Frugal SBD

[RonniRoo]

I love stovetop popcorn! We have one of those crank pots for popcorn and it works great! Our favorite right now is to sprinkle it with parmesan cheese and fresh ground black pepper.

Magna, I've been following your frugal threads with interest. You have some great ideas for keeping down the costs, but I have to say, I'm totally jealous of your grocery deals. Food here is so expensive.. ok, everything is expensive. I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the $2 per cucumber cost when gas is $3.59 a gallon, LOL.

~~Veronica

[Magna]

Just wondering - you mentioned that vegetables grow really big in the summer, but not in your yard because it's shaded. Would it be possible for you to get some produce from your neighbors, maybe offer to buy your neighbors' extras? You might get some cheap produce that way. If you can cook and freeze them, you could stock up and use the vegetables during the winter.

Also, if any of your neighbors hunt or fish, they might give you some of what they take. Someone might end up with more than they want, and not know what to do with it, so if you make it known you're interested in having some game or fish, they might just give you what they can't use. I don't know if it's legal where you are to buy or sell wild-caught game, but someone with a bunch of food they can't eat might just be glad to see someone use it.

[RonniRoo]

Great ideas Magna! I will have to ask. There is a retired couple at the end of the street that grows AMAZING veggies in their garden.

This past summer I was so excited to find a HUGE farmer's market in town and thought for sure I could get some good deals on produce. Well, that didn't go as planned.. the cheapest stand I could find for tomatoes was $6.00 a pound, ugh. On the bright side, they had beautiful veggies and we did splurge for some top quality stuff (you should see some of the sickly produce in the stores up here). I think this summer we are going to try doing more container gardening and see if we can just set the containers in the sunniest spots. We also found a really rich berry patch last year with a combination of wild blueberries and raspberries, so we will definitely go picking there again this summer!

~~Veronica

[RedRox]

The main things that I do are to cook in big batches and then freeze, shop the sales, and look around for good prices. For example, McCann's Steel Cut Irish Oatmeal is $8 or more at most stores (which is just absurd to me!), but only $4.99 at Trader Joe's. When I go visit my parents upstate I stop by their Wal-Mart to pick up Uncle Sam's cereal (about $2 versus $3.50 around here) and canned mushrooms ($.58 vs. $.99 at my store).

I have to ask what the deal is with McCann's? Is it really that much different than plain steel cut oats? I kind of consider oats in general a commodity type item and get them for about $1/lb (both organic steel cut and organic thick rolled oats) at my local healthier food type outlet in what is basically their equivalent of a bulk foods area. (it's just pre-measured and bagged). I've never wanted to ante up the green to try McCann's but I know some people swear by them, so just curious what makes them so different or better to justify that kind of markup over regular old steel cut oats.

[Magna]

I don't see much difference - the bulk kind are fine with me. I suppose some people might not get very good quality steel cut oats in bulk, or McCann's might be the only ones available in their area.

[Dylan]

I buy McCann's because it's the only steel cut oats that I see in the store - my regular grocery store doesn't have a bulk foods area. I think some places charge so much because they consider it an import - often it's with other imported items. Seems a bit silly to me, but that's the only reason I can think of that they'd be so over-priced. I only drink Irish/English tea, but luckily I have family members or friends that make the trip often enough that I never have to spend $8 for 80 tea bags (which would cost you less than $2 in Ireland).

However, since it's just me, I don't mind spending $5 for the steel cut oats at Trader Joe's - I normally make one batch per week for four breakfasts, and the container lasts me a month. $5 for 20 breakfasts is only 25 cents per morning, so that's fine with me.

[RedRox]

Got it! Yeah it's pretty cheap stuff regardless when you break it down like that! I thought Quaker now had a steel cut oats of there own too, so you might look and see if your grocery carries that since it is "Domestic" and not "Imported". Thanks for the explanation!

[Magna]

My microwave popcorn popper turned out not to be ideal. The plastic lid warped in the microwave, it gave off kind of a bad chemical smell, and the amount of popping corn the instructions said to use turned out to be way too much (about half didn't pop). I looked at the customer reviews before buying it and nearly all were favorable, but the ones that weren't mentioned the same problems I saw. But after a couple of uses the lid hasn't warped any more, the smell is pretty much gone, and I am using less corn than the instructions say. It does pop up bigger than on the stovetop.

If I had it to do over again, I'd buy a different popper, but I'll see how this one works out. I noticed some of the dissatisfied customers said you could use a covered Pyrex bowl as a popper, as long as the lid is loose enough to allow steam to escape. It needs to have a lid - plastic wrap won't work.

[Mbelle]

Aarghh! Thanks for posting this .... I just bought the popper you did, after doing the same research as you did. Perhaps I'll return it, unused.

[Magna]

If I had to do it over again, I would (knowing what I now know). Then again, a lot of people seemed very happy with the popper. It may vary depending on the microwave that's used.

[Magna]

Here are a couple of entries in a budget-cooking blog I thought our members might find interesting. This one compares the prices of frozen and canned vegetables:
http://www.likemerchantships.org/2008/0 ... ables.html

This one is just for fun - the blogger talks about cooking menus from a 1950s-era "Meal Management" college home economics book (i.e., cooking on a budget):
http://www.likemerchantships.org/2008/0 ... -menu.html

That 1950s meal challenge wasn't SBD, just frugal home cooking. But you could do it SBD-style, using your own recipes. (And, fwiw, my "SBD Budget Challenge" was basically the same thing!) The thing that made it work, I thought, was that she didn't treat budget food like it was second-rate, or apologize for it. She wasn't sending any signals like "This is cheap stuff, not the good stuff, so you might not like it," or that kind of thing. It looks like she just served it up and expected everyone to enjoy it, which they did. Interestingly, although the food was not all that healthy, she still lost weight.

[Chris55]

Some pretty interesting info on her blog, not just about food, either. Good for frugal moms trying to raise kids on one salary. I really give thanks to my mom who raised five of us on a blue-collar salary. We always said that her family heirlooms were her recipes. She also taught me to be a bargain hunter. She would shop at three or four stores each week to pick up the sale items.

Not many frugal purchases this week. It seems that the closer we get to spring, the higher the produce prices are in Maine. I ended up with cabbage for slaw, carrots, salad greens, tomatoes, and broccoli this week, plus my freezer stash of huge bags of frozen corn (for the family) and green beans. The whole frozen green beans are pretty good if you cook them, then saute a bit with olive oil and garlic. I also had a small semi-boneless ham for dinner, sandwiches, ham & eggs, and will use the bone for soup.

I did buy some ww bread and english muffins at a bakery outlet to pop in the freezer, but then got 3 loaves of my favorite artisan ww bread at our food co-op. The small company only delivers twice a week at random times so when I see the breads I want, I grab them, cut them in half, wrap in foil and plastic, and pop in the freezer. I don't mind spending money on the bread as long as we eat it before it starts getting moldy, so only leaving small portions out is my solution. The rest is in the freezer, ready to be defrosted quickly as needed.

I'm very much looking forward to my organic farm share this summer. I'd love to plant some veggies again myself and will hopefully be able to do so after we build our long-awaited deck this summer. I'm doing some boxes for veggies and flower, at least that's the plan! Meanwhile, I'm stuck with frozen veggies and wilted broccoli from my grocery store

[NoHio]

I am very interested in frugal recipes, so I will be searching this site for them, especially main dishes made with dry beans. Some ways that we save money on our food bills are shopping at Aldi for everything they carry, then going to a regular grocery store for the rest, and having a garden. We had a minor gardening setback yesterday when the flat of plants we had started blew away (at least we think it did, we can't find it anywhere), but we are going to start again on Tuesday. It does seem like many of the recipes in the SBD books use more expensive cuts of meat and other expensive ingredients, but I guess it is worth it for our health, and we will certainly supplement those with recipes found on here and elsewhere on the internet.

[Chris55]

You really do not have to use the recipes in the book. Basic inexpensive cuts of meat are fine. I eat chicken a few times a week, lean cuts of sirloin or london broil, boneless pork loin (which is less expensive than the tenderloin). I love fish and splurge on that, but don't eat it as often as I would like because of the expense. The point is to find things you like to eat that are healthy and find interesting ways to cook them so you're not just eating salad topped with dry chicken every day!

[Magna]

There is a whole "sticky" devoted to bean recipes in the recipe and food area:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=17744

The food and recipe area also has a "sticky" for soup recipes that you might check out as well.