Rachel happened to find this little book here in the Quirky Museum and it did bring a smile and definitely worth sharing here. So here are a selection of the money saving tips from 1982, forty years ago, as published here in the UK.
Kitchen tips
- Save the fingertips of worn out rubber gloves, use them to slip over your fingers when preparing vegetables
- Use stout instead of red wine when you are cooking
- To get the last few drops out of a sauce bottle, stand it in a dish of hot water for a few minutes the turn the jar upside down and leave it for an hour or two
- Freeze bananas that are about to go brown and give them to children as ice lollies
Energy saving tips in the kitchen
- Use vegetable water to make gravy – this saves energy as the water is already hot and contains vitamins from the vegetables (we still do this!)
- Save energy when cooking baked potatoes. Push a metal skewer right through each potato and it will cook in half the normal time (2022 update – alternatively use a microwave cooker, cooks in under 10 minutes, something which was less common in 1982?)
Around the house
- Candles will last much longer if you coat the sides with varnish and allow this to dry before burning. The hard coats prevents the wax from melting away
- Use dried potato peelings for kindling when lighting a fire
- Don’t buy an ironing board cover – cut the leg from an old pair of pyjamas and use instead
- A second hand black and white television maybe a bargain, but you will have to be prepared to throw it away if anything goes wrong
- Cooked chicken bones can be mixed with a little bread and minced to make money saving dogfood, just add some gravy powder
And so it goes on. It might seem quite hilarious nowadays and interesting to see how life has changed in the 40 years since it was published. Some of the hints and tips might seem totally bonkers now and yet there is some common sense in many of them.
Perhaps we, as a society, have become brainwashed into throwing things away all too easily, instead of repairing them or alternative ways of solving a problem?
