Don't Toss Those Onion Scraps

Like most people, whenever I cut an onion for cooking, I've always thrown away the ends and the dry, papery skin that surrounds the fleshy, edible layers. However, this is in fact a big mistake. Although you cannot eat onion skin, it has a lot of flavor in it. You can keep a bag in your fridge or freezer into which you can put onion skins and the drier outer layers of the onion that you peel off. From time to time you can boil them down to produce a flavorful broth for cooking. Just tonight, I boiled some onion skins along with the bones from some chicken I cooked and stripped for soups and stir-fry. I got a fair amount of broth that filled the kitchen with a mouth-watering scent.

It's now in a stainless steel bowl in the refrigerator, cooling enough that I can pour it into peanut butter jars and put it into the freezer until I need it for soup or other cooking projects. Although some people also put the ends of their onions into the bag for cooking stock, you can also start new onions with them. Especially if an onion is beginning to sprout, you can set the top and bottom in a shallow dish of water and they will produce roots. Once you have a solid root network, you can transfer them into potting soil to establish themselves, and then plant them in your garden. You can harvest them as green onions, or you can leave them to set bulbs. When you harvest them, save the ends and start the cycle all over again. You can also grow an endless supply of green onions from a single bunch of store-bought green onions. Instead of using them all the way down to the roots, cut only the green parts and save the small white bulb to which the roots attach. Set them in water, and they will soon produce fresh leaves. At this point you can either plant them in your garden or you can keep them in water and harvest an endless crop of hydroponic green onions. You can even do this if you live in an apartment, as long as you have a window at which you get decent sunlight and where you either have a window ledge or room for a small table.

Gearing Down, part 7 -- Personal Care

Personal care expenditures are one of those things where it may be easy or difficult to reduce when confronted with a sudden financial reverse. Obviously, if you are one of those people who routinely spends hundreds of dollars on hair styling, manicures, pedicures, facials, high-end makeup and the like, it may be painful to give them up, but it is possible to realize substantial savings by making the sacrifice. However, if you're already in the habit of using off-brand soap and shampoo from the dollar store and trim your own hair when it starts showing too many split ends, it's going to be difficult to squeeze much savings out of this area, for the simple reason that you don't want to fall into the trap of false economy.

Personal hygiene is an important part of physical health, and especially when you're in bad financial straits, you really don't want to become ill with preventable problems. So essentials such as soap, shampoo and toothpaste, things that enable you to maintain basic cleanliness, need to stay on the shopping list somehow.

It may be possible to make things last longer by changing your habits of use. For instance, do you usually run a bead of toothpaste the entire length of your toothbrush? Although advertisements usually show toothpaste being applied in this way, since it is more aesthetically pleasing (and helps sell more toothpaste), you generally can get an effective cleaning and decay protection with a lump about the size of a pea or kidney bean.

Also, it may be possible to get free samples here and there that will help you stretch your own supply. For instance, our dentist generally gives out free toothpaste, toothpaste and dental floss with every visit. If a family member regularly travels on business and stays in hotels, they may be able to bring you spare bars of hotel soap and bottles of hotel shampoo. (One trick if you're staying multiple nights at the same hotel is to hide the used soap and shampoo before leaving in the morning. The maids won't throw it away, so you can use the rest for your second or third stay, and will put out fresh soap and shampoo, which you can save and take with you at the end of your stay).

If things get really desperate, some food pantries and other charitable organizations also give away personal hygiene items. So there is never any reason that you should have to go without the fundamental basics of personal hygiene, even if you have to give up some of the creature comforts of personal care that you've been accustomed to. It may mean needing to know where and how to ask and require the humility to be willing to ask, but there is always a way to make sure that you are clean and presentable.

Gearing Down, Part 4 -- Housing

Housing is another area of our lives in which making rapid changes often is not possible. Most of the inertia in housing comes from the nature of the legal arrangements by which we occupy our dwellings and the ways by which those arrangements are terminated.

Most obviously, if you own your house and it becomes unaffordable, you have to sell it, which means finding a buyer. And in a down market, that means the whole horrendous hassle of special cleaning and staging and showing it to people and generally being at the beck and call of your real estate agent until someone decides to buy it. The only alternative to the complexity of selling your house is foreclosure, which puts a big ugly black mark on your credit report that lingers for years.

Just because you're renting, it doesn't always mean you can leave an apartment or rental house that has suddenly become too expensive. Renters are often in year-long leases with expensive penalties for breaking them. Even if you're not locked into a lease, you still need to find new digs, which often means coming up with a large lump sum of cash to cover the security deposit, first month's rent and often the last month's rent.

It's possible to make some economies on other areas of your housing cost, particularly your utilities. However, there is only so much you can pare by shutting off lights, turning back the thermostat, and making sure not to run water when you're not actively using it. If a 5-10% reduction simply isn't going to make the difference between crash-and-burn and survival, you're going to need to look at more drastic measures.

One possibility to look into is sharing your quarters, and the expenses for them, with someone else. Although we often think in terms of adult children moving back in with their parents, there are many other possibilities for working out shared housing arrangements. Other family members or friends may be possibilities for co-housing.

However, you will want to think carefully about your arrangements if you bring someone else into your home. If you are renting, your lease may have restrictions on your ability to bring another person in as a co-tenant.

Also, consider how well you will be able to handle having another person on what has previously been your space. Especially if you have occupied your dwelling for some time, you probably have established routines that have become comfortable. How much are you willing to give to accommodate a new person's routines and habits? If you expect them to fit neatly in the spaces around your life, you're apt to discover that things don't work as happily as expected.

If you're going to have friends rooming with you, how well do you know them, and under what circumstances? All too often, people only see one side of a person. If you've only seen their public face, having to share personal space with them day in and day out may reveal a side of them that proves less polished than their company manners.

Then there is the question of rules and boundaries. When adult children move back home, it generally means moving back under Mom and Dad's rules as well as their roof. When siblings, cousins or friends move in together, things can be more ambiguous. Sometimes it can be possible to sort things out on the fly, but with some people gray areas are sources of trouble. And with friends, it's always possible that differences in your family backgrounds mean that things you would never even thought of discussing will suddenly turn out to be a problem.

If you are a homeowner bringing a non-family member into your home, you may well want to formally delineate the rules of living under your roof and make sure those rules are understood before they move in. If you feel this approach is necessary, it is generally best to start strict and become more lenient if it turns out that gray areas aren't a source of trouble. Starting out laid-back and discovering that it causes trouble, then trying to tighten things up to a more strict arrangement pretty much guarantees resentment and may even lead to loss of respect for your authority as the homeowner.

And if it appears that things aren't working out, it's best to get things dismantled before the petty grit in the gears turns into major aggravations. Friendships have been destroyed for good by trying to make a co-housing arrangement work in spite of evidence to the contrary.

Life after Death for Pantyhose

Don't throw away pantyhose that have seen better days. Unless they've completely disintegrated, you can cut away the panty section and braid the leg parts around a metal coathanger. This will provide protection from staining or rough spots for fragile garments such as silk blouses. Because nylon knits dry quickly, you'll be able to hang a damp garment on such a hanger without worrying that you'll cause the metal to rust.

Drip, Drip, Drip

A steadily dripping faucet can waste gallons of water over the course of a month. Generally the repair is simply a matter of replacing a worn washer; however, in some faucets it can be almost impossible to get to the washer. This can be particularly true with tub and shower faucets, which are often built into the wall of the tub or shower surround.

If you have a dripping faucet which is beyond your skill to repair and you don't have the money to get a plumber in to do the repair, don't despair. Simply set a clean bucket under the faucet to capture the water and use it for such tasks as watering plants or washing floors.