1 new of 68 responses total.
One thing to look into would be farm-style cooking, although I don't know if there's any such cookbook. Typically it involves trying to use as much of the ingredients as possible, avoiding having to throw out things with nutritional value. Example: Cook meat in a skillet, and instead of throwing away the grease, make gravy and use it on potatoes or as a sandwich spread. Hard to say how many such things are relatively doable in a modern kitchen with modern stuff, but it's something to think about. Overall you can save some money with cooking, but really it's a drop in the bucket compared to housing and transportation. Being able to do basic car maintenance and repairs is very useful; not only do you save on shop labor but you also tend to notice things which need immediate attention and can prevent more expensive repairs. Maybe there's a local organization which gives cheap/free car work classes. Or maybe you could trade some guitar lessons for car repair lessons and access to tools? Speaking of things like guitar lessons... have you looked into making a little money on the side that way? A few years ago I noticed a really interesting guitar in a new store which needed work, and ended up fixing it to see if I wanted to buy it. I didn't buy it, but I did end up occasionally doing other repairs for the store. Right now I'm trying to decide if I want to do that kind of work on a half-time basis and spend some money on tools, since I'm the best amp & electronics repair tech to have shown any interest. And while I was almost exclusively doing repairs on store items (it's a vintage instrument store) it turned out there were regular service requests from customers who were being turned away because there was no regular repair tech to make sure stuff got fixed in a timely fashion. So check out the local music stores, and if they don't offer lessons ask why - maybe they were just waiting around for somebody who could actually teach (plenty of people can play, but not so many can be a good teacher) and was reliable enough to keep a regular schedule. And if there's demand, well, go with it. You want to teach professionally, right? The business side might be a little scary at first, but no worse than academia politics.
You have several choices: