Did you have a good Labor Day? Was it a restful day or one filled with activity?
These Monday holidays throw me off schedule for the remaining days of the week. Today feels like a Monday, but I know when I wake up in the morning, it will be mid-week.
Our holiday celebration was once again, a frugal one. I'm not sure we have it in ourselves to do a spendy celebration. This is just our nature. It was just my husband, myself and our two daughters for this holiday. Early in the day we picked and processed plums, completely filling the 6 dehydrator trays. I'll be harvesting and drying more plums tomorrow. Later we played some croquet, badminton, horse shoes, and ping pong. Our ping pong table is damaged, so we used a large folding table in its place, marking where the net would go with painters' tape. This large folding table, by the way, was retrieved from a free pile 2 summers ago.
For our evening meal, we had a cookout over a fire using our own property's wood for cooking. About a month ago, I came across some hormone/antibiotic-free, uncured, no fillers, all-beef hotdogs on clearance for $2.85 a package. I had a coupon I could use up to 5 times for $1 off this brand. I found 4 packages of these marked down hotdogs. So I bought all 4, paying $1,85/package for some otherwise pretty pricey hotdogs. These normally sell for $6.29/package. When I bought these, they were nearing expiry, so I've kept them in the freezer since.
I didn't feel like making buns. I don't use a bun, so I scrounged the freezer for 3 bun-like bread products. I found 2 pretzel rolls and 1 dinner roll. Oddly, all three of my family members wanted the dinner roll. But dad got to have it, as he's the dad. To go with the fire-roasted dogs I heated a can of sauerkraut, sautéed some garden kale and carrots in leftover bacon fat from earlier in the week, made a tomato salad with garden tomatoes, and sliced up part of a watermelon (the only thing I bought specifically for the weekend, at 48cents/lb). We were out of sweet pickle relish, so I chopped up some sweet and spicy watermelon pickles for an impromptu relish to go with the mustard and ketchup. For dessert I found some graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate chips in the pantry for s'mores over our fire. All in all, a tasty, easy, and cheap holiday dinner for the 4 of us.
We sat outside under the repurposed Christmas mini-lights for a couple of hours in the evening, listening to Spotify music on my daughter's phone and reminiscing about the highlights of each of our summers. School begins tomorrow for the district in which both my daughters sub. Today I replaced the summer kitchen table runner with the harvest-themed table cloth. Summer is fading fast in my neck of the woods.
Whether frugal or not, I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Does it feel like summer is about done for you, too?
