food

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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Junk food: Sometimes it just tastes good.

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(Happy Throwback Thursday! This post, originally published in 2014, celebrates something called National Junk Food Day. This year NJFD is on Friday, July 21, but my blog, my rules. DF and I are still eating quite well, thanks to frugal food hacks, our garden and our never-ending search for good deals. That doesn’t keep us from eating some junk now and then, though. Here’s why.)

It’s National Junk Food Day, apparently. And me without a single Moon Pie in the house.

In fact, I’ve eaten quite well today. Breakfast was oatmeal made with half yogurt whey and half water and flaxseed, plus half of the last banana in the bunch (shared with DF, because I’m kind like that).

For lunch I had rice topped with roasted vegetables – carrots, broccoli, Walla Walla onions and home-grown turnip, plus a dish of homemade yogurt mixed with a spoon of homemade orange marmalade and more of that flaxseed.

If only I’d known about the holiday. I might have gone to McDonald’s for breakfast and Burger King for lunch. Nothing says “bad for you” like a single meal that holds all calories needed for the entire day (with way too many in the form of grease).

On the other hand, I did eat white rice instead of brown. So am I junking out sufficient to the day?

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Low- or no-spend February 2023, Weeks 2 and 3. (I’m back.)

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Running a little late, obviously. I was already a bit tardy with the low- or no-spend February challenge update when a stomach bug made me almost completely work-avoidant. Many quarts of hydration and loads of hours of sleep later, I am much healthier. But catching up on belated assignments meant missing a week.

While mildly ill, I was reminded yet again that sickness means either spending way too much (medical co-pays, prescriptions, special foods) or feeling too crummy to spend much at all.

This time around it was the latter, fortunately. I was also reminded that I live in a low-maintenance prepper paradise where just about anything I needed was already in hand (and likely bought on sale or at Costco). Powerade? We got it. Canned chicken soup? Ditto. Generic ibuprofen PM, so I could sleep for 12 hours at a stretch? You bet.

That sleep was some of the coziest ever, thanks to the brand-new-to-us down comforter  whose frugal purchase was detailed in the first roundup. Reading some of the comments on that piece, I was impressed by a couple of readers’ stirring tales of thrift.

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Pinto bread: A weekly beans story.

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Earlier this month I mentioned a frugal challenge called “weekly beans.” DF and I have vowed to make beans the focus of at least one meal a week. In part that’s because of inflation, which is scaring our frugal pants off right now. Mostly, though, it’s because we have so many beans in storage.

Sure, they’ll keep indefinitely (or what passes for indefinitely at our ages). But why have them, so why not eat them? Especially since they were bought at a lower price than they go for now, and since they’re good for us, and since they’re so darned tasty?

The week after that post we used the seasoned black beans from the freezer for rice bowls and burritos. The last few spoons of beans went into a soup made from boiling bag broth, to add some additional heft (and nutrition) to the carrots, potatoes, onions and homegrown celery.

Last week I announced that I would cook a few cups of pinto beans. Most would go into the freezer for future chili. But some would go into a recipe that I couldn’t get out of my brain: pinto bean bread.

Once I saw that, I couldn’t un-see it. The same is true of things like ketchup cookies and Kool-Aid pickles. It isn’t just a good idea to try these things. It’s the law.

Pinto bean bread isn’t a new thing, but it was certainly new to me. This particular recipe came from a blog called A Farm Girl in the Making. The blogger, Ann Accetta-Scott, called it a “stick-to-your-bones and fill you up kinda recipe.”

She’s not wrong.

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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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