Every time we cut into a loaf of that super-simple rustic bread, we wind up with bread crumbs. As I swept them off the butcher-block work station one day, I remembered a scene from Zola’s “Germinal,” a realistic (and depressing!) book about 19th-century French coal miners. As the eldest daughter makes sandwiches for everyone to take to work, her 11-year-old brother, Jeanlin, gathers up the crumbs and puts them into his bowl of coffee. Now that’s some extreme frugality.
I figured that what’s good enough for Jeanlin is good enough for me. So I started saving the crumbs.
Before you think that I’ve finally gone ’round the bend in terms of economy, or that I’ve become a parody of frugality, hear me out.
At first I made fun of it myself. Early on I displayed probably one-sixteenth of an inch of breadcrumbs in the plastic container, and told DF that in another seven or eight months we might have enough to make a batch of meatballs. A small batch.
But as regular readers know, DF and I have found a ton of ways to save on food and are always looking for new tactics. This isn’t because we’re afraid we’ll go hungry – it’s just another part of our frugal ethos. Each piece of food represents not just money but also resources: Think of the dollars and fossil fuels that went into planting, irrigating, spraying, harvesting, packaging and transporting the elements of our meals, and of the dollars we spend to get those elements.
So why not use all of it? Especially if there’s a way to bring Harry Potter into it?
About that last: The two of us were reading about molasses for some reason (yep, we’re nerds) and got on the subject of treacle. He wondered how much different it would taste from regular molasses. To surprise him, I used some gift cards from my Swagbucks account to buy a small tin of Lyle’s Black Treacle. [As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small fee for items ordered through my link.]
Treacle is…intense. Sometimes he drizzled a bit on cornbread or rolls, but mostly the tin just sat there until I remembered the concept of “treacle tart.” Apparently this is one of Harry Potter’s favorite desserts.
Turns out one of the supporting ingredients in treacle tart is…breadcrumbs. You can see where I’m going with this.
Extreme frugality in practice
The result is pictured in the illustration. The flavor was a bit like shoo-fly pie but less sickly-sweet, due to the lemon juice in the recipe. It was good enough, but not good enough for me to want to make it again (especially when I have so many cans of pumpkin in the basement and bags of apples in the freezer).
But I’m still saving breadcrumbs, because why not? Eventually they will become meatballs.
This isn’t just about saving all the orts, but rather about making smart money decisions. As I noted in another article:
“Not-wasting is a central tenet of frugality. A life without waste is a life in which each decision means something. This doesn’t limit our choices, however. It merely refines them.”
Some (but not all!) of the other ways we use up all the bits:
The boiling bag. Follow the link for a detailed explanation, but short form: We don’t throw out vegetable/fruit scraps or poultry or meat bones, but rather freeze them to become broth. We also freeze all our vegetable cooking water and use it to cook those scraps. (A slow cooker is ideal for this.)
Pea broth. Last summer we cooked down all the peapods separately, making the sweetest liquid you could imagine. It makes an amazingly good split-pea soup, with a mirepoix made from our own celery and carrots plus a ham bone and diced meat from a ham that DF did on the Weber.
Garbage soup. Save the last bits of meals: the eighth of a cup of mashed potatoes, the half-spoon of peas, the shreds of turkey from the carving board, the final scrapings of gravy, etc. etc. Put it in a bag in the freezer and when the bag is full, make soup – maybe with some of the boiling bag broth?
Stale bread. Our rustic bread never goes stale, because we eat it way too quickly. However, when I find a really cheap loaf of French bread on the day-old rack (I’ve paid as little as 29 cents), I cut it into cubes and leave it on trays to harden up. Then I coat the cubes with olive oil, sprinkle them with seasoned salt and bake until brown. These croutons rarely make it to a salad or bowl of soup, because DF eats croutons the way some folks eat potato chips.
Recently I found a Stove Top stuffing recipe cheat and plan to tinker it to suit my taste. The broth I used is from a jar of Better Than Bouillon (organic, low-salt) that I got for free on the Buy Nothing Facebook page. I’ve also made a coconut bread pudding, with organic coconut that I also got through Buy Nothing.
Meat fat/juices. Any time we cook meat, we pour the pan juices into a Pyrex measuring cup and put it in the fridge. The jellied juices go into the freezer, to be added to a someday soup, stew or gravy. The fat is frozen separately and used to sauté vegetables.
More ways to use all the bits
Hot cereal. When I can’t finish my oatmeal, I add the leavings to waffle or pancake batter. You can also do a search for recipes using leftover oatmeal. (Or just heat it up the next day.)
Dairy products. Sour milk gets set aside for waffles or Lightning Cake. When my homemade yogurt starter starts to smell like bread or beer, I freeze it and use it to make a terrific chocolate cake. You can’t taste it. I promise. Remember, back in the day “sour cream” meant, well, cream that had gone sour.
Sauté oil. After you’ve fried onions, garlic or other vegetables, save the olive oil/animal fat for another cooking job. You could also drizzle it over rice or pasta, or do what DF does: Spread it on bread.
Veggie pesto. When I roast broccoli and cauliflower, I save the leaves, cores and stems on the advice of chef/food writer Tamar Adler. In her book, “An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace,” she showed how to cook these into a chunky, pesto-like product with the addition of garlic, olive oil and salt. It’s very tasty with crackers or raw vegetables, or eaten atop freshly cooked pasta. She was also the one clued me in to cooking peapods to make broth for pea soup. [As an Amazon affiliate, I may earn a small fee on items purchased through my links.]
Condiment tail-ends. The link explains it all. We are determined to use every last scrap of mustard, pickle vinegar, salsa, catsup, etc.
Apple juice. We’ve frozen six or seven pies’ worth of sliced apples, and dehydrated a ton more for snacks. All the cores go into the freezer until DF has a slow-cooker’s worth, and then he simmers them with a few cups of water overnight. Some of the juice he’s keeping in the fridge and some is in bottles in the basement.
The bottom line
Recently I was shocked to see ordinary ground beef for almost $7 a pound. Bulk-buy flour has gone up at least $6 per bag at Costco in the past five months. Canned goods, shelf-stable foods, sweets – all have leapt in price recently.
According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index, the cost of eating hasn’t been this high for a decade. It’s not your imagination: Food prices are going through the roof. Extreme frugality may become a necessity, if it isn’t already.
So why not work to get as much out of every food item you buy?
I know that not everyone’s as determined (read: obsessed) as we are. Both DF and I have gone through what I term “lean times”: constrained as to the kind of food we could get and/or unsure how we would pay for groceries. Obviously that’s had an impact. But given how much food we give away (relatives, friends, the food bank) and how often I treat niece and her kids to meals out, I think we’re not pathologically fearful. If we were, we’d be hoarding every dime.
You don’t have to do everything – or even anything – on this list. But as the per-plate price of food continues to climb, remember that preventing food waste helps make your groceries more cost-effective.
Readers: How do you use what others might consider unusable?
Related reading:
- 12 ways to save money on groceries
- Extreme frugality: Waste nothing edition
- How to save money on meat
I love reading these types of articles.
What do you use pickle vinegar/juice for?
You can use pickle juice (usually fill or sour pickles, I think) in some recipes for deli rye bread. It mimics the tang of a fermented starter without the time and effort. I like a recipe on the King Arthur Baking site for this.
Sorry, dill not fill. 😉
I use pickle juice to rinse out the mayonnaise jar and mustard jar to add to potato salad or to thin down too thick salad dressing. Sometimes when I have leftover meat, I use a little to moisten the mixture and thereby using less salad dressing. Sometimes I drink the dill pickle juice, it seems to help leg cramps.
A reader mentioned that her Polish grandmother used to make “dill pickle soup.” I tried it and it was pretty good served over sliced boiled potatoes.
We pour dill/sour pickle juice into nearly empty mustard bottles and give them a good shake. Sometimes we add a squirt of this mustard vinegar to homemade soup, and I like it with this recipe: Saute onions (and celery, if you have it) in a small skillet; add a little diced ham and stir until the ham gets a little crispy; pour in leftover lentils and some mustard vinegar and heat; crack an egg on top, turn down the heat and put a lid on the skillet until the egg is poached.
That sounds wonderful
The chickens get our bread, cracker, and tortilla chip crumbs.
Donna, thank you for an excellent article. This kind of stuff gets my juices flowing! I don’t think there is as much satisfaction that rivals using it all up and having a good meal to boot!
I will step up my bread crumb saving. I’m a big fan of Aldi’s Pane turano bread (sp?) But it has been hard to get of late. I will try your recipe. Regardless I’m saving breadcrumbs from now on.
I also save the catsup bottles and mustard jars and pickle jars to find new uses for the Tail end of the bottle.
I add a little stock to the catsup bottle and shake it up. This gets used in any recipe where a tablespoon or so of tomato paste would be welcome.
We also enjoy mixed nuts. And I always fret about the “nut dust” at the bottom of the can or jar. I decided I will add that to breadcrumb bag. It would make a delicious addition to meatballs or stuffing.
Excited to read others ideas.
Hadn’t ever thought about using the crumbs at the bottom of a bag of nuts. You could also stir them into plain cake or cookie batter, or use them as a topping for ice cream?
Oh, and we save the salt at the bottoms of pretzel bags, too. It goes into soups or stews.
Thanks for this article. I do save my beef and chicken bones in ziploc bags to make stock for soup. I also save onion peels, pieces of peppers, squash, green beans, carrots, and what have you for that. I read about doing that in an earlier post of yours, so thank you! 😀 I have found that I actually prefer the homemade stock to the Kitchen Basics brand that I had been buying for the last 20 years or so. I have also been stocking up this year on stuff that we use a lot of, like canned good items, meat when it is on sale, and free range eggs. This experience, combined with getting through this last nearly two years of COVID restrictions, lockdown, and sometimes empty store shelves, has brought me full circle to a better relationship with food. I plan for making more than one meal out of everything I cook, but we rarely have leftovers.
We like the homemade stock better, too, because:
— There’s less salt (no salt, to be precise)
— It’s always different
— It’s free!
Always fun to take a quart of stock from the freezer and realize that by adding just a few chopped vegetables (and meat, if we have it) plus seasonings we will have a healthy, nourishing meal. Doesn’t hurt a bit that we have that great rustic bread to go along with it.
European cakes will use breadcrumbs in place of most of the flour. My family bleats for sachertorte, an Austrian specialty, every Christmastime. (Now they’re asking for it at birthdays too, the stinkers.)
https://cindybrick.blogspot.com/2007/12/hack-cough-and-sachertorte.html
I also try hard not to waste anything — but it’s tough sometimes. It helps that our dogs will eat not-quite-spoiled leftovers, but still… I do make banana bread and cake. (The leftover peels can be used to polish boots.)
A lot of stews and soups will incorporate unrelated vegetable bits. Sour cream (milk, too) that’s starting to go still makes a wicked sour cream poundcake, and wonderful pancakes. (Good biscuits, too. And if you’re making biscuits and gravy, the leftover flour and bits from the biscuits goes straight into thickening the sausage gravy.)
Sometimes I deliberately make a series of meals, knowing that the leftovers from each will combine well into a final dish. (Like pizza, for example.) Then I can feel smug, knowing I didn’t waste a thing.
I have Tamar Adler’s book and love it! I haven’t read it in years, so time to crack it open and start rethinking how I use the food I have on hand. Thanks for the reminder.
Although Adler often cooks with high-end ingredients, she is also all about using every bit of every product. I really enjoy her book and sometimes read a chapter just for fun — while I eat lunch, of course. It makes whatever I’m eating taste better.
I do the same thing with my apple peels and cores! We love milk and drink 2%, so I buy full fat, take out a quart and replace it with water. I also add some water to the quart I took out. We drink it very cold anyway and don’t notice any difference with extending it with water.
A depression era recipe: My father used to take stale cornbread and pour milk over it for breakfast. Somedays that is all he had to eat (his family lost their farm in the Dust Bowl). He still loved that and preferred it over boxed cereal. His mother canned/dried every bit of food she could find, and sometimes that was all they had for dinner. Although they had moved to town, she kept chickens in the backyard, and one of the delights that Dad could remember was when a hen grew too old to lay, she was Sunday dinner. Red beans and cornbread, garden produce, and soup were the mainstays of the diet. Pretty healthy when you think about it.
Grandma had Grandpa make a food dehydrator consisting of two screens (salvaged of course) with a wooden frame. Food was all over the house. Dad said that they had to be careful where they stepped so as not to trample garden peas or carrots or beans. Nothing went to waste, absolutely nothing. Clothing was hand made, transportation was a mule instead of a school bus, and at the ages of 10, each child went out in the community to work for 50 cents a day.
This Thanksgiving I plan to give thanks for this resilient family who raised the man who became my father. It makes me angry to listen to people whining about their plight in life when all that is needed in most cases (I do recognize that some people have health problems) is a stiffer backbone and some gumption to make life better.
An interesting aside: Grandma kept a hoe next to her stove to deal with critters like mice and snakes. Dad said that she could kill a varmint including a rattlesnake with one swipe. Yikes!
I love your grandparents. It’s nice they shared their stories with you!
I prefer buttermilk on my cornbread. Sometimes I hide a wedge or muffin, so I can have mine… : )
I love your grandparents. It’s nice they shared their stories with you!
I prefer buttermilk on my cornbread. Sometimes I hide a wedge or muffin, so I can have mine… : )
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It was good to read this all again. I read where someone added a bit of hot water to the “empty” peanutbutter jar, shook it up and used it for peanut sauce flavor. This would be great on anything thai.
My dh is finally on board with saving all my scraps. Used to think I’d lost it until he retired in 2020 and saw prices I’m used to seeing.
Thanks again!
A lot of spouses are shocked by the cost of living once they slow down long enough to pay attention. And the peanut butter jar trick is a new one on me. Thanks for sharing it.
LOVE the peanut butter jar trick. Going to try on steamed broccoli.