groceries

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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“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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