmer home is by writing down meal items we love to have at our favorite restaurants and finding ways to make them at home. In our quest to eat well (which for us means finding a balance between eating healthy and throwing in a few of our favorite not-so-healthy restaurant foods) but still keep our grocery budget at around $400 for our family of six, we’ve found ways to make a number of popular restaurant dishes at home for cheap.
We do this not only for regular weekly meals, but for celebratory meals such as Valentine’s Day as well. By finding ways to make restaurant dishes at home, we can save the money we would have spent on a restaurant excursion, yet still eat a special and satisfying meal.
As we work to eat primarily whole foods and stick with a largely macrobiotic diet, we are continually looking for new recipes that are healthy, flavorful, cheap and easy to prepare. One of our favorites has become this homemade fried rice recipe I put together last winter. It’s healthy, delicious and easy to make too. Many times we serve it alone, or occasionally we’ll serve it with an oriental salad, as seen in the picture here.
Healthy, Delicious and Cheap
Our local Costco sells a large bag of oriental salad for $6.99. The salad is quite similar to the Oriental Chicken Salad served at popular chain restaurants, except for that it’s sans chicken. This bag can serve our family of six for two meals, which brings the price of the salad down to $3.50 per meal. Since we buy our veggies in bulk, we can easily make the veggie fried rice for less than $1.50, bringing the total price of the meal to $5 or less. Try it at home and let me know how you like it.
Recommended for your “Feeding Your Family for Less” library:
Homemade Fried Rice Recipe
Ingredients
4-6 cups prepared rice (we use organic brown rice but any rice will do)
1/8 to 1/4 c. toasted sesame oil
1/4 to 1/2 c. frozen peas
1 garlic clove, pressed
1 onion (yellow or green will work), diced
1 large carrot, shredded
1 egg, scrambled with milk
a sprinkling of soy sauce, salt and pepper to taste
Directions
In a large non-stick frying pan or wok, heat sesame oil on medium high. Add peas and onions and cook for about 2 minutes, stirring regularly. Add the carrot and garlic and cook for another minute or two. Scoot the veggies over to one side and add the beaten egg/milk mixture, tossing it until the egg is fluffy and fully cooked. Mix the veggies and eggs together, add the rice, and combine until mixed well. You can add more oil if need be at this point. Add soy sauce, salt and pepper to taste, continually mixing. That’s it!
Being quite picky about my fried rice, I’ve found this recipe most similarly emulates a good old-fashioned quality Chinese restaurant tasting rice. It’s nice to be able to serve this at home, avoid the MSG (which is nothing more than a liquid sprinkled on many Chinese and Thai food dishes) and save money as well.
For more information and recipes for the frugal meals we serve at home, click here to access our Frugal Food section.
I’d be curious to hear after you try it if you find it as delicious as we do here. Also, feel free to share the restaurant meals you serve at home as well. We’d love to hear from you!
Hey, friends!! My dear friend Michelle, who blogs over at Rockin’ the Mom Role, (and who I lovingly call my “cooking extraordinaire” friend because of her expansive culinary talents) has created a mouth-watering gluten free cinnamon roll recipe, which she so kindly shared with us. This recipe would make the perfect addition to your Thanksgiving meal plan, either for breakfast or along with the Thanksgiving meal. Enjoy!
Delightfully Delicious Gluten Free Cinnamon Rolls
Those who follow me, know I’ve been on a mission to create a Monkey Bread worthy of my very critical tastebuds. While I am obsessed with finding a recipe for light and airy nuggets of cinnamon sugared baked dough balls, which I make ONCE A YEAR, my girls have been missing plain old-fashioned cinnamon rolls, which we enjoy year ’round. While in Seattle recently (my oldest graduated college and it was her graduation wish to take a trip out there) we found a little bakery offering gluten free cinnamon rolls at a little shop in Pikes Marketplace. Finding them, and chatting with the shop owner, we ordered them to be picked up fresh the next morning. Fresh and warm, the flavor was excellent, but they reminded me more of an expertly made biscuit dough, rolled with cinnamon, sugar and butter and baked. Don’t get me wrong, it made me re-think my monkey bread if I cannot figure out a risen dough version. But based on the oooooh’s and aaaaaah’s, along with murmurs of happiness from my girls, it was obvious the cinnamon rolls were highly cherished. Read more
Last week I wrote a post sharing about how we feed our family of six for roughly $400 a month. If you haven’t read that post, click on the preceding link and read that one first. This post will go into more of the secrets we use to keep our grocery costs so low. The average per person cost with our method is $67 per month, per person. We do this by using a combination of several different shopping and cooking techniques. Now, let’s build on what we talked about last week. Read more
I’ve gotten several requests lately from readers asking how we feed our family of six for roughly $100 a week. We spend roughly $400-$425 dollars a month to feed our family. One sweet gal brought a smile to my face when she wrote “Do you mean $400 twice a month?” Nope. $400 for the entire month. As I started to think about how to share our tips, I realized that when I was looking online for ways to feed our family for cheap, I wanted details. Details about what they bought, how much they bought and what they served for meals.
So that is what this post (and part 2 of this post) will entail. I think you’ll be surprised to find that we feed our family relatively well on the little we spend. We buy only organic milk, flour, sugar and butter, for instance. We don’t eat a ton of junk. Here are the nitty gritty details on how we feed our family for $100 a week and on how you can feed your family for less too. Read more
Every year for the kids’ birthdays, we let them pick out their favorite birthday meal for us to eat at home, complete with their favorite dessert as a part of our attempts to have frugal birthday parties. Sometimes the kids do this pretty frugally, sometimes not. Like when one kid asked for a (famous ice cream store) ice cream cake for her dessert last month. I cringed at the thought of spending 20 bucks on a store-bought cake just for the six of us, so I started to think about how we could replicate an ice cream cake here at home for less.
This recipe is the final result, and it got rave reviews from the entire family, including hubby, who LOVES the store bought ice cream cake and is picky about that kind of stuff in general. Here’s how I did it: Read more
