It’s me. I’m the crappy mender.
1. I hand-sewed a potholder
This terry cloth potholder came with some very wide stitches, and unsurprisingly, they started to come out not long after I bought it.
The potholder is really too thick to fit in my sewing machine, so I hand-sewed it, which was also a little bit of a challenge.
It is not my neatest work, but I don’t really care that much because the point was for it to be functional. And functional, it is.
2. I bought some marked-down chicken at Aldi
I was going to buy a bag of frozen chicken thighs, but my store was out.
Boo.
However…the refrigerated section held packages of bone-in chicken thighs marked 50% off because it was the sell-by date that day.
So, I bought two of them, brought them home, deboned the chicken, and then froze it on baking sheets before transferring the thighs to (washed and reused) plastic bags.
This way I can grab just a few out of the freezer at a time.
I know myself well enough to know that if I stuck that big package of thighs in the freezer, I would not want to get them out and use them!
But deboned and individually frozen? Yep, I will use those.
And I am happy I saved the chicken from getting thrown out at Aldi.
3. I made a little batch of broth from the bones
I browned some of the skin with some onions and celery, then browned the thigh bones, added water and salt, and cooked it all for a few hours.
This felt like an especially satisfying broth batch since it came from the bones of discounted chicken; it’s like a bonus on top of a bonus!
A friend loves using an Instant Pot for broth and suggested I do the same. I texted back and said, “I don’t have one! I just have a non-instant pot.”
4. I bought a Souper Cube knock-off at Aldi
I noticed that Aldi had some 1-cup silicone freezer molds that look sorta like the expensive Souper Cubes!
So, I bought one for $4.99, and I used it to freeze my broth in one-cup portions.
5. I put parchment paper between my tortillas
Bear with me here as I explain: a package of tortillas is too much for a two-person household to use quickly.
But also, sticking the whole package in the freezer is not great because it’s hard to pull off just a few tortillas, so then you end up thawing a whole bunch of them at a time, and then refreezing them when you’re done.
This is not great when you really just wanted to make a scrambled egg taco/burrito for yourself.
So this time, I cut up some small squares of parchment paper and put them between the tortillas before I froze them.
This should make it easy to grab only as many as I/we need at the moment, and hopefully this will help us avoid wasting any.
Your turn! What frugal things have you been up to lately?
Source: www.thefrugalgirl.com…