In my original article, I lauded the flexible recipe as it enabled people to easily fit whatever ingredients were on sale into a simple casserole that would work for dinner. This meant you could truly pick up whatever was on sale, fit it into the “flexible casserole,” and it would reasonably work.

Here’s the original recipe, from page 625 of Complete Tightwad Gazette:

1 cup main ingredient (tuna, cubed chicken, turkey, ham, seafood, etc.)
1 cup second ingredient (thinly sliced celery, mushrooms, peas, chopped hard-boiled eggs, etc.)
1-2 cups starchy ingredient (thinly sliced potatoes, cooked noodles, cooked rice, etc.)
1 1/2 cups binder (cream sauce, sour cream, can of soup, etc.)
1/4 cup “goodie” (pimiento, olives, almonds, water chestnuts, etc.)
seasoning to taste
topping (cheese, bread crumbs, etc.)

That basic structure makes a lot of sense and some elements of it are quite healthy. The only parts that are really questionable in terms of health are the binder and the topping (the “goodie” could be questionable, too).

So, let’s see what we can do to make this recipe a bit healthier without sacrificing flavor or cost.

A healthy and cheap binder Most casserole recipes use a creamy soup as a binder, but quite often the element that makes them into an effective binder is usually corn starch, which is very calorie dense. So, what can you use instead?

One option is to use eggs. This will turn the casserole into more of an egg strata, which means it’s appropriate for any meal (including breakfast). Eggs are protein rich and add much less salt and fewer calories to whatever casserole you prepare.

Ground flaxseed (if you can find it for cheap) is another good binding agent to add to casseroles. This is more of a “sticky” binder than a “structure” binder like egg whites, but it will certainly do the trick. Almond flour also works, in my experience.

Another option that works well in some casseroles is simply mashed-up beans. They can function as a great binder in a “softer” casserole, especially when used in a small quantity. Don’t expect a highly firm casserole when using them, though.

A healthy and cheap topping The best solution here is to take an ordinary topping and make it healthier.

If you’re going to use cheese, for example, use a low-fat and low-sodium cheese and perhaps mix some dried (or fresh) herbs in with it so that you use a smaller amount of cheese to provide the covering you’d like without sacrificing flavor.

If you’re going to use bread crumbs, use whole wheat crumbs and also augment them with dried herbs.

Lower salt ingredients Choose low salt ingredients along the way. Many of us already get quite a lot of salt in our diets, so choosing low salt ingredients is an easy way to make a dish healthier.

So, what might you come up with if you did this in a healthier fashion?

Cheesy Breakfast Bake
1 cup cubed low-salt ham
1 cup mushrooms
1 cup shredded potatoes
1 1/2 cups egg whites
1/4 cup black olives
ground black pepper
1 ounce cheese tossed with tarragon

Just bake it at 350 F until the egg is cooked.

Light Lunch Salad
1 cup tuna
1/2 cup chopped hard-boiled eggs
1/2 cup finely sliced celery
1 cup cooked long grain brown rice
1 1/2 cups low fat mayonnaise
1/4 cup black olives
seasoning to taste

This can be served cold or even used on sandwiches.

Chicken Casserole
1 cup shredded cooked chicken
1 cup broccoli
1 1/2 cups cooked long grain brown rice
1 cup vegetable stock
1/2 cup ground flaxseed
2 ounces fat free cheese
ground black pepper

Mix thoroughly and bake at 350 F until the cheese is thoroughly melted and the broccoli is done.

Southwestern Casserole
1 cup cooked shredded beef (or ground beef or black beans)
1 cup salsa
1 1/2 cups cooked long grain brown rice
1 cup mashed black beans
1/4 cup black olives
seasoning to taste
2 ounces shredded cheese sprinkled on top

Bake at 350 until the cheese is melted. Serve with corn tortillas.

Each of these recipes follows that same basic structure. Each of these recipes is reasonably healthy (and in some cases, quite healthy). Each of these recipes can be altered and experimented with based on what you have on hand, what’s on sale, and what you like.

As long as you know the basic recipe, the rest simply follows. Never be afraid to experiment with a meal at home. Try mixing things together and find out what happens. You might find something great. You might not. Even in the worst case, it’s just one meal. In the best case, you’ve found something you enjoy. In either case, if you use a basic structure like this and fill in the holes with what’s on sale and what you already have, it’s an inexpensive meal.

The post Building a Healthier “Flexible Casserole Recipe” appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

My doctor has two simple rules of thumb for eating healthier. He says that it’s pretty difficult sometimes to figure out what’s healthy and so he suggests two things. First, more than half of the food you eat in a day should be plants. Second, if it comes from a factory or a mine, eat it as rarely as you can, meaning if it’s not obviously a plant, a vegetable, a direct animal product, or a piece of meat, try to avoid eating or drinking it. That’s it.

So, how do I get these two different worldviews to work together? How can I follow such simple standards for healthy eating while also keeping money in my pocket? These five tactics really work well.

I’m excluding the obvious tactic of having a garden from this list, simply because quite a few readers don’t have adequate space or adequate time to start and maintain one.

Buy plenty of whatever fresh items are on sale at the grocery store.
If you examine your preferred grocery store’s flyer, you’ll usually find at least one fresh fruit and at least one fresh vegetable that’s on sale. Often, you’ll find two or three of each.

When you go to the store, those are the vegetables and fruits you’re going to really focus on. These will be the cornerstones of your diet for the week. Buy plenty of them. Eat them as much as you can stand that week.

Here’s the thing: it’s just a week. At the end of the week, there will be a new flyer and new fruits and vegetables on sale.

Make healthy foods convenient to eat.
When you get home from the store, make those healthy fruits and vegetables as ready to eat as you possibly can. Clean them. Cut them up into snack-sized bits. Put them in several baggies so you can grab them when you’re on the go. Keep them at the front of your refrigerator so they’re ready to go.

Obviously, follow the lead on what your fruit or vegetable is. If you bought a lot of spinach, for example, make some “salad on the go” bags in Ziplocs with a fork already in there (and maybe a little container of salad dressing you made yourself). If you bought bananas, just keep them out where they’re visually obvious for you. If you bought carrots, chop and peel them into smaller pieces for snacking.

If a food is really convenient when you open that refrigerator door, you’re more likely to grab it when you’re in a pinch. I often grab vegetable pieces if I see that they’re ready to go, for example. It’s all about the path of least resistance.

If it’s fresh and about to go bad, store it.
The most effective way to do it is to freeze it, of course, but there are lots of things you can do, particularly if you have a blender.

If you have a blender, turn all of your remaining fruits (along with a bit of your remaining vegetables) into smoothies and freeze them in single-serving batches. You can literally freeze them in plastic cups if you’d like so all you have to do is pull one out of the freezer and put it in the fridge for 24 hours or so to have a very cold and delicious smoothie.

If you have vegetables left over, turn them into something you can easily use later on. Chop root vegetables into small pieces and freeze them. Turn tomatos into tomato sauce – or, if you have onions and other herbs and spices, make some pasta sauce, and freeze that, too.

Almost any fresh item that’s just on the verge of going bad can easily be converted into something delicious that can be stored for later use, which keeps you from buying a processed equivalent of that item at a later date.

Drink water. If you like fizz, carbonate it. If you like flavor, add a bit of fruit juice, ideally from fruit you juiced yourself.
Seriously, drink water. If water is your primary beverage, you’re going to save a lot of money on beverages and you’re taking in a zero calorie substance.

If you feel thirsty, drink some water. If you don’t feel thirsty, don’t drink anything. You get most of the water you need from your food anyway.

If you absolutely must have bubbles in your water, see if you can get a carbonating unit like a Sodastream on the cheap. If you absolutely must have flavor in your water, add a bit of fruit juice to it before you drink. I sometimes like a hint of lemon in my water myself.

Listen to your body, not the clock.
If you’re hungry, eat. If you’re not hungry, don’t eat. It’s that simple.

Yes, sometimes we have busy schedules with narrow windows of opportunity for a meal. If that’s the case, plan around it. Keep food that you can snack on throughout the day. Unsalted nuts are great, as they fill you up with just a few of them.

Noon doesn’t mean “time to eat lunch.” The decree of “time to eat lunch” needs to come from your sense of hunger and how your body actually feels. If that means not eating until two or three, so be it. If it means not even eating a lunch at all, so be it.

At the same time, put about half as much on your plate as you might normally do. If you normally eat two scoops of something, put on only one scoop. Clean your plate, then reassess whether or not you’re still hungry. As above, if you’re hungry, eat. If you’re not hungry, don’t eat.

Almost always, this causes you to eat less without the hunger. The less food you eat, the more food stays in the fridge or cupboard for tomorrow and the less you have to buy at the store the next time you go. That saves you money.

The post Five Tactics for Cheap, Healthy Eating appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

The vast majority of the time, when I’m shopping for groceries on my own, I shop at Fareway. Fareway is a discount grocery store – they make this clear on their signs and grocery bags. Their selection is sometimes hit and miss, but I can usually find all the produce and other items that I need there. However, when I shop at Fareway, I always feel really good at the checkout – the total is usually very low.

We supplement that store with some warehouse shopping (Sam’s Club is the closest to us by far) and sometimes at local ethnic grocery shops. On occasion, we’ll go to other stores to look around, but we rarely buy much at those stores because, frankly, when you’re used to a discount store, everything seems expensive. Really expensive.

Sure, stores like Whole Foods provide a very nice shopping experience. There are lots of very tasty goods on sale there and they seem to constantly be offering samples of their wares. It feels like an upscale grocery store and it can be fun to go there and wander around.

The catch is that the prices are incredibly high. I can buy virtually the same exact items elsewhere for literally half as much in many cases. Sure, those high prices are subsidizing the open layout and the samples and other things, but, frankly, those aren’t things that I need when I’m buying my food for the week.

It does not make sense to pay extra for things like an open floorspace or “free” samples or a “hip” environment when you’re struggling to pay your bills.

If you shop at such a place, view it as a “treat” and figure that half of your bill there comes out of your monthly entertainment or hobby expenses.

Instead, here’s a much better approach. Go to your usual grocery store and buy the things you usually buy. Check out, save that receipt, then stop by a few other grocery stores in your area. Go to “expensive” ones, sure, but also go to some of the dirt cheap ones. Bring a notebook and a pen along with you.

When you’re at these other stores, jot down the prices of everything you bought at the store you regularly shop at. If you bought a gallon of milk, go see what a gallon of milk costs. If you bought a head of lettuce, go figure out the cost of a head of lettuce. You get the idea. Write all of these down as you find them.

This is a good Saturday afternoon activity when you don’t have much going on. Alternately, you can simply choose to shop at those other stores in subsequent weeks and simply use the receipts for comparison.

When you’ve written down all of the prices at various stores, take that notebook home and bust out your calculator. Add up the total price of all of these staples for each store and see which store is the cheapest.

I’ll virtually guarantee you that the difference between a place like Whole Foods and a place like Fareway or Aldi will astound you. For a person buying food for a family, the difference in price for just a week’s worth of groceries will measure in the three figures, and I’m not exaggerating. Over the course of a year, that’s thousands of dollars saved by simply buying the same food items at a different store.

Once you’ve figured out the comparative prices, start shopping at the store with the lowest total price. Make that your usual store. Feel free to stop by the others once in a while, but treat that as an entertainment or hobby excursion and, as I mentioned above, apply half of your bill there to the entertainment/hobby spending portion of your budget for the month.

As my father once said as we were strolling through an expensive grocery store: “If you want fresh guacamole, buy yourself an avocado at the cheap store.”

The post Buy Your Groceries Sensibly appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Vacations can be a lot of fun, but they can also be really expensive, and one of the biggest travel expenses is food. When you’re traveling, not only do you not have access to your own kitchen, you’re also often tempted to just eat at a restaurant when you’re near one while out and about visiting sites.

That can seriously add up. If we were to eat out and spend even just an average of $10 a meal per adult and $5 a meal per child, our trip to South Dakota and Wyoming would set our family back $1,485 just for food alone! That actually exceeds our lodging for the trip, believe it or not.

At the same time, eating out at an unusual restaurant in a town you’ve never been to before and may never be in again can be quite fun. To us, that’s a part of a family vacation.

So, what can we do to cut down on those costs without removing the fun? Here are some of the tactics we’ve built up over the years.

Take along some food for the first leg of the trip. The night before we leave, we’ll actually pack a bunch of food for breakfast and lunch the next day. Fresh fruit, sandwiches, vegetables, water bottles, and other such things can easily be packed up in advance and kept cool with ice.

Then, we just stop at a state park or something near lunchtime and eat a picnic lunch. It gives the children a great opportunity to run around and wear themselves out, which usually causes them to nap most of the afternoon (enabling much easier travel for a while).

Visit a grocery store upon arrival. Pick up things like breads, cold cuts, fruits, cereals, and other such simple fare. Fill up your refrigerator (in your hotel room or cabin) or your cooler with the stuff that needs to remain cool.

Each day, prepare a simple breakfast of fruit and cereal from what you have on hand and pack a lunch with those materials, too. Pack the lunch along with you and eat it on that day’s excursion.

Use the peak-end rule for evening dining. Pick two evenings during the trip in which you’ll eat out at a very nice restaurant. I suggest an evening fairly early in the trip for one such nice meal and the final evening of the trip for another nice meal.

For the other evening meals, eat at a low-cost place for dinner or, if you have a cabin or are camping, simply prepare a meal of your own at those spots.

The “peak-end rule” is a psychological phenomenon in which we judge our experiences almost entirely on how they were at their peak (pleasant or unpleasant) and how they ended. For example, if you have a family reunion that was largely pleasant except for one big argument in the middle and a big argument at the end (I have been part of such reunions), you’ll view the whole reunion as pretty unpleasant in retrospect.

Similarly, I’ve found that if you plan a vacation with one amazing event in the middle and a pretty good event to close the vacation, you’ll remember the vacation as being incredible, even if most of the days weren’t stuffed with excitement.

The same goes for dining. If you visit a town and eat two really great meals there, one at the end of your visit, you’ll come to think of the food as incredible on the whole and you’ll look back with pleasure. The rest of the meals are far less vivid in retrospect, so make them inexpensive and simple.

Keep hydrated and keep snacks on hand. If you end a vacation activity and find yourself really hungry and thirsty, you’re going to find it much easier to talk yourself into eating out somewhere expensive without making a good, rational decision about it. If you keep some snacks on hand, though, and everyone has access to water bottles, you won’t have your choices driven by the base impulses of hunger and thirst and won’t make a rash decision.

Choosing and executing a few simple frugal food tactics can turn a rather expensive vacation into an affordable one without taking away from the experience or the memories.

The post Food and Vacation appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

The result of all this is produce – lots of produce. Before switching diets, we already ate a lot of fresh vegetables and fruits, but the dietary change has taken things to a whole new level. Fresh fruits and vegetables are now the largest part of our diet, and with that we’ve had to really focus on techniques for minimizing cost and maximizing value when it comes to produce.

As I sat down to write this article, I started off with a long list of specific tips before eventually realizing that many of them boiled down to variations on the exact same tactic. In the end, I found six useful and flexible tactics that we use constantly to trim our produce budget.

It’s worth noting that many of these tactics work well with other food items. Although our focus is on fresh fruits and vegetables, quite a few of the ideas carry over to meats, canned goods, frozen goods, and other items you’ll find in your local grocery store.

1. During much of the year, we let the produce sales lead our purchases and our meal plans (often resulting in food experimentation).
More than ever, we let the fruits and vegetables completely lead our meal planning. If there’s a big sale on Brussels sprouts at the store, then we’re going to be experimenting with Brussels sprouts. If we’re able to find a great bargain on green bell peppers, then we’re going to be eating meals involving green bell peppers in the near future.

In order to pull this off, a couple of things have to be in place. First of all, we need to have a general sense of what kinds of things one can do with a particular vegetable. What can you do with a Brussels sprout besides merely steam it? It turns out that there are quite a few things one can do with it, and the more things you know (or can easily find), the more sense it makes to really stock up on that produce sale.

Much of that knowledge comes from experimenting and from reading, both in cookbooks and on the internet. In the kitchen, I really prefer to have a cookbook around because it’s usually very convenient for the food research process as well as for cooking, as you can bookmark it and leave it open while cooking and you don’t have to panic if you splatter a bit of sauce on a page.

Thus, we often snag cookbooks at garage sales and other discounted places, and I often receive them as gifts, too.

An example of a cookbook we picked up at a garage sale. The sticker price is $0.50, but it was a green sticker, so I believe it was discounted more than that.

So, we’ve looked at the grocery flyer and we know what produce is on sale this week. We have some ideas about how most of the sale items can be used. The next step is to put together a meal plan.

This is usually pretty straightforward. We look ahead at our calendar for the coming week and identify which weeknights will allow us to cook something that might take a while, which nights need a quick meal, and which nights are going to rely on a crock pot. Then, we just start penciling in meal ideas into those boxes. We might have something like eggplant parmesan one night when we can cook slowly, a pasta meal when we need something faster, and perhaps a rice-and-beans-and-okra meal in the slow cooker on one of the other nights.

It all relies on what’s on sale. That’s what pushes the meals we select.

From this meal plan, we develop a grocery list. We just identify the items we need (beyond the on-sale produce item and the other items we already have on hand) to make the meals we’ve selected. This usually involves a bit of pantry digging, but a solid grocery list can come together within half an hour of sitting down with a store flyer.

2. If we see an amazing deal, we freeze or can the excess.
Every once in a while, we’ll stumble across a deal that’s just simply amazing. A friend will give us twenty pounds of sweet corn. We’ll find some roadside stand selling tomatoes at ten cents a pound just to get rid of his excess before they rot. Some grocery store will offer up an amazing loss leader just to get customers into the store.

If we find a deal like this, we’ll go far beyond what we could consume before the vegetables or fruits go bad. We’ll find ways to store it, which often means freezing or canning the items.

For example, if I have twenty pounds of sweet corn, I’m likely to save a few dozen ears for eating immediately, then I’ll take the rest, shuck them, cut the kernels straight from the cob, and put them in freezer containers measuring about two cups apiece. These containers will make for wonderful additions to soups and stews in the fall and winter as well as potential side dishes and ingredients in other things.

There’s usually at least one very good technique for preserving each type of fruit or vegetable. Tomatoes, for example, can easily be frozen whole (soak them in water for a while, then freeze them on a cookie sheet and you’ll wind up with very firm frozen tomatoes which thaw wonderfully) or canned in a variety of ways. Some beans are usually best left to dry and stored in your pantry, while others can be canned or frozen. The National Center for Home Food Preservation has a ton of tips, from techniques to specific ideas for specific produce types.

3. Fresh produce isn’t just bought at the store.
As I hinted at above, the local grocery store is just one source for fresh produce. There are many ways to get fresh vegetables and fruits into your kitchen.

Roadside stands These tend to populate the roads all over around here when it gets late in the summer or into the early fall. Prices will vary, mostly depending on how urgently the person needs to sell the items. Sometimes, you’ll find a really great deal; often, it’s just a bit lower than the prices at the store. If you find something great, take the items home, then plan the meals for the next week around them.

Farmers markets These tend to vary greatly, too, in terms of prices and what’s available. I tend to have a lot of luck going near the end of the farmers market, where someone needs to offload most of their remaining stock and is dropping the price rapidly.

Friends We have quite a few friends and family members who are avid gardeners. We informally swap fresh items with them, often in a “gift” method. If they have an abundance of tomatoes, for example, we might find a bunch of tomatoes on our front step.

Co-ops If you’re really willing to be flexible, a farmer’s co-op can be a great deal. In our area, most co-ops revolve around getting a box of whatever the farm is producing that week. Over the course of a year, the sheer weight of this ends up being a pretty strong deal per pound, but it’s unpredictable, both in terms of the exact poundage you’ll wind up with and the exact items you’ll get. Our neighbors are members of a co-op and they often wind up with more than they can eat and sometimes with items they’re unsure about.

And then there’s the big one…

4. We plan our garden to offer a lengthy harvest.
Yes, we have our own garden.

This is our garden on a nice summer day.

We plant lots of different things in our garden, but we usually stick to beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers because they’re fairly hardy while growing and there are a lot of things you can do with them in the kitchen. We’ve also planted onions, broccoli, sweet corn, peppers, strawberries, and many different herbs over the years (and many other things that I’ve mostly forgotten about).

One key with our garden is that we try to stagger the plantings based on the expected harvest time. For example, let’s say we have access to two different kinds of tomato starts, one that will produce tomatoes in 70 days and one that will produce in 90 days. We might plant two or three of each of them, then wait ten days and plant two or three of each kind again. That means we’d have production from a few plants in 70 days, a few in 80 days (the 70 day plants plus ten more days), a few in 90 days, and a few in 100 days. That spreads out our tomato production, meaning we’re not dealing with a flood of them at once.

It takes a bit of planning, and it’s definitely not an exact science. With some luck, though, we’ll find ourselves spreading our harvest out over three or so months (late July to late October, usually) without having too much of a food flood all at once.

We do still wind up with extras, which we freeze or can, but we’re not stuck with a garage full of vegetables that have to be dealt with. A small batch can easily be handled in an hour or two. Fifty pounds of vegetables is a major project and often results in mass giveaways.

If you’re thinking of starting your own garden, here are some tips for starting a garden inexpensively.

5. What do we do with items that are getting late in their life cycle? We make vegetable soup!
Even with this type of planning, we still often wind up with vegetables and fruits that are unused. We’ll buy three peppers and use two in a recipe, or we’ll have a few too many tomatoes from the garden – you get the idea. They stay in the crisper or on the table until they’re just starting to get old.

What we often do at that point is chop them up a bit, toss them into a large freezer container, and then wait until that freezer container is mostly full, then we just make a big pot of vegetable soup. We boil some water (or stock – see the next item), dump in all of those frozen vegetables, add a bit of salt and some spices, and let it cook slowly.

Because of the variety of vegetables, each batch winds up a bit different than the others. There will be one or two vegetables that contribute a strong flavor, while others fade into the background. Almost always, though, it’s delicious.

Here’s some ratatouille we made a while back in the middle of cooking. It’s a bit heavy on the green vegetables; ratatouille is as colorful as the ingredients you choose.

Another option if you don’t like the soup route is to simply make ratatouille with it. I love making ratatouille, as it’s just loaded with flavor. Ratatouille is quite easy, except that if you’re freezing various leftover vegetables, you do need to keep them all separate until you make it. What you’re going to do (roughly) is add your vegetables in order of toughness to a warm skillet with some heated olive oil until everything is tender. Here’s a good guideline for many common summer vegetables; a quick Googling will find other vegetables.

6. What do we do with scraps and other items still left unused? We make stock, and then make compost!
Even after this, you’ll often still find yourself with a few leftovers. You’ll chop up a vegetable and find yourself with some edible-but-not-quite-perfect pieces left over along with some pieces that you wouldn’t want to eat. You’ll find some vegetables in the back of your freezer that have a bit of “freezer burn” to them.

Even those things don’t have to go to waste.

If the items are at least edible, we usually just turn them into a batch of vegetable stock. In our freezer, we have a container for leftover vegetable pieces – discarded bits of a tomato, a few extra spinach leaves, an unused portion of kale, and so on. These are things that could be eaten, but are fairly marginal.

When our container is full, we just put all of the vegetable scraps into a slow cooker, fill it most of the way up with water, and turn it on low for the day (often with just a dash of salt and ground black pepper).

Here’s a batch of vegetable stock in the midst of cooking in our slow cooker.

At the end of the day, the water has transformed into delicious vegetable stock, a liquid that will make almost any dish better and will make soups absolutely amazing. We just strain out the remaining vegetable pieces and save the liquid in small portions (one or two cups).

What about the pieces we’ve strained? What about the inedible pieces? Those end up helping our garden next year via the composter.

This is our barrel composter, which sits behind our house. We put plant scraps, yard scraps, and other vegetation in it and then eventually use the compost on our garden.

Behind our house, we have a barrel composter. Into that composter goes the really bad vegetable scraps, some yard waste, and a few other odds and ends (coffee grounds, for example). We keep it damp and rotate the barrel once a week or so.

In the spring (and sometimes in the fall), we empty out that composter and spread the dark organic material all over our garden. It’s an amazing natural fertilizer and it keeps the soil rich in our garden. This helps the plants to grow like wildfire the following growing season.

As a convenience, we do keep a small lidded pot on our kitchen counter, where we keep scraps over the short term. We usually fill this container, then take it out to the composter once every few days or so. That way, we’re not running to the compost bin multiple times a day.

And so the cycle continues. All along the way, we’re using tactics to reduce the cost of our food budget, from the seeds in our garden to the vegetables on our plate on to the scraps we’re about to throw out and back around again. These tactics keep our food budget under control and ensure that we always have fresh and delicious things to eat.

The post The Vegetable Train: Six Ways We Save Money with Fresh Produce appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Eventually, my father stopped doing this. Part of the reason was that the ceiling in our basement was pretty low and he had to stoop constantly when he was down there working and I think it began to bother his back.

The other reason, though, is that he began to really wonder if it was worth doing it compared to just buying vegetables at the store in the winter.

Lately (particularly as winter has descended upon Iowa), I’ve found myself thinking about those grow lights in the basement and wondering if I couldn’t clear out a spot in our basement for a small winter garden.

The question, of course, is whether this would be worth it. Would I actually be saving money growing my own vegetables in this way?

Grow lights This is where the real cost of the system comes in. Let’s say I decide to grow about 80-100 square feet of vegetables in my basement. This could be covered by an array of small grow lights or a single large grow light. After looking at a lot of options, it seems that the best choice is a single industrial-strength grow light like this one. The problem is that such a light costs around $300 depending on where you buy it. There are lower-cost alternatives, of course, but those have their own problems.

This single light would allow me to convert an 80 square foot room in our basement into a greenhouse, more or less.

Energy use of grow lights The grow light described above uses 1,000 watts of energy. If you ran the grow light 12 hours a day for three months, that’s 1,080 hours of use. The energy cost of this would be about $120 for a season of vegetables.

Pots We’d also need a collection of pots to grow the vegetables in. Thankfully, these can be found pretty cheaply and would be a one-time investment of about $100 or so.

Soil I’m lucky to have access to adequate soil and compost, so the cost here is negligible for me. However, if you’re made to use potting soil, the cost would be rather high for 80 square feet of vegetables.

Seeds The seeds for this project would be relatively inexpensive on the whole, totaling perhaps $3 per growing session (assuming that you’re not using heirlooms, in which case this would be a one-time cost of $4 or $5).

Water The cost of the water would be negligible. We’ll figure a dollar’s worth of water per season.

So, let’s figure up the costs here for ten “seasons” of growing.

One grow light, costing $300.
Ten seasons of electricity, costing $1,200.
Pots, costing $100.
Seeds, costing $30.
Water, costing $10.
(You’ll also need soil if you don’t have access to it.)

The total cost of all of these elements is $1,640, or $164 per season.

There’s also the housing cost of having 80 square feet to devote to such a project, plus the cost of heating and cooling the room (I’d just keep it at our house temperature plus the grow light), which would add some additional cost to the equation.

Using this as a guide for vegetable square footage, I could plant a lot of vegetables in 80 square feet.

Without getting into the complexities of a diverse collection of vegetables, let’s just say I could plant a single tomato plant per square foot and that tomato plant would provide ten pounds of tomatoes. This would mean I would get 800 pounds of tomatoes out of this room every growing season, assuming that because it is indoors, I’ll minimize or eliminate pest or disease problems.

This would give me a cost per pound of tomatoes of about $0.20. Compared to the cost of tomatoes at the store this time of year (about $2.99 a pound), that’s quite a deal.

The problem is that pulling this off is a tremendous amount of work and planning. I would be installing grow lights, hauling tubs of dirt into my basement, planting lots and lots of seeds, and performing all sorts of regular maintenance. I would easily estimate that I would spend 100 hours per growing season cultivating these plants.

There’s also the issue of dealing with that much fresh food coming in at once. Much of it would have to be canned or frozen, adding to the cost and time, or given away to friends, increasing the cost per pound of production but also providing a gift to friends, or perhaps even sold in small amounts if an arrangement could be found.

In the end, this type of gardening can save you some money, but it’s going to be a labor of love along the way. If gardening is something you’re passionate about, you will save money with this effort. I would estimate that you could even approach minimum wage with it for the time invested if you canned all of the excess vegetables along the way.

Still, the question really is whether you find personal value in doing this. If you do, this can certainly be a great project for an extra room in your home.

The post Does a Basement Greenhouse Really Save Money? appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Erin writes in: I have a question for your “Saving Pennies or Dollars?” series. It’s about dried beans, like pinto, great northern. Would it be worth the time to buy dried beans and can them myself, or am I better off just buying the cans at the store when they are on sale. I have a pressure canner and a simple recipe for canning my own beans.

First of all, it’s pretty easy to find canned beans at the store for $1.50 per can or even a bit less than that. Canned beans are not a particularly expensive item.

Having said that, you can easily find dried beans for $1.40 per pound or less.

So, how much does that equate to? Beans approximately double in weight during the cooking process due to the absorbed water. A 15 ounce can of cooked beans, in other words, equates to about 7.5 ounces of dried beans. Thus, the cost of an equivalent amount of dry beans is about $0.65. You’ll save about $0.85 per can cooking them yourself, in other words.

However, that accounts for just the cost of the beans. If you wish to can them, there is significant cost to the canning process – a pressure cooker (for non-acidic items), a large pot (for water-bathing acidic items), jars, lids, and rings are all required to make this work, and these items all eat into the $0.85 per can you’re saving by canning yourself.

Lids can vary greatly in cost. If you want reusable plastic lids, you’ll be spending about a dollar each to get started, but you can reuse them a few dozen times before dings begin to make them not work, bringing the cost down to $0.03 per use. Other lid options have a lower initial cost, but are one-time use.

Jars and rings often come together for approximately $1 apiece in twelve packs. Again, you’re going to reuse these things many times, so the cost quickly goes down into the range of $0.05 (given my own history of breaking jars, 20 uses seems like a reasonable number).

A pressure cooker is going to be your big cash outlay. You can get a decent pressure cooker for about $40, which should last you a long time. Let’s say you use it 100 times with 6 jars each, though. That’s still a cost of about $0.07 per jar for the canner.

These costs quickly knock down the savings you get from canning. In fact, it’s going to take several batches of canning for you to reach a point where you’re breaking even on the supplies compared to buying cans of the food in the store.

If you notice, the cost per jar for each of the items above assumes a lot of uses, so if you’re only canning a few times a year, it’s probably not cost effective to do it.

From my own experience, I find that the time invested per jar canned across a lot of different things is about eight minutes. In other words, if I’m canning six jars of something, the time to actually can the items versus just making the items and putting them in the refrigerator is about forty five minutes or so.

Now, if I’m saving $0.65 per jar (the $0.85 in savings from using my own beans minus the $0.20 in costs for canning) and it’s taking me eight minutes per jar, I’m saving about $4.88 per hour of canning. Frankly, it’s not worth it at that price for me just as a savings method. There is savings there, but not enough to make up for the lost time.

However, the food quality is a factor, too. I’d far rather eat a food item I canned myself than a canned food item from the store. The quality of garden-fresh salsa I made myself and canned versus a jar of salsa from the store is huge, for example. The same is true for almost anything else – including beans.

So, are you doing this to save big money? No. You’re saving a little, but not a lot. You’re doing this because you’re turning out high-quality food for your pantry and saving a little bit of money, too. For me, that adds up to a worthwhile deal.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Canning Beans appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Here’s exactly how we do it.

The Basic Tools
Obviously, the most basic thing you need to have is a soup pot or two. We often make soup in these 5 1/2 quart enameled cast iron pots, but any pot that ranges from five quarts or so on up will be sufficient for making soup. I highly recommend having a lid.

You’ll also need to have a ladel, as it makes serving the soup into bowls much easier. You’ll also, of course, need bowls and spoons for eating and a spoon for stirring the soup.

That’s really all you need in your kitchen (aside from a stovetop) to make soup pretty much any time you want.

The Basic Ingredients We Always Have on Hand
We keep a steady supply of a few key ingredients on hand at all times for soup making.

Our three most frequent soup ingredients are barley, egg noodles, and dried beans. These form the backbone of many of the soups we make, plus they store quite well in the pantry in their dry form. When we find a sale on these, we stock up every time.

We also keep a few basic seasonings on hand, such as salt and pepper. In addition, we also usually keep some homemade vegetable stock around for the liquid of the soup. We also keep some vegetable boullion around in case we’re out of stock.

If you like beef soups, use beef stock or boullion instead. If you like chicken soups, use chicken stock or boullion instead. Keep whatever it is that you like around.

In addition, we keep a few basic spices around: thyme, sage, and bay leaves, for starters. These work well in most soups.

We also keep oyster crackers around as a condiment for the soup.

This is actually all you need to make a flavorful passable soup at the drop of a hat. Just cook the main ingredient, add some herbs and pepper, and simmer for a while until it smells too good to resist.

Varying Things Up
Of course, you’re going to want to vary this for variety’s sake. How do you do that?

The way we do it is that we simply watch for vegetables that are on sale at our local grocery stores. If potatoes are on sale this week, we use potatoes in a batch of soup. The same goes for almost any vegetable, from turnips to kale to spinach to corn. Whatever’s fresh and inexpensive, we try it and use it.

You can also include meat in your bargain hunting, too. If you find chicken or beef or pork on sale, pick it up and use it as an ingredient. If it sounds good to you, it probably is good.

How do you cook it? The first step is to simply boil your liquid ingredients – water and/or stock. You’ll start with this, then likely add more liquid during the cooking process if the soup gets too thick. Don’t worry about evaporated water – the flavor will just get richer over time.

The easiest way is just to search for your ingredient on Google with the addition “time to boil.” So, if you want to know how long to make soup with, say, turnips in it, you’d search for “time to boil turnips.” You’ll find that turnips take 25-30 minutes to boil.

Then, just make a list of all of your ingredients and how long they take to boil. Add the ingredients in order so that they all finish cooking at the same time. So, for example, if you have beans that take two hours, turnips that take 30 minutes, and potatoes that take 20 minutes, you’d start the beans, let them cook for an hour and a half, add the turnips, and then ten minutes later, add the potatoes.

The exception to this is the meat. If you’re adding meat (I actually also do this with onions and a few other things, too), I suggest cooking it separately until it’s done, then adding it with about ten or fifteen minutes left to go for the soup. Take some of the soup broth you have going, pour it in the pan that you cooked the meat in while the pan is still hot, then pour it back into the soup pot to add some delicious flavor.

It’s incredibly easy, incredibly tasty, and incredibly inexpensive – my kind of meal!

The post The Soup Kitchen appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

I plan on continuing the series on an irregular basis, but doing the series each week has taught me some worthwhile lessons about food, frugality, and time management.

Experimentation has rewards
One of the big reasons for us to start doing this series was that we both enjoy experimenting with our cooking. We love trying new meals and, believe it or not, our food adventurousness has rubbed off on our children as well. I’m amazed when we have friends with children over (or visit them) and their children refuse to eat most of the items on the table. Our children try them with relish.

The biggest reason why I love experimenting is that I am constantly discovering new ingredients. For example, I would have never even thought of getting fresh tarragon, chopping it up, and putting it into scrambled eggs. I tried it on a whim due to a suggestion of how to use tarragon – and I found that it made the eggs wonderful. Now, whenever I can find some fresh tarragon, I make some amazing scrambled eggs.

Try a new vegetable or a new fruit or a new herb or spice or a new type of cheese. You might find something that you really enjoy that you never expected. Even better, you now have something new to look for during food sales as well as a broader repertoire of ingredients you feel good using in your kitchen.

At the same time, there’s always another meal
Of course, the immediate drawback that many people point to with such experimentation is that you might wind up with a meal that you don’t like at all.

My philosophy on that is this: I usually try new ingredients when I can get a good discount on them. That way, if it turns out that I don’t like it, I’m not out very much money. Most of the time, though, I find that I do like this new ingredient. Even during the worst case scenario, where I find the meal inedible, I can always find something else to eat if I’m hungry.

The upside to discovering something new that I like is far greater than the downside of a dollar or two lost and the potential prospect of remaking a single meal.

A regular repertoire of meals is invaluable
We’re a two income family with three children, two of which are in multiple activities. The simple reality of things is that we don’t have the time in the evening that we would often like to have. Quite often, one of the parents is on autopilot when it comes to dinner preparation. We simply want to be able to prepare something easily, something that we know how to do, and something that will please everyone while being reasonably healthy.

When we try new meals, we’re often asking ourselves whether this meal should become part of our regular meal repertoire. However, most nights, particularly during the school year, we just pull a meal from that repertoire and assemble it for dinner.

Adventuresome meals are fun, but they often don’t work in the context of a typical day at our house. The vast majority of the time, we rely on things we know how to make or variations on those themes.

Preparing meals in advance is invaluable, too
Along with that tactic is the incredibly useful tactic of preparing meals in advance. We’ll often prepare a full meal, store it in a sealed container in the freezer, and pull it out the night before or in the morning of a day when we know that dinner plans are going to be tight. Sometimes, we actually just pull out a kit we’ve assembled from the freezer and just add it to the crock pot. Other times, we put out a frozen casserole dish with a note saying “put this in the oven at 350 degrees at 4:30.”

These meals prepared in advance also make being adventurous a bit more difficult, as you don’t want to prepare a quadruple batch of something before you’ve tried it out with the family. Thus, our premade meals are invariably old standbys, like tuna casserole or vegetarian lasagna.

Having these meals on hand makes it possible to get one kid to soccer, another kid to dance, and still have a good meal on the table when everyone converges at home.

Let what you have on hand lead you
People often get stressed out about following recipes and finding a bunch of obscure ingredients. You really don’t have to do that. Just use what you have on hand and you’ll almost always come up with something good.

What really works well is when you have a “framework” recipe, like the flexible casserole recipe or ratatouille. These are recipes where you can basically plug in whatever ingredients you happen to have and make something that works. At least a couple of the “Dinner with My Family” posts resulted from this type of experimentation.

Instead of panicking about what to have, just throw open your cupboard door and try to assemble something. Keep an open mind and you’ll be surprised at what you can come up with.

Let what’s on sale in the grocery flyer lead you, too
We love using fresh ingredients in our meals, but they can often be expensive at the store. So, often, we just buy whatever produce is on sale and use that as the backbone for our meals for the week.

If cabbage is on sale, we’ll make some sort of cabbage rolls or cabbage-based soup. If eggplant is on sale, we’ll make eggplant lasagna. If spinach is on sale, we’ll make a spinach alfredo and have spinach salads with other meals. If bananas are on sale, we’ll eat one bunch and use another to make a loaf or two of banana bread.

Again, many of our “Dinner with My Family” recipes have resulted from just this type of purchase. We buy some vegetables that are on sale and make a dish based on them. It’s cheap, tasty, and fun.

The post Some Thoughts on Dinner With My Family appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Each year, my mother takes charge of preparing a huge family Thanksgiving meal. Each year, there’s a small mountain of leftovers to deal with.

I know that many other families find themselves in the same boat. What do we do with all of these leftovers? This year, I spent some time perusing a pile of old Thanksgiving food magazines, cookbooks, internet sites, and other places looking for good things to do with leftovers from Thanksgiving. Here are some of the ideas I found.

Leftover turkey can easily be cut into small pieces and used as part of a pasta dish three days later or so. Preparing a turkey marinara or a turkey alfredo is easy – just prepare the sauce, add some cubed turkey, and put the sauce over your preferred pasta. The sauce alters the flavor of the turkey so much that it becomes a new meal.

Another approach is to use leftover dark meat and bones to prepare some turkey stock. Take everything that’s left from the turkey and put it all in a crock pot along with any extra leftover vegetables (such as green beans), some pepper, and a small dash of salt. Let it cook on low all day, then filter out all of the leftovers, leaving behind some delicious turkey stock. Freeze the stock, then use it as the base for soups and other things throughout the winter.

My favorite use, though, is to just cube it and save it in small bags. This way, you can quickly pull a bag of the turkey out of the freezer and use it as a salad topping. I did this for multiple Thanksgivings and found that I was always happy to toss some cubed turkey on top of my salads at home.

Leftover mashed potatoes can be used in a lot of ways. My personal favorite is to save them for a few days, then form them into discs and fry them with a bit of vegetable oil, making potato pancakes. If your potatoes are particularly soft, you may want to add just a bit of corn starch to thicken and harden the pancakes so that they don’t fall apart in the pan.

Another use for leftover mashed potatoes is in shepherd’s pie, which can be made a day or two after Thanksgiving and easily frozen for later use. Just fill a 9″ by 13″ pan about half full with leftover vegetables, add some cooked meat that you prefer, pour some appropriate broth on top (about a cup), and then spread the mashed potatoes on top. You can even sprinkle a little cheese on top if you’d like.

One final trick – and this is a great thing to do if you have mashed potatoes that you’re going to freeze – is to incorporate them into a simple biscuit recipe. Just add them in to give your biscuits a special texture and flavor. Biscuits are easy. All you need is 3 cups of flour, 2 tablespoons of baking powder, a teaspoon of salt, a quarter cup of sugar, half a stick of cold butter, a beaten egg, and somewhere between half a cup and a full cup of buttermilk. Combine all of the ingredients until the dough you make is just barely sticky (start with half a cup of buttermilk and add more if it’s just too dry). If you’re using potatoes, just mix in the potatoes with the dough for a bigger batch.

Leftover dressing (or stuffing) can be a bit of a challenge. One technique that seemed interesting was to press as much of it as you can into a square container, squeezing it in there very tightly. Leave it there for a while, then remove the stuffing. You can then slice the stuffing, using it for sandwiches (yes, that would be pretty carb-heavy, but you could also add plenty of other condiments and toppings).

One important thing to note, though, is that stuffing/dressing freezes really well. Usually, we freeze our leftover dressing and then use it in a month or so with another meal when we’re in a pinch. It can make a great side to an otherwise dull meal.

Leftover cranberry sauce simply begs to be used in muffins or scones, particularly if you have the whole-berry kind and not the gelatinized sauce (though that can be used, too). Simply find your favorite muffin or scone recipe and use the cranberries as an ingredient in them. Delicious!

My favorite use, though, is to turn it into barbecue sauce. That’s right – barbecue sauce. Just take a cup and a half of the sauce and put it in the blender with 3/4 cup ketchup; 1/4 cup honey; a tablespoon of cider vinegar; a teaspoon each of Worcestershire sauce, onion powder, and garlic powder; and a pinch of cayenne pepper and ground black pepper. Mix this into a puree, then save it for next summer for a tremendous barbecue sauce.

Leftover turkey gravy can be used much like a stock if you freeze it. You simply water it down and use it as the base for a soup at a later time. It works surprisingly well, as the boiling and the stirring causes the gravy to thin out into a flavorful soup starter.

You can also save the gravy to use as part of a pot pie, or use it as the liquid ingredient in the shepherd’s pie above (though that may be too much Thanksgiving taste right after the meal, so if you do this, I’d freeze the shepherd’s pie to use at a later date).

Hopefully, these tactics will keep you from throwing out perfectly good holiday leftovers this year!

The post Some Thoughts on How to Deal with Thanksgiving Leftovers appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Laura writes in: roasting a whole chicken, only costs about a dollar more to buy it cooked at Sam’s Club and mine didn’t taste as good

For starters, part of the problem may have been your technique. I use a default “beer can” technique whenever I roast chickens, in which I insert a tin can or a beer can into the cavity of the chicken. The can is mostly full of some sort of liquid with various herbs and spices, such as garlic and peppercorns. When the chicken is roasting, the entire chicken is balanced on the can.

I do it this way in both the oven and on the grill and it works great in either context. The flavor and moistness of the meat is wonderful when finished.

I’d highly suggest looking for an oven-roasted “beer can” chicken recipe and using it for your next chicken roast. It really does produce a wonderful whole chicken.

Now that we have this issue out of the way, the real question is whether or not the amount saved on buying a whole roasted chicken is worth the additional time. I went to my local Sam’s Club to find prices on roasted chickens. I found whole chickens for sale for $0.89 per pound and pre-roasted chickens for $1.29 per pound. Assuming I buy a four pound bird, I’m saving about $1.60 buying a raw chicken.

So, what about the prep time? I can take a chicken out of the package, insert a can into the cavity, and have the chicken in the oven in about five minutes, according to my own estimate. It would then take roughly an hour for the chicken to roast, which is passive time. I’d then have to stick the tray upon which the chicken baked into the dishwasher, but that time is negligible.

So, if you assume that you have plenty of time to prep your own dinner, roasting your own chicken is the way to go. You’re saving $1.60 (in this example) for about five minutes of work.

However, the key thing to remember is that when you’re buying that whole roasted chicken, you’re basically paying for convenience. There are evenings where busy families simply don’t have an hour to set aside while the food cooks in the oven.

This is the voice of experience here: on evenings where my children have soccer or tumbling class, it can be a juggling act to get a home-cooked meal on the table at any reasonable dinner time.

Lining up a recipe in the oven like this can be a trick, so we often use a slow cooker for meals on these nights. For us, a slow cooker is the best solution to the family time crunch that many families seem to have in the evenings. It enables us to have a lot of flexibility with regards to when we get a meal on the table.

There’s also the health factor. When you prepare food yourself, you have much more control over the ingredients in it. Food sold in stores has a lot of questionable things done to it, from food coloring to imitate freshness to all sorts of artificial things to enhance flavor through chemistry. If I have a choice, I’ll pass on this.

So, if I were doing this, I’d never buy a whole roasted chicken unless it was an emergency. If I had time, I’d enjoy the $1.60 in savings I got from putting five minutes of prep work into the chicken. If I knew I wouldn’t have the time, I’d set up a slow cooker meal. The only time I would consider it is if I had planned to have a lot of time, but something unexpected changing that schedule.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Whole Chickens appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Our garden is producing a few last-minute things – well, mostly onions at this point. Along with that, we have our ongoing crusade to use up all of the things in our pantry and freezer, including such items as cans of diced tomatoes and premade pizza crust (as I mentioned before, I’d rather make my own crust, but Sarah found an amazing sale on several cans of it and picked them up).

What to do… what to do… how about we mix all of these things together and make something of a ratatouille casserole? Sounds like a plan to me.

What You Need
The nice thing about ratatouille is that you can pretty much use whatever flavorful vegetables you have on hand. In our case, we had a can of tomatoes and an eggplant, as well as some onions and a pepper from the garden. All you need is eight or so cups of your favorite vegetables.

In addition, you’ll need three teaspoons of olive oil, 2 teaspoons of minced garlic, a taspoon of dried basil, a teaspoon of red pepper flakes, a dash of salt, 2 teaspoons of balsamic vinegar, a package of refrigerated pizza dough (or a small batch of homemade dough, which is my own personal preference), and two cups of shredded cheese, preferably mozzarella or a mix with at least some mozzarella in it.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
Chop up your vegetables! This is always a good thing to do the night before you prepare a homemade meal. Just chop them into small pieces and store them in the refrigerator until you’re ready to use them.

Preparing the Meal
Since this recipe is so quick to put together, the first thing you should do is get your oven preheating to 425 F. After that, put the oil into a large skillet and start adding your vegetables.

Can’t you just smell the onions cooking?

You’ll want to add vegetables in order of firmness, so you’ll add things like onions and pepper first, let them cook for five or so minutes over medium high heat while stirring, then add some softer vegetables like eggplant and garlic, cook for five more minutes while stirring, then add the very soft vegetables like tomatoes and cook for five more minutes. Add your spices with the softest vegetables, so toss in the basil, red pepper flakes, and salt at this point.

Right as you pull the mixture out of the pan, add half of the cheese and mix it thoroughly into the vegetable mix. Then, put the mixture into a 9″ by 13″ casserole.

Sprinkle the remaining cheese on top of the mix, then put the pizza crust on top of the casserole. Cut a few slices in the dough so that the steam has a place to escape, then put it in the oven for 15 minutes.

You end up with a beautiful and tasty casserole. We served it with some fresh applesauce and a few remaining green beans from our garden.

Optional Ingredients
As I mentioned above, you can use pretty much any vegetable in this. Corn, spinach, potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts – you name it and it’ll probably work in this. You can also vary the cheese, using other types in a mix with the mozzarella or on their own. No matter what you do, this pot pie will turn out well.

The post Dinner With My Family #37: Ratatouille Pot Pie appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

My wife loves this recipe and finds reasons to make it often. It’s helped by the fact that we had a giant harvest of squash this year, so we had to find lots of ways to use it. I like curried soups and stews, so that definitely contributed to my desire to share this one with you.

Most of the cost here is going to be the vegetables, so the more of these you have access to outside of the grocery store, the less expensive this recipe will be.

What You Need
Here’s what you need for this meal…

You’ll need:
a diced bell pepper
half of a diced onion
one minced garlic clove
a cubed and peeled eggplant
a cubed and peeled butternut or acorn squash
1 cup cooked chickpeas (canned is fine)
1 cup water or vegetable broth (we used stock)
1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder
one teaspoon of olive oil (or other vegetable oil)
salt and pepper to taste

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
The best thing to do in advance is to chop up all of the vegetables and store them in bowls in your refrigerator. You can store the bell pepper and onion together, and you can store the eggplant and squash together, too.

Preparing the Meal
Preparing the meal is really simple. Just put the oil in a large saucepan over medium heat until it’s shimmering. Then, add the bell pepper and onion and stir for five minutes.

It’ll smell really good at this point!

Next, add the garlic, curry powder, and a dash of salt and pepper and stir for a minute more, then add the remaining ingredients. Wait until the liquid is at a low boil, then reduce heat until the liquid is barely simmering.

Let it sit for twenty five minutes, then serve. We accompanied it with a simple sandwich.

Optional Ingredients
You can make all kinds of vegetable substitutions in this meal and still have a great soup. You can use any kind of bell pepper, replace the chickpeas with other kinds of beans, use pumpkin instead of the squash, and so on. As always, use what you’ve got on hand or have inexpensive access to.

The post Dinner With My Family #37: Curried Chickpea Stew appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Jeff writes in: How much money do you ACTUALLY save in time and money by making your own coffee at home? I would appreciate the assumption that the user is using non-generic, non-Folgers or Maxwell House coffee.

For some standardized data on this, I visited the website of the SCAA – the Specialty Coffee Association of America. In one of their protocol documents, I found this information, which I’ll use to analyze how a great cup of coffee is constructed at home:

The optimum ratio is 8.25 grams of coffee per 150 ml of water, as this conforms to the mid-point of the optimum balance recipes for the Golden Cup.

Let’s say we’re looking at a 16 ounce cup of coffee – what you might fill a to-go cup with from a coffee shop, for example. A 16 ounce cup of coffee is approximately 473 mL, which, using the ratio above, would require 26 grams of coffee to make it yourself. An ounce is 28.3 grams, just for measurement’s sake.

So, how much does “good” coffee cost? I asked my wife to select what she considered to be a very good coffee for the price and she chose Eight O’Clock Coffee’s original ground, which can be obtained at a rate of $0.39 per ounce.

Simply put, you’d need about $0.38 of decent ground coffee to make a good 16 ounce cup of coffee at home. There’s also the negligible cost of water and electricity (say, one cent per cup), plus the ongoing cost of filters (say, two cents per cup), plus the cost of the cup (say, one cent per drink prorated out over time), plus the startup cost of purchasing an inexpensive pot to brew the coffee with (say, another two cents per cup, prorated out over time). That’s a cost of about $0.44 for a 16 ounce standard coffee.

Now, if you add cream or other ingredients to that, you’re increasing the cost, but not significantly. For example, International Delight French Vanilla liquid creamer costs $0.08 per cup. Other options might ding you as much as a quarter per cup for flavoring, which is still leaving you below $0.70 per cup.

Depending on what exactly you order at your typical coffee chain, a 16 ounce coffee will set you back somewhere between $2 and $5. The variation here is pretty impressive, but even if you’re comparing the low end of a purchased coffee with the high end of a homemade cup, you’re still talking about a savings of a dollar per 16 ounce cup. It’s quite likely you’re saving even more than that.

What about the time? I’m not a coffee drinker, but Sarah usually sets up the coffee pot the night before. It takes her about a minute. When she gets up, she flips a switch, and then she drinks a cup a little while later, then fills her to-go cup on her way out the door, taking her maybe another minute or two. She usually cleans the pot up when she gets home from work, taking another couple of minutes.

The time invested is perhaps five minutes total per day, and she’s probably saving $2.50 or so per day, making for a pretty good hourly rate. Plus, she believes the coffee made at home tastes better.

If you drink coffee more than a time or two a week, you’re going to save money making it at home, and it’s probably going to be well worth the small amount of time invested, too.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Making Your Own Coffee appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Melissa writes in: I’d be interested in knowing if its economical to make your own pasta. I did it the first time the other day to make noodles for my chicken noodle soup because i didn’t want to run to the store. The noodles were far superior, but it did take a bit of time as opposed to dumping a bag of egg noodles in the pot.

This is fairly hard to quantify, actually. Making your own noodles can be surprisingly inexpensive. All you really need are eggs and flour to put together noodles at a lower cost than what can be found in a store, and, as you mentioned, they are just fantastic noodles. Once you start using them, it’s really tough to go back to purchased noodles because the quality difference is immense.

The challenge here is time. To make your own noodles, you’re going to have to invest some significant time in making the dough, rolling it out thin enough to make noodles, then cutting it up.

Just to measure the time, I made a batch of egg noodles in my own kitchen recently. You just take four cups of flour, plus four eggs, plus enough water to make the volume of the eggs equal a cup (if needed, it might not be depending on your egg size). Knead the eggs and flour together until it makes a dough, then roll it out flat repeatedly, folding it over, and rolling it out again on a floured surface, then cutting the noodles and leaving them out to dry. This is about $1.20 worth of ingredients, and it took about forty five minutes to convert all of the dough into noodles working at a steady pace.

I then went to the store and found a pound of extra wide egg noodles for $2. In terms of cost, I saved about $0.80 on the batch, but the noodles I made were light years ahead in quality.

If you’re doing a strict cost comparison, I saved about $1 per hour of work making the noodles from scratch in a typical home kitchen environment. If you’re making them from scratch just to save money, it’s not worth it.

The problem with that simple conclusion, though, is that you’re not quite comparing apples to apples. The quality of homemade noodles far surpasses what you’re ever going to buy in a store.

If you really value the food you make at home, then making homemade noodles is going to be worth it. It’s enough to turn a regular meal into a memorable one and a great meal into a fantastic one. It’s the kind of thing that will leave your guests truly enjoying the meal you prepared and leave you with a satisfied mouth and stomach.

It’s also going to be healthier, because you control the ingredients. If you want to use whole wheat flour and egg whites, you can. If you want to make your own specific flour mix, you can. If you want to use farm fresh eggs, you can. You control it all. There’s no hidden ingredients or preservatives or mysterious industrial processes or anything else.

Such value, though, is incredibly hard to quantify because it comes down to the value you hold in such things.

If it were all about the dollars and cents, you’d probably never make your own noodles.

But sometimes, it’s not about the dollars and cents.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Making Your Own Noodles appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Alexis writes in: My husband and I go through a jar of salsa a week. Problem is, the brands without high fructose corn syrup average $2.79 at our grocery store. Would it be cheaper to make our own? Since tomato season is about to end on the East Coast, would canned tomatoes make a difference in the DIY route?

I’m with you on avoiding the high fructose corn syrup in salsas. I try to avoid it in everything I eat. The human body doesn’t need it, to say the least.

Of course, when you make that choice, prices go up. As you mention, it’s pretty tough to find salsa in the store without corn syrup in it for under $3 per jar.

But how much does it cost to make salsa at home? I like Alton Brown’s simple salsa recipe, so I’ll use that as an example. It contains:

6 Roma tomatoes, chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 seeded and minced jalapenos, plus 2 roasted, skinned and chopped jalapenos
1 red bell pepper, fine dice
1/2 red onion, fine chopped
2 dry ancho chiles, seeded, cut into short strips and snipped into pieces
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 lime, juiced
Chili powder, salt, and pepper, to taste
Fresh scallions, cilantro or parsley, to taste

I went to the local grocery store and price-checked these items, using a few simple substitutions (like diced tomatoes for the Romas). I came up with a total of $4.40.

I then made a batch of this and found that it made a volume of salsa equal to about two and a half typical salsa jars. I saved it fresh in the refrigerator.

So, my cost per jar of making it from scratch is about $1.80. This assumes, of course, that I keep it fresh in the refrigerator and don’t can it. If I choose to can it, the cost is going to start approaching that of just buying a jar in the store.

My conclusion is that if you’re just making some fresh salsa for a party or something, it’s cheaper to make good salsa yourself. However, if you’re making it to can, you’re going to want to think about your approach carefully.

Of course, there’s one big key to all of this: the garden. If you have a garden that can provide you some or all of the ingredients in the recipe, your salsa is going to be less expensive whether you can it or not.

For example, pulling just the tomatoes and a bell pepper from one’s own garden drops the price of ingredients by about half. Plus, your salsa will taste better. This saves dollars, not pennies, and it saves your taste buds, too.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Making Your Own Salsa appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

As we slip deeper and deeper into fall, our family is starting to eat more cold weather food – thicker soups and chowders and so on. Hand in hand with this is our ongoing effort to slowly clear out the recesses of our pantry and our freezer by using items that have been in there for a while and largely forgotten.

The result of this is our own homebrewed “Wisconsin farmhouse chowder,” which takes several different ideas from recipes we’ve heard and things we’ve tried in the northeast Iowa and southwest Wisconsin area. It’s simple to make and I hope you enjoy it.

What You Need
The ingredient list is pretty straightforward. You’ll need:
- 3 1/2 cups of milk, separated into 1 1/2 cups and 2 cups
- 2 medium potatoes, cubed
- 3 or 4 shiitake mushrooms, chopped (morels would also work if you have a source for getting them)
- A bag of flash-frozen mixed vegetables -or- one cup each of corn kernels, diced carrots, and chopped broccoli
- Dashes of a few spices, including thyme, black pepper, red pepper flakes, and salt
- Half of a cup of peas (frozen or fresh, whatever works best for you)
- 1 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
If you’re using fresh vegetables, it’s always worthwhile to make them the night before, as well as the potatoes. You’ll also want to chop the mushrooms. You might also want to make the mushroom cream as well…

Making the mushroom cream is simple. Simply take two cups of milk in a saucepan, toss in the dried mushrooms, and let it simmer for half an hour. Add a dash of pepper and a dash of salt, then add two tablespoons of flour and stir it until the mushroom cream thickens a bit. You can add more flour if you’d like, but don’t thicken it until it’s solid.

Preparing the Meal
Once you have the mushroom cream, described above, add the remaining milk to it, stir thoroughly, then raise the heat to a low boil (medium to medium-high heat should do it).

Add all of the rest of the ingredients at this point except for the peas, stir thoroughly, then allow it to simmer for fifteen minutes, stirring regularly.

Add the peas at the fifteen minute mark, stir thoroughly, and allow to simmer for about three more minutes. Pull the soup off, allow it to stand for five minutes or so, then serve.

We served the soup alongside the wraps from last week. Many different types of wraps or sandwiches could accompany this soup.

Another option is to simply toss a small handful of shredded cheddar on top of the soup, as shown here.

Optional Ingredients
One simple step would be to replace the homemade mushroom cream with canned cream of mushroom soup, though there may be a flavor degradation here. Since switching to making my own by boiling mushrooms in milk, I’ve never really wanted to use the canned kind. You can also somewhat vary the vegetables according to what’s available to you.

The post Dinner With My Family #36: Wisconsin Farmhouse Chowder appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Jenny writes in: One thing my mom always did and that I’ve started doing is to make the equivalent of prepackaged meals and store them in Ziplocs to use in the future. How much does this really save?

On the surface, I think this is a really good idea. Many mixes that you buy at the store can very easily be assembled at home, where you have much more control over the individual ingredients and thus the healthiness of the meal mix as well as the price.

The question is whether or not you can actually save a significant amount of money by doing this. My calculations seem to show that most of the time, you do save money by making the mixes yourself.

I’ll use minestrone soup as an example.

You can easily get Bear Creek minestrone soup mix for $3.96 a bag. A bag mix weighs about 9.3 ounces and has the usual ingredients you’d expect for minestrone soup.

What about a dry soup mix? I based my “dry” minestrone soup off of this recipe from the Washington Post. A dry mix would thus contain:

2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon good-quality beef bouillon granules (may substitute vegetable bouillon granules)
3 tablespoons minced dried onions
3 tablespoons coarsely chopped dry-packed (not oil-packed) sun-dried tomatoes (may substitute chopped freeze-dried tomatoes or dried sweet pepper pieces or dried chives, or a combination)
1 1/4 teaspoons dried oregano leaves
1 teaspoon dried marjoram leaves (may substitute dried thyme leaves)
1/2 teaspoon dried minced garlic (may substitute garlic powder; do not use garlic salt)
Scant 1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes (may substitute 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper)
1/4 cup uncooked pearl barley
1/4 cup dried red or brown lentils
1/4 cup dried green or yellow split peas
1/4 cup dried kidney beans
1/4 cup dried cannelloni beans or great northern white beans
1/2 cup dried medium-size macaroni, penne or corkscrew pasta

This recipe ends up making about twice as much as the Bear Creek mix.

Much like the Bear Creek mix, I found each ingredient on Amazon, estimated how much of it I would use in this mix, and added up the cost. It came up to about $4.23 a batch, which is about twice the size of the Bear Creek bag. If you divide this in half, you have a total of about $2.11 per bag – about $1.85 cheaper than the Bear Creek minestrone mix.

I did some very rough estimates of other mixes and consistently found myself coming out with an ingredient cost adding up to about 60%-75% of the prepackaged mix.

You might be thinking, “Great! Let’s make our own mixes and save money!” Not so fast.

First of all, there’s a time cost involved. You’re going to have to invest some time into this project. Each mix will have to be made by hand, measured out, and mixed.

Second, you’re going to need containers. We often use small Rubbermaid containers for these kinds of things, but Ziplocs work, too. Yes, you’ll reuse these containers a lot, but there’s still a cost.

Third, and perhaps the most painful, you’re going to have some leftover ingredients. Unless you want these ingredients to go to waste (which would reduce the value you get from doing this), you’re going to have to plan for other mixes and meals to use the leftover ingredients. One solution, of course, is to just make a lot of mixes and give the extras away as gifts.

For me, these three drawbacks aren’t severe enough to overcome the benefits and savings of making my own mixes. I love having a container in the cupboard that I can just toss into a pot, add some water (and maybe some vegetables), and immediately have soup. This is especially nice when I know the ingredients in the mix are good and it’s less expensive than buying a soup kit in the store.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Meal Mixes appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

This week’s goal was simple. What sort of healthy lunch can we make with the stuff on hand that’s in the spirit of fall (and has some of the flavors of the season), while still being relatively light, appeals to the kids, is inexpensive and uses a lot of what we had on hand already, and can easily be made in a large batch to pull out of the refrigerator in a day or two for a tight meal?

I think we pulled all of that off with this one. These wraps make for a perfect lunch and can also accompany a stew or soup for the evening meal – in fact, I ate these wraps in both of these settings. They’re a bit sweet (from the peanut butter), but both fall-flavorful and fairly light at the same time.

I’ll give Sarah a lot of credit here. She came up with these during some of her kitchen alchemy, where she just seemingly pulls out a bunch of random stuff and assembles a meal from it.

What You Need
All you’ll need is some peanut butter (I’m honestly not sure how much – just get out a jar and a butter knife), some tortillas, 1/4 cup minced apple per tortilla, 1/8 cup shredded carrot per tortilla, 1/8 cup granola per tortilla, and 1 teaspoon of roasted wheat germ per tortilla.

Roasted wheat germ is easy. Just spread out the wheat germ on a baking dish and pop it in the oven at 350 for about five minutes. Perfect.

We were able to find all of this stuff on hand at our house except the granola, which we picked up for a few nickels at our local grocery store.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
The thing to do beforehand is to prep the carrots and apples. Simply chop the apples into oblivion and shred the carrots. You might also want to toast the wheat germ.

Of course, assembling the wraps is so easy that this is the real work of the meal.

Preparing the Meal
Lay out a tortilla in front of you. Cover it in a thin layer of peanut butter, then add the other ingredients as described in “What You Need.” Here’s what one looked like before wrapping.

Once that’s done, simply wrap it up, slice it in half, and enjoy!

These wraps work as a standalone meal. They also work as an accompaniment to other foods, particularly soups.

Optional Ingredients
You can substitute other spreads for the peanut butter. In fact, the last time I made these, I actually used almond butter. You can try things like hazelnut butter as well, though it’ll make the wrap very sweet. If you want it less sweet, use cream cheese as the spread. For other ingredient substitutions, you can leave things out as you wish or used other vegetables as a substitute, such as shredded sweet potato.

The post Dinner With My Family #35: Peanut Butter and Apple Wraps appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Calista writes in: Does making your own baby food purees save pennies or dollars?

As always, it depends on the source of the food you use to make the puree. If you’re using excess produce from your garden, it’s going to be cheaper, of course.

However, where Calista raises an interesting point is with fresh fruits and vegetables that you can buy at a very low price at the grocery store. How do you decide when it’s worth it to make it yourself versus simply buying those convenient Gerber baby food containers?

I’ll use bananas as an example. I can frequently buy bananas at my local grocery store for $0.49 a pound – and, often, they’re on sale for less than that. If I peel out a pound of bananas, I’m left with about eleven ounces of fruit, based on my weighings on my kitchen scale. To this, I would add roughly five ounces of water, milk, or formula to create a smooth texture, then puree it in a blender. After that, I’ll have to individually package it in some method, usually by filling up an ice cube tray with the puree and freezing it. Boom – a pound of “banana baby food” for about $0.50.

On the other hand, I can buy a 3.5 ounce tub of pureed bananas from Gerber for $0.57 per container (16 containers for $9.13). A pound of these containers would be about the same as four and a half of these containers, or $2.28.

In other words, I’m saving about $1.78 per pound of bananas that I turn into baby food. This requires the time to peel a few bananas, put them in the blender, add some liquid, hit the puree button, then pour the liquid into the ice cube tray and pop it in the freezer. That’s about five minutes of work for a pound of baby banana puree.

So, in the case of straight-up bananas, you’re saving dollars and not cents making the baby food yourself.

So, what’s the cutoff for value? I’d be willing to make my own baby food if I were saving about $8 per hour. I would estimate that I could convert a pound of raw foods (like bananas) into baby food in about five minutes, and a pound of food I’d have to cook (like broccoli) into baby food in about ten minutes. Thus, I’d have to spend an hour to convert twelve pounds of raw food into baby food or six pounds of cooked food into baby food.

It costs roughly $2.28 to buy a pound of processed baby food, or $13.68 for six pounds of processed baby food or $27.36 for twelve pounds of processed baby food.

To make cooked baby food worthwhile, I’d have to find a source of the food at $5.68 ($13.68 minus $8) for six pounds of the food, or about $0.95 per pound for the raw food. So, if you can find, say, broccoli at $0.95 a pound or less, it’s probably worth your time to turn it into cooked baby food.

To make raw baby food worthwhile, I’d have to find a source of the food at $19.36 ($27.36 minus $8) for twelve pounds of the food, or about $1.61 per pound for the food. So, if you can find, say, bananas at $1.61 per pound or less, it’s probably worth your time to turn it into cooked baby food.

In the end, you can certainly save dollars by turning some foods, like bananas, into baby food. It gets trickier when you look at out-of-season fruits and vegetables, though, as the cost for a pound of those foods tends to make the savings quite small (and can even result in a loss).

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Baby Food appeared first on The Simple Dollar.