It's time to do stuff better! It's been a while, right? I thought I'd share three things I actually do that are super thrifty, make use of stuff you'd otherwise throw away, and are, possibly, border-line ridiculous. You be the judge.

1. Make your own bread crumbs. I'm not sure if I've already quoted a super favorite author of mine, Jennifer Reese in Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, on this, but even if so, it's worth repeating:

"Home made bread crumbs cost nothing if you make them bread you would otherwise throw away. Store-bought crumbs range from $2.50 to $6.00 per pound, which is more than ground beef and completely insane."

Truth.

I throw stale bread, a certain five-year-old's rejected crusts, and the bottoms of various breads (ends and crumbs) into a bag I keep in my freezer all the time. I don't discriminate between types of bread, freely mixing rye and white and wheat and hamburger buns with ciabatta. When the bag is full, I process it all into a coarse crumb, and toast in the oven until golden. Voila - bread crumbs! For free! I store them in a glass airtight jar, but you can also store them in the freezer. This saves money, takes almost no time, and there's pretty much no reason not to do it. The exception: Panko, which I do use fairly often, and which I buy.

2. Use Butter Wrappers to Grease Baking Dishes.  One day, while I was baking a bunch of things, and therefore generating several room-temperature butter wrappers, I realized that those waxed papers are coated with perfectly good (delicious, salty) fat that I could be using to grease my baking dishes. This is particularly useful for me since I don't use lard or Crisco. I now store all my butter wrappers in a Tupperware container in the fridge, and when I need to grease something, I grab a wrapper and grease away. Often, one wrapper will grease several dishes. Does everybody already do this? I've never seen anyone do it before, but it's not like I attend a ton of baking parties where it might come up. (Though that sounds like an awesome pastime, actually). For those vegans in the bunch, this also works with vegan "buttery sticks," and I also use an oil sprayer rather than buying spray oil, which also lets me not spend money on PAM. The butter has a really long shelf life, especially in the fridge. It's practically indefinite. Happy baking!

3. Use the dregs in your jars to make dressings. You might have seen this in the context of making peanut butter-based dressings; it's floating around a couple Buzzfeed lists. It might seem a tad bit silly, but you feel so clever when you're using the very bottoms of the jar -- especially since rinsing out the jars for recycling can be such a pain -- and it's also super handy to use the jar, add some ingredients, and shake shake shake your way to dressing, without dirtying a dish along the way. I've done this with mayo, peanut butter, jellies and jams, and it's always rewarding. Here, I tossed a couple tablespoons red wine vinegar with a several tablespoons olive oil and a squirt of Dijon mustard into the remnants of an apricot fruit spread jar, shook all around, added salt, pepper, and a tiny squeeze of honey to taste and then ate it on my lunch salad. Yum yum yum.

Sooooooo, there's a quick and easy Do Stuff Better for ya. Do you have any super thrifty kitchen practices? Did you inherit them from your Depression-era grandma or come up with them yourself? Share share share in the comments! (Oh, and I probably won't post tomorrow, as we're headed down south for some springtime celebrations, but if not I'll see you Monday!)