Adding On

Last night, baked potatoes served pretty plain and simple -- some cheese and sour cream -- with a side of cauliflower.  Tonight, the lovely strained broth from my Sunday chicken carcass turned into soup with dumplings.  Everyone should really know how to take a whole chicken and take it from roasting to picking the last little meaty bits off the boiled neck bones into the end soup...it seems a waste if you just throw those bones away, plus it's so fun to cook it until you've got a big pot full of jiggly chicken Jell-o.

Which brings me to another subject, a favorite of mine, frugality.  I was recently asked to give a little 20-minute spiel on saving money to the Relief Society ladies, and so I've been thinking a bit about it.  I was paired with a coupon guru for the other half of the hour, which was a perfect balance since I take rather the opposite approach.  I was slightly perturbed when trying to research last-minute, though, that I had a hard time finding any useful info online in terms of living cheaply.  The easily-found sites were all, all based on couponing.

I know there are others like me out there, but rather than have to corral all my thoughts at once and dig deeper into the researching, it occurred to me to do frugality posting the way I do my food posting, one day at a time.  So that will be a new feature, my dinner menu along with one way I saved money that day.  How 'bout it?

So for today, it was knowing how to take a cooked chicken carcass and turn it into soup and day-old soda bread into crumbs for the dumplings on top.  Not to mention the amazing healthful qualities of good stock, all the minerals from the bones in easily-absorbed form along with the mild antibacterial/antiviral properties of chicken fat.  Yes, indeed.  Ian has a doozy of a cold right now, so it should help him a lot.