Frugal Friday

Quite a busy week here with plenty of money saving going on !

Firstly, we have been busy in the garden, MrShoestring has been chopping the last of the wood for the winter and on Tuesday the axe handle broke ! He wasn't sure he could get a new one to fit as it is a very old axe, so he mended it instead ! That was a great bit of moneysaving and took a lot of ingenuity! We also harvested tomatoes, apples, butternut squash, turnips and beetroot and planted some winter hardy lettuce and rocket for the days ahead. The seeds have already germinated because the weather has been so mild, fingers crossed it continues to be so!

There has been lots of cooking from scratch including :- spaghetti bolognaise in the slow cooker, which used up an old bottle of wine we had been gifted and where I stretched the meat with a couple of handfuls of lentils. This was great as the whole dish then did for 2 meals and there was 1 portion left for MasterShoestring's lunch one day. We also made pancakes, waffles, pizza, chicken pot pie, bread, chapattis and apple crumble. A quick bit of baking before MasterShoestirng came home one day also produced a tin full of flapjacks which had lasted all week !

MrShoestring took a packed lunch to school everyday and I made muffins for this and put them in the freezer so there is no danger of them going mouldy in the tin, which has happened before. Now, I just pull out a frozen muffin the night before and it's defrosted by the time he needs to eat it and it's still nice and fresh.

We took a picnic and drinks for a day out in London and I mended the rucksack we used so that we can carry on using it. The coffee flask spilled all over the rucksack when MrShoestring was chased by a pigeon, but it's washable so it was easy to get out the stains. We visited Bletchley Park for free on the Heritage Open Day and are looking forward to two more days out over this coming weekend, also to properties which are participating in the scheme.

I gave away 3 things on Freecycle and made £12.47 for the gift fund from selling books to Ziffit. I also got £2 worth of Love2Shop vouchers from the postal survey. I have enough points from the Nielsen shopping survey to redeem for cinema tickets but I'm going to wait until October to do so as then the vouchers will have a long expiry days on them, rather than the end of September.

How has your frugal week been ?