Each week, I’ll present a low-cost meal (or a meal that demonstrates a lot of options for cutting costs) that my family eats for dinner and enjoys. Many of the recipes will be vegan or vegetarian, with options to add other ingredients for non-vegetarians.

As I’ve mentioned several times, Sarah and I are making a special effort to spread out our trips to the grocery store – and with some real success. Part of this is simply using things that we’ve had in the refrigerator, the cupboard, and the freezer for a while.

One item that’s been in the fridge for a bit are some rolls of prepackaged pizza dough that we got on sale a few months back. We like to make our own pizza crust, but the price was low enough on the prepackaged pizza dough that we simply bought some.

How do we use it, though? Usually, when we make pizza, I just make a crust from scratch.

The solution was obvious: sandwich pockets. We simply take ingredients that we have on hand, fold pieces of the dough around those ingredients, and bake them in the oven.

What You Need
Last night, we made two large batches of these sandwich pockets. One variety (the one I took lots of pictures of) included broccoli, fresh chives, and cheddar cheese. I also made some pockets using bell peppers and ricotta cheese. Both types included a mix of dried herbs (oregano, basil, and so on).

To make four pockets, you need a roll of refrigerated pizza dough (or a small batch of homemade dough), the ingredients you wish to put in the middle, some salt and pepper to taste, and a single egg.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
If you’re using any fresh vegetables in these pockets, chop them in advance. This always saves time.

Preparing the Meal
The first thing you’ll want to do is mix together your filling ingredients. For me, this means for four pockets, I’ll mix together a cup and a half of broccoli, a cup and a half of shredded cheddar, a dash of salt, a few dashes of ground pepper, three tablespoons of chopped chives, and a few dashes of mixed dried herbs.

I simply toss all of this stuff together with my hands until it’s reasonably consistent.

After that, I unroll a container of the pizza dough on a surface lightly coated with flour or with canola oil to prevent sticking.

Cut this pizza dough into four equal pieces. In the center of each piece of dough, put roughly a quarter of the mixture.

Simply fold over one side on top of the mix, then fold over the opposite side. After that, fold the remaining two sides over the mixture, forming a pocket. Easy as can be!

Crack an egg into a bowl and beat it with a fork. Then, brush the egg on top of the pockets. This will create a wonderful golden crust on top.

Preheat the oven to 425 F, then place the finished pockets onto a baking sheet that had lightly been coated with canola oil to prevent sticking.

When I had the sandwiches all ready to go into the oven, there was a bit of the mixture left over, so I sprinkled some on top of each of the pockets. Here’s eight of them, ready to go into the oven.

Bake the sandwiches for fifteen to seventeen minutes, until golden brown on top, then serve. We had some sliced apples along with the sandwiches, making for a great lunch or a light dinner!

Optional Ingredients
Obviously, you can put pretty much anything you want into these pockets. One thing I like about these is that you don’t have to stick with what you might think of as pizza toppings. It might seem odd to put broccoli on a pizza, for example, but it works perfectly here. Just use roughly three cups of filling for every four you make and let your imagination run wild – meats, vegetables, cheeses, mushrooms, whatever you want.

Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a great discussion on The Simple Dollar’s Facebook page concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I’m going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.

Kate writes in: I love to cook, and one of my favorite things to make from scratch is chicken stock. I know making it yourself saves money, but I would love for you to go over how much it actually saves. If you’d like to factor it in, I also save vegetable scraps (carrot peels, potato skins, vegetables in the fridge that are starting to look a bit mushy) and chicken bones when I cook and freeze them, so it cuts down on the amount of vegetables and chicken I have to buy to make the stock. That might be a tip to pass along to readers, apparently this is something only I do among people I know who like to cook, and it has spread since.

We sometimes make stock ourselves out of leftover vegetables. Before we made the switch to being vegetarian, we also used to make stock out of chicken bones and spare vegetables, much as you describe.

Typically, we make about four quarts of stock at a time. We use our crock pot for this and simply dump in about two or three quarts of various kinds of scraps, fill up the crock pot with water, turn it on low, and let it cook gently for several hours. When it’s complete, we simply strain the liquid and store it in quart-sized containers in the freezer.

Our crock pot runs at about 100 watts, so we use roughly $0.12 of energy when making a batch of stock. This adds about $0.03 per quart for energy. The amount of water used is negligible.

At the store, I can easily find (somewhat) comparable stocks for approximately $3 per quart. This means that my crock pot produces about $12 worth of stock at the store price. There’s also the option of buying broth, which is thinner and a bit less flavorful, at a lower price ($1.50 or so a quart).

The value of the stock really comes down to the cost of the ingredients that you use to make it. If you use nothing but the scraps left behind by other meals and view homemade stock as a “bonus” of sorts, stock is incredibly cheap and an enormous bargain.

The question of value comes into play when you start looking at actually buying things to supplement the stock. It doesn’t take a whole lot of purchases to add up to the value of the stock itself, so you have to be very careful when making purchases.

For example, if you’re making chicken stock and purchase a whole chicken, you’re sinking $6 into the stock (ideally, you can still use the chicken for other purposes here, but not always). If you buy even a few vegetables to go along with it, you’re quickly approaching the cost of just buying stock at the store.

For me, given the extra time invested and the cost of the ingredients, stock is really only worth it when you’re using scraps, such as leftover vegetable pieces and/or bones.

Our method for accumulating these scraps is to simply save the uneaten and unused remnants of meals. For example, if we cook too many green beans, we’ll toss the remainder into our “scrap bag” in the freezer with the intent to use it someday for stock. When we reach a certain amount (usually a few quarts), we use it as the basis for vegetable stock.

Another possible option for making stock occurs if you have a free source for the needed ingredients. For example, if you’re facing an overabundance of garden vegetables, you might want to make some vegetable stock using some of them. If you’ve suddenly acquired a large amount of chicken or beef for free or for a very low price, you may want to use some of the meat for stock.

Stock is simply an effective way of using materials that don’t have a direct food use without these items going to waste. Using items directly for stock isn’t a big money saver, but using items indirectly for stock in the form of scraps can indeed save dollars.

Abbie writes in:

My family is considering a move to a smaller town for professional purposes. The only problem with this move is that we’re Orthodox and thus we follow the dietary laws. This means that the food our family eats must be kosher. Where we live now, we have great access to kosher foods but we’re pretty certain that our access to such foods is going to become much more expensive when we move. Do you have any suggestions for making this work?

Just to clarify, Abbie is referring to Orthodox Judaism for her family’s religion.

First of all, good luck on making such a challenging move. From what you describe here, this is clearly one of those moves that would come with a long list of “pros” and “cons.” From the way I understand it, your list that would be in favor of moving includes professional reasons as well as some cultural reasons, but the cons list includes other cultural reasons and spiritual reasons. Finding the right balance there can really be a challenge and I can understand a desire to mitigate some of the cons.

So, how can you handle this situation?

The first thing I’d do is study small towns that would be a good match professionally for your family. There are many smaller towns with an Orthodox Jewish community in them. The single member of the religion that I’ve had a strong relationship with lived in Madison, Wisconsin and seemed pretty happy with it.

Since I’m unclear as to exactly what the professional reasons are for the move, you might have a lot of towns that will work or you might be highly restricted. The less restricted you are, the greater the possibility you can find a town with a community in it that can support a local grocer that matches your spiritual needs.

What if that’s impossible? I see several things that you can do.

One option is to talk to the local grocers and see what they have in stock. I’ve had great success in the past requesting that grocers carry specific items with narrow appeal simply because I’ve requested them. Of course, this may have to do with the specific grocer that I often use (Hy-Vee, which is an Iowa grocery chain), but I do know that some grocers are flexible on what they choose to have on their shelves. Come armed with information on brands that you use that the store does not carry and see if they can help.

Another option is to buy in tremendous bulk on occasional food buying trips. This is going to require a lot of planning, of course, as well as some food storage space. Let’s say you live two or three hours from a large city that contains a grocer that sells a wide variety of the foods you need. This my be something that you can do in conjunction with working with your local retailer.

Yet another option is to rely on online grocers. One example of an online grocer that might meet your needs is All in Kosher. Amazon offers a pretty solid selection of certain types of kosher goods.

You might want to supplement these options by starting a garden. Since you’re involved in the entire growing process, you can be sure that the vegetables and fruits that your garden produces match your dietary and spiritual needs. This is also an incredibly inexpensive route for obtaining food, plus it’s an option that’s much more viable in a smaller town.

Most likely, you’ll have to use some combination of these tactics. If you’re looking at things through a frugal lens, though, my recommendation would be to have a very large garden and a freezer. This way, you can produce tons of vegetables for your family, which can provide the backbone of your diet and store them easily. If you work in conjunction with local grocers, you may be able to fill in most of the rest of your diet, leaving more expensive options for rarer occasions.

Good luck on your move!

Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a great discussion on The Simple Dollar’s Facebook page concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I’m going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.

Gretchen writes in: I have a grain grinder and I make my own whole wheat bread using freshly ground grains. The taste is so good but how does grinding grains compare to just buying whole wheat flour? Although I don’t think I could go back to store bought flour because the taste is so much better.

Honestly, this is something I’ve been thinking about doing. I would love to make bread using freshly ground grains in exactly the method you described, mixing grains the way I would like them. I’ve never really thought about it from a money-saving perspective, though, so I guess it’s time to run the numbers on that.

I can get a sack of whole wheat flour weighing five pounds for $1.50 to $3, depending on what I get. The brand I’m most happy with is King Arthur, which comes in at around $3 a bag, while the generic is at about $1.50 a bag. We’ll use the King Arthur kind for comparison’s sake here, because the purpose of doing this is to have higher quality flour.

A five pound bag of flour has about twenty cups of flour in it. My homemade bread recipe uses a little over three cups of flour, so I’d get enough flour for about six loaves of bread out of one bag. That gives me a cost-per-loaf for just the flour of $0.50.

A home grain grinder can cost around $20. It’s extremely similar to a home coffee grinder, actually, in that it takes larger grains and grinds them into a fine powder. Both devices even look fairly similar.

Now, let’s look at an example of wheat. You can get whole wheat berries dried for approximately $1.10 per pound. This was the best price I could find by asking around and searching websites – it was suggested by a person at a local food co-op.

In this case, to get five pounds of flour, you’d need five pounds of wheat berries, costing $5.50. You’d also need to pro-rate in a bit of the cost of the grinder (say, $0.05 if you use it a lot) and the energy cost (say, $0.02). This gives you a cost per loaf of about $0.93 for flour you grind yourself.

So, clearly, buying flour at the store is less expensive than grinding it yourself, at least in the quantities that you’d be able to do it at home. The large flour manufacturers work on an enormous scale and thus are able to buy the wheat at a much lower price than we’d be able to.

This isn’t to say that you won’t have access to less expensive grains. I can easily get access to dry corn for an extremely low price. I have farmer friends who would sell me a bushel of corn kernels for $7 or $8 – that’s 56 pounds of corn. If I’m interested in making corn meal at home, this would be an incredibly inexpensive way of doing it. If I had access directly to a wheat farmer, I could probably make a similar deal. (For some reason, I’m tempted to make homemade corn bread now.)

In other words, you probably can make flour at home cheaper than you can buy in the store if you have direct access to wholesale grain prices. The problem is that most of us don’t have this kind of access.

Regardless of the price, if you’re the type of person who deeply enjoys making things from scratch, this isn’t a terribly uneconomical thing to do. If you have the right sources, it can even be the less expensive option.

Either way, it’s inexpensive enough that I’m tempted to get a grain grinder and try to make a truly from-scratch loaf of bread.

Each week, I’ll present a low-cost meal (or a meal that demonstrates a lot of options for cutting costs) that my family eats for dinner and enjoys. Many of the recipes will be vegan or vegetarian, with options to add other ingredients for non-vegetarians.

At this point in late September, we’re starting to reach that point of using what things are still coming in from the garden along with the things we can find in our freezer and pantry to make new dishes. We’re also starting to move into more “fall”-type dishes, such as heartier soups and stews.

Our vegetarian gumbo is a great example of all of these things at once.

What You Need
You’ll need a half a cup of flour and a half a cup of your preferred vegetable oil to make the roux, a key flavorful part of the gumbo. You’ll also need a variety of vegetables – we used a small onion, a small bell pepper, a stalk of celery, a diced tomato, a handful of green beans, two sliced carrots, a handful of sliced okra, and a bit of cumin, paprika, and oregano for spicing. This will all be served over rice, so you’ll also need that.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
The biggest preparatory step you can take is to simply chop up all of your vegetables in advance. This is a great prep step that you can always do the evening before or the morning before a meal prep.

Preparing the Meal
The first step is to get your rice cooking so that it’s ready when the gumbo is finished. Rice is quite simple to prepare, so I won’t focus on the details of that here.

The next step is to make the roux, which is essentially just a mix of flour and fat. Since we’re making a vegetarian gumbo, your fat will come in the form of a vegetable oil. Simply stir together the flour and oil over medium-high heat for about ten minutes, constantly stirring, until it begins to turn a bit of a caramel color, something like this (I perhaps added a bit too much flour to the roux here, but it’s workable).

As soon as you have roux, add the stiffer vegetables (like the onion, bell pepper, and celery) and cook for another five minutes, stirring a lot at the start to distribute the roux, then regularly thereafter.

At this point, add all of the remaining ingredients and about four cups of water. Stir thouroughly and then let it simmer for about forty minutes, stirring regularly.

When everything’s finished and the vegetables are tender (the carrots are probably the best ones to check), simply put some rice in a bowl or on a plate and pour some of the gumbo on top. Delicious! We served it with a fruit medley.

Optional Ingredients
You can get away with using pretty much any vegetable in gumbo, though I would consider tomatoes and onions to be pretty essential, and okra to be nearly so. Simply use up whatever your garden is providing or whatever vegetables you can easily acquire.

If you wish to add meat, you can easily add sausage and chicken to this meal. Cook the sausage and chicken in the pan before you do anything else. Remove the meat and leave the fats behind, using them as the “fat” portion of the roux that you make by simply adding flour to the liquid in the pan after you remove the meat and stirring it rapidly.

Dinner with My Family is on a one week hiatus (which is party explained below). It will return next week.

Over the last month, Sarah and I have been experimenting with a longer period between grocery store trips.

Prior to this month, we had almost always done a weekly grocery store visit, usually on Saturday but occasionally on Sunday or Monday. This enabled us to do a single week meal plan, a process I described in detail a while back.

Simply put, we would just make a list of all of the meals we would make during the upcoming week, then we would buy groceries to fulfill those meals, along with staples like milk and so on.

Over the past few weeks, however, we’ve made a commitment to extend that period between grocery store visits for several reasons.

First, our pantry has a lot of stuff in it that needs to be used up. It’s almost full to the brim and it would be very good for us to use the stored food before some of it goes bad, such as the half-full container of quinoa or the egg noodles or the spices we purchased several months ago. This is purely a money-saving tactic, of course.

Second, our time constraints are different now. Sarah has returned to work and our two oldest children have a bevy of evening activities. This makes preparing a fresh meal from scratch every evening substantially more difficult than it was during the summer or when Sarah was off on maternity leave.

Third, we wanted to really explore options for make-ahead meals. Lately, we’ve been looking carefully at meals that we can make mostly in advance and store for the future. We want to try making a diversity of meals this way, from soups and stews to casseroles and pizzas.

Finally, we want to prolong the magic of our garden as we enter fall. If we can take some of those vegetables and use them in meals that we can use down the road, we’re extending the life of the fresh vegetables in our garden without putting them to waste. If we can use three more onions and three more tomatoes from our garden, that’s a good thing.

The end result of all of this is that over the last month, we’ve only been to the grocery store twice. How did we do it? Here are some of the specific tactics we used.

We switched to drinking water with our meals. This is something I’ve always done, but my wife and my two oldest children consistently drink skim milk with their evening meal. A month ago, we switched. The exception to this is our youngest child, whose pediatrician recommended that we keep him on whole milk for a while longer. Thus, we buy whole milk just for him, which lasted perfectly for two weeks twice now.

We’ve tried making double batches of almost every meal. If I make a homemade pizza, I make another one for the freezer. If we make soup, we store an extra batch of it in a gallon-sized freezer container. If we make a casserole, we make another one for the freezer. If we make burritos, we make a bunch of extra ones for the freezer.

We’ve tried to base meals on the items we have in our pantry. What can we do with a lot of quinoa and barley? How can we use a half a pound of ground tarragon? What can we do with this buckwheat flour? These are all questions we’ve considered over the last month or so – and most of them have come to good answers.

The end result of these methods is that for the month of August 15 to September 15, our grocery bill was about 50% lower than our average month of groceries. At the same time, we’ve also banked several meals into the freezer that we’ll be able to use in future months. (Yes, part of that reduction was due to an influx of vegetables from the garden, but not nearly all of it.)

The biggest reason why this has happened, in my opinion, is that we’re drastically reducing our impulse buys. Even with a grocery list, we usually tend to make a few impulse buys on each grocery store visit. This not only saves us money, but it also helps with our health as well.

Time, money, health – this move is a triple win, in my eyes.

Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a great discussion on The Simple Dollar’s Facebook page concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I’m going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.

Jacqui writes in: Canning. I’ve been told it can be really cheap, but from what I can tell unless you are growing your own, it isn’t worth it.

Sarah and I do a small amount of canning, mostly tomato-based things in a water bath. We can things like tomato sauce, salsa, pasta sauce, and so on. However, beyond that, we actually don’t can very much. We find it more cost-efficient to freeze vegetables in the fall and use them in the winter instead.

So, what are the comparative costs here?

Canning requires jars, lids, and rings. You’ll also need a large pot (for acidic items) and/or a pressure cooker (for other items). I won’t include the pots in this calculation because they’re easily used for other purposes. I’ll also only count 1/10th of the cost of the jars because they can be reused quite a few times.

You can get quart jars for about $1.40 apiece new. If you reuse them ten times, that’s $0.14 per jar. You can also get bands and lids for about $0.70 per set, and since you’re able to reuse the bands, you can also get just lids for about $0.40 apiece. Thus, your cost per canned jar for the materials is about $0.54 with some additional startup costs.

Canned goods You can buy a pint can of many canned vegetables at the store for $0.89 or $0.99. Many other items will cost substantially more than that. Thus, it’s pretty clear that if you have a source for fresh vegetables, you can save significant money by canning yourself.

Flash frozen goods You can get about a quart of flash frozen vegetables at the store for $1.39. Obviously, as with canned goods, the selection at that price is fairly limited.

Freezing requires containers and a freezer. We’ve had a standalone deep freezer for years. As I calculated before, the cost of maintaining and using a deep freezer is about $130 a year.

On average, we freeze an item for six months and it takes up about 1/2% of the freezer, so our cost for that individual item in the freezer is $0.32. We use freezer containers over and over again to freeze items, so the cost for the container is $0.01 or $0.02. This gives us a total cost of roughly $0.34 to freeze a quart of vegetables ourselves if we use it in six months.

Simply put, the raw cost of freezing or canning is cheaper if you do it yourself, but only if you have a source of free or extremely inexpensive vegetables and fruits.

The cost of even deeply discounted fruits and vegetables easily pushes the cost of freezing and canning yourself up into the range of “no longer a bargain” and “most likely a loss.” Freezing and canning yourself has startup costs, too.

You can save dollars, not pennies by canning (or freezing) if you have an abundant garden. Otherwise, it’s not worth it.

Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a great discussion on The Simple Dollar’s Facebook page concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I’m going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.

Liora writes in: I love vegetable and fruit juices, so I decided to buy an inexpensive juicer instead of buying veggie juice at a stand next to my school- I think this will pay up very quickly because a cup of juice in that place costs 3.44 and a cup of juice at home costs pennies to make.

It is going to save you some money, but how much money?

In the past, we had a standalone juicer that we used several times after we first acquired it, then sat to the side simply because the cleanup was quite a lot of work for just a few cups of juice.

Instead, today we just use a blender. We take the raw fruit, toss in a little bit of ice, and blend until you have a liquid. Toss the pieces in the dishwasher and you’re good to go.

So, why didn’t we continue using the juicer? We tried two different models over the years and found that both required approximately 10 minutes of cleanup for each batch of juice that we made. The only way we could make juice efficiently using it was by making a lot of juice at once. There was also the prep time, which involved the cleaning and peeling of the fruits and vegetables that we used.

So, for example, if we were to juice a bushel of apples, we would have the initial cost of the apples – about $20. After juicing, this would make us roughly twelve quarts of apple juice (about three gallons).

Cleaning and slicing the apples took about twenty minutes – doubling that time if we chose to peel the apples first (so that we could use the pulp for applesauce).

Juicing the apples took about ten minutes, as we’d have to stop to remove pulp and clear out clogs at least a few times.

Cleanup would take another ten minutes.

This would mean that for three gallons of fresh apple juice with a juicer, we’d have to use $20 worth of apples and forty minutes of time. There’s also the additional (small) cost of a portion of the cost of the juicer itself, plus the cost of the electricity, totaling perhaps another dollar. Of course, this is fresh, high-quality apple juice.

The only comparable apple juice I could find at the store would be fresh apple cider, which would cost around $8 per gallon. This would have a total cost of $24 for three gallons.

Now, it’s worth noting that I consider my homemade juice to be substantially better than anything from the store. The homemade juice is significantly better than the $8 per gallon juice from the store.

Of course, if you’re comparing this procedure to the cost of the juice that Liora is buying ($3.44 for a 16 oz. cup, meaning $27.52 per gallon), then making her own juice is a tremendous bargain.

Still, if you’re in a situation where you’re buying juice from a juice stand, you’re far better off buying yourself an insulated cup and buying high-quality juice from your local grocer. Then, just fill up that cup each morning before you go and enjoy the juice when and where it’s convenient for you. That will still be less expensive than the juice stand if the juice stand is anything like the one that Liora visits.

Making your own juice (or at least bottling it yourself) saves dollars, not pennies, over repeatedly buying it at a juice stand.

Speaking of which, I think I’ll go fire up my BlendTec now, toss in some bananas and strawberries and a few ice cubes, and drink something delicious (and healthy).