After reading through the first round of comments asking about your grocery budgets, I starting thinking of small ways we could all save money. I was amazed to read everyone's comments, to see how strict you adhere to your budgets, what you are willing to spring more for, etc.
I am by no means a budgeting expert! However I've been around a few kitchens in my day!
- View meat as a flavoring agent, and not the main focus. I think this might be one of the easiest ways for meat-eaters to stretch their grocery budget. Instead of buying expensive cuts of steaks and chops, look to flavor-packed cheaper items. These items are frequently fattier, but you will be using them in far less quantity. Consider, for example, bacon. One strip of bacon per person in a pasta dish will add amazing meat flavor with very little cost. Another benefit of bacon is that it is two ingredients in one - a meaty flavoring agent and a cooking fat. Keep a jar of fat in the fridge (our grandmothers would never have been caught without one!) and strain your bacon grease into it. Bacon fat is great for cooking eggs, potatoes, popcorn, biscuits - all sorts of things. Sausage is another item which is flavor-packed, and a little goes a long way. One link (4 ounces, typically) will flavor pasta, soup, greens, etc. The same goes for pretty much any cured meat product (prosciutto, bresaola, pancetta)
- Use ingredients with more than one use. Always buy your chicken on the bone. First of all, it is cheaper. Secondly, it's more flavorful. Thirdly, you can use the bones to make stock. Keep a large plastic bag of bones in the freezer and add to it until you have enough to make stock. Ham hocks are another ingredient perfect for this. One ham hock costs about $2 and will flavor an entire stock pot full of beans or greens. Pick the meat from the hock when you are finished using it and add the (small but delicious) meat to whatever you have been cooking, and then add the bone to your bag of poultry bones.
- Know what size to buy. Never, and I mean never buy peppercorns, vanilla beans, specialty salts, rice, beans, grains or nuts in small packages. Buy in bulk at stores like GFS. Buy bulk online. I'm going to talk more about this soon.
- Get to know your specialty stores. I'll tell you know a few of my favorite secrets. You can buy odds and ends of cheese at lots of cheese shops - Whole Foods (especially in Dublin) frequently has a basket of cheese ends, where you can purchase small quantities of expensive cheeses. This next is one of my favorite secrets: at Carfagna's, you can buy cubed prosciutto ends for next to nothing. You see, prosciutto (the cured ham from Italy) comes on a leg. This means that at some point, the leg can no longer be cut on a deli slicer. Carfagna's cuts this meat from the bone, cubes it, and vacuum packs it into 8 ounce packets (you can find them across from the produce, in the cured meat section). They are great for pasta - they contain quite a bit of meat which you can slice off if you are patient, there is a lot of fat, too - and they are also amazing for flavoring soup, beans, and greens. Prosciutto also makes a great stock, which you can make from just a few of these cubes. Of course, there is also the creme de la creme of "throwaways," the prosciutto bone itself. Good luck getting that one.
- Learn "rustic" cooking. Many old fashioned cookbooks are full of ways to pinch pennies. The more I learn about the roots of cooking - particularly European cooking but also Asian - the more tips I learn on how to save money. In an Italian kitchen, it seems as thought nothing is thrown away. Parmesan rinds are used to flavor tomato sauce (and to teeth babies), bean cooking water and pasta water become precious ingredients to use as thickening agents (they are amazing), and stale bread is turned into bread crumbs, soups, or dessert. In Japanese cooking, kombu (a form of seaweed with an intensely savory flavor) is used to make stock; the softened seaweed is then used to make a variety of pickles. Shitake stems are used for flavoring. African-American slaves in our country were given harvest scraps to eat - turnip tops and entrails and the like. Their ingenuity created a cuisine and a culture which is cherished today.
I am hoping to have 5 more thoughts very soon. What are your tips?
