DH told me about the $5 off any produce coupon after I bought the cheap produce. Normally, I would have used it to buy my ordinary stuff, so today I tried a different tactic - I used the coupon to get fruit I rarely get like white Rainier cherries and an heirloom melon. Total treat for $2.

Joy of Cooking had a recipe for fish cakes that I tried out. I can't ever follow a recipe straight even the first time. Its a quirk of mine.

Basically, the recipe was 1.5 lbs of flaked fish, finely chopped onion, lemon juice, spices (old bay and parsely in the recipe), an egg yolk and 5 tbsp mayo as binders. Form cakes, dredge in breadcrumbs and fry in 2 parts vegetable oil and 1 part butter. Not exactly health food, but darn tasty and a pretty efficient way to hide a small amount of cooked and mashed vegetables. I snuck in three of those leftover little white boiling potatoes.

Cooking is one of the most important frugal skills in my arsenal. Prepared food is always more expensive than the raw ingredients and it sure makes me feel clever when I can hide leftovers in a tasty way. To think I used to joke that the dorm cafeteria used to do the same thing! Except they weren't very clever about it.

I just don't like seeing containers in the refrigerator for more than a couple of days because after that, no one wants to risk taking an exploratory peek or sniff.

Tomorrow is DH's birthday - a restaurant trip tomorrow night. Then in the next couple of days comes salmon salad sandwiches and salmon macaroni salad.