One of my favorites on nachos or as a side to shredded pork tacos are pickled jalapeños. The heat of the peppers and the twang of the vinegar add vibrancy to rich, fatty dishes. But, my preferred brand (Mrs. Renfro’s, if you’re curious) goes for about 6 bucks a jar.

I picked up a pound of jalapeños over the weekend for about a buck fifty, and, with a little guidance from the always informative Ruhlman (and his new partner in crime Michael Symon), I’ve got a jar ready to go for under $2 and about 10 minutes of work. And I’m confident they’ll be better than store-bought.

• Empty plastic bottles - $0.00. Scavenged from recycling bins on my way to the nursery.
• Culinary herbs - $2.95 a piece. The cost less living than they do dead!
• Potting soil - $5.00.

With the bottom cut from the bottle, a little duct-tape to reinforce the holes I punched in each of the four sides, and a little struggling to get the plant fed through the neck, I have a reasonably elegant and space-saving upside-down hanger. Worried about drips? My mints, growing directly below, are happy to get the water.

Apparently, this technique works well for tomatoes, and the internet abounds with advice on upside-down planters.

• 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.

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, 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.

For a unique, flavorful, fast pizza sauce, combine tomato paste, our roasted shallot vinaigrette, and olive oil.

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.

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.