Frugal Framnett

One of my favorite soups is lentil pea soup.

The beauty of this soup is it is not a Martha Stewartesque soup requiring 128 simple steps (each with 28 sub-steps) to make. Not only is it simple to make it is very good tasting and will help fill your belly on the cheap.

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Getting ready to roll & cut pasta

So too with making your own pasta!
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One of the hangups most people have with doing their own cooking is not so much the money required, but the time. In opting for convenience people give up quality and pay more.

While homecooking always will take time there are ways to spread out and minimize the time investment.

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We have and use a programmable thermostat in our house. It is a Hunter model 44550. It has the following features:

• A light
• Furnace/AC run time logging
• Home mode
• Four daily program points
• Weekend & Weekday programming modes
• Seven day programming modes

The device is handy but not perfect.
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Lazy Man and Money discusses frugal bar keeping. I find it interesting and want to to add to it.

I spend extra on sipping booze and less on mixing booze. In fact, I would consider it quite uncouth if you asked for me to mix up a glass of XO & coke, in fact, I probably would flat out refuse to do so. At best, I would pour in the Aristocrat and mix the coke. Same too with any bourbon starting at Jim Beam level and going up (FYI, I don’t much care for Jack Daniels (which btw is technically not a bourbon) so I wouldn’t have it on hand). I have a bottle of Canadian Club on hand (a gift) but have not opened it up yet, I should do that tonight.

I agree with the assessment of Gins - that is Gordons for mixers & Tanqueray for sipping gin (i.e. martinis). I never could stand martinis until a friend said you need to have good gin for those, makes sense.

Vodka I only drink as a mixer so cheap vodka works for me.

I don’t drink rum a whole lot and usually straight up when I do. I have a couple of bottles of Tanduay and one of Meyers. I am not a real rum connoisseur.

Brandy is one class of liquor I try to have a mixing bottle and a sipping bottle. I look for VSOP (or better) of any brand and inexpensive for mixing.

Other liquors I like to have on hand - mainly peppermint schnapps, but I should also think of Jaegermeister & blackberry brandy.

As far as wines go, I like Ravenswood & Boggle, but usually have a big bottle of inexpensive cab around for sipping & cooking. Beer?

Today, my brother came down and we unloaded a trailer load of wood about what I consider to be one-½ cord of it and I started up our fireplace again.

I have a computerized temperature taking system in my “office” and it shows what I believe to be indicative of what we can achieve with our wood fireplace.

Both images I generated from temperatures taken in the same location in our house and external weather conditions are pretty much the same.

My conclusions are that one can economically and effectively use their furnace as a base heating system and a wood fireplace for creating peak heat conditions.
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One of my favorite winter foods is beef stew. Not the kind you buy in a can at your local grocery store, but real homemade beef stew. Not only is it tasty and nutritious, but it is also made with inexpensive ingredients. Carrots, potatoes, celery, onions, garlic, and a hunk of inexpensive beef.

In addition, it does not take a huge investment in time to make, though the recipe I present is for slow cooking the preparation time on your part is minimal. Often times I prepare it the night before and then plug in the slow cooker in the morning.
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Okay, so now you have a fireplace and of course it is cold out and you want to warm the house.

Now you need to get wood. Now, there are some things you need to know about wood before you go out and buy it. There is only one kind of wood to burn and that is properly seasoned wood!
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In my previous post I discussed about saving money on heating bills using wood heat. Is wood heat more inexpensive than natural gas, electric, oil, or propane? One would tend to answer yes, but not so fast, hunches are fine but in order to definitively answer that question you need to run some numbers.

What you can not measure or calculate you have to rely on hunches and while hunches are a good first cut at answering a proposition they can often be wrong.

I keep coming back to the E85 situation, it is cheaper to fill your vehicle with E85, your money is staying local and going to local corn growers & ethanol plants so that may bias you into concluding E85 is more inexpensive, but when you calculate the cents it costs you to drive a mile on E85 vs. E0 or E10 my experience shows the hunch wrong — E85 is more expensive!

Onto calculating heating value.
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