food

7 uses for old/odd canned foods.

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I’m in the middle of a stealth trip to Phoenix to see my daughter. As always, I offer a second pair of hands for big chores* and/or to take on any tasks she wishes were done but hasn’t had the energy to complete. This time around, canned foods are involved.

Her small pantry cupboard has needed reorganizing for a long time. Some of the dried and canned foods in there were from my COVID-era visit. Did I throw them away? Nope. I made soup.

I took some of the oldest canned foods and drained, combined, spiced and slow-cooked them into a kind of prepper ragout. Use what you’ve got, right?

The stew included two cans of chicken tortilla soup, a can of crushed tomatoes, a can each of kidney and red beans, a can of whole-kernel corn and a small jar of turkey gravy. Abby was thawing some chicken for a lemon-garlic-yogurt dish, so I sliced off a bit to add to the crockpot. I cooked up some old** rice to add to each bowl, and garnished each serving with a dollop of yogurt or a bit of grated Monterey jack cheese.

Was it super-delicious? Only when I was really hungry.

Was it pretty good, though, along with being filling and frugal? You bet.

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How to get free eggs this month.

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I’m getting several dozen free eggs this month, and so can you. Or maybe you can, depending on how the deal shakes down for you. (More on that in a minute.) But at the very least you’ll get a very decent discount.

A shopping app called Ibotta is offering a $2.50 rebate on eggs every Friday in February. Obviously a dozen eggs costs a lot more than that these days; they’re currently $7.69 per dozen for a basic store-brand dozen. But by combining a few frugal hacks, I’ll get those cackleberries for zero dollars.

In fact, I’ll be earning money for buying them. Here’s how it will work:

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Frugal hack, frugal snack.

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Sometimes you just want a crunchy treat. Chips or pretzels come to mind, but have you noticed the prices lately?

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, a 16-ounce bag of potato chips now costs 47% more than it did five years ago. Here at Casa Frugal we have a frugal workaround: homemade croutons.

I started making them for salads, but often they would be gone before supper because DF favors them as a snack. And why not? They’re salty and crunchy and incredibly cheap. Croutons can be made while you’re roasting meat or baking a cake; if you’re not cooking, you can bake them in an air fryer or toaster oven.

I can get a loaf of day-old Italian bread for as little as 58 cents. That means almost a pound of snacking joy – and as the years have gone by, I’ve refined the technique. Here’s how we do it.

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Harvest home.

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For the past few weeks DF has been practicing the music for an ecumenical service that will take place near Thanksgiving. The song that sticks in my head most is “Harvest Home,” an 1844 hymn*. This quatrain in particular applies:

Come, ye thankful people, come

Raise the song of harvest home;

All is safely gathered in,

Ere the winter storms begin.

No storms yet, but it was 29 degrees when I got up the other day. We are thankful that all is safely gathered in.

It was a somewhat dismal summer for the second year in a row, and gardens were more than a month late in ripening. Some things didn’t produce well, or at all; for example, a local tree expert posted on Facebook that he didn’t get a single cherry from his five trees.

We didn’t get that many cherries ourselves: 28, to be exact. Then again, this is only the second year the tree’s been in the ground. Popular fruit-tree wisdom holds that “the first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps and the third year it leaps.” However, I can’t hope for too much in 2025 because a moose got into the yard last week. It harried all three of our fruit trees before DF could scare it off the property by banging a hammer on a shovel.

This isn’t the moose that got into the yard, but I bet he knows the one who did.

Fortunately, we’d already harvested the apples the previous week. Moose can be real jerks.

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Strawberries are in season.

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Let me be clear: In no universe would I mix tomato paste with strawberries. I’m simply using the can to illustrate the size of some of this year’s fruit. Aren’t they lovely?

How I wish blogs could share aromas, because our house smells marvelous right now. We are eating all the strawberries we want – and we want a lot of them – yet still have leftovers. The question was, “How can we preserve them without freezing it or turning it into jam?” The answer was, “Dehydrate them.”

Thus far we’ve dried a quart of these little beauties (see below), which means we sliced and dried about four quarts. That sounds onerous, but it really wasn’t. DF and I sit across from each other at the table, slicing and chatting, until the dehydrator is full or until we run out of berries, whichever comes first. Some people sit around watching TV or playing board games. We slice berries.

Why do this? Because we want every berry to have had a reason to ripen. I have never tasted berries like these before, either in New Jersey (where we picked them ourselves) or from Seattle farm markets. They’re as sweet and tender as the memory of first love and, as DF’s younger son marveled, “They’re red all the way through!”

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Frugal hack: Grocery substitutions.

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I discovered a great frugal hack the other day while trying to use a “weekly digital deal” coupon at Fred Meyer. The store, which is part of the Kroger chain, offered six-packs of 16-ounce soft drinks* for $3.49.  

Some days I don’t drink soda at all, and some days I’ll have two. Lately I’ve bought bottles rather than cans, so I don’t have to drink an entire serving at once. Tightly capped, a Diet Pepsi will hold over until the next day.

When I see a price like this one, I limit out until the next big sale. Unfortunately, the store didn’t have any Diet Pepsi. It had every other Pepsi flavor imaginable (and some I don’t like to think about**), but not the one I wanted.

No Diet? No problem! I headed off to another Fred Meyer and found the same empty spot on the shelves. A grocery manager looked everywhere and sadly reported they, too, were out. Damn those weekend barbecues and salmon-fishing trips!

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Senior Tuesday takedown.

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The boneless/skinless chicken breasts featured at the supermarket entrance made me feel a little queasy today. Not because they looked bad; on the contrary, they looked fresh and appetizing. It was the $8.49-per-pound price tag that made me want to lie down with a cold cloth on my eyes. After all, it was Senior Tuesday and I’d hoped for some low prices to go with the extra 10% off store brands.

Good deals – really good deals – were about to be discovered, in two batches. That led DF and me to a new rule for bargain hunting, which I’ll explain below.

The total bill was $77.83 for a shopping trip that included 51 pounds of fresh meat, 23 cans of corned beef hash (more on that in a minute), salsa, sour cream, three pounds of bacon and a big bottle of creamer.

It was the meat that made us happiest, however. DF was so tickled by the markdowns that he added up the weights and noted the original prices vs. what we paid. Here’s how it all shook down:

  • Five pork roasts, ranging from 3¾ to 4½ pounds, for $1.06 each (96 cents after the senior discount)
  • Five whole chickens, two of them organic, averaging five pounds each, for 96 to 98 cents apiece (86 to 88 cents with discount)
  • Two packages of organic boneless/skinless chicken breasts, totaling 5.65 pounds, for $1.95 each ($1.69 with discount)
  • Five one-pound packages of Angus beef burgers with barbecue seasoning for 98 cents each (88 cents with discount)
  • Three pounds of bacon, which would normally total $18.87, for $12.02 thanks to store coupons

The 51 pounds of meat (excluding the bacon) would have originally cost $233.72. After the senior discount, we paid $17.97 for 51 pounds of animal protein.

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Always check the register receipt.

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Recently I wrote a piece about why you should always check the clearance section. The other day, DF and I were reminded why you should always check your register receipt, too.

While shopping on Senior Tuesday (10 percent off all Kroger brands), we noticed that boneless, skinless chicken breasts were on sale at an almost agreeable price. Since I wanted to try a new recipe (butter chicken in the slow cooker), we decided to spring for a package rather than buy a whole chicken and cut it up.

(Maybe not the most frugal move, but he recently had a major health issue and since then we have sweated far less small stuff. Besides, it would be loads cheaper than going to an Indian restaurant.)

Generally I do check the register receipt; in fact, I tend to watch items as they get rung up, to make sure that sale prices show up correctly. On that day, however, we were both a bit distracted. At one point he did glance at the electronic readout and said, “Wait – did that say 99 cents a pound? … No, I guess that was the discount per pound.”

When we got home I checked the receipt to see how much we’d saved overall – and noticed that the boneless, skinless chicken had indeed rung up at 99 cents a pound. D’oh!

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Moose in the curriculum.

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Some high-school biology classes require you to dissect a frog. In Alaska, the stakes — and the steaks — are a lot bigger.

The following video, shot at Chugiak High School, shows freshman science students field-dressing a bull moose. Well, mostly field-dressing it: The animal had already been gutted before being transported to the school. 

Warning: If you can’t stand the sight of a dissected frog, you might want to skip the video. It’s not gruesome — no guts, remember? — but it’s graphic.

Chugiak is an unincorporated community about 20 miles north of Anchorage. Technically it’s part of the municipality of Anchorage, but both it and nearby Eagle River have their own identities (and zip codes). One of the Chugiak High School’s science teachers decided to go beyond preserved (or plastic) frogs to teach, uh, gross anatomy.

 

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Life as a personal grocery shopper.

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We found chicken for less than 12 cents per pound yesterday, a discovery too good to keep to ourselves. Instead, I did what I always do: Texted my niece and my neighbor to see how many packages they might want. While I never wanted to be a personal grocery shopper, I can’t keep deals like that to myself.

Those poultry deals were five-pound-plus packages of chicken drumsticks for 64 cents, and boneless, skinless, organic chicken breasts (2½ to 2¾ pounds) for $1.28 apiece.

We left the store with a lot of chicken. It helped them, and it helped us reach our goal of getting a free turkey* through a store offer.

Sharing deals is a sort of frugal ministry for me. Maybe it could be for you, too.

I’m not saying you must do this every time you hit the store. Or maybe at all, if it doesn’t fit your current life. But given how expensive food is getting, think what a gift this could be to others. 

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