Friday Follies: The new layout

Please link up your Friday Follies below!

Welcome to the new layout! I hope you find it easier to read and to find what you're looking for. Also, Frugal Follies is now on Facebook, so please check us out there!

This week's Folly is that I spent waaaaaay too much time working on the new layout, and not writing blog posts. In fact, I forgot to write a new part of my multi-part series on selling used books online. Next week, I promise!

What funny or crazy things have you done in the name of frugality? Please leave a link to your post below.  I would appreciate it if you had a link back to Friday Follies in your post!  If you don't have a blog, then leave a comment.  Thanks!

Also, link up your good shopping stories at my other linkup, Wednesday Weekly Shopping, and check out more bad days at Friday Fails and Friday Frustrations.

Read more...

Friday Follies: More fun at Albertsons (link up your follies, too!)

Please link up your Friday Follies below!

Why do I even have a grocery budget, when I keep overspending it?

Don't get me wrong, I had a good reason.

My local Albertsons is going out of business - today is the last day - and the sales have been progressively getting better and better and better.  And I keep going back for better and better deals.

I went on Tuesday, when groceries were 40% off, and here's what I got:

 

I spent $25.13 on all this stuff: 5 rolls of paper towels (free with coupons), 7 boxes of tissues (also free with coupons), 5 cans of fruit, 4 cans of tomatoes, 2 boxes of Special K fruit crisps, 1 box of granola bars, 1 bag of popcorn, 5 cans of tuna, a bunch of bananas (only 25% off), and a loaf of bread.  I had coupons for everything except the popcorn, bananas, and bread.

Then I went on Wednesday, when groceries were 50% off, and got all this:

I spent $29.24 on this stuff: 4 jars of spaghetti sauce, 4 cans of pineapple, 4 boxes of herbal tea, a gallon of milk (only 25% off, but when do you get a sale on milk?), 1 grape juice concentrate, 1 nasal spray (75% off), 4 jars of sprinkles (90% off), 2 packages of frozen fish fillets, 2 containers of hummus, and 4 containers of salsa (with coupons, 11 cents overage on each one).  I had coupons for about half the items.

Well, if the damage to my budget wasn't bad enough, I went today, when the sales were 75% off on groceries and 50% off on dairy.  I thought the place would be pretty empty after all the sales, but there were still quite a lot of groceries there. I got all this stuff for $36.29:

Yes, it took two pictures to get everything:  2 bags of cocoa, 2 boxes of cereal, 12 cans of tomatoes with green chilies, 2 packages of fruit cups, 10 cans of mushrooms, 6 cans of mixed nuts, 3 boxes of drink mix, 1 box of cake mix, 1 can of frosting, 1 bottle of strawberry syrup, one bag of marshmallows, two bags of dates, one box of wheat gluten (for baking whole-wheat breads), 18 2-packs of butter, 4 cans of orange juice concentrate, 6 cheese chunks, 4 boxes of cream cheese, 4 boxes of pectin, 3 packages of glue sticks, 3 boxes of pain reliever (90% off), and 4 jars of sprinkles (95% off),

So, all together, I spent $90.66.  Granted, I won't have to buy a lot of stuff for quite a while. But, why do I even claim to have a budget?

Link up your good shopping stories at my other linkup, Wednesday Weekly Shopping, and check out more bad days at Friday Fails and Friday Frustrations.

What funny or crazy things have you done in the name of frugality? Please leave a link to your post below.  I would appreciate it if you had a link back to Friday Follies in your post!  If you don't have a blog, then leave a comment.  Thanks!

Read more...

Friday Follies: Lack of planning (link up your follies, too!)

Please link up your Friday Follies below!

Friday Follies is a weekly feature here at Frugal Follies, where you can link up your story about a crazy, silly, or just boneheaded thing you did in the name of frugality. Last week I told the story about overspending my budget by a mile at a great Albertsons sale. Previously I told stories about my garbanzo cake disaster, about buying Rome apples for school lunches and about the strange thing in my freezer.

This week, I did two pretty boneheaded things. I'd show you pictures of them, but unfortunately my camera needs new batteries... oh, wait, that would be three things. First, I let my camera battery run out and didn't buy a replacement one. Bad for blogging. Oops.

Well, then I guess second would be that I planned my menu for Freezer Cooking Day without actually checking the items in my pantry! I committed to making a lot of French bread to put in the freezer, only to discover that I didn't even have enough yeast for a single batch. I tried it anyway, adjusting the ingredients to the amount of yeast I had... except for the flour. Oops! And I didn't realize this until after I had put in the yeast into the breadmaker pan. I tried to scoop out some flour, but some yeast came out too, and the liquid started mixing with the yeast... Well, anyway, it ended up working out, and I made two nice loaves of French bread, instead of four.

Third, after cooking a bunch of things in the crockpot (tomato sauce, beans, and applesauce), I decided to use it once more to make crockpot oatmeal for breakfast the next day. Except that I forgot to grease the crockpot... again. In the morning my house was full of a wonderful aroma, and the crockpot was full of crusted-on oatmeal. It took several soaks and scrubs to get rid of it. Aargh.

Basically, the theme of the week was a lack of planning. Sigh.

Link up your good shopping stories at my other linkup, Wednesday Weekly Shopping, and check out more bad days at Friday Fails and Friday Frustrations. 

What funny or crazy things have you done in the name of frugality? Please leave a link to your post below.  I would appreciate it if you had a link back to Friday Follies in your post!  If you don't have a blog, then leave a comment.  Thanks!

Read more...

Friday Follies: Blowing the budget (link up your follies, too!)

Friday Follies is a weekly feature here at Frugal Follies, where you can link up your story about a crazy, silly, or just boneheaded thing you did in the name of frugality. Last week I told the story about my garbanzo cake disaster; in previous weeks I shared my story about buying Rome apples for school lunches and about the strange thing in my freezer.

This week's biggest folly for me has to be my trip to the local Albertsons store closing sale.  As I tell my story here, I went to the sale without having a plan.  Though I did get some good bargains, I ended up spending almost $80, way past my budget of $60.  Ah, well.  Such is life, and I'll have to pay for it by having an even smaller weekly budget for the next month.

Link up your good shopping stories at my other linkup, Wednesday Weekly Shopping, and check out more fails at Friday Fails! 

What funny or crazy things have you done in the name of frugality? Please leave a link to your post below.  I would appreciate it if you had a link back to Friday Follies in your post!  If you don't have a blog, then leave a comment.  Thanks!

Read more...

Friday Follies: My pantry garbanzo cake disaster (link your horror stories, too!)

Friday Follies is a weekly feature here at Frugal Follies, where you can link up your story about a crazy, silly, or just boneheaded thing you did in the name of frugality.Last week I told the story about buying Rome apples for school lunches; the week before, it was about the strange thing in my freezer.

As you may know, I have been doing the Eat from the Pantry Challenge this month. One of the things I wanted to use up were several cans of garbanzo beans, or chickpeas. I had originally bought them (on sale) to make hummus. The problem is, to make hummus you need tahini (sesame paste), which was very expensive at the store and never on sale. So the cans sat and sat and sat in the pantry.

Well, it was time to find a new use for them! I went to the library and found a cookbook about beans. I leafed through the recipes and found, surprisingly, a cake recipe made from garbanzos, flavored with cinnamon and orange zest. How interesting! I thought. This would make a great blog entry, about making good food from surprising ingredients!

The first tip-off that I should have noticed that it wouldn't work was that the cookbook was actually printed in Great Britain, with approximations of the ingredients into American measures. Probably not a good idea.

I started making the cake. The first step was to remove the skins from the garbanzos. Garbanzos have skins? I didn't know that. After removing about twenty, I said, "How bad can it be with them?" and stopped.

Then, I was to use the food processor to make a paste out of the garbanzos. Except they didn't make a paste, just chopped-up garbanzos. Hmm. I added some water - probably too much, in retrospect - and then they did make a pasty concoction.

The rest of the recipe went well. I added eggs, baking powder, sugar, and cinnamon. I removed the zest from an orange I had bought especially for the recipe.

Finally, it was time to put the cake in the 9x5 baking pan. The directions said to line the pan with parchment paper. Oops. I don't have any. Would wax paper do? I didn't want to chance it. So, I just greased the pan as well as I could, put in the batter, and baked it for 80, yes 80 minutes.

When I took it out of the oven, it smelled pretty good! As instructed, I let it cool for ten minutes, then attempted to take it out of the pan. It was stuck. I ran a knife around the edges and tried again.

Shlump! About half the cake came out of the pan, with the other half still stuck in there. Hoping to save the half that came out, I checked the consistency of the cake. It was like a wet sponge, almost completely uncooked despite 80, yes 80 minutes of baking.

(I did nibble a piece of the cooked part of it... and it actually tasted okay, and not like garbanzos at all!)

Obviously, it all went into the garbage. But at least I got rid of two cans of garbanzos, and I got a great story out of it!

Check out more fails at Friday Fails!  What funny or crazy things have you done in the name of frugality? Please leave a link to your post below.  I would appreciate it if you had a link back to Friday Follies in your post!  If you don't have a blog, then leave a comment.  Thanks!

Read more...

Friday Follies: My baking apple mix-up (link up your mix-ups, too!)

Friday Follies is a weekly feature here at Frugal Follies, where you can link up your story about a crazy, silly, or just boneheaded thing you did in the name of frugality.Last week I told the story about the strange thing in my freezer.

This week's Friday Folly for me was all about apples.  Last week I had bought a bag of Rome apples at a great price.  My daughters and husband take a piece of fruit in their lunches; I gave them the apples on Monday.  They all hated them so much, none of them could eat it!  What a waste.  I then discovered that there was a difference between baking apples and apples eaten out-of-hand.  I've never made an apple pie from scratch, so I guess I never learned this lesson before.

But the good news is, I made Crockpot Raspberry Applesauce from the remaining apples, and it was delicious!  So it worked out, after all.

What funny or crazy things have you done in the name of frugality? Please leave a link to your post.  I would appreciate it if you had a link back to Friday Follies in your post!  If you don't have a blog, then just leave a comment.  Thanks!

Read more...

Friday Follies: The strangest thing I found in my pantry

Welcome to Friday Follies! This is a place to post something funny, crazy, or just plain dunderheaded that's happened during your adventures in frugality. Whether it was spending $10 in gas to save $1 on toilet paper, rebuying a shirt from a thrift shop that you previously donated, or just forgetting the coupons you meticulously clipped, here's a place to post it.

A few days ago, I was taking inventory of my pantry and freezer, as part of my goals for the Eat from the Pantry Challenge. I found lots of strange things - a jar of coconut oil from some health kick I'd been on once, a totally freezer-burned fish filet, 8 individually-wrapped bagels in different parts of the freezer (left over by my daughters from various Sunday deli breakfasts), some Halloween candy from years past. But this was the strangest:

What are those? They are gel pads for nursing moms, to help with the pain when you are engorged with milk. I'm not sure why they were still in my freezer - after all, my youngest child is almost five!

What funny or crazy things have you done in the name of frugality? Please leave a comment for Friday Follies!

Read more...