The Vine: July 23, 2010
Dear Sars,
I am a single woman with limited amounts of time and money. I’d like to start eating healthier and thriftier, but the two don’t seem to go together very well.
There have been a lot of articles on this subject recently, but they all seemed to be aimed at families and not practical for the single gal. Can you and your readers help me out with some ideas?
Hungry On A Budget
Dear Budge,
I’ll let the readers suggest any books or links; my advice is to invest in a Costco (or similar) membership, which will let you stock up on staples cheaply, and a crockpot, which will let you huck a bunch of ingredients into a bowl and leave them for the day, then come home to a healthy stew.
Or you can devote one day or evening every two weeks to making a handful of recipes that serve 6-8, splitting up the food into freezable single-serving containers, and popping everything into the freezer until you want it. You can do it with salads as well; just prepare each serving ahead of time and box it up without dressing, then take it out, glop some vinaigrette on it, done.
You can tailor the system to work for you based on your schedule and your culinary tastes, but the key is to have healthy meals ready for you whenever, so you’re not tempted to heat up yet another Lean Cuisine or place yet another pricey takeout order because you’re too tired and hungry to fix a healthy meal.
Dear Sars,
I’m hoping you or the Vine Nation can help me with another mystery book. I’m a librarian, so you’d think I’d be able to find it, but I have very few good keywords to search, and NoveList and Google have let me down.
The book is probably an early YA novel, c. 1983 or so. It’s about two girls who I think are orphans and resemble one another a bit, both with dark hair. They are each on their way to either live with family or go to an orphanage/boarding school, and decide to trade places. Part of this clever ruse involved trading a tam o’shanter hat.
I believe the book mostly follows the rich girl who took the poor girl’s place. Later in life they run into each other and the other girl refuses to acknowledge ever knowing the protagonist. I remember really liking it back in elementary school.
Thanks in advance if anybody recognizes this one!
Kaijsa
Tags: Ask The Readers food popcult
@ Budget – Ask Metafilter is a GREAT resource for “help I have to eat cheaply” answers. This one is specific to vegetarian food, but search the archives there are dozens of similar questions.
A lot of popular food blogs (hey, they have their own search!) have posts about cooking from the pantry, and will help you figure out what to stock so you can always throw something together quickly. Marriedwithdinner.com is doing a series called “Dinner on a Deadline” that addresses the too busy to cook much but still want to feed myself well conundrum so many of us face.
My own personal tip for healthful frugality is this: beans. Dry beans are dirt cheap, you can cook up a huge pot on a Sunday afternoon and have beans for dinner (topped with shredded cheese and eaten with a tortilla, this makes me VERY happy), then put them in a pasta dish with some veggies, or refry them and stick them in a quesadilla or burrito, or to add cheap protein to a salad, etc, etc, etc.
I know the book! It’s Searching For Shona, by Margaret Jean Anderson. I bought it at school bookfair when I was little. I can see why it stuck with you – it definitely stuck with
me (especially the end)
@Budget: I haven’t been keeping very current with this site, but I used it quite a bit last year as a source for ideas. It’s called Cheap, Healthy, Good: http://bit.ly/KRdFo (Sorry, I’m useless and don’t know how to embed links here)
Everything Sars and Adrienne said, I second: the freezer is your friend, Tupperware is your friend, beans are awesome. Finding ways to tweak leftovers if you get easily bored can be fun- when your cooking for yourself, there’s no one else to weird out! Who says you can’t make tacos out of leftover chicken parmesan, and so on? Adding lots of produce to your diet and keeping price down simultaneously is hard, but try to just learn what’s in season and hit local farmer’s markets- this is the time of year to go for it. Berries are ridiculously cheap right now here in Virginia and they are superfoods that are great for breakfast, snacks, and dessert.
My husband is doing the shopping and cooking for us right now, and I sent him to this site and gave him a challenge to keep us healthy and lower our grocery bill, and their general tips have definitely helped: http://bit.ly/p2AZs
I’ll stop now. Good luck!
(OH GOD, I’m horrified I used “your” instead of “you’re” – I’ve stoned people for less. Apologies!)
The book is definitely Searching for Shona – It’s still one of my favorites! :)
Agreed with everything above. The biggest trick I’ve found is doing my own portion contol. I buy a big bag of chips and a thing of ziplocs, then parcel it out myself. Grab and go.
Also: make your own pizza. I either go with Boboli or make my own dough and freeze some for whenever. But you can load it up with fresh ingredients and since you’re making it, it’s not dripping with grease like (delicious) pizzeria pizza. And is so much cheaper than picking up a pie (or even a couple of slices).
If you live somewhere like NYC or another city with a lot of farmer’s markets and/or produce stands, that’s where I tend to buy my fruit, as it’s significantly cheaper. I keep a thing of peanut butter in the office and bring in an apple or celery–perfect afternoon snack/lunch side dish.
I struggle with the time investment of cooking, too, so I’m not much help there, but I am good at getting cheap, healthy food. You don’t say if you’re in a city or not, but if you are, and your city has a Chinatown, try buying your produce there. I don’t know why, but Chinatown produce always seems to be substantially cheaper than elsewhere. Otherwise, yes, yes, yes! to buying in season. This will save you loads of money, and it also usually means the produce is fresher and picked closer to ripeness (because it didn’t have to be shipped from a long way away where it IS in season). Also, you probably know this, but in case you don’t, on most grocery deals that are something like “Buy 2 for $1,” the deal will still be honored even if you only buy 1 (i.e., it will cost you 50 cents instead of the regular price). So, if you’re shopping only for yourself, and can’t possibly use two watermelons, you can still get one for cheap.
Soup is great for cheap, healthy, and fast meals. Packaged udon noodles or fast cooking rice, some broth, some veggies (you can get whatever’s on sale, soups are great for bruised or questionable vegetables), and a couple minutes on the stove. If you save the ends and peels of the vegetables in a bag in the freezer you can make your own stock—which is cheaper and healthier than store-bought stock.
Once you have a full bag of veggies and/or meat bones, you just dump it in a soup pot with water and let it bubble a way while you eat dinner and watch tv and stick it back in a bag in the freezer before bed.
@Budget – I really like the cookbook “Going Solo in the Kitchen” by Jane Doerfer. Recipes are sized for one person, she gives tips on food storage and buying things more cheaply, and it’s all easy and healthy – nothing too fancy and intricate. I went through it and marked all the recipes I wanted to try, listed all their ingredients, and then stocked up on the most frequently used. It’s great because it gives me variety without a lot of effort or leftovers.
Buying non-perishable staples (flour, sugar, etc.) in bulk is a good thing, and I absolutely agree with everyone who says the freezer is your friend.
If your freezer is small & you don’t want it filled only with stock & tomato sauce, you can also share bulk-cooking. Every few months, my sister and I get together to cook up vats of tomato sauce (which then goes into single servings of lasagna & other pastas), and chicken & vegetable stocks, and then we split the results. This allows us to make cost-efficient quantities without living on pasta for a month just to clear out enough space to make ice cubes.
I have to echo Adrienne on the beans reco – they are awesome, cheap & versatile – and there are some other pantry & freezer staples you should always have on hand to work with. For freezer, in addition to stocks (which mix nicely with beans to make great soups really fast), you should have frozen veg & fruit/berries (store-bought or home-frozen) to mix into sauces or stir fry, single-serve meals you’ve made & frozen; for pantry: beans, dried whole-wheat pasta, high-fibre/protein grains (quinoa, kamut, brown rice, etc. – these can also be kept in freezer), rice noodles/soba/udon, dried mushrooms (which can be bought at Asian markets for next to nothing in pillowcase-sized bags), and tuna.
Also, if you have outdoor space to have a garden for fresh herbs, tomatoes, peppers, it can motivate to cook with them, as well as saving you some money on the veg.
I actually disagree with Sars’s advice to get a Costco (or Price Club, or Sam’s, etc.) membership. I am a single woman who did get a membership to one of those clubs as a cost-saving measure, but I quickly found that
1) the quantities in which they sell most foods are way too large for a single person, and I ended up often wasting a great deal of anything perishable just because I couldn’t eat it fast enough (and you do eventually run out of freezer space)
and
2) just because you can buy it in bulk doesn’t always (or even usually) mean it’s cheaper. When I really started comparing the unit prices at the grocery store versus those at the “discount” club, I was shocked to discover that they were often HIGHER at the club. You just don’t notice unless you break out what would be the individual price of the smaller can or quantity at the regular store.
I stopped using the discount club because of these two problems and I have never regretted it.
Budget
I’m in the same boat as you and fortunately I have cool co-ops around that take that sort of thing into consideration. They have a shopping on a budget class that you can take – maybe there’s something like that around you? Anyway, I have two other suggestions for you:
1) Familiarize yourself with the cheaper but weirder produce like kale. There are lots of recipes floating around the internet.
2)The bulk section is your friend! I’ve always found it to be cheaper than the prepackaged food and the stock is fresher (at least in the places I shop) because of the popularity.
Good luck and have fun.
I love Not your mother’s slow cooker recipes for two, by Beth Hensperger. See if you can find it at your local library and try a few things before you decide if you want to buy. Other cheap eating:
Eat seasonal fruits and veggies, they’ll be the cheapest.
If you have a garden, grow cherry or yellow pear tomatoes. Pick them, wash them pat them dry and throw them in zip lock freezer bags. I’ve done this for years and it’s great having them to add to soups and beans during the winter. String beans work the same way, as do blueberries.
If you like all parts of the chicken, buy whole chickens on sale and cook them in a crock pot, strip the meat off the bones and freeze into individual portions. Again, freezer bags or those little disposable plastic containers work great. I’ve eaten frozen stuff that’s 6 months old and it still tastes fine (and I’m a picky eater). You can use it on sandwiches, in soup or on salads.
Oatmeal or eggs for breakfast instead of cereal.
Powdered milk, unless you’re actually a big milk drinker. You can mix up a quart at a time for baking.
Buy your staples in the bulk food aisle, if possible. You can control how much you buy and when black beans are on sale for 29 cents a pound you can stock up!
Budge–I’d say that how you work this will depend on what kind of storage you have, but also what’s right for you. Don’t feel obliged to make your meals look like home ec studies, with carefully balanced portions of different food groups.
I’m another to recommend the freezer if you can manage it. I’d also recommend BYO for food at work. I’m particularly fond of the speed bento approach as discussed at http://lunchinabox.net/; it’s a great way to use all the little bits that aren’t big enough for a meal without wasting food or feeling like you’re making a crappy casserole. I also bring an afternoon snack–cheese and fruit and a piece of crispbread, usually (the crispbread is kept around because I don’t like it enough to raid it for its deliciousness but I’ll eat it when I need something solid to tide me over); that’s to keep me out of the vending machine. In fact, I’d say in general I find it important not to get to that ravenous stage where you chuck the whole thing and go grab pizza because you’re too hungry to figure out dinner.
@Budget
“Notes from the Frugal Trenches” is by a single woman in your position. She regularly blogs about her budget weekly meal plans – which include at least five portions of fruit & veg every day. She also blogged about some general frugal food tips in her recent “100 ways to save money” series – http://notesfromthefrugaltrenches.com/2010/07/12/one-hundred-ways-to-save-money-part-iv/
Personally, I echo a lot of the earlier comments – the freezer is your friend and if you’ve got any outdoor space at all, or even a sunny windowsill, try growing your own herbs and veg. If nothing else, a pot of basil will help cheer up pasta dishes and pick-and-come-again salad leaves are perfect for someone in your situation – just pick what you need each meal, the rest keeps growing rather than turning to green slush in your fridge. They’re typically ready to eat 3-4 weeks from sowing.
I’d also recommend making soup – easy to pack with veggies, often easy to make (10 minutes of chopping, leave to simmer while you’re doing your chores), easy to freeze/defrost, easy to reheat – and cheap.
@Budget: I’m going to disagree with @Kendra re: Going Solo in the Kitchen; I find that it calls for a lot of specialty ingredients so I rarely use my copy any more. (Rice flour to make “Scottish” shortbread? Really?) YMMV.
In addition to what everyone else has said about dried beans, soup, crockpot, and use of a freezer, I’ll add lentils to the list. They are also cheap, and don’t need to be soaked, and (I’m told) can be used in all sorts of places instead of ground beef, like tacos.
Budget – others have touched on this, but let me reiterate that a huge part of both healthful and frugal eating is cooking from basic rather than prepared ingredients. Bottled pasta sauce? Skip it. A can of crushed tomatoes is cheeeeap. Add half an onion, a little wad of butter, simmer for 30 and bam, you have Marcella Hazan’s superbly simple tomato sauce. Dress up as needed. So many staples are really inexpensive and give you lots of flexibility. If you can make time on the weekend, plan your meals for the week before you go to the store, make a list and stick to it. If you want to go whole-hog dork like me, make the list as an excel spreadsheet with three columns: item, location, and notes. For location, list the approximate location in the store (i.e. dairy, produce, canned, etc) then sort by the location column before you print. I love to cook but HATE grocery shopping, and this list method keeps it quick and keeps me on track for buying the things I need.
In terms of having the time to cook – you just have to decide that you have it. I work around 60 hours a week and cook dinner every night. The key to getting it done is three-fold. First, I have ingredients on-hand (this is why grocery shopping for the whole week is far superior to several little trips on the way ). Second, I walk in the door and start cooking. I don’t turn on the TV, I don’t sit down at my computer. As soon as I get wrapped up in something else, inertia sets in and I lose all my momentum for getting food on the table. Third, I keep my kitchen clean so that when I do the aforementioned walk in and start cooking thing, there’s actually a place to do it.
Though this will sound counter-intuitive, I think it’s easier to cook more meals than less.
Budget, all the advice here is great! My two cents:
1)Make a list before shopping. Sounds elementary, but it really helps you stick to the budget once you’re at the store, and if you’re shopping for specific dish ingredients, you won’t freeze up in the aisle thinking “now, was that condensed milk or evaporated milk?”
2) Read those grocery circulars that come in the mail. They list what’s on sale and can help you plan meals accordingly (“Hmmm, ground beef’s on sale and so is tomato sauce–spaghetti tonight!”)
3) Buy How To Cook Everything. It’s filled with great recipes and has a wonderful list in the front of the staples you should always have around so you can always fix something.
4) If you’re prepping food beforehand for the week, variety is the soul of economy. You may think making just a giant lasangna and a pot of soup for the week is a great idea on Saturday night, but by Tuesday you will be so heartily sick of both that you’ll find yourself stopping by Burger Barn or ordering pizza. Depending on space issues, try to keep enough food around that you can shake up your menu.
5) If you had something you really loved at a restaurant or freind’s house, ask for the recipe (freind) or see if you can find a recipe on the internet. One place I went to made a dish called Hoppin’ John Cakes, and they were so great I googled them to find out how to make them at home. Now I have another yummy dinner and a way to use up those stale bread heels.
6)Don’t try to like something you hate because it’s healthy or on sale. Just because kale is on sale 10 for $10, you won’t eat it if you hate kale and all it stands for. It’ll just go bad, or you’ll make a giant crock of soup that sits in the freezer for six years, taking up space.
@Nanc in Ashland, is that Ashland, OR? I went to college there!
@Budget- While the freezer thing is great as every one has said, if you’re like me it’s not very practical because I have a smallish fridge and a roommate so I can’t just fill up the freezer willy nilly and leave no room for him. So, As you haven’t said much about where you live I will second the Chinatown recomendation as well as the farmer’s market. Keep Arborio rice, a box of pasta (whole wheat if you prefer) and if you have a Trader Joe’s around I recomend their microwavable brown rice. Also, cans of black beans are, like, $.80 there. I myself am a big fan of cooking for four and putting the leftovers int he fridge. I can’t do the whole “make a vat of soup” thing because, well, as mentioned not enough freezer space, but I can say, cook up a pork tenderloin and then use it in different ways throughout the week. Start looking through the weekly mailer your market sends out. If something looks interesting and cheap, throw it into the food network website and see if you can get any ideas.
Lastly, keep a bag of frozen stir fry veggies around. If all else fails, throw that in a pan with a little soy sauce and maybe some chili powder, a splash of stock and/or wine if you have it, throw it over the microwavable brown rice, voila, dinner in ten minutes.
Jen S., yep, Ashland, Oregon. Where it’s finally feeling like July! (Not that I love hot weather)
One more frugal tip: Butter freezes just fine. If you find it on sale buy an extra pound or two and just put it in the freezer.
I totally concur with using the freezer and crockpot suggestions, but the trick for me with the freezer is remembering what’s in there!
Sunday mornings, I sit down with the local grocery flyers, the cookbooks, a note pad, and a cup of coffee and plan out all the meals for the week-lunches and dinner- and taking into account what’s happening that day. Busy day, something quick to fix. Evening off? Something more leisurely. Then, its one trip for groceries. I discovered I can save about $50 a week (that’s for two of us) this way – fewer exhausted, ravenous stops at the store on the way home to by something from the deli, which always expands into impulse buys. And, you can plan it so that the chicken roasted for dinner on Sunday is also Monday’s pasta and Tuesday’s lunch. Also – while the thought of a delivery pizza is pretty tempting after a long work day, knowing that the broccoli is waiting in the fridge makes it more likely that I’ll actually cook.
Knowing ahead of time what’s for dinner and that the groceries are on hand makes me very happy – and saves me from having to discuss the issue with my husband, who refuses to think about what he’ll have for dinner until after he’s had his lunch. Now I just tell him what dinner will be, and he can arrange his gustatory day appropriately.
I agree wholeheartedly with Bria’s threefold rule for making time for cooking. A little organization in your schedule can help to cut down on impulse-buying (or takeout) for dinner at the end of a long day. At least it does for me. And I don’t feel quite so overwhelmed if I can manage to keep the kitchen tidy. (Granted some weeks, that seems like a pretty big If.) And I second the recommendation about shopping in your Chinatown, especially for things like fresh herbs.
I don’t have How To Cook Everything, but I’m sure I’d like it. I think Mark Bittman’s awesome, and his (shorter) book called The Minimalist Cooks Dinner is built around the idea of fresh, fast, healthy meals on a weeknight. Some specialty ingredients are called for, but nothing too extravagant or weird. There’s a comprehensive pantry list there, as well.
@Budget,
I agree that the Costco/warehouse membership does not fit with cooking for 1. Been there, done that. Did not save money. But it does help if you are friends with someone who DOES have a membership to go with them every few months to stock up on the few items that are cheaper and not going to have spoilage.
Be honest with yourself how much you are ok seeing the same food in different forms in the same week. Family pack chicken can be cheaper. After a few days, will you be tired of things that taste like chicken (same goes for canned tuna, etc.)? Can you make a big pot of rice or quinoa or pasta and pair it with lean protein + new veggies every night? If you’re ok having rice 5 different ways, then rice it is that week! Cheap, faster, easier. Figure out your “breaking” point for foods, and go with that.
Eat more eggs. They are high nutrient value for the cost, and they can look/taste different depending on the rest of the meal.
Eat oatmeal, not cereal. Buy it in bulk.
The advice about containers is spot on. Think of using it for items like yogurt – much cheaper to buy a large size and dole out your portion than to buy single-serve.
When you get home from food shopping, make a list of your perishables – especially produce – and post it on your fridge. Cross things off as you eat them. If you see that the same food items are “left over” on the list and then being thrown out on a regular basis, stop buying them, no matter how healthy they are!
Personally, I love Costco. They have converted pretty well to the smaller shopper, in terms of offering 12 12-14 ounce cans of things like tomatoes (for like $5) and canned black beans (organic, even). Organic Olive oil by individual bottles (2 quarts I think) for around $12 (I almost never use vegetable oil anymore). We are only 2 people, and my husband travels for his job and is gone Mon-Thurs most weeks, so I am mostly cooking for myself. We don’t buy huge amounts of things we can’t eat before it goes bad, but I get a big box of spinach or other salad greens, red peppers which I roast on my grill myself and then place in small ziploc bags and freeze. They are awesome to put on sandwiches or add to tomato sauce (made as described above, with canned tomatoes, garlic, onion and fresh or the little bottles of jarred basil). Free Range eggs, 18 pack, which keeps for a long time. I love a hard boiled egg, slice of cheese, slice of ham on an english muffin for breakfast! Can boil the eggs in advance and make it really quickly in the morning.
We don’t buy a lot of meat at costco, but I do get some when it is on sale at the grocery store and food saver it (although I do love the crab legs on the weekends!). Veggies, I get what is in season at the grocery store or at veggie stands in the summer. I am trying to get my husband to learn that meat is not a required component of every meal, but it is slow going. Summer is a lot easier because of all the fresh veggies available.
The discount clubs are great, but you do need to be aware of value per unit cost, and definitely have a list, and avoid the grazing, so you reduce your impulse buys of things you don’t need or want.
Lots of good tips here, Budget. I’m not exactly in the same position, but I am a mom of two toddlers, and dinner time is the witching hour for kids this age–they are whiny, clingy, cranky, and demanding of undivided attention riiiight about the time I should start cooking supper, and I can’t think of anything to eat except pasta. I’ve grown to love the freezer in many ways. One of those is that I try to prep and freeze basics instead of whole meals. I’ll take a weekend and brown a bunch of ground meat, and then I can freeze the cooked meat in 1 lb or .5 lb bags. That way, if I get a craving for tacos, I don’t have to check for meat or thaw meat or anything–I just have to heat up the precooked stuff. I do the same with chicken–cook a boatload at once, cut it up into cubes or strips, and freeze that in 1-cup baggies. Beans work the same way. Dried beans are much cheaper than canned, but they do require more of a time investment. About once every other month, I have a bean weekend where I cook tons of pinto and black beans, and then those get frozen in 1-cup baggies, too. This gives me the price and nutrition of dried beans with the convenience of canned.
I recently started menu planning to beat the late afternoon brain freezes, and it is working out nicely to both control our budget and keep us from eating pasta three nights a week. My high-tech system involves a calendar, and I sit down and pencil in meals for the next month. I’m flexible, of course, if there’s a great deal on pork chops one week, but planning ahead keeps me from buying unnecessary things or buying things I like but forgetting about them until they start talking back when I open the refrigerator door. We don’t have a ton of meal variety here because I’m not a great cook and don’t particularly enjoy cooking, but the freezer/calendar combo has kept us from spending a ton of money eating out and kept us from eating whatever pre-cooked, salt- and preservative-filled “meal” I found in the freezer aisle at the grocery.
It is worth noting that, at least in Brooklyn, actually going to Costco sucks, particularly on summer weekends. Stupid, loud chaos conducted at the slowest possible speed. Definitely try to go with someone, so that that person can prevent you from killing your fellow shoppers/buying that giant bin of animal crackers.
Once you’re home, it seems worth it, but on-site, on a Sunday, you want to kill yourself.
One thing I do is go to Produce Junction (not sure if it’s a local chain, but most people I know have something comparable in their area even if they don’t know it), buy a few veggies, and freeze about two months’ worth of ratatouille as a result. It’s great with cheap things like rice, pasta, or beans.
Carrie and Andrea, you’re awesome! It’s definitely Searching for Shona. I was fairly sure I’d have to rely on somebody remembering it, since I couldn’t remember a thing about the author or the characters’ names. Thank you!
Hungry, I’m eating super cheap these days while I pay off crushing debt (thanks, grad school and moving expenses), so I can sympathize. I’m also living solo, so I feel you there, too. I’ve been relying on a lot of lentils and rice, spiced liberally, plus other cheapish staple food. Meat is a budget-buster, so going veggie while ensuring enough plant protein is a way to cut costs and potentially calories and fat, too. Tofu is really cheap these days, particularly if you can get it in big sizes, and it keeps in the fridge for quite a while if you change the water.
I buy my dried beans, legumes, rice, oats, and spices in bulk at the co-op and switched to whole wheat pasta and brown rice, which are more filling and taste better (to me). I live in the high desert and am not a gardener anyway, so it’s hard to eat local or get cheap veggies and fruit here. Frozen vegetables are your friend during off seasons. They taste great, and the big bags last a long time. Bread is expensive in stores, so I’ve switched to baking my own (see Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day).
Good luck!
@Nanc I’m feeling ya. Up here in Seattle it’s STILL “Hey, the sun’s out! Kaloo Kalay! Oh, wait… there it goes.” Just wrap me in fleece and throw me to the orcas, I’m done.
More actual advice:
Subscribe to your newspaper. Lots of coupons and the food section (ours is on Wednesdays) with recipes. I’ve gotten tons of great ideas from it.
Budge:
If you have the room/cash, you might want to invest in a teeny-tiny electric grill. When I was growing up, my (single) mom and I had one on our apartment balcony; I don’t think it could have been more than 18 inches across and cost less than $100. It was excellent because it was SO EASY. Marinate meat, stick it on the grill. Wrap up vegetables and/or bread in aluminum foil with a dash of salt, stick it on the grill. Since there was so little clean-up and so little time needed, we ate in a LOT more than we would have otherwise.
Admittedly, we live in San Diego, so…it was grilling weather year-round. But still, it’s a thing to consider: you want to make cooking as easy (and fun!) as possible, so you’re more likely to do it.
I read this somewhere recently (I can’t remember where) that made a lot of sense. Instead of trying to do a food court thing, where you have Italian one night and Middle Eastern the next night and Thai the night after that, plan to have Mexican week or Chinese week. The perishable ingredients get incorporated into the next night’s meals more easily if the next night’s meals are kind of in the same family.
I would also say don’t be afraid of frozen or canned vegetables. In season tomatoes are amazing and cheap, but if it’s not summer, I’m sticking to canned. They are better and cheaper than fresh tomatoes off season. This pretty much applies to any off-season vegetable.
Yes! “Searching for Shona!” The first one of these book searches that I recognized! Loved the book as a kid. It was two girls in London during the Blitz of WWII. They meet in the train station as both are being shipped off to distant relatives/caregivers that have never met them befiore, so their ingenious switch goes undetected. The rich girl was supposed to go to Canada, and the poor girl to the countryside in England. They don’t encounter each other again until after the war, and the formerly poor girl shuns the formerly rich one, and refuses to switch back. And both are ultimately satisfied with their new lives. Fascinating book!
I don’t have anything new to add, but wanted to thank Bria for ‘whole-hog dork’ (hee) and Jen S 1.0 for the excellent rendering of my current, fellow Seattlelite, mental state.
For eating healthier (possibly thriftier, possibly not, depending on where your starting point is), I find buying the big bags of frozen veggies in the freezer section of the grocery store helpful. My problem has always been that fresh veggies are OMG sooo much work…you have to wash them and cut them up and I just don’t wanna. The frozen ones are already washed and cut up, you just have to put them in the microwave for a few minutes. It gets me eating veggies rather than junk food.
My newest food obsession: Cuisinarting vegetables to a nice hummus-y texture, then spreading the puree on crackers. I add a ton of garlic and a whisper of Romano cheese, so it feels really decadent but is actually good for me. Well, except for the crackers. And the softball-sized serving of malt-ball gelato I reward myself with afterwards for being so conscientious. But other than that.
Also, it takes like five minutes on the prep side, so I’m like, “Dang, why don’t I cook/puree more often, it’s so eeeeeasy,” and then it’s time to clean the Cuisinart and I’m like, “Ohhh, right. THIS part.”
Unless someone’s like, “Consider a souffle,” this is totally the least helpful comment of the day. Heh.
@ Kaijsa & Carrie – yes yes YES on “Searching for Shona” ! Although the ending, w/ Shona outright taking Marjorie’s identity for good, really freaked me out when I was a kid. :/ Something about the permanence of what they both initially thought was a prank …
Another good YA identity-switch is “Charlotte Sometimes” – like SfS, but with time travel.
and @Andrea and @Kaijsa again and @Suz – failure to read thread = FAIL. Sorry!
In re: crockpot cooking – does the T. Nation Hive Mind have a good way to combat the mushiness and blandness that seems typical of many slow cooker recipes? Or am I just doin it wrong?
For the purposes of cooking healthfully and cheaply, I say go Costco. I buy the big bags of veggies — 10 lbs of spinach, 2 lbs of brussels sprouts, 2 lbs of green beans — and those make my main dishes. I find recipes on epicurious.com (or weightwatchers.com, or google) for those items. If I buy fish/meat in bulk, I break them into individual freezer ziplocs (also bought in bulk!). Pantry items like pasta are seriously cheap at Costco — like a dollar a pound. Tofu! $3 for $4. I can’t get everything there, but it’s worth the membership cost for me for some stuff.
I want to second Kelly’s comment way up at the top and also recommend the blog Cheap Healthy Good. It’s written primarily by a New Yorker who was cooking for herself and is now cooking for herself+boyfriend. The hook is basically in the title-she does some just finding healthy (cheap) recipes, some taking other recipes and seeing if they still taste good with maybe half the olive oil the recipe calls for, or seeing if you can really taste the difference if you use a part-skim cheese, and then posting the results, with nutritional/calorie/fat statistics per serving. She has a very fun, casual, approachable style, and she’s very non-pretentious about cooking in general. She’ll have notes in the recipes like “Well, this called for bean sprouts, but I didn’t have any and it still turned out good!” or “This called for oregano and savory, but I just had oregano so I used double of that,” which is totally how I cook too. She also has posts where she compiles advice across the internet for things like what pantry staples/cooking supplies are really essential, and other general tip posts that are really useful.
Don’t be afraid to shop around — I recently moved to the UES from Brooklyn, where I discovered several of the organic yogurts and juices I like are actually considerably cheaper at Whole Foods compared to my neighborhood supermarkets — enough so that it’s worth it to budget time to take the bus over and back (sometimes I walk there from work to save myself one bus fare). If you have to shop using a car, try to consolidate trips/errands to save gas money — maybe the store with cheap produce is close to the library, etc.
Someone upthread mentioned the New York Times’ Minimalist — even if you don’t buy a book, a look through his archives on the Times website can be really helpful. He did an article last year on 101 Simple Salads which I constantly use (particularly this time of year) — it has combinations of ingredients I never would have thought of, but every salad I’ve tried has been delicious, easy to make, and extremely healthy.
@Sars:
“malt-ball gelato”?
You dropped that in there so casually, I had to read it several times and say it out loud twice in order to fully comprehend. Where? Where do I…hold on, I’m overcome…just…where?
@Sars: “Stupid, loud chaos conducted at the slowest possible speed.” Word! Get a flat cart sometime, they are *much* more effective at mowing down that chump who chokes off an entire aisle while collecting samples for her herd of kids. Not that Costco shoppers ever make me feel violent or anything.
Budget, do some research on freezing things. If you have the freezer space to work with, some things like blocks of cheese freeze better than you’d think, so you can stock up during sales.
Biggest money-saver I have found is to buy ingredients and skip the prepared stuff. Dry rice cooks well in the micro, as does oatmeal; beans take time but require minimal attention. Cutting up your own broccoli doesn’t take that much time and you save compared to the cost of extra packaging and fees for some factory to do it! For that matter, sensible bulk shopping saves money in another way: as long as you can use the food before it spoils, try to end up with the best packaging-to-food ratio you can manage, and avoid paying for multiple wrappers that go in the trash.
The slow cooker makes the cheapest cuts of meat nice and tender. Those are *so* worth the money, by the way, and a nice 5-qt is less than $20 at walmart. If you want to save up and make an investment, a pressure cooker makes short work of “long” meals like stews.
Also, for those who eat dairy, yogurt is much cheaper to make than to buy, and pretty easy. Info is abundant online. We make it by the gallon in a slow cooker and turn it off (or on) periodically to maintain the optimal temp. Whatever amount of milk you start with is the amount of yogurt you end with… and milk is much cheaper that commercial yogurt.
2nd/3rd/whatever the suggestions for Mark Bittman’s work and beans over meat. Also, depending on your experience, it may be worth it to take a basic cooking class or two – knife skills, baking techniques, etc. The point being, it will be faster and less daunting to cook dinner every night if you get a solid grounding in the basics. If you can swing the fridge/freezer space, it’s much cheaper to buy the least processed things. So cook up a whole mess of dried beans and freeze, as JenK suggested, or buy a whole chicken. Either cut it up yourself and freeze the parts for individual use, or roast the whole thing on the weekend, then dissect and fridge/freeze/reuse. Don’t forget to make soup from the bones, that’s the best part!
Two of my favorite cheap and easy meals: box of jiffy mix, canned or frozen corn, and an egg. Add cheese and chopped lightly steamed greens (kale, spinach, collards, chard) for a complete meal. Bacon and hot peppers are optional, and adjust the batter texture with milk as needed. This can be fritters/pancakes, muffins (also freezable), or a big pan of cornbread.
Meal 2: Start a pot of rice. You’ve got time for brown rice if you start it before doing anything else. Then chop and saute veggies, either all together in a wok or in batches in a small frying pan – anything goes, really. Last thing, empty the veggies into a bowl, and do a couple of sunny side up eggs in the pan. Combine rice, veggies, and an egg, top with soy/rice vinegar/lime juice/mirin/sesame seeds/hot sauce/other, and call it bibimbap (a sort of Korean stir-fry).
@Suzanne, I recommend putting the more “fragile” ingredients on top–for instance, if you’re making a lamb stew, put the meat at the bottom, than the carrots, than the onions near the top. I find it softens the meat without dissolving the veggies.
Also, cook on low if you can–takes longer but renders a velvet finish. And don’t overcook. If the recipe says, say 5 to 7 hours at low, I try to make it err towards the five hour mark. And don’t go beyond the seven hour mark or it’ll all just dissolve. Slow cookers cook slowly, but they don’t pause.
One thing I have found with the little ziploc/baggie things, I tend to be too lazy to wash & re-use them. So now we freeze our single-serve portions of beans, sauce, whatever in muffin pans, then turf them into larger bags which are easier to track. We found some silicone pans cheap at a thrift store, these are perfect. The large bags must be labelled though, one frozen brown hockey puck looks a lot like another. I make my own multigrain porridge in 1-2 week batches, freeze 3/4 cup servings, & nuke 1 puck with a little milk for much cheaper than instant oats.
The frozen foods section can give you ideas. If they can sell individual portions of something, you can freeze your own version of that. They sell ‘family packs’ of meatballs, seasoned wings, toaster pancakes; you can make batches of these when the ingredients are on sale & freeze on cookie sheets before storing in the bag.
@Suzanne I found I really had to hunt around to find good recipes for the slow cooker _ everything I found on the web consisted of “half a bottle of tomato sauce (err I guess you call it Ketchup) and a packet of mushroom soup”-type recipes which made me gag just thinking about them.
The Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker books mentioned above are pretty good, as is Rick Rodgers The Slow Cooker Ready and Waiting cookbook. The front section of Rodgers’ book is good for learning how to use the cooker properly. I’m pretty sure the Australian Woman’s Weekly is available internationally, so if you can track down their slow cooking book, it might be worth it.
The one thing I’ve learned is that the idea that you can just chuck everything in the pot, turn it on and cook the fuck out of it while you’re at work and have a tasty, not watery meal is a myth. I think I have a very fast slow cooker (heh) but have discovered most things need a max of about 6-7 hours, beans and big roasts excepted. And it’s worth doing the fiddly browning at beginning and, if you have time, sauce reduction on the stove at the end.
Also, avoid any recipe that consists primarily of tinned tomato, celery and carrot. They are to blandness what Ed Hardy shirts are to douchebags, a big old warning sign.
@budge I’ve been getting into the website http://www.justbento.com at the moment _ it’s primarily for lunches, but good for tips about how to freeze rice portions and make portion-and-freeze meat dishes. I can just throw a lunch together with things in the freezer.
And if you do the slowcooker thing, experiment with making congee/jook. I know it’s traditionally a breakfast thing, but half a cup of rice makes heaps and then you can vary the meats and vegies you add to keep it going a few days without becoming monotonous. If you’re in Chinatown for vegies, you can treat yourself to some barbecued pork or duck for it, it’s pretty cheap.
@budge Oh and I just remembered: on the Australian version of Lifehacker, a friend of mine has just done a Mastercheap challenge in which he tried to feed himself for a week on just $25, with no freeloading or using existing pantry items _ lots of eating for one advice there, although it’s a little carbo loaded for my tastes.
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2010/07/mastercheap-eating-for-25-a-week/
@Liz: I think it’s from Ciao Bella. My sister-in-law found it behind some frozen peas and was like, “You’re the Whopper person around here; you try it.” It’s good, but a little light on actual balls.
(hee.)
I would suggest purchasing some kind of food saver vacuum system. I got mine at Target for, I think, under $50. It has paid for itself many times over. Fridge foods like cheese last a lot longer, as do frozen meats (no freezer burn!). Some things (soft foods) you should freeze overnight before you vacuum pack them, or they’ll get squished. I second the crock pot idea; I love mine, especially coming home to a nice hot dish in the winter.