A few frugal things

Yesterday, I:

-made whole wheat pancakes to use up some buttermilk

-cut one of my kids’ hair, a job I don’t particularly love, but which I figure has saved me almost $2500 so far.

(I’m assuming $15/cut, between the price of the cut and a tip, but I’m not sure how accurate that is, since I’ve never taken this kid anywhere to get a hair cut.)

-used up some leftover grilled vegetables by making a fajita bowl of sorts…grilled onions and peppers, a few leftover shrimp, the last of a bunch of cilantro, an avocado half, and sour cream.

-bought a black wool pea coat online for Lisey. My girls all have black pea coats from Old Navy, and Lisey is a little too big for hers this year. I saw the coats were on sale online and I used a $40 credit card reward I had from Old Navy to buy the coat.

It was $35 on sale and if you spend $50, you get free shipping. So, I added a denim skirt to my shopping cart, which bumped me right over the limit (I’d have had to spend $7 on shipping, so adding the skirt only cost me an extra $8 in reality).

And given that I had my $40 reward, the total cost for the coat and the skirt was only $10. Yay!

(I would have used Ebates to get 2% cash back, but I was having trouble getting my $40 reward to work on the site, so I had to place my order by phone. Boo.)

-went to the library to return a pile of books that happened to be due that day.

(Good thing I happened to sign onto the library website that morning! That would have been a big late fee, and might very well have qualified as a stupid tax.)

Of course, we walked out with a pretty large pile of new books.

The library is such a fantastic resource for my kids…if I had to supply them with purchased books, they wouldn’t get to read nearly as many as they do now.

(and my house would be positively overflowing with books.)

-stopped at a drugstore on the way to use my $2 Lindt chocolate coupons (which I read about on Katy’s blog)

Yay for batching errands!

-stopped at a local market on the way home to buy some chicken, cilantro, and a jalapeno

The chicken isn’t particularly frugal (!) but it comes with no packaging, is local, and tastes somewhere around 97.8% better than grocery store chicken.

No jalapenos were to be found, so I asked if they were out of stock. The produce guy said he’d check in the back, and a few minutes later, he came out with these chopped peppers in a bag and gave them to me for free (he’d cut the bad parts out of the jalapenos they had.)

Of course, I like free, but what I like even better is that we’re eating peppers that would have been thrown out.

Schweet.

-made dinner, which I happened to not feel like doing, and which happened to be chicken cakes with cucumber relish, which I read about on Nom Nom Paleo and which has been sitting in my to-try pile for a bit.

(Could I say “which” a few more times in a single sentence? I think not.)

Daylight faded before I was done, but I did cook up one teensy test chicken cake before the sunlight totally disappeared.

They’re a bit like the fish cakes we love to eat around here, and we always have some tartar sauce with those. So, I mixed up some mayo, cilantro, and chopped red onion to make a sort-of-tartar-sauce-ish thing to eat with the chicken cakes.

What frugal stuff have you been up to lately?

P.S. I did do other things yesterday too, like, you know, school with the kids. I just was listing frugal schtuff here. 😉