Think outside the recipe: Pantry cooking saves money and time

Way back when our family lived on two incomes, I actually shopped for stuff called for in recipes. Now, I shop for the cheapest possible healthy items in food groups and find recipes (or make some up) that use what I have on hand. THAT is the concept of pantry cooking, and it's the one thing that can save you significantly on groceries.

First off, I have to say that if you don't have the More With Less Cookbook, get it. Find it used if you can, scour used book stores or garage sales, but get it. This is the only cookbook out there that has cheap people in mind and actually caters to pantry cooking and never wasting a morsel. Also, the recipes are low-sugar, which is great for my diabetic Hubs.

Today, I'd been de-nailing a pile of used lumber I'm going to recycle into a barn, and suddenly realized that it was 5 p.m., and I'd defrosted no animal proteins for the Chez Cheap evening meal. What's more, I'm pretty sure everyone is tired of canned green beans, and the five I picked in the garden... well, even I can't make those stretch far enough for four of us. In the fridge, I saw two heads of cabbage that were starting to look a little suspect, bacon ends and pieces (strictly for flavoring recipes, this stuff works great and it's super cheap as bacon goes), and five dozen eggs (from our chickens). When I was new to all this, I'd look in the More With Less index under “cabbage,” because that's what I had the most of that needed to be used, er, very quickly. Because I know my book so well now, and know what my family loves, I had three days' meals planned with that single glance in my fridge (Formosan Fried Cabbage with rice, Eggs Foo Yung, and Vietnamese Fried Rice).

If the fridge had been bare and I had gotten a head start, we could have turned away from Asian and gone more Mexican. A slow cooker (tightwad must-have) full of pinto beans can feed my family for at least a week, but I usually cook two pounds of beans so I can freeze some. (Think Bubba from Forrest Gump as I extoll the virtues of pinto beans, beans and corn bread, refried bean dip, bean and cheese tacos, bean and cheese nachos, fried bean patties, beans and rice, chili with beans, bean enchiladas...)

The bottom line is, you don't have to follow a recipe for every meal you make, and the ones you use the most should feature cheap food that's also healthy. Shop the stock-up sales, cook with what you have, and: Never. Waste. Anything. That's my cheapo mantra.

Preserving Garden Abundance

On our little homestead, summer means it's super hot, the garden is cranking out the produce, and we're doing everything we CAN to keep up. And can, we must.

We are super lazy gardeners, so really industrious people can produce a lot more food in a 1,000-square-foot garden than we do. Still, our garden goodies combined with some excess from friends, and here's what we've added to our pantry so far (in about the last week):

• We turned about 75 pounds of cucumbers into 4 gallons of gherkins (fermented pickles, which are "cooking" in the entry closet), 7 quarts of kosher dills, 4.5 quarts of sandwich slices, 7 pints of relish and a gallon of cucumber kimchi. (About to make more of that... so awesome!)
• Our fig trees took the year off last year during the drought, so they're pumping out fruit this year at a rate of about 2-3 gallons a day. I usually make fig preserves, but I already made 7 pints with what we had in the freezer, so I'll make more of that, but I'm "branching out." I'm thinking fig syrup and rosemary-fig preserves. Now to get that goat so I can make goat cheese...
• A friend gave us a bag of assorted cayenne, banana and jalapeno peppers, so we pickled the whole peck of peppers. That made for four pints and some giggly tongue-twisters for the boys.

 All in all, it's not a bad start to the summer. Gotta get back to it now; on the menu today is zucchini and tomatoes and all... those... figs. And maybe cream-style corn. And, if anyone has creative ideas for using up figs, please let me know!

DIY convenience foods: Feed the freezer

You've probably read blog posts or articles about super talented and organized people who spend one day a month “freezer cooking.” These people spend 8-10 hours putting together meals they can freeze and pop in the oven for quick dinners, and they are my heroes. I'm just not that organized.

Being disorganized and responsible for the entire homestead 9 months out of the year makes for some harrowing mealtimes, so yesterday I spent the entire day cooking breakfast. I rarely have a plan when I start cooking, so what I ended up with is a freezer full of breakfast rolls (dinner rolls filled with bacon, egg and cheese), french toast bars (using a failed batch of biscuits) and cinnamon rolls. I figure it's about a week's worth of breakfasts, and they're packaged in foil to go in the toaster oven for about 20 minutes in the morning.

Since these breakfast creations came about through trial and error, it's tough to compare them to store-bought frozen breakfast items. But, I'm pretty sure they're more healthy and cheaper being made from scratch. Freezer cooking is probably really worth it if you're organized. Personally, I prefer adding to the freezer a little at a time. If I make a pot of beans, I put half in the freezer after a quick soak. After cooking, I put half of the remaining cooked and seasoned beans in the freezer. That leaves me with a half-pound (before cooking) of pintos, which we can take care of in one meal. If I choose to reinvent the rest of the beans on subsequent days, I can do it by taking the frozen beans out in the morning. If not, they have fed the freezer stash and are a cheaper alternative to frozen pizza when I'm in a hurry or have stepped on half a dozen rusty nails and can no longer stand up to cook supper.

However you do it, one big tightwad rule is “feed the freezer.” Some families don't like leftovers, and can even recognize reinvented ones the next day. But, put those same leftovers in the freezer, wait a couple of weeks to reinvent, and, voila!: brand new food. It doesn't just work well for leftovers, either:

• Cheese. Calculating price per ounce for my price book, I discovered that a nearby members-only store had the cheapest cheese in town, but it came shredded in 5-pound bags. When I get it home, I fill five, one-pound freezer bags and put four in the freezer. Shredded cheese freezes like a champ, and can even be used frozen if you forget to take it out to defrost. Bread crumbs from slicing homemade bread, and the heels of some tougher loaves, go into a bag in our freezer labeled “bread crumbs.” When it's full, I give it a whirl in the food processor, pour in a little butter and some herbs, and it makes homemade macaroni and cheese downright gourmet.
• Fresh herbs. We use a lot of cilantro around here, but we never could use it fast enough to prevent the black slime from claiming it in the crisper drawer. Dried cilantro just isn't the same as fresh, so I tried a tip I read. Chop and freeze fresh herbs (works for all I've tried), just by themselves, in a jar. When you need some for a recipe, flake some off the top with a spoon, and you've got that fresh-herb flavor without the time constraints of fridge storage.
• Milk. Cow's milk from the grocery store has become less of a staple for us as we've found other ways to get our calcium, and a $3 a gallon, it's a good thing. To make it go even further, I buy whole milk and cut it to approximate 2 percent milk. I get the gallon home, pour half into a clean gallon jug and freeze it. I fill the unfrozen milk jug the rest of the way with water, and do the same with the frozen jug about two days before we need it. This trick effectively cut my milk costs in half. It isn't for everyone, but my children aren't toddlers and no one in my house needs whole milk, so this works fine. (If you do this, though, add milk powder before trying to make pudding or yogurt. Cut milk lacks enough milk protein to make most recipes “set up.”)
• Dry goods. Combat weevils in flours, dried beans and rice by putting them in the freezer for at least 48 hours once you get them home from the store. That amount of time in the freezer will prevent any weevil eggs from hatching (and believe me, they're in there), and if you put them in a sealed container right away with a bay leaf on top, your weevil problems will be gone.
• Water. If all your freezer-feeding efforts still haven't filled it to capacity, put plastic water jugs in the freezer just to make it run more efficiently. All those energy-efficiency experts say freezers and refrigerators run better when they're full, so save money by keeping them that way. And, when you find that 49-cent-a-pound turkey deal, take out all the water and dry goods, serve up some of the leftovers and fill your freezers with your latest stock-up buy!

What's that? You say you only have the freezer-fridge that's in your kitchen? Maybe it's time to talk about high-value tools that every frugal chef should watch for at garage sales...