groceries

Spring, and cake, and springy cake.

by

Spring has sprung,

The grass has riz,

I wonder where the flowers is?

That’s a little poem my dad used to recite when I was a kid. He was also fond of:

Spring has sprung,

The grass is riz,

The bird is on the wing.

Isn’t that absurd?

I always thought the wing was on the bird.

Trouble is, spring hasn’t sprung – not reliably, anyway. As I noted in “Snow and soup,” we’ve been having back-and-forth weather. One day it’s so sunny and mild that it’s 95 degrees in our closed-up greenhouse. Then it drops into the 30s at night and only grudgingly inches back into the 40s the next day.

Today my niece sent a photo of a strawberry blossom in the bed next to her foundation. Woo hoo! And when will our less-protected beds follow suit?

While snow meant soup, sorta-spring has meant cake. I may have a new favorite. And it’s frugal cake.

 

Read more

Snow and soup.

by

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.

 

Read more

12 ways to save money on groceries.

by

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.

 

Read more

High food bills? The Grocery Budget Makeover can help.

by

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.

 

Read more

Shopping the office potluck. Plus: Book discounts.

by

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.”

 

Read more

The quinoa baffler.

by

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.

Read more

Adventures in steamed bread.

by

bread-steamingAs part of my low-maintenance prepper campaign, I’ve been thinking about ways we could cook if a major earthquake led to a loss of electricity. We’ve got a burn barrel and a Weber outside, and if the gas were still on we could manually light the stovetop (but not the oven).

We’ve got tons of staples on hand and could likely outlast a major emergency – even if all our shiftless relatives showed up – because we have a fireplace insert plus loads of canned goods, flour and beans. One thing we couldn’t do easily? Bread.

Thus I’ve been researching recipes like stovetop corn pone, tortillas and other relatively simple staffs of life. When I recently got a copy of “The Kitchen Stories Cookbook: Comfort Cookin’ Made Fascinating and Easy,” my eyes fell upon a recipe for Boston brown bread.

The result is literally steaming in the photograph. (DF snapped the picture shortly after the first pieces were cut.) It was the perfect antidote to a cold winter night when paired with a thick soup made from boiling-bag broth, a pint of home-canned turkey, and whatever vegetables we had on hand.

My theory is that fresh bread, or even fresh tortillas, can make an ordinary meal – or an emergency one – seem much nicer than it actually is.

Read more

Physics and frugality.

by

thRecently I had fun trying to recognize the desiccated ingredients of the boiling bag I was emptying into the slow cooker. After a few minutes of frugality CSI (cooking scene investigation), I identified the following:

Onion skins, Asian greens (they’ve gone to seed so I’m removing the last small leaves), teeny-tiny green apples (to avoid stressing our newly planted trees, DF took off most of the fruits), carrot tops and greens, potato peels, and small green tomatoes (jumpers from our greenhouse plants).

Also cucumber peels (from fruits too high in cucurbitacin to eat as-is), red romaine leaves (too bitter after bolting for salads, but fine for broth), green-bean ends, squash blossoms (from our blue Hubbard plant), dandelion greens and a little chickweed (because revenge).

After adding a freezer container of vegetable cooking water – from corn, peas, lentils, potatoes and green beans – I had quite the potage de garbage going. Cooked and drained, it smelled a lot like Campbell’s vegetable soup and tasted even better.

All this recycling reminded me of the notion that energy can’t be created or destroyed, but rather transformed from one form to another. In our home, food gets created – we grow the stuff as well as cook it from supermarket ingredients – but it never really goes away.

 

Read more

Paying less for handwashing.

by

thRecently the two bottles of Method foaming hand soap in our bathroom were on their last few squirts. They’d been there since I moved in almost three years ago. (Tempus fugit!)

We also keep bar soap by the bathroom sinks, which is probably why the bottles lasted for three years’ worth of handwashing. The foamy stuff is undeniably easier to use than the bars, though.

It’s also easier to use than regular liquid soap. You get exactly what you need, vs. squirting out a surplus that either slides off and down the drain or that takes too long for an impatient child to wash off all the way.

Neither DF nor I are exactly children. (Chronologically, anyway.) But we’ve been watching his granddaughter about once a week and my two great-nephews also visit. Given that children are two-legged petri dishes when it comes to the latest viruses, I’d like to make it as easy as possible for them to wash their hands.

Since I’d remembered reading a recipe for foam-refill soap, I went prospecting online rather than pay full price. Even if it were a relatively small saving I thought I’d give it a try.

Good news: It was an easy frugal hack.

Better news: We already had what we needed on hand.

Best news: The saving was actually pretty decent.

 

Read more

Free health screenings and more.

by

thA little news you can use before the weekend, beginning with free health screenings at Sam’s Club on Saturday, Jan. 9.

All the Sam’s Club stores with pharmacies will offer the following tests to anyone who walks in (i.e., you don’t need to be a club member):

  • Blood pressure
  • Total cholesterol
  • HDL (the “good” cholesterol)
  • Glucose
  • Body mass index
  • Vision and hearing (at some locations)

The estimated value is $150. If you’ve been wondering about glucose or cholesterol, get yourself in there and find out where you stand.

 

Read more