Cheap Beef

Meat can be intimidating when you're on a very tight grocery budget. I have learned to appreciate the value of a whole chicken by stretching it over several meals, but even then, chicken is still expensive. While ground beef is definitely the cheapest way to get some red meat into your menu, I am learning to think ahead and make other cuts a good value.

Sirloin tip is a large cut of lean beef roast. If you get it on sale, it can actually compare to the price of ground beef! When you see a sirloin tip for a great price, BUY IT! You can cut it into cubes and use it in place of stew beef. Because it is so lean, it's best to cook it slow, so I wouldn't recommend it for stir-fries. Some store butchers might be willing to grind it for you and you'd have some lean ground beef at a great price. However you decide to cut your roast, package it into smaller portions (approximately 1lb. each), and freeze them.

My favorite way of using this meat is to place it in the slow cooker as soon as I get home, then shred it for BBQ Beef On Buns!

What To Do With Leftover... Granola Bar Crumbs

DON’T THROW OUT YOUR CRUMBS!

I dump all granola bar crumbs, or super crumbly granola bars, into my granola bin! Even if a granola bar recipe flops, it’s usually still a perfectly acceptable granola that we can eat with yogurt! And if I’ve made granola bars with chocolate chips, it’s a bit of a treat, too!

BBQ Beef On A Bun

4 buns
2 cups shredded cooked beef roast
1 cup barbecue sauce

Split the buns and lightly toast them. (Butter them, if desired.) Place the beef and the barbecue sauce in a small saucepan and place it over medium heat. Stir well and cook until the beef is heated through (3-4 minutes. Alternatively, place the mixture into a casserole dish, cover, and bake in the oven at 350* for approximately 30 minutes. Spoon the barbecue beef over the buns. Serve immediately.

Big Beef Roast

1 beef roast (4-5 lbs.)
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
14 oz. beef broth
1 large onion, peeled and thinly sliced

Trim fat from roast. Place roast into a 5-quart or larger slow cooker. Sprinkle with seasonings and rub them into the roast with your hands. Pour the broth around the roast. DO NOT POUR IT OVER THE MEAT! Separate the onion into rings and add them to the pot. Cover the slow cooker and cook on low until the beef is fork-tender (8-10 hours).

Turn off the slow cooker but leave the beef in the pot. Using two forks, carefully tear the beef into shreds. Stir the shredded beef well to mix it with the liquid in the pot. The cooled beef can be refrigerated or frozen for use in future recipes.

Using Flyers To Plan Your Menu

Using the weekly grocery flyers to plan my menu has been a key to keeping my grocery bill down. After first “taking inventory” of what I already have on hand, the next step is to look at what the sales are that week. For me, I get my weekly flyers twice a week – on Thursdays and on Saturdays. My Sobey’s flyer comes on Thursday and my Superstore flyer comes on Saturday. As I’ve mentioned before, I have found these two stores to be the best bang for my buck. There are rare exceptions, and I’m always scouting for better deals, but for now, this is my method.

Flyers can be tricky. Generally speaking, the items advertised on the front and back pages of the flyer are the best deals. Inside the flyer, there are sometimes other sales and good deals, but the front and back pages are the best. Also, flyers often list items with the price, leading you to believe that it’s on sale, when in fact, it’s the same price as it always is! This is one reason why it’s a good idea to keep track of what you’re spending for your usual items. Some people use a price book for this. I have yet to start mine, but I plan to do that in the near future. You can do a search online for pricebooks and come up with a wealth of information.

Anyway, after perusing the flyers and getting a good idea of what will be on sale when I do my grocery shopping, I plan my menu using as many of the sale items as possible. For example, if canned tuna is on sale for a great deal, you can bet we’ll be having tuna sandwiches and probably at least one other tuna meal that week. Also, if you have enough room in your grocery budget, when you come across a really amazing deal, stock up on the item if it’s something you use regularly.

For Canadians, www.flyerland.ca has most of the flyers you would need to plan your grocery shopping wisely. There are all the major grocery store flyers on that website. Make use of them!

Another advantage to keeping tabs on the flyers is that you learn the patterns of the sales. I’ve noticed that many of my regular items are on sale in approximately 6-week cycles. This is helpful because I can then buy 6 weeks worth of the item when it’s on sale, if I have the room in my budget, enabling me to never pay full price for that item. It’s also helpful because I can wait for an item if I know it will be on sale in a week or two. If I’m wanting to buy chicken legs and I know they are on sale in two weeks, I won’t plan meals that use chicken legs until the sale week arrives.

Practice using flyers and save!

How To Make FREE Soup!

There are two methods I use to make soup at no extra cost.

1. I keep a large ziplock bag in my fridge. Throughout the week, all vegetable peelings, vegetable ends, etc. get tossed into the bag. The bag usually has a lot of carrot peel, potato peel, celery ends and leaves, onion peels and ends, garlic peel and ends, etc. (See note below.) I sometimes also have a jar in the fridge that I use to save all the vegetable cooking water from the week. If I cook frozen peas, I drain the cooking water into my “soup jar.”

At the end of the week, dump all your “savings” into a large pot. Cover it all with water and simmer it slowly for a few hours. You could also put it into a slow cooker and cook it for 4-6 hours on high, or 8-12 hours on low. Strain it and save the broth. This is the base of your soup.

Now you have a few options:

-Freeze the broth to use as a base for soups that you have recipes for, or make up your own.

-Turn it into a soup immediately by adding in cooked rice or lentils or beans or WHATEVER, and chop up some fresh veggies and add some seasonings and make a whole new soup.

-Use this liquid for the second Free Soup option below…

2. I have two or three empty ice cream buckets in my freezer. These are the big ones – 4L, I think. One is for chicken, one for beef, and if I have a third, I use it for ham or veggie. Whenever there are leftovers at the end of a meal, I put them into the appropriate bucket. If we have chicken stir fry and there are leftovers, they go into the chicken bucket. If we have shepherd’s pie with ground beef, those leftovers go into the beef bucket. Whenever I add new leftovers, I make sure they are covered with water or broth or leftover cooking liquid from veggies. Then the bucket goes back into the freezer. When a bucket is full, I let it thaw and pour it into my big soup pot. We reheat it and taste it. Sometimes we need to add some salt or other seasonings to give it more flavor, but usually, it is the most delicious soup ever!

These soups are different every time. But it’s like a taste adventure! And the best part is, it’s FREE! You’re making soup out of things you would have normally thrown away. For us, these soups are usually enough for two meals each. TWO MEALS FOR FREE!

Waste not, want not!

NOTE: It is recommended that you make sure your trimmings and leftovers are washed and relatively dry before putting them into your storage bag or container. This ensures that they stay as fresh as possible and don't go bad before you're able to make your soup. 

Also, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts generally do not make a good stock.

Outsmarting Grocery Pricing Trickery

- Pay very careful attention in the produce section. Notice the difference between prices listed as $_/each and $_/lb. Today, I had one leek on my grocery list. In the produce section of the store, leeks were all bundled in groups of three. Most people assume that the price posted above the leeks is for the whole bundle. NOT SO! The price posted was per pound! I only needed one leek, so I took apart a bundle and placed only one leek into my cart. And so I paid for only the one leek that I wanted! And I paid much less than I would have for the whole bundle, which I probably would have ended up forgetting about in my fridge and wasting! And one of my key mottos for keeping the grocery bill down is “Waste not, Want not!”

- Make notes on your grocery list about what the exact sale item is (while looking through the store flyers). There are two main reasons for this:

1. At the store, you might find that what you thought you could buy on sale, is not always as it seems. For example, this week’s store flyer told me that Primo brand pasta was on sale for $1 per 454g package. With careful planning, and on a super tight budget, one might put one pasta package on the grocery list. However, when I arrived at the pasta aisle, there was not a single package of pasta smaller than 900g. The price of the 900g package WAS $2.00, which works out to the same thing as $1.00 per 454g, but the flyer was deceiving.

2. Sometimes, if you get to the store before they have posted the sale prices, you won’t know which brand is the one advertised at the sale price. Today, cans of tuna were listed in the flyer for $1 each. When I got to the store, they hadn’t posted the sale prices yet. There were three brands of tuna to choose from. I have been paying close attention to this store and its sales for a long time, so I had a pretty good idea of which cans were on sale,  but sometimes they get tricky. Other times, it might be only a specific type of product. One week, canned tuna was on sale, but it was only the cans that had garlic and herbs in them! Sneaky, sneaky!

How To Cook Dried Beans

This is so simple.

1 part dried beans (black, pinto, kidney, etc.)

3 parts water

Put in your crockpot and heat on low overnight. Approximately 10 hours. Done. It’s that simple. Once you’ve got these beans cooked, you can use them in any recipe calling for beans!

You never need to buy canned beans again. This one thing alone can save you a LOT of money over the course of a year. I have often found very large bags of dried beans and legumes in the ethnic section of the grocery store for a lot cheaper per unit than the regular size bags in the bean section.

I like to make a massive batch and then freeze them in smaller portions in ziplock bags.

*NOTE: Different types of beans have different cooking times. I find chickpeas cook longer than kidney beans, for example. Check your beans after 8 hours, if you can. If you end up cooking them too long and they're really mushy, never fear! Use them for your own homemade refried beans!

Saving On Snacks For Kids

Cut It Up

Whenever I serve my kids snacks, I always portion it out. If I’m serving something like trail mix, I put it into little cups that hold exactly 1/3 cup. If I’m serving fruit, I always cut it up and divide it between the kids. This is a huge savings because, if I send them to get an apple, they each take one, and two of them leave at least a third of the apple around the core and then throw it away, believing it’s done! That’s two-thirds of an apple wasted! Instead, I slice two apples and divide them evenly between my three kids and add some cheese or nuts or a glass of milk. No waste and everyone’s satisfied!

This probably sounds like a lot of work, particularly if your kids are all still really young. Believe me. I’ve been there! Here’s another idea for you:

Sort It Out

Get a plastic platter with compartments and an airtight lid. I got a nice, big, round Tupperware one from a garage sale. Actually, I think I got mine for free. On the day you do your grocery shopping, take a few extra minutes to fill each compartment with something different – chopped veggies, cheese cubes, fruit (cut it up and soak it for several minutes in a water/lemon juice mixture), nuts, dried fruit, granola bar bites, pita chips, etc. If you want dip, you can make veggie dip or yogurt fruit dip or Happy Apple Salsa or hummus or whatever. Store this in the fridge. When snack times roll around during the week, give each of your children a small bowl or container and let them choose what they put into it. Then close the container up and put it away immediately. Don’t refill the container until it’s totally empty. My kids love the weeks I do this. And they get a nice variety of snacks and they are all healthy! It’s also super easy.

Make It A Combo

I have also found that my kids don’t get hungry as often when I combine their snacks properly. If we’re having fruit or veggies, I always pair it with some sort of dairy or protein. Apples and cheese or a glass of milk, dried fruit with nuts (trail mix), raw veggies and yogurt dip or hummus, etc. If I give them just an apple, or just a bunch of carrot sticks, they’re hungry 20 minutes later!

Be Sneaky

If your kids are asking for a snack and it’s really close to mealtime, give them some raw veggies. They’ll eat them because they’re so hungry, and you don’t have to worry if they don’t eat their veggies at supper! It’s a win-win!

Save Your Butter Wrappers

I never throw away a butter wrapper. I neatly fold it into a rectangle about 2.5 inches by 1.5 inches. I have a nice stack of these in my cupboard. I use them to grease cookie sheets, pizza pans, bread pans, or cake pans. It’s a little awkward using them to grease muffin cups, but it is possible. I just prefer to grease my muffin cups with nonstick cooking spray, or just using my fingers and oil or butter. No butter is wasted in this house! Not even the stuff stuck to the wrappers!

I Love My Rubber Spatula

A frugal cook must own a rubber spatula. A frugal cook must use the rubber spatula faithfully. When I began to use my spatula, I was fascinated by the amount of extra food I was able to come up with! Take muffins, for example. I used to make a muffin batter, scoop it into the muffin cups, and just scrape the batter bowl as best I could with my wooden spoon. Little did I know, that even when I did my most thorough job with the spoon, there was still often enough batter left for one more full muffin, or at least enough to make my muffins a little bigger. The same holds true for cookie dough, pancake batter, and any number of things you might concoct in your kitchen. It's amazing with big jars of peanut butter or mayonnaise. Take out your trusty rubber spatula and develop a new and lasting friendship!

Reviving Limp Celery

For years I have thrown out celery when it got limp and rubbery. NO MORE! It’s so simple. Place limp celery stalks into a sinkful of ice water overnight. In the morning, your celery stalks are like new! It really and truly works!

I have found that washing, taking the ends off, and cutting my celery into shorter sticks (about 3 inches in length) the day I get them at the grocery store helps them last longer. I put them in a ziplock bag after I cut them.

Getting 20 Meals Out of 1 Ham

Yes, I actually get 20 meals out of one ham. When ham is on sale, buy a big bone-in uncooked, but smoked, ham. (It’s possible around here to get a good size on sale for $20 or so, making this a source of protein for 20 meals at $1 per meal PER family. That’s cheap.) Bake it in your oven and use it for your first meal. Everyone gets a good slice. You might serve it with mashed potatoes and corn and applesauce for a traditional ham dinner. Use your favorite recipe and meal combination.

Let the ham cool. Then slice off the fat and discard it. Slice off all the meat. Leave a little bit on the bone. Use the ham bone to make Ham and Bean Soup. This soup is delicious! Make a big batch. This is good for about 3 hearty meals for us. Sometimes 4.

Now chop up all the rest of the ham. Cube it wherever possible. For oddly cut pieces, just chop it up into nice bite-sized chunks. Put these into ziplock freezer bags in portions of about 1-1/2 cups – 2 cups each. Use these portions for:

Quiche (one small package is enough for two regular quiche pies, making enough for two meals)

Scrambled Eggs (Use one small package and just add some ham to your scrambled eggs. You should be able to use one package for several breakfasts.)

Ham and Pineapple Pizza (One small package is enough for one hearty pizza and is enough for one supper and one lunch for my family. One large package can be stretched to cover two pizzas, making enough for two suppers and two lunches for my family, or for one meal when serving another family.)

Other soups

Macaroni and Cheese (Just add some ham for extra protein and a more gourmet flavor.)

Hash brown casserole (When you add ham, it makes a hearty main dish.)

Stuffed Corn Bread

Recipes to come….

Cabbage

Cabbage. Cabbage is today’s tip. How many times have you purchased lettuce for salad only to discover it has wilted long before you’ve used it up? OR, have you made a salad that didn’t get finished and have to throw it out because it got wilted due to being cut/torn/or slathered in dressing? No more! Cabbage to the rescue!

I love to use cabbage for salads. I love the crunch – no matter what! I love that it lasts WAY longer in the fridge (or even just in the salad bowl) than actual lettuce. Not only that, it’s packed with far more nutrition than the average lettuce. AND, it’s WAY CHEAPER! You just can’t beat that!

If you don’t like regular green or purple cabbage, try Chinese or Napa cabbage instead. It’s a lot more lettuce-like with all the benefits of regular cabbage!

A Breakfast Menu "Routine"

Planning a menu can sometimes feel like drudgery. I find that I go through menu-planning phases – from the Mountaintop of Menu-Inspiration to the Valley of Absolutely NO CLUE! What works best for me is a sort of menu “routine.”

My weekly breakfast routine looks something like this:
- Saturday = pancake breakfast (cooked by my loving husband EVERY SINGLE Saturday)
- 3 hot cereal breakfasts
- 1 egg breakfast
- 1 muffin/toast breakfast
- 1 granola/yogurt breakfast

Within this outline, the details can vary, but it gives me a GREAT starting point.

The hot cereal breakfasts consist of some type of hot cereal (Red River, Cream of Wheat, oatmeal) with various toppings. Sometimes I’ll do a raisins and spice version; other times it’ll be a more exotic coconut and dried pineapple, etc. We usually have a glass of milk and a fruit alongside our cereal. It all depends on what is in my pantry and what’s on sale that week!

The egg breakfast has limitless possibilities. A personal favorite is a fried egg on English muffins with tomato slices and a glass of juice. The kids drink milk. I sometimes add a slice of cheese for the family if they’ll need an extra boost that morning. Or, scrambled eggs with all sorts of chopped veggies and basic buttered toast with a glass of juice. Or simply a fried egg with a muffin and a smoothie. Or biscuits and eggs and a fruit salad. Like I said, limitless possibilities.

The muffin/toast breakfast is a quick one. The muffins are prepared ahead of time so the morning of that breakfast, we can just grab one and go. I like to pair this breakfast with a smoothie or a fruit salad and a glass of milk. Very quick and simple is the key for this one. It usually ends up being our Sunday morning breakfast because we have to be out of the house much earlier than usual on Sundays.

The granola/yogurt breakfast is just that – homemade granola and yogurt with fruit. Another quick and simple breakfast.

So with my menu “routine” already in place, planning the breakfasts for each week are a little easier, even when I’m feeling uninspired. The routine is half the battle!