Green Clean

It's true, you can keep your house clean using only baking soda and vinegar. It's cheap and reassuring that you can limit those extra chemicals.

If you want to get a little fancier, here are some great recipes. I bought spray bottles from dollorama to store them in. If I had to do it again I would buy colored bottle to identifie them easily, or just make the tags colored.

Soap Scum
1 t.s. borax
½ t.s. liquid detergent
¼ cup vinegar
2 cups hot water

Basic all purpose antiseptic
1 t.s. essential oil (tea tree or pine)
1 t.s. washing soda
2 t.s. borax
½ t.s. liquid soap
2 cup hot water

Antiseptic spray
2 t.s. tea tree oil
½ t.s. soap
2 cups water

Deodorizer Spray
½ cup water
½ cup vodka
10 drops essential oil (lavender for example)

Windows
½ cup vinegar
2 cups water

Inexpensive Ingredients

Sarah, my food-critique friend, sends these tips our way.
They come from the Epicurious site (For people who love to eat).

Here are their Top 10 Money-Saving Ingredients

• potatoes
• rice
• pasta
• chicken
• beans
• apples
• canned tuna
• eggs
• cheese
• flank steak

Check out the site for inspiring recipes! Even if it's inexpensive, it doesn't have to be bland.

Great deals!

For great deals on used (and sometimes new) items I love:
http://www.kijiji.ca/
http://www.usedottawa.com/
ottawa.en.craigslist.ca/

And for sales in canadian stores, printable coupons and free stuff check out:
http://www.redflagdeals.ca/

Recessionista

!Viva la recession! !Viva!

Well, not quite.  Actually not at all.  But recessionista is the loving nickname my husband has given me.  He wishes he had invented the term, but he heard it first on CBC (of course), and there were other terms that are emerging in these economic times, like staycation and frugalista.

Fifty cent bread

I love the Ace Bakery, especially the olive loaf. Unfortunately their breads are not 50 cents, they are usually between 3 and 5 $.
Fortunately my friend Sarah gave me an excellent bread recipe which I have been using for over 6 months and it gives lovely loaves similar to Ace's, crusty and tasty, and costs generally less than two quarters!
Here is the recipe and a how-to video.

Since my dutch-oven pot is a bit wider, I use for cups of flour (3 white and one of either rye or hard whole wheat), and depending on the flour I add about two cups of water, a bit more than 1/4 tea spoon of yeast and 1 1/4 tea spoon of salt.

Three variations I love are:

• adding pumping or sunflower seeds to the flour
• adding olives and rosemary (reducing the salt a little if the olives are really salty)
• adding walnuts and chopped up figs (yum!)

Here are some that we made...

Miserly Guidelines

Before returning the Miserly Mom book to the library I figured I would share its guidelines with you:

1. Don't confuse frugality with depriving yourself
2. Remove little wasters of your money
3. Keep track of food prices
4. Don't buy everything at the same store
5. Buy in bulk whenever possible
7. Eliminate convienience food
8. Cut back on meats
9. Waste nothing
10. Institute a soup and bread or baked potato night
11. Cook several meals at once and freeze them

Reading on Living on Less

In these unstable economic times I started doing research on how to live on less.  The are a number of books at the library, and I found that though they had a different goals in mind, many books on how to be a stay-at-home mom had valuable information on how to cut down and live on less.

Miserly Moms

(Has good tips, but in general I didn't relate to the author who says she saved money not having to get manicures for when she was working, and often talked about God's plan in a very generic way.)

How to Raise a Family on Less Than Two Incomes

(Helps to have a closer look on spending, goes through many of different economical aspects. Most of the book does not apply to Canadians, giving tips that would only apply in the US.) 

 

You Can Afford to Stay Home With Your Kids

(A step by step guide based on the experience of the two authors. Very down to earth. More than just the economical aspects, it deals also with the social and emotional sides of staying at home, and has an interesting section on how to beat the stay-at-home blues. )

The joy of Not Working

(Though highly recommended, I found the book didn't apply to me. The author is an advocate of making a career out of leisure, which is not my main motivation.)

The Simple Living Guide

(Much closer to my heart, down to earth and practical, this book surprised me in its dealing with all aspects of simplifying life.  I wished I could have kept it longer but someone else had reserved it at the library.)

All of these books start with the same step : make a budget.  When you know exactly what you spend, and you take decisions on what you want to spend, you can reach financial freedom. The bottom line is you need some money to have choices (work more or less), and to have that money you need to make choices on what you want to spend it.

We had merge our quicken files once we moved-in together, but before Christmas we took a hard look at last year's spending in details. We were surprise how the little things add up. We were still living within our means, but we could do better, much better. 

With new goals for the new year, and practical ideas, it's exciting to see how things will pan out!

Paper, Plastic or Corn?

From paper or plastic dilemma we have gone to the bag or no-bag. Being conscious of the quantity of plastic accumulating we easily switch to cloth bags (one of which even became my purse for the time being). Saying no to bags was rewarding, but our soon depleted stock left us with a new dilemma when it came to the kitchen garbage and Mika the dog's waste.

We were not ready to go bag free.

It was time to investigate corn by product bags. These so-called compostable bags.

I got the kitchen-catcher size from Canadian Tire, and the poo-sizes from the dollarama on Montreal Rd.

The poo-bags are great! Perfect size. And though we know they will end up in the landfill, at least the whole has a greater chance of decomposing than if it was in a plastic coffin.

The kitchen catcher is designed as a compost bin liner, and will fully compost. The problem with our kitchen is that at the moment our compost is out of commission because of winter (We are going to start a new initiative with the condo once spring arrives since Ottawa is taking its sweet time to start the city-wide composting program). All this to say we currently have kitchen organic scraps going into our kitchen garbage, and with all the humidity the first time we used them I was concerned with the structural integrity of the bags. After a week it had bsorded some of the humidity.

For the time being we will keep the bags until spring, and use them for the dry garbage and say yes to a few more bags for another 3 months.

It's that time of the month

Time to save money and help the environment!

I've been using the Diva cup for almost a year and it's great! I still have to use a pantyliner on days when I have ultra-heavy flow (which is usually just one day), but I do save on tampons and maxi pads. I bought it for around 35$ at Arbour on Bank street and figure I saved about 110$ so far.

I haven't tried canoe-camping with it yet - that will be a new adventure for next summer.

p.s. Ooooo - browsing the Lunapads website (which sells the diva cup) I saw the reusable cloth pantyliners. I'll give them a try and tell you about it.

Cook for a day - Eat for a month

Though after over-eating during the holidays, you would think that cooking 30 meals would be the last thing I would do before school started again, but that was exactly what we did on Saturday. Having more time in the New Year was one of the greatest incentives. We had already been cooking one major thing on weekends to eat during the week. Unfortunately I do not have Andrzej's unending capacity to eat the same thing every single day until the end of time.  I need variety!

So here is the plan - cook 3 portions of 10 recipes in one day, freeze it in ziplocs (which are not made with cancerogenous-leaching-plastic yay!), and voila! Food for a month and eat the same thing only three times a month! That I can do.

We ended up doing 4 times the following recipes:

*crustless quiche

*lasagna

*potato/chickpea curry

*pea soup

*ham-potato casserole

*spaghetti sauce

* and hummus with the extra chickpeas

I did the groceries and the spaghetti sauce on Friday night.  We cooked everything in the morning starting at 8am and by noon we were all done.  And it all fits in our fridge-freezer!

Plus: Less cleaning, great time investment, costs less 

Key: Planning recipes (www.allrecipes.com is a great tool), making stations in the kitchen  (chopping, spices, cans, assembly) 

Minus: You need all the cooking gear for it to be time efficient (food processor, crockpot, good knife, big pots)

I wish I could say I thought of this by myself, but I looked it up in a few books.  Here is the best one:

Frozen Assets

And some others:

Month of Meals

Cook Now Serve Later

Fresh From the Freezer

(All of which are available at the Ottawa Public Library.)

Coming back to the blogosphere

After the circus blog and the wedding blog I needed break, but lately I found that I was rereading my day and activities as blog entries. Instead of letting my thoughts escape me, I figured I might as well share them with the faceless world of the blogosphere. Most of what I was musing had to do with frugality, being green and general home economics, so here it it : Home Musing.

Enjoy!