Psst, I make money on some of the links in this post at no cost to you. It keeps the lights on around here. Amazon links are affiliate links.

What a weekend! I gotta say that we were quite productive, but still made time to sit back and relax. There was a lot of cooking and gardening this weekend; I feel pretty good about how we spent our two days off.

How was your weekend?

Frugal toilet removal

After replacing the toilets last week, we had one more thing to do: remove the old toilets. They’ve been chillin’ on our back porch for the last week. While I’m all about shabby chic decor, this was a bit too shabby for my taste.

It’s been a pain trying to find a dump that would accept our trash. After getting the run-around, our trash company said they could pick the toilets up for “just $150.”

Yeah, no.

Instead, Mr. Picky Pincher loaded up the old toilets and took them to a dump near his parent’s home, where he disposed of them for a $10 fee. I’m all for saving $145.

Fancy dinner!

Earlier this week I helped a family member with some graphic design stuff.

…Which is hilarious to me, because I’m not a graphic designer at all. But family still thinks I am one, and I’m happy to help when I can.

As a thank you, they sent us a very generous gift card to our favorite Brazilian steakhouse. Yowza! Not one to turn down generosity, Mr. Picky Pincher and I grabbed Friday dinner at the Brazilian steakhouse.

We had an amazing meal and only paid $20 for the tip. I’m trying to work on my diet, so I did eat much more greens and veggies than I normally would. It’s a good start!

Chikfila coupon

Chikfila sent me a coupon a while back for a free Breakfast sandwich. I’m not one to turn down free sandwiches, so we grabbed breakfast there on Saturday morning. I also brought my reusable water bottle so I wouldn’t have to ask for a cup of water. Look at me, preventing plastic waste.

Gardening

It was a big weekend for gardening. Although many parts of the country are starting to feel the chill of winter, it’s been 80 degrees here in Texas. Fall here is such a joke. Anyway, it was good planting weather. We’ve admittedly been slacking in the gardening department, so we tried to make up for it with a flurry of planting.

Sprouting potatoes

I’ve always wanted to grow my own potatoes. Since fall is the perfect planting season for spuds in Texas, I decided to get the ball rolling.

Potatoes are weird little things. It’s not like they grow from a seed; you have to start them from another potato, called a “seed potato.”

I swung by Whole Foods and bought organic russet potatoes and a bag of organic fingerling potatoes. I needed organic taters because conventional potatoes are typically sprayed with an anti-sprouting chemical that prevents them from forming eyes.

I left the potatoes in the pantry for a week. The fingerlings developed impressive eyes, but the russets needed a little longer. After consulting a few sites, I put the fingerling potatoes in an egg carton and sat them on the windowsill. The sunlight will encourage the eyes to continue growing until they sprout. Once the shoots are an inch long, they’ll be ready to plant.

Since the russets didn’t sprout yet, I’m trying a hack to sprout them. One site swore that you could quickly sprout potatoes by placing them in a closed paper sack with onions. I figured, “Eh, what the hell?” and gave it a go. I don’t see any eyes yet, but I’ll check over the next few days.

Plantin’ time

We halfheartedly tried to grow seedlings for our winter garden. But we forgot to water them and most of them died. Oops! I was able to revive a few of them. We decided to go ahead and plant the seedlings in our raised beds, where they would be automatically watered with our irrigation system.

Mr. Picky Pincher also direct-seeded our remaining raised beds. So far we’ve planted broccoli, arugula, rainbow chard, okra, and lettuce.

I also planted the green onions that we sprouted in our kitchen. At least the squash plants are doing well! They’re getting ready to put on blooms, which hopefully will mean there’s squash in our future.

Cooking

Thanksgiving is next week, which means we’re gonna be busy! We’re hosting this year so it’s gonna be crazier than usual. I wanted to pre-cook as many components of our non-Thanksgiving meals as I could. I’m also trying to make a point of eating healthier foods. I’m a work in progress, but I think I’ve made some good steps forward.

Kombucha starter

I loved having kombucha on hand when Mr. Picky Pincher made it. I decided to pick up where he left off and make my own kombucha. It’s a great addition to your diet for probiotics.

I used a glass of unflavored kombucha from the store as my starter. I made a sweet black tea and let the suckah sit in a cabinet for a week. It needs another week to develop the SCOBY. After that I’ll be able to start making kombucha.

Apple chips

I’m trying to make healthier snacks that I can easily store in my pantry. After searching around the internet, I realized dried apple chips would be a perfect healthy snack.

I bought a sack of small, red apples from the grocery store and thinly sliced them by hand. I admit it was kind of a pain to remove the core without an apple corer, but I made it work.

Once I sliced all the apples, I placed the slices on our dehydrator shelves (Amazon link here). I sprinkled them with cinnamon for flavor and let them dehydrate for 12 hours.

I gotta say, these are pretty tasty! I think the cinnamon detracts from them, though, so next time I won’t add the cinnamon. I stored the dried apple chips in a Ziploc and I’ll keep them in the snack pantry for easy access.

Sausage patties

Thanksgiving is throwing a bit of a wrench into my healthy diet plans. We’re hosting family this week and it’s a little hard to sell them on “spinach smoothies” for breakfast. 

I planned crowd-pleasing (yet not super-healthy) breakfasts like sausage biscuits with gravy to easily and quickly feed everyone.

I decided to pre-cook a bulk amount of sausage patties to speed things up this week. Thanks to Mr. Picky Pincher’s meat grinder adventures from last week, we had plenty of homemade breakfast sausage to use up. I formed the patties and cooked them in a cast iron pan for a nice crust. I made about 10 patties, so we should have more than enough to feed everyone.

Green dressing

For next week’s breakfast I’m making a frittata with lox and a green onion dressing. I decided to make the dressing ahead of time since it was vegan and involved a few more steps.

I soaked cashews overnight to make this easy green onion dressing. I whipped it together in our Vitamix (Amazon link here) and stored it in the fridge for later. Texture-wise I wasn’t able to tell it was vegan, so that’s a win.

Shredded chicken

We’re eating a lot of meals this week that involve shredded chicken. Instead of making shredded chicken on weekday nights, I pre-cooked a whole container of chicken breast this weekend. I simmered it on low in the crock pot with chicken stock, and then pulled it apart with a fork. Once it cooled I vacuum sealed it and stuffed it in the freezer.

Easy!

Yogurt

Our yogurt stash was dangerously low this week, so I made a new batch of my homemade yogurt. Adding twice the amount of starter cultures fixed the problem of my yogurt taking too long to ferment. I guess it just needed a little help!

Sweet potato waffles

I’m slowly but surely trying to find good alternatives to bread, particularly for breakfast. I came across a keto recipe for breakfast sandwiches using sweet potato waffles instead of biscuits. I used this recipe.

This was surprisingly easy to cook. Even more surprising was that it tasted amazing! I’m excited for these.

I froze them in a Ziploc and I’ll heat them up in the waffle iron for breakfast this week. Next time I think I’ll cook a bulk batch and keep them on hand. Mmmm.

Healthy dessert experiment

As y’all probably know, I am obsessed with sweets. Like, I would dive into a vat of sugar if it wouldn’t kill me.

Unfortunately, my love of sugar leads to a lot of added calories in my diet. Add that with the thyroid fiasco, and I know something about my eating needs to change.

To start, I’m trying to treat fruit as a dessert. Although it still has sugar, it has a lot of beneficial fiber and nutrients. It’s better than, say, an Oreo. Anyhoo, I tried out two simple and healthy recipes for fruit-based desserts.

First I made this orange and pistachio dessert. It was simply an orange sliced horizontally and layered with homemade Greek yogurt. Then I sprinkled the entire thing with pistachios and a little bit of honey.

Oh y’all. Sorry for the crappy picture, but this was soooo delicious. Mr. Picky Pincher even liked it. The pistachios add salt and a depth of flavor that makes this dessert taste like it’s from a five-star restaurant. And it helps that it’s healthy.

The second dessert I tried was even simpler. I sliced organic strawberries and topped them with thin slices of mint. I had leftover blackberries in the fridge, so I tossed them in there, too.

This dessert was pretty tasty, but I preferred the orange one, myself. I’ll still eat this, though!

Biscuits

I made a batch of biscuits to feed family for breakfast this week. I like to slice them once they’re baked and then freeze them for later.

These will pair nicely with our homemade breakfast sausage patties.

Meatballs

Later this week we’re eating “upside down” pasta bowls, which is another keto recipe I found. I definitely don’t want to make meatballs on a weekday, so I pre-cooked these.

I didn’t follow a recipe but here’s what I put in them:

• 1 lb ground beef
• 1 lb ground pork (from our meat grinder!)
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup homemade bread crumbs. I save our leftover scraps of bread and make our own.
• 1 teaspoon salt, pepper, basil, and oregano.

I rolled the meatballs and opted to bake them. It makes the meatballs a bit healthier, and plus I don’t have to clean up frying oil. I cooked the meatballs on a rack on top of a baking sheet. This lets the fat drip off the meatballs and onto the sheet pan. I made sure to put down a layer of foil so the fat wouldn’t burn onto the sheet pan.

After about 20 minutes roasting at 400 degrees, these babies were ready to go!

I do wish I’d sprayed the rack with oil. The meatballs got stuck and I had to pry them off. Ugh. Once they cooled I vacuum sealed the meatballs and froze them.

DIY soap

I travel a bit for work, and that means I’ve amassed an impressive collection of free hotel Soap. I’ve hoarded these bar soaps for a few months and wanted to put them to good use.

I decided to turn the bar soap into liquid hand soap. I can’t stand bar soap, but I’ll use the hell out of some liquid soap.

I grated all 10 of the soaps into fine soap flakes. I then heated them with a shizton of water in our largest pot. Once the soap flakes completely incorporated into the water, I left the mixture overnight to cool and congeal.

Weeeell. The next day it was a Jell-o sort of consistency; too thick for liquid soap. I added more water and heated it again until it was incorporated. The next day, it was the perfect thinness.

I gotta say, though. This stuff was slimy and snotty in texture. It was definitely soap, but it was weird! Mr. Picky Pincher helped me pour the soap into some leftover plastic bottles and said, “Honey, I think this is one of the weirdest things you’ve ever done to save money.”

I labeled our recycled containers with some stickers from my crafting box. Fun fact: I’ve owned these stickers since I was a junior in high school. I guess there’s some bit of “packrat” in many frugal people, eh?

We stored these under the sink and won’t need hand soap for a while.

Zap’s Adventures

Zap is such a little scamp! For two days in a row he kept me from making the bed by “claiming” sheets or pillows. What a little bub.

Zap looooooves the weighted blanket I got for Mr. Picky Pincher’s birthday (Amazon link here). He napped with me each day this week and took up more than his fair share of the blanket.

Blanket hog!

Zap enjoyed frolicking in a new Amazon box. He was irritated with me when I took the picture because I wasn’t playing with him.

Caturday is the best day for a nap!

We want to know: How did you spend or save money this weekend?

The post What A Frugal Weekend! November 19 appeared first on Picky Pinchers.