Seven Different Ways I Have Saved Money This Past Week

1.  Making one meal go further.

Alan was feeling exhausted after working with at the bungalow all last week, so we splurged and had a chip shop tea to round the week off.  It was just too much for me, so I saved half of my fish and chip meal for the next night.  It warmed up beautifully in the Remoska, but it's always a shock to see how much fat comes out of fish and chips when it's reheated.  😮

Enough to put you off getting it again?  No not really, once in a while it's perfectly okay to have a little treat, especially when it actually lasts over two meals.

2.  Using up sad looking vegetables.

I've been using up the contents of my fridge this week, so the tail end of carrots, celery and onion were roasted together, to make us a sort of carrot wellington.  It's on the menu every week at Mum's care home and we have always said that we should give it a go.

Once cooked it was all wrapped in some homemade pastry and cooked until beautifully golden brown.

  Unfortunately, my camera has been playing silly b*ggers recently and deleting random photos, especially the last one in each series I take ... so my gorgeous pastry extravaganza has now vanished into our stomachs and the ether.

I thought I had  gone mad so I did test it out, and yes out of a set of three photos, the last one vanished!!

I am now double checking and taking duplicate where needed ... another money saving thing as I really don't want to have to buy another camera.

3.  Making good use of free food.

I had half a sachet of a 'freebie' tomato ketchup, so I found a burger in the freezer and made sure I used it all up.  It might have been free, but even so I wasn't going to waste half of it.

4.  Using what I already had open.

I wanted a bit of sweetcorn to add to my tuna salad sandwich mix, so rather than open a full can I stood at the worktop and picked some out of the frozen mixed vegetables.

5.  Shopping Lists

A letter came for me with a blank A4 sheet of paper added for some reason.  As I was just about to write out my shopping list, I turned it into six shopping list sized pieces of paper and used one straight away.

6.  Replacement for breadcrumbs.

There were a lot of Weetabix crumbs left in the tin last time I refilled it, so I tipped them all into a jar ready to add to banana and walnut muffins ... I forgot to do that.  So instead I thought I would try them as breadcrumbs to coat two mashed potato and tuna fishcakes.

It worked a treat, and surprisingly didn't taste too much of Weetabix.

7.  Free guilt-laden napkins.

On Sunday when we were getting our motorway services lunch on the way back from seeing Mum, I headed back to the table before Alan, telling him that I would get the napkins.  I had forgotten that he is a bit deaf in one ear at the moment and he didn't hear me ... so he too picked up some napkins.  I felt guilty but there's no way to push them back into the dispenser, so instead I will make good use of them at home.

Just seven of the ways I can think of that I have saved us a little bit of money this week.  Of course there are probably many more, but so many things are done without even noticing yourself do them after a lifetime of watching the pennies.

What have you done recently that helped out your budget in some way?

Sue xx