What Do We Eat?

The vast majority of this week's posts have been focused on food.  Guess I'm on a roll. (*groan* a food pun, even!) So, what do we eat at this little place here if I'm not buying anything that comes in a box?  (Not true, by the way, powdered milk comes in a box.  Saltines come in a box.  Granola bars come in a box.  Pasta comes in a box--I didn't buy any pasta this month, cuz I still have a lot from my last stock up when it was 99 cents a box. . .  Which reminds me of one of my frugal tenets:  buy a lot when on sale; enough to get you through until the next sale.)

I gave you quite a few of the things we eat in my post Cooking Ahead, without actually naming them on a menu.  Now, to the best of my recollection, here are three weeks' worth of  actual dinners at this little place here.  Everything is pretty much from scratch, keeping in mind I don't (yet) make hot dogs or pepperoni myself.  Although now that we have a sausage stuffer, that day is definitely coming.

Sunday: cabbage & sausage casserole (homemade polish sausage)
Monday: chicken enchiladas
Tuesday: pizza calzones
Wednesday: potato soup w/fresh baked bread
Thursday: chili mac and applesauce
Friday: venison steak w/sauteed onions & mushrooms, salad, french fries
Saturday: hot dogs & brats, twice baked potatoes, dill pickles


Sunday: venison loin steaks over brown rice, sauteed onions & peppers
Monday: BBQ pork over boiled potatoes, corn
Tuesday: chicken noodle soup (used fettucini noodles, broken into thirds; sometimes I use wide egg noodles)
Wednesday: pork quesadillas, Spanish rice, refried beans, applesauce
Thursday: pasties
Friday: lasagna with garlic bread
Saturday: ham, fried onions & potatoes

Sunday: taco dip with tortilla chips (light dinner, had been to a funeral in the early afternoon and ate at the after-funeral meal) (note #2: my taco dip is taco meat, refried beans, shredded colby jack cheese, salsa, lettuce and sour cream)
Monday: venison stroganoff, green beans
Tuesday: potato soup (again--gotta use up those potatoes in the cellar!)
Wednesday: hamburgers on the grill (it was over 40 degrees outside, what can I say??), with sauteed onions & mushrooms, blue cheese, dill pickles, baked beans and french fries (using up them potatoes. . . )
Thursday: roast chicken, mashed potatoes, chicken gravy, corn
Friday: venison steak, boiled potatoes, florentine blend veggies (cauliflower, broccoli, carrots)
Saturday:  chicken pot pie


What about breakfasts, you ask.  Well, breakfasts are usually pretty quick things, with maybe something more time consuming on a Saturday morning.  In Cooking Ahead, I talked about many different flavors of quick breads being an easy breakfast.

Typical breakfasts are any one of the following:
granola, fried eggs, scrambled eggs (with onions & cheese!), banana muffins, apple coffee cake, omelets, bagels & cream cheese, blueberry & cream cheese coffee cake, sour cream chocolate chip muffins, pumpkin muffins, strawberry muffins (in June), blueberry muffins, apple cinnamon muffins, pancakes, french toast, waffles, any flavor of quick bread. . .

Lunches are by and large leftovers from dinner.  You know: chili, chicken soup, spaghetti, pizza, extra pasties or calzones (that were wrapped in foil and put in the freezer just for lunchboxes).  Occasionally a sandwich like: hot ham & cheese, pb & blueberry j (or cherry, or strawberry, or peach, or pear or blackberry), or a tuna melt.  From time to time DH likes to just have pickled veggies (hot peppers, usually), summer sausage, cheese and crackers packed in his lunchbox.

Can't forget desserts.  We don't have dessert every night, usually just two or three per week.  In the past few weeks we've had:  lemon squares, oatmeal butterscotch cookies, ice cream w/caramel sauce, chocolate pudding, apple pie, no bake cookies, kiwi squares, walnut brownies, homemade chocolate heart candies (Valentine's Day), chocolate chip cookies.

Snacks are usually fruit, veggies like carrots and celery, nuts, or cheese and crackers.

As far as meat goes, the majority of our meat is venison, followed by chicken, then pork, then turkey, then beef.  Usually home raised, very rarely from the store.

There you have it.  What we eat at this little place here.

Challenge #7: Try a New Recipe

This week somehow evolved to have an eating theme.  So, how about we make this week's challenge fit right in?

Try a new recipe.

What a fun challenge!  You can go about it in any number of ways.  You can look at what you need to use up (remember my withering kiwi turning into kiwi squares for dessert?  Or 2012's glut of squash and ensuing squash recipe mania at this little place here?) and then do an internet search for recipes using that item.  You can look in your own cookbooks for something that sounds good, then see if you have the ingredients on hand to make it.  Or, you can just pick a recipe out of the blue--or a cookbook, or off the internet--and go to the grocery store to buy what you need for it.

Really.  I personally am too cheap frugal to do it the third way, but you can.  I'll let you.

Meanwhile, I think I will be looking for a recipe for a potato dish I haven't tried.  Which is going to be challenging, as we really like potatoes and I've cooked them many different ways in the last two decades.  I'll let you know what I come up with.  Hmm, can I amend the rules of the challenge to include recipes we make up that aren't written down somewhere all ready?  Can I make a potato something-or-other up from my head and call it a new recipe?

Yes, yes I can.  And so can you.  Creating a whole new recipe will definitely count as trying a new recipe for this challenge.

Cooking Ahead

More with the eating ;0)

Part of how we eat at this little place here involves cooking ahead, or at least planning ahead.

Our beans are bought dried; not pre-cooked and in a can.  Any chili, or bean soup, or hummus I want to eat requires that I first soak the beans overnight.  Takes 6-8 hours, but doesn't require anything from me other than putting them in a pot and covering them with water before I head off to bed and go to sleep.

Another example for you:  chickens.  When I butcher chickens I part out some of them, packaging by body part (leg quarters, breasts, wings) with the rest of the body (usually bones and a few stray small muscles) being the carcass for making soup out of.  The chickens that are left whole are automatically considered three meals:  usually a roast chicken the first meal, a chicken potpie the second meal, and chicken soup (using the bones and little bits of meat not used the first two meals) as the third meal.  Variations are chicken fajitas, chicken burritos, chicken quesadillas, chicken tetrazzini, or chicken and dumplings.

Other large meat chunks are treated the same.  A ham is multiple meals (ham dinner, scalloped potatoes & ham, fried potatoes & ham, ham in an omelet or scrambled eggs), or one meal plus leftovers sliced for lunch meat.  And the bone can be used to flavor pea soup--or bean soup, but I prefer smoked hocks in my bean soup. A pork shoulder roast normally becomes BBQ pork and another dish using shredded pork (pork quesadillas, anyone?).  A beef pot roast is a yummy pot roast dinner, and also lunch meat, or shredded hot beef sandwiches.  Even a meatloaf is expected to stretch for more than one meal:  it is dinner, and it is also sliced for meatloaf sandwiches at lunch time.

Breakfasts can be cooked ahead, too.  While I generally prefer my muffins hot out of the oven, quick breads such as zucchini, banana, strawberry, rhubarb, or pumpkin can be made the day before and served as a speedy breakfast the next morning.

When I make pancakes, french toast, or waffles, I normally make a batch that is a bit larger than needed that day, and then I wrap the extras in foil, and store them in the freezer for a day when we want a waffle or pancake or french toast, but don't have the time to make batter, heat the griddle, and do the cooking.  They are also super handy for when you need your kids to be able to feed themselves a filling breakfast before school.  Much better and cheaper than buying their equivalent in the grocery store freezer case.

Eating well doesn't have to be expensive.  And saving money doesn't have to be hard.  Plan ahead, cook ahead.  It will cover both good health and living frugal.

Eating and Shopping

Eating and shopping.  They are intrinsically related.  Those items which we do not grow/kill ourselves must be purchased.  I have to admit, I enjoy eating much more than shopping.  I might even go so far as to say I enjoy hunting/harvesting animals more than shopping.  At least with the taking of an animal's life to turn it into food, there is a sense of accomplishment, and a reverence for what it means to live, and to eat.  That reverence, and accomplished feeling, are both lacking when cruising the grocery aisles tossing things into a cart.

In all honesty, I find grocery shopping to be entirely frustrating.  There are so many items in their bold and colorful packaging clamoring for my attention.  It seems that the ones I really want, the real food, is in the drabbest packages, and often down low in hard to see spaces.  Why are the cheese sticks hanging right from eye to waist level in the refrigerated display case, where you can reach out and get several, but the 1.5 pound blocks of cheese in the same flavors are tucked down around knee to mid-shin height, half hidden under the lip of the case?  Frustrating.  Boxes of cereal?  They encompass head to knees of an entire aisle longer than my house, yet finding the rolled oats (not the add-water-and-eat oatmeal packets--just old fashioned oats that I make granola with) are somewhere in that confusing riot of color, cardboard, and cartoon characters, usually at floor level.

We don't eat much ready made stuff.  Less and less, actually, the more and more of it being reformulated to contain things like high fructose corn syrup or highly processed soybean oils, neither of which like me too much.  I'd rather go to the extra effort of combining ingredients and applying heat in my own kitchen to make the same thing rather than buy it ready to eat and end up with a migraine or a very punky stomach after consumption.

To give you an idea of what I do buy (which my girls mainly refer to as "ingredients" rather than food--they open the pantry looking for a crunchy snack and say "Mom, there isn't any food in here; just ingredients"), here is a summary of my receipts for my most recent grocery shopping excursion.  The "Big One" to last until the middle of March, when the next large shopping trip is scheduled.  I will pick up a few odds and ends between now and then, such as milk, and toilet paper (my preferred brand was not on sale today), but for most items this is pretty much it until the Ides of March arrives.

Non-Food:
water softener salt
Fels Naptha soap (for making laundry soap)
light bulbs
ziploc baggies--sandwich size and quart size
pkg of 250 napkins
"little cups", aka paper bathroom cups for rinsing after brushing teeth
kitchen trash bags

Food:
4 pounds carrots (might need to buy more)
1 head celery (might need to buy more)
4 large sweet potatoes
2 pounds bananas (most likely will buy more in 2 weeks)
6 cans tuna (the 'spensie kind that only has fish and water in it, no broth or soy oil)
15 pounds unbleached flour
1.5 pounds lettuce, red leaf and green leaf (will buy more)
3 gallons milk (will buy more)
1 dozen bagels (I really need to perfect making these, it's cheaper)
2 boxes graham crackers (ditto)
2 boxes oat & honey crunchy granola bars (ditto)
10 pounds sugar (which I will probably use only 5 or 6 pounds of in a month, but the 10-pounder is cheaper than two 5 pound bags)
4 pounds brown sugar (again, won't need that much, but the 4 pound bag was on sale.  So, next month's brown sugar is taken care of too)
wasabi almonds
tequila (what can I say, DH has been hankering for some margaritas lately)
12 pack IPA (we really need to get back to home brewing; it's been a year and a half!!)
4 cans cream of mushroom soup
6 cans sliced mushrooms
2 boxes saltine crackers
1 bag oyster crackers
1 bag bacon bits
1/2 gallon orange juice
4 pounds semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 pound mini chocolate chips (for on granola cereal and in muffins)
1 pound sliced American cheese
2 pounds extra sharp cheddar cheese
1 pound colby jack cheese
4 8-oz pkgs cream cheese
2 pounds sour cream
2 pounds roasted peanuts
2 pounds pistachios
5 pounds tangerines
2 pounds seedless grapes
2 cans refried beans (naughty me, I should make these)
3 pounds rolled oats
2 pounds whole bean coffee
2 pound frozen corn kernels
1 box powdered milk (for hot chocolate mix and hamburger helper-style dinner mixes)
1 quart canola/sunflower blend oil
2 pounds basmati rice
3 pounds brown rice
1 pound flaked coconut
1 bag mini marshmallows (can't make hot chocolate without marshmallows!)
1 pound dried navy beans
1 pound dried northern beans
1 pound dried mayocoba beans
1 pound dried black beans
2 pound dried red beans
4 pounds butter (will need more, but wasn't on sale and I'm out)
1 pound iodized salt

And that's it.  What don't you see?

• Breakfast cereal.  Frozen waffles.  Pop tarts.  Cookies. Bread. Muffins or coffee cakes.--All those I make myself (well, not pop tarts, but I do have a recipe for them!)
• Cheese cubes or sticks or shreds.  
• Any canned veggies--because all the canned ones we eat are homegrown and home canned and sitting in my cellar, as are most of the frozen ones too.  Just wasn't a good year for corn last year and I didn't get any put up.  
• Meat--The vast majority of mine is home grown or hunted, I buy very little meat.  (I confess, I was cruising the meat department for some beef, but even on sale it was way more than I am willing to pay.  Geez, for that price I'll save my pennies and buy it on the hoof next fall.  It will be better quality, too). 

What is ready to eat?

• Carrots, 
• celery, 
• tangerines, 
• grapes, 
• bananas, 
• three kinds of nuts, 
• cheese if you cut it yourself, 
• granola bars (for DH's lunchbox), 
• graham crackers, 
• the bagels, 
• milk, 
• oj. 

The sort of stuff (well, maybe excepting the bagels, and graham crackers) that people should eat when they want an easy snack rather than all that other stuff at the store in those colorful bags and individual wrappers inside boxes sitting at eye level on miles of store shelves.

The cellar at this little place here also holds apples still from last fall's harvest (Sept/Oct to Feb in cold storage, and my home grown apples are still in fine shape, looking just as pretty as the ones at the grocery store, only they are 100% organic and traveled zero miles to get to my house.), as well as canned pears and peaches, and both applesauce and pear sauce.  Potatoes are still holding out down there; in fact I think I grew too many or maybe we haven't been eating potatoes often enough this winter. I still have 1.5 bushels left.  Some will be this year's seed potatoes, but still. . . I need to put potatoes on the menu just about daily from now til April; they won't store much longer than that.

Speaking of the cellar, I think that is my favorite place to go shopping.  It has exactly what I need, with all the right ingredients and none of the bad things I don't want to eat.  It is my personal, customized grocery store.

Using It Up

Being frugal means not letting much go to waste.  I'd say not letting anything go to waste, but, well, experience has shown that it is pretty much impossible to never waste anything.

Because it has always been important to DH and I that our family be able to live on one income--so that I could be home with the kids as much as possible while they were growing up--frugality has been a requirement.  The less wasted, the more efficient our money is.  The less wasted, the less gets thrown out and the less we need trash removal services (ours is currently the lowest plan offered on a weekly basis).  The less wasted, the less we need to bring into our home.  It's a cycle.  I think some people call it 'the simple life', yet it is far from simple.  Being frugal can be pretty complex sometimes.

Through the years, there are some things that have just become a normal part of life for me.  Such as creatively using foods that most people would rather toss out because they no longer look grocery store perfect.  Withered apples that have been in storage too long.  Potatoes with growths from their eyes.  Bananas that are just about completely brown.  Carrots and celery that are a bit slack.

All are still perfectly edible, perfectly safe to ingest.  Brown bananas make the tastiest banana breads, muffins, and bars.  Withered apples can be sliced and cooked into fried apples or diced and made into apple coffee cake with no one being the wiser except the chef.  Potatoes with growths?  Peel (and you can actually plant those peels with the sprouts on them for a new crop of potatoes) and cook as usual.  Wimpy carrots and celery turn out fine in the soup pot.

Recently I bought some kiwi fruit (on sale, and with a coupon to boot!).  The first six got eaten quickly, as kiwi is somewhat of a treat at this little place here.  The remaining two sat in the fruit drawer of the fridge for over a week, looking like they were attempting to turn into kiwi raisins (Hmm, is there such a thing?  Future science experiment? Maybe I should Google it.) until I decided that apparently nobody in my house wanted to eat them anymore.

So, being the frugalista I am, I looked up recipes that called for two kiwi fruit.  And, by the magic of the internet search engine, I found exactly that.  Who knew you could make kiwi squares pretty much the same way you make lemon squares?  Not I.  Not until the other day.

Those two over aged kiwi got eaten as dessert in their new, baked form.  They were okay.  Not as tasty as lemon squares, but at least the kiwi got used up instead of wasted.

Creativity in the kitchen (and turning a blind eye to less than picture perfect fruits and veggies) is a must for a frugal lifestyle.

Sometimes We Think We're 20

It started as a beautiful sunny Saturday, with a high in the low twenties.  Gorgeous, calm, sparkly day.  I did some housework while DH headed outside to stoke the wood boiler.

Soon I heard a snowmobile start up, and when I peeked out the window, I saw him tinkering with the Bearcat and the dog sled.

The dog sled?  Yes, we own a dog sled.  We came into it in a roundabout way:  DD1 was fishing with her uncle (DH's brother) one summer when she was younger, and she spotted the dog sled submerged in the lake that the uncle lives on.  Several months later, DH's brother surprised us with it--he'd hauled it out of the lake and brought it down to this little place here, thinking we could rig it up to haul behind the snowmobile so the kids could all ride.  At that time DS1 was still in high school, and the rest of them were small enough to fit two on our single sled, so with the dog sled all four could go round the field at the same time.

Well, the snowmobile we had at the time didn't work well for that, something about the tongue of the sled and the track of the snowmobile. . .   So the dog sled sat beside the barn for several  a whole lot of years.

Until pretty much now, when DH decided to try hauling firewood in from the woods with the dog sled and the Bearcat.  You see, the wood pile has shrunk at an alarming rate the past six weeks.  What is left of it will last another month by our estimate, and we don't want to have to turn the propane heat on this season.  Knowing there are multiple stacks of firewood out in the woods ready for the burning, DH wanted to retrieve some of them while the snow is still good for sledding.  It is too deep for using the tractor currently, and our ten-day weather forecast is calling for a big, mushy, muddy warm up to head our way.  Not very conducive to getting that firewood up to the boiler unless we do it now with the snowmobile.

Anyway,  DH hooked the dog sled to the Bearcat and proceeded to haul four or five loads of firewood from the stacks we have scattered throughout our woods and that of the neighboring farmer to the north (who doesn't heat with wood, and has told us numerous times to help ourselves to the blow-downs and deadfall on his property.)  Turns out the Bearcat and the dog sled are a great team.

Well, it was such a nice sunny, temperate day that once I was done with my housework, I suited up and jumped on one of our other snowmobiles just to have some fun tooling around the fields for a while.  Actually, tooling around sounds much more sedate than what I was doing.  When you have 1200 foot straightaways and no traffic, well, you can open that baby up.

So anyway, I proceeded to have some fun that is probably inappropriate for a woman my age, and after nearly separating myself from the snowmobile at high speed a few times (mogul-like snow drifts), and nearly rolling it on turns a few others (whoops, a bit too sharp too fast), I decided to go back into the house and cool off.  Yes, cool off.  All that snowmobile hi jinks had me a bit sweaty.  Those machines aren't light and do require a little muscling sometimes.

Later in the day, after DH had hauled an extra few weeks worth of wood for the boiler, and had his own fun on the zippy red snowmobile, we decided to load the dog sled up with the chainsaw and our other tree pruning accoutrements, and head back to the woods to work on some of those wild apple trees.

We spent a good hour and a half--until the sun went down--working back there, including a bit of "don't try this at home" with DH and the chainsaw about eight feet in the air doing some topping out of a tree or two.

I swear, sometimes he forgets he's heading to his mid-forties and thinks he's still 20 years old.  Which is kind of ironic, because other days he is achy and feeling his age, complete with a touch of arthritis developing in the foot, ankles, and leg he broke when he was 20.  Proof, I guess, that men grow old, but never really grow up.

Me?  As for my behavior on occasion, I plead the fifth.  :0)

Anyway, Saturday was a nice day.  Productive, yet also really fun at times.  And neither DH nor I killed ourselves while acting half our age.

Challenge #6: Love Yourself

With Valentine's Day here, I'm sure we've all seen the commercials for things you can buy to show someone you love them.  Buy your wife this sparkly diamond pendant from Big Name Chain Jeweler and let her know how much you love her.  Order now these lovely dozen roses off this florist's website and get a discount rather than paying through to nose at your local florist on the 14th.  Ladies, buy this little bit of silk and colored lace, wear it, and let your man know how much you love him.  Buy these overpriced chocolates to let the special person in your life know how much you love them.  Make your reservations now at Le Pricey Ristorante for a steak dinner that weighs more than your man's clunky winter boots, and he'll love you forever.  Or, alternately, take your woman to Le Pricey Ristorante and get her drunk on overpriced wine and, well. . . .you can fill in the blank with your own fantasy.

We get it.  Valentine's Day means loving someone and showing it either by giving them a material item, or providing a service for them. Jewelery.  Flowers.  Candy.  Steak.  Alcohol.  Sexy apparel.  Love, love, love.

But what about you?  What if you don't have a person in your life who will buy you any of those things?  Or maybe you have a person who would love to buy you gifts if they could, but the money just isn't there right now.  Or maybe you have a person, but they just aren't a demonstrative romantic.

Often, that leaves us feeling bad.  Unloved.  We know better (or maybe we don't), but we still feel that somehow we are less worthy than those around us sporting gifts in red or pink wrappers this mid-February day.

So, this week's challenge is to Love Yourself.

If you don't, who will?  Do something nice for yourself.  It doesn't have to require spending money (but certainly can if finances allow!).  Loving yourself is more of a mindset than a material object.

Eat something you love.  Watch a movie you like.  Go somewhere you've wanted to go, but haven't because your spouse, or children, or friends weren't really all that interested in going there.  Pamper yourself--maybe a long soak in the tub, maybe curl up on the couch with a good book, maybe an appointment for a massage or mani/pedi if that's your thing.  Do your favorite hobby, or sign up to take a class in a new one you've been thinking of trying.  Listen to your favorite music.

Loving ourselves is often the most difficult task we face in life, so we push it aside and focus our attention on showing others how much we love them.  Yet if no one reciprocates, we are left feeling worthless, undeserving of love.

Which is really a bunch of bull.  Everyone is deserving of love, just by virtue of being alive.

Love yourself.  You are worth it.  Flowers or not.  Jewelry or not.  Steak or not.  Card with hearts and poetry or not.  Lingerie or not.  Love yourself.

Remember, you can't make anyone else happy; only they can make themselves happy.  Which also means that no one can make you happy, except you.

Love yourself.