Tag Archives: frugal

Freeze It! Save Time by Making Double

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Woman cooking soup

Oh, no! It’s 5:00PM, and I don’t have a clue what’s for dinner. Don’t you wish you had a nice, home-cooked meal in the freezer you could just pop into the oven. So many of us are stressed and busy beyond our ability to cope well. No time for dinner too often means resorting to feeds that we know very well are not good for us.

My solution has been doubling my favorite meals, but keeping my family from getting bored by freezing half. Then, I have a quick, easy meal later.

A month ago, I bought a chest freezer, so I’ve been excited to fill it up. I’m not so excited that I’m likely to go the way of once-a-month cooking (cooking a month’s worth of meals in a day), though. That thought fills me with the dread of standing in the kitchen all day and of eating the same food for a month. If that idea overwhelms you, too, take baby steps. Just double some of your favorite meals. As this becomes routine, you might even get more ambitious.

Containers. Using freezer-safe, tempered glass containers makes it very easy to stack and store your frozen food. If you are going to freeze more than a week in advance, you might want to invest in labels and markers so you don’t end up leaving food in the freezer too long.

Recipes. Start with your favorite foods that are easily frozen. Many soups and sauces freeze well. We double time-consuming meals like lasagna and pot pie, freezing one uncooked. We don’t usually freeze foods with a lot of vegetables because I don’t like the texture of some thawed and reheated whole vegetables. It is easy to add fresh vegetables to reheated meals, though.

Buy on Sale. Be flexible enough to take advantage of a good sale when it happens. Looking for red-label foods that are set to hit their expiration date in a couple of days saves us money already. Don’t just freeze the raw ingredients. Double what you make as well as what you buy, so you can freeze the meal.

Don’t double new recipes. For the same reasons, don’t plan to freeze foods that you haven’t tried before. If you didn’t like it the first time around, you’ll likely just leave it to wither away into ice dust in the corner of the freezer.

If you are ready to save time and save money but you aren’t ready to make freezing meals a new lifestyle, doubling what you already love to eat is a great way to create no-stress dinners for your family.

Image © Littleny | Dreamstime.com

Dinner on a Budget

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Young family making dinner on a budget

When you are making a healthy dinner on a budget, you balance two needs: keep the quality high and keep the grocery bill low. The more work you are willing to put in and the more you plan in advance, the less you will end up spending and the easier it will be to keep this balance.


Grow It Yourself

Can you plan dinner a year in advance? Sure, sort of. It’s not too early to plan your garden for the year.

It’s nice to eat fresh vegetables, and you may also want to preserve your own food to save money. My mother always made pickles and salsa. We seldom bought these at the store. I guarantee we won’t need to buy mint tea for a long time, but there is nothing else we grew this past season that will cover our needs for the whole year. I aspire to grow enough of one food that I can make it worth the time and effort to preserve a year’s worth from our own garden. I have two ideas for foods I think I could cover out of my garden if I focus our efforts for the year: berry preserves or pickles.

Even if you don’t grow your own food, you can buy foods when they are abundant and prices are low then preserve them yourself. Some farmers markets are in their last few weeks right now.


Buy Ahead

One way to cut costs is to buy food as it is discounted. If you want to take advantage of daily specials (“Must be sold today!”), you will need somewhere to store the food. You don’t even really need to plan in advance, as long as you are willing to do a bit of improvisation once the moment of recipe decision comes.

A small, energy efficient chest freezer costs only a few hundred dollars. Chest freezers run more efficiently than upright freezers, and they freeze most efficiently if they are kept full.


Cook It Yourself

When you’re tired and hungry, you are much less likely to make the less expensive choice for dinner. Just to for comparison, and to encourage you to plan ahead, this is what my family of four pays for a chicken dinner.

  • Eat out chicken dinner, restaurant, $40-50 (if you are lucky)
  • Buy chicken dinner, fast food, $20-30
  • Buy chicken dinner, grocery store, $15-20
  • Buy a cooked chicken, grocery store, $6-8 + another $10 for side dishes for $16-18
  • Buy a raw chicken and cook at home, $5 for 2 chickens (on special) + $5 for tortillas, avocado, cheese, and lettuce for a total of about $10 (and, it lasts for a couple of meals)

I base this on the two chickens I bought this weekend (“Today’s Special”), which provided a great Sunday lunch and dinner for about $10. We didn’t really plan ahead, but we improvised around the best deal available.

Even if you only eat take out food once a week, that can add $100 a month to your food budget. If you actually eat out in a restaurant, you add closer to $200 a month. It doesn’t seem like much at the time, but it all adds up quickly

What you need on those evenings when you are tired and hungry is something you can pull from your freezer and heat up.


Divide Meals

If you need quick, easy to heat and eat meals, make them yourself. Before I was married, I could make a huge pot of soup on the weekend and eat it for a week when I got home late. With four people to feed, we can sometimes get three meals out of one pot of soup or chili or two meals out of a dish of lasagna.

Look at your family’s favorite foods and figure out which are most easily scalable. Then, make a lot, divide it into enough for tonight and later. Freeze the rest in the right amounts for a whole dinner, and you have a very easy meal for another night. It’s your own two-for-one meal deal.

It is possible to be frugal by buying the cheapest foods, but don’t fall into that trap. Eating processed and prepared foods costs you more in health and wellness in the long run. Stick with whole foods, single ingredients that you put together yourself.

Eat well and inexpensively!

Image © Arne9001 | Dreamstime.com

Square Foot Gardening Gives an Easy Start for Anyone

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Urban Square Foot Garden

Are you ready to jump in and plant a garden in your backyard? If you have the space to move beyond an indoor garden or an outside vertical garden, a square foot garden is an ideal way for a beginning gardener to get started on the gardening adventure.

A square foot garden divides a small space into one foot squares with only one type of plant in each square. Larger plants, like tomatoes, are planted just one to a square, while smaller plants, like carrots, are planted with many (16) to a square. The method is very efficient in use of seeds, use of space, and use of water. Because it is so easy to understand and so encouraging, this method works well for gardeners who are intimidated or overwhelmed by the idea of growing their own food.

The space needed can be quite small, but the method is scalable by just repeating the 3′ x 3′ or 4′ x 4′ squares separated by spaces big enough to walk through and to stand while you tend your garden. Your squares can be dug into the ground or planted in a raised bed frame. (The official guidelines put the garden in a frame, but you can adapt the method.) The grid lines between each square foot section can be made with string or something more permanent, like strips from old blinds. You have a lot of choices within the basic guidelines for square foot gardening.

Best of all, you can start today. Draw a 3×3 grid, add dots to represent your crops (1, 4, 9, or 16, depending on plant size), then start building the frame. You can begin in any season.


Square Foot Gardening Resources

  • All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholemew. This is the square foot gardening bible.
  • Square Foot Gardening Foundation. This foundation, started by the Square Foot Gardening author, aims “to end world hunger by reaching out to families and teaching them how to grow healthy food for their daily meals.”
  • “How to Build a Square Foot Garden,” Frugal Dad. Using the method outlined by Mel Bartholemew, this gardener added a drip irrigation system. Photos and detailed descriptions.
  • My Square Foot Garden. If you are wondering how to garden for your climate, look for planting plans from many different gardeners. The plans are so simple to create and so inspiring to look at.

Image © Claus Mikosch | Dreamstime.com

Now Is the Time to Buy Winter Clothes

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Children's Winter Clothes on Sale

Children often grow out of their clothes before they wear them out. After Christmas and into the New Year is a great time to look for winter clothes. A lot of children will have new clothes for the holidays, so families will probably be looking to get rid of old clothes. Combined with the New Year’s / Hogmanay urge to clean up and ship out old stuff, you have the ideal time to get winter clothes for your kids.

Make a list. Start with an honest assessment of what you need in what sizes so you don’t end up impulse buying more than you need.

Look for sales. Comb sale advertisements in the papers before you head off to the stores. Save yourself the grief of having to physically push clothes around on the racks. De-stress. Only go to the sales that are most likely to have what you need.

Trade with friends. If you have a large enough circle of friends and acquaintances, clothes can be passed from family to family until they wear out. You might not be trading clothes for clothes with the same family, but you can often work out a fair system for trading in a circle.

Consign and shop consignment post-holidays. Gather up the clothes that don’t fit your children and take them to a consignment shop IF the shop gives you decent terms. Don’t give away the clothes for nothing. Near me, I have only found shops that give terrible terms, so I don’t do this.

Buy a size up. As you are part-way into the season, you will save money by buying the size you will need next year. My children know I am going to buy coats with arms too long, and they are just resigned to it.

Stock up while the stocking is good. For cloth diapers, baby carriers, and toys, be sure to check our Year-end Sale at bynature.ca.

Image © Lucyna Onik | Dreamstime.com

High Standards: Good Value

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Nellie's dryer balls

Good ValueGood Value
Quality, long-lasting, reusable and multi-use items are high on our list of criteria for products that meet our Good Value standard. Often times this will mean a product will help you save money over the long term, either by replacing use-and-toss items or by offering more than one use which extends the life of the product well into the future.

With reusable products, you have a larger expense up front, but you don’t have to pay much over time to maintain your cloth diapers, wipes, reusable gift wrapping, and other reusables. In the long run, you save a lot of money.

One thing you do need to be prepared for is laundry. It isn’t difficult, but you don’t want to lose your environmental gains through the way you launder. So, look for the same good value in laundry products that you do in your washable goods.

  • Use low-impact, biodegradable laundry soap
  • Soften clothes through the gentle impact of dryer balls rather than with chemicals
  • Run full loads of laundry to take advantage of the importance of agitation action in cleaning
  • Line dry outside when your weather permits and inside when it doesn’t


Good Value from bynaturea.ca

We offer long-lasting, reusable products in every category from cloth diapering to personal care to feeding to celebrations. We offer you hundreds of products that meet our Good Value standard.

Nellie’s Dryer Balls
Nellie's Dryer Balls

Nellie’s Dryer Balls soften clothes naturally by soft impact that flexes the fibers of your clothes, towels, and diapers. You don’t need to even consider chemical fabric softeners or dryer sheets when you use dryer balls.

If you are scent sensitive, you can use dryer balls as is. If you like a subtle scent with your wash, put Nellie’s Dryer Balls Fragrance Sticks into the center of the dryerball. Available in either citrus or lavender. Scented with essential oils.

For the past month, we have been telling you more about our Safe Family Promise at bynature.ca. This post on Good Value wraps up our twelve high standards. To make it easy for you to identify products by their key attributes, look for our standards labels. Please tell us either here or on our Facebook page which standards are important to you and which products you would like to see us consider under each of those standards.