Julia Scott, aka the Bargain Babe, believes in showing her gratitude. That’s why she organized the Frugal Festival in the Los Angeles area – to thank her readers.
This year, even non-L.A. readers can attend. Virtually speaking.
food
Lactobacillus love: Is it wrong?
I never cared much for yogurt. It generally seemed too sour to me, unless it was turned into tzatziki sauce on a gyro sandwich.
Apparently I just never had the right kind of yogurt.
I’d heard that the homemade version was better than the commercial kind. I’d also read about people making yogurt in a slow cooker. After looking online for instructions I settled on a slight variation of the process described at A Year of Slow Cooking.
And then I improved on it.
How to kick your Diet Coke addiction.
I can remember my grandfather grousing about the price of cigarettes. He swore he would quit when it went up past 35 cents a pack.
It did, and he did.
Now I know how he felt, although my particular vice is brown and fizzy and gives me reward points. At an Anchorage supermarket I was shocked to find Diet Coke selling for $8.19 per 12-pack. Thank goodness there’s no sales tax here.
That works out to 68 cents a can. It won’t break the bank. But really? More than eight dollars for a 12-pack? For something that I can’t even get drunk off of?
Stamp Out Hunger 2011: Spare a can for your fellow man.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 50 million people in this country are “food insecure,” i.e., they do not have regular access to adequate nutrition. More than 17 million of them are children.
You can help, at least a little.
Garbage in, supper out.
My apartment smelled delicious last night after I threw the following into a pot: chicken stock from the freezer, organic chicken stock from a carton, a bunch of spices, a little balsamic vinegar and half a can of tomatoes.
While it simmered, I diced carrots and cooked them along with frozen corn and peas. I added some pasta to the stockpot; after it was tender, I added about a third of a cup of leftover quinoa and the strained vegetables.
And wished it weren’t hours past suppertime. I wanted soup. But I had to wait until the next day, except for the few spoons that I tasted in order to, um, adjust the seasonings.
Do you scrape burned toast?
While making breakfast I scorched the toast. Automatically I scraped off the Cajun part before smearing on some butter and homemade jam. Then I started to wonder: How many people would have just thrown it in the trash and started over?
I grew up scraping toast. My family would have considered it wasteful to toss charred chow, given how simple it is to fix.
Recently a thread started up on Not MSN Money, a community formed by so-called “refugees” from MSN Money’s now-defunct message boards. The thread, “What do you do with the heels from bread?,” asked readers whether they use them or toss them.
Guess what the answers were.
Choosing what — and whether — to buy.
While visiting my dad recently I enjoyed a whole bunch of regional delicacies. Although I get irritated with those who claim it’s my job to uphold the economy by spending lots of money, I do believe in supporting small local businesses.
Or so I said every time I visited a South Jersey custard stand. Rationalization is a wonderful thing.
The Mensa member makes jelly.
Last week I got permission to pick grapes from a nearby fence. My first batch of jelly turned out a lovely wine-purple color and my apartment smelled like communion.
But it was a lot more work than blackberry jam: You pick, then crush, then simmer, then strain the pulp through a cheesecloth-lined colander, then add sugar and cook.
On Sunday I picked pretty much all the ripe grapes that were left. Yesterday I patiently pulled out the stems, made sure there was a one-to-four ratio of underripe to ripe fruit (I don’t use commercial pectin), washed them, crushed them, simmered them, and poured about half the results into a cloth-lined colander set over a bowl.
The yield was three cups of juice. I scraped out the drained pulp, poured the rest of the simmered grapes into the colander and walked away to do another chore.
And then.
Win a year’s worth of groceries! (Gotta love a contest that mentions “bacon sugar.”)
Ever thrown away a half-used food product because, well, you never got around to using it? So has 77% of the population, according to a survey done for the J.M. Smucker Company.
Don’t toss it, repurpose it – particularly if it’s a Hungry Jack brand item. The “Use Up the Box” contest will award a year’s worth of groceries to the best recipes that use the company’s instant mashed potatoes, pancake mix or syrup. Two caveats:
- Your recipe must use at least one cup of Hungry Jack instant mashed potatoes or pancake mix, or at least ¼ cup of Hungry Jack syrup.
- Your recipe cannot be “Doughnut Bites With Bacon Sugar,” because that’s already been done.
How “salvage” groceries can save your budget.
Anybody here eat food from the scratch-and-dent grocery?
Anybody here ever heard of the scratch-and-dent grocery?
If not, head over to MSN Money to read my latest Living With Less column. “Save with scratch-and-dent food” explains how salvage stores work and offers tips on buying from discount grocers and the dented-can bin, too. [Edited to add: Since MSN Money changed platforms, the pieces that I wrote are no longer available through conventional channels.]
Maybe the idea skeeves you right out: Eeeewwww, old food! But plenty of it isn’t old.