Frugal Living

I always encourage my children to eat vegetables. One of the surefire way to get them to eat variety of vegetables is to keep on serving them on the table even when they said they hated it. One of the advantages of living in a rural area is that local vegetables are cheap. I can buy a huge bundle of pechay here for P5.00, and a kilo of camote for P10.00. These are just some of the cheap vegetables organically grown here.

Green leafy vegetables are generally cheap. They can be versatile too. I usually like to saute those chinese kangkong with garlic and a dabble of oyster sauce. To add some punch on the vegetable dish, chop one sili, but scrape the seeds out if you are serving the dish to children.

Eggs is something I cannot live without in the kitchen. Eggs generally cost P5.00 here in my rural town, so I tend to buy eggs by the tray from those huge egg stores in town. Rather than buying eggs from the sari-sari store, you can save more than P20 if you buy them by layer.

Fish is still cheap in our part of Mindanao. One can still find a kilo of galung-gong for P70 here. Since we live in a coastal town, fish is generally the main source of protein. In our home, I cook fish generally 80% at most time. We have avoided chicken altogether because my children are allergic to them.

Fruits. You can buy the fruit in season to save money. You can save more from buying bananas, papaya, pineapple from the local fruit stands as against to imported grapes or apples.

As for rice, we have cut down our consumption by 1/3 because I started dieting again.

Do you have other frugal tips to share?