Archive for Cooking

Money-saving tips for Thanksgiving

By Valerie

Friday, November 18th, 2011

Here are a couple of tips to save money this Thanksgiving.

When you’re chopping celery for your stuffing, save the celery stems and leaves, and use them when making stock with your turkey carcass. They have all the same flavor and are going to be strained out anyway.

Also, when you are peeling onions for your various dishes save the onion skins and use those in your stock as well. The onion skins add color to your stock.

Check out our previous post about poultry seasoning, (http://dollydomestic.com/605/poultry-seasoning/,) and our other post about food substitutions (http://dollydomestic.com/10/what-to-do-when-you%E2%80%99re-out-of-an-ingredient/)

This last tip would have been more useful several months ago, what I do is save the bread crusts that my husband and boys don’t eat. I put them in a bag in the freezer and use them for the croutons for my stuffing. Thanksgiving morning, I dice them up, and toast them in the oven.

Categories : Cooking

Tags : frugal food, Saving Money, Thanksgiving

Chicken Math – Is buying a whole chicken a better deal?

By Valerie

Saturday, September 17th, 2011

I admit it, I’m a sucker for short-cuts. I, even as frugal as I am, frequently buy boneless, skinless chicken breasts… but only on sale, usually under $1.80 lb.

A couple months back one of the local stores had whole fryers on sale for 59¢ a pound (gone are the days of those 39¢ birds, at least in my part of the country).

The chicken I bought was 4.99 lbs., total cost was $2.94

The cavity had been stuffed with extras, which really annoyed me, so I counted and weighed them. This ploy is fairly common and IMO is cheating on behalf of the stores. In my experience, all of the grocery stores in my area sell chickens like this.

There was a full pound of ‘junk’ in the cavity, including the tail, neck, and extra fat.

My chicken must have been some sort of a mutant, it had:

4 hearts
2 livers
2 gizzard sets

That came to 5.5 ounces in organ meats (which is included in the 1 pound referenced above). I figured I should weigh it separately, since it is actually edible (I generally cook it and give it to my dog). The other 10.5 oz was garbage. I suppose the TWO necks could be used in making stock…

The carcass itself, once I cut all the meat off was 12 oz. Carcasses, while not edible themselves are useful for making stock.

All in all, I got 3 pounds of meat from my whole chicken (this is not including the skin, wings, carcass or innards), so my final price for meat was $0.98 per pound, plus I had the carcass for soup and the organ meats for the dog.

Once you’ve cut up a few chickens, it’s not particularly challenging. If you’re not de-boning it it’s even faster. I can probably cut up a whole chicken in 10 minutes or less, and I don’t do it all that often. (I prefer to roast my birds whole and strip the meat off after their cooked.)

So I save 80¢ a pound, for 3 pounds, $2.40 for less than 10 minutes. That doesn’t seem like a very big return on investment, but when you extrapolate it out, it’s over $14 hour.

Categories : Cooking

Tags : price per pound for whole chicken

Use What You Have Cooking

By Valerie

Tuesday, March 1st, 2011

I know that most readers of this blog are couponers. And as couponers, we tend to stockpile food.
The question then becomes:

How do I find recipes that use the ingredients I have on hand?

I’ve have a few different approaches to solving this dilemma.

A list of recipes stuck to the side of my fridge that pretty much call for the ingredients I generally have in my pantry and freezer.
Use It Up Cookbook: Creative Recipes for the Frugal Cook
by Catherine Kitcho that I got from Amazon a few years ago (an okay book, but not exactly what I was hoping for)
Search recipe sites that let you use the ingredients as search items

I just read about Google’s foray into this… I’ve never seen it before, but I’m not sure if it’s new or not.

In the regular Google screen, search on a few ingredients you have on hand. Google recognizes these as food and a new option shows on the left side: Recipes. Click on it and you’ll see more options to further narrow down the results by selecting other ingredients. You can even choose to show only recipes that match your desired cooking time or calories per serving.

Nifty! Don’t you think?

(I’m in the process of working through 3 freezers worth of food — mostly meat & veggies, which *should* do wonders for my grocery bill in the next month or so.)

Categories : Cooking

Ready Set… Save – recipes that match local sale prices to the ingredients!

By Valerie

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

Simple and Delicious has changed to ReadySetEat, and I love what I’m seeing!

I clicked on the recipe in the newsletter and saw a nifty little ‘Sale’ tag on one of the ingredients. Clicked on it and… voilà! (we’ll see how that accent transfers to the web…) It showed me where, LOCALLY the item was on sale.

Go to the Dinner Made Smarter page where you can enter your zip code and select your stores.

Oh, and there are coupons on this site two: right now there’s a Hunts Pasta Sauce coupon for 40¢ off one can, and a LaChoy coupon as well.

Categories : Cooking, Saving Money

Tags : coupons, saving money on food

Homemade Sausage & How to Make It

By Valerie

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Homemade Sausage?

Have you ever tried homemade sausage? Making homemade sausage can save you money. The meat used is typically pork shoulder (Boston Butt) and it can be found on sale for less than $1 per pound. The other supplies and ingredients you will need are seasoning and casings (casings are optional if you want loose sausage to make patties or crumbles with). You will also need a meat grinder or a meat grinding attachment for your mixer.

I took advantage of a sale on Boston Butt (pork shoulder) a few weeks ago… it was under $1 a pound, so I figured I’d grab a couple and use one for BBQ pork and the other for Bratwurst.

In all honesty, my results were just so-so. I’ve got the technique down, but I’m not happy with the seasoning. My last batch (a year or so ago) I mixed up my own seasoning and it just wasn’t quite right, so I decided to buy packaged seasoning this time. On the last batch I also made the mistake of trimming my pork, which actually makes the sausage too dry. In fact several of the recipes I’ve read have you ADD fat to get the right texture and flavor. There aren’t exactly a lot of choices when it comes to bratwurst seasoning. I went to Central Meats on Kempsville Rd. and got my casings and a package of Legg’s Old Fashioned Seasoning. (both come with enough to make 25 pounds of sausage, I was only making 10, so I measured out the pro-rated amount) The casings and seasoning came to just over $9. You can order both casings and seasoning on Amazon.

Guess what? The packaged seasoning wasn’t any better than my own! The thing is, while it’s not bad, I’m looking for something that tastes more like Johnsonville Brats, and these ain’t it!

How to make sausage (homemade)

Making homemade sausage isn’t complicated, but you do need a meat grinder. Mine is the food grinder attachment for my Kitchen Aid mixer. If you’re gonna stuff the sausage in casings you need an attachment for that as well. I use the Kitchen Aid Sausage Stuffer Attachment.

Cut the meat into 1″ chunks, including the FAT
Grind the meat using a coarse grinding plate
Mix in the seasoning
Re-grind the meat using a fine grinding plate (if you’re not stuffing it, you’re done!)
Attach a correctly-sized sausage-stuffing tube
Grab an assistant and while one person stuffs globs of ground, seasoned meat into the meat grinder shoot, the other one catches the sausages and twists the segments. This can get a little wonky, best if the person with bigger hands and/or better coordination handles this part.

I like to let the sausage flavorings mull a bit before cooking. Usually a day in the fridge is fine. For the sausages I’m going to freeze, I pile them up on wax paper so they aren’t touching and ‘flash freeze’ so I can bag them later and still be able to only get out the number of links we’re gonna use for any particular meal.

I’m not going to post my bratwurst seasoning recipe, since I don’t think it’s that great. My Italian sausage and my breakfast sausage recipes are simple and excellent. Leave a comment or send me a message if you’re interested in those recipes. If someone has a Johnsonville-tasting brat seasoning recipe, I’d love to have it!