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!