Six Food Scraps You Can Regrow in Your Kitchen and Garden

Organic romaine hearts, 3 days.

Leftovers can be handy for creating new meals and feeding hungry chickens, but if you've ever had carrots sprout little roots in the crisper tray, you've witnessed the greatest thing about fresh food: it can grow MORE fresh food.

Imagine my excitement when I found out there was a book called, “Don't Throw It, Grow It!, ” that was all about growing food from your kitchen scraps! Sadly, I checked out the book from my local library and quickly realized that it wasn't about growing food at all. It was about growing pretty plants from your food scraps, and it was geared toward people living in apartments who didn't have the money to buy house plants. I'm not opposed to sprouting a sweet potato vine, but for my purposes of stretching our food budget, I wouldn't keep that vine in a pot on a windowsill. Plant that same sweet potato in a tire, bury all but six inches of the vine as it grows (by stacking tires and adding soil), and by the first hard freeze next year you have 20 pounds of sweet potatoes in a tire tower. Now, that's a recycling plan I can get behind. Other food scraps that can turn into food are:

1. Onion root ends, including green onions or scallions. Chop the onion, plant the roots and keep moist. You will grow another. Whole. Onion. I kid you not.
2. Carrot tops. Carrots produce seed in their second year, so grow your own carrot seed by planting the tops of carrots (usually sold at a year old) and sprouting the greens. The carrots you use must be non-hybrid/open-pollenated to guarantee seed production. Try organic.
3. Lettuce and greens. Put the root ends of romaine lettuce, celery hearts, turnips and beets in a glass full of water. Grow a salad in your windowsill.
4. Kiwi vines. Kiwi is a tropical fruit and likes it hot, with some watering to help it along. The vine grows FAST, and you need a few to guarantee you get a male and female so they produce fruit (technically, berries). Plant a slice of kiwi in a pot of soil, keep it moist and wait for seedlings.
5. Sprouted garlic cloves. Plant a clove of garlic in the early spring or fall, and in a few months you've got a whole head of garlic! Talk about return on investment.
6. Sprouted potatoes. Now's the time to cut those sprouted potatoes up, roll them around in some wood ashes to prevent rot, and put them in the ground, sprout facing up. Read up on growing potatoes, because you'll be doing it!

There are lots of other fruits and veggies you can plant, and some I won't try because they won't produce anything usable. Avocado pits may grow into nice trees, but they won't produce fruit north of Brownsville, Texas, unless they're in a 40-foot-tall greenhouse. My parents are currently growing teeny orange trees from seeds that sprouted in old fruit, but since most citrus and apples are grafted, these little trees may not grow true fruit. Only time will tell. The moral is, keep a stack of small paper or plastic cups and a bin of potting soil near your cutting board, and plant those scraps to see what grows. Then tell me so I can copy you and share with the class, m'kay?

The top 5 items every frugal foodie needs

Multitasking is something lots of people are good at, but how good are your kitchen tools at multitasking? When you have a small kitchen, a small budget and value your time, there are five multitaskers you must find at garage sales to help maximize your hourly wage.

Big-ticket item No. 1: Bread machine

I live in Texas, and it gets HOT. Bread is expensive to buy, but super cheap and a lot healthier to make. I do not, however, want to heat up my oven when it's 110 degrees outside. My bread machine was free (thanks to a super awesome cousin/best friend who got it at a garage sale for 20 bucks and shared the love – thanks, TripleR!). It is the Cadillac of bread machines, a Zojirushi with so many settings you can't even shake a stick at 'em. It takes me three minutes to load and set it, and when we wake up in the morning, it's to the smell of fresh-baked bread. (Wipe your mouth, you're drooling.) Buy a bread machine cheap, and cross bread off the grocery list. BIG savings.

Foodie must-have item No. 1: Good knives

We have pretty expensive knives, thanks to some generous wedding guests. The thing is, we usually only use the paring knife, the 10-inch chef's knife and a cheapo bread knife we stuck in the block with the stuck-up Henckels guys. So, instead of buying the whole block for $399, you could just buy individuals and put them in a cheapo block. They're still mind-numbingly expensive for knives, but dull knives in the kitchen are dangerous, and these last for. Frickin. Ever. You'll thank you.

Mom must-have item No. 1: A blender

Smoothies are a mom's best friend, and no store can sell salsa that's as good as what Hubs can whip up in the blender. Plus, it's handy for making ranch dressing. Did I mention smoothies? Old, mushy fruit (and even lettuce, a.k.a. a “Shrek Smoothie”) goes into a baggie and into the freezer, then straight into the blender with a little milk, yogurt or just water for an awesome summertime snack. My kids think it's a treat. Gosh, even our snacks are multitaskers!

Girlie splurge item No. 1: A KitchenAid stand mixer

I would NEVER have purchased this for myself unless I found an awesome Craigslist deal, but Hubs went behind my back and bought it for Mothers' Day one year. It makes any kind of baking such a breeze, and kneads specialty breads for me so I can do other stuff. You can find lots of attachments for sale online that have been barely used that make it a sausage grinder, ice cream maker, pasta machine and maybe even a really good mixer. And it's pretty. So, so pretty. My precious...

Alternative to pricey stuff item No. 1: A food processor

There are plenty of pricey food processors out there, but lots of people ask for them when they get married, then sell them at garage sales about five years later after using them once. This is a must-have for making baby food, but can also mix and knead doughs just fine. It also whips up some dreamy pesto with fresh basil from the garden. Oh, and it chops veggies like a champ. Even those miniature versions like the Magic Bullet do just fine, and can also take care of a lot of your blending needs, too. They can even take care of a lot of your “blending needs,” too. Like frozen margaritas after a whole day of very organized freezer cooking.

Project: Salvage-Style kitchen island for less than 30 bucks

OK, I'll admit it. I have a lot of pet peeves. People who say, “libary.” Misspellings or incorrect punctuation in advertisements (I will never shop there). Shipping film left on electronic devices and appliances (eek!! Must...peel...).

But maybe my biggest pet peeve is people who claim they're selling something frugal, because it's a bold-faced lie. Frugal can't be bought, that's the whole POINT. If you have to buy something to call yourself frugal, thrifty, or any other popular label floating around cheapo-world these days, go ahead.

But I don't have to like it.

Case in point: I got an e-mail from a home improvement warehouse that sometimes offers good tips or pretty pictures I can get ideas from. Their big sell this time? “Salvage Style Kitchens.” They take stock cabinetry and make it look funky by adding ginormous wood corbels to kitchen islands, “distressing” the paint to make it look old and worn, and then charging three times more than they would normally (it was seriously like $1,400 - I snorted!). Really? Like any self-respecting trash picker would pay $125 each for mismatched milking stools that aren't even the same size. We'd use the stuff if someone gave it to us or we found it on the curb, but why on Earth would I spend thousands of dollars on stuff I can find and/or make for nearly free?

"Salvage style" $22 kitchen island, made out of two free bathroom vanities. Note super-stylish salvage bar stool at right, next to the dog's bowl, which came with the dog.

I must be way ahead of this trend, because my entire home is in true “salvage style,” which I love because it's free or nearly-free. My kitchen island is fast becoming the latest object of my affection. Right after we moved into this house, I saw an ad on Craigslist for two free bathroom vanities. The Most Awesome Goat Rancher I Know helped me load them up and get them home, and I put them in the kitchen, back-to-back. Mr. Rancher then built a custom-made top for my cabinet island, and it became functional. My boys and I recently (finally) painted the whole base a soft green (paint was given to us), and I (finally) installed some hardware I bought two years ago at an actual salvage store. Total cost for my island: $22. Now if I can just decide whether to use tile or laminate on top, it'll be finished.

Guess I'll be watching the curbs to see what turns up...

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!