I feed two hungry monkeys, neither of which are very picky.

Except for one thing.

They absolutely, will not ever, under any circumstances eat leftovers of their own free will and choice.

This is a problem.

They are not particularly big monkeys, so they don’t actually eat that much. A recipe for 4 can easily serve 6 at our house. Unless my husband and I turn into complete gluttons we are often saddled with leftovers.

I refuse to waste perfectly good food, especially if it will save time and money. Despite their pleas we have leftover night on a regular basis. I am not above bribing and I am certainly not above playing tricks.

Trick #1 – Transform dinner into game night

These games work best if you have at least two or three different dishes available to serve.

Dining out, at home

A frugal budget doesn’t allow for eating out much but you can create the experience at home. Whip up a menu of leftover choices. Take their orders yourself or let your kids play server for the night. If you want to complete the experience, let them color at the table while you heat and serve the food.

Luck of the draw

Before calling everyone to the table, prepare the plates and assign each one a number and write corresponding numbers on slips of paper.  Have each person draw from a hat to discover which fabulous entree will be theirs to enjoy.

Hometown buffet

Heat everything up and arrange on the counter buffet style. Let each family member come through the buffet line and serve up their favorites.

Crazy, mix-up night

If your choices permit – make up plates with odd pairings – soup with a side of mashed potatoes, pork chops and mac and cheese, etc. Get the kids involved and see who can create the craziest combination. If you want to go all out, assign someone to judge and award prizes.

Trick #2 – Incentives and value-added perks

You probably had to bribe them the first time through the meal to eat their veggies.  Why stop now?  Sweeten up the evening with fresh-baked cookies or other treats to be exchanged for a clean plate and a whine-free evening.

Trick #3 – Supplement with something new

Sometimes there is not enough leftover goodness to go around. A tasty side dish that is quick and easy to prepare will win the hearts and minds of grumbling eaters.

Trick #4 – Become intimate with your microwave

Microwaves can be your greatest friend on leftover night. But we’ve all experienced the rubbery disaster of over doing it. Food will retain it’s texture and flavor better if heated to lukewarm rather than piping-hot. Chicken, for example, is super gross if reheated too much. Since every microwave is different get to know the various reheat options and power settings on your model.

The magic of the microwave is it’s ability to zap the water molecules inside your food, releasing energy and thus heat.  The more water it has to work with, the better and less dried-out results you’ll get. Add moisture to rice, pasta, casseroles and potatoes by sprinkling water over the dish before nuking it and cover meats and breads (i.e. waffles and pancakes) with a damp paper towel.

All units do their best work if you don’t ask them to take on too much at once. Individual serving sizes are ideal and it’s important to stir midway through cooking to help the food heat evenly.

Trick #5 – Raise the white flag

If no amount of skill, trickery or cajoling will convince stubborn eaters to consume reheated food — there’s no shame in defeat. Try to cook in smaller batches, freeze half of a large recipe prior to cooking or eat it yourself for lunch.

Cereal Dust - (n) the crushed up remnants of cereal collecting at the bottom of the box.  Super gross if it makes it into your breakfast bowl, often too much to throw out without pangs of guilt and the key ingredient in this frugal recipe for moist, delicious muffins.

I always get a kick out of being frugal and green at the same time by using up every last drop, crumb and morsel of food in the house.  In a frugal life devoid of luxuries I suppose it gives me a self-important high.  I’m saving money and the environment.  Hooray for me!

I keep an air tight container on my shelf next to the cereal.  When I get to the gross remains of a cereal box, I add to my dust collection, mixing and matching cereals to my heart’s content. My latest batch contained everything from Raisin Bran to Golden Grahams. I even saw a spare Cheerio or two.

Cereal Dust Muffin Recipe

2 cups cereal, crushed
1 1/3 cups milk
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 cup oil
1 egg
1 1/4 cup flour
1/4 cup brown sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 t salt
1/4 t cinnamon

Mix ingredients together, fill muffin tins 3/4 full and bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 18 to 20 minutes.

More of the how to

I suppose you could stick the cereal dust in a plastic bag and smash with a rolling pin, but that kind of defeats the purpose of this being a frugal and a green recipe.

I say dump the dust in the bowl, mash it with a potato masher or even get in there with your hands. It doesn’t have to be super-fine, but you do want to destroy renegade flakes that may have made it into the bowl wholly intact.

All the other ingredients can just be dumped in and mixed.

Variations for…

Raisin-haters: Any variety of fruit – apples, blueberries, etc. – make a tasty substitution. Heck, the muffins are tasty enough without any fruit.

Calorie-counters: Substitute applesauce for oil. Ditch the oil completely or try half and half. I’ve done both, 100 percent applesauce makes the muffins a bit chewy, but either way works.

Fiber-fiends: Use whole-wheat flour instead of white flour. Half and half works best, but if you don’t mind muffins that sink like a rock in your stomach, go all in.

Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without…

Ahh…the battle cry of my frugal ancestors who walked across the Great Plains and settled the Rocky Mountain West. As family legend has it my great-grandmother never owned more than two dresses at a time. One for wearing and one for washing.

I wish I had the guts to be that frugal. Alas, in this consumer crazed world I’ve moved up a few notches on the frivolous dial.

Use it up

Needing some dried fruit for my super-health, homemade granola, I turned to three bags of not so tasty cherries. They had been a screaming deal but were fast becoming shriveled due to their overall tastelessness. Drying them seemed like the best option to enhance my granola and save the cherries from the trash can.

Except for one thing.

No dehydrator.

Making do with an electric frying pan

Never fear!  I dug back to my frugal roots and devised a way to make do with what I have. And if you find yourself with more cheap produce than you can possible eat before it goes bad, a few simple steps will get you on your way to dried-up perfection.

Step one

You have to have fruit. As I said, I had cherries.

Step two

Pit, cut, slice, dice, or what have you.

Tedious, but made much better when done watching a rerun of a favorite show.

Step three

Arrange the fruit in an electric frying pan. You could use the oven, but it’s likely to guzzle more electricity than could possibly qualify as a frugal option.

Cover the fruit, but leave the lid open a crack to let moister escape.

Proper dehydrating temperature is between 120 and 140 Fahrenheit. The lowest on my frying pan was 170, so I figured the “warm” setting would get me pretty close.

Step four

Check in on your fruit every few hours to stir and drain the juice and condensation.

Step five

Dehydration time will vary based on initial juiciness and size. Remove the fruit when you think it’s properly shriveled. The cherries took about 24 hours.

Step six

After you remove the fruit from the pan, pat off any remaining moisture and cool it on the counter. Store in an airtight container, eat plain, toss it in breakfast hot breakfast cereal or bake into granola bars.

Frying pan vs a REAL dehydrator

A few weeks after my frying pan experiment, I ended up with more cherries on my hand and a friend let me borrow her dehydrator. I decided to give it a whirl.

Which was better?

The dehydrator was definitely faster, taking about 16 hours. It could have been less, but I didn’t catch the cherries in time. And actually, they became the consistency of Craisins.

The electric frying pan never fully cut the moisture. It left the cherries chewier, more like a fig. Personally, having tried both, I prefer chewier, especially for cooking into granola bars.

And I broke my friend’s dehydrator.

So for me, the big winner was making do!

While I know nothing about this model, I have zero trouble picking on HP as it is the most recent cause of my heartache.

There it is.  Sleek, sexy, shiny.  It can do so many things.  Print. Fax. Photos. Scan. Copy. Dishes.

Well, maybe not that last thing.

Best of all, the price tag is amazingly affordable.  A hundred bucks!  Check out its resolution.  And did you see how many pages per minute it churns out? Smokin’ hot.

But like all steamy romances – it won’t last. Maybe a month, maybe less.  The next thing you know your dreamy home-office printer transforms into a bottom-feeding, money-leaching, ink-guzzling machine.  First it needs magenta, then cyan.  Yellow is usually the last to go, giving your pages a sickly, haunting look.

Black.  There’s plenty of black.  But for some reason your once darling of a printer prefers to create black using the smaller, more expensive color cartridges.

The sensors are wrong.  They tell you half way through that there is no more ink.  They demand to be fed.  Their hunger is insatiable.

Soon your printer is a drain on your pocket book and then a drain on your patience because for crying out loud, you just bought new cartridges two weeks ago!  Resentment replaces adoration and a seething desire to throw it at the wall is growing stronger.

Razors and replacement blades

Your not alone in your misery.  Not that it’s any comfort, but the progression of this romance is completely orchestrated and it isn’t limited to cheap printers.

The printer industry has adapted King C. Gillette’s business model.  Back in 1890 Gillette invented the disposable safety razor and then pioneered a crazy idea.  Step one: sell the handle for cheap. Step two: make money hand over fist on the replacement blades.

Sound familiar?  The 21st century version of this model is reflected in 1) cheap printer, 2) insatiable appetite for ink.

To make matters worse, cartridge manufactures don’t follow labeling laws that would help establish a standard price/ounce.  Savvy consumers are getting tired of shelling out bucks for an unknown quantity of ink and a storm is brewing.

In the meantime, avoid the trap

Keep your head on straight and don’t be immediately seduced by the printer’s low price tag.  Research your options thoroughly before you commit.

• Consider the cost of replacement ink cartridges in your purchasing decision. Check to see if high-volume cartridges are available.
• If you are going to use refills, look for models that have tri-color cartridges instead of individual color cartridges.
• Don’t believe the resolution specs on the box – ask to see a print out from the model you want to buy.
• Read more about being an informed printer buyer at Consumer Reports.

If you’re already trapped

There are a few ways to trick your printer into giving you more bang for your buck.

• Cartridge refills will not make your printer explode and they are sometimes (not always) cheaper than new ink from the manufacturer.
• Clean the print heads, especially if you don’t print on a regular basis.  Ink heads tend to clog up if they are allowed to sit too long.  The printer will compensate by using other colors, draining some cartridges faster than others.
• Ask yourself – do you really need everything in full color? Since black ink is cheaper, keep an empty set of color cartridges on hand and adjust your printer settings to gray scale.  Some programs won’t print black and white, when that happens, pop in the color cartridges.  Otherwise leave in the empties and rely on the black to do the heavy lifting.
• Google your printer model to learn what other model-specific tricks frugal and tech-savvy folks have discovered.

A parting word

If you have been in a long-term, committed relationship with your printer and it hasn’t given you grief over the quantities of ink it guzzles, please leave a comment and let us know where to find some stability in our printing needs.

This beauty of a plate from Pottery Barn will bust your pocket book in more than one way.

No, don’t starve yourself.  But did you know that the average person consumes 500 more calories a day than 50 years ago?  Seriously, no lie.*  Also, since 1960 the plate size has grown from 9 inches to today’s average of 12 inches.

So you think you are piling on one or two portions, but in reality it’s more like three or four portions at each meal.

Getting the skinny on the facts

It goes without saying that all kinds of health implications stem from this wild increase of food consumption.  I’ll just mention a few:

• Eating 100 extra calories a day equals a weight gain of 10 lbs per year – so what does 500 do?
• (Again, since 1960) the average female waist size has gone from 30 inches to 37 inches and the average weight has gone from 140 to 165.
• Men certainly aren’t exempt either – their waists have grown from 35 inches to almost 40 inches on average and they are tipping the scales at 195 today, instead of the 166 from 50 years ago.

Oops, this isn’t a health blog

I’m big into health and eating right. Whole grains, ditching the fast food, lots and lots of fruits and veggies.

But when I’m staring at my own 12-inch plates in one hand and my wallet in the other, I’ve got to ask; is my plate draining my food budget?

Your plate is a total budget buster

At first I was thinking that three inches can’t possibly be a big deal.  But then there’s math to consider.  Pi times the radius, squared.  And not the tasty kind of pie that fits nicely on a 12-inch plate.  Math pi.  Yuck.

So that extra three inches ends up providing space for 78 percent more food.  Without even trying, you can pile almost twice the food onto your plate than your grandparents did.

There’s no equation for figuring out the percent increase that causes in your food expenses, but there’s no way it’s not doing something to your pocket book.

Eat with your appetite, not with your eyes.

So try eating less. Tonight when you serve dinner, spoon out enough to fill 3/4 of the plate and dream of all the leftovers you’ll have for tomorrow. It will be healthy for you and your budget.

*I swear I’m not blowing smoke. All the facts and figures in this post come from an NBC Nightly News report dated June 21, 2010.

Are you as in love with this old-school tent as I am? Besides the metal poles, the pricetag on Craigslist is it's best feature.

It’s hard to think of a cheaper vacation than camping – and it is cheap.

But add up gas to a remote destination, park entrance fees, camp site fees, fishing licenses, all the special foods you buy for those times when the fish aren’t biting, new gear, firewood….

Whew!  Still cheap, but not free.

If you’ve got a backyard, a tent and some imagination, you can take a weekend camping “trip” that brings the added benefit of nearby running water and flushing potties.

Disconnect, unplug and unwind

You’re camping.  You aren’t in your backyard anymore, but some remote wilderness full of adventure and excitement.

Set the mood by pretending you have no service; no wi-fi, no bars, no nothing.  Turn the ringer off your home phone too. If you turn off your techno-gadgets, so will your kids.

Heck, go so overboard that your flashlights are the only thing running on batteries.  Replace ringtones and text alerts with silliness and laughter.

Dinner by firelight

Do you have a fire pit?  Craigslist and Freecycle are fabulous resources for free wood.  Then you’ll be fired up (ha, ha, couldn’t resist a good pun!) for making tin-foil dinners or roasting hot dogs.  And it wouldn’t be camping without marshmallows and s’more fixings!

No fire pit? No worries. Use a gas grill for dinner.  When you’re ready for dessert, remove the grates and toast the marshmallows over the flame. You can also build a small fire in a portable grill or hibachi.

Having the right stuff

Besides being free, the best part of the backyard campout is that the packing list is super-duper short. It’s also amenable to frugal substitutions.

• Tent (or a tarp draped over a line)
• Sleeping bags (or a couple of blankets)
• Air mattresses, cots, pillows, etc. (or the cold hard ground if your back can handle it)
• Flashlights (drawing a blank on a substitute – besides they’re an emergency essential must!)
• A can-do camper attitude (nope, sorry, there’s no substitutions for perky camp-councilor-ness)
  

But with that perkiness you are ready to…

…fill the evening hours with fun camp activities.  The Ultimate Camp Resource has hundreds of ways to flesh out these ideas.

• Sing camp songs
• Put on skits
• Tell ghost stories
• Star gaze with a telescope or pair of binoculars
• Go snipe hunting
• Play hide-and-go-seek and other night games

That’s not all

Family togetherness is priceless!  But you can also try this for a fun, cheap birthday party or youth group activity (be sure to warn your neighbors first).

What other ideas and suggestions do you have?

MmmmMmmm! This is the first dish in a series of cheap, tasty and easy recipes that stretch one chicken breast into an entire meal.

It’s perfect for hot summer nights and the creamy, sweet dressing has a magical way of tricking my kiddos into eating broccoli.  For the very best taste, be sure to make this salad a few hours in advance and cool in it the fridge.

It makes 4-6 servings but you can always increase the pasta and the dressing to make it stretch to serve more.

Ingredients:

1 chicken breast, cooked and cubed
6 slices of cooked bacon, crumbled
6 cups cooked rotini noodles
1/3 cup minced red onion
3 cups chopped broccoli
1/2 cup raisins
1/4 cup sunflower seeds

Dressing:

3/4 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

Toss all the salad ingredients into a large bowl, except for the sunflower seeds.  Mix dressing and add to salad.  Cover and refrigerate for at least 2-3 hours.  Add sunflower seeds and serve with your choice of melon or green salad.

Time to stock up on deals as stores clearance out their summer merchandise.  There will be tons of sales that seem to call your name – but don’t forget the frugal shoppers battle cry  – It’s only a deal if you actually need it!

Shop for next year’s wardrobe

Now’s the perfect time to get t-shirts for less than $5.  Consider buying your kid’s clothes for next year.  You probably have a good guess of what size they will be.  Same goes for you – grab a few deals on shorts, swim suits and sandals.

Spruce up your garden

Stores need to move their summer stock of flowers, shrubs, and vegetable starts.  You can get deals on plants that look a little sickly or wilted.  A bit of TLC and some Miracle Grow will revive them to their full glory.

Furniture for backyard living

You’ll see big mark-downs of patio furniture starting now.  If you’ve been scrimping and saving for the perfect set or just want to add to your collection – now’s the time.

Shop the outskirts of town

Big retailers watch growth trends and will build stores in anticipation of future demand.  These stores don’t move the same merchandise volume as stores in more established areas. Not great for them – but a virtual gold mine for you!  Their clearance racks will be brimming with more than your average round up leftovers, with plenty of choices of styles in a variety of styles.

Credit Cards.

Bad, evil, horrible, awful?

Or useful tool in the hands of a responsible spender?

J.D. (of Get Rich Slowly fame) posed this interesting question about credit cards and it’s got me thinking about my own credit card history.

I have a credit card.  But it’s been collecting dust in my wallet for nearly two years.  Back in the days when I used it I ALWAYS paid the balance every month.  I’ve not always been gung ho about being frugal.  But what’s appealing about 18% interest?

No thank you.

Credit Card Equals Budget Buster

When I did whip out that shiny piece of plastic, it was a way to quickly buy something that we technically had the money for but wasn’t in the monthly budget.

Ninety-five percent of the time these credit card purchases were impulse buys – meaning my husband and I went over budget every single month for the first eight years of our marriage.

Staying on Budget

The key to on-budget months was ditching the credit card completely, avoiding the debit card and using cash for things like groceries and miscellaneous expenses. (I should mention that I am an ardent Dave Ramsey-ite.)

We tried cash and came in on-budget for the first time in December 2008.  I knew then and there, if I could keep within my spending limits during December, I could do it for the rest of my life.  But the credit card had to go the way of the dodo.

The Magic of Budgets

The truth is, a budget for the sake of budgeting is boring.  In sticking to a budget we discovered a really cool financial truth.

Budgets free up extra cash and extra cash helps you make financial progress. Impulse buys no longer supersede important family goals.

Since going credit card-less we can more easily afford essential things like car repairs and carpet cleaning.  We’ve also started saving money at an incredible rate.  Last month we paid off our second mortgage – it took us 14 months to save $40K.

Completing the Circle

After seeing this success from a credit card-less life – would I ever go back to using?  I’m certainly more responsible than I was.

But no…no way.  I broke that habit and I am never, NEVER going back.

I mean, would you?

Check out this great post on Budgeting in the Fun Stuff on how to keep your appliances running at their best.

I’d chat longer – but I’ve got some filters to change and some vents to clean!