food

The birthday pear fiasco. (Free recipe inside!)

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Every year my daughter sends me a box of Harry & David pears for my birthday. The sweetness and juiciness of this fruit defies description. I look forward to them every year because you just can’t get pears like this in Anchorage. This year’s delivery was a little different, because the pears were delivered…frozen.

Not because they sat all day on the temps-in-the-teens porch, either. The delivery guy put the box directly into my hands. But when I opened up the gift, I found a batch of pearsicles.

Somewhere along the way, the fruit had encountered too-low temperatures – and there’s plenty of those on the Last Frontier. That’s never happened before with a Harry & David’s delivery.

As any savvy consumer would do, I phoned the company. Listened to the apologies, accepted a new delivery date for a new box of fruit.

And as any good frugalist would do, I wondered if I could salvage the old box. So I sliced one open and took a tentative nibble: hard and not sweet at all. Not surprising, since pears are picked under-ripe and allowed to develop to their full potential when customers want them.

While putting the pear’s core into the boiling bag, I decided that the rest of the fruit would not follow. I invented a new dessert* instead.

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Soup of the evening.

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DF was an alchemist this morning. Pulling containers and bags of stuff from the fridge and freezer, he filled the crockpot with:

Two kinds of broth (chicken-vegetable and seasoned pinto bean)

The drippings from a chicken he’d cooked on the Weber

Leftover pork loin (bought deeply discounted, of course)

Chopped-up garlic scapes (from the 2022 garden)

Diced onions

A handful of red and yellow pepper chunks (from the produce section’s “ugly but still good” shelf and cut up to freeze)

Homegrown celery (frozen), carrots and potatoes

The slow cooker began to emit a marvelously savory aroma as the day wore on. A little after 5 p.m., DF sliced up some of his easy rustic bread and announced that dinner was served. Outside it was 13 degrees and snowy, but indoors it was all warmth, comfort, and food that was prepared and shared with love.

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Easy(ish) food preservation.

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Recently a neighbor offered me a Lowe’s-sized bucket of apples and a gallon of pie cherries. The former became eight pints of applesauce and the latter a 10-inch pie. At some point that day I got a Facebook message from an old friend; while e-chatting, I learned she, too, was elbow-deep in food preservation that day: tomatoes, corn and green beans.

The coincidence made me grin, especially since her early life goal was to become a big-city journalist and live the single-gal life. (She did become a journalist, but spent most of her career in a small town.)

I asked her if she’d ever pictured herself using a pressure canner, or was that something our moms did. Her response: “We are lucky we grew up the way we did, so we can survive. I rarely shop but when I do it’s only for what I can’t grow myself.”

Those are thoughts I’ve voiced myself. Growing up fairly broke got me through single parenthood and a protracted midlife divorce. Now I’m no longer jobless or broke, but the soaring cost of food (and other stuff) is making me really nervous.

Not everyone is able to (or wants to) freeze, can or dehydrate. But hear me out.

For starters, think about broadening your definition of “preserving” food. In my opinion, bulk buying, stocking up during sales, and combining sales with rewards programs are all ways to “preserve” food. As in, you’re making sure you have the groceries you need at the best prices you can find.

You’re preserving your budget along with the food. The money you don’t spend on grub is money that can go toward other essentials. It’s unlikely that many of us will starve in this country, but a whole lot of people will be mightily inconvenienced, in a couple of ways: 

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Relishing summer’s bounty.

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A reader named Ringo apparently misses the garden updates, and asked whether we were still growing fruits and vegetables. Yes, and I’ve been taking pictures like mad – but still haven’t organized a major “looking at this year’s garden” post. As a stopgap, I’m going to write about relish.

Why relish? After all, we’ve frozen peas and raspberries, made rhubarb leather, and canned rhubarb compote and raspberry jam. We’ve eaten some very good tomatoes, lettuces, greens and strawberries. But the relish might be the best thing to come out of this summer, because we may have invented a new recipe.

Relish was never a huge thrill to me. It was just something to put on hot dogs and hamburgers. But last year our Chelsea Prize cucumbers, an English variety from Renee’s Garden Seeds, produced so heavily that I decided to look for a bonehead-simple relish recipe. (As a Renee’s Garden Seeds affiliate, I receive a small finder’s fee for sales made through my link.)

Found one, too. And then DF improved on it.

He improves on so many things in my life, as I’ve written before. When I described the relish recipe DF said, “You know what might be a good addition? Some jalapeño.”

We have pickled jalapeños in our fridge – a can we’d found in the dented-can bin, because that’s how we roll. So I diced up a bit of pickled pepper and added it to the mix.

The result was delicious: sweet yet pungent, mellow but with a peppery zing! that turns even the cheapest hot dogs into a decent meal.

Sometimes we nibble it by the forkful, like a salad. Which I guess it technically is, being made of cukes, onions, garlic, sugar, and mustard and celery seeds.

Our enjoyment of this humble condiment reminded me of a passage from Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine”: 

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Extreme frugality: Deal eyes.

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The first Tuesday of every month is a standing date for DF and me: “Senior Day,” when folks over the age of 55 get 10 percent off all Kroger brands. In keeping with our extreme frugality ethos, we cruised the entire store to look for special deals.

And boy, did we find one. The price was so startling that we did double and then triple takes: 1½-pound boxes of Kroger breakfast sausage links for 49 cents.

What made the deal extra-surprising is that the 1½-pound boxes of Kroger breakfast sausages right next to them cost $4.99 each. Examining the extreme-frugality version, we saw the reason for the startling differences in price: The cheaper sausage needed to be used or frozen that very day.

Fortunately, we now have two freezers: My niece replaced her 5-cubic-foot model with a much bigger deep-freeze, and gave us the old one. DF and one of his sons had picked it up just two days before.

So we bought a lot of sausage, including five boxes for my niece and her kids. This being Senior Day and the sausage being a Kroger product, we even got an additional discount. (Sort of. More on this below.)

The moral of the story: If you want to practice extreme frugality, you need to develop what I call “deal eyes.”

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Anatomy of a frugal freezer.

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Recently I did an article called “Anatomy of a frugal meal,” in which I detailed the various hacks that went into producing a last-minute meal that was both cheap and delicious. The reaction was so positive that I decided follow-up pieces might be in order.

The first idea came when I opened the freezer and realized how many things were engineered into that relatively small space. To be clear: This is the freezer atop our fridge, not the chest freezer. (But that one’s pretty full as well.)

As you’ll soon see, the fridge freezer has both good deals and odd stuff. Yet each item represents the best use of our food dollars, whether that’s growing it, buying it on sale or getting maximum use out of every bit of nutrition.

About that last: In a piece called “Extreme frugality: Use all the bits,” I pointed out that the price of eating hasn’t been this high for 10 years.

“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? (As) the per-plate price of food continues to climb, remember that preventing food waste helps make your groceries more cost-effective.”

Our freezer is crammed with cost-effective (and sometimes free) items that keep costs down and mealtimes delightful. Have a peek inside.

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How I got $50 worth of free food.

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Like many of you, I’m very nervous about fast-rising food prices. That’s why I was thrilled to get $50 worth of free food recently.

It was pretty simple: I cashed in some rewards program points for a $25 Kroger gift card and a $25 Safeway gift card. And I can’t truly explain just how happy that made me.

It felt a bit silly, to be honest. After all, the cupboard was by no means bare and I had money in my checking account. No one would have gone hungry had I not cashed in; as the king and queen of the stealth stock-up, DF and I are good for the basics. (So many basics.)

Fresh fruit and certain vegetables, though, and eggs, and milk for my oatmeal and to use for making yogurt? Those kinds of things need to be bought regularly. Hence the gift cards.

Flashing this scrip at the cash register felt great. Instead of spending money on the fresh stuff, I’d be sending those food dollars to the account where I keep my saved savings.

But I’m not writing about this to brag. I’m writing it to suggest that those of you with smartphones download some shopping apps and start earning. And if you’ve got a credit card that isn’t a rewards card, consider shopping for a new one.

Rewards points matter. My $50 head start at the grocery store says so.

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Anatomy of a frugal meal.

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It was close to suppertime, and no supper was in sight. We had three or four ounces of leftover pork tenderloin, bought deeply discounted and frozen until needed. I thought to slice it thinly, cook some rice and steam some peas from last year’s garden.

That would have been okay, but dull. Instead, I started pulling things out of the freezer:

A bag of chopped celery, also from last year’s garden

A bag of chopped red and yellow peppers, bought from the produce manager’s “ugly but still good” shelf

A bag of chopped onions – DF recently noticed an onion was starting to rot, so he cut and froze the still-good parts

A bit of turkey fat, from a bird we cooked a couple months ago; we save the fat from all pan juices, for cooking vegetables and making white sauce

Next, I put on a pot of rice (bought by the 50-pound bag at Costco) and melted the turkey fat, announcing that I planned to caramelize the vegetables and then add the diced tenderloin and some kind of sauce. DF diced the meat, then thinly sliced some carrots while I considered potential sauce ingredients.

What immediately jumped to mind was a bottle of General Tso’s sauce that I’d gotten free from our neighborhood’s Buy Nothing Facebook group. I poured maybe four tablespoons into a glass measuring cup, along with some rice vinegar (from an ancient bottle lurking in the lazy Susan) and a shake of powdered garlic (another Costco buy).

The slowly cooking onions, peppers, celery and carrot were making the kitchen smell divine. Maybe this olfactory distraction was what caused me to overdo the vinegar somewhat. It didn’t quite drown out the General Tso’s, but it didn’t do the sauce any favors, either. A few splashes from a jug of Langer’s pineapple-orange-guava juice (bought on sale, with a coupon) brought the vinegar into line and added a sweet hint of citrus.

Just typing this is making my mouth water. How about yours? 

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Stamp Out Hunger: Can you help?

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This Saturday, May 14, marks the return of the “Stamp Out Hunger” campaign. The food drive was canceled for two years due to the pandemic. But this Saturday (May 14), the National Association of Letter Carriers will once again be collecting nonperishables to distribute to area food banks.

Can you help?

The country’s largest single-day food drive, Stamp Out Hunger will take place in 10,000 towns and cities across the United States. Given the scary-high price of food lately, it might feel harder to contribute. But let’s reframe that: Given the scary-high price of food lately, donations are needed more than ever.

If you can spare a can for your fellow man, I promise you that you’ll feel good about it. But only if you can afford it. You should not donate if you’re having trouble keeping food on your own table.

Or maybe your pantry is pretty secure, thanks to your frugalvore tendencies. Could you part with a box of mac ’n’ cheese or a can of tuna?

Tuna is a much-requested item, as are any protein sources. Here’s what the NALC is asking people to leave by their mailboxes on Saturday:

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