Frugal Food #9: Use it Up!

Here's a little task for you:  go into your pantry or freezer, and see what you find that you had forgotten you owned.  Remember that stuff you bought on sale a while ago but now is in the back of the cupboard sporting a layer of dust?  Or that great cut of meat you put into the freezer, and lost, that is now nearing the end of conceivably being edible?

Now, take whatever it is you found, and figure out when this week, you are going to cook and eat it.

Use it up!  It won't stay good forever, and what was the use of buying it if you were only going to end up throwing it away?  Eat it! Use it up!

Go back to Frugal Food #8 and re-read it.  Then look up the meal planning post for ideas, if it is a cut of meat you're not sure what to do with.

If this is something out of your deep freeze that is over a year old, don't automatically assume it's no good.  Yes, I know what the government guidelines say about the storage life of meat in the freezer, but nobody is going to sue anyone here, and it's a shame to let good food go to waste.  I really don't think you will get sick from eating meat that was stored 3 or 6 or 12 months longer than what some food chart tells you it should be. In fact, I know from experience that you won't.

We have eaten 2 year old burger that didn't harm any one.  It had a slightly freezer burnt taste, but once cooked into something spicy (like taco meat or chili), that odd flavor was easily masked. 

We have had a stick of venison summer sausage that somehow got to the bottom of the freezer and lay there undetected for a year.  Still delicious, still completely edible after being discovered and thawed. 

A 24-pound turkey raised in 2008 that didn't get cooked until Thanksgiving 2009 is another example of longer than recommended frozen storage.  It was awesome, better than any frozen turkey I'd ever had from the store that was supposedly 'fresh'.

Deep freezes are amazing that way: they have such cold temperatures that things can be stored in them for quite a while without experiencing any deterioration in quality or flavor.  Even now, at the end of November, we are pulling leftover baked goods (cookies, french breads, zucchini bread) from my farmers market booth out of the freezer and enjoying them.  The farmers' market ended two months ago.  Some of the baked goods are starting to get a bit of a 'freezer' taste, so we are eating them up now rather than baking fresher ones.  I'm using them up, and saving $$ on ingredients versus baking new ones.

Your regular part-of-the-fridge freezers don't have quite that ability. So it's doubly important to go exploring in them often and use up anything that has been there for six months or more.

And, with the holidays and their glut of food upon us, it's really important to use up the leftovers in your fridge in a timely basis.  If you still have Thanksgiving leftovers sitting in there, they've probably given up the ghost at this point (I did a search and rescue mission on mine yesterday; 99% of whatever hadn't been eaten by now was sorta fuzzy and smelly).  So, clear those out, and make a point of doing a weekly leftover check from here on out.

Use it up.  Quick, before you end up having to throw it out.  Wasted food = wasted money.  Wasted money = the opposite of frugal.