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.
2 comments:
Love this, it encourages me to use up what I have before I go shopping this week. I will just go shopping in my pantry :)
That's my favorite part, because I get what my Momma calls "the don'ts." You know, when you just don't wanna do anything? Pantry cooking enables me to avoid grocery shopping when I want to procrastinate, so I am my own enabler. :)
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