The Mexican Aisle

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Recently, I've started to become acquainted with the section of my Publix that houses the Hispanic ingredients. The bit that I particularly like right now is the selection of Hispanic spices. They come packaged in clear plastic baggies, which isn't the greatest thing in the world for freshness, but if you only need a couple tablespoons of something, it can be just what you're looking for. The variety is pretty good, and many of them come whole, like star anise, cinnamon sticks and nutmeg. I bought a little bag of pine nuts to make Lebanese stuffed eggplant this week. I only need a few tablespoons for the recipe. Why waste the money on a bottle?

And check out the difference on prices:

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These are the sesame seeds I bought to top an Asian coleslaw a few months ago.

From blog

And these are the ones I didn't buy. Holy cow. What a difference. And sure, you get more with the bottle. But how often do I use sesame seeds? They'd go to waste. And I don't have to traipsing all over town to find a place that sells high quality spices. It's amazing what you can find in your neighborhood grocery store these days.

It crackles even as we speak.

This is my third loaf of bread this week. We, uh, really like it. According to the recipe, the longer the pre-made dough sits in the fridge, the more the flavor develops. When I pulled this out of the oven, I was immediately hit with a waft of fresh sourdough and the sound of the crust crackling. While I will never call any of the loaves I attempted this week bad, this one is undoubtedly the best.

I have mixed up a second batch of dough, this time using a few cups of whole wheat flavor. I've done so much baking recently, I've run out of regular all purpose.

I got in a discussion about making your own bread with a co worker this week. With the economic downturn, we're all feeling the pinch and finding places we can save money. He's interested in making bread at home to save on groceries, which is an area many of us have been hit by rising costs.

So let's break it down. That loaf of bread, which could easily cost five dollars at a store was made from:

3 cups water Water
6 cups Flour
Salt
1 1/2 packs Yeast


Yeast costs about $3 for three packets. My recipe uses 1 and 1/2.
A 5 pound bag of flour costs about $3 as well. That's about 19 cups.

Salt and water are so cheap that the price is negligible.

My ability to do the math is breaking down now, but that recipe made three loaves this week. And my house smells awesome. If that doesn't inspire you to try it, I don't know what will.

Skip Week

This is a skip week for us grocery shopping. We have everything we need, except for a few paper products, so we skipped going to Publix today.

As I've mentioned before, I am a food stockpiler. Or hoarder, depending on how nice you want to be about it. Ever since we first got married, I've been tracking sales and clipping coupons. I have a frugal nature and I enjoy getting bargains.

The two sites I rely on for tracking deals are The Grocery Game and Coupon Mom. The Grocery Game is a subscription site. You pay ten dollars for eight weeks of one store. You can also subscribe to additional stores in your area and comparison shop. Each week, they publish a suggested shopping list based on forecast trends. You see, most grocery prices are on a three month cycle. If you only buy that item when it's cheapest, and buy a three month supply, you stand to save money. The Grocery Game is very user friendly. It breaks deals down into color coded categories. Green is free. Blue is for stockpiling. Black is on sale, but not the best deal.

More recently, I signed up for Coupon Mom. Coupon Mom is actually a locally run business. She lives in Alpharetta, I believe. So yay, Northside! Coupon Mom is a free service. She makes her money off banner ads on the site. They also allow you to compare different stores to see who has the best deals. They will list EVERY sale, no matter how minor. So it can be a little unwieldy to wade through.

My habit is to get up on Sundays and check these sites. I'll write down the sales I want on the back of an old envelope. Then I'll check my menu plan and see if I need additional ingredients. Then I'll check to see what I'm out of that I can't live without (toilet paper). I'll put the matching coupons in the envelope, then put it in my purse, so I'm ready to go.

The switch up lately has been fruits and veggies. We've been hitting the farmers markets on Saturdays now and getting fresh fruit and veggies there. In fact, I have even neglected to stockpile canned and frozen veggies like I normally do, because we simply haven't been eating them all summer. Since we've only got about six more weeks of farmers markets though, I need to start doing that again. But the only fresh produce we've bought at Publix in months is bananas. We're just getting a better quality, and better prices at the farmers markets. It's not worth it to buy them at the grocery store until they close for the year.

The draw back to using so many coupons, is that you end up buying tons of processed foods. The testimonials on these sites are always things like "I bought $700 worth of groceries for twelve cents this week!" I have never, ever had a receipt that good. Don't get me wrong, I have saved tons of money, but I think in order to get those very high savings, you have to be buying tons and tons of processed junk. And I'm working on cutting that out as much as I can. So I save less now, but I'm eating better. And i make up for it by making things like bread and soup stock from scratch when I can. A bag of flour costs about the same as a good loaf of bread, after all.

Anyways, the big, big payoff to stockpiling groceries being able to say "You know, we don't need to go this week" and just not spend that money. that's when I really feel like this pays off. We bought our produce yesterday at the Riverside Farmers Market around the corner. I had to go to Target today anyways, to take advantage of their big sale on school supplies (I bought 93 yellow pocket folders with brads for less than seven dollars! Whee! Um, I hope no one else needed them...) , so we bought our toilet paper and dish soap there and got pretty good prices on it. It just feels really good to not need to go grocery shopping.

If you decide to sign up for the Grocery Game, please put me down as the referal. My email is jennifer.liang@gmail.com. Thanks!

Menu Planning

I love planning, which is an odd trait for me to have, considering that I'm massively ADHD. I also love food, which means I adore menu planning.

I first started menu planning with my mom when I was in junior high. I was taking over cooking dinner every night, and we discovered that left without a plan, I either made the same thing every night for dinner, or I became paralyzed by indecision and didn't make anything at all. So every week, on Sunday, I'd sit down with mom and we'd figure out what I was going to cook each night. We'd go through the freezer and pantry, ask everyone what they felt like eating, and looked for new recipes I could try.

The weekly menu was a road map. It wasn't absolute. If I decided, for example, that peas would be a better side than corn, I was free to switch it up. If I decided I'd rather have chicken fingers tonight, I could move the Hamburger Helper to Tuesday. What it did, was give me an idea of what was available and how I could use it. It narrowed down my options. (And if you know anything about ADHD, you know too many options is a BAD thing for me to have!)

When I started cooking for Jimmy, I did the same thing. I'd write down all the days I planned to cook dinner, then fill in the meals. I'm a little more advanced now. I still start with going through the pantry and seeing what I have. Right now, since I do the farmer's markets on Saturday and I do my menu planning on Sunday, our meals are revolving around seasonal ingredients. Then I check the sales at Publix. I use both The Grocery Game and Coupon Mom to get the best deals. Sometimes I have a recipe I want to try. Other times, I'll have a craving, or my husband will.

Menu planning is a great tool. It helps me save money on groceries, not waste food, and avoid the "Well, what do YOU want to eat?" argument at 6 PM every night. It also helps me avoid making poor food choices. I know what I'm cooking, so I can make sure I'm avoiding processed foods. Right now my thing is trying to plan my meals to include as many plant species as possible. Weird, I know. But I like doing it that way, as opposed to counting fat grams or calories.

You may have noticed my absence recently...

School starts tomorrow, which means I've gone back to work. I've had a full week of pre-planning and Open House, and classes start tomorrow. I always get a little thrown by going back to school. I have to readjust my sleep patterns and eating habits to "normal" and so I tend to disappear from the internet for a week or two when ever this happens.

But I have piles of email to attend to before I can think about updating here this week. So instead, I'll link you to an awesome blog I found this morning via my Google Reader suggestions. It's called "Grocery Cart Challenge". It's written by a mom with four kids and a husband that she feeds on an average of $50 per week. Insane right? But she pulls it off each week somehow. Her blog is chock full of shopping tips, recipes, menu planning ideas, and household advice. Definitely check her out.

Eat Your Vegetables

Jennifershmoo over at Vegan Lunchbox updated today with a great article on how to get deals on healthy fruits and vegetables. She writes:

"With the cost of food so high, how can any of us afford to emphasize fresh, healthy fruits and vegetables? When times are tough it's tempting to stick with foods that are cheap, calorie-dense, and comforting (like starchy American junk food) instead of foods that have fewer calories and might go bad before you finish them."

Her tips are pretty common sense, and easy to follow. I recommend clicking through the link if you're interested.

Crockpotting for Fun and Profit- Maybe not profit

I feel like I've been really lazy here lately. Pretty much every meal is a potential blog entry, so I feel like I'm letting down all thirteen of my readers when I don't post about what goes in my mouth in excruciating detail every day. But that's just sort of insane, so I'll just stick to updating every couple days.

Anyways, this week I am mourning my beloved Crockpot. My crockpot is five years old this week (it was a wedding present and our anniversary is Saturday. Aww.), and I've used it almost every week since then. I think a Crockpot is an essential kitchen appliance, much like a chef's knife or a dishtowel. You just need one around. Mine shows how much I love it. The metal casing is stained. The knob broke off years ago, and last week, the handle crumbled in my hand when I tried to pick it up to move it. No joke. The plastic just crumbled.

Since I use it so much and it's become so battered, I've been hinting around that I'd like a new one for my anniversary gift this weekend. (Why yes, I DO think kitchen appliances are romantic. Why do you ask?) But so far, he hasn't picked up on it.

What do I use my beloved crockpot for? All manner of things. I make tacos, spaghetti sauce, curries, soups, stews, oatmeals and more. In fact, I discovered a new blog last week, A Year in Crockpotting, that's giving me all sorts of great ideas. (And some terrifying ones. You do not fry rice in a crock pot. It ain't fried rice if you do that.) My favorite thing to do, though, is to use it to cut out prep work for later. I'll explain in a bit.

For those of you who aren't familiar with a Crockpot, it's a big ceramic bowl that sits inside a heating element and cooks your food on a relatively low temperature for several hours. It uses less energy than the stove and doesn't heat up your kitchen in the summer, which makes it a decent choice if you're trying to save on energy costs. Crockpots are ideal for tougher cuts of meat, like pot roasts, briskets or chicken thighs. These also happen to be cheaper cuts. The collagen strewn throughout that makes them so unsuitable for roasting makes them perfect for braising. So again, it can help you stretch your budget.

Because of the long cooking times, you can start dinner in the morning before you leave, and come home and sit down almost immediately to a home cooked meal. That's the big reason why mine has gotten so much mileage over the years. When we first got married, I was a full time student at GSU. Then I had my student teaching. Then I was a first year teacher. You'd think teaching is this great career with the summers off and go home at three every day. Not your first year. I was easily doing 70 hour weeks. So for several years, if it didn't come out of a crockpot, I wasn't making it.

Last week, I did one of my favorite things you can do with a Crockpot, and made beans. Beans are great nutritionally. They are full of fiber and B vitamins. The canned beans, though, are very high in sodium. Dried beans are sodium free and much cheaper besides. So I buy dried beans in bulk, cook them in the crockpot, put them into baggies, and freeze them. I made black beans last week. I used the left over stock from the tocas on Memorial Day to cook them in, and they are quite good. Three cups went in the freezer that night, the rest went to a black bean soup over brown rice. I have a pound of pinto beans and what looks like a pound of white beans sitting in the pantry that I need to cook up and freeze.

Hmm. Maybe I should hint a little stronger.

Biofuel

You know, I had a gut reaction to biofuel a few years ago. Everyone was jumping on the ethanol bandwagon, claiming that corn based fuel will save us all. But it seemed so wrong. We EAT corn. Millions of people don't have enough to eat. Why would we put FOOD in our cars? Wouldn't it be easier to, you know, drive a little less?

According to a recent article in TIME, I'm right. "...biofuels pit the 800 million people with cars against the 800 million people with hunger problems."

We've all experienced the rising costs of fuel the last few years. And now we're seeing a rise in the cost of food. These things are not unrelated.