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On the Cheap


hotMeat

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How do you cook on a budget. How do you get every conceivable molecule of goodness out of a whole chicken? Where do you find tomatoes off season for less than $6/pound? How do you make sure nothing EVER goes bad?

Here's one: I like to buy big cheap cuts of meat (pork shoulder, brisket, beef shins, etc.) and cooking them all day. They come out tender and oh so flavorful.

Cooking cheap has always been a central in my kitchen. This does not mean sacrificing quality for cost. What I'm interesting in here is maximizing the intersection.

Edited by hotMeat (log)

Snozberry. Who ever heard of a snozberry.

-Veruca Salt

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I'm the same way. At home, I cook cheap and easy food. One way to get around expensive meat is not to buy it. I use a lot of TVP and meat substitutes in my home cooking. Using good canned ingredients helps too, since you mentioned tomatoes.

Stephen W.

Pastry Chef/Owner

The Sweet Life Bakery

Vineland, NJ

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Heh. This might be a slightly different take on the topic from what you intended, but I got a terrific education on cooking reasonably good food for way cheap when I was on unemployment for a year (thank-you, dot-com bust :rolleyes: ). I not only became an expert on the relative merits of the various food-banks in Seattle, but got quite inventive in combining food-bank offerings with real cheap supermarket buys to produce decent wholesome food. My main strategy was to use time-tested "poor-folks food" techniques, taking some cheap high-bulk starch and doctoring it up with seasonings and just enough protein etc. to give it character and make it more nutritious.

Regularly got a whole lot of beans, rice, and potatoes from the food banks, along with random smatterings of vegetables, a few canned goods, and occasionally some cheese and other protein. Shopped the supermarkets looking hard for bargains, day-olds, and reduced-for-quick-sales items, and for super-cheap high-flavor meat oddments like ham hocks, chicken necks and backs, turkey wings and tails, bacon ends and trimmings, and random assorted offal (fortunately, most Seattle supermarket meat departments had not banished their butchers, so trimmings and offal could be regularly found). Then I'd make big batches of rice and beans or split pea and barley soup or dirty rice or the like, using my meat gleanings as embellishment to the grains and/or legumes.

Mind you, I was bloody sick and tired of beans by the time I clawed my way into a full-time job again, but at least I was able to survive on the unemployment checks without too much freak-out. And I hardly suspected I was ahead of the curve on the whole offal vogue! :laugh:

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Well not buying tomatoes out of season is a start.

Long slow cooking of cheaper cuts of meat is a good idea - although you do have to factor in energy costs (Something do-good 'frugal' cookbooks sometimes forget).

Less meat - and then when you do have it you can afford to buy meat you are happy with, and I find that the cheaper cuts are better and often cheaper in a good butchers than in a cheap supermarket.

More pulses, vegetables (In season!), rice, pasta etc. I steer clear of 'meat substitutes' I am not a fan at all.

Stocking up on spices, oils, vinegars etc when you have the cash helps.

Also invite your friends round - a big pan of something like 5 bean chilli, or a big rustic ham hock soup costs very little. They will probably bring wine, and invite you round to theirs (And they might have steak!)

I love animals.

They are delicious.

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This thread reminds me of my graduate school days. Some of my fellow students were vegetarians of various flavors; I'd sometimes call myself a "financial vegetarian." I was also somewhat limited in my shopping capability, since my only modes of transportation were the bus (not a great option since they quit running at 6:30 PM) and my bicycle. This limited my capability to roam for less expensive products, and it also limited my capability to bring home more than I could eat. It was always interesting when I needed to get more T.P. :laugh: My general rule was that I'd never get any more than would fit in a handbasket, because I wouldn't be able to get it home otherwise. I always got kind of a strange look when I asked if I could bag my own groceries, and proceeded to stuff them tightly into my panniers (and backpack, if need be). I'd always be very careful to "pre-bag" anything potentially spillable or cold in a plastic grocery bag before it went into a pannier, both to protect my panniers from spills and condensation, but also so I'd be sure to have a steady supply of plastic grocery bags to use in my kitchen garbage can.

The T.P. was something I'd plan ahead for, and only bring home on nice days because it could only get home if I bungeed it to the top of my rack, over the panniers.

One thing I did that helped on both cost and transportation fronts was to have my milk delivered. I very quickly learned that milk is (a) heavy, (b) bulky, © spillable, and (d) perishable. Because it was heavy, it had to be carried in my backpack rather than in one of the panniers I'd hook to my rear rack because it would unbalance me. But that didn't leave much room in the backpack for the other things that also traveled better in the backpack, like eggs (too big to fit in the top of a pannier, where I knew they wouldn't be crushed). After a few incidents with © and finally realizing that plastic jugs leak when their sides are compressed, I got sick of having to wash my leather-bottomed backpack after every shopping trip. And the backpack, pressed against my hot sweaty back on the hot summer days after work, when it would be 100+ degrees F, always made me nervous about (d). So finally I called the local dairy, and they came out and brought me a milkbox to go next to my front door. Every Monday and Thursday, a half gallon of fine moo juice would appear in the box, usually arriving between 3 and 4 AM.

Much to my surprise, the price of milk delivery wasn't much different than the grocery store milk price. They delivered twice a week, so I always had plenty of milk (and occasionally had to call and ask them to not bring me any more for a week or so, until I had caught up.) I didn't have to haul milk home from the store, so I'd have more room in my backpack on my other shopping trips for the fragile things like fruits and vegetables in season. And I discovered that my food cost went down, because I no longer went to the grocery store for milk and came out with a bunch of other stuff that I didn't really need.

I liked to shop at the co-op for some of my food, not so much because it was organic but because I could get stuff in bulk and get only the amount I needed. Also, it would pack smaller that way because the only packaging was a bag. Grad school was when I first learned about the joys of oatmeal.

And then, there was the farmers market. I always knew that summer was about to end when the chile roasters came. They'd bring a big truck with a drum roaster mounted on the back. You'd tell them what you wanted, and they would either have them ready to go or they'd tell you when to come back. My favorites were the Anaheims and the poblanos. In either case, I'd get a big bag of roasted chiles. The chiles would come out of the roaster and get scooped into large plastic bags, then twist-tied shut. The plastic bag would then be put into a paper grocery bag. Despite the insulation, I'd always feel the heat against my back. The chiles would always be the first place I'd stop at the market (to place my order) and the last place I'd stop (to pick up my chiles). In between, I'd roam through the tables and pick up other goodies. I don't remember getting fresh lettuce by the time the chile roasters came (too hot) but we'd get peppers, tomatoes, Olathe sweet corn, and other yummies. They always went into the panniers, so they wouldn't get roasted by my chiles before I got them home. Then, when I got home, I'd first thing line a baking sheet with foil, pull on a pair of latex gloves I swiped from lab (after destroying a brand-new pair of contact lenses the first time I tried it) and skin and otherwise clean my roasted chiles while they were still warm. I'd lay the cleaned chiles on the baking sheet in a single layer and freeze them, then bag them to use while they lasted into winter. Sometimes I'd even make a second trip to the market for another round of chiles.

My biggest summer treat was an ice cream cone from the shop downtown. I lived a little more than a mile away, and on a hot summer night I'd walk there, get a cone, and enjoy it as I walked back home. Getting a container at the store was out of the question in summer, because on the days when it would have tasted really good, it was too hot for me to get it home still frozen.

Sometimes when I went shopping after work, especially if I didn't have stuff that needed to be kept cold, I'd get a roasted chicken from the store. That first night I'd eat some of the chicken, and pick the rest of the meat off the bone. The next day, I'd simmer the bones and skin in a pot of water and veggies for a few hours (sometimes in a crockpot while I was at work all day). Then, all I needed to do for dinner was strain out the bones, skin, and spent veggies, skim off as much of the fat as I could, and add back the meat, some more veggies (sometimes frozen ones from a bag), and pasta or rice, and let it cook a little bit longer. Voilà! Chicken soup for the next two or three days.

I'm glad I don't need to bring home pizza on a bicycle any more.

MelissaH

Edited by MelissaH (log)

MelissaH

Oswego, NY

Chemist, writer, hired gun

Say this five times fast: "A big blue bucket of blue blueberries."

foodblog1 | kitchen reno | foodblog2

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