food

Snow and soup.

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All the snow had melted. The ground was clear for probably 10 days. Teeny-tiny plants were popping up in the bed next to the house, self-seeded from either the spinach or the Asian greens that grew there last year. Maybe both.

Close by the seedlings, dandelions loomed like Godzilla over the population of Tokyo. Eventually they’ll get pulled out, but for now I just let them grow so I could pick them for the boiling bag.

Here are there in this south-facing bed, the rhubarb was peeking up above the soil. The deep pinky-red spears and low, dark-green leaves made a stark contrast to the dark, wet soil. It made me think about lovely cobblers, and batches of compote for my homemade yogurt, and maybe a few rhubarb-raspberry pies.

Speaking of raspberries: They weren’t exactly budding, but they were definitely thinking about it. Although DF cut them back quite severely last fall, I was pretty sure they’d rally the way they did the last time he implemented his scorched-earth pruning policy.

And then the snow came back.

 

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12 ways to save money on groceries.

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If you want to balance your budget, start by looking for ways to save money on groceries. You probably can’t negotiate your rent/mortgage or car payment downward, but you can find wiggle room in your food bill. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nearly one-third (32.7 percent) of our food dollars go toward meals prepared somewhere else.

Saving money on groceries means different things to different households. Not everyone lives near a warehouse store, or can afford to belong to one. Nor can everyone grow a garden or visit you-pick farms.

Fortunately, plenty of other ways exist to keep food prices as low as possible. This article’s focus is on getting food at low prices.

Use some (or all!) of the following hacks to eat well without breaking the budget.

Look for “manager’s specials”

Not store-wide sales, mind you. No, these are items that are close-dated or otherwise no longer welcome at the store. You’ll generally save 50 percent and sometimes more.

Meat and dairy items need to be used or frozen quickly, of course. I grab half-price milk whenever I see it, for making yogurt, but milk can also be frozen. Ask the dairy and meat departments at what time(s) of day these marked-down products are put out.

With regard to shelf-stable specials, sometimes it’s because they’re holiday items (canned pumpkin, chocolate bunnies) that have to move along. It might also be a new product that didn’t do as well as the manager hoped, which is how we scored a dozen boxes of mango-flavored gelatin for practically nothing. (We prepared some of it with apple juice instead of cold water and called it “mangle” Jello.)

Sometimes the manager’s special rack includes scratch-and-dent stuff, such as canned goods that have been dropped by shoppers or boxed/packaged items with torn or crushed corners. We’ve gotten some extremely good prices this way; last year we found several giant cans of pickled jalapenos for less than a dollar apiece.

Note: According to the USDA you shouldn’t buy any can that has visible holes or punctures; is swollen, leaking or rusted; is crushed/dented badly enough to prevent normal stacking or opening with a manual can opener; or has a dent so deep you can lay your finger into it.

 

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Honey-mustard pretzels: An easy, frugal snack.

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Lately we’ve been playing around with recipes for honey mustard pretzels, thanks to having scored one-pound bags of Snyder’s of Hanover pretzels for 50 cents apiece at the bakery outlet.

We’ve experimented with proportions and also the type of pretzel: minis, nuggets and “snaps” (the square ones that look like tic-tac-toe grids — see illustration at left). Yesterday DF came up with what I think is the simplest and most flavorful honey mustard pretzels recipe in the whole wide world.

In the interest of scientific discovery, perhaps you should try it yourselves.

Here’s how:

Melt two tablespoons of butter. (We use a Pyrex cup in the microwave.)

Add three tablespoons of honey and three tablespoons of prepared mustard.

Stir in one teaspoon powdered mustard, a shake of garlic powder and a splash of Worcestershire sauce.

Pour one pound of pretzels into a large bowl and drizzle the sauce over them, stirring constantly until evenly distributed. (A rubber or silicon spatula works well.)

Coat two or three cookie sheets with cooking spray and spread the pretzels as evenly as possible. Bake at 250 degrees for at least one hour, stirring every 15 minutes. If they still feel super-sticky, bake them a little longer. (We have left them in for 75 minutes.)

Break up the pretzels with a pancake turner or your brave, brave hands. (Pro tip: It’s more fun to lick your fingers than a hot metal utensil.)

 

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Enchilada sauce and the domino effect.

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On Sunday I finally cooked the red enchilada sauce I’d been planning to make for ages. Generally I do a double batch and freeze half, because the recipe calls for three ounces of tomato paste and the cans are all six ounces.

Make ahead and save, right? Especially when you see how much you save: The red enchilada sauce at the store cost $2.79 to $4.49. By comparison, this recipe cost me maybe 50 cents (and probably not even that much) for more than four cups of the stuff. In part that’s because I used clearance-rack tomato paste (29 cents a can) and cumin and chili powder from Costco-sized jars.

Better still: I can control how much sodium goes in, and I can tinker the recipe a bit. For example, I added a little unsweetened cocoa powder for richness and replaced the water with broth made with chicken bouillon. But since both these additions had also been found on the clearance rack, they didn’t boost the total cost by much.

Naturally the flavor of the homemade stuff is so much better than the canned variety. No preservatives, less salt and it’s amazingly easy to make. We’re taking 10 minutes, start to finish. The recipe is from a delightful cookbook called “Budget Bytes: Over 100 Easy, Delicious Recipes to Slash Your Grocery Bill in Half.” (You can also access it at the BB website.)

Bonus: Finally making time to do the enchilada sauce led to all sorts of shenanigans. In a good way.

 

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The inadvertent Pi Day.

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Yesterday found me waxing housewife-ish because DF was on his way home from a nine-day trip. After long trips I love walking into our home to find out he’s cleaned or boiled up some whale chunks. Thus I make it a point to return the favor when he goes out of town.

For starters, I washed the sheets and hung them on the line, along with the blanket and comforter. Next I opened some windows and briefly aired out the place, taking advantage of high-30s temps and a mild breeze.

Finally I baked one of his favorite dishes: homemade turkey pie. It’s kind of a pain to make because it has so many moving parts (more on that below), and this one was even more challenging because I used a bigger, deeper pie pan than usual. Since I had pastry dough left over I decided to make a raspberry-rhubarb pie as well.

Believe it or not, I’d completely spaced that today is Pi Day.

 

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Eat the cake.

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Last week I saw a Facebook meme that said, “Life is short. Take the trip. Buy the shoes. Eat the cake.”

I’ve set up a trip, to the American Society of Journalists and Authors conference in New York in mid-May. And I baked a dessert that my mother used to make for us: Sour Cream Chocolate Cake.

Two out of three ain’t bad.

 

The cake recipe was already on my mind, because of a batch of homemade yogurt gone awry. The starter was on the very edge of nope-buy-a-new-one. Because I wanted to believe it was okay, I used it. Magical thinking wasn’t enough, however, and the yogurt turned out smelling something like bread and something like beer. It shouldn’t smell like either of those things.

 

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High food bills? The Grocery Budget Makeover can help.

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Erin Chase, the woman who proved that $5 meals can be  both healthy and appealing (even to kids), is at it again. To promote another session of her five-week “Grocery Budget Makeover” online course, Chase is offering a free video workshop.

The entrepreneur is mom to four boys and also the creator of (among other things) the $5 Dinners concept, a class on Instant Pot cooking and a series of cookbooks. The goal of her Grocery Budget Makeover is to teach consumers how to cut their food spending in half.

Specifically, she wants to “change the way you shop for groceries – forever.”

The free workshop – actually a handful of short videos – is designed to give you a taste (so to speak) of the course.

 

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Shopping the office potluck. Plus: Book discounts.

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The following post is based on an excerpt from “Your Playbook For Tough Times, Vol. 2: Needs And Wants Edition.” I’m offering holiday discounts on this book and the first one; see the end of the post for details.

Many years ago I dropped into a different department at my workplace, to ask a question. That section’s holiday potluck was winding down, and the ebullient partygoers invited me to help myself.

My eyes lit upon the nearly empty ham platter. “Has anyone claimed the bone?” I asked.

Apparently no one had. “Go ahead and take it,” I was told. “Do you have a dog?”

“No, but I’ve got a pound of pinto beans and an onion.”

 

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The quinoa baffler.

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Tonight’s dinner featured quinoa eaten within 30 feet of where it was grown. Not too many Alaskans – or too many U.S. citizens, actually – can say that.

This was our first year of growing quinoa and it did quite well. It grew tall quickly and never actually flowered, but its colorful seed heads were lovely to look upon.

What we ate was based on a recipe called Chicken Enchilada Quinoa Bake. “Based on” because I nixed the cheese (DF isn’t a fan) and also the green chiles (didn’t have any). The enchilada sauce* was homemade, from the Budget Bytes recipe, because it’s so easy and so cheap to make.

The cheese- and chile-less version was delicious. What made it even more special was how we got the seeds from the stalks. We’d done some by hand, which is a laborious (though oddly contemplative) process. At some point DF suggested we look up quinoa harvesting machines. We found one, too, but the cost was $899.

So we kept looking – and found the Rube Goldberg-esque design of our dreams.

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What’s your splurge?

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A woman I know spent part of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend payout ($1,100 this year) on herself. She described it as a “splurge,” but we’re not talking mani-pedis, airline tickets or high-octane chocolate.

Instead, she plunked down some of those annual bucks for a pair of items that are simultaneously sensible and self-indulgent:

A new set of flannel sheets, and

One of those Instant Pot* cookers.

Both are useful and both were on sale (with in-store coupons to boot), making each splurge doubly sensible. Yet they’re also supremely self-indulgent because they’ll make the winter so much cozier.

 

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