Frugal Friday round up #fivefrugalthings

It’s Friday again and time for my Frugal Friday round up! It’s been a quiet week of mainly working from home. Mr S has been away, so I have just had the cats and lodger for company. I have got a lot done though, and binged on a few Netflix series that he wouldn’t enjoy watching…

I had intended to tidy the garden, but have done nothing out there… must get it tidied up before the bad weather really hits!

Spicy little numbers

Regular readers will know that we grow some of our own fruit and vegetables, partly for fun and partly to save money. Mr S grew some chillies in pots in the greenhouse. I wasn’t very excited about this, as they all looked green and I don’t use chillies much.

They didn’t seem to be doing much, then suddenly yesterday I realised that one of them was full of bright yellow fruit! They look fabulous. Here they are with the very last of the courgettes. The tomatoes are still coming, although more slowly now.

The round green thing is the sum total of our melon crop, which was a bit of a fail 😀.

Now I have to decide how to use the chillies. I think they are a fairly mild variety, so I might just make a pot of ratatouille with more kick than usual. Will have a think, but let me know if you have any ideas. There are more coming through and some green ones two (hoping some of those will turn red).

Batch cooking catch up

I said in last week’s meal plan post that I intended to do a lot of batch cooking this week. I love batch cooking as it is so nice to have loads of easy ready meals stacked up in the freezer when you need them. It also saves time in the long run and lots of money. You can read my post on batch cooking here.

As planned, I made a slow cooker chicken curry, which was nice. Then I made a big pot of Bolognese sauce and a spicy vegetable and chick pea stew. I was supposed to make a nut roast to cut into slices for the freezer but I ended up super busy and working late so will attempt that this week.

And this is the great thing about batch cooking! On the day I worked late, I had some chicken curry and rice, which took ten minutes to make.

Yellow sticker bargains

Our local Coop often has some great reduced items. I stock up whenever I see them and freeze if necessary. When I popped in last Sunday, they had loads of these little stock pots for 10p each. Usually I wouldn’t buy them, but I grabbed four packs.

I used a couple of little pots in my batch cooked Bolognese and they made it taste really nice. It’s great that the Coop makes the effort to get rid of out of date items rather than just binning them. I hate food waste. Things like this don’t go off anyway!

Winter breakfast

Now that the mornings have turned chillier, I am really enjoying my morning bowl of porridge. I don’t buy those little sachet things anymore – although I used to. Now I have realised that it is almost as quick and much cheaper to use ordinary oats and make it in the microwave.

This is such a cheap breakfast. I like mine made with half milk and half water, served with some fruit from the garden and a blob of honey. It’s super healthy too.

Sometimes I ring the changes (if I am organised) and make overnight oats (you can see how in this post about Slimming World breakfasts), which is delicious but not as warming as a hearty bowl of porridge.

Free spa day

Mr S is a keen swimmer and has had a swim membership with a local school pool for years. However, their prices have been creeping up and up. He decided, for just a bit more money, to join the local health club, where he can use their pool and all the other facilities as well.

It wouldn’t be worth me joining,  as I exercise at home, but he got two free day passes so I went for the morning with my daughter. We were able to use the pool, jacuzzi, steam room and sauna. They even had an aromatherapy room, which was lovely.

We were going to have lunch there too, but looked at their prices and decided to treat ourselves to dinner at the local Toby restaurant instead, which was really inexpensive and very good value. We had a roast each for £8. A panini at the health club was £12!

I have been showing how we live frugally on my Instagram feed, doing a post each day of October, which is going to be a very low spend month. Come and follow!

So that is my Frugal Friday round up. I think that doing lots of small things to save money every day adds up to a lot more  money in the bank. That’s what frugal living looks like to me. How has your week been?

As ever, I’m linking up with this Cass, Emma and Becky in this week’s ‘Frugal Friday’ linky.