Frugal kitchen tips
March 3rd, 2008
The Urban Vegan has a helpful guide to money saving tips in the kitchen. She mentions baking your own bread, freezing cooked beans, using leftovers as well at 22 other helpful tips. My top picks from the list are:
- Buy in season - This is a huge, huge money saver, when you make your meals based on what’s cheap/available vs. what a particular recipe calls for you can save enormous amounts of money
- Pack a lunch - This should go without saying, the lunch you pack is going to be fractions of the lunch you can buy, and you can make it healthier
- Stock up - savings for buying in bulk are significant, if you run out of room in your cupboards start storing cans under your bed (you’re not using that space anyway)
- Avoid bottled water - Even if you dont care about the environmental impacts of bottled water, it’s absurdly expensive, you’re much better off getting a water filter and filling up a reusable water bottle. Further most bottled water is most likely not any cleaner, more sterile or safer in any way.
- Cut down on the Lattes - This one wasn’t on there, and of course it’s your choice, but brewing coffee at home can save a bundle, and with lattes is easy to mimic the majority of lattes you can buy. Just do the math for a second, (1 $3.25 latte/day×(5 days/week)×(52 weeks/year)=$845 year on coffee. That doesn’t include a tip. You could buy 2.5 complete organic locally grown fresh butchered pigs for that much money.
This is Why Your Fruit Salad Sucks
February 8th, 2008
If you’ve ever wondered why citrus at restaurants always tastes better and looks prettier than yours at home, this is why. Seriously, though, it’s called supreming, and it’s worth the small effort.
NY Times 101 Simple Appetizers, and a Brief Treatise on Olives
December 19th, 2007
The New York Times has posted a great list of 101 Simple Appetizers that can be prepared in under 20 minutes for you holiday parties.
Quite a few of the recipes call for olives — which you should never, ever buy at the grocery store, unless your store has a particularly good olive bar and you’re short on time. Buying canned or jarred olives at the grocery store is somewhere below putting your money into a little pile and burning it for warmth on the scale of fiscal sanity. Any moderately-sized community will have at least one Greek or Mediterranean specialty store, and any respectable Greek or Mediterranean store will sell gallon jars of good-quality olives for under $20. Compare that to the $8 you’ll spend on a 8 or 12 oz jar at the grocery store. Do the math — I’ll wait. Mmmhmm….convinced?
No Knead Bread, Revisited
December 6th, 2007
As one of the billions of people now enjoying New York Times’ (in)famous No Knead Bread on a semi-regular basis, Cook’s Illustrated’s recent revisions piqued my interest. If you don’t have a subscription to Cook’s Illustrated, you can get a rundown of the changes here.
No Knead Bread, photo licensed under CC courtesy of Taryn Domingos.
Essentially, Cook’s Illustrated addresses the major issues people were having — namely, the dough falling during transfer to the pan, and lack of flavor. Additional salt seems to help address the latter, but the article suggests substituting small amounts of vinegar and beer into your liquid to give the bread some additional complexity.
They also suggest several small procedural changes, including 15 seconds of kneading. Heresy, I know.
Pantry Essentials: Tubed Tomato Paste
November 30th, 2007
The easiest way to get great tomato flavor into your dishes in the winter when good, fresh tomatoes aren’t available is tomato paste. I never ended up using the canned stuff on a regular basis because it tends to be overly acidic, and because I never could use an entire can. Luckily, tomato paste is available in smaller quantity and (much) better quality in tubes — similar to travel-sized toothpaste tubes. While you end up paying more per ounce than canned paste, it’s a lot tastier, a lot more useful, and always on hand when you need it. While the tubes will probably run you $4-5 dollars at your grocery store, you can get a supply (12 tubes) at Amazon for under $25, which works out to under $2 a pop.
For a unique, flavorful, fast pizza sauce, combine tomato paste, our roasted shallot vinaigrette, and olive oil.
Cheap Source for Molecular Gastronomic Compounds
November 14th, 2007
Although I’ve long derided, snickered at, and generally disparaged the trend towards foams, airs, and wholly unnatural emulsions in fine cooking, the mad scientist in me has finally won out (with a little prodding), and I’ve set out to begin experimentation.
Unfortunately, the specialized emulsifiers, thickeners, and gelifiers employed in this style of cooking are often prohibitively expensive. Texturas (Buy), one of the most popular product lines, starts at $30 for the cheaper compounds on up to $100+.
Now the good news. In the bulk spices section of my local organic co-op, I was able to buy enough lecithin, agar agar, and xanthan gum to keep my experimenting for months — for about $8. These and related products are sold as nutritional supplements or as alternatives for people with food allergies. While the co-op would be the last place most folks might expect to find these additives, it’s an affordable way to get your feet wet.
Intro to Freezer Savings
November 12th, 2007
On the heels of Ultimate Guide to Freezing Food comes Wise Bread’s Intro to Freezer Savings.
One of the most interesting and useful techniques outlined is the use of ice cube trays to freeze easily portioned amounts of just about anything — stock, sauces, purees:
I’ve been freezing lots of pumpkin puree in cubes to use for homemade pumpkin vinaigrette and pumpkin lattes.
More freezing wizardry to come.