What's for Dinner?

hanksgiving day has come and gone, and we are all still wearing pants with elastic waistbands. In light of this overstuffed holiday, this weeks frugal Friday tip is about saving money on your grocery bill this week.

These days, the average Thanksgiving dinner costs around $45.00. That's less than the tab if you were to go out an eat at a restaurant, but it's still a big chunk of change. I can sometimes squish my grocery list down to $50.00 for about a week and a half's worth of food, so $45.00 will pretty much blow my budget.

Lucky for Shawn and I, we live close enough to both of our families, that we get to have 2 Thanksgiving dinners and lots of left overs. Once we get home, I am very careful to use everything we get. I don't want a single morsel to go wasted. Even if you only get one dinner, or worse if you're the one footing the bill, the question still remains, "what am I going to do with all of this food?"

My brother is the type of guy who will eat a traditional Thanksgiving meal made of left overs until he slowly runs out of each item. By the end of the week he is toting a plate of cranberry sauce and turkey skin to the sofa. If you pefer a little variety in your left overs, here are some links I found that will give you some great tips on how to use everything you've got without eating the same dinner over and over again.

• Turkey Vegetable Soup, Turkey Waldorf Salad, and Cranberry Carrot-Muffins to name a few.
  
• Paula Dean's Left Over Recipes
  
• Alton Brown's Day After Thanksgiving Breakfast Hash
  

Love,

Christmas TV Schedule

hristmas time is upon us! One of my favorite things about this time of year is... CHRISTMAS TV! I LOVE LOVE LOVE those old Christmas cartoons, Ruldolph, Frosty, and my dear favorite, The Year Without a Santa Claus. Oh! And I just love it when they play A Christmas Story for 24 hours on Christmas eve!



Here I am to share the joy, this is the link to the 2008 Christmas TV Schedule!
Enjoy!

CLICK HERE FOR THE 2008 CHRISTMAS TV SCHEDULE!

Love,

Pack a Snack!

ith Christmas time upon us, we are all going to be spending a lot more time out and about. Whether we are at the mall shopping, walking the neighborhood looking at Christmas lights, or standing in the cold watching the Christmas Ships pass, we are bound to work up an appetite.


I am the ultimate sucker for the food court. After a couple of hours of shopping I get whisked away by the smell of deep fried everything and special sauce.

Things have changed since I've had Caleb. Before I leave somewhere I pack a lunch box for him. I fill it with animal crackers, apple sauce, fruit cups, and sometimes a PB & J sammie if we are going to be gone a long time. I've learned a valuable lesson... it is not illegal to bring a lunch sack to the mall.

Seriously though, I don't know why I never thought of it before, but the important thing is I am doing it now. Pack a food with protien and carbs and fiber so you feel nice and full and get lots of energy. A trail mix, or a package of almonds is perfect, inexpensive, and a lot less dangerous to your jean size than a hamburger or taco.

Another thing you can easily tote along is a water bottle. Water is the new air, everybody is doing it. A refillable water bottle is not just for the gym anymore, and a lot of food vendors will refill it for little or no money.

So, pack a snack to take with you while you Christmas shop. You'll feel a lot better about what you've eaten, and with all the money you save, you can get me a Christmas gift!





Love,

Frugal Friday

ere is another Frugal Friday tip for you! I noticed that when I buy dish soap, the container almost always says 2x's concentrated or something to that effect. I can only assume that this means I am supposed to use half as much of the soap, but since I transfer the soap into a pump dispenser, I am unable to control how much I squish out.

My solution? Brace yourself because it sounds kind of cheap. I dilute it. I mix it 3 parts soap, 1 part water. It works really well.

• My dishes get just as clean
• I use way less soap
• The soap lathers much quicker
• I've been using the same container of soap for over a year!

Trust me when I say that my dishes get just as clean. I am so anal retentive about my dishes. I can't stand it when were are little pieces of food left on dishes after the come out of the washer. One thing I refuse to ever ever ever do, is pick the food off with my fingernail. If for some insane reason I ever have a dish come out of the washer with a piece of anything stuck to it, I soak the dish in hot water and bleach and then rewash it in the next load.

There are a lot of things in life that I am relaxed about. There are a lot of times I will cut corners. Mark my words, I will never ever compromise the cleanliness of my dishes, and so if this dilution works for me, it will probably work for anyone out there who is within the realm of normal.

Love,

November is Almost Over

can't believe my little baby boy is 11 1/2 months old. We are only a little over 2 weeks away from his first birthday! This year has gone by so quickly. It really does seem like just yesterday that we brought him home from the hospital. Everyone told me that the first year goes by lightening fast. It isn't that I doubted anyone, it's just that you can't fully understand how true it is until you live through it.

It's interesting to me when I think that there are friends of mine, even friends living less than 30 minutes away, who have never seen Caleb. It doesn't even feel like it's been a long time since I have seen them. Now I have a child, which is a whole different way to gauge time. Oh my, now that I am thinking about it more closely, there are people I haven't even seen since before I was pregnant!

Kiddos just take up a lot of your time, I guess. I am busy all the time, but I wouldn't change it for the world.

Love,

Blogger Award! Spreading the Love!

ey! It's my first blog award. Thanks to Janell for thinking of me when it came to this one. Here are the rules... I am supposed to list 6 things I value, list 6 things I don't.

So here it goes:

I Value:
1. My God and Savior, Jesus Christ.
2. Shawn, of course.
3. Caleb, obviously.
4. Family
5. New mops
6. Bank Holidays

I Don't Value:
1. Foreign Currency
2. My Own Life (Acts 20:24)
3. The Views of an "ethical" Vegitarian.
4. Abortion proponents' views or anything they have to say on the matter.
5. Psychics
6. Socks With Holes

So there ya have it...
Love,

Frugal Friday

y mom and I are constantly giving each other our tips and tricks for shaving a little off of our everyday expenses. Today she exclaimed, "We should really start sharing this with people!" So, here it is, the first installment of Frugal Fridays.

Each week I will share a frugal living tip with you. These tips will be either something I actually do myself, or a tip that I receive from someone else. I will do my best to try out the advice before I pass it along and I will give you my thoughts on how well it worked.

Today's Frugal Friday tip is something I have been doing for the past year. I told my mom about it last week and she loves it. I tear my dryer sheets in half. It sounds simple because it is! I find that my laundry comes out just as fluffy soft when I use half a dryer sheet compared to when I use a whole sheet.

How much can you save by tearing your dryer sheets in half? My mom and I went to Costco where we bought the Kirkland brand of dryer sheets. The package cost us about $9.00 and came with two boxes. That equals around $4.50 for each of us to have a box of 246 sheets. That's a deal already! By tearing the sheets in half, we will get 492 loads of laundry dried and fluffed. That means we spent $4.50 for over a year's worth of laundry even if we do more than one load on some days!

Give it a try and let me know how you like it! My mom and I didn't even notice a difference in the laundry. Our towels were still fluffy, our sheets were still soft, and our clothes still smell like a fresh breeze!

If you have any tips for Froogle Fridays, email them to me at FrugalFridayTips@gmail.com. I might just try out your tip, and pass it along!

Love,