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Archive for the ‘Frugal Foodie Tips’ Category

Earlier I wrote a post about the financial benefits of keeping a large pantry in your house in which to store food.  So, now that the financial benefits are laid out, how do you get started with this pantry? If you are new to cooking then you may not have the faintest idea what items to stock. Even those of us who are seasoned cooks don’t always approach the stocking of our pantries in anything more than a haphazard manner.

If we approach this pantry stocking activity with a modicum of sense and organization we can save even more money by ensuring that we don’t run out of items, that we have the time to wait until things go on sale or we find a great coupon, and so on.

To begin this organization effort, the following is a list of the things I would deem important to stock up on and keep in the pantry. Of course you will only buy these things when you can get your hands on a good coupon for them or a sale price that is exceptional. But starting with a list that you can tick off as you go should lend some order to this somewhat daunting task. To that end:

Pantry Items to Keep In-Stock

• Canned tomatoes, crushed or whole
• Canned beans, any variety
• Rice
• Flour
• Dried pasta
• Sugar
• Salt
• Canned vegetables
• Cooking oils such as: olive, vegetable, canola
• Vinegars such as balsamic, white, and red
• Baking powder
• Baking soda
• Oatmeal
• Chicken and beef broth (and/or bouillon cubes)
• Canned fruit
• Tuna
• Peanut butter
• Cream of mushroom soup
• Cornmeal
• Brown sugar
• Yeast (in packets if you can’t refrigerate it)
• Cornstarch
• Crackers
• Barley
• Dried beans, any variety
• Peas
• Lentils
• And plenty of your favorite spices

Worried about space? Some people convert their linen closets into pantries and put the linens in boxes under their bed. Some use racks in the garage or coat-closets in the foyer. If you are well-stocked you only need one of each item out at a time, making storage of the extras in the kitchen unnecessary.

Some of the dishes that come to mind that could be made from these pantry ingredients are: spaghetti with tomato sauce, home made tortillas with rice and beans, bread, stew augmented with whatever fresh meat and vegetables you might have on hand, and oatmeal cookies!

Whenever possible I buy minimally processed canned food. For the canned vegetables, for example, I might buy no salt-added, whole green beans. I figure I can always add my own salt and oil later if I want it.  Are there any items that you keep in your well-stocked pantry that I have left out? Please share!

Does homemade cereal save you money?

If your family is like mine you eat a good amount of cereal every week. I’d say we go through about 2 boxes a week between the four of us. I think some of that might be just from pure waste, however, since my kids don’t always judge proportions correctly yet! Anyway, I thought I could save some money by making our own cereal (plus it tastes WAY better!) so . . .

I’ve run the numbers and figured out that the #1 reason to make your own cereal is to enjoy its superior yumminess as well as its superior healthfulness over store-bought. Sadly, it doesn’t wind up being much of a bargain unless you are comparing it to expensive cereal that’s not on sale.

Just in case I can save someone else the trouble of going through this cost-comparison, however, I am recording my findings here. You might also be interested in making the cereal I link to below simply for the pleasure of eating good-quality cereal that takes very little time to make.  One could argue that to compare the homemade with the cheap store-bought is unfair. In that case, you might consider it a cost-savings nevertheless. Without further ado, here are the cost differentials and break-downs:

The Cost of Store-Bought Cereal: Low = $4 for 20 servings; Medium = $10 for 20 servings

You could spend as low as $1.60 per pound on Raisin Bran at Safeway right now (2 for $4). If you buy a regularly priced cereal in the mid-range, you would spend around $4.50 (Raisin Nut Bran). Higher priced cereals go over $5 per pound.

The Cost of Homemade Cereal: $11 for 20 servings

First off, the homemade granola found here is delicious! You can adjust it any way you want to by buying different nuts to suit your taste. You can substitute cheaper ingredients as well (the nuts are expensive!). All this is to say that the $11 price-tag may be high depending on what you put in yours. I, however, priced the recipe as-is, minus the optional ingredients.

7 cups oats $2 | 1 cup wheat germ $2.50 | 1 cup wheat bran $0.30 | 1/2 cup brown sugar $0.20 | 1/2 cup vegetable oil $0.31 | 1/2 cup honey $1 | 1 tbsp. vanilla extract (imitation) $0.20 | 1 cup chopped pecans $2.50 | 1 cup chopped dates $2

Note: all prices are from Safeway.com. I priced the generic brands where possible.

It dawned on me a few weeks ago that spices are really expensive! It just happened that two of our staple spices, cumin and chili powder, needed to be replaced and I spent over $10 buying two small jars of them at the grocery store.  Since we don’t regularly buy spices I guess I just wasn’t paying much attention to how much they cost. Anyway, my new revelation led me to research some places where you can buy less expensive spices and here is what I came up with:

1. Local Asian, Indian, and Latin American markets

These small grocers stock up on the spices that are frequently used in their home countries. You can generally buy whatever quantity you want at extremely cheap prices. The fact that you can buy as much or as little of a given spice as needed is important because spices can lose their flavor over time so you don’t want to buy too much.

2. Walmart, Costco, etc.

These stores sell the cheapest spices, both in monetary terms and in quality, so watch out! A great post over at likemerchantships explains the results of one taste-test between Walmart cinnamon and more expensive gourmet cinnamon. The gist was that the Walmart cinnamon smelled and tasted much weaker than the others. This was probably due to the fact that spices can be repackaged and resold cheaply when they are past their most flavorful. This same quality caveat holds true for the super-cheap spices bought at places like Big Lots and The Dollar Store.

3. Trader Joe’s

If you have one nearby (we don’t!) this can be a good option because Trader Joe’s usually has good quality foods sold at cheaper prices than your grocery store. However, they do not have the best selection so you can’t exactly count on them having a particular item that you need for a particular recipe.

4. Buy Online

This is one of the most popular options. The following companies sell their spices on-line, frequently in small quantities, and at less expensive prices than you can get at the grocery store. They typically have better quality spices and more selection than the grocery store as well!

Penzeys

WorldSpice

HerbCo

5. Store Properly

Above all, you have to remember to store your spices in airtight containers that are kept out of the light. These two practices are crucial to maintaining the potency of your spices.

There are a couple of good tips on how to save money over at BankRate right now. They hold a frugal tips contest every month called Frugal $ense. You can win $100 if you submit a tip and it gets the highest user rating. Last month’s winner was all about saving money by only grocery shopping once a month. She literally plans out all the meals for the month on a calendar, saving the items that take the longest to cook for the weekends. Check out her tip here.

I was sifting through the entries for this month and while I didn’t see much cost savings in the tip to line dry your clothes instead of using the dryer, I did think that the one on growing your own vegetables was great. Basically, this person is talking about taking your background garden to a whole other level by producing a surplus and canning/jarring/freezing it to make it last throughout the year. We’re talking not just veggies but also berries and fruit trees. Although fruit and vegetable prices would probably never go as high here in the continental U.S. as they are, say, in Japan where I hear it might cost about $50 to buy your own fruit and make a fruit salad with, it still would save you a lot of money to do this. It makes me remember a trip to Switzerland where I saw that most of the homes along a train route I was taking had their own little vegetable gardens. Perhaps our residential landscape will start to look like that in the future.

In my last post I said I would post a picture of my square foot garden. Here it is! The kids and I just took this picture an hour ago. The lettuces and spinach are doing quite well, as are the Swiss Chard and green onions. The carrots are growing even though they aren’t really visible in the picture. For some reason they grow really slowly. I planted half of this garden (8 squares) on April 1st and the other half on May 1st. My reasoning was that then I would get to have salad for a longer period of time. When I harvest all of one square I will replant with another crop after adding a bit more compost for nutrients.

I can’t wait to harvest the first square of mesclun next week. I think you are supposed to harvest that particular type of lettuce while it is still young and small. We should have a good salad that cost us pennies!

With food prices going higher and concern over the environmental costs of shipping produce around the globe, many people are looking for any alternatives that can help them reduce costs and emissions. One solution is to grow your own vegetables and herbs. While most of us think of a traditional garden plot in the backyard to accomplish this, there is a great alternative called square foot gardening.

If you haven’t heard of it before, Square Foot Gardening was started by Mel Bartholomew to increase the yield and decrease the work of gardening at home. I started my square foot garden last summer even before I bought his great book on the subject, using the tips that he lays out on his website. In fact, I ordered my garden box from his website and was extremely pleased with the low price and quick delivery (with two little kids I just didn’t have the time or energy to go buy lumber and build it myself).

The basic concept is that you build a wooden box that is 6″ high, fill it with his special “Mel Mix” which is 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 vermiculite, and plant your seeds in square-foot sections inside the box. The 6″ is deep enough for almost all vegetables, believe it or not, and you can build a frame to grow things like melons and other vine plants to grow upwards on. You can get quite a big yield from this method because the plants are close together, you use less water, and you don’t need chemicals to kill weeds since the Mel’s Mix has no weed-seeds.

The kids and I had a great time with it last summer. I do have to have a lot of patience when we plant because my kids get so excited that they would just as soon dump the entire seed packet into one hole if I am not watching closely. Also there was the “foot print” incident which neither child would own up to, but thankfully the seedlings are growing through the footprint despite the odds.

Since we live in a colder region with lots of precipitation our best crops were lettuce and carrots. This year we planted a lot of different veggies and are hoping for an even bigger yield since we now know a little bit more about what we are doing! Already the lettuces (Mesclun and Romaine) and spinach are growing nicely. I think I will retire my AeroGarden for the summer and start it up again in the fall since we will get all that we need from the outside garden. Please keep an eye out for my next post when I put up some pictures of the garden!

A whole heck of a lot of people eat a salad for lunch, whether it is their entire lunch or just a side. (I am one of those that eats a salad on the side - but then, I also front-load my calories early in the day and eat less in the evening.) The cost of the lunch salad can be broken down as follows:

Most Expensive: The Super-Duper Convenient Salad - $4.00

Buy this from the salad bar at your local grocery or restaurant. You are paying for the ability to say “hey I want a salad today.” Then presto - there it is! This salad will run you anywhere from $4-$10 per day for a total of $20-$50 for a 5-day workweek.

Medium Price: Salad in a Bag - $2.00

This is more work than the salad bar choice and you have to do some pre-planning. But it is so much cheaper!

2 bags of mixed-green salad greens = $3-$4 or ~1.60 per serving

Dressing = $4 per bottle or ~20 cents per serving

Croutons = $2 or ~20 cents per serving

Total cost per salad: $2.00, total cost per week: $10.00

Even though the salad is “pre-washed” you’ll want to wash it again at home (remember that spinach scare a few years ago?), then use your salad spinner to dry it or just lay it out on some paper towels for a while. Divide into 5 servings using plastic containers, then divide the dressing into 5 smaller containers (or just take the whole bottle to work). Put croutons in baggies. Put in the fridge and you are set for the week.

Least Expensive: Chop the Greens Yourself - $1.01

Prep your ingredients on a Sunday and have them ready to go for the week. If you buy a head of lettuce (1 head of green leaf lettuce is about $1.50) plus 1/2 pound of mesclun mix (about 60 cents) you’ll have enough greens for 2 weeks of salad. They might go bad after a week, though, so that is one downside. If you have a spouse or someone to share it with then this is a good option. Shred some carrots ($1.80) and 1 cup of cheese ($2.00); hard-boil 3 eggs ($1.20); add croutons ($2) and dressing ($4). This comes to about $1.65 or $8.25 for the whole week. Keep in mind that you’ve added cheese and eggs to this salad whereas you didn’t for the medium-priced salad. If you omitted the cheese and eggs then your total cost would be $5.05 for the week or $1.01 per day.

All these figures are based on my local Safeway prices.

Here’s a great idea that I ran across recently: save money by creating a pantry in your home. Many small and medium sized kitchens do not have a pantry but you can build one yourself with metal shelving (try Home Depot - much cheaper than what is essentially the same thing at Williams Sonoma). Even if it is in the basement, where you’ll have to make trips up and down the stairs to get to it, it is still worth it. Here are the reasons why:

• With all that storage space you can really buy in bulk; Buying in bulk = money saved
• Fewer trips to the grocery store because you will usually have enough ingredients to whip up a good dinner, lunch, or breakfast; fewer trips = less gas, fewer impulse buys
• No need to run to the store and stock up before a big storm, you are already stocked!
• Easier to keep track of needed items; when something runs out, write it down on a designated white board or chalk board on the pantry door or hanging from the shelves; fewer “emergency” trips to the store to get an item for a recipe that you forgot to get

Are there any other benefits of having a pantry that I haven’t thought of?