Thrifty Thursday: Cooking in Batches

This is my second "Thrifty Thursday" post. I want to stay motivated as I work on our family budget--part of that motivation is sharing what I am doing. It can be discouraging to read frugal blogs and see how people feed their families on so little money--I feel like I am trying hard and yet I don't see those results. I am sensitive to the fact that many people are frugal out of necessity and don't have the option to "not succeed" in their attempts. The last thing I want to be is patronizing. Nonetheless, I feel like we are bleeding money around here and there are some expensive things we need to save for. I know there are people who want to reduce their spending but do not know where to start..so I am writing these posts for them and myself :) I hope you are inspired and if you can add any ideas of your own I hope you will comment below :)

As a stay-at-home-mom, I am very fortunate to have the time to bake and cook from scratch. I am really so grateful that I am home every day with my kids. The flip side to that is that I am home everyday, EVERY. DAY. with my kids!!

Let's just say that as much as I like preparing the meals that we eat, I do like a break from it now and again. Likewise, we are often out and about and returning home at meal time can be an ordeal if I am not well-prepared. It often leads to impulsive trips for take-out food as we leave town, or expensive ready made meals from the grocery store. On average it is about $40-50 to feed my family of four a meal of fried chicken or Chinese food. That leaves enough for Husband to take a lunch the next day, but is not comparable to a homemade meal that might feed us all for under $10.

So, to combat boredom with the every day meal preparation around here, and to be better organized for our busy times, I have begun cooking batches of food on Wednesdays. Last week I made an extra large batch of meat sauce and from it made a lasagna to freeze for another day.

 The remaining sauce was also frozen and can be served over pasta or combined with beans and spices to make a quick chili. If these two frozen dishes prevent us eating take-out twice in the next month, that is a savings of $80 or more. I estimate that the sauce cost me less than $7 because the hamburger came free from my parents' farm. Even with the cost of cottage cheese, lasagna noodles and mozzarella on top, these are some frugal options when we are in a hurry. I am so fortunate to have a small chest freezer and a stand-up freezer in which to store extra meals. For anyone interested, I have written about cooking in batches here and here.

Do you ever prepare food ahead of time? Can you suggest any meals that are quick to prepare when we are on the run?

BBQ Pizza Crust

We are enjoying some summer heat this week, although I know it can't last. We are silaging at the farm (the beginning of the end of summer every year). This morning I heard Canada geese flying over my yard. The days are noticeably shorter and from here on out we will savour each day of summer as though it is the last.

In the interest of not heating up the house this week, I opted to try my New York Style thin crust pizza on the BBQ. The crust recipe is from my America's Test Kitchen cookbook and we love it. The dough is made with cold water and stored in the fridge up to 3 days. While I am reducing our grocery spending I plan to keep the dough on hand for quick affordable meals. Once it became so hot I dreaded to use the oven, so I finally made pizza on my BBQ :)

Once the dough had come to room temperature on my counter, I heated my pizza stone in the BBQ. Of course the wind picked up and it was hard to keep the grill as hot as I liked but I lit the searing burner and rotated the crust to try for more even cooking. 

I spread the crust on lightly oiled parchment paper and transferred it to the baking stone. 

So good already! I also plan to use this recipe and method for homemade naan bread!

Once the bottom of the crust was crispy I flipped it and added our toppings. We had one with tomato sauce, pepperoni and mozzarella and the other with Greek and feta dressing topped with mozzarella and Asiago. I would add less cheese next time, as it can easily be a bit soggy in the middle. The kids loved their pizza on the BBQ, however, and J said it was the best pizza he ever had :)

There was dough left over so I cooked it lightly on both sides and froze it for another day. This should help us avoid those impulsive trips through the drive thru on our way home from town and will likely become a part of my weekly meal plan.

Delicious!!

Don't Call Him a Cowboy (until you've seen him ride)

30 degree heat, air conditioned cab, old country tunes and a view I love. 

I used to pack silage for my dad every year. It's the low-man on the totem pole job, but I've never minded. Since having kids I haven't been able to help more than a few hours at a time. But today I got to ride a tractor while my kids helped gramma with her chickens. I felt useful again, although I know I'm useful in other ways. I'm out of practice and my dad spent a bit of time correcting my work ;) but all in all, a day well spent!

Thrifty Thursday: Make Your Own Spice Mixes

For the next while I hope to blog consistently about budgeting and reducing my grocery spending. Ideally I will come up with a new thrifty topic to post on Thursdays. As I was thinking about the subject I realized I am almost out of oregano (which I didn't grow in my garden this year). I was making a lasagna to freeze (part of my effort to stop bringing home take-out after a long day in town) and remembered that I used to mix my own Italian blend of herbs. There are a multitude of recipes online (pinterest, allrecipes.com, etc) but most of them have some variation of the following herbs: equal parts thyme, oregano, savory, marjoram, basil, sage, rosemary. There were recipes that added other ingredients, if you want to go more complex, but I think I used to use marjoram, basil and thyme on their own as a substitute for oregano.

homemade gravy mix

I have posted before on making my own spice blends. I now make my own gravy mix, blackened seasoning for salmon or chicken, taco seasoning, and I have recently begun seasoning popcorn with spices I have on hand. Rather than buying pre-mixed packages of seasonings it makes more sense for me to buy the most common herbs and mix them as I need them. It is about $5 for the popcorn seasoning my son likes and it is soooo salty (not to mention anti-clumping agents and goodness knows what other preservatives). All I need to do is look on pinterest to find cheap, make-your-own blends and have fun experimenting.

The idea behind my Thrifty Thursday posts is to share some of what I'm trying here as I attempt to curb our spending. Creating your own seasonings might not save you a noticeable amount of money but it is a start, and I need to start somewhere!

What's Blooming

Bachelor buttons, so easy and pretty

So many weeds, so much trimming to do! July is a busy month with the kids. I'm looking forward to a slower August and more time at home. A return to our routine, if possible. I begin to feel a bit scattered when we are always on the run and it has been that way since June. Time to stop and smell the flowers!

Foraging in Our Backyard

Foraging for food is a concept that, to me, is becoming more trendy and mainstream these days. Even the term "foraging" is more stylish than "picking berries". When I was young it was something most farm women did out of necessity to keep sweet preserves throughout the winter months. We gorged on pies and bowls of fruit with cream and sugar before the long hot days of jam-making made the house too hot and the black flies insufferable. I should confess that I hated picking berries when I was young (much like I detested gardening....hmmm...perhaps my lifestyle is a return to the values my parents taught us back then). I am interested in learning to identify mushrooms so we can someday forage for them, but for now I'll settle for the saskatoon bushes we are lucky to have growing wild right here in our yard.

Saskatoon berries are similar to blueberries and this happens to be a great year for them. We are making the effort to freeze and preserve plenty so that we won't resort to buying blueberries fresh in the grocery store (they are tasteless anyways) or even the frozen bags that are trucked across the country. The few hours of work should save us money while also making use of wild, organic, local food that is literally on my doorstep.

So what to do when you have a glut of any particular crop? First I search through my granny's old recipe books, because they were compiled by prairie farm women who ate seasonally. A classic on the Canadian prairie is the Jean Pare Preserves cookbook, where I eventually chose the recipe for "fruit" as requested by our elderly neighbour. He described to me how his mother used to combine rhubarb and saskatoons in quart sealers.

I am not sure I got it right but I gave it a try and sent them over with Husband along with some saskatoon muffins (recipe adapted from my America's Test Kitchen Cookbook).

I also concocted a saskatoon berry syrup for the boys to have over pancakes.

I found a recipe for saskatoon sauce so I made that and froze the sauce to serve over cake this winter or use as pie filling or in muffins. All in all, I feel like we have made good use of the free wild berries on our land. I have 2 large ziplock bags of berries frozen already, and another 3 gallons of berries to do something with tomorrow. We haven't begun to put a dent in the berry supply, so I might do some jam for small gifts at Christmas. Have you got access to wild berries where you live? If so, what is your favourite way to preserve them?

Orange is the New Pink

We have been blessed with a "rain delay". It was 12C this morning with a driving rain. I just couldn't make my kids go swim in a lake. We got some baking done this morning but it was too wet for weeding. This afternoon I dropped the boys off at Gramma's house and headed for the library and to grab a few groceries (more on the books another day). 

While childless in town I couldn't help but stop at the fabric store. While at the store it began to pour rain. While it poured rain I got lost in stacks of feminine but not girlie prints. You see, I'm banking on it that a couple up and comers will be girls...I'm really hoping ;)

Nothing too baby...nothing cartoonish...a hint of retro and not too much pink. In fact, I found some oranges that I really liked and a lovely print that's meant to look like the old butterick patterns from the 60s. LOVE!! 

The lady in the orange dress so reminds me of pictures of my mom when her and my dad first got married. A much more fashionable time...

I have berries to pick, a yard to tame and one more day of swimming lessons. There will be pickling and preserving before much sewing can happen here. But it's almost enough to make me look forward to winter :)