Joyful Momma's Guide to Shopping and Cooking Frugally: Tasty Tips for Saving Money From the Grocery Store to the Dinner Table
Author: Kimberly Eddy
Date: 2011-08-15T04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Self-Help; General
Description: Learn smart shopping techniques for big savings, including:Planing a menu and master shopping listWisely using coupons for maximum savingsWhat bulk shopping really means, and how to make it work for you.Frugal cooking techniques to make food taste great at any price!Handy food seasoning chart to guide you in making flavorful frugal mealsFeeding teenagers on a tight budgetWeight loss and health within a frugal budget...and more!
Publisher: Joyful Momma Publishing

Joyful Momma’s Guide to

Shopping & Cooking Frugally
by Kimberly Eddy
www.JoyfulMomma.com

“Joyful Momma’s Guide to Shopping and Cooking Frugally”

© 2011 Kimberly Eddy / JoyfulMomma.org

Some information is reprinted and modified from Basics of Frugal Cooking ©2006 Kimberly Eddy

All Quoted Scripture is from the King James Version of the Holy Bible

Care has been taken to ensure the accuracy and safety of the instructions and recipes herein, however the author and publisher urges you to use common sense and safety when applying any advice to your own family. The author cannot be held responsible for any injury or unforeseen problems as a result of this book

Special Thanks to Tammy & Catherine Card for Proofreading.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Wealth is an Attitude of the Heart

Part One: Basic Tools for Frugal Shopping

An Overview of Shopping Strategies & Options

Planning Your Menu & Master Shopping List

Planned Snacking, Or: Managing a Sane Grocery Budget with Teenagers in Your Home

Confessions of a Coupon Convert

Forming a Simple Coupon Strategy

Customer Loyalty Programs

Why Cash?

Storing Your Stash of Bulk Foods

The Home Grown Pantry

Part Two: Saving Time & Money

Making Friends with Frugal Spices, Herbs, & Condiments

Freedom from the Tyranny of Packaged Foods

When A Convenience Food is Not a Convenience

Crock Pot Convenience

Making Your Own Convenience Foods

Buying & Using Bulk Meat

Miscellaneous Frugal Recipes for the Home

Part Three: Frugal Shopping & Cooking in Special Circumstances
Health & Weight Management on a Tight Budget

Food Allergies on a Tight Budget

Food Pantries: Giving and Receiving

Part Four: My Favorite Frugal Ingredients & How to Prepare Them

Introduction to Preparing Frugal Foods

Cooking with Potatoes

Cooking with Dried Beans

Cooking with Rice & Grains

Cooking with Flour Products

Cooking with Frugal Cuts of Meat

Helpful Resources

Introduction to the Second Edition: Timeless Principles for Saving Money

When I originally wrote the first edition of Basics of Frugal Cooking some five years ago,it was before the economy really tanked and grocery prices skyrocketed. Sales for that ebook have taken off recently, but so have emails asking me how on earth I can spend so little. These days, I can’t.

Clearly, with the changing times, an update to this book was in order. After all, not only has the basic situation changed, but I’ve learned so much more since I wrote the first edition of this book. I’d been planning an update, but the emails I’ve received finally pushed me to actually take the time to sit down and write it.

The amounts I spend and you spend on groceries may have changed, but the principles for how to save money remain timeless. My overall strategy remains very similar, but with addition of couponing and more carefully examining unit pricing as I shop.

I’ve also received some criticism regarding how “starchy” or “carb heavy” my recipes and recommendations are. In the recipe section of this book, I talk about the big frugal foods that are almost always affordable every time of year and in most locations. That’s the point. If you are trying to be as frugal as possible, this is a suggestion for how to make your grocery dollar stretch, rather than a book on weight loss or health food. By centering some meals or dishes around consistently frugal ingredients, and adding vegetables and fruits as you are able, based on sales, deals, garden bounty, and so forth, you can have a reasonably healthy diet. Vegetables are notoriously inconsistent in their pricing from season to season, particularly when wild weather causes problems with crops, therefore it was impossible to list any of them as a consistently good deal.

Naturally, it’s important to get as many fresh fruits and vegetables into you and your children, as your grocery budget allows. I’ve altered many of the recipes to add information on this very topic in this edition.

Obviously, if you have an unlimited grocery budget you can eat very healthy, but with a restricted budget, you have to make concessions. It’s not ideal, but as the saying goes, we do what we have to do.

Since this time, I’ve also entered a new phase in my life: mother of teenagers. I used to think that the jokes about their eating habits were a big joke. Sadly, they’re not. I can buy three or four bags of apples when I go to the store, only to have them gone the next day. I buy two six-packs of romaine hearts a week, and sometimes it lasts until my next shopping day.This hasn’t been all bad though. Having teenagers has helped me learn some new tricks in my grocery budget, especially as they help me prepare meals now.

With older children and a more restricted budget, my weekly schedule and available time changed dramatically. Although I am still at home, I work part time from home as a web designer, and I teach art once per week at a small private school in our church. These activities have helped to keep our family afloat financially as my husband’s income continues to drop, but they’ve also limited how much food I can make completely from scratch. I’ve learned how to make my own home made convenience foods and prepare some meals ahead of time when time allows.These changes help to keep my grocery bill low, even as my schedule fills up.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve also embraced couponing. Back when I originally wrote this book, I found the idea of couponing to be pretty irrelevant. Most of the time, through bulk buying, purchasing from farms, and other careful planning, I could save more than by cutting coupons. I would occasionally buy some things with coupons, but most of the time, nothing I needed had coupons available. I’ve since learned how to save money with coupons to really make my grocery dollars stretch. We’ll be discussing this later as well.

This second edition also has some bonus extras. First of all, I’ve included a few other printables, such as a menu planner, a printable checklist for creating your own menu plan and master shopping list, and a printable chart for using seasonings and spices when cooking. I hope these are a blessing to you.

Blessings,
Kimberly Eddy June, 2011
Fostoria, Michigan

Wealth is an Attitude of the Heart

I wasn’t raised clipping coupons or pinching pennies. I actually thought I was poor growing up because my parents wouldn’t buy me designer jeans or allow me to join the ski club, but the truth is, we lived pretty comfortably. Neither my dear husband nor I had much practical training in money management. I had to have my college roommate’s boyfriend teach me how to balance my checkbook at college. I passed a placement test for higher math, but didn’t know how to balance a checkbook. Pathetic.

My husband had a different background than I did. His parents were public school teachers at a time when teachers didn’t make very much. His parents were children in the great depression, and his mother in particular was the daughter of Romanian refugees. She had a hard life, and was extremely frugal, though not always in practical ways. She seemed to enjoy revelling in her poverty and making everyone around her suffer over her lack. Her extreme frugality and martyr attitude left a bad taste in his mouth for any kind of frugal living. He hated to ever do without anything, and always wanted to give me nice things. My husband didn’t want me to ever feel like I had to tighten down, especially on groceries.

I didn’t actually become a Christian until I was twenty years old, and I was married to Martin about 18 months later. No one, during our pre-marital counselling or early Christian walk taught us principles for money management or budgeting. We flew by the seat of our pants. One bit of advice we did get, from both sets of parents and a few friends, was to make sure we had enough credit.

I honestly can think of no worse advice on the planet, now that I’m older and hopefully wiser. That simple bit of advice has essentially ruined our lives. If you’ve ever been in debt up to your eyeballs, I’m sure you know what I mean.

The worst part about debt is that it takes more than a conviction from listening to a few Dave Ramsey programs to finally break free. If you’re in debt, and suddenly realize this is a bad place to be, you can’t just get free in one or two months, or even one or two years. We’ve fought the fight for over a decade. Debt, sadly, locks you into a financial cycle of being perpetually broke.

We had children fairly quickly, and in quick succession. We had five children all born within the first seven years of our marriage. We also had a mortgage on a mobile home, rising lot rent, credit card bills, medical bills, and stress.

Right after our fourth child was born, we were able to finally sell our trailer, which was becoming very expensive due to lot rent, and we purchased a 100-year-old farmhouse in a rural area.The monthly payment on the new house was actually less than what we were paying monthly on the mobile home, and it was much bigger. We were very happy with ourselves, and the fact that we had not only gotten rid of a home that would only depreciate in value, but had done so while paying less per month.

Sadly, this was not to last. About eleven years ago now, my husband received a tremendous pay cut. We suddenly had to live on 1/3rd of his normal income. That week, my husband handed his wife $40 for the groceries, with some regret, explaining it was all he could afford to give me, and that this was all he would be giving me until at least the end of the year, unless something changed. We would also try to lower other bills. Martin was always trying to encourage me, and to tell me that the economy would eventually turn around. He reassured me his pay and hours would eventually go back up. Many weeks, this was little comfort when holding $40 for a week’s groceries.

Of course, as you might imagine, I balked. I cried. I whined. I had a hissy fit. I told him that it couldn’t be done. I quoted the statistic I had recently read about the “average” thrifty family of four spending $121.00 a week for groceries [1], and I reminded him that we were, in fact, a family of seven. The problem was, if we were to continue to work towards paying off debts, especially medical bills, we needed to continue paying more than the minimum amounts on those bills as long as we could make it work, and the best place to trim was the groceries, so long as we could.

“My dear,” he finally said, hugging me, “I have confidence in you. I know you can make this work.”

In the back of my mind, I heard the words of Proverbs 31, “The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.” (Proverbs 31:11). Lord, help me to be that woman.

My mind suddenly began to race around, as I realized that I already had most of my necessary staples. I realized that because I like to be prepared, I had a plentiful pantry. I purchase many things in bulk, and I canned many more things from our garden. Our pantry was quite full of the basics at that moment, and all it took was some prudent planning on my part and God’s grace in this area to make our new budgetary restrictions stick. It was not always easy to do this, but the Lord certainly enabled me in this area. That was ten years ago. My husband continued to hand me just $40-$60 each Thursday (though with the price of groceries going up that figure has continued to grow), for groceries for the week, up until 2005, when he got a new job with a significant pay raise close to what he had been earning. We had lived five long years with no raise. In fact, he had a pay cut since the original “poverty week”.

Through all of this, the Lord was teaching us that He is our true provider, and He has helped us both, especially me, to learn to gather my manna one day at a time.This whole situation has increased my faith in God, for we never went hungry and without our basic needs. If anything, we came to see more clearly what our true needs actually are, and experience true joy in Christ. We have learned to focus more on Him in our household. God never failed to provide for us, and He often added many extras on top of our basic needs. We also learned to be more thankful for what we did have, as we looked around and realized that though there were many with more than we had, there were also many more families with far less. It’s easier to be thankful when you look at those who are less fortunate than you, instead of focusing in on everyone who has more.

A month an a half after my husband got his new job, the parent company of his shop elected to shut down the shop and put everyone out of work. Not only that, but our last two paychecks bounced, causing all of our checks to bounce. We were back to square one. He went through several new jobs in the years since that time, as many of these manufacturing companies went out of business as the economy began to sink even further. For nearly a year, my dear husband even worked in another state, living in the basement of a friend of a friend, and commuting home most weekends. This was extremely difficult and frustrating, but we survived.

As of this writing ( June, 2011), my husband’s income has dropped again, down to just a few dollars an hour over what he was earning when we got married 20 years ago, all the while expenses have risen. With no pay raise, and rising expenses, we’ve continued to learn what is and is not a necessity, and how to make each penny stretch. Over the last ten years, I have become very good at making the best of the bare bones basics. I’ve also been thankful for those extra blessings sent our way.

I’ve also had to learn that being frugal is about more than spending under a certain amount each week on groceries, or about pinching pennies. I can live frugally with a wrong attitude, just as easily as I can live lavishly with a wrong attitude!

My attitude has a huge impact on my family and I as we tighten our family budget with each of these pay cuts. Your attitude through all of this affects your family too.
If you are a reader on my blog, or if you’ve read anything else I’ve written, you know that as a Christian I’ve grown to really live by the truth that God is my Provider in all of this.

Perhaps it has been used as a slogan so often that we no longer believe deep within our souls the incredible reality of the Lord as our Provider God. “God is my Provider” is my motto in life now. It is not just something to be printed on a bumper sticker, or painted onto a banner; this truth is a source of incredible hope and help for me as I shop for groceries for my husband and family.

Do I trust God? I mean really trust Him? Do I believe that God has provided me with exactly what I need, nothing more or less?

That can be a challenge!

Although I’d be lying if I said I always have the right attitude full of hope, trust, and faith in these situations, I have really grown in this area through these situations.

I confess that more often than not, with each pay cut and each difficulty, I’ve usually started out with a temper tantrum. Sometimes I’m like a spoiled child in this area. I get whiny. I get afraid. I react wrongly. I have to apologize once I’ve calmed down.

However, after the dust settles, and I calm down, and I again return to a place of peace and of trust, I find renewed energy, renewed hope, and strengthened faith. I get to know God a little more personally. I find myself more sympathetic to those who are in dire straights too. I give differently when it comes to donating to food pantries and benevolence funds, having been on the receiving end of those a couple of times now.

After the first edition of this book was published, I received a pages-long ranting email from a dear lady who bought my ebook, and who apparently disagreed with my views on trusting God as my provider. She was angry and bitter over “wasting” her life being frugal and wanted to “save” me. I don’t handle that sort of thing well, and her email actually made me cry.

Her accusation that I was being a fool to keep trusting in this situation hit me hard. I’m sure part of it was the fact that I read her email right after having major surgery, while hopped up on whatever fun pain medicines they gave me following the reconstruction of my shoulder. That will skew anyone’s perceptions and reasoning skills. It took me some time to get to a point again where I realized that whether I trusted God or not, the situation, the circumstances, remained relatively unchanged. That much was true.

So, why trust God at all if nothing changes one way or another?

Ah, but something does change.

What did change was what was going on inside of me. That horrifying distance between God and I. The peace was gone. I no longer had that peace that once allowed me to go to sleep, and stay peacefully asleep, while God worried about our 401K, the cost of college, and how we were going to pay the bills.

You see, it’s not, “I’m going to trust God, and do A, B, and C for Him, and He’s going to rain money down on me.”That’s what the heretics on “Christian” television teach (while, ironically, begging for money from poor people who need something to hope in).

I like to think of it this way. As a child, I didn’t wonder if I was going to eat that night, or how something was going to work out financially. I trusted my father to take care of that. In the same way, even when a situation seems impossible by human standards, we can rest in the fact that God is in control of all of this. In addition to the peace God provides, I’ve also seen Him provide for me by guiding me in smart shopping and great deals. He can provide me with better sources of what we need. He has directed people to drop off bushels of produce from their farm, just as He’s directed me to drop off boxes of groceries to others from time to time (that trusting and listening to God thing goes both ways -- if He’s leading you to bless someone, do it. It is, after all, more blessed to give than to receive!). God can even give you and I the grace to make our wants fewer, and to be content in whatever we presently have.

Contentment & Frugal Living

As I told you earlier, I was raised in an upper middle class home with far more material things than we have right now, but my family thought they were “poor” because they didn’t have all that they thought they needed. I thought we were poor because I was wearing Garanimals while everyone else had Gloria Vanderbilt. Now, however, I live in a household earning significantly less, but I feel like a queen.

How is that possible?

Let me let you in on a little secret. Wealth is an attitude of the heart. A wise man once said that we can all choose to be rich by making our wants few.

The Apostle Paul taught this truth as well when, under inspiration of the Spirit, he wrote, “But godliness with contentment is great gain.” (1 Timothy 6:6) A truly content person feels wealthy and blessed with whatever God has provided for her, be it a bag of beans in a tar paper shack or a steak dinner in a fine mansion. Without contentment, even that steak dinner or mansion won’t feel like enough. A discontent person is always miserable, no matter what, because they’ll never have “enough”.

Don’t believe me? I once heard quoted that Rockerfeller, when asked by someone how much wealth would be “enough” for him, replied to the man, “Just a little bit more...”.
Going back, again, to that ranting email I received, I realized that by letting her get under my skin and in my head, I lost that contentment. The attitude of “I deserve better”, though it may be useful to encourage someone towards success, can completely destroy your life if you stop being content with what you have. Let’s face it. We’ll never have all of the things we’ll ever want. As soon as you buy one iPhone®, there’s going to be another version of it coming out a short while later, and the discontent can start all over again. I know that nothing saps my energy quite like feeling sorry for myself, and feeling like I deserve more than what I have. The worst part about this is the fact that, while thinking about and pining away over all that we don’t have, we stop noticing, appreciating, or being thankful for all that we do have.

As wives, our attitudes towards what God has provided through our husbands has a huge effect on how a man feels about himself. This may seem hard for a woman to grasp, but many men’s self worth is closely tied to how much he earns and is able to provide for his family. Discontentment on my end discourages not only me, but my husband.

I learned from an older lady once that I am in a unique position to make my husband feel like the poorest man on the planet even if he earns a good wage, simply by desiring more and more. On the other hand, I can also make my husband feel like a rich man when I check my attitude. I can be blessed and thankful for the plenty he does provide.

Let me give you an example. When I purchase frugal groceries I can either slop a pile of flavorless rice and beans onto a plate, or I can prepare an elegant meal out of properly seasoned and prepared staple foods such as rice and beans, and present it at the table in such a way that those sitting at the table can’t wait to eat. If I am feeling self-pity and am allowing myself to become upset and even bitter at having to “somehow” make due on far less than I think I deserve, then my natural reaction is to make sure everyone around me knows how miserable I am, and to make them share in my misery. It’s this very attitude growing up that made my husband rebel so strongly against frugal living.

Our attitudes can spoil a meal faster than “poor” ingredients, and so we need to check our attitudes first of all, in all areas of frugal living.

This isn’t just food either. As a wife who shops at second hand stores and garage sales, I know that I have a choice. I can be adorned in lovely, tasteful clothing that looks as if it came from an elite boutique (when in fact the whole ensemble cost less than $5). On the other hand, I could choose to be miserable over the small amount I have for clothing, and therefore dress myself and my children in stained up rags and mismatched outfits. Although this book is mostly about saving on groceries, the attitude even applies to home decor. I like to dress up my house, even on a tight budget. You know that show about decorating a room for “under $500”? My kids love to joke that I can do a whole house for that much. For our dining room, I have a selection of dining room chairs that came from second hand stores, garage sales, and even from the curb on garbage day! However, I did not leave them in the condition in which I found them. Sandpaper, paint, and suddenly the 10 mismatched chairs oddly seem to go together.

I like to say that I don’t have “junk”; I have “eclectic style”. Money is not everything, and being “poor” does not mean that you have to advertise your poverty by not doing what you can!

Don’t Just Shop for Yourself

When our income originally dropped, and I got into the habit of frugal shopping, I took a friend shopping with me one day. She wanted to see how I shopped and managed to spend such a small amount. I remember her shock when I went down the soda pop aisle and grabbed a two liter bottle of Mountain Dew. Wasn’t that frivolous for someone in my situation? Wasn’t that a waste of money?

If it were up to me, and my preferences, I would forgo Mountain Dew. However, I did not buy it for myself, and I am not shopping just for myself. I am managing the grocery money in such as way as to make sure my husband has no need of spoil. His favorite drink in the whole world is Mountain Dew. He didn’t “demand” I buy it, but he would always get a big smile when he’d see it each time I went shopping. I looked on that simple purchase as part of his spoil, so to speak. This is just a simple way of honoring him and saying “I love you” , and thanking him for working hard under such discouraging circumstances.

Since the economy has further worsened, our situation has become even tighter, my husband has chosen to cut the pop out altogether, but the simple fact that I always went out of my way to do this little thing for him was always a source of blessing to him.

When we make frugal meals for our families, we do not need to make it readily apparent at the dinner table that we are suffering any lack. Frugally prepared meals can be as elegantly seasoned and served as food in a fine gourmet restaurant, with a little bit of skill on the part of the chef! My goal, though I have failed in it many times I am sure, has been to not serve our frugal meals in such a way that makes us feel like we are eating “depression era slop” as my husband calls it.

My dear husband had grown up on a home where his mom punished everyone for there not being enough in the grocery budget. She did this by making food as awful as possible, then complaining about money when anyone complained about the food. To this day, if anyone suggests using powdered milk to save money, my husband flips out and has a full blown panic attack, the foul taste of watered down powered milk in his mouth. He drank watered down powdered milk most of his childhood. When I bought some to use in my granola recipe, it took quite a bit of time to reassure him that I was using the powdered milk for baking and not for drinking.

Once we had to tighten our own belts in our family, my husband told me these stories from his childhood and begged me not to do that to our children. I agreed. This was one tradition that I didn’t want to continue. Having travelled all over the world after college, I had been around people who were dirt poor but didn’t let on at all when feeding their families or showing hospitality. I had also been around people who wallowed in self pity because of their lack, and made everyone around them miserable. The difference was not in money, but in attitude.

I was at an advantage in our home because my husband loves Chinese food and Mexican food. Since we were no longer able to eat out as frequently as we were used to, I learned through online resources, cooking shows on television, library books, and experimenting how to make many wonderful, flavorful and frugal Asian and Mexican dishes. Many ethnic dishes from other parts of the world major on readily available staple foods for that region, and are inexpensive to make when you have those staples on hand. In a matter of years, we went from ordering Chinese food once a month, to canning our own plum duck sauce [2] and making homemade egg rolls [3] that my husband and children insist are better than at the Chinese restaurant. Recently, my husband splurged by taking us out to a Chinese restaurant on Mother’s Day, and we all now agree that we prefer home cooked!

As I’ve worked towards tightening the grocery budget, and keeping it under control through these different ups and downs in the economy, I’ve learned not only how to pinch a penny, clip coupons, and make do on the best of basics, but also how to truly be content, at peace, and how to find joy in the little things of life. Since the financial difficulties that started for us over a decade ago, things have gotten worse for many of my friends and blog readers.

I try to encourage others, as best as I can, when they are faced with stagnate or shrinking wages and rising expenses, to deal with those heart attitudes first. This is mostly because I’ve figured out (through trial and error -- mostly error!) that my biggest budget battle is fought and won in my own heart and mind. As I approach saving money and tightening down, if I’m focused in on what I don’t have, or what I have to cut back on, I will begin to get irritated, angry, and stressed over my frugal shopping and cooking habits. I don’t want you to be that way! This isn’t punishment. Consider it saving money in one area so you have more to spend in another.

Part One:
Basic Tools for Frugal Shopping

An Overview of Shopping Strategies and Options

There are a few ways to shop, which you, no doubt, have already figured out.

For me, bulk shopping is the cornerstone of being frugal with my grocery money. Now, there always seems to be some confusion about bulk shopping and what exactly that entails. When I’m talking about bulk shopping I do not necessarily mean buying huge amounts of stuff but rather buying things in the largest usable quantity if it offers you a savings.

As I’ll talk about later, sometimes this can mean buying several smaller sized items that are both on sale and have a coupon with them, for maximum savings. Having a large family, I’ve always bought larger sizes until a friend shared with me how she has found buying several smaller sized items paired with the right coupon can provide huge savings. So, bulk shopping means buying whatever quantity and size provides you with the lowest unit price.

The most common way most people seem shop is to go to the local mega-mart grocery store and buy whatever they need (and sometimes, buying whatever looks good at the moment). Whatever the price turns out to be when you get to the check out, that is what it is. Some folks manage to save a little bit here or there when they remember to bring their coupons, or when they find the items they need on sale the same week they need them. Other times, in a pinch, shoppers may have to run to the ultra-expensive corner store when they run out of a needed ingredient.

Some people add to that trips to warehouse buying club stores, like SAM’s and Costco. These mostly specialize in brand names, in bulk, and at a cheaper rate. Sometimes the warehouse store has no-brand items in bulk for an even better rate. This is a better deal on many things. You need to be super careful when shopping at warehouse stores, as not everything there is a good deal. If you’re not careful, you run the risk of spending more than you otherwise would. When shopping at these club stores, pay attention to unit prices, which I’ll talk about more later.

Finally, you can save even more by developing your own sources for inexpensive things you use more of, such as oats. In many areas, there are bulk food stores.These usually do not spend too much in advertising, for their best advertisement is word of mouth. You can usually find such sources by asking around those you know. If you see a mom with a dozen children who is not married to the local millionaire, she will likely be able to tell you of a few inexpensive shopping locations in the area. The best place to start looking is your local home schooling support group, or a health food store. While the health food store is pretty expensive in some things, many other items are a better deal there. People in health food stores can often point you to bulk sources for whole grains, beans, and other typically bulk purchased items.

Most herbs and spices are less expensive when purchased at a health food store or a bulk foods store. Some larger health food stores sell herbs and spices in bulk for far less than a grocery store. Usually they list the prices of those spices with the price per pound, which can look very expensive at the outset. However, you will likely only be purchasing one or two ounces of seasonings at a time. If you were to figure out the price per ounce (by dividing by 16) you would see how affordable it really is. After all, when you purchase a one or two ounce jar of seasoning at a grocery store for $3.59, you are actually paying $57.44 per pound!

Another huge savings comes from purchasing meat either in bulk, or at least purchasing meat from a local butcher shop, rather than at the grocery store. Grocery store meat is usually more expensive than meat from the butchers, and it’s also usually of a poorer quality. You can purchase meat in bulk by ordering a “side of beef ” (a half of a cow) from some butcher shops. They usually will cut and process the meat for you and package it up to your specifications. When you buy your meat this way, beef can be as low as $2.00 per pound (up to around $8 per pound, depending on your area), including the butchering costs.

Stocking up when meats or anything else goes on sale is also a great savings for many families. When Turkeys are less expensive around the holidays, we often will buy a few turkeys to put in the freezer. If there is something that you use often, or that is a staple in many of your favorite recipes, watch for it to go on sale. When it does, stock up on it if it can be easily stored. This does not just apply to groceries but also to toiletries and cleaners. In fact, I find that saving on toiletries and cleaners enables me to have more money for better quality groceries.

In some areas, you can find sources for food among your own neighbors or church family. For example, we know a local family that raises bees. We are able to buy honey from them for far less than the little bear shaped squeeze bottle of honey that has been pasteurized to the point of losing nutritional value. You may know of a family that has chickens and provides you with eggs for an affordable price. There are the weekly farmer’s markets for fresh, locally grown produce during the gardening season. Some areas in the north have family Maple farms, where you might be able to purchase some maple syrup (the real stuff ) for a wonderful price.

Figuring out where to buy local produce and products takes some research on your part at first, but the returns are well worth it. I believe it is important to support my local economy as much as possible. Whenever possible, our family tries to buy from local businesses, farms, and homesteaders. In this way, our buying dollars go to support local businesses and farmers, instead of large corporations in states (or countries) far away. This isn’t always possible, but when we have a choice between one or the other, we purchase from local sources unless the added cost makes it impossible.

If you still can’t find bulk food sources near your home for items like bulk spices or grains, you might try mail-ordering your staple foods from companies such as Wheat Montana, The Urban Homemaker, and mail order co-ops. I have a list of mail order places in the back of the book, most of which are family owned.

Planning Your Menu and Master Shopping List

As you probably know, if you fail to plan, you essentially plan to fail. A good plan will help you succeed in doing whatever you need to accomplish, or it will at least move you closer to the goal. A menu plan is our not-so-secret weapon for saving on groceries.

By taking inventory in what you have on hand, what sort of food you enjoy eating, what is on sale, and what is in season, you can create a menu plan that suits your family.

For a basic family menu plan, start by making a list of your family’s favorite types of foods. I periodically brainstorm with my husband and children to get an idea of what their favorites are. When we once again needed to tighten down, I made a huge list of all of our favorite meals, as well as favorite snacks. I took that list and wrote down the ingredients needed for each meal. I also added to that list items we need to buy less frequently. This wasn’t really a done-in-one-afternoon sort of project. I sat down, and did a huge amount of this in an hour or two one afternoon, but then I left the list sitting out on the counter, on a clip board, so I could add items to it as I thought about them.

Using this list, I created a master shopping list. I actually typed it up on the computer, organized by category and then alphabetical order. Because I’m a pretty flaky person sometimes, I find this master list to be very useful in not forgetting some minor ingredient in an item on my menu plan for the week.

By using a master shopping list to double check what I need before going to the store, I save on trips to the store during the rest of the week, thus saving money, too. I also have a chalkboard in the kitchen where everyone is supposed to write down items we need. Having older children, I’ve made them responsible for writing down what they just used the last of, though we’re still working on doing this consistently. I will be more specific with my shopping list later, while doing my research as to where I’ll shop during each shopping trip. The Master list only helps me see what I have to buy.

I also use this list to help me weed through my coupons each week. I’ll talk more about coupons later in more detail, but for now, I’ll point out what should be obvious: if we’re using coupons for items we wouldn’t normally buy anyway, we’re just spending extra money. Right?

We usually clip out every single coupon out of the papers each week, as I’ll write more about later, and after clipping them, I do a sort, where I decide if the coupon is useful to me or not. How do I decide if a coupon is useful to me? If the coupon is for anything at all on my list of things I ever buy, it’s useful. If it’s for something that looks good, but is not part of what I buy, it will add a few dollars to my grocery bill instead of saving me money. If I wouldn’t have bought it without the coupon, I shouldn’t buy it with the coupon.

In many ways, my master shopping list is like a sort of inventory list for my kitchen and pantry. I use it to check off what we are in need of, in order to make what’s on the menu plan. This isn’t because I’m super organized, but rather quite the opposite. I have had too many weeks where I’ve made multiple shopping trips because I forgot some key ingredient, or some critical item, such as dog food.

This is partly why I love stocking up too, because when I am well-stocked with items I’ve found during a great sale, I’m not as likely to have to run to the store for a few things we forgot. This saves not only time and gas money, but it also saves me grocery money. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who rarely comes out of the store with exactly what was on my list. Stores bank on you “remembering” you need something else while walking towards what you need. I try to spend as little time in stores as possible. They’re programmed to make us spend more on impulse purchases.

I’ve known some ladies who shop once a month, and if you have a smaller family this may be an option for you. For us, this strategy doesn’t work, as our fridge is usually stuffed as soon as we get home from our weekly shopping trip, starting with the five or six gallons of milk I purchase each week, and the two packages of six romaine hearts that are on my permanent shopping list. Some of my friends that shop once a month freeze their milk, and just forgo the fresh veggies during the later portions of the month, which doesn’t work for us. Whenever you implement any shopping strategy, you have to make it work for you and your family, otherwise you won’t stick to it. It’s like a diet, but for your grocery budget.

I also use my master list to record what is the maximum unit price I am willing to pay for that item. It takes a while to build this. One of the most practical ways to ensure that you get a good deal whenever you shop is to compare prices, especially unit prices, for items you commonly buy. If you know what a good price for an item is (and is not), then you can better judge whether or not something is a good deal.

The problem, for me, is my memory. If only my memory was that good!

A brilliant example of how knowing your unit prices can save you big money came up around my daughter’s birthday. That week, I needed cake mix for two birthday cakes. With a little research in the store circulars, I discovered that one store had our favorite kind of cake on sale for 50 ¢ a box. You can barely make German Chocolate cake from scratch for that price. However, watch out! The frosting that went with it was marked up to $3.69 a jar. So, in saving money on the cake, I could have thoughtlessly reached for their frosting too, and actually spent more than buying it at regular price at another store.

What do I mean, exactly, when I say “unit price”? Let me use this example. Say you want to buy some bread flour. If you buy it in a small, 4 lb bag, it is only $2.49, but if you buy it in a 25 lb bag, it is $7.50, and in a 50 lb bag, it is $11.95. Which is the better deal?

If you were only looking at the price, then obviously the four pound bag costs less than any of the others, but it is not the best deal because of the unit price. The unit we are using is the pound, and to figure out the unit price, we are going to figure out what the price per pound is.

For the four pound bag, we will figure out the unit price by dividing $2.49 (the price of the product) by 4 (the number of pounds in the bag). We need to do the same thing with each of the other packages of flour.

Obviously, the better deal would be to purchase the fifty pound bag of flour, so long as you use enough bread flour to justify the purchase. In other words, if bread flour is something you buy often and use often, you would be better off in the long run to purchase fifty pound bag of bread flour at 24 cents per pound than a smaller bag at 82 cents per pound. Though you will initially spend more money on the larger bag, over the long term, you would save $29.00 on fifty pounds of bread flour! That is a significant savings, especially if you use large amounts of bread flour. On the other hand, if you know you won’t use all of that bread flour, buy the smaller amount. That $29.00 will be no savings at all if the flour you bought went to waste. I always try to keep in mind that, when buying in bulk to save money, bulk doesn’t just mean buying the largest package available, but the largest usable package that offers a savings.

We also have to look carefully at the unit price, rather than to just assume that a larger package will be the better deal. I have begun to notice some great deals on smaller packages. Sometimes it’s cheaper to buy the smallest sizes. I recently found brown rice on sale in 1 pound bags for just 80 ¢ a pound. That was a little bit less than buying it in a larger quantity, and much more practical. Knowing your ideal price per pound, you can tell if a sale is a better deal or not. Having these handy on your master grocery list is a big help, because none of us has that good of a memory. The older I get, the worse the “instant recall” works on my brain. I have to have it written down.

As I planned my master menu plan, I also made a basic list of all of the regular activities my family participates in each day of the week (for example: art on Monday, church on Wednesday, piano on Thursday, etc.). By thinking through the way your week looks, you’ll be able to better plan what to make for dinner on each day. This will help you to have an idea of how much time you will have for cooking each day. Planning my menu based on our weekly activities is is important, because I don’t want to inadvertently schedule some time consuming dish for a day when I’m not going to have much time to cook. In our case, there are also days when the teens in our family do the cooking, both as good practice for them and to help me out a bit, and I have to make sure they don’t have anything too complex either.

The menu plan not only helps with shopping but it also helps with the common problem we seem to have in our home. The scenario tends to go like this:

“What’s for dinner tonight?” someone asks me.

“I don’t know. What would you like?” I respond.

“I don’t know. What do you want?” they reply.

“I don’t know either. What sounds good?”

“I don’t know.”

“How about spaghetti?”

“Nah.”

“How about potato soup?”

“Didn’t we just have that?”

“I could make a salad with some grilled chicken on top...”

“No....not really in the mood for that.”

“How about if I make up some chicken breasts, rice, and veggies?”

“Hmmmm. Doesn’t sound good either. What else do we have?”

...and round and round we go.

This is what each and every day without a menu plan looks like in our family, and maybe even your family.

I’ve heard from others who find having a menu plan restrictive, but I’ve not found that to be the case. Having a definitive menu set up is pretty freeing, because you don’t have to get everyone to formulate a consensus before you start cooking. You are always free, of course, to deviate from the menu plan if no one, including the chef, is in the mood for what’s on the menu for tonight. That happens in our house, especially with the heat wave we’ve experienced this summer. Having a plan doesn’t mean being a slave to it. Instead, your menu plan offers you some guidance so you don’t have to think too hard about what you’re going to make.

Most weeks our family follows a general plan for how I will cook for each day of the week based on our activities and our favorite meals. Having this general plan allows me to tailor those favorite meals based on what is on sale that week and what is in season. For example, one of our favorite types of meal is Pizza*, then pizza or Calzones (pizza pockets) can be a regular meal for each Friday, but what goes on the pizza changes, based on what is available, on sale, or in season (sometimes I will have bacon and peppers, other times it may be veggie lovers only).

Knowing that we regularly enjoy pizza, I sometimes will pre-bake and freeze some pizza crusts for use later. If I see French bread baguettes on sale at the store, I will purchase those and freeze them to make quick French Bread Pizza

4. On hot days such as today, my “Pizza” is not a baked pizza, but rather store-bought Pita bread (on sale, of course) used for the crust topped with Pizza sauce [5], Parmesan cheese, and Grilled Chicken Breast. I also know to look for those ingredients on sale, or coupons to use for those ingredients.

As you think through your own favorite meals, and develop your own menu plan, you’ll be able to better plan your grocery list, and figure out which items to stock up on during great sales. Your menu plan and master shopping list will also save you the stress of trying to decide what is for dinner, and figuring out what you need to purchase on your next grocery trip. Although developing both of these takes some time, it saves you quite a bit of time and brain power in the long run.

In the back of this book, you’ll find a printable checklist for developing your own menu plan and master shopping list.

Planned Snacking Or: Managing a Sane Grocery Budget with Teenagers in Your Home

You may have noticed that most of the blogs, web sites, and books about saving on groceries are usually written by moms with young children. I think this is because the time when most of us are having to tighten down is when we make that transition from working out of the home mom to stay at home mom. Most people probably aren’t still obsessing quite as much over saving money by the time they have teenagers, because many people are set in their careers by the time those years roll around. Our family has broken that mold, being non-conformists.☺

My husband and I have joked that we are trend setters, having done that whole recession thing long before it became so cool that everyone else was doing it. Sadly, with the recession, others are finding themselves needing to save on groceries once more, even after they have older children.

Taking money saving advice from other moms with very young children can be a little bit frustrating in some regards. Paying for food and toiletries for a potty-trained toddler is vastly different from feeding five teenagers. Not only do they eat more, but teenagers know how to open the fridge or reach high shelves by themselves. In fact, sometimes I need them to reach high shelves for me. Reasonably well trained teens also know how to cook by themselves.

By the time I had a few teenagers, I experienced a great example of why I also plan snacks in our family meal plan. While getting ready to cook fried rice for dinner one day, I opened the fridge only to realize that we had no more bell peppers, no carrots, no celery, and no other vegetables of any kind. Someone even ate the green onions.

I would have made salad, but we only had a half a heart of Romaine left. I considered making potato soup, but the potatoes were gone. I wound up making a sort of stir fry with chicken breast, yellow onions, parsley from our garden, and a large amount of sauce over the rice.

“Um, where’s the veggies in this?” my husband asked. Unlike a lot of guys, my dear husband loves veggies.

“Ask the kids. I had 6 pounds of carrots in the fridge a few days ago, but now there aren’t any. I had 2 hearts of celery, but none today. I had 3 packs of green onions, but those are gone. I had 22 red peppers from that sale they had, but none of those...”

One by one, they each confessed to snacking on the contents of the crisper in the fridge.

Let me emphasize that though: 6 pounds of carrots, people!!?!

I am at least thankful that they prefer vegetables to anything else. This just becomes a bit complicated and expensive when trying to make a meal plan and grocery list work, to say nothing of having the last of the toothpaste, shampoo, and maxi pads used up when you need them.

Commonly, when my children were all little, particularly back when I had 5 children ages 6 and under, people used to feel the need to say to me, “Do you realize you’re going to have five teenagers at once? You poor woman!”

They would say that as if having five teenagers were a bad thing.

So far, the only downsides I’ve found to having five teenagers at once are the added expense to my grocery bill, and the frustration of having children eat up ingredients for planned meals. I actually enjoy having teenagers in the house (more than I enjoyed having five preschoolers at once, that’s for sure). This doesn’t have anything at all to do with grocery shopping, but I need to tell you anyway: Don’t let anyone worry you or discourage you about the teen years. It’s actually quite fun, though a bit expensive.

Getting back to the topic of our grocery bill, I’ve found the best solution to this problem of teens (or older children) eating up my ingredients for my menu plan is to have snacks planned out on the menu plan as well. I also post my menu plan clearly, so that the hungry masses know what ingredients I will be needing, and which ones may be freely eaten as snacks.

When planning out snacks, I try not to be too restrictive. I don’t plan out each day’s snacks. Instead, I have a list of foods that are available that week for snacking “while supplies last”.
Leftovers are always fair game for a snack or a quick lunch. I also try to purchase yogurt for a snack or breakfast. I’ve tried to make my own yogurt, but no one in the family, especially not my husband, likes it. With coupons and sales, I’ve found that I can purchase flavored yogurt for a very good price. Salsa and tortilla chips are also usually available for snacking.

Having the week’s menu plan displayed near the fridge has also been helpful. I’ve also taught my teens to ask before they take anything out of the fridge that isn’t on the snack list.

Unless it is something that we absolutely can’t wait until shopping day for, I usually make due without that ingredient or item, eliminating it completely from the recipe, and making a substitute as much as possible. Being able to recognize what the kids are snacking on also has been a help to me, so that I will be able to buy extra of that item when possible.

Because I’m concerned not just about saving money but also health, we limit what I grab as potential snacks to food I want to encourage them to eat. If you want to discourage your family from eating junk food, you can’t have it in the house, and you have to provide a tasty alternative. We do drink some soda pop on special occasions, which is the only time you’ll find dessert in our house as well. Somehow we live.☺

Planning snacks, menu planning, and stocking up hasn’t completely eliminated vital ingredients being used up as snacks from time to time in our happy home, but it has greatly reduced this from happening.

Confessions of a Coupon Convert

There was a time when I didn’t bother with coupons unless I came upon a coupon for something I needed by happenstance, or if someone gave me coupons. I’ve recently become a coupon enthusiast though, as those who issue coupons have begun to actually make coupons I can use and which are worth my while. Learning how to properly use coupons has also been a big help to me.

I’ve always told those who ask me why I don’t use coupons, “Well, I’ve yet to find one for fresh produce or for 50 pound bags of brown rice.” In other words, as I try to eat a whole foods diet (as much as our budget allows), I’ve been discouraged by only finding coupons for prepackaged foods that we don’t use, and things I don’t feel are healthy. Additionally, having a larger family, I didn’t find it practical to buy smaller packages of anything, even if I did have a coupon for it.

This is still a problem for many of the coupons I find, but I’ve noticed that the makers of coupons, and different grocery stores, particularly Kroger®, have begun issuing better coupons. Kroger® mails me out coupons quarterly based on my spending habits in their store when using their loyalty card, and the coupons are always for things I have bought in the last 4 months. I was so excited to get a coupon for $5 off $20 or more in the produce section. Wow, finally someone gets it. Kroger® turned me into a regular customer.

I don’t want to buy things I don’t really need (or products I don’t use). I don’t want to buy things just because I have a coupon for them. There is something about having a soon-to-be expiring coupon in your coupon caddy that makes many of us feel pressure to buy that item, even if it isn’t something we need or regularly use. That’s why manufacturers make coupons in the first place.

A friend of mine also introduced me to a show called Extreme Couponing™ on TLC. I have some mixed feelings about the show itself.

First off, no stores around here (or anywhere in our area) would allow me to use that many coupons for like items. Most of my local stores limit shoppers to three coupons per like items. That little trick of dividing up your orders doesn’t fly at my grocery stores. To be honest, while watching the TLC show Extreme Couponing™, and reading up on couponing online, I was trying hard to figure out how on earth these women were finding these deals since I seem to shop the same stores, but I haven’t seen those kinds of sales. Whenever I tried doing what they do, I usually wasted a lot of time and spent more money than I planned. I found the whole situation frustrating.

This show also concerns me because I feel that there’s a difference between stocking up, buying in bulk and hoarding. I’m still scratching my head at the 72 bottles of mustard the program showed one woman purchasing, swiping the entire shelf clear of them. What could you possibly do with all of that mustard that would justify that? Just as baffling was the single woman buying diapers long before she had children. I love stocking up on items we use, particularly when I get a great deal on them, but stocking up on items you don’t realistically need is totally different.

Clearing the shelves of more than a reasonable amount of one item is annoying for your fellow shoppers and inconvenient for your store staff. As I’ve watched this show, I’ve seen women flip over a display to dump all 103 units of a product into their carts and completely clear shelves.

Many stores now, in response to this show and seeing this practice on TV now limit shoppers in how many of each item they can purchase when it is on sale. There has been a backlash by stores based on “abuses” they have seen on this show. Many stores are tightening up their coupon policies, which hurts other coupon-using shoppers. One of our stores stopped allowing customers to divide up their orders for the sake of working around the coupon policy, which raised our grocery bill significantly, especially with our large family.

With that said, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the results of implementing some couponing principles in my own shopping plan. Obviously, when implementing a little extreme couponing in our own home, we don’t have to have a massive storage cellar full of junk food, diapers in a babyless household, and mustard.There’s a method to the madness in saving big with coupons, and it starts with planning. By carefully matching up in store sales and specials with coupons, it is possible for me to achieve big savings when grocery shopping.

I had an epiphany one day though my 14 year old daughter.

Anastasia said to me, “Well, why don’t we just start with one thing? I mean, let’s find one thing on a really good sale, that we also have coupons for, and buy as many as we have coupons for. I bet if we create a stash of items we need and use, one item at a time, we’ll start seeing bigger savings.”

This made perfect sense, and again convicted me of my perfectionist streak. I am the sort of person who is all or nothing. If it doesn’t work perfectly the first time I try, I tend to give up. I don’t do it. Why try to do my whole grocery trip extreme couponing style, when I could just buy one or two things that way each trip, stocking up on staples and toiletries?
The idea got me rather excited. I carefully looked over the sale fliers from all of our local stores, including our brand new Walgreens that just opened, and compared them with the pile of coupons I had. After about an hour of really thinking things through (I’ve since found an easier way, which I’ll share with you later), I realized there was one outstanding deal that lined up with my coupons, and would help me stock up on something our household always seems to need.

My first big haul, of thirty-two of one item, was of all things Stay Free® Maxi Pads.

I know, I know. Insert your snickers here.

The reason why I bought 32 packages of Stay Free® Maxi Pads was simply because that was the best deal on the week that I promised my daughter we’d try this. I actually got them for free. Well, not exactly free. I made money on the deal.

At Walgreens that week, packages of maxi pads were $2.99, which isn’t a bad price, but it’s not great either. I would consider it middle of the road. However, Walgreens was giving me a $3 off my next order coupon for every package I bought. So, basically I got those for free, though I had to pay for it up front.

I also had coupons for Stay Free® Maxi Pads. They weren’t all the same coupon. I had about 9 coupons for $1 off each package. I also had 12 coupons for 50 cents off each package. These coupons happened to be in envelopes of coupons a sweet older woman at our church frequently gives me, as well as from the two Sunday papers I had dutifully pur chased with the intentions of saving loads of money.

Let’s do the math on that one.

32 packages of Stay Free® at $2.99 (total: $95.68)
9 coupons for $1 off (-$9)
12 coupons for 50¢ off (-$6)

This means that, out of pocket I paid $80.68 (plus tax). Ouch. That’s more than half my grocery bill for the week. I can assure you, it hurt to do that, but thankfully our teen son was out of town that week. Those of you with teen boys know what I’m talking about.

But wait, there’s more!

I was given, at checkout, 32 $3 off coupons for my next trip to Walgreens. A total of $96.00 off!

Incidentally I didn’t buy these packages of pads all at once, nor did I buy them all at the same Walgreens, because I didn’t want to deplete their limited supply, especially for an item like this. I wouldn’t want to be the lady who ran into Walgreens in need of pads only to find the shelves emptied. I bought 6 at my Walgreens near us, and 6 more at another nearby Walgreens store. I persuaded my darling husband to buy more on the way home from work (I know! What a guy!). Then I bought the rest the next day, at two different Walgreens on the drive down to my mother’s house for a family get together (as each of these stores were on the drive anyway). Each time, the Walgreens cashier rang up each item separately so that I’d get all of my Walgreens’ coupons for my next shopping trip.

Essentially, I made $15.32, and I had enough maxi pads to last us for several months. Having four teen daughters this was and is important. We seem to run out of this sort of thing too often.

The very next week, Walgreens had my favorite shampoo on sale, and I again had a boat load of coupons to match. I was able to get my favorite kind of shampoo for 50 cents per bottle (regularly $3.99), buying about a year’s supply of my shampoo and conditioner over the course of that week.

That $96 in Walgreens coupons also paid for my milk for a couple of weeks, as they had the best milk prices in town the next two weeks.

Now, you may be wondering why I would take my coupons and stock up on a year’s supply of shampoo. There’s a method to the madness. By stocking up when something is an outstanding price, I’m solving two problems. First, the $8 I would have spent ($3.99 for shampoo and $3.99 for conditioner) when I needed shampoo next time was saved. I’ve also made sure that I got the best price possible for shampoo by buying it while it was on sale instead of when I ran out.

I like to think of it in terms like this: I just added $8 more to my monthly grocery budget for just $2 per month. Now I am free to buy other things with that money, because I don’t have to worry about shampoo for a while. I also don’t have to resort to buying cheap shampoo that will make my frizzy hair even wilder. If you have crazy hair, you probably can appreciate that.

You see, when you need to buy something like pads because you find yourself screaming, “OH no! We’re out of pads!” (something you used to hear me say quite a bit) you are at the mercy of whatever the price is at that moment for the item you need. If you buy it when you don’t really need them at that moment, but the price is awesome, you can better control what you spend.

I chose to spend $24 on shampoo and conditioner for a year so that I didn’t get stuck spending $8 a month. I chose to invest $80.68 in pads so that I’d have $96 in credit at Walgreens, and I’d not have to worry about buying those again until another sale came around. That’s the beauty of it. By the time another great sale on pads came around, I had stored up coupons like crazy, and was able to stock up once again. Oddly, no one wanted to go shopping with mom on that week. Even dear husband was hiding when he saw me approach with a handful of coupons for those.

My next big planned purchase was for toothpaste. I normally don’t use Crest® brand Toothpaste (we prefer Aquafresh®), but I had a boat load of Crest® $1 off coupons. I was looking through my coupons realizing I had 22 $1 off Crest® 4.6 oz. or larger coupons. Again, these were mostly coupons others had shared with me. I waited to see a Crest® sale to use them all, which was hard, as we were getting down to the last bit of toothpaste in the house.

Finally, the sale to beat all sales on Crest® appeared. An area store had the 4.6 oz tubes of Crest® on sale 10 for $10. Now, normally, being a bulk shopper, I like to buy the biggest size possible. Most of the time, this seemed to give me the best unit price. However I’ve found that I can’t ignore the smaller sizes, especially when they are both on sale, and there’s a coupon for them. Usually the combo of a sale and a coupon makes the overall unit price on a smaller size unbeatable.

What kind of deal did I finally get? I had 22 $1 off coupons for Crest® 4.6 oz or larger, AND Crest® 4.6 oz was 10 for $10. You can’t beat free. Again, I didn’t buy them all at once, so as to not clear the shelves. I bought half and my husband bought the other half on his drive home two days later.

More recently, during back to school sales, I had a stack of Crayola® coupons and coupons for Bic® Pens. A local store had a great deal on both. The Crayola® Crayons were only 24 ¢ for a 24-pack, and the Bic® pens were only 50 ¢ for a ten pack. Given that I had $1.00 off coupons for both, after the cashier rang me up, she owed me money. We won’t be out of pens for a while, either.

You may be saying, “Well, that’s fine, but that’s just a few items. I need big savings.”
Here’s what I’ve learned: if you are following smart shopping principles with your grocery budget, while being able to periodically stock up on these more “extreme” deals through coupons and sales, you’ll build momentum towards bigger savings. If you think you are going to just walk into the store with a stack of coupons and some planning on your first go-around and walk out with $300 worth of groceries for $.03, you’re not being realistic.

As I said before, each time you invest in stocking up on a certain product when it’s on sale and has a coupon to go with it, allowing you to get the product for a very low price, you’re really buying not only the product, but you’re adding whatever you’d regularly pay for that product to your grocery budget, because that’s one less thing you’ll need to buy regularly, or for a while.

The following chapter offers some more specific and detailed advice for getting started.

Forming a Simple Coupon Strategy

So, how do we get started with big savings with couponing and smart shopping? We have to start with a good plan. We already hopefully have our master list of all of the things we regularly buy, as I mentioned in the earlier chapter. Now we need to figure out how to get as many of those items as we can for as little as possible.

As I stated in the last chapter, please don’t be deceived into thinking you’re going to just waltz into any store with a handful of coupons and a sale flyer, and walk out with hundreds of dollars worth of groceries for just a few dollars.This, sadly, is not realistic. Couponing, particularly extreme couponing, works best I’ve found when we allow ourselves to slowly build momentum.

Starting off with a few very good deals, and stocking up on those needed items will help you get going. Remember, you don’t want to invest in a stash of items you are not going to use. If you do that, you’re simply wasting money, buying items you really don’t need. Our goal in couponing should be to make coupons work within our own regular grocery list.This will allow us to see savings on top of what we’re already spending, instead of causing us to buy items we don’t normally buy.

Know the Coupon Rules at Your Stores

One aspect of using coupons that can ruin your best laid plans is the ever changing rules governing coupon usage at your local stores. Particularly since the television show Extreme Couponing™ began airing and became so popular, our local stores have radically tightened up how they allow customers to use coupons.

Here are some issues you’ll need to consider.

1. How many coupons for a like product (that is, multiples of the same product) are you allowed to use?

In most of our stores in our area, we are limited to buying three per shopping trip. This means, if I have three coupons for Bar S® Hot Dogs (as I did this week), I can only use three coupons for three packages of hot dogs. I can’t scrounge around for more coupons and use them in the same visit. Our local stores do not allow us to split our orders up as you often hear recommended, though some stores further away do.

Usually, when I have more than three coupons for a product that is on sale for an amazing price, I will send dear husband into the store with the coupons as well on his way to or from work. If the savings will not be eaten up by the gas for making an extra trip, I will sometimes go into the store for an extra trip at a later time. This usually happens if I am in the area anyway, such as a trip to my mom’s house.

2. Does the store in question double coupons? Is there a limit on doubling coupons?

For maximum savings, doubled coupons can be a big blessing. One local chain store only doubles coupons up to 50 ¢. What this means is that, if I had a 50 ¢ coupon for an item, the store would actually give me $1.00 off. A store within the same chain that is only 7 more miles away doubles coupons up to $1.00. Whenever I have enough coupons worth up to $1.00, I usually will drive the extra 7 miles for the added savings.

Knowing this information also helps you decide which store to use which coupons at. For example, if the same item is on sale at two different stores, for the exact same price, it would obviously be more advantageous to buy the item at the store that will double your coupon.

3. Can I “stack” coupons? In other words, can I use
more than one coupon for one item?

Stacking coupons can really save you big. One of our local drugstores allows shoppers to use both manufacturer’s coupons (that is, coupons issued by the maker of the product, which are usually clipped from the newspaper or printed off the internet), and coupons issued by their store for the same purchase. This means you are able to save both the amount of the store coupon, plus the amount on the manufacturer’s coupon.

4. Can I use both digital and paper coupons?

One problem I’ve run into involves automatically loading digital coupons onto my shopper loyalty card. When I do this, I am not allowed to use any paper coupon I might have for that product, and I am not given the option of choosing which deal to use. Be very careful with digital coupons, and only load them at the last minute if you need them.

5. Does the shopper loyalty card limit the number of “deals” I can purchase?

For example, a local drugstore that I often shop at will sometimes say on a store coupon, “Limit One Per Customer”, and you have to use your loyalty card to use the coupon. Well, if I have three copies of that coupon, I can’t go back to the store on a different day to buy more. It literally limits me to one per customer. I found this out when I was trying to stock up on $50 iTunes Gift Cards for each of my children for Christmas. This store had a sale of $30 for a $50 iTunes Gift Card, limit two. Lord willing, they’ll run this deal again before December!

6. Does your store issue rain checks for sale items that are out of stock, and can you use coupons with rain checks?

This past week, a local store had a sale on toothpaste: 10 tubes for $10 again. I had 8 coupons for this brand of toothpaste at $1 off. Unfortunately, the store ran out of the toothpaste almost as soon as the paper came out! Thankfully, the store allows me to get a rain check on the items. All I need to do is go to the service counter and ask. Most stores do give rain checks, but I have found one store that does not allow you to use coupons with rain check items.

7. Does your store allow you to use coupons printed off the internet?

Believe it or not, two stores in our area will not let me! The manager explained to me when I asked that he had too many people trying to redeem coupons that they had photocopied. Because they are printed off the internet, it was hard for the cashiers to tell the difference. Normally, when you print off internet coupons, the software allowing you to print the coupons (such as the embedded printable coupon widget on my web site, www. JoyfulMomma.com) limits you in how many coupons you can print for each item. Each coupon also receives a unique bar code. The store in question was not able to be reimbursed for those fraudulent coupons.

How do you figure out the answers to these questions?

Many times, the store’s coupon policy is found in the fine print on the back page of their sale flyer each week. Otherwise, it should be posted somewhere in the store. You can always ask at the customer service desk for a copy of the store policy. Most of the time, I’ve found stores have their coupon policy written down and displayed somewhere in the store.

Finding Coupons

There are free printable coupons available on my website, www.joyfulmomma.com These offers and coupons update weekly.

In order to get started couponing, we need to first find some coupons we can use. Each Sunday, while the rest of us sleep loving people struggle to get dressed for church, my early-rising son runs down to the corner store to purchase three Sunday papers for me. We figured out, by trial and error, which local Sunday paper had the best coupons for the best price, and so we purchase the cheapest newspaper that still has all of the coupon inserts. Later I discovered that we could save even more money with Sunday only subscriptions. The quality of the newspaper didn’t really matter to me since I was only interested in the coupons. We have enjoyed having multiple copies of the funny pages though.

Most of the coupons I use are either printed off the internet, or through the newspapers we purchase each Sunday just for coupons. I have other coupons that friends and church family have given to me. I also receive quarterly coupons from Kroger®, based on my purchasing habits of the last quarter. I signed up for this service on Kroger’s® website using my shopper loyalty card. Other stores with loyalty cards have a similar service.

Because our stores generally limit us to three coupons per like items, I only purchase three newspapers each week, giving me about three of each coupon. Some products have more than one coupon for their product in the same Sunday inserts. Recently, I again wound up with a large stash of Crest® coupons just in time for Kroger’s 10 for $10 sale on Crest®, all from my three newspapers.

Weeding Through & Donating Unnecessary Coupons

As I mentioned earlier, I sometimes tend to feel pressured to buy items simply
because they are on sale or I have a coupon for them. That about-to-expire coupon staring back at me can make me feel guilty about letting it go to waste if I let it.

Though it is at times painful, the next part of my coupon strategy is weeding through my coupons before I organize them.

I find it more time saving to cut all of the coupons I have out all at once, on my dining room table. I usually throw them into a bucket as I clip them. Those ice cream pails are great for this. Once I’m done clipping, it’s time to sort. The first sort I do is to figure out if I need it or not.

I have three piles for this: usable, unusable, and baby products.

The reason is simple: I have friends who need coupons who don’t have babies, and some who do. I donate my baby coupons to ladies at my church who have young ones. I donate other coupons to other ladies I know at church. I’ve also learned which coupons my different friends really need. One friend loves L’Oreal® products, another only uses Pampers® diapers, and another uses frozen dinners for her husband’s lunches. Likewise, they send coupons I use my way.

This can sometimes be stressful for me, as I use only about half of what I clip. That part of me that hates to see anything go to waste freaks out at the thought of buying three newspapers when I only use half of the coupons or less. Sometimes I have remind myself that I actually save more than 10 times what I spend on the newspapers with just those coupons, plus I have an opportunity to bless others.

What do you do with expired coupons? Members of the United States Military have use for them. US Military are allowed to use expired coupons for up to an extra year after the expiration date. The web site www.CouponstoTroops.com has many resources for donating your expired coupons to our troops, and more information.

Organizing Coupons

Organizing all of these coupons, even if you are going to give away half of them, can be quite a feat.

I started off using a typical coupon caddy for organization. With the volume of coupons I was using, I soon realized this was not working for me. I was having a difficult time seeing, at a glance, which coupons I had on hand. I needed a better system.

As I said in my book,Quiet Times in Loud Households, I have an addiction problem when it comes to office supplies. Office Depot does more for this girl than a trip to Nieman Marcus. I spent a lot of time obsessing over how to best organize my coupons for maximum efficiency before a friend finally showed me her system.

I ran into Heather and her brood in the store one day. We stood there chatting, when I suddenly glanced down at her complete rig. She had some kind of a desk system clamped onto the cart where the child seat normally goes, with a huge zippered three ring binder full of clear baseball card organizer pages. In the slots of the baseball card protector pages, were coupons, neatly organized by category, brand, and so forth.

The cheapest place by far to order these 9 pocket sheet protectors is Amazon.com, which has boxes of 25 for less money than any store in our area had for a package of 10. I was blessed to find a three ring zipper binder at a garage sale on my way home too.

I have my binder set up with dividers for different categories. On the pages, I leave room for other brands of products, which I may find next week in the coupon inserts. In other words, I don’t just jump to the next category on the same page. I start on another page. Otherwise, I’d have a mess on my hands after a couple of weeks of clipping coupons.

I also have store-specific coupons on separate pages. For example, Kroger coupons are kept separate from the manufacturers coupons for the same product.

Doing my Homework

Making wise use of your grocery budget by combining coupons, sales, and bulk shopping means doing some homework to plan your shopping trip carefully. I usually spend about an hour each week matching up my sales with coupons.

I always start with those items I need to purchase, which are usually located on the chalkboard in my kitchen. I look to see if I have any coupons online or in my coupon notebook for those items. Less than half of my grocery list each week is now items I need immediately (that is, items I’m out of ). This took some time to build up enough of a stock pile of frequently used items to get to this point. However, now that I have such a well stocked pantry and stockpile, our family could easily survive if we were unable to go grocery shopping for a few weeks. By stocking up on necessary items, we’re able to lower our overall grocery bill because I have the freedom of waiting to purchase most items until they are on sale with a coupon. This has translated to big savings, though as I said earlier, it took some time, one great deal at a time, to snowball to this point.

Next, I check out my favorite couponing web site, www.CouponMom.com, which has a database each week of sales plus coupons for major grocery and drug stores. I look up both grocery stores for Michigan (where I live), plus the listing for all drugstores on her web site. I first look to see if there are any sales that also match those items I have to buy.

Using the listings at CouponMom.com, I have the listing reset to sort by greatest savings. Anything that is listed as “Free” or “More than Free” (like those Bic® Pens I mentioned earlier), I will automatically buy if it’s something we use. If we don’t use these items, but I know someone who does, I’ll buy them if I’m able, and bless a friend. After that, I scan the listings to see which stores have the best deals matched with coupons, and formulate the rest of my shopping list for the week.

Instead of lugging my big coupon organizer into the store, where my attention deficit disorder will go into overdrive, I find that it works better for me to put the coupons needed for each store into a separate envelope. On the outside of the envelope, I clip (with a paper clip) my shopping list for that store for the week. This helps my easily-distracted brain focus better on the task at hand. I usually mark any item on my list with a “C” if there is a coupon with it. I write “BOGO” if the offer is a “buy one, get one” offer and “2x” if the coupon is for the purchase of any 2 of a certain item. This shorthand is something I came up with after messing up a few times with my coupons.

Just to be sure, I pull out the coupon for the item as I’m grabbing it off of the shelf, to double check what restrictions, if any, are on the use of the coupon. On more times than I care to say, I’ve zoned out on the BOGO offer, only grabbing one of the item, and having to go back in the middle of my order to get another one. I’ve also grabbed the wrong size.

Always double check!

Finally, I plan the order of my shopping trip. I usually shop at each of the stores in my area while out on my trip. What order I hit each store depends on what I’m buying at those stores, and their relative distance to each other. In the winter this is less important, but in the summertime, I always plan to purchase my refrigerated and frozen goods last.

Preparing for Your Shopping Trip

I have a few preparation rituals I follow before my shopping trip each week, that seem to help things go smoothly, in addition to the planning I’ve already described.

In hot weather, I always try to keep a cooler in the back of my van, with a fresh ice pack in it. This helps me if I need to buy one or two refrigerated items before going to my last stop. For example, last week, one store had lunch meat on sale, but not much else in their refrigerated section. I was able to buy the lunch meat anyway, and keep it fresh in the cooler while I finished my shopping at the last store.

I always start my shopping trip off with a trip to the bank to take out my grocery money. I find that using cash helps me to spend less, and it’s easier when going to multiple stores. I also play a sort of game when grocery shopping, trying to see how far under budget I can come. I usually use the surplus towards some goal which I’ll write about more in a later chapter.

One goal we had was to become debt free. I would take every extra penny from grocery shopping, and pay down a credit card before going home. Another time, while saving towards our emergency fund, we put every extra bit from our shopping trips into the emergency fund. Right now every extra penny is going towards our housing fund. I usually put the dollar bills towards these goals, but all of the extra change goes into my piggy bank.

I also find that packing a snack when shopping keeps me away from the Slurpee machine or the Starbucks® across the street from my stores. I usually pack myself some bottled water and maybe a bag of popcorn to give me something healthy to snack on. The nearest town with grocery stores is about forty minutes from our house, so shopping takes longer for me than if I were living in the city.

What can you do to prepare for your shopping trip? Think it through and try to incorporate some new money saving routines in your shopping day.

Customer Loyalty Programs

Over the years I’ve heard a variety of responses to the topic of store loyaty programs for it’s customers. These loyalty programs are usually free to join, and come with cards to use, including a small card for your key chain. At checkout, you swipe your card, and you instantly save money on in store sales.

There is a downside though. As many have pointed out, customer loyalty cards are used by stores to track your purchases and your shopping habits so they can more specifically market to their customers. Some may see this as a breech of privacy. I know that I’ve found it both wonderful and a little creepy that Kroger always seems to know what coupons to issue me each quarter through their customer loyalty program. I love the idea of coupons tailored to my purchasing habits. As for privacy concerns, I’m not really sure just how much they’ll learn about me other than I’m cheap, but I have a thing for whole bean gourmet coffee, Italian ice, romaine lettuce and Colby Jack cheese. It’s not quite the stuff that peeping Toms are made of. My shopping habits aren’t a national security issue.

Others have pointed out studies [6] that show that stores which have loyalty programs usually also have a higher non-sale mark-up than other stores, though I have not personally found this to be true. In any store, with or without a loyalty card, you need to be very mindful of the prices. Each store has it’s loss leaders, that is, the items that are marked down drastically to get people into the store, and a higher mark up on other items. Although I used to shop almost exclusively at Super Walmart®, I found that I save far more even if I only shopped exclusively at Kroger® or Meijer®. I save even more spreading my shopping out over local drugstores as well, most of which have customer loyalty cards.

Some of these loyalty cards enable you to give back to a charity in your community. In my case, our church has set up an account through the loyalty programs of a few different stores in our area, and when shopping, a percentage of my total goes to my church’s private school.

In the case of Kroger®, there is the additional benefit of earning points towards money off of your gas purchase. For every 100 points (or $100 spent), you are able to get 10 ¢ off per gallon of gas. This has been a tremendous savings for our family, with the rising cost of gas.

One of my drug store’s with a loyalty program, Rite Aid®, allows me to earn enough points to get 20% off my purchases for a year, and it provides members with an on call pharmacist to answer your questions.

If there is one big problem I do have with loyalty programs, it’s the idea of loading digital coupons onto your loyalty card. Many of these programs advertised this as saving you the trouble of clipping coupons. Unfortunately, it prevents you from using any clipped coupons or deciding which coupon to use. Once you’ve loaded digital coupons onto your loyalty card, you are not allowed to use a paper coupon for the same item, even if it’s a better deal. Be careful when using the digital coupons.

Why Cash?

When I go grocery shopping each week, there is one stop I make before I ever hit any store. That stop is the bank (or the ATM machine). Each week, I pull out the same amount of money for groceries, although I very rarely spend every last penny of it. I feel that shopping with cash, versus a check or a debit card, is key to saving big money at the store. How is that so?

When I have cash, I can actually feel how much money I am spending. When I am using a checkbook or a debit card, it’s not quite as “real” to me. Studies have actually shown that people who shop with cash instead of checks or plastic actually do spend less money
overall. [7]

Cash shopping makes me more aware of how I’m doing in regards to my budgeted amount. I can look in my wallet and see, at a glance, how much is left over. This works better, for me anyway, than looking in a checkbook register to see how much I have spent already at different stores on my grocery shopping route.

Shopping with cash also makes me more carefully plan my trip. There is nothing more embarrassing than being up at the register, with people behind you, and realizing you don’t have enough money. When I am adding up how much different items in my cart are going to cost as I shop, I always figure it before coupons, so that I undershoot how much I am spending. I also am less likely to deviate from the plan, if I know I may run out of money.

I have also started to play a little game with the cash I have for my grocery budget. Yes, I know, I’m easily amused.

I have picked a goal to save towards with the money that I save at the grocery store. Right now, because of different situations in our family finances, I have more than normal in my grocery budget, but I still tighten it down as much as possible. We are saving towards buying a house with cash (which I am looking forward to doing), and in that vein, I put whatever money I save on groceries towards my house fund.

Recently, a bank in our area had a promotion, paying $125 to anyone opening a new account with a $50 or more deposit. That was reasonable enough. The bank itself has a branch in my last stop during grocery shopping, right inside of the store. After shopping one evening, I opened an account with the money I had leftover from the most recent couple of shopping trips. After every shopping trip, I put whatever I have left over into that account. Even though it is technically a checking account, I took the checks and put them in the very back of the junk drawer where they’ll not been seen from again until the urge to clean it out hits me again. This way, I’m not spending the money. My house fund in looking up.

In past years, I’ve also used leftover cash to go directly to any store or bank where we had a credit card, and I’d make a payment on the principle of the card. Sometimes this was some silly amount, such as $8.16. And yes, at first the ladies at the store rolled their eyes like I was a total loon. That was the case until the recession hit. Soon I was giving out financial advice when I finally paid that card off...$8.16 in change at a time.

Another idea is to use this money to save towards other goals such as a family vacation, a Christmas fund, an XBox® fund (as a friend is doing) or setting up your emergency fund. We had long desired to have an emergency fund, but emergencies kept wiping it out. It would seem to me like we’d work for close to a year to put aside that $1000, only to have it vaporized as soon as different appliances, cars, or house related things went on the fritz. It was very anti-climatic to empty out our emergency fund for these pesky little emergencies. I spent nearly a year funding an emergency fund, again with leftover grocery money, and again with an account opened in a different supermarket bank that offered me free money for opening the account.

I have accounts all over town, designated for different purposes. That may sound weird at first, but I can assure you, not having all of that in the general fund where we may decide wanting to order pizza tonight constitutes an emergency works better for us. The separate accounts allow our different funds to grow safe and secure. Twenty years of marriage has taught me this. You really can’t trust dear husband or I with too much ready cash.

So, by “rewarding” myself for spending under my budgeted amount by funding either our emergency fund, or our housing fund, or sometimes even our “take the kids to Tim Hortons” fund, I encourage myself towards saving money. I can more tangibly see that the money I didn’t spend on groceries is going to some other goal close to my heart, instead of just sitting there in the checkbook register, waiting to be spent.

Storing Your Stash of Bulk Foods

As I talked in more detail in the section on frugal grocery shopping, we can experience a huge savings for our household budgets when we buy in bulk. Bulk shopping doesn’t always mean buying a huge amount of something, but rather buying in whatever USABLE quantity is the best value, which often requires a larger purchase. These larger purchases mean that we have to have somewhere to store them properly, which may take some forethought if you are limited on space.

A friend of mine, with limited space, has set up two step ladders from a garage sale (about $3.00 each), with boards across each rung of the ladder to make shelves. Her husband is not-so-handy, and she didn’t want to “build” anything. Plus, they rent their home, so attaching something to the walls was out. I thought this was a clever alternative to shelving. It actually looks quite attractive too, since she spray painted the ladder and the boards to match.

Currently, our downstairs bathroom is decorated in “deconstructionist style”. That is, the shower area completely fell apart due to a leaky pipe behind the wall. The bathroom is basically a sink and a toilet now, with a large, empty space where the shower and tub used to be. We added a set of shelves to the area that we also found while out garage saling, and use this to store most of our stock of toiletries and cleaners. On the floor against a wall is a large storage tub that holds a batch of our homemade laundry soap [8].

Other storage is found in different parts of our home, including our cupboards and pantry in the kitchen, our upright freezer in the basement and the refrigerator in the kitchen.

Dry Storage

Our dry storage and pantry items include our dried beans, grains, pasta, flour, sugar, honey, canned goods, and mixes, as well as baking supplies such as baking soda and baking powder. Most of these items keep for a long time, and have what we call a long shelf life. This means that they do not go bad quickly, and can be stored in your pantry for a longer period of time than something that is more perishable. Because I am trying to shop frugally and cook frugally, I work hard at centering our meals around these “staple”items that can be purchased cheaply and don’t go bad quickly. I also stock up on any boxed or canned goods, including condiments, that can add to those meals.

To keep the dry storage items fresher longer, they must be stored properly. Most of these staple foods do best when they are kept away from heat, light, moisture, and critters. How sensitive each item is to heat, light, moisture and bug infestation varies, but in general, any storage system that protects against those four things will keep your staple pantry products fresher for a longer period of time.

In days gone by, most homes were equipped with a pantry. A pantry is a room or space designed to optimally store your dry goods, staples, and home canned products. I am blessed with a walk in pantry off of my kitchen in my older home, but when I lived in my mobile home I simply dedicated a set of cupboards for smaller pantry items, and I stored larger pantry items (grains and flour packed into bakery buckets) in other spaces such as my closet floor. In a smaller home or apartment, you will have to get more creative with storage if you plan to do any bulk shopping, but it can be done. I have a friend who stores bakery buckets under her coffee table, which is then covered with a table cloth so that the buckets are not visible. She also has buckets under end tables in the living room. Another friend has canned goods stored under her bed.

When I purchase my flour and whole grains, it is usually in 50 lb paper bags that are stitched at the top, as a bag of potatoes usually is. When I get home with this large bag of flour or grains, if I were to leave it in the bag, and simply use what I needed directly out of the bag, I would eventually run into problems. The flour might become contaminated with debris and infested with bugs such as grain mites which are attracted to such a feast. A large bag could also more easily spill. Left open, it would lose it’s freshness too.

Instead, I transfer my flour, grains, beans, and sugar to large bakery buckets with lids that seal well. Bakery buckets can be found cheaply or for free at many commercial bakeries. They are buckets that bakeries receive their icing and other supplies in, and they seal up very well, keeping bugs out and freshness in. Simply asking at most grocery store bakeries or smaller independent bakeries will usually get you one or two buckets for free or a few dollars.

I decorated my bakery buckets by applying contact paper to the outside of my buckets, to make them look nicer. This is not entirely necessary, but it helps to make my kitchen look a little bit nicer. Some bakery buckets need a special tool to open them up easily (depending on the lid style). This tool is available at online retailers such as www. UrbanHomemaker.com.

Bug infestation can be a particular problem when you start storing grains, especially if you leave them in the bags. Most grains seem to develop this problem if they aren’t stored properly. Even when I purchase brown rice in those one pound bags I mentioned earlier, I usually empty them directly into one of my 1 gallon containers with screw top lids. I found these at Walmart. They are a little bit pricey (about $3-$4 per container), so I purchased them one at a time, over the course of several months, building my stock of them slowly but surely. A friend of mine got some for 50 ¢ each from a Sub shop nearby, that had pickles stored in them. The jars smelled terrible at first, but she eventually got them clean enough to use for storing flours and grains.

Glass jars designed for home canning, as well as any empty jar with a screw top lid, can make great storage for smaller items such as baking soda, salt, spices, herbs, and pastas. Smaller salsa jars and baby food jars are also handy for this purpose. Most of my herbs and spices are stored in old salsa jars, which makes it well worth it to purchase salsa in smaller jars when they are on sale with a coupon!

Toiletries, especially cleaners, should be stored away from food if possible. I usually keep cleaners and such on the floor of the pantry or in the bathroom now that my children are all older and know not to play with Lysol®. I do take extra care when storing toilet paper and paper toweling, because they tend to absorb moisture. Although it seems more practical to have these in the bathroom, because of the steam from showering, I keep them nearby but not inside of the upstairs bath where we shower. Anything in a box, or anything that looks as though its packaging could be damaged by steam and moisture should be kept out of the kitchen and the bathroom if at all possible for longer term storage.

Refrigerated Foods

Those foods which need to be refrigerated usually are purchased in the refrigerated section of the grocery store or they say “refrigerate after opening” on the package. Additionally, most produce keeps fresher for a longer period of time in the refrigerator, in the vegetable crispers in the bottom.

There is one thing I’ve learned to not refrigerate. Growing up, we always kept our bread in the fridge. However, bread products will go stale up to six times faster in the refrigerator as opposed to sitting wrapped on the counter top! As with dry storage, keep bread in a cool, dry place to prevent mold, and keep the bags tied well to prevent drying out.

For most families, ours included, the fridge can be a real disaster area. Do you have unknown and unidentifiable plastic containers of “leftovers” stashed in the back of your fridge? Are your vegetable crispers cruddy? Does the door stick? A good habit to get into would be to give your fridge a good cleaning on the day before you go grocery shopping. This way, you will have a clean space to put what you have purchased and you will have the opportunity to inventory your refrigerated foods. Having to throw out spoiled food from the back of your fridge is no savings at all! Knowing what you have will help you to use it on time.

I try to have our fridge organized in such a way that foods my kids are allowed to freely snack on are in one section, usually in a large rectangle plastic basket. Another section is for containers of leftovers. Another area is for condiments. I try to have some form of organization in the fridge so as to minimize waste. It seems to me that my family ignores anything they can’t immediately see, so I try to hide anything I want them to ignore in the back of the fridge, and I move all leftovers and snacks towards the front. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Part of this organization is to try to go through and clean out the fridge once a week, right before I start making my shopping list, so that I can see what we have and what we’re out of. I also like to take the time to condense any odd condiments (because children and sometimes husbands don’t always notice already-opened bottles of their favorites), and toss any mystery leftovers.

To keep your fridge running optimally, keeping your refrigerated foods fresh, it is important to follow the manufacturers directions for your refrigerator. If you no longer have the instructions you may even find them on the internet. Most refrigerators have drip pans that need to be emptied and cleaned, or coils on the back that should be regularly vacuumed of dust and cobwebs to keep it running well. Also, there are certain spots within each fridge and freezer that should never be blocked by food or anything else, so that the air circulates properly. These vary by each model, so check your instruction manual. Over-stuffing your fridge can shorten it’s life.

Frozen Foods

Frozen foods are foods that you keep frozen in your freezer. Some people use the freezer above their refrigerator for this and others have an additional freezer, usually a chest freezer or upright freezer. My own preference is for the upright freezer, if you need an additional freezer. I have found that too many things got “lost” in our old chest freezer, and much energy was wasted as the door was kept open as we dug around in the chest freezer looking for what we wanted. An extra freezer is definitely a necessity if you purchase meat in bulk or stock up on things like frozen turkeys when they go on sale. You will also be able to pre-make some homemade “convenience”foods to keep in your freezer, if you have room. Our own upright freezer paid for itself within a year through these kinds of savings.

A friend of mine recently found a gently used freezer on Craigslist.org, and another friend got a used chest freezer for free on Freecycle.net. My own freezer came at a steep discount from the department store. Our freezer was a demo model, sitting out for people to look at while they shopped. As a result it had some “unsightly” dings and scratches all over the door and sides, which I really could have cared less about, because it does run well. These are all pretty hit or miss, but they are possibilities for finding an affordable freezer, or any appliances really.

When I bulk purchase meat, it is usually in the form of purchasing a side of beef, or having my chickens slaughtered. Since being rezoned, so that we can no longer have chickens, I now purchase a 40 pound case of boneless chicken breast from a butchers or 25 pounds of ground hamburger in a large package. Obviously I would not want to just stick all 25-40 pounds of meat into the freezer together. Usually, before I freeze my meat, I repackage it in more usable packages using zipper freezer bags, in amounts that reflect how my family usually uses that meat. For example, I store my hamburger into 1-2 pound packages in freezer bags, and I usually finely slice my chicken breast (with kitchen shears) and put those slices into 1 pound bags. I talk more about using bulk meat later. A freezer is also a handy place to store foods that you have prepared ahead of time. For example, dried beans are cheap and healthy, but they also take time to cook. When I have to make up a batch of beans for something, I always make extra and freeze some in zipper bags for later, in usable quantities (1-2 cups). This is an excellent time saver. When I do this I always keep black beans separate, to keep them from making all of the other beans black. I have also prepared full meals ahead of time, such as preparing and freezing Lasagna* or Enchiladas* for later use, or by freezing sliced meat in a marinade for quickly assembled Shish Kebobs [9] or Fajitas [10]. By freezing certain favorite meals that freeze easily, I am able to have some “fast food” on hand that simply needs to be reheated in the oven to serve. This is perfect for sick days, “I don’t feel like cooking” days, and any time when I am short on time. I have instructions on making each of these later in this book.

Many ladies enjoy doing what is often called Once a Month Cooking, and they prepare all of their meals like this. I find that preparing and freezing meals works best for us in smaller amounts, with a few meals prepared ahead of time. When I store anything in my freezer, I generally prefer to use zipper freezer bags for the task. With freezer bags, I am able to squeeze all of the air out of the bag before closing it, and I am able to store it easier because the shape of it can easily fit wherever I want it. Sometimes I use other plastic freezer containers, although I have found that my food more often gets freezer burn with those than with the bags. For dishes such as Lasagna, I use disposable lasagna pans with cardboard lids. I usually reuse the pans, but it also is very convenient for taking a meal over for someone who is just out of the hospital or just had a baby, as they don’t need to worry about the pan. I stock up on these pans and the freezer bags whenever I see them go on sale and have coupons for them.

Whenever you prepare something to freeze, the most important thing is to get all of the air out to keep them from getting freezer burn or by going stale. As I said, the freezer bags seem to help with this more than any other container. When I buy loaves of bread on sale, and I have more than I could possibly use, I also freeze these too. If I can find a larger freezer bag that will fit the whole loaf, I will put the bagged loaf right into the larger freezer bag. Other times, I’ve taken half of the loaf out to put it into a smaller freezer bag, removing as much air as possible.

The Home Grown Pantry

Obviously a great way to save on the grocery bill is to have a backyard garden. In particular, this is a great way to get more fresh fruits and vegetables into our families affordably. The hard part, as you may have realized, is not in how to grow what you need, but how to store it in a usable way so that it keeps for a long enough time. There are several ways to store home grown produce: fresh storage, refrigerated storage, frozen, dehydrated, or canned by either water bath or pressure canning method. There have been entire books written on what to do with each possible home grown product, and it is beyond the scope of this book to give you anything more than an overview.

The most important keys, especially for a busy mom, are these:

- Grow only what you are going to use or sell

- Only grow what you can easily and efficiently store.

- Only grow what you can’t buy in the store for cheaper.

These three key points are important to keep us from straining the proverbial gnat while swallowing a camel. For example, I see no point in growing mountains of potatoes when I have a nearby source that sells me potatoes for $1.99 for a 50 lb bag of Unclassified (odd shaped) potatoes. Potatoes are hard to grow in our soil, tricky to harvest, take up garden and storage space, and can certainly be purchased for cheaper.

On the other hand, red bell peppers are expensive for most of the year, but grow well for me in the garden, are easily stored in the form of Roasted Red Pepper Sauce [11] which I prepare and then freeze in ice cube trays (they keep well in zipper bags and make fine additions to any sauce). As you can see from my recipes, they are one of my favorite ingredients.

In my home grown pantry, I primarily stick to canning tomatoes, tomato sauce, salsa, and sweet pickles. I freeze fresh chopped basil, fresh chopped cilantro (which is an herb that seasons my Mexican food well, but tastes best fresh or frozen), and roasted red pepper sauce. I also freeze some sweet corn, shredded zucchini, and pumpkin. I dry many of the other herbs I grow in the garden, for use in teas or as seasonings for other dishes. I use my home grown onions and garlic in canned preparations such as salsa and pickles, and I store the rest fresh in the pantry for immediate use.

We have many strawberry and raspberry plants, which the kids enjoy all summer long. I never get enough to can or to prepare anything from them, but fresh is best anyway. My kids all enjoy grazing in the garden when our fruits and berries are in season.

There are several methods to preserving the harvest that are commonly used by gardeners and farmers today: Live storage (or root cellaring), Freezing, Dehydrating, and Canning. I highly recommend the Ball Blue Book of Canning and Preserving for up-to-date, accurate, and detailed information on the exact process. You’ll not find any resource more thorough on the topic of preserving your home grown harvest.

Live storage (Root Cellaring)

Live storage is used with certain fruits and vegetables that keep fresh longer without much done to them. Apples, for example, can be kept in crates in a cool, dry place for months, as can potatoes, onions, winter squash, and many roots. In the days of old, many people had root cellars, which were specifically designed to keep such fruits and vegetables fresher longer. Today many people may use basements for this, though due to central heating in the home, they may not stay as fresh as long. Refrigerating is another option, though food may dry out in a refrigerator, and this also takes up space. There are other options too, including burying some of the food, and using straw to insulate it in special containers.

As long as you regularly eat what you are keeping in live storage, it should stay fresh for a few months under good conditions. Periodically, you would need to examine the fruit and vegetables in live storage, and make sure that there are no bad spots. When you are root cellaring, you must be vigilant about checking your produce regularly.

Freezing

The second option is freezing your garden-fresh produce in a freezer. For this purpose, if you have much to freeze, you may need an extra freezer. Many fruits and vegetables freeze well fresh, and some need to be blanched (briefly dropped into boiling water) before freezing. I freeze some of my herbs, vegetables, and fruits, usually in freezer bags.

I freeze fresh minced basil, cilantro, rosemary, and roasted red peppers in ice cube trays, and later transfer each of these herbs to freezer baggies for storage. When I need some basil, or cilantro, roasted red peppers or rosemary for a recipe, I simply pop an ice cube of whatever herb I need into my recipe, thawing it first if needed (depending on the recipe).

The Ball Blue Book of Canning and Preserving and Rodale Press’ book Stocking Up each have detailed instructions for how to freeze every sort of vegetable, fruit, or herb, for further information.

Dehydrating

Dehydrating food is also a great way to preserve some fruits and vegetables. This makes it easier to store fruits, vegetables or herbs for future use, and it keeps much of their nutritional value.

Dehydrating, as the name implies, involves taking a certain amount of water content out of the fruit, vegetable, or herb, to keep them from spoiling. This is usually done with a commercially purchased dehydrator. The prices on dehydrators vary greatly, from around $20.00 to around $500.00. Sometimes you can dehydrate your produce in your oven, though there is not as much airflow and the results are not as reliable as with using a dehydrator with a fan in it. Results are even better with a dehydrator with a fan in the back of the dehydrator, rather than a fan that sits under the food, unless you are only dehydrating in small quantities.

Dehydrating herbs for culinary use can be easily done without a dehydrator or oven. I find the tried and true method of tying a bundle of my herb sticking it into a paper lunch sack, firmly tying the top of it, and hanging it upside-down to dry, works best. When the leaves, seeds, or flowers that you are wanting to harvest are dry, you can shake the bag well and sometimes “squish” it around a bit, and your herbs are in the bag. You do get some pieces of the branches this way, but most of the time it is fairly easy to pick them out. I like to store my dehydrated herbs in little salsa jars, though you can use any jar you have on hand.

Canning

Canning foods is a process of heating the food in a jar with special lids to seal it. The heat, ideally, kills all the “bad beasties” in the food, seals the food safely in a jar, and preserves it safely for you. Canning has been around since the early 1800’s, and since that time, science has improved upon the technique, and continues to make progress in the safety of home canning.

Home canning is different from commercial canning, which uses industrial equipment to heat the food far hotter than you can get it in a home kitchen. There are two basic methods of home canning: water bath and pressure canning. Water bath canning is for any high acid food, such as most fruits, tomatoes with lemon juice added, and any sort of pickle. It involves putting jars with canning lids into boiling water, and boiling for a specific amount of time, depending on the size of the jar, and what you are canning.

Pressure canning is used to safely can any low acid food such as meats, vegetables, and soups. This technique requires that you can the jars in a special pressure canner, under a certain amount of pressure in order to get the temperature high enough to preserve the low acid foods. Because of the time involved in pressure canning, with time to get it up to a certain pressure, long canning time, and cool down times, I only rarely pressure can anything. I eventually blessed an avid gardening friend with my pressure canner.

Part Two:
Saving Time & Money

Making Friends with Frugal Spices, Herbs, and Condiments

I had a newly married friend tell me, “I don’t ever use recipes with too many ingredients”. She also was upset that her husband complained about how bland her cooking was. I tried to encourage her that sometimes an ingredient list looks long because of all of the herbs and spices listed in it. I don’t judge a recipe’s degree of difficulty by the number of ingredients in it, especially if most of those ingredients are seasonings. Seasoning food doesn’t take much time.

Your main ingredients to a dish, of course, are where most of the flavor comes from. However, knowing how to properly season those ingredients can mean the difference between bland food and amazing cuisine! Most people complement me on my cooking skills, which is flattering, especially given that I don’t have the money for the best ingredients around. I do make sure I have good seasonings available, both in my pantry and in my garden. They make a huge difference.

The most important principle for you to learn as you begin to explore the wonderful world of seasoning frugal dishes is that spice racks are to be used for flavorings, not kitchen décor. The way most people store herbs and spices in their kitchens is not the best way to keep them fresh and flavorful. Herbs and spices maintain optimal flavor and freshness by being stored in a cool, dark place, not in glass jars on a shelf on the wall over your stove.

Of course, most of my spices are stored in glass “salsa” jars, cleaned out well, with a band of Contact paper around them to block out most of the light, and to make them look more attractive too. I keep them in a cupboard or in my pantry in the dark, away from heat. This seems to work for keeping them fresh.

When I cook, I always view amounts of a spice in a recipe as a suggestion. Those amounts are my jumping off point. As you prepare food for your family, all dishes should be seasoned to your tastes, which may require more (or less) hot sauce, curry powder, garlic and onions as it does in this house. We are “fire” freaks over here. No matter the dish, we all seem to add at least one drop of Tabasco® at the table.

As I have grown in experience in cooking, it has become easier to season foods to taste, and to discern what a dish is yet lacking when I taste it. Thankfully, my oldest daughter is also an expert in this area. I have her do quite a bit of taste testing for me.

When to season your dishes is just as important as how you season them too. Most herbs should be added towards the end of the cooking process because they will release their favors fairly quickly. Herbs are pretty much any leaf. In contrast, most of the seeds and spices (such as cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and capers) should be added near the beginning of the cooking process.

After you’ve allowed your dish to simmer for a while, you can taste it to see if any adjustments need to be made to the seasonings. Adjustments to the seasonings in a dish should be done after the dish has simmered or has cooked almost completely, because the flavors in most dishes become stronger with simmering. Take a clean spoonful of your dish, let it cool slightly, and taste it. Usually if the spoonful is too hot, it’s more difficult to discern if you need more seasonings, so make sure to cool it off. When you are starting out it really can be much trial and error, although even if you can’t tell what is lacking, you likely can at least sense that something is missing from your dish.

The joke is that in Michigan the only two seasonings we use are pepper and catsup, but life does in fact extend beyond those two. There are many techniques you can use in your own home kitchen to improve and maximize the flavor of the dishes you are serving. When making a soup or stew, for example, a simple mirepoix (pronounced MEER– pwah)

can help your soup or stew to taste amazing. This is a gourmet cooking technique that is quite frugal and simple to do.

Simply peel and finely chop 1 carrot, 1 rib of celery, 1 onion, a clove of garlic, and any other aromatic vegetable, and sauté them until slightly browned before adding your other ingredients.

This simple technique will help any soup or stew, and even some rice dishes, to taste amazing!

When using any sort of spices, particularly un-ground seeds such as caraway, cumin, or coriander, the flavor can be maximized by adding those to when sautéing a mirepoix. By adding just a small bit of oil to sauté spices, vegetables, or just onions, you can add quite a bit of flavor to your dish. One very important principle to remember is that spices, which are seeds, bark, or roots, are best added at the beginning of cooking a dish (unless otherwise noted in a recipe). Herbs, which are mostly leaves, should be added later, unless otherwise noted.

Knowing which spices and herbs go best with which ingredients will be a great help to you in saving money while maximizing flavor in your kitchen. Most seasonings are associated with a specific meat or a specific region of the world. Many ethnic dishes are less expensive to prepare and are big on taste because most of the rest of the world does not have the resources to eat meals based upon expensive ingredients. These meals are based on frugal staple foods and proper seasonings that create fabulous tasting meals. I am at an advantage when cooking frugal meals, as my husband loves Mexican food. Mexican and other Latin-type dishes are generally healthier and more frugal than the standard American diet many of us eat. These dishes can be made with very frugal ingredients and seasoned with coriander, cilantro, chili powder, onions, garlic, and tomatoes, and accented with condiments such as sour cream (or plain yogurt), salsa, and grated cheese.

In the same way, for Italian-flavored dishes, seasoning your dishes with seasonings such as garlic, basil, rosemary, marjoram, oregano, fennel (seed fennel, leaves, and bulb), and onions will bring out an Italian flavor to your ingredients. Greek and Mediterranean foods are similar to Italian dishes, and are seasoned with coriander, rosemary, thyme, oregano, marjoram, garlic, and parsley.

Middle Eastern foods tend to major in seasonings such as sesame seeds, coriander, cumin, thyme, parsley, mint, garlic, cinnamon and sometimes cloves. Many Middle Eastern Dishes are accented with condiments such as yogurt.

Indian dishes are usually spicier, and seasoned similarly to Middle Eastern dishes, with the addition of Curry Powder (a spice blend usually made up of ginger, turmeric, fenugreek, coriander, cumin and garlic), Garam Marsala (a spice blend of cinnamon, coriander, cumin, cloves, ginger and garlic), or hot ground red pepper. Many Indian Dishes are served with a side of chutney to cool it down, and they often combine sweet and spicy ingredients. Many times, there are both fruits and vegetables used in Indian dishes.They also sometimes contain coconut or coconut milk.

Coconut milk is often found inexpensively in grocery stores, in the ethnic foods aisle, though it is usually high in fat. We don’t use coconut milk too often unless we find the lower fat variety for a great deal. Coconut milk does add a certain richness to the sauces of otherwise simple dishes. Recently, I was able to find several coupons for canned coconut milk, and later that exact brand went on sale, allowing me to stock up on one of our favorite flavors.

Chinese dishes usually are carried by the flavors of their main ingredients, and only a few added flavorings (not excepting the MSG that too many take out Chinese restaurants in America use!). Many stir fries and other Oriental dishes can get a wonderful flavor from a simple technique used in some restaurants. As the wok or skillet is heating up with some oil, add a few drops of sesame oil (found in most supermarkets in the ethnic foods aisle) to the regular oil, and some minced ginger. This will help give your stir fry some added flavor. Adding some Chinese Five Spices (a spice blend that is also sometimes called “Oriental Five Spices”) will also add to that Asian flavor.

Soy sauce is also used often in Chinese cooking, though it is high in sodium and should be used lightly. You can reduce your sodium intake by only using the soy sauce at the table, rather than when cooking. Another great flavor to add comes from a splash or two of rice vinegar, which is also found near the Oriental foods in your grocery store. In particular, this makes a big difference in salads and in dishes like egg rolls. You’ll find a recipe for egg rolls later.

Again, as with the canned coconut milk, I’ve been able to find coupons and fantastic sales on Chinese Five Spices, Soy Sauce, and Sesame Oil, allowing me to stock up on these favorite ingredients.

When serving anything containing beef or other meat (such as veal, venison, or other game), adding some Worcestershire Sauce, Soy Sauce, or a spoonful of Onion Soup mix to your dish to bring out the flavor of the meat. Many health food stores or bulk food stores sell onion soup mix in bulk (to save you from having to buy it in little packets), and many of these bulk onion soup mixes do not contain MSG, though you should still read the label carefully. I learned to appreciate the value of Onion Soup Mix with Venison a few years ago, after my husband lost his job again. Friends gave us two deer, butchered and wrapped, and with the right amount of onion soup mix and other spices, the venison tasted like beef. Onion soup mix really improves the flavor of any wild game. In the same way, dishes made with chicken or other poultry can be improved with adding a teaspoonful of chicken soup mix, which also can be purchased in bulk, with or without MSG.

To help you out, I have created a handy chart with all of this seasoning information, available in the back of this book, or
downloadable here for easier printing.

Freedom from the Tyranny of Packaged Foods

I’ve noticed that there is one big setback for many families when purchasing grocery items. If no one in the family knows how to cook at least a few meals from scratch, or is not a confident cook, then the grocery budget needs to stretch to accommodate more packaged food items. If you are not a confident cook, you’ll find yourself needing to rely more on prepackaged foods instead of cooking from bulk. By learning to cook, you’ll be more free to choose how to shop and how to allocate your grocery money.

As you grow in your cooking skills, you will become free from the tyranny of prepackaged foods and expensive take out. You will get to pick and choose which convenience foods you enjoy, and which ones are a waste of money. Sometimes convenience foods are a true convenience, and other times, their time savings are spurious at best. Because I know how to bake and cook from scratch, I now have the choice at any given time to choose to use a boxed mix or some other convenience food, or to do it completely from scratch.

Each of us has the same twenty-four hours in a day, but not everyone has the same responsibilities filling up those hours. Moms with many little ones, moms who are working out of the home, ladies who are helping to care for aging parents, or any other situation which adds more demands on our time can also limit what we can and cannot make for dinner. By knowing how to cook with or without packaged foods, we can choose, based on our day’s schedule, what to prepare from day to day. I’ve included some time saving frugal recipes later on too.

Generally, I make cakes, especially for my children’s birthdays, from a boxed mix, usually choosing one that is on sale that week that I also have a coupon for. Many times, I’ve paid less than 50 ¢ per box mix. The savings in making it completely from scratch is not huge, and a box of cake mix often goes on sale. However, recently, my husband was out of work and I needed a cake for a birthday celebration that was to be taking place that weekend. There would be no grocery shopping for the next two weeks, though thankfully my pantry was full of staple foods. From those staples, I was able to make a cake with a little bit more work than what I normally put into a cake, and I made homemade butter cream frosting too. Though I usually choose to buy a mix, I know that I don’t have to. I know how to make cake and frosting from the ingredients I have on hand, so I was able to bake and decorate a cake with or without a mix. That’s freedom!

Knowing how to do things “the old fashioned way” gives us huge freedom to decide how and where to save a few pennies to a few dollars when preparing a meal. When I shop with a specific amount of money allotted for my groceries, I have to make decisions as to when and where I am going to make something from scratch or whether or not I have to have something that will save me time due to activities on the agenda that week.Thankfully, with a good foundation of cooking skills, I can make many things either from a frozen premade convenience meal, a boxed mix, or from bulk purchased staple items.

The final price of anything is not my only concern when I am shopping for my family. There is more to wisely managing your household than just the financial bottom line.

For example, I try to not just buy the cheapest things I can, but reasonably healthy frugal favorites that my family loves. I don’t see much point to make food that no one likes, and begrudgingly eats, or buying only junk food.

I also don’t want to spend my valuable time doing nothing but cooking.Think about this for a minute. How many of us are looking for ways to trim back our grocery budget so that we can afford to be home with our children instead of working out of the home? I would guess that would constitute the bulk of the readers of this book. If being available for our children is the goal, then we also don’t want to allow all of our money-saving and penny-pinching activities to swallow up all of our precious time with our children, do we?

Being free from the tyranny of processed foods is about more than forgoing boxed mixes, canned soups, and the like. It’s about being able to chose where to pinch a penny and where to spend a little bit more to buy some extra free time on something more important.

When a Convenience Food is Not a Convenience

When we know how to cook well from scratch we are best able to decide where to draw the line with convenience foods in our grocery budget. Now, most of us do purchase some sort of convenience food to some extent. The ability to purchase meat, pre-butchered, cleaned, and packaged is a convenience that housewives of 150 years ago did not have. Many of their chicken recipes started with catching, killing, plucking feathers, and butchering dinner before anything else. Thank God for meat that comes pre-processed!

Convenience foods are not always a bad thing, and can be a great help to a busy homemaker, particularly the mother of young children. If you have many young children right now, you have more important things to do than spend all day long in a kitchen plucking feathers off of tonight’s dinner. The idea behind wisely using convenience foods is to discern within your own level of skill and financial situation, which conveniences really save you time for their cost.

As you may have realized, not every convenience food is a true convenience. If I’m going to pay extra money for a convenience food, I want to genuinely save me time and effort, and not all of them do.

I’ve found that many of today’s packaged foods simply measure the dry ingredients for you and charge you quite a bit for the convenience of not having to pull out your measuring cups. Oatmeal is a good example of this. We purchase our oatmeal in 50 pound bags at a health food store. You can also purchase it fairly cheaply at a grocery store in 2 pound containers. The most expensive way to purchase your oatmeal, however, is in a box full of little envelopes of pre-measured oatmeal, especially if you have many mouths to feed.

Another example is of popcorn. Microwave popcorn has become so commonplace that most people have forgotten what real popcorn tastes like, unless they’ve been to the movies recently. My family jokingly refers to me as a popcorn snob, because I’m very particular about my popcorn.There’s just no comparison between fresh, stove top popcorn, and the microwaved stuff.

A while ago I was at a warehouse shopping store, and purchased a 10 pound bag of popcorn. That is, ten pounds of just popcorn seeds in a bag. While making small talk with the young cashier, as she rang me up, we struck up a conversation about food, since I apparently grabbed a selection of weird stuff. She was asking me what I was going to do with each thing. When she got to the popcorn, she looked at the bag and asked me, “So, do you buy bags to make this in?”

At first I didn’t quite understand what she was asking. Then it hit me. She thought I bought microwave popping bags to make it in. I laughed and said, “No, I make it on the stove.”

An older gentleman was behind me, and he started to snicker loudly at her shocked response.

“What? You can do that? Really? How?” she asked.

I explained how to pop popcorn on the stove. A short while later, she called her friend over, and had me explain it to her friend too. The fellow behind me was still chuckling about this, and told me he had no idea that kids today don’t know what real popcorn is.

To make popcorn on the stove:

Using a heavy-bottomed pan with a lid, heat up a small bit of oil. Add 1/4 cup of popcorn kernels. Cover and shake the pan a bit to keep it from sticking, add melted butter and salt and serve.

These young ladies were absolutely amazed. I felt so old because someone old enough to be the customer service manager at Costco’s had never in her life seen popcorn made on a stove.

Even more recently, my older teens were having a work day up at the church, and my daughter brought a bag of popcorn and my pan with her for her contribution to snack time. She and the other teens had sprung it on me at the last minute that they needed a snack to bring, and popcorn was about it. Ruth was later telling me with much giggling about how all of the other teens stood there in awe watching her make popcorn on the stove. One of the young men at the work day requested a Whirly Pop Popcorn pan like mine for his graduation present.

Other times, convenience foods can be handy to have around, because some time is saved. Before I had a food processor, I often would buy biscuit mix, pie crust mixes or frozen pie crusts. Cutting in shortening or butter into flour is something I always had a hard time doing, though my husband loves pie and biscuits too around the holidays or as a special treat. A food processor can cut in the shortening quickly and evenly, but biscuit mix or pie crust mix is very handy to have around for those days when I just don’t feel like it.

Bread baking is the same way. Baking your bread homemade, especially from bulk purchased ingredients, is definitely more frugal than buying it by the loaf at the store (unless you shop at a day old bread bakery or baked goods thrift stores if you have those available). The convenience of having bread on hand, and sliced, definitely comes in handy for a busy mother. Personally, I enjoy baking bread, and have even written another ebook all about baking bread. The problem is, I do not always have the time to bake bread either, and some days it is just too hot to bake. Today it is 97 degrees and we don’t have air conditioning, so obviously we are buying bread this week.

Other ladies may enjoy making biscuits or pie crusts but hate pulling out all of the ingredients for pancakes in the morning, and so they purchase a pancake mix. For others, it could be purchasing a canned pizza sauce for homemade pizza, or spaghetti sauce for spaghetti. As your family’s manager, it is up to you to decide which convenience foods are a genuine convenience to you as a keeper at home, and which ones are a drain on the family’s finances that could be done just as simply the old fashioned way.

Crock Pot Convenience

For meals prepared on time when I’m extremely busy, my Crock Pot (Slow Cooker) is my secret weapon. I have been regularly using my slow cooker for a few years now to prepare meals while I’m out of the house. This is especially handy on Sundays, while we’re at church, on errand days, or on days when we’re having a field trip. Of course, I also use it on days when I’m in the house, to save on time.

In fact, the first time you use your slow cooker to try out a new recipe, you should use it while you are home, so you can see exactly how long a certain meal takes in your slow cooker. The settings on each really do vary quite a bit, as I found out when I bought a new one, after my old one, which belonged to my Grandfather, finally gave up the ghost. Apparently my new one was much more efficient. Who could’ve guessed?

In the same way, my crock pot and your’s may have different standards of heating, so please do not blindly go by my cooking times, or you may ruin dinner. I don’t want that!

If you’re just now looking into investing in a crock pot, may I recommend a crock pot that has a removable crock? Although these cost slightly more than the kind with the crock that doesn’t come out, they are far easier to clean (after all, you can’t soak the heating unit in the other kind). I notice that I don’t use any “time saving” appliance as much when it is a pain to clean, which means I wasted my money by buying it.

What are some meals that we enjoy making ahead of time in the crock pot? I’m glad you asked.

Dried Beans

Dried beans have a lot going for them. They are very cheap. They are very healthy. They taste great. They are versatile to use.

So, what’s the problem? Why don’t we use them more often?

They take too much time to cook! They are inconvenient!

You really can’t just whip up something quickly with dried beans. The traditional way of making dried beans involves soaking them overnight and then cooking them for a long time the next day. Usually, during this cooking process, they boil over on your stove, making a mess.

This is where the crock pot comes in. I’ve discovered that I can prepare a one pound bag of dried beans in a few hours in my crock pot, and without them boiling over on my stove. I first learned cook dried beans in a crock pot as a poor college student. A bunch of us all lived in a large Victorian-style house in Marquette, Michigan, sharing a common kitchen.

We all were either vegetarians or vegetarian wanna-bees, and we were all poor college students, so we had lots of dried beans, whole grains and things of that sort in the pantry. These things were all within the budget of a poor college student. The problem was, being all college students, and none of us could cook well, and beans take so long. We were busy with classes and working, so we couldn’t put beans on the stove and let them simmer for a while, per the directions, as no one was home long enough to watch them.

We figured that there must be a way that the crock pot could be put to use to cook up the beans while we were all out of the house. I finally realized that if you cover beans by twice as much water and put them in the crock pot in the morning, by dinner time you can use them (sometimes sooner, depending on your crock pot; I was still using Grandpa’s crock pot at the time). It took some experimenting to work on this, but eventually I would make a batch of beans in the morning and by dinner we’d be able to make something with them.

Today, I still use this method of cooking dried beans.

Start, of course, with rinsing and sorting the beans, as you often get bits of stone and dirt in there. If possible, soak your beans for a few hours. Soaking beans, and changing the water helps lessen the gassiness that beans cause. Add them to the bottom of the crock pot. Eyeballing it, cover them with twice the water as you have dried beans. It’s okay to have more than enough water, but twice the amount is the bare minimum.

Set your crock pot on high, if it has settings. If you set it to high, you’ll have finished beans within three or four hours, depending on the beans and your crock pot. If you set it on low, you should have cooked beans after letting them cook in the slow cooker all day.

When I cook a batch of dried beans, I always cook more than I need at that moment, and I freeze the rest in small freezer bags for later use. This allows me to use beans quickly, without having to cook them all day.

Dried Bean Soup

(serves 7)

I have a large bakery bucket full of a mixture of dried beans (although there are no black beans in there, because they discolor all of the other beans). I use this mixture of dried beans to make a tasty Italian style bean soup, that is wonderful with fresh bread. You can either make this on the stove or in the slow cooker.

Ingredients

- 2 cups of mixed dried beans

- 2 quarts of water or broth

- 1 medium can of diced tomatoes (or 2 fresh diced tomatoes)

- 1 minced onion

- 2-3 minced cloves of garlic (or 1 tsp. of dried garlic)

- 2 Tbs Basil
- 2 Tbs Marjoram
- 2 Tbs of soup base or boullion cubes
- 1-2 bay leaves
- salt and pepper to taste

Combine your ingredients in your crock pot, and let it simmer all day on low or medium (depending on your heat settings). Adjust seasonings to taste. Right before I serve this soup, I like to add 1 Tbs more fresh basil leaves.

Naturally, when it comes to cooking any kind of dried bean soup, you can come up with endless variations on this sort of soup, based on the seasonings and other ingredients you use. Check out the handy chart in the back of this book to develop your own variations. You can also modify other dried bean recipes from other sources for the crock pot.

Chicken Tacos

Another variation I enjoy making in the crock pot is Chicken Soft tacos. Obviously, I’m only preparing the meat in the crock pot, and will assemble the tacos themselves later.

Ingredients:

- ½ pound of chicken per person

- 1 pinch each of Paprika, Cayanne Pepper, Garlic, Oregano, Cumin, and Coriander

- 1 finely minced onion

- Salt to taste

- about ½” of water on the bottom of the crock pot

Place the chicken in the crock pot, lightly seasoning each piece as you put it in there. Cover the crock pot and put it on high. Let it roast for about 3-5 hours, depending on your crock pot. The chicken should be falling apart.

Shred the chicken into a bowl. In another bowl, finely slice some fresh lettuce. Have a few more bowls with other optional taco toppings, such as fresh tomatoes, fresh onions, fresh bell peppers, and avocado. Serve with shredded cheese.

Place sour cream or plain yogurt into a pastry bag, or into a zipper bag if you don’t have a pastry bag. Cut a corner off of the zipper bag, and use it to easily squeeze sour cream onto your tortillas or shells. It’s less messy than trying to spoon sour cream into the shells!

Add meat and other toppings, and serve.This recipe can also be used with beef roast or pork loin to make beef or pork soft tacos.

Roast Chicken Dinner

We frequently make some kind of a roast chicken dinner for dinner on Sundays using our crock pot. As with the bean soup recipe, there are endless variations on this kind of dish, based on the seasonings you can use (see the chart at the end of this book). The chicken can be served with vegetables on the side, and brown rice or potatoes.

Provençal Chicken

Ingredients:

- 1 split chicken breast per person

- ¼ c. of prepared dijon mustard (or honey dijon) per chicken breast.

- 1 generous pinch of dried Tarragon per breast

- pinch of salt

Lay chicken into the crock pot, one piece at a time, coating each chicken breast well with mustard and Tarragon.

Roast on high in the crock pot for about 3-4 hours, depending on your crock pot. This can also be made with turkey breast or with pork loin.

I frequently use this method of roasting meats to prepare any meat that needs to be cooked ahead of time for any recipe, such as making tacos, burritos, or dishes like those.

Making Your Own Convenience Foods

As an alternative to buying convenience foods, we can also make our own convenience foods at home of commonly used ingredients. There have been many other books and articles written on this topic, for every kind of mix imaginable. I have my own preferred homemade convenience foods. Some of these are stored in the freezer. I am thankful to have an upright freezer for this purpose, but I know that these suggestions for freezing ahead may not work for every situation.

Frozen, Precooked Dried Beans

As I wrote about in the last chapter, you can save quite a bit of time by preparing your dried beans in a larger than necessary batch, and freezing your cooked beans in freezer bags for quicker use. This is a big time saver when it comes to using dried beans.

Frozen “Garden Burgers”

I absolutely love different kinds of veggie burgers. The problem is, buying store bought veggie burgers is extremely expensive. Thankfully, we can prepare our own veggie burgers fairly easily and freeze them for future use. This is also a very frugal meal.

Begin by cooking 1 c. of small red beans and 1 c. of black beans in the crock pot. Let cool. Puree in food processor, set aside. Finely chop in a food processor about 2 cups of vegetables of your choice. Most recently when I made these, I used these vegetables from my garden:

- 1 hot habanera pepper
- 3 sweet banana peppers
- 1 carrot
- 1 leek
- 1 onion
- 3 cloves of garlic
- 1 summer squash or zucchini

Set your processed vegetables in a sieve over your sink to let all of the excess water drain out of them. This is crucial for your burgers sticking together. Mix with the beans.

Add:

- 1 c. of cooked brown rice

- 2 c. of raw oatmeal. Use quick oats or take regular oats, and pulse (uncooked) in a food processor.

- 2 Tbs. of ground cumin
- 2 Tbs of ground coriander
- ¼ c. of fresh cilantro (optional)

Let your dough sit for about a half an hour in the fridge. This helps it stick together better later.

Line a baking dish with lid (or another freezer safe storage container with lid) with waxed paper. Using wet hands, form your dough into patties. Place each patty gently into the storage container on the waxed paper. Add another layer of waxed paper after you fill the first layer. Keep going until you run out of dough (should make about 1 dozen burgersized patties).

To cook:

Place the frozen patty on a hot skillet or griddle. If you’re using a grill, I find it better to place it on some foil or a grill-safe baking sheet, to keep it from falling in the cracks. They tend to crumble, as most veggie burgers do, when placed on a grill. Pan fry or grill for about 10 minutes on one side, then flip and do the other side for an additional 10 minutes.

I like to eat mine on a tortilla with lettuce, tomato, and onions, and a bit of taco sauce.

Grated, Frozen Zucchini

I love zucchini bread, but I find it to be too hot to make it when the zucchini is all ripe in the heat of summer. Instead, I take my larger zucchinis, and I grate them down. I freeze the grated zucchini in quantities called for in my zucchini bread recipe. I also grate some up for other recipes too. The important thing to remember when freezing zucchini in different quantities is to write the quantity on the bag in permanent marker before freezing, or you may have to try to figure that out while getting ready to cook.

Because zucchini takes up so much room in the garden, and because I noticed everyone else is eager to pawn off their inevitable surplus of zucchini off on me, I no longer grow my own zucchini in the garden. I just leave my car unlocked at church during the months of July and August, and it magically appears in my front seat after each service. It’s a big time saver over growing it myself.☺ If your friends are always giving you their extra zucchini too, you may want to rethink growing yours.

Frozen, Peeled Bananas

You may have noticed that the grocery store sometimes has bags of seriously overripe bananas for sale, usually for a dollar or two per bag, and looking as though they have the shelf life of a few hours left in them. Whenever I find bananas at a fantastic price like this, I peel and freeze them for use in smoothies, or to put in homemade ice cream or other recipes. I have a friend who frequently adds frozen bananas to most of her baked goods because they are sweet and moist, allowing her to use less sugar and oil. When we have them, we usually use them up in smoothies or when making biscotti.

To freeze, peel the bananas. Break them apart into usable quantities, depending on how many bananas you’d use, for example, in a recipe or as smoothies. Place them into zipper bags, and freeze.

To use in smoothies, just add them frozen to the blender. To use in other recipes, thaw as needed.

Fresh Herb Frozen Cubes

Being an avid gardener, particularly a herb gardener, and an herb enthusiast, I love the taste of certain herbs fresh in my recipes. Unfortunately, I can’t always have them fresh, because summer doesn’t last nearly long enough, and the cats eat my herbs if I bring them indoors. A few years ago, I came up with a way to preserve my favorite fresh herbs by freezing them in a usable way.

I begin by washing the herbs off. Then I put the herb into the blender or food processor, and I process with a small amount of water until the leaves are finely minced. The water helps the herbs to stay together once frozen.

Taking an ice cube tray, I fill each “cube” with the minced herb. Freeze the tray in the freezer until the herbs are frozen. Pop the cubes out, and store them in a zipper bag.
To use the herb cubes, use 1 cube for every 2 Tbs of fresh herb called for in a recipe.

This works particularly well with fresh basil, cilantro, rosemary, mint, and parsley, but not all mixed together of course!

Roasted Red Pepper Cubes

I love roasted red pepper sauce. I think it makes a great sauce, and it also makes a fantastic additive to spaghetti or pizza sauce. Red peppers are extremely expensive though, and so this is my way of preserving a large bulk purchase of red peppers when I find them for a fantastic sale.

Recently, red bell peppers were on sale 11 for $10. Another time, I was able to buy a case of them, which were all starting to wilt, deeply discounted.

To roast red peppers, begin by washing them well, and removing any stickers on the skin. Preheat the oven to 400° F. Place your red peppers about an inch apart on baking sheets, and stick them in the oven for about 10-15 minutes (or longer, depending on the size of the peppers). The skin should blister and blacken on the red peppers.

After pulling the peppers out of the oven, allow them cool until you are able to handle them, but not completely. Using a paring knife or other small knife, core and peel the peppers (the skin should come off easily), and place the flesh into a food processor.
Process the roasted red peppers until pureed, and pour into ice cube trays. Allow them to cool completely before putting the roasted red pepper sauce into the freezer. Once the cubes of red pepper sauce are frozen, put them into a freezer bag. Use them in sauces such as spaghetti sauce or pizza sauce.

Bake or Buy and Freeze French Bread Baguettes

We love pizza around here, but sadly pizza can sometimes take too much time, because I have to make the dough. When I am able to, I try to have in my freezer a few things that will make pizza go faster on days when time is short:

- Store bought and frozen French Bread Baguettes (when they go on sale)

- Home Made Baguettes

- Home Made Pizza Crusts

The real trick is to freeze the bread without it getting freezer burn or stale in the freezer. The key to this is to remove as much air as is possible when freezing the breads. I usually will cut the baguettes in half anyway (so that they’ll fit better) or I’ll bake my own baguettes in “freezer bag size”. I take the baguettes, wrap them in plastic or freezer paper, and stick them into the freezer bags, squeezing as much air out as possible. I usually freeze them pre-sliced down the center longways, so that I can simply decorate the pizza on the frozen crust and stick them in the oven already frozen.

This makes for a very quick and easy meal!

Simple Baking Mix

This simple baking mix can save time over having to pull out dry ingredients, and it saves money over buying a boxed mix. This baking mix can be used for making biscuits, dumplings, and other baking mix recipes.

Ingredients:

- 8 cups flour
- 1-1/4 cups nonfat dry milk powder
- 1/4 cup baking powder
- 1 Tbsp. salt
- 2 cups solid vegetable shortening

In a large bowl, combine flour, milk, baking powder, and salt. With a pastry blender or two knives, cut in shortening until the mixture looks like coarse cornmeal and the shortening is evenly distributed. Store in tightly closed covered container in a dark, cool place. Use in place of ‘Bisquick’ in any recipe.

Simple Pancake Mix

For the mix:

- 6 cups flour
- 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
- 3 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 tablespoon salt
- 3 tablespoons sugar
- ½ c. buttermilk powder

For the pancakes:

- 2 cups Homemade Pancake Mix
- 2 eggs
- 2 cups milk or buttermilk
- 4 tablespoons melted butter

To make pancakes, mix the ingredients together in a large bowl. Heat a griddle over medium high heat, and pour ¼ c. of batter onto the hot griddle. After batter is bubbling, flip the pancake carefully to cook the other side, about 2 minutes.

Homemade Granola

In our family, we generally don’t buy boxed cereals, except on special occasions. But, we do love granola, especially with some vanilla yogurt. I make homemade granola, mixed with a variety of dried fruits for added flavor.

The real key to saving on granola is to find your ingredients, especially the dried fruit, in a bulk food store, instead of in small packages in the grocery store.
Granola can be made any way you’d like. The ratio is always 9 units of dry ingredients to 1 unit of wet ingredients, plus 1 unit of dried fruit. So, for example, if I have 9 cups of dry ingredients (see chart below), I’d get 1 cup of wet ingredients mixed in there, and would later add 1 cup of dried fruits after it has cooled. Remember 9:1:1.

Mix your wet and dry ingredients together in a large bowl, then spread your granola mixture out onto baking sheets. Bake at 275 ° F for about an hour, mixing frequently, until dry. Allow your granola to cool before adding dried fruits.

Dry Ingredients

(9 units)

- Rolled Oats
- Rolled Wheat
- Rolled Rye
- Bulgar
- Dried Coconut
- Whole Wheat Flour
- Whole Grain Flour
- Corn Meal

- Grounds or Finely chopped nuts such as:

- Almonds
- Walnuts
- Peanuts
- Hazelnuts
- Macadamia Nuts
- Cashews

Wet Ingredients

(1 unit)

- Honey
- Molasses
- Coconut Oil
- Sesame Oil
- Olive Oil
- Vegetable Oil
- Brown Sugar (diluted
- in water)
- Maple Syrup

Dried Fruits

(1 unit -- added after baking)

- banana chips
- figs
- dates
- papaya
- mango
- apple chips
- raisins
- prunes
- dried oranges
chocolate chips (yes I know that’s not a fruit)

- carob chips

Buying and Using Bulk Meat

One big bulk food savings we experience comes from buying our meat in bulk. Usually when I mention buying meat in bulk, I tend to either get comments in person or via email to the effect of, “I can’t imagine what meat in bulk even looks like…”.

I believe bulk meat is one of our best ways to save money, as it allows us to have good quality meat for the best price. The goal of frugal shopping is, after all, not just saving money, but feeding our families as best as we can for the best value. When it comes to purchasing meat, I try to buy lean meat, focusing mostly on boneless, skinless chicken breast, ground beef, turkey, and stewing beef (with the fat cut off ). I can usually purchase each of these (except the turkey) in larger quantities by asking at the meat market.

You may be wondering why I go to the meat market for my meats, instead of just buying grocery store meat. There are two main reasons: price and health. Most of the time, meat seems to be cheaper at the meat market, and it also seems to be fresher. When a butcher wraps your meat for you, in front of you, then you can see it better than when you purchase meat that has been sitting a package. At a busy meat market, with a fast turnaround, even if the meat is packaged, you know it’s fresher than at a supermarket with a lower turn-around on meats. Meat in many supermarkets tends to sit longer than I’m comfortable with.

To put it bluntly, supermarket meat scares me. Meat “on sale” at a supermarket…I won’t even go there. I don’t have any happy thoughts associated with that image. A friend’s teenage son was telling us several years ago that he nearly got sick when he saw that the grocery store where he worked washed, salted, and repackaged meat past the sell by date. Illegal? Sure it is. Can you prove they did it though? After he told us about that, the words “manager’s special” on a package of meat in that store took on an entirely new meaning.

Ewwww.

Shopping at a meat market is different. You walk up to the butcher, and he scoops out your ground chuck in front of you, allowing you to see whether or not there is a major difference in color between the inside and the outside (which you cannot do with a package), and if something were to be bad, you’d smell it long before you got home, unlike a package.

Recently, we got a 40 pound case of boneless, skinless chicken breasts. How did I manage this? By asking at a meat market. They allow me to order a case (40 pounds) ahead of time.

It would be foolish, though, to just stick it in the freezer in it’s present condition. I’d have a 40 pound brick of chicken on my hands. Instead, I create some convenience foods with my chicken, preparing it into packages I can use for different recipes.

We clear the table and get to work as soon as we bring it home. Our supplies are:

- Meat Scissors (“kitchen shears”)
- Cutting Boards
- Freezer Bags
- Large bowl
- Kitchen Scale (that’s optional)

These cases of chicken are usually divided into 4 ten pound bags, and so we work on one bag at a time. Each bag is prepared differently when it comes to our house, based on the different ways we tend to use chicken in our home.

For example, about half of the chicken we leave in whole breast format, for different uses.The other half, we cut into small strips or cubes, using the kitchen shears. Opening one of the ten pound bags at a time, I begin cutting up the chicken into usable strips. I make a lot of stir fry, fajitas, chicken, and stew for meals in our home.Taking the time to cut up the meat before I even freeze it saves a HUGE amount of time later. Because I’m cutting up so much of it, I start to get into the groove a bit, and the job goes much faster than doing one little bit at a time.

For meat that I would use as Fajitas, I create a marinade for the meat. I pour the marinade into the bags of chicken, so that as it thaws before I use it, the meat also marinades. The marinade contains:

- 1/4 c. of lemon juice

- 1/2 t. each of cumin, coriander, garlic powder, cilantro

- 1 t. each of chili powder and minced onions

- Dash of hot sauce (optional) or a pinch of hot red pepper (also optional).

These are all approximate measurements. I tend to eyeball it, making sure all of the meat is covered in marinade before I seal it up.
Make sure you seal up the bags nicely, and squeeze out as much of the air as is possible. This keeps your meat fresher longer. I try to use up my meat within 2 months after freezing it.

Miscellaneous Frugal Recipes For the Home

Most of us take for granted the fact that we must buy certain things, such as laundry soap. Unless we were raised super frugal or grew up anywhere but suburban America, we probably don’t even realize that it is possible to make commonly used things such as our own laundry soap.

In fact, after I put this particular recipe on my blog, with photos of the process, my mom phoned me up to tell me I should probably take it down. I mean, what would people think, knowing I make my own laundry soap?

All I know is this. Enough people around us have gone through hard times financially (some harder than what we’ve been through) and so by now I think people know that you do what you have to do to save any way you can.Ten years ago, people might have rolled their eyes. Now that the recession has had its way with most of Michigan, I’ve found that today most people ask me for the recipe. That includes my friend who drives a BMW.

Back when my kids were all very little, I had a recipe for homemade laundry soap, and it didn’t work very well at all. When you have babies and toddlers, there are more stains. I felt like any savings were washed away (pun intended) by the still-stained clothing. Stains still do concern me, but that’s what coupons for Oxy-clean® and Stain Stick® are for.

The recipe I used for homemade laundry soap was a different recipe too. This recipe is alleged to be the one the Duggar family uses (or at least a variation on it). I’ve seen variations on this recipe all over the internet, and I know several friends who use it personally, with great success. It’s not original with me, obviously, and I’ve not been able to figure out who developed it so as to give proper credit. An older lady I know alleges that this one has been around since the Great Depression, which is also possible.

I was still dubious because, since couponing, I have learned that it is entirely possible to buy a bottle of name brand laundry soap for under 50¢ if you have the right combo of coupons and sales.

You can’t beat that…or can you?
Seeing as how I had to do some grocery shopping that day, and the fact that we were burning through my stash of very small bottles of laundry soap, I decided to buy the ingredients and give it a try. I was told the total cost would be around $12, and that it would make more than one batch.

The ingredient list was simple enough. I’d need three things, two of which I had never purchased before:

- Fels-Naptha Heavy Duty Bar Laundry Soap

- Arm and Hammer Washing Soda (not to be confused with baking soda)

- Borax (a staple in this house since the days of cloth diapering, and also an item on this week’s shopping list anyway)

To find these items, check your local hardware store, particularly a small town hardware store that has lots of odds and ends. When I walked into our little hardware store, I was immediately overwhelmed by how packed full of “stuff ” it was. My ADD went into overdrive, as I tried to figure out where to step next.

“What can I getcha?” the guy behind the counter asked.

“Um…would you happen to have Fels Naptha Soap?”

“Now, what kinda hardware store would this be if I didn’t? So, making laundry soap or did ya fall into poison ivy?”

“Laundry soap.”

The gentleman walked over a few cluttered aisles, handed me the Fels Naptha, and then asked me if I knew what else I needed. He had it all right there, and told me he even had a print out of the recipe in case I needed it. I looked it over and realized it was the same one a blog reader had sent me. This is one of the reasons why I love living in the country!

The total: $11.42 (including Michigan Sales Tax).

I know what you’re probably thinking.Twelve dollars sounds about normal for buying laundry soap, not just ingredients. “But I can spend that much to buy other name brand laundry soap!” I can hear you say.

Not quite.

This one recipe makes 10 gallons of finished product. 10 gallons! You’d pay that much for 1 gallon of name brand detergent. Not only that, but this recipe doesn’t use up all of what is in my shopping bag. I have enough Washing Soda to make seven more batches, and enough borax for nineteen batches. The only thing I’ll need to purchase again is the Fels-Naptha bar, which cost just over a dollar.

I was still a little dubious. I had a small bag of supplies that cost under $12 that were supposed to make well over 10 gallons of laundry soap? This just didn’t seem probable.

When I got home from the rest of my grocery day, I got started.

Homemade Laundry Soap

First off, I had to grate the Fels Naptha. I grated it into a bowl, and then added it to a pot of 4 cups of hot tap water, which I then turned on medium low heat. We’re going to stir and heat until the soap is completely dissolved. I have a box grater I purchased at the Dollar Store for this purpose.

A warning here: this bubbles over unless you really do stir continuously and watch it carefully. Use a larger than needed pot.

The next step requires a five gallon bucket or larger. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I use my five gallon buckets (bakery buckets) as my own personal canister set — storing flour, sugar, wheat, and rice in them. I didn’t want to add something soapy to an empty one. Instead I had a small Rubbermaid tub lying around that was 10 gallons in size. I decided this would work well.

I filled my tub about halfway with hot tap water. To this I added 1 cup of Borax and 1 cup of Arm and Hammer Super Washing Soda. After stirring to dissolve, I then added the melted down Fels-Naptha Laundry Soap. I then put the lid on it, and stuck it in the corner of my back hall storage area. I let it sit overnight. The laundry soap needs to gel up.

The next day, it was time to put some of it into a one gallon container. I originally entertained the thought of pouring it into the old, empty laundry soap containers I had in the basement that I was too lazy to carry up to the trash. This was quickly dismissed, after I realized that (1) the tiny spout thing did not want to come out of the larger hole, and (2) I probably would not have been able to “pour” the gelled soap into the larger hole without wasting half of it. The funnel also was a bust (it wouldn’t slide down the little hole).

Instead I used a 1 gallon container. I filled the container half way with the soap-gel, and the other half with hot tap water. I put the lid on and shook well until dissolved. Now, when I need to do a load of laundry, I use a ½ cup to measure out my laundry soap. If you have a front loader, use ¼ cup.

After putting my math skills to the test, I figured out exactly how much it cost for a 10 gallon batch of laundry soap:

- 1 Fels-Naptha bar = $1.29 (I’ve been told that buying this in a pack is even cheaper)

- 1 cup of Arm & Hammer Washing Soda = $0.57

- 1 cup of Borax = $0.29

Total: $2.15 for 10 gallons.

Homemade Dryer Sheets

The same friend who told me about the homemade laundry soap told me of a way to make homemade dryer sheets. I love using dryer sheets when I do my bedding, as everything smells so much fresher. However, that always seemed a bit wasteful during tight weeks. Instead, I learned how to create my own affordable dryer sheets.

When I find a good deal on fabric softener, with sales and coupons, I stock up on fabric softener. I also stock up on sponges when possible, as those are handy for a variety of uses.

Taking my sponges, I cut the sponges in half to form squares. This way I know they are used for the dryer sheets.

I poured the small container of fabric softener into a bucket with a lid. I used an empty ice cream pail for this task, as it was about the right size. I also filled the fabric softener bottle up with hot water, shook it well, and poured the water into the bucket too, to dilute it.

Toss in the sponges.

Now, whenever I need a dryer sheet, I reach in, squeeze out a sponge, and toss it into the dryer. The sponges are reusable. however, when you notice them starting to fall apart, it’s time to retire them. You’ll usually get about a year’s use out of them.

Used old sponges are great in water balloon fights. Dip in water, don’t squeeze out, and throw it at your target.

Bath Salts

One indulgence I always enjoyed was fancy bath salts, though obviously, that has had to come to an end as well. I have learned over the years some variations on how to make bath salts stretch, as well as making the store bought salts stretch.

Stretching Store Bought Bath Salts

If you have a favorite variety of bath salt, there is a simple and affordable way to make these stretch.

Start off with a 1 gallon bucket with a lid on it. Again, I used an old ice cream pail. Fill the bucket 3/4 of the way with epsom salt when you find it on sale. Add your favorite bath salts to the bucket of epsom salt, and stir it well.

Leave the bucket alone for about a week, with the lid on. The oils used to scent the salts should permeate the entire bucket in that time, if you’ve mixed it well.

Making Homemade Bath Salts

If you’d like to try your hand at making your own bath salts, you can do this too, by using epsom salt and scented oils or essential oils. Be sure to use scented oils that say they are for cosmetic or personal use, as some for household use are irritating to your skin. Some are not designed to be used on skin.

Please note that essential oils are very strong, and some can have medicinal effects, so be careful when using them. I usually add a few drops of rose oil or lavender oil to a gallon of epsom salts, and allow it to sit for a week after mixing well. You can learn about other combinations of essential oils by doing some research on the internet.

Other Recipes

In the
resources section of this book, I have a listing of websites with further frugal household and bath recipes for you to try.

Part Three:
Frugal Shopping & Cooking in Special Circumstances

Health & Weight Management on a Tight Budget

Healthy food costs more than junky food.That’s a sad fact of life. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t do what you can to make your meals healthier and to lose weight despite a tight grocery budget. I actually get all of the hair on the back of my neck standing up when discussing this topic sometimes, because of some of the idealistic arguments I’ve heard in regard to a proper diet. For example, I’ve been told by many, many friends that eating a perfect diet is worth it because it saves on your medical bills. This somehow implies that I can take money out of a line item in my budget labeled “medical bills” and stick it into the grocery budget. In a perfect world maybe. Sadly, my medical expenses will not go down each week proportional to what I’m spending on healthy foods.Our health insurance costs remain the same.

We all know, or at least have a very good idea, what constitutes the ideal diet. Lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, eating foods as natural as possible are all ideal.

Ideal is one thing, but reality is often different. Just because you can’t afford “ideal” right now doesn’t mean you should take a nose dive into Junk Food Heaven either. Based on our own family budgets, we have to make decisions on how to spend that money, and we should spend what we do have on the best quality foods we can afford.

In many ways, I find it ironic that poverty and obesity go hand in hand. Fifteen years ago, I would have thought that was a non sequitor. How can you be fatter when you’re poorer? I’ll tell you how. Cheap food that fills your belly for less is full of things that are known to cause obesity. The poorer you are, the less fresh produce you consume. Many poor also don’t have a very high education, and therefore don’t know much about nutrition (though here I am, despite graduate school).

Of course, if you were to look at a photo of me right now, as I sit here typing this, you’d probably think I was something of a hypocrite, seeing that I am fat. However, despite our budgetary restrictions, I’ve actually lost 37 pounds over the last year. Actually, I’ve lost more than that over the last year, but regained some of it following surgery. The pans of brownies that friends brought me during my recovery didn’t help. Just 37 pounds have remained off. I still have about 50 or so pounds to go before I am where I want to be, but I’m getting there, a few ounces at a time.

More important than the weight loss is my over all health. Despite needing two surgeries in two years (one for an old shoulder injury, and another for gall stones caused from the medicines they gave me from the shoulder surgery), my doctor tells me my health is fantastic. He was actually surprised at my blood work because of my weight. My blood pressure is in the ideal range, despite being clinically obese. My cholesterol is good. My blood sugar is good. My doctor even told me I had good muscle tone. If only we could get all of that health to show through on the outside! ☺

I’ve had a problem with yo-yo dieting for the last ten years. My yo-yo’ing goes something like this:

“Marty, I can’t lose weight with so little to spend on groceries! I need to diet, but I need more fresh fruits and vegetables in me to do it. To follow (name that diet), I need to buy.....(name expensive foods I don’t normally buy)....”

“Okay, we can do that this week. Go ahead. Buy more fruits and vegetables. You know I prefer them anyway.”

So, for a few weeks in a row, I spend over a month’s worth of grocery money on food specified by whatever diet I’m working on, usually something to do with buying and eating more fresh fruits and vegetables. The primary “problem” (dare I call it that) is my children love fresh fruits and vegetables. I’m glad for this, but we quickly blow through $100 worth of groceries in two or three days, instead of it lasting the whole week.

Cha-ching.

And what am I going to say? Sorry kids, the healthy stuff is only for mom? Here have some bread?

I’d lose weight -- lots of weight -- during those weeks when we had an abundant grocery budget. Then, my husband’s work would slow down, hours would be cut back, or I’d not have any web design work for a while, and BAM! on the pounds would go with a vengeance.

I finally realized that this was probably worse for me than not losing weight in the first place.

If weight loss was to be permanent, it had to be a sustainable lifestyle. Sadly, eating a perfect diet was not sustainable due to circumstances beyond my control (money), in addition to the usual dark chocolate cravings we all get. I needed to somehow make my weight loss work even when the budget was tight.

I also came to realize something else. When I had the grocery money to buy healthier food, I also controlled my diet better. When I was “punished” with a restricted budget, and I had to restrict how many fresh fruits and vegetables I could buy, I also tended to say, “Ah, who cares! It’s hopeless!” and have an extra serving of whatever was for dinner.

This is not good.

I’ve managed to lose those 37 pounds following these principles. It was not through following some guru’s eating plan, nor buying food I couldn’t afford all the time. I didn’t waste three weeks of grocery money on supplements that promised me easy weight loss. I simply followed some simple principles I want to suggest to you, just to give you an idea of how to make this work for you too.

My brainstorm really came one day while I was making spaghetti sauce. I had been realizing slowly that I needed to make weight loss work even when my budget was tight or I’d forever be up and down by 50 pounds for the rest of my natural life based on my husband’s overtime and my web design clients. I looked in the pot, as I browned my hamburger, only to realize it was swimming in grease. I looked around for something to pour the grease into, and grabbed a glass measuring cup, and a sieve. Draining the grease, I was shocked and disgusted to find nearly a cup of drippings in just over two pounds of hamburger. You had better be believing I started to drain the grease every time I made anything with burger, or I bought ground turkey when it is available.

Little things like this may not send me on a “Lose 20 pounds a month” sort of testimonial, but it will allow me to slowly maintain my weight loss and health.

Here’s some more suggestions:

1. Drink Water. Unless your tap water is absolutely disgusting in flavor, water is free and it’s better for you than pop and most juices (which are high in sugar). Even bottled water is cheaper than bottled pop if you must buy your drinking water. I used to balk at spending $3.00 for a 32 pack of water, but I would spend $1.29 on a two liter of health-destoying pop? Pretty dumb. A filtering system is also an affordable alternative.

2. Drain your grease. As I said before, drain the fat off of any meat you cook. I originally only grabbed that measuring cup because it was handy at the time, but if possible, drain it into a glass measuring cup to remind yourself how much grease is in there. Ewwwww.

3. Favor whole grains over processed carbs. Carbs are not all bad, nor are they all fattening. Whole grains fill you up, provide fiber and other nutrition, and are over all better for you. Although on the outset brown rice may look like it costs more, a package of brown rice will produce twice as much cooked rice as white rice, making it a better financial value too.

4. Portion Control Don’t just pay attention to what you eat, but how much you eat. Now, I am the sort of person who gets really obsessive about some things, and when I first heard the phrase, “portion control” I started thinking about saving up for a fancy scale. This is not necessary. I’ll make it easy for you. A portion of anything is about the size of your fist. Anything more, and you have more than one portion.

5. Walking and Stairs. Forget an expensive membership to a gym. If you are so fat that you can’t walk up stairs without breathing heavy, you need to walk up your own stairs a few times a day until you can do it without being winded. Sometimes I add a variation to this free-but-strenuous exercise by carrying laundry up my stairs too.Taking your kids for walks up to the park, or around the park is also great exercise. Don’t worry about “power walking” or “I won’t burn enough calories”. If you are living a sedentary life so far, you’re not burning any calories now either. Move your body in any way you can.

6. Lean Meats. If you’re a meat eater, choose lean meats.That means, choose chicken breast. Choose ground turkey over ground beef (which is, by the way, usually cheaper per pound too when buying the frozen packages of it). Choose turkey hot dogs over “mystery meat” hot dogs (also usually cheaper anyway).

7. Make healthier overall choices. Look, just because you have a coupon for something, doesn’t mean you have to buy it. I already talked about that a little bit, but I’m reiterating it. If you want to eat healthier, and if you want to lose weight, you have to go lighter on the processed junk (hopefully eliminating it altogether). For example, I love Mac n Cheese, but it’s not the best choice in regards to food. So, we’ll eat it occasionally (sorry health food purists) and I’ll enjoy every bite of it, but I’ll keep those bites limited to one or two portions (and remember: portions are the size of my fist, not however much I can fit on my plate).

8. Dried beans are cheap, reasonably tasty if cooked properly, and very, very healthy. They have loads of fiber, loads of protein, and dried beans are lower in calories than most foods. They are also low in fat. Dried beans are a good choice for losing weight and eating healthy.

9. Know the difference between feast days and normal days. Not every day calls for a feast. In our family, we do not have dessert very often. Dessert is actually reserved for holidays and birthdays which, with a large family, happen often enough in our household.

It is possible to lose weight (or maintain your weight) on a tight budget without following a complicated diet and eating plan or belonging to a gym. Just remember to keep portions to the size of a fist, and make the best food choices you are able to afford.

Food Allergies on a Tight Budget

After I wrote the first edition to Basics of Frugal Cooking, I received a few different emails asking me how to save when you have food allergies. I’d think about that for a bit, and frankly be at a loss. The more restrictive you have to be, the harder (and more expensive) shopping is. I already had to deal with some minor food allergies. I’m allergic to most sea food, and my son is allergic to cheese, but those are both easily avoidable. I didn’t really understand the challenges and expenses involved in food allergies until I became very allergic to milk and dairy products for about a year. Thankfully, following my gall bladder surgery, my reaction to dairy has subsided, but this experience showed me how irritating and expensive a food allergy can be.

My allergy came right after I had my shoulder surgery. The doctor had given me some kind of anti-inflammatory drug for to get the swelling down before surgery, and to help keep the swelling down following my shoulder decompression and excision. My shoulder injury actually added about 10 pounds to my weight due to the swelling, which was horribly painful! I am normally paranoid about prescription drugs, but at this point I was in far too much pain to do a full Google® search on possible side effects before getting my medicines.

Within a few months, I was constantly feeling ill, which made my shoulder feel even worse, as you might imagine. After seeing a different family doctor in the practice, we finally realized I had developed a dairy allergy. Later I found out that dairy allergy and gallstones are two very common side effects of this particular combination of drugs I was on. Lucky me.

I now have more than my fair share of sympathy to anyone with a food allergy. Milk is in everything. Store-bought bread, some tomato sauce, non-fat refried beans in a can, Raman noodles, and a variety of other things you’d never expect all have milk in them. Cheap tortillas have milk. The pricier ones don’t. Every salad dressing that I like has milk in it. Some lunch meat, hot dogs, and pre-formed hamburger patties contain milk. Nearly all chocolate has milk in it (not just milk chocolate). After getting used to reading the allergy warnings on foods, I’m thankful to not be allergic to Wheat or Soy as that’s in far more things than milk is.

Did you know that milk is in non-dairy creamer sold at SAM’s Club? I didn’t bother to read the label, since it said “Non Dairy” on it, right there in the title, but after I again felt a wave of nausea wash over me, I looked, and there it was, under “Allergy Warning: Contains Milk”.
Naturally, like any other sensible, logical person on this planet, I marched into SAM’s Club with my Allegedly-Non-Dairy Creamer and demanded an explanation, especially since throwing up has got to be one of my least favorite things to do. They all insisted that there was no milk in it. Oh, but wait, there it is on the back of the container. Everyone was baffled.

We later called headquarters and they told me that non-dairy means it’s safe for people who are lactose intolerant. Sadly, I’m not only lactose intolerant, I’m also allergic to milk (which, I’ve learned in the last two years, is a completely different allergy). I finally switched to adding So Delicious® Coconut milk to my coffee as creamer. It worked, but it was more expensive (though thankfully I find frequent coupons for that too).

I learned pretty quickly that food allergies wrecked havoc with my grocery plans, even though I mostly cook from scratch already. The only place I thought I had dairy was the milk in my coffee and the cheese I use on foods. As it turned out, there was dairy in far more than that.

As with any other grocery budget, when dealing with my dairy allergy, I have to make choices with regard to where my money goes. I often have to spend a little bit more money on certain things. For example, I either have to make my own bread, or I have to stock up on bread that contains absolutely no milk while it is on sale, though completely dairy free bread tends to cost even more than the cheap breads, even with the sales. I’ve gotten to know which brands really are dairy free, and which brands have milk in them.

I make sure to snag coupons for dairy free products that we need. Sometimes I will even email companies whose products I can use and ask for coupons, mentioning that I haven’t seen any in the papers. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to receive many coupons by mail this way.

Cheese is used in many frugal dishes to add protein and flavor. I was not only dairy allergic, but my son is allergic to cheese itself, so we don’t add cheese to every part of the dish. Most of the time, I will add cheese to only some of the enchiladas or burritos, instead of to the whole pan of them, or I’ll serve the cheese on the side.

Obviously, cooking from scratch lifts some of the limits off of you in regards to food allergies, because you can then better control the ingredients which go into the foods you prepare. Still, as I mentioned earlier, some ingredients still have dairy in them where you may not even think there should be dairy, but it’s far easier than if I used too many processed foods. Learning to make foods from scratch really is the best and most reliable way to avoid offending foods, in addition to reading labels diligently. The more we can control what ingredients we are putting into the foods we make, the better we can manage this situation. Coupons are our other ally, helping us buy both ingredients and prepared grocery items that do not contain allergens.

Food Pantries: Giving and Receiving

During a low point in our lives, my husband lost his job just in time for Christmas. We had already been on a tight budget and he had already been working out of state after the machine shop he was working for was closed suddenly. We were still trying to recover from that boss paying us with bad checks for the last two weeks (money we never did get back). And now, he was laid off again on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

I felt very awkward when someone came to our door with boxes of food for us. I had helped organize food drives many times, and could never understand why many people were so weird about getting a few boxes of groceries to bless them in a hard time. Now, here I was acting in the same weird way. If there was one thing we were good on, it was groceries, because I stock up when I can, but the food pantry items helped us to extend that food I had on hand until we could get another job, an unemployment check, or some other help. I was humbled. I started to understand a little by more why those I’ve helped in the past always seemed a little timid about accepting help. It really isn’t as easy as you’d think it was.

Even Jesus Himself once said,“It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

I had to remind myself that, by refusing help, I was denying someone a blessing too. I love how it feels to help someone else out. I also needed to humble myself and allow someone to help me.

Opening the boxes, I was filled with gratitude of the generosity of others, but I also remember the feeling that washed over me when I saw some of the things that were in there, including what looked like an ancient bag of navy beans that had probably traded hands a dozen of times.

I was pretty convicted about it.

Why?

Because when it came time to collect for the food pantry, I would usually look in my own pantry and pull out those things I didn’t want. I even remember one time giving two bags of navy beans that someone had given to me. Now I had two boxes full of items on my table, partly containing items that other people didn’t want.

Ouch.

I consider this to have been a learning experience for us. As I laid in bed that night, I was trying to figure out what on earth possessed me to give my rejects to people in need, instead of something that would bless them. Maybe it was an assumption on my part, a wrong one, that when someone is in need, they ought to be thankful to have anything at all. How could I not realize that, on top of the financial stress, it was emotionally stressful to be unemployed and needing to humble yourself to accept help? How could I not realize how important it was to do whatever I could do to be a blessing by feeding a soul not just providing nourishment for the body?

I’ve noticed that what most people donate to food drives locally have changed over the last few years. Instead of getting skimpier to reflect the recession’s toll on all of our budgets, there has been more meaningful giving. I can only assume it comes from knowing, perhaps for the first time, what it’s like to be in need. Being in need seems to teach us empathy like few things do.

During that time of unemployment in our lives years ago, I learned how to cook things like navy beans (instead of passing them along again). Pity anyone who didn’t know what to do with dried beans, though. I think I zeroed in on the navy beans more because, in 20 years of helping with food drives at church or in the community, for some reason every household seems to include some ancient looking bag of navy beans in the box of what they’re giving away.

I told a friend who was helping me pack up care packages to families facing unemployment in a group I belonged to that I’ve come to see navy beans as the “white elephant gift” of food drives. We both laughed. She had also received care packages with the ancient bag of navy beans, and told me that was also the last time she ever gave them away to someone in need.

Some have asked, “Well, what should we give when there’s a food drive?”

It’s really easy. All you have to do is stop thinking:

“What do I have here in my pantry that I can get rid of while easing my guilt and feeling like I helped someone?”

and start thinking:

“If my family were facing unemployment, and discouraged, and in need, what would not only meet a need but what would also be a blessing to us?” When you think about yourself getting the box of goodies, you put entirely different things into it.

There are other, simple ways to give to your local food pantry too. Most grocery stores have some sort of change bucket at the end of their checkouts for your food pantry. Stores like Meijer and Kroger have gift cards to buy for the food pantry, starting with $1 donations. When I am able, we try to round up our grocery bill to the nearest $10 at the last store I shop at for the day, to help someone else out.

After all, that someone may one day be you or someone you love.

Part Four:
My Favorite Frugal Ingredients & How to Prepare Them

Introduction to Preparing Frugal Foods

When attempting to be more frugal in our grocery budgets, we need to focus primarily on preparing meals that center around staple foods that are consistently a good value. In this next section, I have listed what I have found to be the “Top Cheap Ingredients”, which give you the most bang for your buck.

Most of these recipes, as a result, are centered around consistently inexpensive foods, with suggestions for things that can be added but are optional (such as more vegetables). I usually give an amount of vegetables to add, plus a list of vegetables that would work well in this particular recipe, depending on what is available to you, and on sale, since vegetables and prices vary greatly from season to season and regions of the world.

For most of these recipes, it is understood that you should season them “to your taste”. My family and I like things a little bit spicier than most people probably do.The amounts for the seasonings are a jumping off point for you, not set in stone. I also want to point out that you can add as many vegetables to most dishes as you wish, based upon what is available in your area, and your budgetary restrictions.

Because my focus for this book is frugal cooking, I was careful to not recommend any ingredients that vary greatly from area to area. Unfortunately, vegetables and fruits tend to have great variation in price from season to season, and from location to location. Thus, the vegetables included in each of my regularly used recipes tend to change based upon what good things I find at the store each week! When I am making stews and soups, for example, I tend to add different vegetables to my stews, based upon what I have available. In most of the recipes, I have made note of what I tend to prefer in those recipes as far as vegetables, but I also leave it open to you to make specific modifications to the recipes.

Obviously, eating more fresh fruits and vegetables is better for our health, though it is not always possible within a limited budget to do so. Usually, for many meals, we have a salad with the meal, and fresh fruits for snacks as much as we are able to throughout each day. Again, the recipes here are given to provide recipes for ingredients that are consistently a good deal for the frugal kitchen artist.

Potatoes

Potatoes are a versatile and economical food choice upon which to build many meals. In our area, we are able to purchase 50 pound sacks of “Number 2” potatoes (meaning they are not perfectly shaped) for between $2-10. Unclassified (odd shaped) potatoes sell for even less. While potatoes will not keep indefinitely, they will stay fresh longer than most produce if keep in a cool, dry, dark place. Remove any “sprouts” and do not eat those. Potatoes can form the backbone of your meal or they can make some wonderfully creative, tasty, and frugal side dishes. Our favorite way to serve potatoes in our house is baked or boiled.

Baked Potatoes

There are two different ways to make baked potatoes. You can either bake them in a conventional oven or in a microwave. Start by selecting potatoes that are all about the same size, so that they will be completed at the same time. Wash them well, scrubbing with a vegetable brush if needed.

To bake potatoes in a conventional oven , wrap each inside of lightly greased foil, and place them in an oven preheated to 450° F for about 45 minutes (depending on size of potato, of course). Carefully remove them from the oven, and serve warm.

To bake potatoes in a microwave oven , poke each potato with a fork and cook them in the microwave for 20 minutes each. If you are cooking more than one potato at once, increase the time by five minutes per potato, or consult the instruction book that came with your microwave, since they are all slightly different.

Baked potatoes (or even boiled potatoes, below) are great topped with sour cream or plain yogurt, leftover sauces, stews, or other toppings of your choice. We often have a potato buffet if we have several dishes of leftovers, and top our potatoes with toppings such as leftover spaghetti sauce, chili, and beef stew. This is a fun and enjoyable variation on “leftovers night” that works well in our family.

Boiled Potatoes

If you do not wish to bake your potatoes, you can also serve them boiled. To do this, again select potatoes of a similar size, and wash them well. Boil the potatoes in water for about 30 minutes or longer depending on the size of the potatoes. Drain them well and serve with or without the peelings.

Roasted Potatoes

To roast your potatoes, wash the skins well or peel the potatoes. Cut your potatoes into wedges or fries. We use about 1 pound of potatoes per person. Next, marinate or season the potatoes, using the seasonings of your choice (see the chart on spices and seasonings), or using a salad dressing or store bought marinade.To marinate the potatoes, put them into a large bowl or into a zipper bag with the marinade and let them sit in the refrigerator for about an hour to blend the flavors. Next, put the potatoes onto a few baking sheets, being careful not to crowd them. If you have them piled up, they won’t cook evenly, so try have some space between potatoes. Roast at 450 ° for about 20 minutes. They are done when the vegetables are fork tender. This can also be made on the grill, by placing the potatoes into a pocket made with foil.

Roasted Sweet Potatoes, aka Fire Fries

Yes, sweet potatoes (or yams) are not actually potatoes, and they are more expensive than potatoes, but this recipe didn’t fit anywhere else. Sweet Potatoes are good for you, but many people aren’t used to eating them, beyond candied yams over the holidays.This makes a good side dish for Thanksgiving or other holidays. We also enjoy it with burgers, hot dogs, and other picnic foods.

My roasted sweet potato recipe is below. We call them “fire fries” after my youngest started calling them that.
Peel and slice 1 sweet potato per person. I usually will cut them into “french fry” shapes or large wedges. The shape does not matter, except that you keep the size consistent for consistent roasting.

Toss them in a bowl with:

- Enough oil to lightly coat them (I use olive oil or coconut oil)

- 1-2 Tbs of curry powder
- 1 Tbs of ginger
- 1 Tbs of chili powder
- A generous pinch of salt and pepper

Lay them out onto baking sheets, being careful not to crowd them onto the sheets. We want them to roast evenly. Roast at 450 ° F for about 15 minutes. Flip them over carefully, and roast them for 10 more minutes, or until they are lightly browned.

Scalloped Potatoes

Scalloped potatoes can be served as a side dish or you can serve it as a main dish, adding some leftover meat to it as it bakes if you wish. We usually add leftover turkey or pork loin, cubed, if we have it. A friend serves this with ham in it.

To make basic scalloped potatoes, butter a baking dish or large roasting pan. Preheat your oven to 375°. Begin by parboiling your potatoes until they are just fork tender. Peel and slice about three pounds of potatoes (about 5 cups) and thinly slice one onion.

Make a cream sauce by melting 2 Tbs of butter in a sauce pan, and adding 3 Tbs Flour. Mix well to absorb all of the butter, then whisk in 1¾ cup of milk. Keep whisking over low heat until a thick sauce forms.

Add your potatoes and onion to the buttered baking dish. Pour your cream sauce over the top of it. Sprinkle about 2 Tbs of parsley flakes and 1 tsp. of paprika over the scalloped potatoes.

Bake uncovered for about 40 minutes. Allow it to sit for about 10 minutes, or until the sauce has thickened. If you’re adding cooked meat or any extra vegetables, add them about 10 minutes before your scalloped potatoes are done baking.

Potato Soup

Potato soup is a hearty soup for a cold fall or winter day. It is also extremely easy and inexpensive to make. If possible, use a white potato for potato soup, as it will keep it’s shape better than a russet.

Begin by peeling, chopping, and cooking 1 pound of potatoes for each person being served. To cook the potatoes, cover them with enough water to go about an inch over the top of the chopped potatoes. Set aside when potatoes are fork tender. Reserve the cooking water.

In a soup pot, add ½ slice of finely chopped bacon per person, and cook it until crisp. Remove the bacon from the pot and set aside. Remove the bacon grease, reserving only 1 tsp of it. Brown 1 finely chopped onion, 1 tsp of caraway seeds (optional), 1 finely chopped carrot, and 1 finely chopped rib of celery in the pot. Add 1 Tsp. of flour. Stir to absorb any liquid, then slowly ladle about 2 ladle’s full of cooking water into the flour mixture. Stir frequently over low heat, until it thickens. Add the remaining liquid (straining if necessary, if foam formed), and the cooked potatoes.

Season with:

- 1 tsp. of rosemary
- 1 Tbs. of parsley flakes
- 1 pinch of salt

- 1Tbs. or 2 boullion cubes of chicken soup base (optional)

Allow the soup to simmer for about 15 minutes to blend flavors. Garnish bowls with the cooked bacon.

To serve it a bit fancier, I sometimes ladle the soup into soup mugs, and top with a spoonful of sour cream, some fresh chives from the garden, bacon bits, minced onions, and cheddar cheese, just like one of our favorite restaurants serves theirs. It makes a simple bowl of potato soup into something a bit more elegant, and frugally too!

Corn Chowder

To transform the potato soup recipe above into corn chowder, add 1 can or 1 ½ cups of corn and a can of hominy (optional). Don’t use the bacon or caraway seeds, and substitute 1 Tbs of butter for the bacon grease to thicken it. Season the corn chowder with parsley flakes, salt, and pepper. If you wish to top off the corn chowder when serving, top with sour cream, minced cilantro and chives, and shredded cheddar cheese.

Basic Stew

A “stew” is thicker than a soup, and usually contains coarsely cubed vegetables and meat. Potatoes add a great deal of bulk to any stew. Combine potatoes with stewing beef, chicken or other meat, a small amount of water, and other vegetables, and cook covered (preferably in a Dutch oven) until everything is fork-tender.

We have two favorite stews that we enjoy: Hungarian Goulash and Klefiko (my own spin on a Greek dish).

Hungarian Style Goulash

(makes about 10 servings)

In a pot or Dutch Oven, sauté the following in a small amount of oil until the onions are lightly browned:

- 2 sliced onions
- 2 minced cloves of garlic
- 1 diced carrot
- ½ Tsp. of caraway seeds
- 1 minced rib of celery

Add 2 pounds of stewing beef, and brown the meat while stirring frequently. Add 2 quarts of water or beef stock. If you added water, add some onion soup mix, beef bullion, or Worcester Sauce for added flavor. Add 2-4 potatoes, peeled and chopped. Season with

- 1 Tbs. Paprika
- 1 Tsp. Curry Powder
- 1 small can of tomato paste (optional)
- Salt and Pepper to taste

Cover and simmer until everything is fork tender. Serve with Waldviertler Potato Dumplings (recipe below), noodles, biscuit dumplings, or barley.

Knödel (Waldviertler Potato Dumplings)

(makes about a dozen dumplings)

If you live in a German Part of town, you may actually find these pre-made and frozen, in the frozen food section. For a special treat, they can be made at home too. The name, Waldviertler, refers to a region of Austria, north of Vienna, near the Czech Border, where I spent my 15th summer, and where such cuisine is very common.

Start by boiling 3 pounds of potatoes, letting them cool, and peeling them. Mash the potatoes well or crush them using a potato ricer, if you have one. Next, stir in the following:

- 1 egg
- ½ cup of uncooked grits
- 1 cup of flour
- 1 Tsp. salt

This dough should be thick and only slightly sticky. Add more flour to your dough if you need to prevent sticking. Using floured hands, roll the dough into 1 inch balls, and place on a dish. Let the dumplings chill in a refrigerator for at least an hour. Alternately, they can be frozen for up to a month in zipper baggies.

To cook the dumplings, drop them one by one into simmering stew and cover well. Let them cook for 20 minutes.

Klefiko (Greek Pot Pie)

(makes about 10 servings)

The night before, marinate a large roast (about 3 lbs), cut into chunks, or stewing beef, venison, or other meat in:

- ½ Tsp. Thyme
- ½ Tsp. Garlic Powder
- ½ Tsp Oregano

- Enough lemon juice diluted 3:1 with water to cover the meat

The next day, make a dough by mixing:

- 6 cups of flour
- 2 Tbs of Oil
- 2 cups of water

Let the dough rest in a bowl while prepping the other ingredients. In a large pan (Dutch oven, lasagna pan, etc.), place:

- 6 thinly sliced onions
- the marinated meat with marinade
- 2-4 bay leaves
- 5 cubed potatoes (skins on)

- The peeled cloves of an entire bulb of garlic (optional)

- 1 cup of other optional vegetables, diced (recommended: red peppers, green peppers, zucchini, eggplant, green onion)

Roll out the dough to be as large as the pan you are cooking in. Place the dough over the top of your Dutch oven or roaster, and tuck in the ends. Do not poke holes in it. The dough needs to be in one piece for this to cook as it should

Bake this at 300° F for 2-3 hours. This is a great variation on the Sunday afternoon roast, as it can cook while at church.

Mashed Potatoes

Mashed potatoes are fairly simple to make. Just boil the potatoes until they are very soft (you can do this with or with out peeling them first). If you did not peel them yet, peel the potatoes after they have cooked, and mash them with a potato masher or a potato ricer. Add a small amount of butter, salt, and milk as you are mashing. Add only enough to soften up your mashed potatoes, but not so much that they are runny.

When making mashed potatoes dairy free, substitute a dairy free milk such as Almond Milk or Rice Milk, or use canned chicken broth.

Latkes (Potato Pancakes)

(makes about a dozen)

We’ve used this recipe for leftover mashed potatoes,though you can also used freshly shredded potatoes.

- 3-4 potatoes, shredded (or 4 cups of leftover mashed potatoes)

- ½ c. shredded or finely minced onion
- Salt and pepper
- 1 egg
- ¼ c. flour or bread crumbs

Heat a small amount of oil in a frying pan. Form a pancake of about 1/4 c. of your dough, and fry until golden brown on one side. Flip your pancake over and fry until golden brown on the other side.

Hash Browns

(serves 7)

Begin making your hash browns by parboiling 2 pounds of potatoes about 10-15 minutes. This can be done the night before. Peel them and shred the potatoes plus one onion. Add a pinch of salt. Press the entire mixture into a frying pan and fry for 10 minutes.

Flip over carefully and fry for approximately 12 minutes more.

Potato Curry

(serves 8)

Another unique way I enjoy potatoes, is to make a potato curry with them. We enjoy Indian food in our house, especially because we love spicy foods. As a reminder, the spices and seasonings are only a recommendation. Season to your taste.

Cube several potatoes. You can leave the skins on or peel them off for this dish. If you are leaving them on, be sure to wash the skins very well.

Next, in a large pan, sauté 2 sliced onions until they are clear in a very small amount of oil or butter. Add your diced potatoes, and stir them with the onions until lightly browned.

Add 1 can of diced tomatoes (with their juice), and a pinch of the following spices:

- Cumin
- Coriander
- Ginger
- Ground Cinnamon
- Ground Cloves
- Curry powder
- Salt
- Pepper

To fill out this dish, you may add other vegetables or cooked meat to the dish, or leave it as is.

Simmer, while stirring often, until the potatoes are fork-tender. This makes a great side dish, or it can be used as a main dish.

We usually add other root vegetables to it. I also enjoy it with red bell peppers added right before serving, so that the peppers are still crisp. A friend enjoys adding broccoli and cauliflower to her potato curry.

Dried Beans

The suggestion of “living on beans” almost sounds like a bad joke at times, because the impression most people have of bean dishes is that they are somewhat blah. Eating beans is the sure sign of poverty to some people, and is the last resort.

Yet, beans are not only inexpensive, they are also very healthy and very versatile to cook with. Beans can be used to extend meat in a dish or as a substitute for it. Adding more beans to your diet can be a very easy and cheap way to eat healthier. They are high in protein, high in fiber, low in fat and low carb -- and cheap! You can’t beat that combo.

If your impression of beans are of a food that is associated with bland meals only hobos would eat, then you only need to learn how to cook them better, and to introduce them slowly into your family’s diet. Grains and beans are the most important foods on the food pyramid and they are an incredible food bargain, but they have a bad reputation because of people who just boil them and serve them as is.

When talking about eating beans, I feel like I also have to address that rather unpleasant side effect that beans are known to cause. There are a few ways to minimize this.

On the next page, I have a chart about different kinds of beans. Not every bean is easily digested, and those that aren’t have this effect more than the easily digested beans. Also, we can minimize the digestive issues with beans by soaking the beans, discarding the soaking water, and cooking our beans in fresh water (instructions follow). Cooking beans thoroughly also helps.

Dried to Cooked Bean Measurements

The above chart should help you when deciding how many dried beans to cook for your recipe. I usually will cook a larger batch, and freeze the unused portion for another time, if possible. This saves me the time of cooking up dried beans each time I need them, as that is quite time consuming.

Guide to Different Kinds of Dried Beans

To Cook Dried Beans

If a recipe calls for you to use cooked or canned beans, you can substitute cooked dried beans instead. This is more frugal and also healthier. Before preparing dried beans, rinse them well, and remove any debris. Sometimes small pebbles wind up in there.

There are two methods I’ve used to cook my dried beans. I’ve made them either on the stove top or in a Slow Cooker. When preparing beans, you should ideally presoak them for several hours, and discard the soaking water to help prevent digestion problems later. The longer you presoak your beans, the more time you cut off of your cooking time.

Presoak your beans by covering them with twice as much water. Allow them to sit for several hours or overnight. Drain them in a sieve.

Cook your beans using one of the methods below.

Stove-top Method

Cook your beans on the stove by covering them with twice as much water and bringing it to a boil. Once your beans have reached a slow boil, turn down the heat, cover them, and let the beans simmer for an hour or two, or until soft.

Be sure to use a big enough pan, as some beans, especially Garbanzos, tend to boil over. Your beans will grow in volume, and so you’ll also want to take care to have enough room for them to expand.

Using a Slow Cooker

Alternately, you can also put your dried beans into a slow cooker, and allow them to simmer on medium or low for several hours. I usually cook a large batch of beans, and from there, put the cooked beans into freezer bags for later use.

I discussed this earlier here.

Other Bean-Cooking Tips

You can usually cook different sorts of beans together, although split peas and lentils cook too fast and will be mush if cooked with other pre-soaked beans. Both lentils and split peas need only about a half an hour to cook until done.

I also take care not to add black beans and garbanzos to any bean mixtures I’m cooking until the very end. Black beans will discolor all the rest of your beans, and therefore they should be cooked separately. When I cook anything with black beans, they have a tendency to turn everything purplish-black. I cook garbanzo beans separately because they cook a little bit longer than other beans do.

Beans such as split peas and lentils can be cooked just like brown rice, and do not need to be pre-soaked.They are the “fast food” of dried beans. Add 2 cups of water for 1 cup of dried lentils or split peas.

As you can see from the chart on the previous page, not all beans are the same, or taste the same. My personal favorite bean is the Garbanzo bean, also known as “chick peas”. These beans have an almost “chicken” flavor and are very versatile to cook. In our family, though most of my family would claim to hate beans, a dish made almost exclusively from chick peas is at the top of their list of favorite foods, and thankfully, it is easy to make: Hummus!

Hummus

Hummus is a dip made from cooked garbanzo beans (chick peas), and is usually served with Pita Bread (I sometimes use tortillas or any other flat bread), Tabouleh, and Falafel.

Falafel is also made with garbanzos. Hummus is a great, cool dish for a hot summer day, and it can be brought along as picnic food too.

To make hummus, put the following ingredients in a food processor or blender:

- 2 c. cooked or canned chick peas
- 1 onion
- 5 cloves garlic
- ¼ cup lemon juice
- ¼ cup olive oil or other oil

- ¼ cup tahini (Sesame Paste) OR 3 Tbs. of Sesame Oil [8]

- salt to taste
- 1 tsp. paprika
- 1 tsp. ground coriander
- 1 tsp. ground cumin

Puree all of these ingredients until the hummus is creamy.

Chill before serving. To dress up the hummus, you may garnish it with a few dashes of paprika and a sprig or two of parsley. Serve with Tabouleh, Falafel, and Pita Bread.

Falafel

Falafel are chick pea croquettes which go well with hummus and tabouleh. These are a bit more complicated to make than the hummus or the tabouleh, but are worth the effort.The recipe calls for fresh parsley and fresh cilantro, which is why we mostly make this dish when it is summer, and we have an overabundance of both in our herb garden. Generally flat-leaf Italian parsley and cilantro do not cost very much in the produce section of your grocery store, but they are also not something that one generally keeps around either. The recipe works okay without those fresh herbs, but they definitely add to the flavor.

Begin by soaking 2 cups of dried garbanzo beans covered in water by a couple of inches. Let these soak for several hours or overnight. For best results, you really cannot use canned chick peas for this. I know, I’ve tried, with poor results.

Once the beans have tripled in size, put the soaked chickpeas (but not cooked) in a food processor and pulse them to coarsely grind the beans. Unlike with hummus, we don’t want to turn them into a paste.

Next, add:

- 1 chopped onion,
- 2-5 cloves of garlic,
- 1 tsp. coriander
- 1 tsp. cumin
- ½ tsp. salt

- ¼ cup cup fresh parsley, though dry can be used in a pinch.

- ⅛ cup fresh cilantro (optional)

Puree this mixture in the food processor. Adjust the spices as needed. You should salt and pepper the falafel mixture to taste. Refrigerate your falafel mixture while heating the frying oil to 375 ° F. If you don’t want to deep fry the falafel, you can also bake them. Instructions are below.

Form falafels by scooping out the mixture with a teaspoon, and carefully slipping it into the hot oil with a second spoon. Fry the Falafel in batches until they are dark brown all over, about 5 minutes per batch. Drain the falafel on paper towels. They should be moist in the middle, and crunchy on the outside.

To Bake Falafel

The falafel will be a bit drier if we bake them, however they will be lower in fat too.

Preheat your oven to 400 ° F and place small balls of falafel onto a lightly oiled baking sheet. Brush the balls of falafel with olive oil or other oil (the oil is optional – but it helps them to not dry out), or spray with a non-stick spray (also optional). Bake for about 10 minutes or until they are completely cooked through.

Cooking time varies based on size, so test one first to make sure it’s cooked in the middle.

This is best served with pita bread, hummus and tabouleh, and makes a great summer dinner, especially when parsley and cilantro are growing in over abundance.

Fennel Soup

Soups are another great way to use dried beans in a “nonthreatening” way in a family of people who ordinarily do not like beans. This particular soup, which is actually called Finnochio del la Pomadora, is great on a cool summer or fall night. The vegetable known as Bulb Fennel looks like celery with a bulb at the end of it, and smells like licorice. Bulb Fennel is found in many produce stores. It’s not always cheap eats (usually costing $1.49 per bulb when not in season or on sale), though when it goes on sale it is a great treat. Fennel is cheapest though, if you grow your own. Fennel is easy to grow, but just takes a long season. Sometimes it is called Fennel, Bulb Fennel, Anise, Vegetable Anise, or Finnochio. It was a popular vegetable in the Middle Ages and Renaissance era, and used in Italian dishes.

Thinly slice 2 or 3 onions and 1 or 2 bulbs of fennel. Sauté the onions and fennel in a little bit of olive oil until clear and slightly browned. Add about ½ tsp. of orange zest (orange peel). Stir in 1 finely minced garlic clove, and stir over low heat for a few minutes.

Add 1 cup of brown rice and ¼ cup of wild rice (optional), stirring to coat. Alternately, you can add any small pasta towards the end of the cooking process.

Pour in 2 quarts of chicken or vegetable stock. Add 2 cups of cooked or canned chickpeas, and 1 large can of diced tomatoes. Let this simmer until the flavors are blended. You can also add leftover cooked chicken or turkey.

Basic Bean Soup

I keep a bucket of mixed beans (leaving out black beans, garbanzos, and lentils). I make different bean soups out of the same mix of beans. Here is how to make unique bean soups any time:

Soak the beans first, after rising and sorting through them for debris. Next, put the soaked beans in a stock pot, with chicken, beef, or vegetable soup stock, or water mixed with onion soup mix. I usually add coarsely chopped onions, garlic, and a few bay leaves to the soup, no matter what variation I am making.

Depending on what kind of flavor you want, add a blend of seasonings to taste (see the chart at the end of this book), once the beans are nearly done cooking. Add vegetables of your choice (such as a can of crushed tomatoes, bell peppers, a minced hot pepper, corn, carrots, shredded cabbage, or any vegetable you have available), and some small pasta (such as orzo, alphabets, stars or small shells). Simmer until vegetables are crisp tender and the pasta is done. Be sure to serve your soup with a some homemade bread or rolls for an added touch.

When I was trying to get my children and family to eat healthier while the children were all still young, one night I made a delicious soup containing a variety of beans, diced tomatoes, and some seaweed! My children all pouted over being made to eat what they called “Seaweed soup”, but we got through dinner with plenty of leftovers. Later that night, while at our midweek Church service, I found two of my children down in the youth group room mooching pizza off of the teenagers after tearfully telling them that mom made them eat seaweed. Out of sympathy, they were allowed as much pizza as they wanted.

The moral of the story: don’t expect your children (or husband) to go from eating take out pizza to eating bean soup seasoned with seaweed or other strange vegetables overnight. The best approach would be to slowly wean them onto healthier food by adding lots of meat and other familiar ingredients at the start, and seasoning the healthier ingredients well.

Healthy and frugal food works best if it encourages us to enjoy eating at home and actually gets consumed, but if it is sending your family off to fetch McDonalds or junk food the second they are excused from the table, then you need to rethink your recipes! Healthy food only does it’s job if we eat it.

Koshary

Koshary is one of our favorite dishes that everyone enjoys. My family only recently was informed that there are beans in it (the only way I could get them to eat it was to leave that fact out before). Thankfully though, this doesn’t taste too “beany”. It is complicated to put together and dirties a few pots, therefore I reserve it for special occasions or times when I really feel like playing in the kitchen. Now that my children are older, my oldest daughter is very good at preparing this particular dish.

In a heavy, deep frying pan, heat 2 T of olive oil, and throw in a few grains of whole coriander (or a pinch of ground coriander). Add 1 cup of lentils (green, brown or orange) and stir fry until slightly brown. Pour in 2 cups of hot stock or water, and let simmer 10 minutes. Add 1 cup of brown rice, and 2 cups more of water or stock. Let simmer, covered, for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

While the rice and lentils are cooking, prepare the other parts of this dish. Cook 1 pound of macaroni noodles (your noodles can be shells, macaroni, rotini, gemelli or any other shape) according to package directions, and drain. Set your cooked noodles aside.

In a medium sauce pan, prepare the sauce, by combining the following ingredients:

- 2 cans of tomato sauce, or crushed tomatoes,

- 1 minced onion,

- 5 cloves minced garlic

- 1 pinch of cinnamon and a pinch of allspice, cumin, coriander, fresh cilantro (minced), thyme, oregano, and onion powder.

Simmer your sauce to blend the flavors. Add a dash or two of Tabasco® Sauce if you need to. I usually add a few tablespoons of homemade and homegrown roasted red pepper sauce that I keep in the freezer.

To Serve

Take about 4 Tbs. of the sauce, mix it with the noodles, to coat the noodles. Lay out the noodles on a platter. On top of the noodles put the rice and lentils. Next, pour the sauce over them attractively.Top with some sliced onions, minced chives and slices of bell peppers (all optional).

This makes a good leftover lunch, served rolled up in any sort of flat bread.

Corn and Black Bean Salsa

Many of my culinary brainstorms have happened when I had too much of something in my fridge, about to go bad, following a particularly good week in the garden. This dish came from one of those weeks. A friend gave me four large bags of sweet corn. We cooked the corn to eat as corn on the cob (one of our favorite things about summer), but we had quite a bit leftover. I froze some of it, but decided to try to clone some corn and black bean salsa that I’ve enjoyed at our favorite Mexican restaurant. It was an instant hit.

Combine:

- 2 cups of corn (fresh or cooked)
- 1 cup of cooked black beans
- 1 red bell pepper finely chopped (optional)
- 1 green pepper finely chopped
- 1 handful of fresh cilantro, minced
- 1 red onion, minced
- 1 handful of fresh parsley, minced
- 1 chili pepper, minced

- ¼ cup of lime juice (substitute lemon if you need to)

- ⅛ cup of olive oil

- pinch of ground cumin, ground coriander, and salt to taste

After combining all of the ingredients in a glass bowl, cover and refrigerate for at least an hour to blend the flavors. Use this on top of tacos, burritos, or nachos. This also works as a nice dip.

Add generous amounts of Tabasco® if it’s not hot enough for you.

Lentil and Rice Pilaf

Sauté 1 finely minced onion and 1 finely minced clove of garlic in a small amount of oil. Add ½ cup dried lentils and 1 c. rice. Stir well to coat and add 3 cups of water or stock. Bring to a boil. Once the water is boiling, reduce to a simmer, cover and let cook for about 20 minutes, or until water is absorbed and rice and lentils are tender.

Refried Beans

To make refried beans, start by cooking pinto, black or small red beans. Puree the cooked and drained beans in food processor, with 1-2 onions and garlic. Add a pinch of ground coriander, ground cumin, chili powder, salt and pepper.

Heat a heavy pan with a small amount of oil. Pour the pureed bean mixture in there and “stir fry” it to cook off the excess water, so that it thickens. When it is thick enough to your liking, it is done.

Tacos or Nachos

Tacos or Nachos can be made with refried beans or simply with some cooked beans.

For tacos, spread a layer of refried beans in the bottom of a taco shell, and add other toppings too (whether seasoned ground beef, sour cream, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, or peppers). I find the refried beans make a nice “meat extender” for tacos, allowing me to use less meat. Alternately, you could also mix some beans into the seasoned beef as you cook it.

For nachos, either serve the refried beans on the side, or drizzled over the top of the nachos, along with other toppings, such as cheese and onions. Heat your nachos in an oven until the cheese is melted, and then top with vegetables such as lettuce, tomatoes, and peppers. You can also add other condiments such as salsa and sour cream. If you don’t wish to add refried beans, you can add cooked beans to the nachos too. Different colored beans will dress up your dish.

Don’t forget to dress up your tacos and nachos with the corn and black bean salsa I shared earlier.

Seasoned Ground Meat for Tacos or Nachos

(makes enough for about 18 tacos)

Begin to make your seasoned meat by browning 2 pounds of ground beef or turkey in a large skillet. Drain off all of the grease from the meat after it has browned. You can either add a packet of Taco Seasoning, or you can season it yourself by adding:

- 1 small can of tomato sauce

- A large pinch of ground cumin, coriander, thyme, chili powder, minced onions

- 1-2 Tbs of Onion Soup Mix

Simmer your ingredients over low heat, stirring often to avoid burning. Season your seasoned beef to taste, adding salt or other spices to the mixture as needed.

Rice and Bean Burritos

(makes about 18)

Mix 3 cups of cooked brown rice with 1 ½ cups of cooked beans (black, small red, or pinto). Add 1 cup of prepared salsa (the tomato variety) and optional seasonings and vegetables:

- 1 minced onion
- 1-3 minced garlic clove
- 1-3 minced hot pepper
- 1-2 bell peppers
- 2-3 T. of fresh or frozen cilantro
- Cumin and Coriander to taste
- 1 T. of chili powder

You might also optionally add cooked leftover meat, such as chicken or beef. In a tortilla skillet or other frying pan, heat your tortillas 1 at a time, until they are soft and pliable. Working quickly, take a hot tortilla, add about ½ cup - 1 cup of mixture (depending on the size of the tortilla) in a row down the middle. Add grated cheese and taco sauce if desired. Roll the tortilla, tucking in the sides when you get half way. Put the rolled tortilla, seam side down, onto the skillet to sear. This holds your burrito in place. Keep your burritos in a baking pan in a warm oven, until you are done making all of them.

Serve with whatever Tex-Mex condiments you enjoy. We love it with corn and black bean salsa, taco sauce, sour cream, and salsa. These are quite filling.

Painted Rooster

(about 10 servings)

Painted Rooster is a dish a friend who lived in Mexico taught me to make. She said there are basically endless variations of this dish, though the main ingredients are red beans, black beans and rice.

Mix 1 cup of cooked black beans, cooked red beans, and 3 cups of cooked rice together in a large pot or bowl, and add any of the following, depending on what I have available:

- Sliced green onions
- Chopped bell peppers
- Fresh cilantro leaves
- A chopped tomato
- Chopped onions
- Chopped cooked meat

- Serve with grated cheese and salsa on the side.

Rice and Grains

The majority of the world eats a starch based diet, and by that I don’t mean simple carbs. Simple carbs (that is, the “whites that aren’t originally created white”—while flours, white rice, white sugar) are definitely not as good for you as whole grains are. The problem is, many of us are not used to eating whole grain breads or grain dishes. Getting used to the high-fiber whole grains can take some time, but they are a great nutritional value worth learning to love. After you get used to whole grains, it is hard to settle for anything else!

A family member once told me that I was wrong on this count, because Chinese people eat lots of white rice. No, American Chinese Take Out uses white rice. As rice actually grows, it grows as brown “whole grain” rice. White rice is a processed food made by sanding the whole grain goodness off of the rice kernels, so that the rice will stay fresher longer, and will be more palatable to those who don’t like whole grains. This process started in the early 1900’s, before we knew the health benefits of the “indigestible” parts of grains, such as the bran. We now know that, although our bodies do not digest the bran, it still serves a vital purpose for colon health.

Another thought to consider is the relative cost between brown rice and white rice. After the first edition of this ebook was released, I received an email from a reader who argued that brown rice is too expensive to purchase, versus white rice. She argued that brown rice costs nearly twice as much. This may appear true on the outset but actually quite the opposite is true. Brown rice costs the same or less than white rice after it is cooked. Let me explain.

When you cook brown rice, you boil twice the amount of water as you would for white rice. So, for every cup of uncooked brown rice, you’ll actually get two cups of cooked rice when you’re done. When you cook white rice, you add equal amounts of rice and water. Essentially, when you compare the price of brown and white rice, you can just divide the unit price of brown rice in half, so that you are comparing how much cooked product you are purchasing.

In this regard, brown rice is definitely cheaper, to say nothing of the health benefits.

To Cook Brown Rice or Other Whole Grain

Brown rice, and other whole grains, are cooked similarly to white rice, except with a 2:1 ratio of water to grain. Whole grains also need to cook about 30-40 minutes, instead of just 10.

To make brown rice, or any other whole grain, bring twice as much water as grain to a boil. Once the water is boiling, add your grain, and turn down the heat to a low simmer, and cover with a tight-fitting lid. Simmer for 30 minutes. I find that the rice (or other grain) turns out fluffier if you turn off the heat completely for the last 10 minutes of cooking time, without disturbing the pot.

Grain Pilaf

To make whole grain pilaf, with one grain or a mixture of different grains (wild rice, brown rice, millet, wheat, rye, quinoa), begin by finely chopping up the vegetables we’re going to add:

- 1 carrot
- 1 onion
- a rib of celery
- 1-2 cloves of garlic
- ½ cup of any additional vegetables

Sauté these vegetables in a small amount of oil or butter. If you wish to add meat to your pilaf, you may add some finely chopped cooked meat. Brown the meat with the vegetables. After your meat and vegetables have been browned, add 2 cups of uncooked grains. Stir your pot frequently, making sure the grains are well coated, and let them become lightly browned. Pour in 4 ½ cups of water or stock, and slowly bring this to a boil. Broth may be used instead of water for a better flavor. Simmer your pilaf with a tight fitting lid on it on low heat for about 30-35 minutes. Let the pilaf sit with the lid on for an additional ten minutes after you turn off the heat, and then fluff it with a fork.

Indian Style Pilaf

This is a pilaf recipe variation that my friend Anitha in Chennai, India shared with me. I added my own slight variations to it, based upon what I had readily available and how we like our rice, but it is a very enjoyable rice pilaf to eat. This recipe works well with white or brown rice, though with brown rice you need more liquid and a longer cooking time, of course.

This recipe uses whole spices, which most people don’t have readily available. You can use smaller amounts of ground spices, though it won’t taste exactly the same. Whole spices are available quite inexpensively at many health food and bulk food stores which sell spices and herbs in bulk.

Begin by sautéing the following in ¼ cup of melted butter, coconut oil, or regular oil:

- 3 cups of rice
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 2-3 cardamom pods
- 3 cloves
- About 1” of sliced ginger root
- 1 bay leaf
- ¼ tsp. of Ground Turmeric

Stirring frequently, sauté this mixture until everything is well coated and the rice is starting to brown slightly. Next, add 1 can of coconut milk, then cover your rice with enough water or broth to cover it by an inch (if you are using brown rice, cover it by two inches). Add a tight fitting lid, then bring to a slow boil. Once your pilaf reaches a slow boil, turn the heat down and simmer on low until the rice is soft (about 20 minutes for white rice, 30 for brown rice). Turn the heat off and let it stand for ten minutes with the lid still on before serving. Don’t eat the whole spices, rather remove them as you are eating.

Preparing Bulgur (Cracked Wheat)

Think of Bulgur as the “Minute Rice” of whole grains. To prepare bulgur, bring twice as much water as the dried bulgur to a boil. Turn the heat completely off, and add the bulgur. Cover and let it sit for about 15 minutes, without heat, until all of the water is absorbed.

Bulgur Pilaf

Bulgur pilaf is a quick and easy version of rice pilaf. Just as with the pilaf recipe above, begin by sautéing a mirepoix plus any meat you wish to add to your recipe (if any). Next, add your dried bulgur to the pan, stirring frequently to coat the bulgur thoroughly.

Add twice as much water or broth as the dried bulgur. Cover your pot with a tight fitting lid, and let it simmer for about five minutes. Turn off the heat and let it sit for about fifteen more minutes undisturbed. The liquid should be absorbed by then. Stir and serve.

Tabouleh

Tabouleh is a Middle Eastern salad that is very refreshing in the summer time, especially if you have fresh mint and parsley growing in your garden. To make Tabouleh, combine the following ingredients into a bowl:

- 2 cups of cooked bulgur (cracked wheat)
- 2 cups of chopped fresh parsley
- ½ cup chopped fresh mint
- ½ cup lemon juice
- ¼ cup olive oil (preferably extra virgin)
- salt to taste
- 1-2 onions (red onions are best)
- 5 cloves garlic or to taste
- 1 chopped tomato
- 1 chopped cucumber

Toss the ingredients together, and chill before serving. This goes well with
hummus, falafel, and pita bread.

Oatmeal

For breakfast most of the time, we either eat granola, pancakes, French toast, or oatmeal. Oats are a very inexpensive breakfast food, especially after you look at the price of boxed cereals.To prepare oatmeal, bring 4 cups of water to a boil. Add 2 cups of regular oats or 3 cups of quick oats. Return to a boil, and then reduce to a simmer. Simmer for about 10 minutes.

We serve oatmeal with maple syrup, honey, fresh fruit, or just plain.

Flour and Wheat Products

Flour or whole wheat berries are usually a great deal all year long, particularly if purchased in bulk. Many flour products, such as breads and rolls, can be purchased inexpensively, too, though they are cheaper when made completely homemade. Sometimes it is a greater convenience to purchase bread, particularly if it is on sale, than to make it from scratch if you are short on time.

Basic White Bread

(4 loaves)

I usually start my basic white bread off with a sponge. This particular recipe that I use makes four loaves of bread. If you don’t want that many loaves of bread, you can make this recipe with half of the ingredients, to make only two loaves of bread. The bread does freeze very well if wrapped nicely.

I mix together:

- 1 Tbs. of Active Dry Yeast
- 3 cups of warm water
- 1 tsp. of honey
- 5 cups of flour

I like to mix this with an electric hand mixer. There is nothing really special about my electric mixer. It’s just a generic hand mixer that I bought at the “dollar store” of all places! At this point the dough is thin enough that you don’t need anything special to mix it with. I am not kneading the dough, just beating out any of the lumps. You can do this just as well by hand with a wire whisk or a wooden spoon. After this is well mixed, I let it rest and rise for fifteen minutes.

After those fifteen minutes are up, stir into this dough the following ingredients:

- ½ cup of honey or sugar
- 1 Tbs. salt
- ¼ cup of melted butter or oil

Mix this in very well, either by hand or using a hand held mixer again. After these ingredients have been mixed into the dough, I slowly add an additional 5 cups of flour to the dough, one cup at a time.

The important thing I want to stress is that you can always add more flour, but you can’t pull out extra flour you hastily put into your dough. If you add too much flour to your bread dough there is no way of getting that dough out again! Go slowly.

Judging whether or not you have too much or just enough flour in your dough is more of an art than a science. After you have made bread a few times you will get the feel for what dough should look and feel like when it has the appropriate amount of flour. After you have added approximately 5 cups of flour, turn your dough onto a floured work surface, and begin kneading. Add a small amount of flour to the board (under your dough) if it begins to stick.

Continue to knead the dough with floured hands, pulling it towards you, punching it down with the heel of your hands, and then repeating the process, turning the dough slightly each time. Soon the dough will become elastic and smooth as the gluten forms through kneading. Only add as much flour as you need to keep it from sticking to your work surface. Sometimes I find it helpful to oil my hands when kneading bread dough if I feel I am close to having enough flour, but the dough is still a little bit sticky.

Place your kneaded, smooth and elastic dough into an oiled bowl, and then flip it back over again so that the top of the bread dough is oiled. This keeps it from drying out while rising. Cover your bowl with a towel, and set your dough in a warm place to rise until double in size, about 1 hour.

When that hour is up, punch the dough down, divide it into four equal parts, and shape the dough into loaves. Set each loaf into a greased loaf pan to rise again until doubled. If you want, slash the tops before letting them rise, with a sharp knife. This looks attractive and helps the surface of the dough to stretch without making a strange rip in some other part of the loaf.

Preheat the oven to 350° F. Bake your loaves at 350° F for 30-35 minutes. Let the loaves cool for 5 minutes in the pans before turning them out and letting them cool the rest of the way on wire baking racks. Bread that has completely cooled can be frozen if tightly wrapped.

I have a complete bread baking ebook available on my website which contains recipes for wheat bread, French Bread, pretzels, bagels, and more, called The Bread by Hand eBook. Just go to www.joyfulmomma.com. A Bread by Hand DVD is in the works.

French Toast

After you have either purchased bread or made some bread by scratch, you can make quite a few things with it, including French toast. French toast is a fairly easy breakfast food to make. In fact, this is a simple meal for children who are learning how to cook.

French toast is a handy way to use up some bread that is on the verge of going stale, and it also makes a quick and easy breakfast. This can be a very frugal breakfast if you have an inexpensive source of eggs, or if you raise your own laying hens. We began to enjoy more French toast when we had our hens, and consequently had an over-abundance of eggs to work with.

Before you begin to work on your French Toast, set up your work area. You should have a spot for sliced bread, a spot for dipping it into an egg mixture, and a place to fry them (a large nonstick electric griddle works best in a large family, but a frying pan or griddle on a stove top also works just fine). Finally, you will need a place to put them after they are done, while you are still frying up new batches. If you are using an electric griddle or frying pan, preheat it before you begin to slice the bread. If you are using a stove top one, preheat it before dipping your bread. Be sure to lightly oil your griddle with either butter, margarine or cooking spray.

Simply slice up bread either in half diagonally (to form triangles) or in thirds (to make “sticks”). Any sort of bread can be used for this, although caraway rye and Pumpernickel do not taste too well in this dish because of the overwhelming flavor of caraway in them. I think that wheat bread or oat bread tastes especially good as French toast, because they are so hearty.

In a small-to-medium sized bowl, crack in a few eggs. Next, take a wire whisk and whisk your eggs until they are well blended and slightly frothy. I also like to add a small dash of vanilla extract to my eggs, to give the French toast extra flavor.

Dip the bread into the egg mixture one slice at a time, thoroughly saturating it with egg before carefully placing it on the hot griddle surface. Repeat this process for each slice of bread. After a few minutes, turn the French toast over, to cook on the other size.

The toast should be lightly browned, and the eggs should be well set. In other words, the eggs should not appear raw in any part. If you are making a large batch of French Toast, place your finished slices on an oven safe platter, and keep them in an oven set to warm while you finish the rest of the batch of French toast.

To “dress them up”before you get to the table, gently shake on some powdered sugar over the top of them, and serve them with maple syrup or fruit syrups. They are also good with homemade jams and jellies.

French Bread Pizza

Using either homemade bread or store bought French Bread Baguettes, you can make French bread pizza fairly easily and inexpensively. As I wrote earlier about homemade convenience foods, when French Bread is on sale, I stock up on it and freeze it, wrapping it tightly. I have also made my own baguettes, and froze them for future use.

Although French Bread Pizza is obviously most commonly made with a French Bread Baguette (those long, skinny loaves sold in bakeries and some grocery stores), any sort of bread can be used. A friend of mine has even used English Muffins that she purchased on sale! This is a great meal to make with bread that is near to the point of going stale. You can use bread rolls of any shape, small loaves cut in half lengthwise, the heels (ends) of your bread loaves, thick slices of bread, or even English Muffins.

Carefully slice French Bread loaves, spread on sauce, and top with your choice of toppings and cheese. Place under a broiler for a few minutes, until cheese is well melted, or bake in a 375° F oven for 5-10 minutes.

For your sauce, you can either use store-bought pizza sauce, or you can make your own.

Pizza Sauce

Sauté a finely chopped onion, and a few cloves of garlic in a medium saucepan. Pour in 1-2 cans of tomato sauce (depending on how much you plan to make). Season your sauce with basil, a tablespoon of onion soup mix, rosemary, marjoram, and oregano. Let it simmer to blend in all of the flavors and to thicken it slightly. You can also brown some ground beef or sausage, drain it, and add it to the sauce.

Pizza Toppings

Pizza toppings are best purchased on sale or in season for the greatest savings. A brick of cheese is going to be less expensive than pre-grated cheese, though you do have to grate your cheese to use it. Soft cheeses like Mozzarella can hurt your food processor when grating cheese. I find that grating a cheese like Mozzarella works best if I stick it in the freezer for about 30 minutes before I grate it. I am also able to buy grated cheese on sale with coupons for a big savings too.

Different vegetable toppings, such as peppers, are only a savings when purchased in season. These can be purchased in greater quantities and froze for later use in freezer bags, pre-sliced. Our pizza toppings are usually determined by what is on sale and in season.

Pizza

Regular homemade pizza is also fairly easy to make, though it requires you to make the dough ahead of time. Making your dough from scratch is not difficult, though there are also many pizza dough mixes available too, and frozen dough. A few weeks ago, I was able to purchase a tube of refrigerated pizza dough for just a quarter a tube on sale with coupons. I have found that the pizza mixes simply measure your dry ingredients for you; their time savings is not much of a savings at all, especially if you are making more than one pizza. Another alternative is to purchase pita bread that is on sale, and make small pizzas on top of the pita bread.

To make pizza dough, mix:

- 2 cups of bread or all purpose flour
- 2 Tbs. Sugar
- 1 Tbs. yeast (or one package yeast)

For added flavor, and a seasoned crust, you may also stir in 1-2 tsp. of any of the following seasonings:

- Marjoram
- Oregano
- Basil
- Garlic Powder
- Onion Powder
- Dried Minced Onion
- Red Pepper Flakes
- Paprika
- Rosemary

Next, add:

- 2 tsp. of salt
- 2 cups very warm water
- ¼ cup olive oil (or other oil)

Mix well with an electric mixer or by hand until well blended. Stir in 3 more cups of flour until your dough is soft and forms a nice ball. Next, turn the dough onto a floured surface, and knead it for about 5 minutes, adding more flour as needed, but being careful not to add too much! Let it rest for 30 minutes in a lightly greased bowl.

Preheat your oven to 375° F. Lightly grease two cookie sheets to prevent sticking. Divide your dough into two sections. Roll out your dough onto each cookie sheet, using your hands if necessary to stretch your dough to fit.

You may decorate your pizza now or after it is baked. Baked pizza crusts may be stored in the freezer, well wrapped, for use at a later date.

Bake about 20 minutes, until the crust is just beginning to brown. After decorating the pizza, slide back into a hot oven for a few minutes, or until all of the cheese is melted.

In our family, we’ve had “make your own pizza” parties for birthday parties for our kids. I would bake up several small pizza crusts (using a small cast iron fry pan), cooling them completely. Each child was able to add their pizza toppings to the crust before I baked them.

Roasted Eggplant Caponata

For a different kind of pizza, particularly when Eggplant is in season, I make up some Eggplant Caponata, and use that instead of regular pizza sauce. Caponata is a tangy, spicy kind of vegetable stew made primarily with eggplant plus other roasted vegetables. I vary the vegetables based on what I have available locally and in my garden, though I always include the eggplant.This can be served warm or cold with fresh bread. I have served it cold on pre-made pizza crusts for a cool summertime treat. “Real” caponata recipes vary greatly from person to person. I was told from a friend in Italy that caponata is just a way to use up the odds and ends leftover in one’s garden at the end of summer, though it tastes better than any such recipe I’ve ever tried.

Place the following vegetables in a large bowl and lightly drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt:

- 1 medium eggplant, peeled and cubed
- 2 red peppers, seeded and diced
- 1 tomato, cored and diced
- 1 bulb of elephant garlic

- 2 cups of misc. vegetables from the garden (zucchini, summer squash, peppers, bulb fennel etc.), finely diced

Lay the vegetables out on a baking sheet, and roast at 400° F for about 15 minutes, until the eggplant is soft.

In a large pan, heat 1 Tbs. of olive oil. Sauté 1 small, finely chopped onion, 2 Tbs. of capers (optional) and a pinch of dried red peppers (optional). Add the roasted vegetables, and stir together. Add ½ cup of water, ¼ cup of balsamic vinegar, and 1 small can of tomato paste. Add ½ cup of raisins or other dried fruit.

Remove from heat and serve immediately, or chill it for later. This can be served warm or cool. Garnish with Parmesan cheese.

Garlic Bread

Just as with French Bread Pizza, garlic bread can be made using French Bread Baguettes purchased on sale, or any other bread product you have available.

Slice the Baguette in half lengthwise. In a small sauce pan, melt about 1/2 stick of butter or margarine, and press 2-3 garlic cloves into the butter. If you don’t have a garlic press, finely chop the fresh garlic or use a teaspoon of powdered garlic. Let the garlic butter cool until it starts to firm up.

Spread the butter on your bread, and wrap the bread with foil. Warm in the an oven set for 300F for about 10 minutes.

Pancakes and Waffles

In the chapter on homemade convenience foods, I have a
recipe for a good pancake or waffle mix. In lieu of the mix, you can also make pancakes from scratch. This is actually my son’s recipe, as he has become our chief pancake maker in the house.

For a good basic recipe for beginning to make your pancakes you need to take a sifter (or a sieve) and sift the following ingredients into a large bowl:

- 3 ½ cups of all purpose or pastry flour

- ½ cup of sugar

- 3 tsp. of baking powder OR ¾ tsp. baking soda and 1 tsp. cream of tartar

- ½ tsp. of salt

Sifting ingredients helps to break up any clumps in your dry ingredients, and it lightens them up. It puts extra air into them. Sifting also mixes them well. Put the dry ingredients into the sifter, and, depending on how your sifter works, either squeeze the handle or turn the hand crank to sift. If you do not have this sort of sifter, you can also use a mesh sieve, and gently tap it to sift the ingredients into your bowl.

After you have sifted your ingredients, add:

- 1 stick of melted butter or margarine OR ½ c. of cooking oil

- 4 eggs

- 2 ½ cups of milk

Mix all of your ingredients well, until the batter is smooth and creamy. Sometimes, when using whole grains, you may need to add more milk to the batter, as the whole grains may make it too thick. After you have mixed your batter, set it aside, and begin to preheat your griddle, and lightly oil it. Your griddle is ready to bake pancakes when a drop of water dances on the surface. I find it easiest to make even pancakes by using a ¼ cup measuring cup to scoop out batter for each pancake.

It is best to start small when learning the basics of making pancakes, with smaller sized pancakes, rather than large ones, which may be harder for a new cook to flip neatly. Pancakes can also be shaped by placing a metal cookie cutter on the griddle (not a plastic one) and carefully pouring the batter in ¼” high. When it is time to flip the pancake over, carefully removed the cookie cutter. Some shapes work easier than others (hearts, for example, work well).

Do not flip your pancakes over until the top surface begins to bubble. This signals that the bottom is browning nicely. Slide a vinyl or wooden spatula under the pancake, carefully lift it up, and then flip it over quickly onto the griddle. In a few minutes that side will be done. Check to make sure it is browned on both sides.

Once you have mastered making pancakes from scratch, you can start to play around with it. This basic recipe for pancakes can be varied by adding dried fruit, nuts, chocolate chips, carob chips or even spices like cinnamon to the batter. Blueberry pancakes can be made by adding a half cup to a cup of fresh or frozen blueberries to the batter.

Making Waffles

Waffles are very similar to pancakes. The major difference is that waffles are made on a waffle iron, forming their shape, instead of being baked on a griddle. If you have a waffle iron, follow your manufactures specific instructions for making wonderful waffles, and for cleaning up the waffle iron, as that varies with each brand. If you are looking to buy a waffle iron, keep clean up in mind. Waffle makers with removable plates are much easier to clean.

To make the actual waffles, add an additional ¼ cup of oil to your recipe. Following the directions on your waffle iron, pour in no more than 1 cup of batter at a time. Be sure to spread it evenly over the lower part of the iron, and close it. Most waffle irons will show a light when the waffle is likely done.

As with pancakes, there are many variations possible. You can add all sorts of fruit, nuts, and seasonings to the batter, or at the table. Waffles are an especially good accompaniment to fresh or canned fruits in the morning.

Pasta

I don’t often make pasta at home, though I have in the past. Maybe it’s the carb addict in me, but I love the taste of homemade noodles. Pasta is most often purchased premade and dried at the store, usually in a box. This is a great convenience food because making noodles from scratch can be time consuming and messy, though homemade noodles are a great treat from time to time too.

Whenever your recipe calls for a specific shape of noodle, there is always a good chance that you can substitute that shape with another shape of equal size if you don’t have a specific shape on hand or if specially shaped noodles are expensive. When pasta goes on sale, it is a great idea to stock up on shapes you commonly use. Pasta keeps well if stored away from light, air, moisture and critters. Take the pasta you purchase and put it in a tightly sealing container, so as to protect it.

Usually smaller noodles, such a stars, alphabets, orzo, and band noodles are used in soups. Fancier noodles, such as Rotini, are used in pasta salads. Muscacholi and other round tube shaped noodles are usually used in casseroles. Spaghetti, Linguini and Angel Hair Pasta are all used with Spaghetti. Lasagna noodles are used in lasagna.

Rotini Pesto

In the summer, when Basil is growing in abundance in my garden, I enjoy making a pasta salad called Rotini Pesto. I watch for and stock up on noodles in a Rotini or Fuselli shape for just such an event.

Pesto Sauce is made by pureeing:

- Two handfuls of fresh basil leaves
- 1 small onion
- 2 or 3 garlic cloves

- 1/4 cup of walnuts, almonds, or other nut (optional)

- 1/4 cup of parmesan cheese
- 1/8 cup of olive oil
- 1/8 cup of lemon juice
- pinch of salt to taste.

This thick sauce can be used on noodles or as a sauce for pizza too. I use whatever nuts I find on sale, usually walnuts. For Rotini Pesto, toss about ¼ cup of the sauce with 1 pound of noodles and chill for at least an hour. Add more olive oil if necessary to toss well with the pasta.

Homemade Noodles

To make noodles from scratch, the recipe is simple enough (flour and eggs, plus a dash of salt). If you have a pasta machine to roll out your pasta, this will help you to make your noodles. If you don’t have such a device, you will need a rolling pin, wax paper, and a pizza cutter. A knife will also work but a pizza cutter helps to cut the pasta more easily.

The basic dough is made by mixing:

- 1 ½ cup flour

- 1 ½ tsp. salt.

Make a small well in the middle of the flour and salt, and add 2 lightly beaten eggs. Using your fingers, slowly work the flour into the egg until it forms a dough, and then knead the dough gently for a few minutes. Cover your dough with plastic wrap or foil, and let it sit for an hour in the fridge.

To begin to roll out your dough, slice off a half inch of dough from the ball, and re-cover the remaining dough so it doesn’t dry out. Roll this slice out between two sheets of lightly floured wax paper until it is your desired thickness (noodles will expand slightly when cooked). Dust the rolled out dough with flour, and cut it with a pizza cutter. Let your noodles dry on a rack, or on a towel for at least 10 minutes before cooking.The kind of racks used to cool cookies work well for drying pasta too.

Cook homemade noodles by dropping them into boiling water or soup and letting them simmer for about 15 minutes. The cooking time varies based upon the thickness of your dough and the width of the noodles, so check them for doneness first.

Dumplings

Noodles are a great addition to soups and stews, but so are dumplings, which are often easier to make on short notice. A dumpling is dough that is steamed or boiled in a soup or stew. Many times, there is a simple dumpling recipe on the box of most commercial baking mixes, or you can make them easily from scratch using the following recipe. Dumplings using a Baking Mix

Mix together 2 cups of mix and 2/3 cup of milk. Spoon over your soup or stew, and steam, covered, for about 20 minutes.

Dumplings from Scratch

Mix together:

- 2 cups of flour
- 1 Tbs. baking powder
- 1 tsp. salt

In a separate bowl, mix together:

- ¾ cup milk

- 2 eggs

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir until the ingredients are combined. Drop your dumpling dough by the spoonful into a simmering soup or stew. Cover the soup or stew and let them simmer for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, remove the lid and let the dumplings simmer for another 10 minutes.

Spätzel

For smaller dumplings, called Spätzel, a special Spätzel maker is used. This looks much like a mandolin grater, except that the edges are not sharp. The dumpling dough is placed in a hopper, and drops through the small holes into the simmering soup or stew below. You can sometimes find Spätzel makers in kitchen stores, hardware stores, or in Amish stores such as Lehman’s Catalogue (www.lehmans.com). They are very inexpensive (usually under $10).

My favorite recipe for dumplings is some homemade Chicken and Dumplings.

Chicken and Dumplings

This can be made either with leftover chicken and canned broth, or by making broth using a whole, disjointed chicken with a carrot and rib of celery cooked in just enough water to cover them Add a small pinch of salt and a teaspoon of parsley flakes too. I also like to season my chicken stock by adding a couple of cloves, a small piece of cinnamon, and some ginger for added spice. Once the chicken has simmered for an hour or two, and is starting to fall off of the bone, carefully scoop out the vegetables and chicken from the broth. Strain the broth to make sure there are no bones in it. Taste the broth and adjust the seasonings as needed. You may need to add some additional salt. Let the chicken cool and debone it with a fork. Set aside.

In a stock pot, roaster, or Dutch oven, melt 2 Tbs. of butter or margarine, and stir in 2 Tbs. of flour to form a paste. Pour the reserved chicken broth into the pot, and stir well to break up any clumps. Add the chopped chicken and diced vegetables, and bring your stew up to a simmer. Add the dumpling dough to the top of the stew, and simmer for 10 minutes with the lid on, then another 10 minutes with the lid off. Garnish the top of the dumplings with a little bit of parsley flakes.

Frugal Cuts of Meat

I’ve already covered this in detail earlier, writing about buying meat in bulk, but I’d like to more generally address buying and using meat. Because using the words “Cheap” and “Meat” together bring to my mind memories of serious food poisoning and a few nights in the hospital with an I.V. in my hand and a bucket in front of me, I need to say a few words about purchasing meat on a budget. Because “bad” meat can make you quite ill, this is one area where I am far less likely to jump for joy when I see a sale or a “manager’s special” sticker on a package of meat. To me, “Manager’s Special” brings to mind (whether actual or a product of my imaginative paranoia) an image of meat that has been around way too long and has been repackaged a few times before finally being put on sale in an effort to get rid of it one last time before finding its way to the dumpster.

I’ve always regretted buying any sort of meat in a package that is severely marked down, as it usually is packaged in such a way as to look it’s best, and the package almost always conceals it’s smell.

Yuck.

Buy meat once from a busy fresh meat market and you will instantly see, smell, and taste the difference. You’ll also be pleasantly surprised to find it is the same price or even cheaper than at the grocery store.

The exception to this is buying frozen ground turkey in one pound packages in the freezer section of many grocery stores. Because the ground turkey is frozen and clearly stamped with a sell by date from the manufactures, I am less wary of it. Jenny O® Frozen Ground Turkey frequently goes on sale. Periodically, I’ve also found coupons for their brand of ground turkey.

My local fresh meat market is also able to bulk order meat by the case for me, as I noted earlier in the chapter on buying and using bulk meat.

Usually, the local meat market has a rotation of what meats go on sale at what times of the month, and after a while you get used to the rhythm of how your individual shop operates. Most of the time, boneless chicken breast, stewing beef, and ground beef are the three best buys in meat, though again, that varies.

So, how do we prepare fabulous, frugal meals with chicken breast, stewing beef, and ground beef? I’ve already covered a few recipes in earlier sections that involved these meats, but now I’ll share some more. Here are my own favorite recipes that we use often.

Spaghetti Sauce

(makes about 10 servings)

Begin by sautéing 1 minced onion and 3 or 4 minced cloves of garlic in 1 Tbs. of olive oil (or other cooking oil). Let the onion slightly brown before adding your ground beef (I used about two pounds, sometimes more). Stir your meat over medium heat, until it browns. If there is an excessive amount of grease in the pan, pour off as much of it as you can, so that you beef is not swimming in oil. Ground Turkey will not have much excess grease at all.

Next, stir in 2 large (about 20 ounce) cans of crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce. Season your sauce with the following herbs to taste (about 1 tsp each):

- Rosemary
- Thyme
- Basil
- Parsley
- Onion Soup Mix or Worchestershire Sauce
- Marjoram

Let your spaghetti sauce simmer over low heat for about an hour for the best flavor. Serve over cooked pasta (about a pound and a half ) or use in Lasagna.

Lasagna

(makes two 9 x 11 inch pans)

This is not your usual lasagna. When I was growing up I really hated lasagna, though I am not sure why. Maybe it was just too cheesy. This recipe for Lasagna I learned while living in Austria and working for a family as an Au Pair. It is much easier and cheaper to make, and I personally think it tastes better.

Begin by making a pot of the Spaghetti sauce from the recipe I gave above. Make sure there are no big chunks of cooked ground beef in it—break up the meat well so it will lay better in the lasagna. Also, cook 1-2 packages of lasagna noodles according to package directions or use no-cook lasagna noodles to save time.

Finally, the third main ingredient is to make a Roux.This is basically a simple cream sauce. Begin by melting a stick of butter or margarine in a medium saucepan. After it melts, add ¼ cup of flour (preferably white flour) to the butter, and stir until the butter has been absorbed. Next, stir in 2 cups of milk, and whisk it well with a wire whisk to break up any clumps of flour. Keep it over low heat to prevent it from burning, and stir until it thickens, then remove from the heat.

To assemble your lasagna, lightly grease a lasagna pan, and lay down a layer of lasagna noodles on the bottom. Spoon some of the cream sauce onto the noodles, and then ladle on a layer of meat sauce. Sprinkle with Parmesan or Romano cheese, and add another layer of noodles, then cream sauce, meat sauce, and cheese. Do this for 3 layers. For the final layer, top noodles with cream sauce and cheese, cover with foil and bake it at 350° for about 45 minutes.

Many times, I make about 4 or 5 pans of lasagna at a time, in disposable foil pans, and I freeze them for later use or to share with others. Freezing a meal like this ahead of time can be a big time saver for a busy family. I like to have a couple of frozen meals available just in case “life happens”, as it invariably does. Being prepared saves not only time, but the money I would have spent ordering a pizza or other take out.

Beef Enchiladas

(Makes about 20 medium)

Like Lasagna, beef enchiladas are easily made in a larger quantity after you get used to making them. They freeze quite well. Usually we make chicken enchiladas, but beef enchiladas are just as easy (the chicken recipe follows). I make either depending on what meat I have.
Begin by browning about a pound of ground beef, and then pouring off the excess grease. Stir in 1 small can of tomato sauce (8 oz) and 1 Tbs. of onion soup mix (or Worcestershire sauce), and then season with the following:

- ¼ cup (one small) minced onion
- 2-3 minced garlic cloves
- 1 t. of chili powder
- 1 t. of cilantro (preferably fresh)
- 1 t. of thyme
- 1 t. of oregano

Stir frequently and let this simmer to blend the flavors.

While your meat is cooking, you can also begin to prepare your sauce. Start by making a Roux as described under Lasagna, melting butter, adding the flour, and stirring in milk over low heat until thick. Once this has thickened, stir in one large can of tomato sauce or crushed tomatoes (about 20 ounces), and stir until thick, remove from heat, and set aside.

Next, warm your flour or corn tortillas according to package directions, and lightly grease a lasagna pan. Preheat your oven to 350° F.

It’s time to assemble the enchiladas. Now, take one tortilla. Spread a spoonful of sauce on the middle of the tortilla, and top with a spoonful of meat, plus some freshly chopped onions, bell peppers, or other vegetables, and grated cheese. Gently roll your tortilla up, tucking in the side edges when you get about half way done. Place your rolled tortilla seam side down on the lasagna pan, and move to your next tortilla. Do this until you have used up all of the meat.

Pour the remainder of your sauce over the top of your tortillas, and top with grated cheese, minced onions, and minced fresh cilantro (optional), and bake for about 35 minutes.

Chicken Enchiladas

Chicken Enchiladas are prepared similarly to the Beef Enchiladas. Precook 2 chicken breasts. Let them cool, and then shred them finely. Toss your shredded chicken in a large bowl with 2 minced onions, 2-3 minced garlic cloves, 3 Tbs. minced cilantro leaves (optional), diced tomatoes (optional) and diced Tomatillos (optional), and ½ cup of grated cheese. Basically you can toss in any vegetable you wish to use. I also like red bell peppers tossed in my filling for chicken enchiladas when they are in season.

When you prepare your enchiladas, again, spoon the sauce onto the tortilla, add a spoonful or two of filling, roll it up, and bake them seam-side down in a lasagna pan with sauce poured over the top. Bake them at 350° F for about 35 minutes. Serve your enchiladas with toppings such as sour cream and salsa.

Soup and Stew

Soups and Stews also provide a great way to use inexpensive cuts of meat. I enjoy making soups in the winter, because of the nearly endless variations I can come up with. No two soups are ever the exact same around here! I vary my soups based upon what is on sale, and available to me at that moment. I have already listed a few soups and stews I enjoy making.

Fried Rice

I find that dishes like Fried Rice or a Rice Pilaf are great for using up leftover meat from a bigger meal. We often have some sort of Turkey Fried Rice after Thanksgiving as we are using up the last bits of our Thanksgiving bird, or we eat other forms of fried rice based upon other leftover meals.

Begin by cooking several cups of white or brown rice. Set it aside. While your rice is cooking you may slice up some vegetables and meat for your fried rice. If you are using raw meat, take the necessary precautions to assure that the raw meat doesn’t touch your other ingredients. Cut the meat into small cubes.

Next, heat a wok or a large skillet, and add just enough oil so that nothing will stick. Add a few drops of sesame oil. If the meat is raw, cook the raw meat first in your wok. After the meat is browned, add your sliced or chopped vegetables to the wok. Stir fry them until they are slightly browned. You may also add spices like Oriental Five Spices and ginger, to taste. Next, add about ⅛ cup of soy sauce or Teriyaki sauce to your wok, and dump your cooked rice into the wok. Using a wooden spoon or a bamboo spatula, stir frequently over low heat, so that all of the flavors and ingredients are combined well with the rice. If needed, adjust your spices and the Soy or Teriyaki Sauce, adding more if needed. Serve as a side dish or as a main dish.

Stir Fry

A stir fry can make a great accompaniment to fried rice or even just plain rice. Stir Fries are fairly quick and simple to make, and taste wonderful. Like most of the recipes I share, this one can be varied based upon what you have on hand and what is in season.

When I return from a big shopping trip to a meat market, I freeze strips of meat in usable portions, so that I can quickly thaw it for stir fries.To make a stir fry, I simply heat my wok (a large skillet works good too), adding just enough oil so that the meat will not stick, plus a few drops of sesame oil. Once the pan is hot, I add the meat and quickly stir fry it until cooked through before adding whatever vegetables I have available. Recently, I made a stir-fry of chicken, sliced carrots, sliced onions, sliced celery, and chopped broccoli. To save time, you can pre-slice and freeze your vegetables in freezer bags for quick use later.

Most stir fries taste best when seasoned with oriental spices, such as Chinese Five Spice, ginger, and lemon grass. For reference, you can look at the sheet in the back of this book. Just add a pinch at a time, and adjust the spices to your taste. Next, create a sauce by adding a small amount of water with a pinch of either chicken soup mix or onion soup mix. I’ve also made sauces using a can of coconut milk for a sweeter flavor.

Bring it to a boil, and stir in a cup of cold water mixed with 1 Tbs of corn starch to thicken the sauce. Stir over low heat until the sauce has thickened. Serve over rice.

Fajitas

Fajitas are very similar to the Chinese stir fry, except that the meat is usually broiled or grilled, and the meat and vegetables are served on tortillas, with toppings such as grated cheese, sour cream, guacamole, and fresh lettuce.

Begin by marinating your meat. As I wrote under the section Homemade Convenience Foods, I usually freeze my bulk-purchased chicken in freezer bags with marinade. You can also use that recipe for marinade to marinade fresh meat.

Put your meat on a hot grill or under the broiler until it is done, and then slice it thinly, or roast pre-sliced in an oven at 375° F. I often pre-slice my meat and marinate it to save time. At this point, put it back on a pan, and add sliced bell peppers, sliced onions, and other sliced vegetables. I have even added some canned and drained hominy to my fajitas before too. After the vegetables have been added, put the pan into the oven or on a warm grill to just slightly roast the vegetables, so that they remain crisp.

You can either assemble the Fajitas in the kitchen, or allow everyone to put their own fajitas together at the table, with buffet-style toppings. Top with sour cream, grated cheese, taco sauce, and other toppings of your choice.

Kebobs

One of my favorite meals for the summer is Chicken or Shish Kebobs. It is simple and refreshing, and changes every time I make it.

When I buy my boneless meat or chicken, I cut it into cubes, put it into a zipper freezer bag with lemon juice diluted with water, a pinch of thyme, rosemary, marjoram, onion flakes, and garlic, and I freeze it in usable portions. For my family, that usually means large bags, but I always leave some meat to marinade in smaller bags in one-person sized portions. I can quickly thaw the meat, put it on skewers and add whatever vegetables I find on sale for a quick meal under the broiler (or on the grill), served on a bed of rice. Sometimes I vary the marinade to be Asian style (with ginger, sesame oil, rice vinegar, Chinese Five Spice, and lemon grass) or Indian style (with lemon juice diluted with water, curry powder, coriander, cumin, and ginger). I usually base what vegetables I put on the skewers on what is on sale or in my garden. For example, we just had some kebobs with red peppers, onions, whole potatoes (from a can), and large cloves of elephant garlic from the garden.

Grill your kebobs or cook under your broiler until the meat is completely done, about 10-15 minutes, depending on the size of your cubes.

Egg Rolls

Homemade egg rolls are not a very difficult thing to make. At first, making egg rolls may seem a bit complex, but once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you’ll see it’s actually quite easy.This is, again, a favorite recipe to use leftover Thanksgiving turkey, though it works well with any extra cooked meat (or meat cooked for this purpose). When we make Egg Rolls, they are usually a meal unto themselves, instead of as a side dish.

Shred up about 2 cups of cooked meat (chicken breast, pork loin, turkey, roast, etc.). Set aside. Finely shred 1 head of cabbage (about 4 cups), 1 medium onion, and 2 large carrots. Add about 2 more cups of other miscellaneous vegetables of your choice (green onions, broccoli, bean sprouts, additional carrots etc). Stir fry the vegetables in 1 tsp. of sesame oil, a pinch of ginger, and ½ tsp. of Oriental Five Spices. Add ¼ cup of rice Vinegar after about 5 minutes. Put the lid on the wok or pan, turn off the heat, and allow the vegetables to steam in the remaining heat for about 10 minutes. Stir in the cooked, shredded meat.

Allow your vegetables and meat to cool somewhat before assembling the egg rolls.

There should be directions and a diagram on the package of egg roll wrappers for assembly. This is how I do it.

Lay one egg roll wrapper from a package on a paper towel or napkin, with one of the points down (so that it looks like a diamond and not a square). Add 2 Tbs. of filling about 1 inch up from the corner. Tuck the corner over the filling and begin to roll, tucking in the two side corners when you get half-way up. Before you finish rolling, dip your finger in water, and moisten the last edge of the egg roll wrapper. Then, press down the moistened edge onto the to complete the roll.

Baked Egg Rolls

I don’t like to deep fry anything, so I have tried different methods to bake my egg rolls. To bake them, heat the oven 375° F. Place the egg rolls on a baking sheet. I find it helps if I put them on parchment baking paper. Lightly brush or spray the egg rolls with cooking oil or olive oil. Bake for about 15 minutes, or until egg rolls are golden brown.

Fried Egg Rolls

To fry the egg rolls, preheat the oil to 360° F. Fry 2-3 at a time, being careful not to crowd the fryer. Fry for about 5 minutes each. Drain on paper towels as soon as you’re done.

Serve with plum duck sauce (recipe below).

Homemade Plum Duck Sauce

(makes 9 half pints)

Soon after we discovered the delights of homemade egg rolls, we developed a new problem. Plum duck sauce is annoyingly expensive (at least for our budget at the time). Because we have a plum tree, dear husband made the suggestion that I learn to make and can plum duck sauce.This sounded like a plan, except... no one liked the home canned plum duck sauce! It tasted nothing like what the store sells.

So, one day, I turned over the jar of Plum Duck Sauce to discover there are neither plums nor ducks therein. Actually, real plum duck sauce has plums. It may even have ducks for all I know. The kind we liked had a very simple list of ingredients:

Pineapple juice, dried red peppers, dried green peppers, dried minced onions, salt, sugar, pectin, and xanthum gum.

Essentially, I deduced, this was a jelly not a relish. This I could do. Inside of most boxes of pectin (sold where canning jars are located in your store, during canning season), there is a handy chart to making a jelly (not a jam) out of most kinds of fruit juice. I took the amounts for Pineapple Juice, and I made a jelly from it. Before adding the pectin and sugar, though, I added 1 Tbs of dried red pepper and dried minced onions, as well as a pinch of salt.

Ah, Perfection.

This actually firms up like a jelly if you use the exact amount of sugar called for (6 cups of sugar per 5 1/2 cups of pineapple juice). Instead, I use 5 cups of sugar, which still seems like a lot to me, but I can just imagine what the store puts in theirs, since it is sweeter. Before serving, we just heat it well in a microwave if I happen to get it too solid. It works well, and costs only pennies of what little jars of store bought plum duck sauce does, especially when pineapple juice goes on sale.

Here is the actual recipe:

Bring one can of pineapple juice (about 5 1/2 cups) to a boil with 2 Tbs. of dried onions, 2 Tbs red and green pepper flakes (dried), and 1 Tbs. of crushed red pepper. I also added a pinch of garlic powder.

After the juice and spices are boiling, add 3/4 cup of pectin (the whole package), stirring quickly to dissolve. Return to a boil.

Add 5 cups of sugar all at once after it is boiling again.

Fill hot, clean canning jars with jelly. Process half pints in a water bath canner for 5 minutes with 1/4 “ head space in your jars.

Helpful Resources

I hope I have given you a larger vision of what it means to shop frugally and eat well on a budget. Below, you will find some additional online resources you may find helpful.

www.urbanhomemaker.com is a great source of bulk pantry items and kitchen tools.

www.wheatmontana.com will help you find distributors of bulk wheat and grain products in your area, or to mail order your grains.

www.localharvest.org will help you find organic, locally raised foods in your neck of the woods. Check this website for farmer’s markets and family farms in your area.

www.lehmans.com has lots of cool stuff like the hand-crank popcorn popper and the spatzel maker I mention in this book.

www.joyfulmomma.org is my website, which is, Lord willing, updated often with recipes, articles and resources for you. Weekly printable coupons are available on my website, automatically updated each Monday.

www.dutchvalleyfoods.com is for purchasing bulk grains and staple items, or starting your own bulk food co-op.

www.couponstotroops.com is for donating expired coupons to US Military personnel and their families.

www.couponmom.com is for a weekly-updated database matching local and national store sales with current coupons (registration required).

www.onceamonthmom.com is a great once a month cooking site.

marmeespantry.blogspot.com, has many frugal recipes for home and personal care, such as bath products.

www.freecycle.net is a resource to find local freebies that others need to get rid of, or to give away items you no longer need to others.

www.craigslist.org is a good website for finding appliances, automobiles, or other items to purchase. You can sell on Craigslist too.

Index of Recipes

Basic Stew

Basic White Bread
Baked Potatoes
Baking Mix
Bath Salts
Beef Enchiladas
Boiled Potatoes
Brown Rice (& Other Grains)
Bulgar
Bulgar Pilaf
Chicken & Dumplings
Chicken Enchiladas
Chicken Tacos
Corn & Black Bean Salsa
Corn Chowder
Dried Beans
Dried Bean Soup
Dryer “Sheets”
Dumplings
Egg Rolls
Fajita Marinade
Fajitas
Falafel
Fennel Soup
French Bread Pizza
French Toast
Fresh Herb Cubes
Fried Rice
“Garden” Burgers
Garlic Bread
Granola
Greek Pot Pie (Klefiko)
Hash Browns
Hummus
Hungarian Style Goulash
Indian Pilaf
Kebobs
Latkes (Potato Pancakes)
Laundry Soap
Lentil & Rice Pilaf
Mashed Potatoes
Oatmeal
Painted Rooster (Rice & Beans)
Pancake Mix
Pancakes
Pasta, Homemade
Pesto
Pizza Sauce
Pizza
Plum Duck Sauce
Popcorn on the Stove
Potato Curry
Potato Dumplings (Knödel)
Potato Soup
Provençal Chicken
Refried Beans
Rice & Bean Burrito
Rice & Lentils (Koshary)
Roast Chicken Dinner
Roasted Eggplant Caponata
Roasted Potatoes
Roasted Red Pepper Sauce
Roasted Sweet Potato Fire Fries
Scalloped Potatoes
Seasoned Meat for Tacos
Spätzel
Stir Fry
Tabouleh
Tacos
Waffles
Whole Grains
Whole Grain Pilaf

Endnotes

1 Official USDA Food Plans: Cost of Food at Home at Four Levels, U.S. Weekly Average, January 2006,
www.cnpp.usda.gov

6 http://www.nocards.org/savings/archive/Waco_Tribune.htm

7 http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/buying-food-with-cash-or-plastic/

8 Tahini is a sesame paste that is found in most health food stores, and in many grocery stores. I’ve recently started using the same sesame oil that I use in stir fries instead, and it works very good too. I find the sesame oil in the same section as the other Asian foods.

Table of Contents

- Part One: Basic Tools for Frugal Shopping

- Part Two: Saving Time & Money

- Part Three: Frugal Shopping & Cooking in Special Circumstances

- Part Four: My Favorite Frugal Ingredients & How to Prepare Them

- Introduction

- Wealth is an Attitude of the Heart

- An Overview of Shopping Strategies & Options

- Planning Your Menu & Master Shopping List

- Planned Snacking, Or: Managing a Sane Grocery Budget with Teenagers in Your Home

- Confessions of a Coupon Convert
- Forming a Simple Coupon Strategy
- Customer Loyalty Programs
- Why Cash?
- Storing Your Stash of Bulk Foods
- The Home Grown Pantry

- Making Friends with Frugal Spices, Herbs, & Condiments

- Freedom from the Tyranny of Packaged Foods

- When A Convenience Food is Not a Convenience

- Crock Pot Convenience
- Making Your Own Convenience Foods
- Buying & Using Bulk Meat
- Miscellaneous Frugal Recipes for the Home

- Health & Weight Management on a Tight Budget

- Food Allergies on a Tight Budget
- Food Pantries: Giving and Receiving
- Introduction to Preparing Frugal Foods
- Cooking with Potatoes
- Cooking with Dried Beans
- Cooking with Rice & Grains
- Cooking with Flour Products
- Cooking with Frugal Cuts of Meat
- Helpful Resources
- 1
- 2
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- I discussed this earlier here.
- Falafel
- Tabouleh
- hummus
- recipe for a good pancake or waffle mix
- Basic Stew
- Basic White Bread
- Baked Potatoes
- Baking Mix
- Bath Salts
- Beef Enchiladas
- Boiled Potatoes