Recently, several couples in our community started a frozen meal exchange. It’s a really simple idea. On a certain day, everyone in the exchange meets for coffee and brings along a laundry basket full of frozen meals, one for each family, along with any needed instructions taped to the lid. The members of the club just swap the meals so that everyone takes home one of each meal that they didn’t prepare.

It’s a very clever idea for several reasons. First, it makes it very easy for people to prepare a variety of home-cooked meals. Second, it drastically reduces the meal preparation time, since there’s only one big session of making several copies of one meal and after that one only needs to pull a meal out of the freezer and toss it in the oven. Third, it’s much cheaper since you can buy the ingredients for your meal in bulk.

Although I’m not a charter member in this group (I did suggest giving me a ring if a spot opens up), I’ve put some serious thought into starting my own group. I asked a few questions, did some research, and here’s a simple guide to starting your own meal exchange with some friends.

Consider who to invite. You need people that are frugal and reliable. Are they people who consistently come through when things are asked of them? Nothing will make an exchange fall apart faster than someone who doesn’t come through.

Avoid food allergies. When you invite someone, get clear information on their food allergies and simply make those ingredients verboten in all meal exchanges. If there is also any intense food dislikes, those should be known, too, though you should consider not inviting any notoriously picky eaters as they will make the exchange difficult for everyone.

Make a very clear set of written guidelines for everyone to follow. You’ll need to specify several policies for the group. I took a look at the guidelines for the local group and it featured the following things.

+ Meals were exchanged on the first Sunday of each month, with a rotation of hosts for the get-together. The host usually served coffee and a simple snack.

+ The meals were expected to be frozen, which means they couldn’t be prepared earlier that day and it’s actually more useful to do them late in the previous month.

+ You’re only allowed to miss one month per year – if you miss more than one, you’re automatically out unless everyone agrees by secret ballot to allow you to stay in (which allows exceptions for something truly exceptional). An exception to this is if you can give a two week notice to the entire group (so that vacations can be handled, for example).

+ To join, everyone had to buy a set of identical pans with covers, one for each other person in the exchange, that they didn’t mind “losing.” That means that the first month, everyone uses their own pans to prepare the meals. After the first exchange, everyone simply used the pans they have.

+ The contents of each meal, along with a clear statement on how to finish preparing it, had to be taped to the top of the lid.

+ A food allergy list (mentioned above) was also included in the form of a “foods that must be avoided” list.

Once you have these guidelines, make sure everyone has a clear copy. You might also want to send out an electronic copy of them.

Have an email list and set up email reminders. An email list makes it easy for you to issue reminders to everyone in the group of upcoming events – the next meal exchange (who is hosting, when, and where), reminders to get your meals cooked, notices of how many meals need to be prepared, and so on. A calendar can also be set up to help with such reminders.

A meal exchange is a really great idea to cut down your food costs and your food preparation time without giving up meal variety. If you have a wide social circle, consider starting one up.

By this time next week, most Americans will have gathered with friends and family and eaten the traditional Thanksgiving meal. I’ll be gathering for three separate Thanksgiving dinners during this holiday weekend.

Quite often, I’ll see people spend exorbitant amounts of money on lavish Thanksgiving spreads. While I completely understand the reason for doing this – often, it’s the one time in the year that we can gather around one table with a lot of people we love – there’s still a lot of simple things we can do to reduce the financial outlay and the stress of the meal without reducing the quality of the day in any way (and often improving it). Here are ten ways to do just that.

Cook and slice the turkey on Tuesday. What? No beautiful turkey on the table? Whatever will we do? In truth, though, the turkey on the table during Thanksgiving dinner often results in lots of problems: it keeps someone away from the meal because they’re carving the bird, the bird is often dry because it hasn’t had a lot of time to rest, and the finished bird often arrives later than expected, delaying the whole meal and often reducing the quality of the other food. Solve all of these problems by cooking the bird on Tuesday or Wednesday, slicing it at your own pace, then putting all of the meat on a platter along with all of the juice and a few pats of butter. Cover the serving platter and put it in the fridge, then just turn on the oven (or the electric roaster) on Thanksgiving to thoroughly warm the meat.

Use nature for your decorations. During the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, there are thousands of colorful leaves all over the place, free for the taking. Be picky – go outside and look for some nice, clean, colorful leaves. All you need is a plain tablecloth and a row of colorful leaves sprinkled down the middle to create a very festive setting.

Get the slow cooker into the act. Many Thanksgiving side dishes can easily be prepared in a slow cooker. Slow cookers consume less energy and quite often can be used in a “fix-it-and-forget-it” mindset. It’s the perfect tool to make cranberry sauce, for example.

Be creative with your Thanksgiving dinner leftovers. By the third day, turkey sandwiches start to get tired. Instead of allowing that to happen, share some of your extra food with people in need (for example, make a couple plates of food for shut-ins you know and deliver the plates) or make something interesting, like kugel or tetrazzini, out of the leftovers.

Round up when you estimate. I’ve been to two different Thanksgiving dinners in the past three years where there was just barely enough food to make ends meet for the number of guests (to put it politely). People showed up bringing unexpected dining companions and estimates for how much each person would eat were strangely low. Don’t fall into that trap. Estimate high, but estimate realistic. After all, you can always eat leftovers, but you can’t undo unhappy guests.

Don’t be afraid of potlucking it. Ask your guests to bring a dish or two with them so that you can focus your time, energy, and money on a few key dishes. Most people are quite willing to help (provided, of course, that they’re not coming from out of town).

Save the bones. Seriously. Put the entire carcass in a large Ziploc bag and save the bones and small pieces of meat for a day or two. Then, take all of the leftover vegetables (potatoes, corn, non-glazed carrots, etc.) and the carcass, stick them all in a crock pot, then add enough water to just cover the bones. Turn it on low overnight (this is perfect to do on Saturday evening after Thanksgiving). Then, in the morning, save the liquid. What will you do with this delicious turkey broth? Freeze it (along with a pound or two of leftover diced turkey meat). Then, in a few weeks, use it as the base for an amazing soup – just add vegetables and/or dumplings to the stock and the turkey (along with perhaps a bit of water to thin it).

Have appetizers. Inexpensive appetizers – like a selection of vegetables – helps people keep the edge off of their appetites and keeps them from over-eating during the main meal. Not only does this make the overall meal more healthy, it often makes it cheaper, since a vegetable tray can be really inexpensive. Much like the turkey, this can also be assembled the day before.

Don’t try to “impress” with your wine. There are countless great wines under $10 (here are five of my favorites from a few years back). Don’t feel the need to buy an expensive bottle of wine to impress anyone. Just stop by your local wine and liquor store and ask for a low-cost full bodied wine for the Thanksgiving table. They’ll be happy to point out something great for you.

Save your recyclable containers for leftovers. Instead of just tossing large containers of items like margarine or whipped topping, save the containers. Then, on Thanksgiving, fill the containers with leftovers and give them to your guests. There’s no responsibility at all for them to return the container and it gets an extra use out of the items that would normally be tossed.

This morning, I was doing a bit of advance planning for our dinner this evening. It’s Friday, which is traditionally homemade pizza night at our house, but tonight we were intending to use some left-over beef stew and transform it into a beef pot pie using a pie crust and some corn starch for thickening.

As I dug around in the cupboards and refrigerator to make sure we had everything on hand, I came across a few scary outdated items in the back of the refrigerator. They looked scary. They smelled scary. And, sadly, they headed right to the trash can.

One of the most disappointing things at our house is food that’s gone bad. It finds its way to the back of the refrigerator or cupboard and, eventually, gets too old to use. I look at such things with disappointment, as it’s good food simply going to waste.

Throwing away food – just like throwing away anything else – is a waste of resources. Our money and/our our time was invested in acquiring and preparing that food and simply throwing it away means that your time, money, and energy went to nothing. That’s a conclusion that doesn’t make anyone happy.

Of course, much like anything else, food can sometimes be recycled to a spectacular second use. Before you decide to toss out the food, give it a serious second look and ask yourself if the trash can is the best ultimate destination for it.

Quite often, the food really is bad and needs to be discarded. If something is moldy, I don’t mess with it (well, excepting certain kinds of cheeses, of course – blue cheese is all about the mold). If something has a smell that indicates that it’s gone wrong, I’ll just toss it. If it’s opened and past the date, I’ll almost always toss it immediately.

Sometimes, though, food that I’ll pass on in its current form has value if it’s used in another context. Here are some examples.

Stale bread If you have stale bread that’s gone dry and hard, get out the grater and grate it into bread crumbs, then save those crumbs in a jar. After all, this is exactly what bread crumbs are. Bread crumbs make a fantastic breading for fish, chicken, and vegetables, helping to seal in the moisture and flavor while making a crunchy outer shell.

Old fruits As long as they’re not genuinely rotting, most over-ripe fruits can easily be turned into an excellent bread. One great example of this is banana bread, which just requires a loaf pan, a spoon, some over-ripe bananas, a bit of butter, sugar, an egg, vanilla, baking soda, and flour. Just mix them in a bowl with a spoon until it’s consistent and put it in a loaf pan. You can make something very similar with many overripe fruits – I’ve made strawberry bread, pineapple bread, and zucchini bread and all were good (we just tend to eat a lot of bananas, so banana bread is a regular thing).

Old vegetables I save these in a small box in the freezer. When I have a full box, I’ll use the vegetables to make a vegetable soup. I’ll just put all the vegetables into the crock pot, add water until it’s got about half an inch of liquid over the top of the vegetables, and then season the whole thing like crazy. It makes for a pretty good – and pretty healthy – meal.

Another old vegetable and fruit tactic Add them to a compost bin. If you don’t have one, ask around, particularly among your gardening-oriented friends. It’s far better to return the leftover materials to the earth than to put them in the trash and watch them head to a landfill. You can use coffee grounds and eggshells in a similar fashion.

Here’s the real message: don’t look at old food as something to immediately be thrown out. Sometimes, it’s a resource that can be used in future meals. It’s far less wasteful to approach things in this fashion, which means that you’re not only conserving your own resources, time, and money, but you’re also sparing the earth.

I love cooking at home.

I used to hate cooking at home, though. I was awful at it. I burnt things. I messed up scrambled eggs beyond all recognition.

But over time, I got better at it. I started figuring out lots of little things that made the entire process smoother and made my results much better without necessarily improving my skills.

Now, I vastly prefer what I make in my own kitchen over what I can get at most restaurants. What I make at home is tastier, usually healthier, and quite a bit cheaper, too.

Along the way, I’ve picked up lots of little techniques for making home cooking much easier and faster. Here are ten that really changed things for me.

Hone your knives. One of the biggest frustrations I had with home food preparation is that whenever I had to chop anything, it took forever and I often smashed them into oblivion. I thought it was cheap knives, but after getting a much nicer one, I had much the same problem after the first use or so. The entire problem was a simple one – the edge of the knife wasn’t honed. Honing a knife’s edge is incredibly simple. Just take a sharpening steel and lay your knife on it, with the hilt of the blade near the hilt of the sharpening steel. Then, with the blade forming a small angle with the steel, drag the blade slowly but firmly back down the steel to the tip. At the end, the tip of the blade should be near the tip of the steel. Then, switch hands and repeat with the other side of the blade, and alternate back and forth a few times. Your previously-dull knife will now slice through vegetables like a hot butterknife through butter.

Don’t fear the crock pot. Crock pots have this strange reputation for turning out bland food. In truth, though, crock pots are just as good as what you put in them – all they really do is cook things at a low heat over a long period of time. The trick is to make sure your ingredients are good and that you’ve added plenty of herbs and spices right off the bat. Crock pots are absolutely perfect for making stews and soups and chilis that benefit from long, slow cooking – just put the ingredients in the crock pot in the morning, turn it on low, and let it sit all day. In the evening, you’ll have a tremendous meal waiting for you. We’ve also found a lot of success slow-cooking pot roasts with lots of vegetables in a crock pot.

You can almost never over-season a dish. The only exception to this seems to be hot peppers, which can drive some people away. Aside from that, you have to go to almost grotesque lengths to over-season most dishes. So, if you’re unsure, toss in some more spices. It’ll usually make the dish more tasty than simply following the recipe absolutely.

Use fresh ingredients. Fresh ingredients are often the key to making a recipe really pop. While frozen vegetables (for example) are passable, nothing beats the pop of fresh vegetables in your mouth. While canned vegetables can work in a pinch, they just don’t compare. Canned meats are convenient … that’s about all I’ll give them. In most cases, there’s more nutrition in fresh ingredients as well.

Store staples in the freezer. Whenever you prepare something that might be used as a staple in another meal, make plenty of it and store the extras in the freezer. Chicken breasts, loose ground beef, loose sausage, and diced onions all work well in this way.

Always make stock out of leftover bones and leftover vegetables. The meal is done. You have leftover chicken bones, or maybe you have some leftover vegetables of various kinds. Perhaps you have a leftover hambone or the bone from the middle of a roast. Quite often, these things get thrown out. Save those leftovers. Just take them to a crock pot, add enough water to the crock pot to cover whatever you add (and maybe half an inch more), then turn it on low and let it slowly cook all night. In the morning, strain the liquid (just to get the big pieces out) and save the liquid in a jar in the fridge. Then, the next time you need to make something using those flavors, just bust out that jar. That stuff is fantastic flavor.

De-glaze at every opportunity. Another great source for flavor is the “glaze” on the bottom of a frying pan after you cook something – that stuff is pure flavor! Just put some water into the hot pan, watch it sizzle, and notice how much of the glaze on the bottom of the pan comes off into the water. That liquid can now be used in a lot of ways, from adding flavor and moisture to rice and side vegetables or allowing the meat to simmer in it.

Stick with comfort foods at first. It’s easy to get caught up in the sexy idea of preparing some novel dish in the kitchen, but if you don’t have the skills yet, it will likely end in frustration and an underwhelming result. Instead, at first, stick with dishes that you know you like that you’re intimately familar with. For me, that means tuna casserole, hamburgers, and broccoli with rice.

Try cooking something familiar without a recipe. Another great way to really amp up your skills in the kitchen is to attempt making a familiar recipe from memory without using a recipe. This requires you to begin thinking on the fly a little bit as you cook and often forces you into doing things a little different. Sure, sometimes you’ll fail, but you’ll learn a lot from abandoning the recipe.

Get others involved. For me, no kitchen experience is better than cooking in the kitchen with people whose company I enjoy. Being in the kitchen while my wife chops vegetables, my daughter stirs a mixture, my son snaps green beans, or my best friend butters some garlic bread makes the entire experience far more enjoyable no matter how the meal turns out. Get people into your kitchen and cook together – it becomes an amazing social experience.

Many weekends – like this upcoming one, for instance – our family is quite busy. We have guests over. We go on family excursions to places like the Science Center of Iowa. We shop for groceries. We go to club meetings. We go to church. We play for hours with the kids. We get caught up on housework – and on our reading. We play a few family games.

Sometimes, I’ll put aside time to prepare a really special meal, but many weekends, we look for ways to get a healthy and inexpensive meal on the table quickly. Even better are meals that are conveniently eaten by guests whenever they arrive.

Our solution, often, is a big pot of soup or a stew. Here are some of the tactics we use to keep guests happy and also tantalize our taste buds with a convenient, tasty, and healthy meal that’s also very inexpensive.

If there’s an opportunity, I’ll make stock during the week. Stock is really easy to make. All you have to do is roast a chicken or a bone-in pot roast in the oven. This just requires a roasting pan – put some salt and pepper on the meat, put it in the pan, put it in the oven at 350 F, and check the temperature after an hour or so and keep it cooking until it’s appropriately heated. Enjoy that meat for supper. Then, take the bones, put them in a crock pot, add a few leftover vegetables and any other vegetables you find tasty, toss in a handful of peppercorns, and turn the crock pot on low before you go to bed. The next morning, just strain off the liquid and save that liquid in a jug, tossing everything else. Voila! You have homemade beef or chicken stock! If you’re a vegetarian and prefer vegetable stock, just do the same thing without the animal bones – put leftover vegetables and any others you like for flavor into a crock pot, cover with water, cook on low overnight, then strain and save the liquid.

In my opinion, stock is the best frugal meal ingredient there is. You turn what would otherwise be thrown away into an incredibly flavored liquid that forms the basis for some absolutely mind-blowing soups that weekend – and all it costs is water, a couple minutes of effort, and maybe a dime or two of electricity.

I also cook extra meat on Thursday night. If I have chicken stock on hand and want to make a chicken-based soup, I’ll make some sort of chicken meal on Thursday night and make plenty of meat so I can have a couple of pounds of leftovers. The same goes for beef – I’ll cook extra of whatever beef we use, whether it’s hamburger, steak, or roast. The same goes for vegetables – if I have vegetable stock, I’ll make a very vegetable heavy meal and save the leftover vegetables from the meal.

On Saturday or Sunday, I’ll prepare the stew or soup in the morning. There are countless soup, stew, chili, gumbo, etc. recipes out there – find one you like and just remember the ingredients. Add the ingredients to the crock pot, then turn it on low and just let it simmer all day long.

Here’s the great part about doing it this way: whenever your activities allow you to eat – or whenever guests arrive – you have a bowl of delicious soup/stew/chili/gumbo waiting for them.

Even better, since you’re utilizing the leftovers and remnants of meals made earlier in the week, the soup is pretty cheap. It’s also incredibly tasty, especially if you utilize a stock that you made earlier in the week.

Can’t wait to get started on doing this? Here are five of my favorite soup/stew/chili/gumbo recipes.

Beef Stew
2 lbs. stew meat, cooked
2 cups beef stock (or water)
1 1/2 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 clove garlic (peeled, of course)
1 onion, sliced
4 carrots, sliced
4 celery stalks, sliced
2 tsp. pepper
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. paprika
2 tsp. corn starch

Put everything but the corn starch in the crock pot and turn it on low. Sometime in the hour before you expect people to begin eating, add the corn starch and stir it in thoroughly to gently thicken the stew.

Chicken Noodle Soup
2 lbs. chicken, cooked (mix of white and dark meat)
16 to 24 oz. egg noodles, uncooked
1 onion, diced
1 carrot, sliced
1 stalk celery, sliced
1 small potato, diced
Enough chicken stock and water to cover the ingredients – if you don’t have stock, add four chicken bullion cubes

Put it all in the crock pot on low.

White Chili
2 lbs. cooked chicken breast, cubed
2 cans great northern beans, rinsed
1 whole white onion, diced
1 bell pepper, diced
1 1/2 cups fresh mushrooms, sliced (optional)
1 cup frozen corn (optional)
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup white wine
2 chiles (or 1 can mild chiles)
2 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. coriander
1 tbsp. ground pepper
3 tbsp. olive oil
1 lime
3 cups chicken stock or water – for every cup of water used, add a bullion cube

As before, combine everything and put it in the crock pot on low.

Chicken Sausage Gumbo
3 lbs cooked chicken
2 cups flour
1 onion, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
1/2 bell pepper, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
6 cups chicken stock or water – for every cup of water used, add a bullion cube
1 lb. andouille sausage, sliced
1 tbsp. salt
1 tbsp. ground pepper
1 tbsp. cayenne pepper

Add these all to the crock pot and turn it on low.

Vegetable Soup
4 cups vegetable stock, chicken stock, or water
2 quarts water
2 bay leaves
3 carrots, sliced
3 celery stalks, sliced
8 garlic cloves, crushed
1 small onion, sliced
1 large red pepper, chopped
1 leek, sliced
5 mushrooms, sliced
1 scallion, sliced
1/4 tsp. pepper
1/8 tsp. salt

Add these all to the crock pot and turn it on low.

Good luck!

Now that my wife has returned to full time work, we’ve been focusing a lot on careful meal planning for the coming week. We’ll sit down on Sunday mornings, plot out what we’ll eat over the coming week, and prepare a grocery list.

One very helpful technique for a busy family like ours is making “modular” meals – ones with elements that can be easily reused in meals later in the week. Quite often, the meal preparation on Monday evening is helping to prepare some element of a meal that we’ll have on Wednesday or Thursday evening, for example. Even better, those “modular” meals can sometimes provide source materials for a quick hot breakfast or an easy lunch that goes far beyond leftovers.

Using and reusing meal components in this fashion is an incredible money and time saver. Here are some examples to get you started.

Roasted Chicken
When you get home one evening, put a whole chicken in the oven to roast. It’s easy – a whole chicken at the store is pretty inexpensive. Just rub the skin down with salt and pepper, put a few things in the chest cavity for flavor (like garlic cloves, quartered onions, celery, and the like), and put it in the oven at 350 F for about 75 minutes or so. I like to pull it out about halfway through and use a baster to get the juice out of the pan and squirt it all over the chicken itself.

In the end, you’ll have a golden-colored chicken with crinkly, tasty skin and deliciously moist chicken meat, somewhere between two and three pounds of it. Enjoy the chicken as the main entree for the meal, but then save the bones and the leftover meat.

The bones? Just put them in a crockpot with a few vegetables before you go to bed. Put in some onions, carrots, celery, and things along those lines – I also like to put in whole peppercorn. Then turn the crockpot on low and go to bed. When you get up in the morning, strain off the bones and large vegetable pieces and save the liquid in the fridge. That liquid, my friend, is an incredibly delicious chicken stock. It can be the basis of a great chicken soup a few days later, white chili, and countless other dishes. Stock is also easily frozen and saved for later. Be aware, though, that at cold temperatures, stock sometimes becomes gelatin-like – that’s completely normal.

The leftover meat can be used in countless ways. Save it for chicken chili, chicken soup, chicken stew (all three of which can also utilize the stock), chicken pizza, or a pasta with a chicken-oriented sauce. You can even dice the chicken and cook them with eggs for an interesting omelet.

Chili
Chili can easily be assembled in the morning, with ingredients tossed in a crock pot and left to cook all day long, resulting in a very quick and simple (and tasty) home-cooked meal in the evening.

Chili is a spectacular leftover dish, as it often has a completely different flavor when reheated as the ingredients tend to meld together more, meaning that a large pot of chili can directly be the source of a second meal.

Beyond that, thickened chili (with a bit of added corn starch) can also serve as a burger topping or as an ingredient in a breakfast omelet or alongside eggs. It’s a utilitarian food that can be used many different ways.

Tacos
Do-it-yourself tacos are a regular early-in-the-week meal here because the individual elements can be used in many other ways.

We generally only lightly spice the primary protein content of the taco – the meat or the beans – so that it can be reused in many ways, from soups to casseroles.

The remaining lettuce can form the foundation of a light starter salad for a later meal.

The remaining cheese can be used in any number of dishes, from casseroles to sandwiches.

The remaining tomatoes always find a home in soups, stews, or sauces. They can also find a home with a roast that’s left to slow cook all day long.

Roasts
Speaking of roasts left to cook all day long, we’ll often put a roast in the crock pot with some beef stock and some pepper and allow it to slowly cook all day until it’s nearly falling apart at dinner time. With some simply-prepared vegetables on the side (or even directly in the pot), it can be an incredibly delicious and savory meal.

The best part? The roast leftovers can be used in a wide variety of ways. A well cooked roast pulls apart easily to make hot beef sandwiches. The remaining roast can be chunked to make a beef stew or beef noodle soup.

The leftover broth is also a functional beef stock, which you can save to use as the basis for things like French onion soup and other hearty soups. It can be frozen easily until you need it.

Hamburgers
“How can hamburgers possibly be modular?” it’s actually incredibly simple. Make extra hamburgers and grill them all at once, then take the extra hamburgers and tear them into tiny chunks.

The cooked hamburger meat is then perfect for making a chili (yes, we might have hamburgers on Monday, chili on Wednesday, and chili and eggs for breakfast on Saturday) or inserted into a pasta sauce or a casserole of some fashion.

In Conclusion…
… the general idea is simple. If you prepare plenty of a staple, modular meal early in the week – which usually contains low-cost ingredients to begin with – you’ve already done much of the preparation for completely different meals later in the week. Your main course on Monday might turn into a stew on Wednesday or a pasta dish on Thursday. Your main course on Thursday might be part of a Saturday potluck dinner or a Sunday brunch.

And since the staple ingredients you start with are so inexpensive (I’m still convinced that a whole chicken is one of the best bargains out there), it ends up making several of your meals inexpensive, drastically cutting down your costs.

Chaining meals together in this fashion cuts down on your prep work (making it possible to prepare more meals at home much quicker) while also reducing your overall cost (by increasing your use of low-cost central utilitarian ingredients). Sounds like a big win in the kitchen to me!

Here in the Midwest, it’s harvest season. People’s gardens are full of produce which is currently being picked, and many kitchen tables are full of vegetables. For a gardener, this can be the best part of the year – the sheer possibility of all of these fresh vegetables and fruits is intoxicating.

But it can also be overwhelming.

For some people, after several months of keeping a vegetable garden in tip-top shape, collecting giant baskets of vegetables means just the beginning of another round of work – often a round that they don’t enjoy as much. The deep, frugal pleasure of spending hours out in the garden with your hands in the dirt is often far separated from the work involved processing the harvest.

So what can you do with all of the vegetables?

The worst choice is to let them go to waste. You’re far better off doing something with the vegetables you harvest than letting them grow old and unusable. Thus, if you’re unable or have no desire to do anything with the vegetables, consider one of the first options on the list below.

Here are seven methods my family uses for dealing with the abundance of a large garden harvest.

Eat it fresh – go vegetarian.
There’s truly no better time to dabble in a vegetable-heavy diet than when fresh vegetables are coming in out of the garden. Just eat them, as many as you can!

It’s surprisingly easy to find creative and tasty ways to use an abundance of vegetables. Slice up cucumbers and onions and put them in a bowl of water with a bit of vinegar mixed in and some salt and pepper available and just leave them out on the table – you’ll find they quickly become your snack. Prepare dishes using all of the vegetables you’re bringing in – go beyond salads to preparing things like tomato pie. Slice zucchini and squash, dip them in olive oil, and grill them.

The possibilities are endless. Try going vegetarian – or almost vegetarian – and sock those veggies away. They’re good for you – and in a few months, you’ll wish you had all of those fresh veggies again.

Give it away.
If you have extra produce, give it away. Give it to your friends. Give it to your neighbors. Give it to the local food pantry. Leave it on the doorstep of families that could use the food.

This is the simplest way to handle the produce – and it has its own benefits as well. First, it provides a great opportunity for social interaction as well as a chance to get to know the people around you. After all, if you’re giving vegetables to your neighbors, there’s a perfect chance to have a conversation and build a relationship a bit. Second, it simply feels good to donate food to people who truly need it.

Dry it.
Yes, bust out the ol’ food dehydrator. It enables you to take garden-fresh fruits and vegetables and put them into a form where they can be stored dry. This works really well for some items, like tomatoes, but not as well for others. You can also dry them outside on a screen, if you’d like.

The advantage of this method is that dried fruits and vegetables are incredibly easy to store while also being very flexible in terms of consumption and cooking. The work to dry them is also quite passive – you mostly just let them sit. The disadvantage, though, is that it requires some equipment to dry (you either need a screen to do it in the sun or a food dehydrator).

Sell it.
Drive around Iowa in the middle of August and you’ll see countless roadside stands with people selling corn and other vegetables, and the farmers markets are loaded with people selling produce. Similarly, August seems to be the month when people really buy these things by the ton – you’ll always see people at the sweet corn stands, buying a dozen ears.

Perhaps the best tactic I’ve seen was a large pile of corn in front of an old farmhouse. The sign said “Peaches and Cream Sweet Corn Here!” I wandered over, only to find that there was simply a box with a slot on top with a sign attached that said, “Take what you need. Pay what you can.” I dropped in a five and took a dozen ears. This is a great way for them to get rid of their excess corn, giving to people who need it and selling to people who can afford it without a ton of additional effort.

Freeze it.
If you have a large freezer, many vegetables can easily be frozen for a few months, particularly if you just intend to use them as ingredients in other dishes. Freezing vegetables is incredibly easy – just soak them in water for an hour, dry the surface, spread them out on a baking sheet, and stick them in the freezer for a few hours. Once they’re frozen, put the whole veggies right into bags or other storage containers.

Obviously, the big requirement here is a freezer for long-term storage. Without a large freezer, vegetable freezing isn’t really an option. Another drawback with this solution is that vegetables last at most several months before beginning to have serious taste and texture degradation, making them unusable.

Still, you’ll find quite a few vegetables in our own freezer. We make sure to use these frozen vegetables during the following winter so stale veggies don’t build up.

Have a party.
You’ve got a harvest, so why not have a harvest party?

Not sure what to do? Boil up fifty ears of corn. Get some cheese, grill the tomatoes, and put a bit of cheese on each one. Use the cucumbers and onions idea from earlier in the article and make a giant bowl. Slice zucchini and squash, rub them in olive oil, and grill them. Make coleslaw. Have a gigantic salad bowl.

In other words, use simple techniques to make these vegetables as delicious as you can and share the results with everyone around you. It takes the idea of giving away your vegetables to a whole new level, creating a great social event out of your harvest bounty.

Can it.
We usually have an abundance of tomatoes and, as a result, we often end up making a lot of different things with the tomatoes: whole tomatoes, diced tomatoes, tomato juice, tomato sauce, ketchup, tomato jam, salsa, pasta sauce, and so on. Given the acidity of the tomatoes, it’s incredibly easy to can these items without spoiling them – just get some jars and lids, sterilize everything, boil what you’re going to cook, fill up the jars, put rings and lids on them, bathe these in boiling water for half an hour or so, then allow them to sit. When they cool, tap the lids – if they spring back, then eat what’s inside right away – otherwise, they’ll keep for years.

My parents tend to grow acres of tomatoes and put away so much canned tomato items that, frankly, we don’t have to do this ourselves – they give us jars regularly. We intended to can some salsa this year, but we had a disastrous year with our tomatoes and it didn’t quite work out.

Another good idea – if you’re able to can salsa or hot sauce or pasta sauce, the jars can easily be decorated and given as wonderful Christmas gifts. It’s a great thing to give to your neighbors during Christmas season, for one.

These are merely the techniques I’ve used myself in my own life to handle an abundance of garden vegetables. What do you do with yours?

As I’ve discussed many times before, eating at home is a huge money saver. Even if you use expensive ingredients all the time (like saffron or morel mushrooms), it’s still cheaper to cook at home than it is to consistently eat out (assuming you’re eating better than the McDonalds Dollar Menu). Similarly, it’s cheaper to make a meal out of basic ingredients than it is to use prepared and processed ingredients – the closer to the raw ingredients you are, the cheaper the meal is (usually).

Along the same lines, I’ve come to realize that I tend to snack on and eat whatever’s convenient. For lunch, I’ll usually eat leftovers because it’s easy – it’s sitting in the fridge and usually only requires a bit of pepper and a trip to the microwave. At snack time, I’ll look at the fruit bowl and flip open the refrigerator door and grab whatever’s quick and at hand.

So why not combine the two and really crunch your food budget?

I was inspired to try some of these things by Mark Bittman’s interesting Food Matters. He suggests a similar phenomenon, that if you make good, healthy food as convenient as possible, you won’t be as tempted to eat processed, unhealthy foods.

By a lucky coincidence, many of the healthiest foods are also quite cheap in their raw form.

So what I decided to do is start cooking some healthy and very inexpensive staple foods once a week in bulk, store them in containers in the fridge, and utilize them all throughout the week in various dishes.

Here’s the game plan.

First, cook a big batch of beans/wild rice/whole grains once a week. You can get these ingredients at the store incredibly cheaply and they’re very easy to cook up in bulk. Just cook a whole bag of beans, a small bag of wild or brown rice, and some amount of a whole grain that you like.

When you’re done, just put the material you cooked into a large container in the fridge. A large Rubbermaid container or Gladware works really well because you can see what’s inside at a glance.

Throughout the week, just eat simple stuff that uses these for ingredients. Here are five examples.

Burritos Put some beans and some rice on a tortilla, heat it up, pour some salsa on it, enjoy.

Omelets Stir up two eggs, toss ‘em in a pan with some beans, spice with lots of pepper, enjoy.

Stir fry Toss whatever vegetables and meats you have on hand in a pan with a bit of vegetable oil over medium heat until cooked, put them on the rice, enjoy.

Swiss breakfast Mix the cooked whole grains with some milk and whatever fruit you have on hand, enjoy.

Bean burgers If you have black beans, this works great. Just mash ‘em together, add a bit of flour, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce to the beans, make some patties, and cook them with some oil, enjoy.

With the huge amount of variations in these recipes – and the many, many more simple things you can toss together – it’s easy to make tons of very simple snacks and meals from these cooked staples in your fridge.

You can take this idea even further by doing the same thing with whatever fruits and vegetables are on sale at the store. Just pick up that vegetable, chop it up, and cook it in some appropriate fashion (or just leave it raw). Just get it to the point where it’s really convenient for you to just grab it and eat it or add it to a simple dish.

The benefits here are tremendous. Suddenly, your snacks and many of your meals become really simple to prepare, really cheap, and pretty healthy, too (regardless of what you add, if most of the meal consists of beans and wild rice and vegetables, it’ll be good for you on the whole). Plus, since you can add whatever you want to those ingredients that are already on hand, it’s versatile and will be quite tasty to pretty much any palate.

Give it a shot and see how it works for you!