Frugality

I'm currently between jobs, which means I'm on a budget. Almost every time I've gone to the grocery store, I've looked longingly at a jar or can of tahini... but I haven't been able to justify buying one.

It hasn't really been an obsession or anything. If it was really that crazy, I'd just buy it. It isn't like tahini is ridiculously expensive. Still, I really like both hummus and baba ganoush. Both of these things require tahini, are easy to make, and are, other than the tahini, inexpensive.

Image by House of SimsToday, I was briefly in Snider's Super Foods and I saw a smallish jar of tahini for over $7. As I contemplated it, it occurred to me that I had an enormous container of roasted sesame seeds at home.

Sometimes, I am an idiot.

I tossed some of the sesame seeds into the microwave for about 15 seconds and then ground them up in my coffee grinder. Mixing that with a bit of toasted sesame oil gave me some great tahini. In about five minutes, there was some lovely hummus for lunch.

"Christina Davidson is a writer and book editor based in Washington, DC. She hosts so many parties and dinners, she would be perpetually broke if she hadn’t developed a method for entertaining the masses on the cheap. Drop her a line if you want to contribute your own tips or ideas for feeding many on very little."

http://www.feedthemasses.org/

Interesting!

Sourdough without the Starter
I'm intrigued by the idea. While I like the idea of keeping sourdough starter around, I've never done it. I'm not much of a baker. On the other hand, I do like sourdough...
from Fun Foods on a Budget!

Greek Nachos
Mark Bittman suggests a nachos variant using Greek ingredients: pita chips, a feta-yogurt topping, spiced lamb... The Greek restaurant that was a couple of blocks away from me (until it closed a few months back) made something very much like this. It was awesome.
from The New York Times

Sour milk
Many older recipes call for sour milk... Today, if we use them at all, we generally use fresh milk and add vinegar. The point of these recipes, though, was to use up milk that had gone bad...
from Frugal Hacks

...and some THINGS THAT SHOULD NOT BE

The Internet is full of things that should not be. If you aren't aware of this, you are sheltered... and fortunate.

My least favorite of late? The Beanzawave: A tiny desktop microwave oven that is powered by USB. It is branded to match Heinz's single-serving baked bean containers, which fit inside it. This is wrong.

My other annoyance? Twecipes. This is a made-up word used to refer to a heavily-abbreviated recipe sent via Twitter. Although I might very well reduce a recipe to its basics myself, I like comments and commentary with my recipes. Tell me what worked and what didn't... how many people it fed... how long it took to prep. A twecipe, to me, is little more useful than a note saying, "make some food."

Whole chickens are a great bargain. If you just roast a chicken and set it out on the table to be picked clean, though, you're probably only going to get a single meal out of a chicken (maybe with some leftovers). With a bit of planning, you can make a single chicken go much farther than that.
Original image by Kai Hendry
How? Consider some of these options:

1. Roast the chicken with extra vegetables, infusing them with chicken flavor. Serve these vegetables with (or as) another meal (Need some ideas to get you started? Chicken-infused root vegetables can be pureed with a bit of cream and some stock to make a wonderful soup. Tomatoes and onions cooked alongside chicken become the basis of an amazing pasta sauce.)
2. Only serve the chicken pieces that people will eat and strip the carcass of the rest of its meat. Use this leftover meat as an accent in another meal. You can add it to a rice or pasta dish, use it for burrito or enchilada fillings, make chicken salad with it, the list is long...
3. Save the chicken carcass (removing the meat first) and use it (along with the neck and gizzards) to make chicken stock.
4. Remove some of the chicken skin and use it to make a pureed sauce for another meal. Yeah, it sounds weird, but it works surprisingly well.

Alternately, if you have an egg-laying chicken, you can get hundreds of meals from it...

Do you have any other money-saving tips for using a chicken? Post in the comments, below.

I rarely have the patience for coupon clipping. I don't want to sift through advertisements and coupons for things I don't need. On the other hand, I like to take advantage of good deals. It occurred to me that there were plenty of coupon sites out there. Most of them, though, will force me to wade through store deals that aren't terribly useful for me. We don't have a Safeway or a Jewel or a Wegman's or a Superfresh or a Giant around here.

Then I found Champaign County Couponing, a blog that chronicles one person's adventures in couponing in my area. That's awesome. It focuses on online, printable coupons from local grocery stores. It prevents duplication of effort, which I really appreciate.

Now, with a little creative Googling, you may be able to find a similar blog that serves your area. Good luck!

Brokeass Gourmet started up about the same time as I began Kitchenhacker.net, and I can't say that I can think of a more timely food blog out there. Focusing on the 'triple threat' of food, wine, and sex; Brokeass is a blog for lean years that you don't want to feel lean. Their recipes and suggestions are aimed at leading you toward a more economical lifestyle that doesn't make you feel like your making any sacrifices.

There are three main ways to improve your cooking:

1. Improve your cooking techniques.
2. Improve your judgment in the kitchen.
3. Improve your ingredients.

Which one do you think is easiest?