This has been a crazy long and fun filled week.  After spending Friday night partying for Lily’s birthday. Saturday was spending cleaning up from said party and finding ways to  save and use as much of the food in my refrigerator as possible.  Food waste is one of the biggest areas that I can save money.  Lily’s birthday party was not on the frugal side so anything we can save and use.

We had purchased 3 veggie trays for the party at Lily’s request.  We came home with extra carrots, broccoli, cauliflower and rainbow peppers. The peppers were placed in the fridge because I am positive that the girls will use these for lunches and snacks over this week.  Matt was in charge of cutting up the baby carrots for freezing we were able to package a total of 9 cups of baby carrots in the freezer.  The packages of frozen carrots to purchase are $1.25 each.  The veggie trays are $14.99. By saving these we were able to re-coup the cost of one of the trays. I was able to steam and puree 5 cups of broccoli which was labelled for use in one of our favorite soups. another $2.25 found.  The cauliflower is not a preferred food for any of us however, I plan to take it with hummus and some ham salad to use as a meal this week as well.  We had purchased 3 bags of potatoes for baking. We ended up with approximately 25 potatoes that had been fully cooked. I made a baked potato salad to go with the pulled pork, Lily received for her birthday.  We also used this as a lunch meal.  We will use some of the potatoes for a baked potato soup this week. By adding some butter, cream cheese and sour cream we have 10 additional dishes of mashed potatoes to use for future meals.   Finally we took the left-over turkey combined with celery, carrots and onion made a casserole for dinner on Tuesday of this week.

The other area that we are focusing on is electricity use. Our electric company has joined the modern age and I am able to monitor our use daily. We have currently increased our usage by 7.77% over last year. I want to figure out what is different and how we can decrease this use as rates are also increasing.

Any suggestions or ideas are appreciated!