Money Saving Idea!

From Dilbert!

Homemade Butter

Or, What to do with leftover heavy cream

For our wedding, we registered for an ice cream maker. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, and brides and grooms can get a little carried away with the scanner thingy at Target. Anyway, so we ended up with one, and I've found that it is used more infrequently than I'd like to admit. The primary reason it's not used very often is that the ice cream recipes all require heavy cream, something I don't have on hand very often. When I do have it on hand, after making ice cream, the extra heavy cream just languishes in the refrigerator, until I decide to make alfredo sauce or throw it out.

This weekend, I found another great use for the extra heavy cream! Butter!

When my husband woke up Saturday morning and I told him I had made butter, he gave me a groggy, confused look. "Without a churn?" Yes, we do have a churn, but it is really old and just decorative. I wouldn't dare put actually food I'm planning to eat in it. So how to make butter, at home, without a churn? Easier than you might think!



Homemade butter
1/2 C to 1 C heavy cream
1 pint jar with lid
Arm strength

Pour the cream into the jar & tighten the lid. Shake, Shake, and shake some more. You'll hear sloshing. Eventually the sloshing will stop. If you open the jar & take a look now, you have whipped cream coating the jar. Close the jar again. Keep shaking. The silence of shaking the whipped cream will turn into a thud-thud-thud noise. Keep shaking until the sides of the jar are clear again, and you can see the clump of butter in the buttermilk (see photo). At this point, you can pour off the buttermilk (save it for biscuits!) and you have butter!

For salted butter, add salt sometime in the middle of this process.

Enjoy the toast! And the knowledge of what's ACTUALLY in your butter!


This is part of a Notebook Experiment from one of Amy's Notebook entries once-upon-a-time ago. Thanks to SouleMama for the inspiration!

DIY: Invisible Fence

I got this question in my email today in response to a request on Freecycle for an Invisible Fence sign for our yard:

I was hoping you could share your do it yourself experience with me. That is our top priority for projects this spring.

I, of course, was delighted to share our experience!

For us, the invisible fence was our top project to get done before this winter to avoid having to walk the dog in the snow!

We were lucky to get the installation kit off of craigslist for much less than it was being sold for in stores. Even if you do get the kit in the store, the whole do-it-yourself project will be less expensive than having the service install it for you!

Planning where the fence would go, figuring out how to get it across the driveway, and finding a climate controlled place for the base unit were probably some of the hardest parts about the project. Once you have a rough idea of where you want the wire loop to be, you lay out the wire and test the configuration with the collar to see that the range is what you expected. We used a garden edger we borrowed to dig the shallow trench for the wire once we figured out where it would go. The "hard work" is getting down on hands and knees and stuffing the wire into the trench. We bought white flags at Menards and marked the edge of the fence range. Training was straightforward, though I may have been less diligent than the instructions say. Our dog did break the fence a few times to chase our neighbor's car in their driveway, but he finally got the idea & hasn't done that for months. Just yesterday we pulled up the rest of the flags (we were supposed to pull them up a long while ago)

Some considerations:

• We had to make sure the wire was nowhere near where we would be digging in the future (ie our garden). If we cut through it in the future, it would be a pain to re-lay the wire. 
  
• I think my husband had to use a electric saw to get the wire buried across our gravel driveway. With a concrete driveway, I think you have to lay it in one of the seams, but I'm not sure how that works. 
  
• We also had to be aware how close the wire got to the house- the signal will come through the wall and shock the dog in the house near windows, if the wire is too close.
  

Hope this helps! Probably way too much information, but good luck with the project! For us, it was worth it.

Washing for pennies

Part of saving money around the house often means making or doing things yourself, rather than paying for a processed version of the product or paying someone else to do the work. This applies to a whole host of things: cooking at home rather than eating out, making from scratch instead of from frozen meals, doing your own home repair, doing your own yard work... the list goes on. Before starting to read money-saving blogs, however, I never thought of replacing my store-bought laundry detergent with a homemade version!

Since I started doing my own laundry, in college, I've not really known what brand to buy. I didn't think about it too much, and defaulted to whatever I saw at home that I didn't think I would have an adverse reaction to. Fast forward 5 years, and I'm tired of buying laundry detergent.


Liquid laundry detergent:
To make this, you'll have to some hunting at your local supermarket. In the laundry aisle, pick up three ingredients:
Borax (probably Mule Team brand)
Washing Soda (probably Arm & Hammer brand- and be sure to get WASHING soda, not BAKING soda)
Laundry Bar Soap (I use Fels-Naptha. Zote brand is mentioned in other recipes)

These ingredients will be good for many, many gallons of laundry detergent, so you'll be set for a while.

Use:
1/2 cup Washing Soda
1/2 cup Borax
1/3 bar soap (grated- use a food processor or box grater to accomplish this)

Heat 6 cups of water on the stove. Add the grated bar soap and stir until melted. Then add the washing soda and borax. Stir until powder is dissolved, then remove from heat.

In a 5 gallon bucket, pour 4 cups of hot water and add the heated soap mixture. Top pail with cold water and stir well with a wooden paint stirrer. Let sit for at least 24 hours. The mixture may separate- stir then add to smaller, more manageable containers than the 5-gallon bucket. As you can see, I've used vegetable oil bottles, milk gallons, and any plastic container that's easy to pour.

Shake container before using and use 1/3-1/2 cup per load.

I haven't done a cost savings breakdown, but others around the web come up with 1 cent or less per load, vastly better than store-bought alternatives. We've been using this soap for about a year and have been happy with our clean clothes!