Frugal Tips You Wouldn't Want Your Family to Know About

i dont really hide that much from my kids (they are older) so they know we dont have a lot of money, so we eat fairly cheaply and if we dont have it, we have to wait til payday.

This isn't something that I do, but I had it done to me when I was a kid and I know for a fact my step aunt does it to her husband and child. She keeps a box of the name brand cereal in her house and when she does the shopping she buys an off brand of cereal and just replaces the bag in the box. He never would eat store brand cereals, but because they were expensive bought them anyway and just made the switch every now and then and he was none the wiser. My mom used to do that to me too when I was a kid, because you know growing up you have to have all the name brand stuff otherwise it's not as cool as the other stuff.

That's funny, my mother used to do that same trick with the powdered milk when we were growing up. She mixed it up in the middle of the night and then put it in the regular milk carton and we didnt' know any different until I caught her doing it one night!! One of my tricks to put vegetables in things is to cut vegetables small, cook them in spaghetti sauce and then blend it so you can't tell there are chunks in there. The kids won't eat chunky spaghetti sauce and I'm not so fond of it myself, gotta trick myself too I guess! :-)

There's not really anything that I hide from my family like that. My husband is usually game for trying whatever store brands I buy, which isn't many. Usually it's cheaper for us to just buy the name brand at the commissary, instead of going to Walmart or somewhere and buying the off brand. The commissary doesn't carry many things that aren't name brand. One thing that I do that my husband doesn't know about, though, is I add extra water to the juice when I mix it up. He says he doesn't like it when it's been diluted, but I usually add about an extra half can or so, because I don't like it if it hasn't been diluted at all. I still dilute my son's more, but he's only 2 so he doesn't even know what juice tastes like when it's not diluted!

I have heard of other people doing this. my son is a big brand name junky and was always complaining about generic food i could have done that and not had to listen to him complaining.

I've been giving my kids soy milk (we bought a case last month) instead of regular milk. Both pride themselves on knowing the difference.. phooey lol. I've also been purchasing the bagged cereals instead of the expensive kind. The crunch is much heartier in these cereals but they still eat it up happily. So much for being brand loyal experts lol

You know what's funny, even though it's not related to the question? I calculated out the price of powdered milk at our store, and for the amount of milk you get once you add water, it's cheaper to buy a jug of milk. We do funny frugal things, but we both know about them.

Great tip amazon. I don't really like the salad dressing kind of mayonaise so, it doesn't really help me personally. I'll bet there are a lot of people on here that it will help. We drank a lot of powdered milk growing up to and I always hated it. What I do now when money is tight is buy whole milk and pour out half into a container. In the jug with the remaining half I add powdered milk and water. It tastes just like the 2 percent we usually buy!

If you've ever received government commodities or received food from a food bank or buy through a group grocery discount program (like Angel Food Ministries or Share Food), then you may have received powdered milk (especially the commodities program) that you still have on hand. One thing I did to make it more "drinkable" was to add a can of evaporated milk to the water when making a gallon. The milk concentration kept it from tasting so watery. Also, if you use the powdered milk in your baking recipes or casseroles (that don't require whole milk), you can get more use out of it, even if that's all you use it for. If you're a big Bisquick fan (or you make your own), add some powdered milk to the dry mix to increase the nutrient power of the mix. It really doesn't alter the taste. Especially if you can't get your kids to drink milk, but they're big on pancakes or biscuits or other things you make with the mix. This isn't necessarily frugal, but it helps keep you from being "stuck" with unused dry milk.

All my children are grown and I'm divorced, so I don't have to trick my family any more. I never did really try to trick them, but I did mix powdered milk with whole milk. They could always taste it, but they drank some any way. They didn't mind it on their cereal. I've recently found a recipe that serves six people that uses only 1/2 lb. of ground beef. There is a big portion of mushrooms in it. I didn't think I liked mushrooms, but decided to try it because it was a recipe that would freeze well. I discovered using fresh mushrooms is much better than the canned ones. They don't have that chewy, trying to escape from your mouth feeling. When I had all my family at home I just used ground beef for flavor, sometimes as little as 1/4 lb. in a rice or pasta dish to fill everybody up.