Hello, I hope you are doing well dear reader. This week continues my low spend, no spend challenge. During this time, I've happily been doing all the free things my city has to offer. We explored a cultural festival, I've taken many walks in the park with my homebrewed coffee in hand, visited family, listened to music and browsed the library. I've also been taking random transit routes just to see more of the city I live in. Have you been taking in the free activities this summer?
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What is going on this week?
- How much did I spend? Low spend, no spend challenge
- Preserve your vegetables
- The Frugal Homesteader [book]
- Content Hub
- Recipes to nourish the soul
- $25 Frugal Ways to Stretch Everyday Products
- Memes
- Editor's summary
Preserve your vegetables
You are cruising your local International grocery store (money saving tip), and you find tons of fresh vegetables being sold for steal of a price. Yams and sweet potatoes for a steal per pound, $1 x 10 limes or a pack of cherry tomatoes, a giant pack of sweet red peppers for $1.99. Great deals, but you dread the thought of how to eat that many stir fries, cruditΓ©s, sheet pan meals, sandwiches, omelets, veggie skewers, veggie sautΓ©s, etc.
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But go ahead and buy them. Because there are simple ways to preserve your vegetables so they last longer and you can space your major veggie meals.
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- Plan your menu around quickly expiring greens first. Things like cucumber, loose leaf lettuce, spinach.
- Wrap your herbs and leafy greens in a paper towel and then in the bag. Pulls the moisture off the leaves and keeps them crisp.
- Put your potatoes and onions in a dark, dry cupboard (but don't forget they are there). Other root veggies can go here, too.
- Chop them up, toss them on a sheet pan and add them to the freezer. When they are solid, you can toss them in a freezer bag. This is the method that will keep your fruits or veggies from clumping together, as to not make it impossible to add to a meal. I have a happy overabundance of vegetables in my freezer. It's nice to have so many nutritious choices when cooking. Popular items in my freezer are zucchini, yellow squash, roasted kabocha squash, and jalapenos. Onions can be frozen this way, too. But sometimes you need to bag wrap them and add to a sealing plastic container so they don't stink up everything.
- Pickle them! Especially purple onions, as they are fantastic on tacos. Here is my favorite pickled red onion recipe.
Frugal Vegan Recipes
π 30-Minute Frugal Vegan Recipes: Fast, Flavorful Plant-Based Meals on a Budget
Think maintaining a vegan diet is draining on the wallet? Think again. Melissa Copeland, the self-proclaimed Stingy Vegan, is on a mission to prove that cooking vibrant plant-based meals doesnβt have to break the bank.
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Main dishes like Veggie-Packed Mexican Rice, Coconut-Lentil Curry and Smoky Mushroom Fajitas are the perfect balance of quick, flavorful and economical. Fruity Granola Yogurt Parfaits and Blistered Cherry Tomatoes and Beans on Garlic Toast make breakfast a cinch, and frugal staples like beans and pasta are transformed into mouthwatering meals like Garlicky Spring Vegetable Pasta, Black Bean Salsa Burgers and Bee-Free Honey Mustard Chickpea Salad Sandwiches.
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With Melissaβs wallet-friendly recipes, you can skip expensive vegan substitutes and pricey health food stores, all while enjoying nourishing meals that are as pleasing to your palate as they are to your bank account.
CONTENT HUB
Optimal time to take Social Security?
We all want our hard invested money to last us during our retirement years. Can a person forecast the optimal time to start taking social security? Take a look at the various factors that need to be considered when targeting the age to withdraw.
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Forecasting retirement expenses
Grab your estimated benefits from the Social Security website. Then grab this free spending tracker from Retirement Manifesto to help you forecast retirement expenses. This tracker has been helpful to my own journey and the site is a great resource for planning a retirement.
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Live to work, work to live
Tawcan reflects on his journey of how work often defines us because we spend significant amount of time at our job. But how do you flip the narrative, gain introspection and create more living life to work balance.
Recipe discovery
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Honey Garlic Chicken
A quick dinner meal that includes tender chicken covered in a super delicious sweet & tangy honey garlic sauce.
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Peanut Butter Bars
Rich, decadent, and easy to make no-bake peanut butter bars with just 5 ingredients!
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25 Frugal Ways to Stretch Everyday Products
If you are having trouble stretching your budget as prices go up, you can save money on some common products β you may just need to change how much you are using or the way you are using it. In this video, we look at 25 examples
Memes
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Low spend, no spend challenge
Drumroll, please... In the last two weeks of my self-imposed low spend, no spend challenge, I have spent $17.82. This includes 3 charges of buying items needed to complete a meal and 1 where I caved into buying a slice of strawberry cake. There is guilt on that last one, but it was worth it. π
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I could have gotten away with doing 2 of those purchases for a total of $8.88. As the 3rd buy of $4.69, I didn't end up using the ingredients because I decided to make something different that I already had all ingredients on hand. But we will still use it up at some point.
I followed chatGPT's advice for my dinners based on the ingredients on hand. Some of the budget meals made were:
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- Green chicken curry over white rice
- Chicken tacos with purple cabbage & tomatoes
- Spaghetti with Italian sausage & loaded with veggies
- Tofu stir fry with veggies over rice
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I can also say that for most of these past 2 weeks, I have not felt too deprived in not spending the fun money. There was one night I was craving a pizza, but I didn't cave in. I would say that I stock the kitchen well with staple items to carry us over.
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I will make sure to put extra frozen pizzas in my cart this next grocery trip to tide my cravings over.
Until next time!
P.S. - do you have a favorite frugal hack? Hit reply and let me know. I'll be publishing them in an upcoming edition of the Frugal to FI newsletter.
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