food

(This is another in an occasional series about extreme frugality tactics that will save you money, while helping you live well. Here’s the backstory.)

Essayist and chef Tamar Adler has a fridge that sounds like mine. In her wonderful book*, “An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace,” she describes icebox shelves of “precariously full jars and tipping-over glasses unidentifiable liquids.” [As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small fee for items bought through my links.]

These jars and glasses hold things like olive oil saved from dried tomatoes or jarred anchovies, leftover artichoke broth, or “the lovely, oily liquid left once a vegetable is cooked…that has collected the imprint of the good butter and olive oil, cloves of garlic, lemon peels, sprigs of thyme, splashes of wine, cracks of pepper, and vegetable that created it.”

Our fridge holds numerous liquid assets, too. So does our freezer. Not only does our extreme frugality mindset not allow us to waste food, it’s great fun to find ways to use these “potions,” as Adler calls them.

The juices that drain from purees of homegrown rhubarb or pumpkin end up getting frozen for smoothies. Last summer we canned five quarts of sour cherries; when pie-making, we drink some of the liquid (apparently it’s a superfood) and froze a certain amount to use in our second Pilgrim pumpkin pie re-enactment.

When I’m at the tail-end of a pint of home-canned rhubarb or applesauce or jam, or a jar of supermarket salsa, or even a bottle of catsup, I add a little water to the container and give it a good shake. The result gets added to a freezer container marked “vegetable cooking water,” which also collects the residue of boiled spuds or our super-sweet garden peas. The liquid is used, eventually, for cooking the contents of the boiling bag: veg/fruit peelings, cores, leaves and such. (The link explains it all.)

Our freezer generally holds three or four boiling-bag consommés, usually labeled “vegetable broth.” A few are less generic: “mostly onion and potato,” say, or “peapod broth” (a sweet green liquid that makes a superlative soup when cooked with split peas, smoked ham and a mirepoix that includes our homegrown celery and carrots).

Sometimes we don’t freeze our potato cooking water; instead, we use it to stir up that bonehead-simple, impossibly delicious rustic bread. Whey that I drain from my homemade yogurt (I prefer a thicker, Greek-style product) also gets used in this bread dough.

A splash of that whey might also end up in oatmeal, chili, stew, stroganoff or curry, and the spud water could be pressed into service for making a mess of beans. Speaking of beans: Sometimes I cook a big batch of black beans with olive oil, garlic, cumin and cayenne, then drain them for freezing – and the liquid gets frozen separately. Its robust flavor turns a more timid onion-potato consommé into one heck of a hearty soup.

Does all this sound parsimonious? We prefer to think of it as getting every last bit of nutrition from every food we cook. With inflation romping all over the nation’s grocery bills, we want to use everything about the pig – including the squeal. 

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