Frugal Finds and Fixes: Paisley and Pantry Edition

Recent frugal finds:

A set of three vanilla candles and two fancy rings, half-price at Michael's. They're sitting in a yard-saled pie dish. I liked this set especially because the holiday rings can go away, but the candles can be used anytime.

I also got a frosty-berries pick for half price, and cut it up to put in Mr. Fixit's grandma's goblets. I was looking for some bagged greenery at the thrift store but didn't find any, so new-but-cheap was second best. The most frugal and ecological would be real dried plants, but we have to be careful around allergies.

Mr. Fixit's grandma made the cloth with crocheted trim, about fifty years ago.

A frugal find for Mama Squirrel: this paisley shawl from the thrift store. It can also be worn as a blanket scarf.

 Another frugal find that became a fix: a pair of grey bootcut jeans for a dollar, but they were too long for me, and I think somebody else short wore them first, because the hems were scuffed. I decided to invest a few dollars in getting them hemmed nicely at my favourite local cleaner/fixer shop. (Places like that are disappearing too fast these days.)

I've already posted about the hat, which goes with the shawl, which goes with the jeans (and almost everything else except bright red).

The storage room in our apartment is part tools, part storage, part pantry. The pantry part has been pretty random; things went wherever they fit. Adding Christmas baking ingredients and other holiday things was sending it into overload.

This week I did a KonMari-inspired cleanout, just on the pantry section. I sorted the food and other supplies into large boxes and bins that would fit on the shelves. Because the containers were so random, I covered the fronts of them with flowery giftwrap. It won't last forever, but it's a good-enough fix for now.

This was frugal for more than one reason! Besides using the boxes and paper on hand, getting more organized helps us make better use of our small space, and keeps us from re-buying things we didn't notice we already had.

Plus it makes me happier when I walk in there and see all the colour and flower power.

Frugal Finds and Fixes: It's Winter Now edition

Two weeks into 2016, the weather has been a string of snowfalls followed by lots of shovelling. I don't ski or sled; my idea of enjoying winter is staying warm indoors.

On a whim, I downloaded the January decluttering calendar from Home Storage Solutions 101, and I've been trying to keep up with its 15-minute cleaning missions. That isn't necessarily a frugal thing, but it's a cleaning and simplifying one. It's also kind of positive when I get a string of things to declutter that already aren't cluttery. Dish towels? We could replace a few, but otherwise they're just folded in the drawer. Plastic wrap and foil? I had to restock rather than declutter those. Kitchen table? I know what she means, I've seen quite a few that could have used decluttering, but ours is usually bare. I'm sure she'll get me on some other point, though. I did clean out the plastic lids etc. (those accumulate fast), and we sent an extra casserole dish and some knives to the thrift store.
 

I got a head start on next week's cleaning-out-pantry-food missions by going through what we have, getting rid of a few things that had expired, and restocking the dry baking and soup mixes. I filled twenty plastic zipper bags with homemade muffin mix, pizza dough mix, lentil soup mix, a mixture of barley and brown rice that we use for Crockpot cereal, and so on. Again, it's not necessarily more frugal, but it does save measuring and cleanup.

We are all out of freezer meals (except for leftover chili that we're going to have tonight with a frozen pizza). I am hoping to replenish those soon.

We've kept on determinedly clearing stuff out and taking it to the thrift store. Drop-off trips usually also mean go-in-and-shop trips; we had one of those today.This is what I found: a purse for $3:

A short tan-coloured skirt for $1 (that's for summer):

And a sweater dress for $5. It's a nice colour and I do like sweater dresses, but it's much too long (I couldn't even get the whole length in the photo. Here's what I did with it. On the subject of chopping and sewing, I'm still working on my Scrap Challenge. It's not going to be all clothes!

What I did to stay frugal: I did NOT buy any of the scarves they were featuring in the front of the store, and they had some really nice ones. But the purse, the skirt, and the dress were higher on the needs-list than just frou-frou. I'll do my frou another time.

Making it from scratch: Stephanie's spice mixes

We've been following A Year of Slow Cooking since its first year.  It's still among my top ten (maybe top five) favourite food sites.  I've also bought the two Make It Fast, Cook It Slow cookbooks.  Not all the recipes have been winners here, but several have become regulars.

The site has a couple of hidden bonuses.  One is pretty obvious: all the recipes give gluten-free options.  This isn't something that currently applies to our family, but it's good to know anyway, especially if you might be cooking dinner for a gf friend sometime.

The other bonus is that, because of the gluten-free recipes, there are alternatives given for things like taco seasoning mix.  This is a good thing for us in several ways.  First, homemade spice mixes are lower in sodium, which is still something we're trying to watch around here.  Some Squirrels also get sick from eating MSG. 

Second, although seasoning packets aren't terribly expensive, mixing your own is probably a better deal.  I also find them a frugal option since they help to make a tasty meal out of other simple ingredients.  Ground beef plus spices makes taco filling; then you add whatever other bean, cheese and vegetable toppings you have, and wrap in tortillas or serve over rice or corn chips (for taco salad).

Plus you don't have to remember to buy taco seasoning, or sloppy joe spice, if you already have the makings for it on the spice shelf.  And, if you're really organized, you can even mix up extra and store it in sandwich bags to make it all as easy as ripping open a packet.

And the last good reason, for us, is that Steph's spice mixtures pretty much suit our cupboard staples and our tastes (with the exception of rosemary, which two Squirrels can't eat).  When you find something that works for you, you stick with it.

So I'm passing on the links to a couple of Year of Slow Cooking mixes that have worked for us, plus the spaghetti sauce mixture that I worked out from a Hillbilly Housewife recipe.  Thank you, Steph!

Sloppy Joe Seasoning  I used this a few nights ago to make a Hamburger Assistant-type meal in a skillet:  a pound of ground beef, a can of tomato paste plus water and seasonings, leftover cooked pasta, and a bit of cheese.

Taco Seasoning.  This one is in More Make it Fast, Cook it Slow under "Taco Dip," but the spice mix doesn't appear on the Year of Slow Cooking website. It's the same recipe as the one in this blog post, minus the teaspoonful of salt.

Enchilada Sauce

Mama Squirrel's Diner-Style Spaghetti Sauce