Category: frugality

I like to do Freezer Cooking, OAMC (Once a Month Cooking), whatever you want to call it. I like to cook. But the reality is that there are nights where I blasted well don’t feel like cooking. Maybe I’ve been on my feet teaching all day. Maybe I’ve dived into my writing to the point where I look up and realize it’s getting on to dinner time and I don’t want to take the time out to make a meal that night. Maybe the family’s just plain busy and it’s not realistic to dump the cooking duties on someone else. So, I like to have a few meals in the freezer for those times.

If you do a search for some variant on the keywords “Crockpot Freezer Cooking” you’ll find a new method for making meals for the freezer that has taken me two days to fall in love with.

What you need: A slow cooker, some recipes you like, some gallon freezer bags, and a freezer. (And you have to like crock pot meals. If you don’t, stop reading now. This isn’t for you).

This is a psycho easy way to have meals prepped to pop in the crock pot of a morning. My family and I prepared about a month’s worth of dinners this way and it took us an hour and a half from start to cleanup. If you don’t have a sous-chef you might want to tack on another half an hour to 45 minutes, but that’s about it. Still, you’re looking at under three hours of prep time for a month’s worth of dinners. This is nothing like the all-day cooking sessions for classic OAMC.

When you do classic OAMC, you cook meals in advance, thaw them and then heat them up on the day you want to serve them.

With Slow Cooker Freezer Cooking, you only do the prep work and store the uncooked meals in the freezer to thaw and toss in the crock pot the morning before you want to serve it. Just prep everything like you would to pop it in the crock pot, but put it in a freezer bag instead, and freeze it flat. Yes, it’s that easy.

One thing with this cooking method, you’re gonna wanna label everything, and add any special instructions. I don’t freeze most of these meals with a lot of additional liquid. So if you need to add stock, or coconut milk or something like that when you cook it, write those instructions on the bag. Don’t count on remembering it.

If you’re a crock pot aficionado, you probably already have dozens of recipes. Don’t sweat it, they’ll work using this method. I do recommend browning the hamburger so you can drain the fat for any meal using ground beef, but other than that, no real cooking in advance is necessary.

If you need some recipes, these are some that I used for my last session. They fit in a three quart slow cooker, and will usually provide a couple of meals for my three-person family. (Why yes, I do freeze leftovers for another meal!) If you’re using a six quart crock pot due to a larger family, you’ll want to double these recipes, but they won’t fit in a single gallon freezer bag.

White Chili

½ lb. Dry white beans, cooked (or two 15 oz cans)

1 lb. chicken breast, diced

½ c. chopped onion

2 T chopped garlic

1 T oreganof

1 T Cumin

2t. black pepper

1 can chopped green chili peppers

Put all the ingredients in a gallon freezer bag. Freeze.

Defrost in the fridge for 12-18 hours, put in crock pot, add ~1 quart chicken stock. Cook 6-8 hours on low, serve with salad.

Chicken Curry

1 lb chicken breasts, cut into small pieces

3c. potatoes, diced

1 c.  plain yogurt

1/4 c.  raisins, ground

1/4 c. cashews, ground

1 c. peaches, mango, or apricots, diced

½ c. onion, diced

3T garlic, chopped

3T fresh ginger, chopped

4 T curry powder

Put all the ingredients in a gallon freezer bag. Freeze.

Defrost in the fridge for 12-18 hours, put in crock pot, add 15 oz can coconut milk. Cook 6-8 hours on low, serve over rice.

I’m on rather an economy drive lately, but I like to eat well.

I’ve discovered a way to save a whole bunch of money on meat.  In my area, a boneless, skinless chicken breast runs over three bucks a pound when not on sale.  Even on sale you’ll never see it for less than about $1.99/lb.

I can pretty much count on one of the area grocery stores having a sale on whole chickens for between $0.89 and $0.99/lb most weeks.  Now, you might say that you get sick of a whole roast chicken all the time, and fair enough.  Sure, I do the thing where I roast a chicken, save some of the leftover meat for chicken salad, then make Garbage Soup out of what’s left every now and then, but it’s not all you can do with a whole chicken.

One thing I’d never done was cut up a whole chicken into its various parts.  If I was going to use the parts, I bought the chicken cut up.  Noticing how much cheaper the whole chicken often is, I decided I needed to learn to cut up my own.

I tried it yesterday, just because, well, I like learning new things.[1] I watched a video on Youtube about it, then on my very first try it took me something fewer than five minutes.  It might not be as cool or as pretty as a professional can do it, but it’s a large enough money savings, I’m all good doing this.  Yeah, it’s a little yucky, but I feel like if I’m willing to eat meat at all, I need to suck it up on the yucky anyway and get real that I’m eating an animal.

Now, not everything I make uses chicken with bones in.  In fact, a lot of it doesn’t.  Next time I find a good sale on chickens, I’m going to learn to debone the chicken.  I’ve been given to understand it’s fairly quick and easy.  I think Elliot Yan claims to be able to do it in 18 seconds, so I’m sure I can do it in a couple of minutes.  The next time I buy a chicken, I’ll debone it and possibly even portion it out already cut up for stir fries.[2]

I’ve seen people talk about the waste involved.  We don’t eat the bones! Who eats the wings?

No we don’t eat the bones, but I cook with chicken stock a whole bunch, and not just soups.   Rice made with chicken stock is delicious.  Beans and rice, jambalaya and many other dishes that use water have a richer flaver, and are more nutritious[3] with the stock anyway.  Bones and chicken backs make fine, tasty stock.  So, no, it’s not wasted.  I just save them in a bag in the freezer for the next time I’m going to make stock.

As far as the wings?  Don’t you ever have parties?  Buffalo wings, and variations thereof are pretty popular ‘round here.  I’m saving mine for the next party I throw.

It does take some time to cut up and repackage a whole chicken, but it doesn’t take that much and it’s not even hard.  If you’re looking for a way to save money on meat, I have to encourage you to give this a try.

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[1] And next week, it might be a new programming language.  C’mon guys, I wasn’t kidding when I said it was my job to learn stuff then talk about it.

 

[2] Which will make my son happy for the nights he cooks.  He detests cutting up chicken.

[3] If you’re worried about calcium intake and are not big on dairy, this is another great way to get your calcium. When you make homemade stock, it leeches from the bones.

I’d mentioned that it is important to have a freezer inventory if you’re doing Freezer Cooking, Once a Month Cooking or the like.   You’d think you wouldn’t.  Surely you’ll remember all that work you went to when putting up that lasagna or soup, wouldn’t you?

Friends, you won’t.

Here’s a truncated example of the freezer inventory system I have.  I have a chart (made it in Excel, don’t snigger) listing the meals I make.   I have up to four check boxes for how many full family meals I have frozen.  An empty space means there’s no meal of that sort frozen.  A diagonal line sloping up to the right means I’ve added a meal.  The crossed line means I’ve used that meal, so it’s gone now.

This gets posted on the fridge, so that I can keep the list updated easily rather than wasting time and paper printing up a new one every time I add food to the freezer or heat up a frozen one.  Anyone can draw a diagonal line.  Anyone can heat up dinner, too.   This is a good system if more than one person in the house is serving meals.

I’d posted a survey in my LJ about cooking and cooking habits. It’s probably pretty skewed, as anyone who reads my stuff is going to be interested in cooking. They’d soon stop reading out of boredom, otherwise, as household management and cooking is a definite interest of mine.  (We all have to eat and live somewhere.  How about systems to streamline things so you’re comfortable?)

It got me to thinking.  When we go to the beach, we stay in a couple of condo units that are basically a large two-bedroom apartment, complete with a reasonably decent basic kitchen.    When we go, we cook in rather than eat out.  With 6-12 people together, restaurants are far, far too expensive to be practical for a week’s stay!

This year, my mother did all of the cooking, but one meal my brother made.  *wince*  I had a project due when I got back, but you know, I really should have made at least one or two dinners. (Don’t let me get out of cooking a couple of meals next year, Mom).

Here’s the thing — I learned about prepping ahead from Mom.  Since she was doing the cooking, this means that meals were often put on to cook slowly in the oven, or simmer slowly on the stove while we enjoyed an afternoon at the beach.  Come five or six in the evening, we’d come up to the unit and there would be a heavenly smell wafting through the corridors.  It brought comment from many of the other people who weren’t making dinner.  They would be going out, or calling in for pizza or some such.

I used to wonder why in the world this place didn’t have  a crock pot as standard equipment (I’d be lost without mine!) when I realized that 80% of the people there wouldn’t use them.

Honestly?  I’d always chalked it up to people not wanting to cook on vacation, rather than a daily habit in their regular lives.   When I was growing up, one cooked dinner most nights.  Mom worked a couple of evenings a week for a little while.  I was old enough (12 or almost 13 when she started), so I cooked.  This was a family tradition.  When she was a teenager and her mother worked full time, Mom was expected to get her brother and sisters together to make sure dinner was on the table when Nanny got home¹.  Cooking dinner was what one did. Working mom or not, somebody was cookin’ dinner.

But I have a question:  If you don’t cook, how in hell do you afford to feed your family?  I am hardly going to claim to be the world’s most frugal kitchen manager, mind you.  My family of three spends about four hundred dollars a month on groceries, so you can’t say I’m exactly cookin’ cheap.  (Those fresh veggies in the bento do add up!)  I don’t shop at dented can stores, I don’t clip coupons (it’s usually for pre-processed stuff I don’t use, anyway).  The only really frugal things I do are to look for cheap cuts of meat, eschew canned beans in favor of dry and cook from scratch for the most part.

I saw an advertisement in the grocery store bragging:  Meal for Four for Under $15! as if this were some sort of wonderful thing.  I started ranting at my shopping partner (I think it was my son that time), “Well, I would bloody well hope so!  Good God, what are people serving?”

Wondering if this was a knee-jerk response from sitting on my high horse, I got out my price book when I got home, and figured the price per serving for some of  my usual recipes.  Understand that this reflects the fact that I don’t pay more than $2.50/lb for meat.  I do watch sales. I don’t buy organic food hand-raised by virgin elves under the full moon, either, okay?  Making dinner for four usually costs me between $5.00 and $8.00.  How can you afford to spend much more on that?  My household isn’t poor, but we’re hardly wealthy, either.  How can you afford to spend fifteen bucks (or more, apparently) on a typical weeknight dinner?

If I didn’t cook from scratch, there’d be no way I could pull that off.

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¹Stories about her explosive reaction if dinner were not ready when Nanny got home are now stuff of family legend.

 

in experimenting with the idea of trying to work out a way to eat on a buck a meal, I was doing some calculations on food prices.  I’d always heard beans and rice were a cheap meal.  I often wondered about that and did the math.  You know, if you make it from dried beans, you’re looking at about a $1.20 for a pretty filling meal. That’s figuring in onions, garlic, peppers, spices and all that smack.  I think beans and rice are going to show up in the menu rotation a lot more often. At least, unless someone in the household complains too much.

I then did the calculation on my typical breakfast.  This wasn’t looking for sales, but simply what I got.  I usually have steel cut oats, nuts and some sort of dried fruit.   The oats themselves are about .21/serving.  The nuts and dried fruit (if I’m not eating raisins and I usually don’t.  Dried berries or apricots are GOOD) drive the price up to somewhere around $1.75/serving.   I think I need to get my lazy ass to a bulk food store at some point because I know I can do better than  that.   Still, not too bad when compared to the Starbucks liquid dess^h^h^h^h^h drinks so often favored by the rushed among us.

Still, it was sobering to realize that’s still considerably over a buck a meal.

I’ve really become distressed lately at this idea that cooking/eating healthily is expensive.

Let’s give Ramen a score of ~$0.50 a package. (I’ve seen it on sale for less, yes)

For $.50 a serving, I can have (according to this week’s local grocery story circular):

• Two Apples, or
• A serving and a half of fresh broccoli or
• Two servings of rough cut oatmeal or
• Five ounces of chicken (if I’m willing to cut it up rather than buying pre-cut parts, and that’s gonna keep you full longer than the fucking ramen)
• Four servings of brown rice or
• A serving of flavored yogurt or
• Four ounces of grapes (which is a lot of grapes)

Sorry, I don’t buy that a crap diet is cheaper. I’ll grant that there are plenty of people who don’t understand how to make a menu, or how to use leftovers well, or how to employ home-made soups and a freezer to prevent product waste, or don’t understand how to use fat healthily to promote saiety (read: Olive oil is your friend). But I don’t buy the idea of a crap diet being cheaper.