Monday Message

"Let us be in a position so we are able to not only feed ourselves through the home production and storage, but others as well." (President Ezra Taft Benson)

I was watching a podcast last night where this gal went to get a few groceries and she showed prices of a few, she noticed convenience foods had doubled in price. A good reason I say, to cook from scratch. Think about what is your favorite and then try to do your own version of it. She also said vegetables  were up in price as well...a good time to put in a garden.

Even if you are like me and HATE gardening with a passion (it causes me sooo much pain!), it is still so important that I do it anyway.

When you are thinking about gardening, think about things that will bring you food on your property like grapes, raspberries, rhubarb, asparagus, walking onions, garlic, fruit trees, herbs, things that will come back each year.

One year a friend gave me a start of garlic chives and now they are taking over the world! I truly believe a nuclear bomb could go off and they will survive. And not one vampire would be near us :p yep they are hardy and oh so good in soup and salad.

Just a thought - if you could put in something like these, now would be the time and you will have food through the years ahead.

Canning and drying food - if you do not know how then now is the time to start learning and collecting equipment and jars. Put out the word that you are looking for jars and canning stuff and hopefully someone near you that is done canning might have some.

Drying - you don't need the most expensive dehydrator out there. Mine is Nesco American Harvest. I bought extra trays and fruit leather sheets.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/g37726528/best-food-dehydrators/

A Foodsaver is a valuable thing to find, be looking at thrift stores if you can't get one new. Look at the big hunting and fishing stores as well and try to get a canister to go with it that could hold a quart size jar.

http://frugalmeasures.blogspot.com/2015/08/monday-message_24.html - In this post, I show you how to use a canister to vacuum seal in jars. I save my canning lids when I open my canned jars of food. I label on the lids so it is easy to see they are used. I save them for vacuum sealing, they do a better job than new ones, plus, it is frugal and you can use them over and over for vacuum sealing.  

If you have the canister, you can use the store-bought jars of salsa or jelly or spaghetti sauce that you have leftover and reuse them. The canister can be from any vacuum sealer as I have a Seal-A-Meal canister and it works just as good on either sealer. Jars have that rubber stuff on the inside of the lid. You can store, lets say, unpopped corn - just fill the dry jar, affix the lid, back the lid up a smidge, put it in the cannister and seal. So you can see this is a huge savings if you can find one. All those partial containers of food could be fresh if you had put them in the jar and sealed them.

We need to be saving on everything we do. Today I made an angel food cake for Easter and I scraped every last bit of batter into the pan. I thought I had done very well with the whisk before getting the scraper but in the end there was a third of a cup of batter I scraped out after I thought I did a good job - a third of a cup! How many times do you throw it in the dishwasher or sink without scraping?

When I was a young married woman, I worked in food service. I remember we were mixing up cookies to bake, I got to the end of the bowl and an older and wiser worker said get all of it out of the bowl, there is at least four more cookies there. Yep, I think of her every time, people can be so wise.

So we need to be the wise ones now and teach our kids how to do things.

In one of the last few blog posts I think you see a cascade container by my sewing machine, it is my thread catcher. I toss things into it like a table-top waste basket. I also showed you the embossing folders in a basket that I had already in the house. Well, I put cardboard as dividers inside that basket, reusing what we have. I also have cardboard strips as spacers in my weaving I reuse.

We need to be frugal now more than ever before.

When you use up that liquid dish soap, fill the container with water and use it outside to wash your hands or use it for dish washing or save for a time you might run out of dish soap, it would get you by till your grocery run.

Before you toss something think how it can be reused.

https://tipnut.com/baking-mixes-seasonings/ - I know I keep putting in these sites, it is because they are so good.

https://chickensintheroad.com/cooking/homemade-hamburger-helper/ - make your own convenience  foods.

https://extension.usu.edu/sanpete/files/Soup_or_Sauce_SOS_Mix.pdf - this is the best substitute for canned soup you can find.

Every little thing we can do to cut costs, even if by only a few cents, adds up. We had a car die once and needed replacing, not fixing - let that panic set in, where would we get the money without a bank loan?? Well, I had been rounding up our checks (this was before bank cards) I had been doing this for a year and having rounded just those few cents on every check we wrote, we were able to buy a used vehicle and that saved the day. So if you think a few cents here or there does not add up, it really does.

I have still been spring cleaning here. In doing so, I moved the babe spinning wheel upstairs. Now there's one wheel on each level.  I started on the purple wool I dyed in the crockpot. I started spinning, it took me a little bit to get used to the electric wheel again but I got back into it.

The other thing I did was wind floss around these wooden characters. I originally picked these up on clearance to use for knitting back before the pandemic. But I decided I would do the floss instead as that is what they were really for anyway.

I worked in the stamping side of the sewing room to try and make more room on my desk area which is really an old table I got at a yardsale many many years ago. I think I got it pretty well organized and more open to boot.

Gus is giving his armchair wisdom...he says you need to still be safe out there, we really still have Covid out there, three new variants so be safe!

Missy says we all need to be more frugal, now more than ever.