groceries

“Stealth stock-up”: A budget saver.

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Food prices rose 8.8 percent between March 2021 and March 2022 – and the latest wrinkle is a mix of labor issues and “idle trains,” according to Reuters.

One way to fight food inflation is to stock your pantry and freezer with the most affordable food you can find today, before prices go up tomorrow.

Not everyone can afford to buy a side of beef or 50 pounds of pinto beans all at once.  But a tactic I call “stealth stock-up” just might save your food budget.

It’s pretty simple: Watch the sales flyers, and when your favorite brand** of pasta or cereal or tuna goes on sale, buy two instead of one. Buy three, if you can swing it.

That’s not to say you can’t also stock up on non-sale items, especially if they’ve been hard to get due to supply-chain issues. But the idea is to stretch available dollars and stash as much food as you can. Sale prices let you do both.

Already shopping this way? That doesn’t surprise me, since frugal people tend to read this site. It just makes sense to pay less.

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13 ways to save money on bread.

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We save money on bread by making our own, with flour and yeast bought in bulk at Costco. Each time, DF writes the date and the price paid on the bag. (He saves those 50-pound sacks to use as yard waste receptacles.)

That’s how we know that between March 2021 and March 2022, the price went up 51.5 percent. In one year! And that’s why I suggested an article for Money Talks News called “13 ways to beat the rising cost of bread.”

This baker’s dozen of ideas includes our rustic bread fetish, of course. It also features tips for those who don’t bake. One or more of these tips could help you save money on bread, too, so check it out.

Some readers have specifically asked me to run links to pieces I’ve written* lately, which is why I’m doing this roundup. Note: Some of my recent work is either fairly boring (useful, but eye-glazing) or else it’s unsigned. Thus these roundups focus on stuff that won’t put people to sleep, or out the folks for whom I ghost-write.

Another piece for Money Talks News is a topic that regular readers might find familiar. “11 ways to turn table scraps into delicious meals” starts with a sobering stat from the U.S. Department of Agriculture: Almost one-third of the U.S. food supply winds up going to waste. Maybe more, since this was an older study.

So what do frugal people do? Repurpose it! Boiling bags, gleaning, liquid assets, turning “bad” dairy into good ingredients and other tactics help us get the most out of every ingredient. 

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Extreme frugality: Be a frugalvore.

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(Happy Throwback Thursday! Given how expensive food has gotten lately, I thought a little shopping reminder would be in order. This piece, which originally ran on Feb. 7, 2021, is one  in an occasional series of articles focusing on saving serious dough. A little background can be read here.)

The “locavore” movement is based on the idea of eating only foods grown within a 100-mile radius of where you live. I’ve got my own version, which I call being a “frugalvore.” It’s pretty simple: You shop mostly (or completely) based on what’s on sale that week.

This isn’t exactly a new idea. Plenty of people shop that way their whole lives. But it might be new to you if you grew up in a home where no one read the supermarket ads, created menus and then worked to get the most bang for each grocery buck.

Frugalvorism both simplifies and complicates your approach to eating. On the one hand, it’s easier to shop because you plan menus around that week’s most affordable foodstuffs.

However, if you’re the kind of person who always shopped by grabbing whatever looked good, then you’ll need to rethink your supermarket habits.

Fortunately, it’s fairly simple. Not always easy, but simple. 

 

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Two quick grocery hacks.

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DF and I didn’t plan to buy eggs or meat today at the supermarket. But we wound up using two quick grocery hacks that saved us quite a bit of money.

While these quick grocery hacks are recurring deals, they’re not always available. We’ve made it a habit always to look for them, though, and today is one of those days that paid off.

The first is to watch for “repack” eggs. Sometimes one or more eggs in a carton will crack and the dozen is unsellable as-is.

An enterprising dairy manager simply repacks the unbroken eggs into cartons with “Grade B” stamped on them.

Some of these cartons are just standard white eggs. Other times, it’s quite the mix of cackleberries: medium-sized, huge, white, brown, bearing an “EB” (Eggland’s Best)

Sometimes I think the B stands for “broken.” Other times I think it stands for “better deal” – because non-organic eggs usually cost from $1.99 to $2.99; those Eggland’s Best are currently $3.99 a dozen. The repack eggs cost 99 cents at one store and $1.29 to $1.49 a dozen at the other. On this trip we bought two dozen.

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Extreme Frugality: Use all the bits.

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Every time we cut into a loaf of that super-simple rustic bread, we wind up with bread crumbs. As I swept them off the butcher-block work station one day, I remembered a scene from Zola’s “Germinal,” a realistic (and depressing!) book about 19th-century French coal miners. As the eldest daughter makes sandwiches for everyone to take to work, her 11-year-old brother, Jeanlin, gathers up the crumbs and puts them into his bowl of coffee. Now that’s some extreme frugality.

I figured that what’s good enough for Jeanlin is good enough for me. So I started saving the crumbs.

Before you think that I’ve finally gone ’round the bend in terms of economy, or that I’ve become a parody of frugality, hear me out.

At first I made fun of it myself. Early on I displayed probably one-sixteenth of an inch of breadcrumbs in the plastic container, and told DF that in another seven or eight months we might have enough to make a batch of meatballs. A small batch.

But as regular readers know, DF and I have found a ton of ways to save on food  and are always looking for new tactics. This isn’t because we’re afraid we’ll go hungry – it’s just another part of our frugal ethos. Each piece of food represents not just money but also resources: Think of the dollars and fossil fuels that went into planting, irrigating, spraying, harvesting, packaging and transporting the elements of our meals, and of the dollars we spend to get those elements.

So why not use all of it? Especially if there’s a way to bring Harry Potter into it? 

 

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How to save money on meat.

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The price of meat is a little terrifying right now. Before you respond with how much cheaper and healthier vegetarianism is, please don’t. We eat a ton of veggies, grains and beans, but we also like meat. For us, the never-ending question is how to save money on meat.

DF is particularly fond of bacon, eating it at two or three breakfasts a week if he can. The price of these pig mornings has cost a lot more lately; according to this article, bacon has gone up 17 percent in the past year. (Seems like more than that up here in the home of the Alaska Gouge.) Which is why I was delighted to be able to buy Oscar Mayer bacon for $3.62 per pound earlier this week.

That wasn’t the rack rate, of course. Some frugal hacks were required. In this article I’m detailing those hacks, for two reasons:

To remind readers that finding the best prices may take a bit of work – but not that much work, and

To encourage readers to look for better deals of their own, vs. feeling anxiety at the cost of meat (and everything else). Given how fast prices are rising, it behooves us all to do a bit of research rather than just buy without thinking and cry without ceasing.

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Attack of the greenhouse tomatoes.

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Most of the year we don’t eat tomatoes, because we know what they should taste like. Oh, we’ll buy a few Roma tomatoes to cut up into salads, but they just plain don’t taste like much.

I once described the flavor and texture as “ketchup-tinged oatmeal,” and I stand by that description today.

At this time of the year, though, we can have all the tomatoes we want. In fact, we have trouble keeping up.

Even eating them up to three times a day does nothing more than keep us from losing love apples to rot. The horror.

Which is why I’m thinking of it as an attack, a la “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.” (As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small affiliate commission on items purchased through my links.)

My niece and great-niece came over for a lunch of Black Prince and Cherokee Purple tomatoes on DF’s fresh rustic bread with mayonnaise, some of our Red Sails lettuce and crisp bacon, plus fresh cucumber slices on the side. (More on those in a minute.)

This has been a year for some weirdly shaped tomatoes. That one in the illustration was uglier than sin, and twice as satisfying. Some of them look normal, but we’ve had quite a few gnarled behemoths that are hard to slice, but completely worth the effort. The flavor just knocks us out.

It’s hard to describe the taste of these heirloom varieties: sweet as sugar but with an underlying tomato tang. There’s a reason they charge $10 a pound for them at the farmers market here in Anchorage.

And there’s a reason we refuse to buy them. In part it’s because we don’t want to pay $10 a pound for meat, let alone tomatoes. It’s also because we can grow these beauties ourselves, and for a few short weeks we can gorge ourselves. More than a few short weeks, actually, because when the weather gets too chilly we’ll bring in all the greenies and let them ripen. Usually we finish them all by the beginning of December, at which point we start to dream tomato dreams once more. 

 

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7 ways to get free groceries.

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Back in July 2019, a member of my neighborhood Buy Nothing Facebook group posted about an estate sale that wanted to dump all the kitchen stuff. Free groceries! Woo hoo!

The catch: You had to take all of it, or you couldn’t have any of it.

That didn’t bother DF a bit. He cheerfully brought home several of those large plastic totes full of nonperishables: soups, relishes, pickles, marshmallow fluff, Minute Rice, dried beans, canned milk, Stove-Top stuffing mix, jams and jellies, other stuff I’m probably forgetting and – our favorite – a 33.8-ounce bottle of vanilla.

The vanilla was our favorite part of the score. Have you priced that stuff lately? On Amazon it seems to range from $1.03 to $4.99 per ounce. [As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small fee if someone shops through my links.]

 

 

Getting this vanilla means two years’ worth of free flavorings for Lightning Cake, cookies, brownies, and tapioca, rice and coconut bread puddings. It’s unlikely that most people will score a find like the estate sale. But I have gotten free food in other ways, too – and maybe some of these tactics could help you build a deeper pantry.

 

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Extreme frugality: Putting food by.

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We spent parts of yesterday and today putting food by. Specifically, we turned seven or eight pounds’ worth of rhubarb into fruit leather.

First we chopped and simmered, then let the soupy stuff drain through a pair of colanders before glopping it into the dehydrator. We saved some of the juice to drink as a tonic; anything that tart has to be good for us, right?

The rest of the juice was frozen into chunks (which I insist on referring to as “Rhubik’s Cubes”) and set aside for my homemade smoothies. Made with free rhubarb and raspberries, marked-down “red band” bananas, half a cup of bulk-bought rolled oats, an egg and a big scoop of my homemade yogurt, these things are cheap as well as healthy. (And since I’m having the second part of my dental implant work done next month, I foresee a few liquid meals in my future.)

The last of the fruit leather finished dehydrating this morning. Like the other batches, it was rolled up inside paper scavenged from two sources: cut-apart cereal box liners and waxed paper saved from my sister’s annual tin of homemade peanut brittle. Flavored with sugar and a bit of ginger, the leather is a tangy, chewy treat that I must stop sampling or there will be none left for winter.

A previous batch of rhubarb had been turned into a compote sealed in pint jars, to be added to future dishes of yogurt. Not sure how many hours it took to do all this, but to us it doesn’t matter. We don’t put a dollar value on our gardening and food preservation, for two reasons: 

  • We don’t get paid for every minute we exist, and
  • We enjoy the process of turning home-grown produce into something we can enjoy next winter.

Some people would rather buy their veggies than grow them. I get that. Not everyone has the physical ability, the time or the real estate to garden. And fact is, the average person buys most of their stuff. We pay someone else to raise meat and produce, bake our bread, sew our clothes, build our homes.

For us, gardening is entertainment – and we don’t have to dress up or drive anywhere to enjoy it. Watching tiny green shoots grow into delicious foodstuffs is a reliable annual miracle. If you’ve ever grown so much as a pot of herbs on the windowsill, you understand what I mean.

Preserving the results is a natural progression. Making raspberry jam, cutting up carrots for canning, picking peas to freeze, plucking greens to dehydrate, slicing beets to pickle, peeling apples to cook into sauce – it’s all fun for us, even when we get tired toward the end.

The greeny smell of dehydrating kale, the sneezy scent of cloves, the sharp bite of vinegar, the soothing aroma of slowly simmering apples all keep us going: This is sustenance. This is satisfaction. This is safety.

 

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Bringing in the weeds.

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We had a cooler-than-usual May, which made us reluctant to put things out early. It’s only in the past week that our planted lettuces were big enough to start semi-harvesting.

(Why “planted” lettuces? Because we’ve been startled by rogue lettuces – and Asian greens and quinoa – popping up everywhere. More on that in a minute.)

Longing to eat something, anything, that was fresh, I started bringing in the weeds in the first week of June. Some were actual weeds, such as the fireweed in the illustration. Epilobium angustifolium was consumed by Alaska Natives long before we got here. I’d been reading about its edible qualities and decided to give it a shot because nothing else was fresh at that point. (Except dandelions, and I find them too bitter.)

So I picked some of the smaller plants, sautéed them in olive oil with garlic and ate them on some of DF’s amazing rustic bread. They tasted mostly like oil and garlic. No surprises there. Underlying it was a slight sweetness, similar to cooked spinach.

Here’s an amuse-bouche view of how they turned out:

At first glance, my friend Linda B. thought it looked like an insect. It does, kind of.

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