In our impatient and busy society, it’s easy to find yourself adopting wasteful practices in the name of convenience and lack of time. In the end these may still win, but it can’t hurt to at least consider some of these interesting and creative ways to save money and make the most of everything — right to the last drop, scrap, and piece of pocket fuzz.
In the kitchen. Scraps and leftovers are easy to waste because they can’t make an entire meal and are perishable. There are countless ways to get creative with leftover food, but here are some commonly wasted items you might not have considered useful.
- Condiments. Do you have ketchup, peanut butter, dressing or mayo bottles that will no longer squirt or scrape easily but aren’t quite empty? Consider using these remnants to create your own salad dressing, marinades, and sauces. If the bottle is microwaveable, simply heat it up for a few seconds to make it easier to pour. A drop of apple cider vinegar added to bottles also works well to loosen up contents; use the bottles to mix your ingredients.
- Pickle juice. You’ve eaten all the pickles, but still have juice. Consider using it to lightly pickle fresh cucumbers and other vegetables.
- Wine. Less than a glass of wine? Add it to the skillet the next time you cook chicken, fish, and other dishes for a hint of great flavor.
- Bread, chip, and cookie crumbs. These can be made into homemade stuffing, croutons, meat breading, or bread pudding. Cookie crumbs can accumulate toward making a pie crust if you store them in the fridge or freezer or be added to fruit and yogurt for breakfast, and to ice cream for dessert.
In the bathroom. One of the commonly wasted items in the bathroom is that little sliver of soap. One simple idea is to stick it onto the bottom of a new bar of soap in a continuous meld of the old and the new. If you want to get crafty, save soap scraps and make your own soap. There are numerous online videos that are easy to follow and utilize everyday items. And, if you travel frequently and end up with a lot of hotel soaps, you can use soap-making methods to combine them into larger bars.
In the office. Do you have too much scrap paper accumulating? Consider using it to scrapbook or make cards, gift tags, and other crafty items. Scrap paper is also great for children’s art projects, or stapling together your own notepads. If you have excess shredded paper, use it for pet bedding or donate it to an animal shelter.
In the craft room. Crafty people always end up with scraps of leftover fabric and yarn that usually end up getting wasted. As with scrap paper, these seemingly useless pieces can be utilized in children’s projects. You can also do searches online for ideas on how to utilize scrap pieces for a larger project.
The list could go on and on, through every room of your home. It really is fun to think of ways you can stretch your money a little further by getting creative with scraps and leftovers. So the next time you’re ready to throw a remnant of something away, try to think of a way you could make it last a little longer.
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