1. This advice given to us at the beginning of our marriage.  We did know this one from the beginning, but we also strayed from this one too many times.  Still, having been told early on, we did do much better than might have otherwise. We'd have done better still to never use a credit card at all, or at least to never, not even once, use it without paying off the balance at the end of the month.

2. Laundry soap, home-made (Also check out my Q and A posts on the laundry soap here. also here, and for more information on suds try here.) This would have saved us a bundle if we'd done it from the beginning or our 1982 marriage instead of only the last five years.

3. After far too many years of ordering pizza delivered on pay-day, we finally realized that if there is any regular indulgence in your life that you can only afford on payday, you really cannot afford it at all and need to get your spending  under control.  We needed to get our self-control under control!

4. Home-made diaper wipes and travel wipes.  We did this pretty well for the last three children. Even though the 'baby' is now nearly 12 years old, I still make these from time to time for traveling.  So refreshing!  And so nice for sensitive skin.  Also, I asked my grandson's mama to tell me off the top of her head her favorite frugal tip she'd learned from me, and this is what she thought of.  My grandson's mama is my second daughter, and while I do love being the grandmama, I can't really say it's more fun than being the Mama.  It's loads of fun, but not more fun- just different.

5. This home-made stain remover, which works even on thrift shop baby clothes with yellowed stains of undetermined origin.  In fact, sometimes I can buy used baby clothes that are drastically marked down because of those yellow stains, and then I soak them, launder them, and sell them at a yard sale or consignment store for more than I paid.

6. Washing my hair with baking soda I do have incredibly soft water. When we went on vacation we stayed in places where the water was incredibly hard, and my hair just felt stiff and icky, so while we were gone I switched back to shampoo- only Head and Shoulders because my hair felt so gross (Pipsqueak, who has thin, silky, very blonde hair, does not use baking soda, and she, too, complained of her hair feeling 'gunky' from the hard water). I noticed that I had to shampoo my hair daily or it was greasy and clumpy, whereas, at home with baking soda, I can go three days between washings, and my hair still isn't as disgusting as it was in 24 hours with hard water and shampoo.

7. Washing my face with cod liver oil The first week I did this every night.  Now I only use the oil a couple times a month, and mostly just splash my face with warm water and baking soda the rest of the time (the baking soda when I am washing my hair), and maybe take clean, wet washcloth to it.  I don't wear make-up, so this regimen works well for me. If you wear make-up, the cod-liver oil is a great remover.

8. This recipe for cookies- no wheat, no corn, no eggs, no sugar, no dairy, but the Cherub still loves them!

9. Reading the Tightwad Gazette Books To be fair to myself, I could not have read these from the beginning because they were not published yet. I do have all my Progeny read them for part of their Home Economics class in our homeschool. If anybody tells you these are 'extreme' ask them how much they are saving each month and what their debt level is, and then ponder whether or not that's the sort of standard you share or desire.

10. Revising my way of thinking from 'what do I feel like having' to the What's In My Hand principle (see also here) , because the biggest aid in frugality is attitude. I know you've heard me say that before, but I don't think we can hear it enough. Y'all are probably much nicer than me, but there are always new areas I am discovering where I am a bit of a spoiled brat. I am 48 years old and I think I was a late bloomer at this growing up stuff.

So... what do you wish you'd known way back when and put into practice from the start?

Related posts:

1. Frugal Hair I recently made the final switch from shampoo to baking...
2. Frugal Ice-Packs and Learning to Plan Ahead I assume we all know the emergency tip about using...
3. Various and Sundry Wonderfully frugal way to get clean, soft, lovely skin- I...

That's because for years our family "vacations" were known by another term- PCS move- that's Permanent Change of Station, or transfer, for you civvies out there. My husband was in the military for 20 years- he was in boot camp on our first anniversary. During his career, we combined our new orders with a road trip and a few visits to sites of historical or personal interest. He saved up his leave for these trips. This is how our family managed to live frugal and still visit places like Yellowstone, Mt. Rushmore, Lliard Hot Springs in Canada, the natural history museum in Regina Canada, campgrounds in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and the Northwest Territory of Canada, as well as all along the Al-Can highway, many a natural history museum, Little Big Horn, Chimney Rock, the Grand Canyon, the Painted Dessert, art museums in California, Nebraska, a cowboy museum in Texas, the Olympic Peninsula and so much more. We were moving, and we took a little detour here and a little detour there.

The military pays families who are transferring a per Diem rate for food. That is supposed to be enough to cover eating out a restaurant, but we never found that it was quite enough for our family- our daughters are surprisingly healthy eaters. It was, however, more than enough to cover picnics, and if we did those right we might even have enough left over for part of the museum entrance fee.=)

My husband retired from the Air Force six years ago, and we no longer get a per Diem travel rate, nor do we do as much traveling. (On the plus side, we do make a little more money in the civilian sector, and he doesn't go overseas without us for two months out of every year). Still, what we learned during our military travels still works for us. Here are some of the things we do while traveling with family.

Foods that travel well:
dried fruits and vegetables. Some of us love snacking on sun dried tomatoes (look for sales, or learn to dry your own), some munch on raisins, my husband's dried fruit of choice is prunes.
Granola- make your own.
Nuts
boiled eggs if you have a good ice-chest
summer sausage
jerky
oranges- they come in their own wrapping and don't get squished like bananas. On the other hand, they can be messy.
Cabbage- seriously, my husband loves to munch on wedges of raw cabbage.
Pretzels
bread and muffins- especially if you freeze it first, pack in single layers in a tupperware container, and store in the ice-chest. We're going to be trying these 'main dish' muffins later this month- they are really miniature quiches you can hold and eat one-handed. We know they work for short car trips as we've been doing that for a few weeks now.
snack mixes- like chex mix- made from scratch, of course.=)
bagels

Sometimes I like to pack meals that we can easily eat in the car, and then we use the time we would have ordinarily spent eating visiting a park or a museum.

We might bring brown paper lunch bags and fill up the bags with our snack items- things like carrot sticks, fruit, chopped wedges of cabbage, popcorn, celery sticks, crackers, cheese, slices of sausage, nuts, raisins, home-made cookies, dried tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes. The Headmaster likes to eat raw green onions. You can usually pick up dried prunes quite inexpensively at the local dollar store or discount grocery.

We like sandwiches in pita or pocket bread best, because the filling isn't so likely to fall out. One of our favorite fillings is this Chinese Pork, either on its own, or mixed with cream cheese. You can make up a batch of this, put it in pocket bread sandwiches and freeze them. Then pack them frozen and eat in a day or two when they defrost.

Sometimes I make sandwiches at home and freeze them in advance. Other times I just pack the fixings. A favorite lunch to have at a picnic table somewhere is miniature shish-ka-bobs. I set out olives, pickles, cherry tomatoes, cubes of cheese or sausage, mushrooms, and canned pineapple chunks (don't forget your can opener!). We supply toothpicks or pretzel sticks and napkins. Each person makes their own miniature shish-ka-bobs on the toothpicks or pretzel sticks (the pretzel sticks tend to break unless you poke holes in the food first).

We find that breakfast is usually the cheapest meal to eat at a restaurant, so if we are going to eat out, that's the time we choose. If we don't want to eat at a restaurant at all, I pack yogurt and homemade granola, and we eat granola and yogurt while driving. Yogurt keeps better than milk while living from an ice-chest.

The harder cheeses keep better than soft ones.

peanut butter, of course, unless you have allergies. Have the peanut butter in sandwiches, in celery, or mixed with powdered milk and a dab of honey for peanut butter 'play dough cookies' (we roll them into balls and eat them)

"Melba" toast- one of our kids favorite snacks when young was home-made whole wheat bread sliced and toasted at a very low heat in the oven for a long enough time that it was dried all the way through. This kept well while traveling (just store it so it can't be crushed to crumbs) and is delicious with a mixture of cream cheese and grated cheese.

For a couple of trips where we weren't sure of hitting a grocery store, I grew sprouts while we traveled. I soaked a jar of sprouts overnight before we left, topping it off with a square cut off from an old nylon stocking and a rubber band. Three times a day when we stopped somewhere I rinsed and drained them. I prefer drinking fountains and pumps at parks to gas station restrooms.;-) That way we had a fresh vegetable just about the time our other fresh produce was running out.

We have also put snacks in ice cube trays. This is fun, but a bit messy at times. I like the tupperware ice-cube trays that have lids. The fun part about this is that small children like having this smorgasbord of snacks to choose from all divided up into little containers, but they are not overwhelmed by the amounts.

We each get a bottle of water that we refill as needed. I like to put a sprig of mint in mine, and I like to wrap other mint springs in a wet paper towel so I can have more when my first sprig is ready to be tossed (or eaten). The FYG has her water rationed because, while we are not unreasonable about bathroom stops, we do think every hour is a bit much.

Where to Stop
Whenever possible I like to take our driving breaks at museums or sites of historical interest, but it's also good to stop at places where the children can run off their pent up energy.

When the children were younger we would stop at rest stops and have foot races, climb trees, ask the children race to the next tree by hopping on one foot, jumping, hopping backward, skipping, and somersaulting- we could ask them to do these things under a watchful eye while we were getting out the picnic stuff. I pack sidewalk chalk and a jump-rope. We can sketch out a hopscotch pattern on the sidewalk in a moment, and the jump-rope can be used in a covered picnic area or in a ground floor hotel room on a rainy day.

Things to pack:
can opener
tablecloth for rest area picnic tables. I also like a quilt to spread out on the ground
paper towels and home-made wipes
water bottles
plates- this is up to you- you can pack one dessert plate for each person, use foods that won't be too messy, and rinse them off after each meal stop, or you can pack paper plates. Or plan foods that don't need plates, and use napkins- cloth can be rinsed, rung out, and set to dry in a sunny window or on top of the ice-chest, or just relax and use the disposable ones. Consider how frugally green you are being by NOT eating at a restaurant=)
ice chest
cheese slicer
vegetable peeler
paring knife and small cutting board (I have one that is only about 18 square inches, it fits nicely inside a ziplock bag with the paring knife and in the side of our ice-chest.
salt and pepper
Ziplock bags or other food storage containers

Other tips:
Plan regular grocery store stops along the way to replenish a few fresh vegetables, fruits, cheeses, and yogurts. I would buy a package of cream cheese and one of grated cheese and mix them in a ziplock bag, kneading until well combined, for a cheese spread for crackers.
Cottage cheese, dill and garlic make a favorite dip for vegetables.
If you long for a hot meal, go through the drive through of a fast food place and order one hot thing from the dollar menu, supplement with your own fruits and vegetables.
Learn to drink water, make sure your kids are fine with water. You will save SO much money this way.

Do some advance planning and prep- cut up turkey ham and freeze it in cubes, bake and freeze muffins and cookies, mix up some snack mix (we like oyster crackers, peanuts, mixed with dill, garlic powder and buttermilk powder and tossed with a bit of oil), make and freeze sandwiches (spreading them with butter will keep them from getting soggy when defrosted), dehydrate some cherry tomatoes or other products, make granola...

What are some of your favorite meals while traveling? How do you save money on food during road trips?

Related posts:

1. Frugal Ice-Packs and Learning to Plan Ahead I assume we all know the emergency tip about using...
2. Summer Salad Here's a salad you can make without going shopping for...
3. Ten Frugal Practices I Wish We’d Done from the Beginning This list is off the top of my head. If...

*Make muffins completely from scratch, rather than using the Raisin Bran cereal recipe (this is another one that really surprises me. Muffins are not difficult and they are quite inexpensive. Raisin Bran even on sale, is not 'from scratch.' )

This is true, except for when it isn't.=) Recently a grocery store in my town had Raisin Bran cereal on sale for .99 a box, and they had coupons in the store for 1.00 off on two boxes of Kellog's cereal, making the Raisin Bran .50 a box. There was a limit on two boxes per customer, so naturally, I had several children go in to buy a couple of boxes.

Here's the recipe my daughter used to bake a batch of raisin bran muffins:

Raisin Bran Muffins

1 box (15 ounces) Raisin Bran

5 cups flour

Sugar (I have a recipe that calls for 3 cups, and one that calls for 1 1/2 cups, how much you use would depend on how sweet you like your muffins and how much sugar you have on hand)

5 teaspoons baking soda

2 teaspoons salt

4 eggs

1 cup cooking oil, melted margarine, butter, or shortening

1 quart buttermilk

Stir the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Beat together the eggs, cooking oil and buttermilk; mix with the dry ingredients. Fill greased muffin pans 3/4 full. Bake at 400 degrees for around 15 minutes.

You can store this batter in the fridge for up to four weeks, and make a fresh, hot batch of muffins in the morning within 20 minutes- get up, turn the oven on, spoon the batter in the pans while the oven is heating, pop them in and bake.

Here's another muffin recipe we often use when being flexible:

Graham Gems
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 stick margarine
1 egg
1 cup sour milk
1 small teaspoon baking soda
2 cups stone ground whole wheat (graham) flour)

Blend sugar and margarine, stir in egg. Add other ingredients. Fill muffin cups 2/3 cup full. Bake at 375-400 degrees for 15 minutes. Makes 12.

You can add 1 cup of dried fruit to the batter, or make them plain and eat with butter and grated cheddar cheese. I prefer them with butter and cheese.

Pip made a triple batch recently and discovered after she already started that she had neither enough brown sugar or the right amount of eggs. She added a bit of white sugar to the brown sugar to eke out the sweetener (she could have added a bit of molasses, too- I have substituted molasses and white sugar for recipes calling for brown sugar only before), and she just made do with two eggs instead of the three called for by tripling the recipe. I believe she also had only 2 teaspoons of baking soda rather than three. The resulting muffins were denser than usual, but I liked them- they had a pleasing bit of extra texture and crunch to the outside- hearty, hippie muffins, I called them.

Amy Dacyczyn in The Complete Tightwad Gazette offers this other flexible maindish recipe:

1 cup main ingredient
1 cup second ingredient
1-2 cups starchy ingredient
1 1/2 cups binder
1/4 cup “goodie”
seasoning
topping

Main ingredient: tuna, cubed chicken, turkey, ham, seafood, etc.
Second ingredient: thinly sliced celery, mushrooms, peas, chopped hard-boiled eggs, etc.
Starchy ingredient: thinly sliced potatoes, cooked noodles, cooked rice, etc.
Binder: cream sauce, sour cream, can of soup, etc.
“Goodie”: pimiento, olives, almonds, water chestnuts, etc.
Topping: cheese, bread crumbs, etc.

Basically combine ingredients, except topping, and then bake (or have on stovetop) until it's hot.

Just as muffins are better with butter, flexibility is better with the attributes of contentment and gratitude. , and perhaps a small sense of adventure- rather than feeling deprived when you start to make a recipe and discover that you are missing an ingredient, look at it as interesting challenge to see what you can do instead, and be appreciative of the things you do have rather than resentful of the things you do not.

Related posts:

1. Frugal Tactics For Cookie Baking I hauled home a 4-lb bag of chocolate chips this...
2. Shopping To Feed A Crowd Last week we discussed feeding a crowd for less. But...
3. Gathering the Fragments… of Thanksgiving Dinner, or what to make with the leftovers. ...

Green cleaning ideas- these are the things we use to clean at our house- and by green, I also mean the green that's in your wallet.  One tip I don't think is on there- to clean sinks I use a bit of baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.  The cinnamon is mainly there because it smells so great.  It smells even better if I save orange peels, dry them, grind them in the food processor, and add them to the sink cleaner.  It's more fun to clean with stuff that smells nice.

Stay away from places where you spend money.  We often have several hours to kill on Sunday afternoons.  We find the best places for us to go are either to the park or to the library, where we hang out, read, play a game of checkers or cards, and don't spend money.
The post here is on optimizing your cell phone plan, which will seem less than helpful to those who don't have one, or to those, like us, who actually go in on the family plan with my mother who lives next door, so we're splitting a single plan between two families.  Actually, we split it up even further, as the two girls who have cell phone with us on this plan have to pay for their part of the cell phone.  Even if you don't have a cell phone, the best part of the post is the bit on negotiation:

Notice that you didn’t say, “Can you give me a cheaper plan?” because yes/no questions always get a “no” answer when speaking to wireless customer-service reps. Ask leading questions.

A leading question is any question that implies the answer is the one you want, and that doesn't really lend itself to an easy 'no.'  Salesmen use leading questions to get your money from you, it's fair to use them to keep your money.

Sell something: Sell it on Ebay, Craig's List, or list some books at Amazon.

And just a reminder- make it do, wear it out.  Use it up, or do without.  In the use it up department, we have this post about using leftover cookie crumbs.=)

What have you done this week to save or make money?

Related posts:

1. Ten Frugal Practices I Wish We’d Done from the Beginning This list is off the top of my head. If...
2. Frugality Is Not Black & White Writing about frugality is trickier than it looks. There's always...
3. Hampton Hotels giving away 10 Amazon gift certificates every Thursday Hampton is starting a Thursday Tweet Deal campaign in which...

This is an old recipe we use when we want something like Quesedillas, but we haven't enough tortillas left to go around.  It's a flexible, what-do-you-have, -add-a-little-more-of-this, -this-sounds-good, sort of recipe.

Chop up a goodly amount of any combination of these sorts of vegetables.  You'll want enough to feed your family at least one serving:

onions
bell peppers, green, yellow, and red (I buy bags of these frozen, as it's cheaper than the fresh peppers most times of the year)
green onions
hot peppers (we don't do these)
A little bit of leftover chicken or beef, if you have it.  We usually don't.
slice tortillas in strips, and then cut the strips in half.  This is easiest if you roll the tortillas up and then slice them. It doesn't matter how many you have.  We generally do this when we have less than one tortilla per person.  It also works for older, dried out and tearing tortillas.
Tomatoes if you have them
black olives if you like them in your Mexican food
Grated cheese

Stir fry the onions in a hot skillet.  Add garlic and a bit of chili powder or taco seasoning.  I usually start with the onions because we like ours very well cooked, and then add the peppers because we're usually using already cooked, but frozen peppers.  Add the meat, if you're using it, and continue to cook and stir until it's heated.  Now, make sure there is still plenty of fat in the skillet, and add the tortillas and stir these as they fry.  When they are golden brown, add tomotoes and/or salsa, stir until heated through, and then top with grated cheese and olives if you want them.  The amounts don't matter- what do you have on hand?  What seems good to you?

Serve this with sour cream and more salsa, and of course, cilantro if you have it.  In spite of the chopping involved, it's a fairly easy lunch to make for a crowd of hungry children, and it's pretty filling.  It's easy to adjust to what I have available in the refrigerator, and it's a nice way to use up the last of the tortillas without anybody feeling slighted.

We had a salad of odds and ends on the side- diced zucchini, corn cut off the last corn on the cob that nobody finished, dill, and a bit of ranch dressing.

And then we had a jello-dessert.

There was about a cup of a fruit salad leftover from a birthday bash, and one container of yogurt.  I made jello the usual way (it was cherry), except I used a handful of ice-cubes instead of cold water for the quick-set version.  I diced the rest of the fruit (mostly peaches, strawberries, and cherries) and stirred that and a container of peach yogurt in and chilled until set.

What are your favorite 'use up the leftovers' recipes?

Related posts:

1. Flexibility In Your Hand A while back in a post on my regular blog...
2. Gathering the Fragments… of Thanksgiving Dinner, or what to make with the leftovers. ...
3. Frugal Eats On Road Trips I tried to count the number of road trips our...

Granny Tea tells me that even though her family lived in town, they owned a cow that they boarded at the outskirts of town- just at the edge. When her father got home from work, the family would drive over to the edge of town and milk their cow. One milk cow produces more milk than most families can drink in a day, and even with butter and cheese making, the occasional crock or jar of milk would go sour. It was a wasteful housewife indeed who would throw out milk just because it was sour, so she made sour cream (which we now buy on purpose from the store) or used it up in a recipe calling for sour milk.

One of our kind readers emailed once to ask me if I really did use sour milk, milk past its sell-by date and slightly off in taste, in recipes calling for sour milk. I really do. Because my husband works at a grocery store, he sometimes bring me home a carton or two of the stuff, and then it's free. I use it in any recipes calling for buttermilk. It makes great biscuits and pancakes. You can also use it for these cookies (this recipe is from another reader):

Sugar cookies
cream together:
1 C shortening
1 1/2 C sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla

add:
2 tsp soda
1 tsp salt

alternately blend in:
4 C flour
3/4 C milk (I used sour milk as you know

makes a very sticky dough, roll with lots of flour if you're going to use cookie cutters, other wise, drop by spoonfuls and flatten with the back of a floured spoon, a butter knife, or a potato masher.
Bake 350 for about 7 minutes; they will be a soft cookie, bake longer if you like them a little stiffer or crisper.

Here are some very old family recipes using sour milk:

Inside a cedar trunk full of all kinds of treasures, I found an old graph paper notebook full of math and physics homework and in the middle of the notebook was a section labeled "Favorite Recipes," dated February, 1901. We are guessing it might be my great-grandmother's and, ever thrifty, she used her children's homework papers to copy recipes. But it doesn't quite look like her writing either. Perhaps it belonged to my great-aunt when she was in high school. At any rate, here are two ginger bread and one spice cake receipt(s) as copied down in 1901:

I think the two different measures of butter in the spice cake recipe are because she made an adjustment after making the spice cake, but that's just a guess. The 1/2 cup is the later revision. Don't you love the ambiguous 'spices?'

According to the 1911 cookbook, The Royal Baker and Pastry Cook, (I blogged about it here). Baking powder renders the need for cooking with sour milk unnecessary, but I think they're selling something.=)

A recipe for shortcake is introduced by this long paragraph:

"[O]ld-fashioned fruit short cakes were generally made with flour, soda, sour milk, and shortening, and were restricted to the strawberry season. We now use Royal Baking Powder for lightening them, employ all the fruits of the various seasons, and thus feast ourselves upon the delicate confections almost the whole year through. The short cake made with Royal Baking Powder and sweet milk is incomparably better, surer, and more healthful than the old-fashioned concoctions. Too much skill was required in combining soda and sour milk. The milk had to be at just the right stage of sourness; not a grain more of soda could be used than was sufficient to neutralize the acid in the milk, or the cake would be yellow, with a disagreeable odor and soapy taste; if too little, the cake was heavy.

Perhaps this was true with raw milk, but I have only once had cookies, biscuits, or pancakes made with sour milk turn out to be less than delicious, and then I do think we had waited far too long to use the milk. At any rate, it seems if you are going to cook with sour milk, you should leave out the baking powder.

God bless, and have a joyfully frugal weekend!

Related posts:

1. Flexibility In Your Hand A while back in a post on my regular blog...
2. Frugal Tactics For Cookie Baking I hauled home a 4-lb bag of chocolate chips this...
3. Freebies: milk, Atkin’s snack bars, Redbox rentals Free half gallon of chocolate milk: Get a half gallon...

I put dry bread in the blender. I have also put very dry bread (dried out in the oven if I need to) in a plastic bag and rolled it into crumbs with a rolling pin.

Where do I get the dried bread? I keep odds and ends of any old 'bread' items in my freezer. This can be, but it is not limited to: corn bread, sliced bread, biscuits, crackers, the last bit of chips in a bag, cereals that aren't too sweet- these all go into a sealed container (jar, bag, or plastic food saver) in the freezer.

Then, whenever I need bread crumbs or have a big enough batch of odds and ends to make it worth my time, I blend them and season them as desired and add them to the recipe. You can toast them in a skillet over a low fire with a bit of oil and herbs and spices for added flavor.

Related posts:

1. Frugal Eats On Road Trips I tried to count the number of road trips our...
2. Flexibility In Your Hand A while back in a post on my regular blog...
3. Various and Sundry Wonderfully frugal way to get clean, soft, lovely skin- I...

For those of you who like a bidet or diaper sprayer for use with your cloth diapers, a commenter to a cloth diaper discussion on my regular blog shared a link for this excellent DIY tutorial for putting together your own for about half the cost.  Honestly, it looks so simple I think even I could do it, and I don't even flip my own circuits.

Cookery- here's a good recipe for feeding a crowd (or not, you can reduce it) frugally and easily- a delicious chicken and potato crockpot recipe, if I do say so myself.  It's one of our fallback favorites- at the end of the day if you have extra guests, just fry up or microwave extra potatoes and cut the chicken smaller.

Speaking of Frugal cookery, TVP is a meat substitute that we use sometimes- it doesn't require refrigeration until after you cook it, you can cook it alone or combine with meat to 'stretch' the meat.  It costs less than ground beef (but more than beans), it's lightweight, so makes a nice addition to backpacking or camping.  We add it to hot breakfast cereal for a proteinboost that keeps us from getting hungry sooner, and it's particularly tasty in burritoes- I fry the tvp in bacon grease or other meat fat to boost the flavor, then cook as directed, combine with refried beans, chiles, tomato sauce, and red onion and herbs and spices to taste, then wrap in tortillas with cheese.  Also makes good sloppy joes.

When the children were small and I had to clean up messes like bedwetting or accidents on the carpet, I liked a mixture of ammonia and baking soda (I sprayed the spot with ammonia, sprinkled with baking soda, rubbed that in lightly, and set a towel over it with something heavy on top of that to 'wick' the dampness out, then vacuumed it up later.  So it makes sense that a mixture of ammonia, baking soda, and dishsoap could be used to replace 'Shout' or other fabric stain removers.

Times are tough for some people, and they are getting tougher for more.  Food storage might be something you want to think about- stock up now, little by little buying extras of whatever is on sale as you can squeeze it in the budget.  Here are some posts to help you think through the process.

Lots of great information here from a guest poster who has been living on her storage for a couple of years of rough times.  Many of the same ideas for disaster preparation can be used for basic economic preparation as well.  See here, here, and here.

Just for fun... yet another frugal idea I've always done and never thought to share- a frugal way to laminate smaller items.

More fun- the simplest toys are often disproportionately delightful - an old spatula, wooden spoon, paint stick, or a stick from the yard, some tape and some ribbons, crepe paper, cut up plastic bags- and hours of joy for a happy little girl.

Related posts:

1. Flexibility In Your Hand A while back in a post on my regular blog...
2. Poll: cloth diapers Now that you know why I made the switch from...

What is your favorite homemade cleaner?  Is it cheaper, safer, or more effective?  All of the above?

DISHES: I'd like to find a less expensive replacement for dishsoap - the kind for hand-washing dishes.  Do you have a tried-and-true recipe?  And has anyone tried combining equal amounts of borax and baking soda in the dishwasher?  It sounds too easy to be true, but we don't have a dishwasher to try it out.

What cleaner would like to find a homemade substitute for?

Don't forget to enter the drawing for the new Frugal Forum: be among the first 50 members to post 25 times or more, and you'll be entered in a drawing for $100 cash!  Post about the drawing on your blog to be entered in a separate drawing for $25 cash.  Details are here.

Related posts:

1. Various and Sundry Wonderfully frugal way to get clean, soft, lovely skin- I...
2. Make Money Writing, Homemade Gifts for Men, and More I've just signed up at Associated Content, where you can...
3. Frugal resources: what’s your favorite? I'm looking for recommendations, and I'm sure others are too....

But I don't want to do a lot of work for nothing.  We live among deer and rocks and very little else.  It makes for lovely breathtaking scenery, but there's no practical way to grow a garden.  We would need an 8' tall fence, several loads of dirt to pile on top of our rocks, a whole lotta water, and some fervent prayers.  Prayer is good, but I don't want to test God by asking him to save our veggies before we have taken appropriates measures and those measures won't be cheap.

So...how about container gardening?  We have a suitable deck.  And now I get to the point.

5 gallon buckets would probably work, but they're a bit on the ugly utilitarian side.  And I'm guessing they're not the most efficient use of space, water, and resources.

I've had my eye on the Earth Box for years now.  Have you used it?  It is all it's cracked up to be?  Is it worth the investment?  Or is it too easy to make  your own Earth Box substitute?

Related posts:

1. Cheerful Frugality Plays Outdoors Earlier this spring I decided to let my garden dreams...