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Grok posted:What are they actually asking for here? Cream of mushroom soup comes up in a lot of recipes, but due to some food allergies I can't just buy a can of Campbell's. I try to just add milk or something but it's never the same. You shouldn't buy canned soup anyways, it's a waste of your money as has been established in this thread multiple times. You don't have to buy $5-$30/lb mushrooms, get the cheapo guys and make several loving quarts of soup for a pittance using stock you make yourself. This is multiple meals by itself, or a component in other meals, without enough sodium to replenish the ocean/preservatives/lovely flavor. Do you have flour, water, salt. and yeast (all crazy cheap)? Make some bread to go with the soup. When you buy those in gredients--which are all in large amounts, way more than what you need for one loaf- you can make bread for the next month. Or you can just blow all that money on maybe 6 cans of flavorless
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Jan 4, 2012 19:46
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 13:01 |
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It's been posted ten million times to buy spices in bulk rather than the jarred McCormick's crap (from co op, health food store, grocery store, or supermarket). It's extremely sound advice, but I don't understand why it's being posted again and again and again. Read the drat thread!
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Jan 7, 2012 01:32
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Bone in chop, come to room temp while prepping the grill, add fresh groundpepper+olive oil, add salt right before grilling, grill to no more than medium. Choose the cheapest roasting veg available, and have that roast with salt and butter and oil while the grill goes. For dessert, grill a banana. Assuming you have oil, butter, salt, and pepper on hand, all you have to do is buy the pork, the roasting veg (which can be freakin potatoes!), and a banana or two- so this can be VERY cheap depending on the pork price and really loving delicious and simple to prepare-and really healthy to boot (assuming you're okay with the sugar in the banana). edit- healthier if veg is green like asparagus rather than starchy like potatoe, but meh, check the price! edit2- one person on the grill and a roommate/friend/lover in the kitchen makes this FAST, but it could be annoying with 1 person only. Yehudis Basya fucked around with this message at 08:37 on Jan 12, 2012 |
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Jan 12, 2012 08:33
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Douche Bag posted:It'd be nice to have chicken bones laying around all the time so I didn't have to use bouillon cubes but it's just not practical. Chicken is expensive 'round here. Yeah, it's crazy how expensive chicken can be. I can't exactly justify spending top dollar at the local butcher on a frequent weekly basis ($8/lb of deliciousness), but I also refuse to buy the 89cents/lb factory farmed stuff. So, I just don't make chicken all that often. Beef and pork are much cheaper around here anyways, so they make the rotation more! They taste better anyways. That said, when I do buy chicken, it is 99% of the time a whole one plus a few chicken backs (usually, those aren't out in the front, but if you ask the butcher, they'll get it for you from the back area- and that stuff is CHEAP!) so I can make lots and lots of stock, which lives in the freezer. The boullion or boxed stock is just revolting to taste, and I'd rather just substitute it with a much cheaper vegetable stock- which solves any potential freezer capacity problems.
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Jan 15, 2012 03:58
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Douche Bag posted:Food tastes better when it's mixed with the blood of the poor. Depends on how much your time is worth. If you have more free time and really enjoy cooking, make the tortillas. If you're down to one spare hour in the day, and you can make a really amazing nutritious protein meat dish OR you can spend time rolling out tortillas, I'd go for the meat- much more bang for your buck. That said, store bought tortillas can be filled with nasty (and unnecessary sugary) ingredients (when all you really need is lard, flour, water, and salt, although I's guess there are better ways of doing it than just those 4). But stuff like stock? Make it yourself, it's worth every moment because the instructions are: 1. put leftover carcass and roughly chopped veg in pot with water 2. cover with lid and let simmer 3. walk away for 3 hours, and spend that time playing with your kids, writing quartlery reports, paying bills I don't know. But I view that investment in time as me MAKING money using ingredients I already have, instead of buying a box of lovely stock for $4 and devoting a few minutes of my life to tracking it down at the grocery. Honestly, the prior 2 paragraphs guide me in most of my culinary choices: - how much is my time worth - what is the health, flavor, and enjoyment payoff - make resulting decision cymbalrush posted:I've seen it mentioned in this thread, but good god are split peas the greatest thing ever. Seriously, 50 cents worth of them are delicious, give you a full days worth of protein
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Jan 17, 2012 01:30
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dino. posted:Seconding what everyone else said. Find a second hand store, and buy a crock pot there. It's not worth buying new. Most people buy a crock pot, use it once, and then get rid of it. Even if you post on Freecycle or search on Craigslist, I can more or less guarantee finding one in any town I'm in. I just searched for one on my local Craigslist, and found ones for as low as $7, that come with the box and everything else, without having to schlep out to Long Island or something. This is so true. I actually hate my crockpot in comparison to my dutch oven since 1) I can't brown meat in the crockpot, resulting in another dish to watch, and 2) I can't control the temperature beyond low or high, and I want more precise control dammit!, 3) it's so monstrously large that I can only make 20-billion servings at a time, and freezer space is limited. Plus, we're only 2 mouths in this household! So, I'll be donating mine to Goodwill this weekend. Honestly, I should have bough at 3 or 4 quart round crockpot way back when, and not a 6.5 qt oval beast. I don't WANT more than 6 servings made at a time! So when you pick your crockpot up, consider how much freezer space you really have available in relation to how many mouths you have to feed. No sense in spending money on food that you're unable to actually finish nor store. Maybe they finally sell little dividers that can reduce the size of the vessel, I dunno, but you need to respect the vessel size otherwise your food will taste like rear end.
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May 17, 2012 17:39
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Dabbo posted:Lately I've been buying lots of produce and using it for smoothies and sandwiches. A good shopping trip will only cost me a bit over $10, and most of that will be from the bread and deli meat. Depends on how fast you go through the bread, how much flour costs in your neck of the woods, and how much time you really want to devote to making it. I make no-knead bread which takes up maybe 15 min of actual work time (the rest of the time is just walking away and letting it do its thing) is just 4 cups AP flour, yeast, and water; each loaf lasts my husband and I about 4-5 days before it molds. A 5lb bag of flour costs ~$4 at the store. So overall, it's cheaper for us to make the bread, but we don't really eat a ton of bread to begin with. But if you want fancier breads that perhaps require more effort and ingredients and go through them quickly.... well, take a careful look at ingredient price and spreadsheet ahoy if you're not convinced of your mental math. Edit- holy poo poo thanks for posting the Budget Bytes honey wheat sandwich bread; it looks great. Gonna have to make that at some point (which will require buying whole wheat flour aghhh). Yehudis Basya fucked around with this message at 18:43 on May 17, 2012 |
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May 17, 2012 18:37
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I've never made pierogi before. If I were to make a filling out of ground beef, potato, chive, and cheddar, would that be considered some horrible Shepard Pie hybrid, or could I still call the dish pierogi in its own right? Also, I'm assuming cook all the way, then freeze?
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Jun 1, 2012 05:44
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GrAviTy84 posted:no, that would be cottage pie, shepherd's pie uses lamb, hence "shepherd". So I made the cottage pierogi last night- they were so deliciously unhealthy, and since pierogi were new for me, I was extra excited about it!  For the filling, I salted and peppered ground beef, then browned it. I then mixed it up with chopped white onion, 2 eggs, and freshly grated white cheddar. I also made mashed potatoes out of red skinned potatoes, cream cheese, butter, salt, pepper, and fresh chives. Mixed up the potatoes into the beef and voila, filling! For the dough, I halved Emeril's recipe: sour cream, peanut oil (ran out of olive but that sounds kinda gross anyways), butter, AP flour, salt, and eggs. According to him, using ground beef as a filling is a Polish thing. To cook, I boiled the cottage pierogi in salted water for 8 minutes (they really do float!), dried them with a towel, and then sauteed them in better to get the skins browned. So unhealthy yet so delicious! They're really, really filling though, 4 of them had me stuffed. A poo poo ton (uncooked in water) live in the freezer now (so even though the beef, sour cream, butter and cream cheese add up, you really get a ton of bang out of your buck), and should be perfect for days when I won't have time to prepare a full dinner, but can handle 8 minutes of boiling and 5 minutes of sauteeing! There's a lot of filling left over too, so either I'm going to make even more pierogi dough for even more deliciousness, or just cook the filling on the stove with roasted broccoli or something for a side. Edit- unhealthy because of the extreme excess of carbohydrates (all the flour and potato) compared to protein and fat. To make healthier, replace the red-skinned potatoes with cauliflower (mashed cauli is pretty yummy); that'll drop your carb level some. To make it actually healthy, drop the pierogi dough as well, so you get rid of the flour.... but then it would no longer be pierogi.... hence pierogi is a delicious yet unhealthy treat! Seriously going to make it with mashed cauli next time, though, or just leave out the mashed part entirely and add chives to the beef mixture. While quite tasty, the potato flavor isn't necessary; I wonder how much its absence would even be noticeable. Why do pastry shells with veg or meat fillings taste so marvelous? Samosas, chicken pot pies, pierogi, cottage/shepard pie, I'm looking at you!
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Jun 8, 2012 17:28
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I used 1 lb of ground beef and believe me when I say that the total filling volume dwarfed the amount I actually used in the pierogi. So much so that I went and got another pint of sour cream to make more dough today; I'll cook 8 pierogi tonight but will probably have something like 50 more to put in the freezer. Any remaining filling is going to be cooked on the stovetop with some side veg! The potatoes were red-skinned, and mashed with fresh chives, butter, cream cheese, salt, and pepper, and obviously I left the skin in. They were really hot and tasty and satisying; I'm excited to thaw them in August when it starts getting a little cooler. This food really is good to make on a budget considering the sheer quantity (the following takes into account making even more dough): $1.50 for half a cream cheese brick $3-4 worth of (fancyish) butter, total 79 cents chives ~$3 potatoes $7 beef (local butcher grassfed stuff) ~20 cents onion ~75 cents worth of cheddar off the brick cost of 5 eggs $5 for all the sour cream I've had to purchase to make enough dough for all the filling cost of AP flour, salt, pepper, and 2 tsp worth of oil ... lets just round up to $25. Depending on how large one cuts the dough, you get ~40-60 pierogi, or ~40-60 cents/pierogi, something like 10-15 servings depending on how hungry you are. If I hadn't used local beef and a nicer butter, or left out the extraneous mash (thus moving cream cheese off the list), I could have made it for a ridiculously cheap price. Edit- making a 2nd full batch of dough (so not halving Emeril's recipe) and this time cutting the rounds larger (3.5 in), I was able to use up all the filling and make 42 more pierogi. Actually, I had enough dough for about 5 more, but ran out of filling at that point. Yehudis Basya fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Jun 9, 2012 |
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Jun 8, 2012 23:52
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Well, the filling isn't that much more than what I already wrote:Yehudis Basya posted:For the filling, I salted and peppered ground beef, then browned it. I then mixed it up with chopped white onion, 2 eggs, and freshly grated white cheddar. I also made mashed potatoes out of red skinned potatoes, cream cheese, butter, salt, pepper, and fresh chives. Mixed up the potatoes into the beef and voila, filling! Mix 1 lb ground beef* with salt and freshly ground black pepper, and brown on the stovetop (don't use nonstick). My beef didn't throw off much fat, but if yours does and you don't like all of that, then drain on a paper towel. Either way, let the beef cool. Then, in a bowl, mix together with 2 eggs, ~4 tablespoons freshly grated white cheddar, and ~3/4 of a diced onion (yellow or white). Mix in the mashed potatoes. This amount of filling is sufficient for ~1.5-2 batches of Emeril's pierogi dough, depending on how large you cut the rounds. For the mashed potatoes, I made a ton, so I could continue to have mashed potatoes over the next week as a side. I only took one big scoopful of the mash (maybe a cup? a little less?) for the pierogi; so the filling was mostly beef with some mash suspended in it. But you could easily change the proportions of that. I make a nuts-and-bolts mash though, so it's not super special. To make it: boil a ~couple of pounds or so of red-skinned potatoes in hot water until soft, about 30 or so minutes. Drain potatoes. Add ~1/2-3/4 cup butter, ~4-5 oz of a brick of cream cheese, and ~3-4 tablespoons freshly chopped up chives and mash together; add salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. If you use fat-free or reduced-fat cream cheese, Jesus will cry. *no idea on the relative leanness of the beef. I use the grass-fed stuff from the whole-animal butcher and he literally grinds together all the gristle and fat and random spare stuff that comes off as he butchers the cows. It was lean enough that not a lot of fat was thrown off in the pan while browning. But don't use 99% or 90% lean or any crap like that, since it tastes so crappy.
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Jun 9, 2012 05:36
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We actually have a local grocery store that sells reasonably-priced produce. Not all of the produce is local, but much of it is, and they're pretty upfront about labeling. But I would love to go to a farmer's market with actual farmers selling actual (preferably cheap, but I'll pay for quality) produce. Our farmers market is just a bunch of restaurants selling their food, random insurance-type people shilling crap, and pre-baked goods. Not a farmer in sight! ... we used to live by the greatest farmers market, too.  The local grocery is pretty great, though.
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Jun 13, 2012 08:04
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nm posted:Also, get them with bones. You will be amazed at how much better they cook up with bones. On top of being cheaper, nearly everything tastes better with bones (plus stock capabilities, helloooooo). I don't get why people buy meat without bones, unless it's a cut that's boneless (i.e. certain cuts of steak). This is a really good book, imo: Bones: Recipe, History, and Lore. I do sympathize with those who don't enjoy the flavor of chicken thighs proper, however. I doubt poor quality meat is the issue, since I've tried 'em from cheap-rear end freezer bags to local, humanely raised chickens that I break down myself. They're just too greasy with a very weird, odd texture. I usually feel that "all food tastes good, and if you don't like something, it's because it hasn't been prepared well". But I make an exception to that rule for chicken thighs, yeesh. Now, chicken drumsticks are the poo poo, I could eat those everyday.
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Jun 16, 2012 22:21
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There seems to be 2 kinds of freezable food: 1) freeze, then thaw, then cook for however long (e.g. boil then fry). Examples: pierogi, ?, ? 2) freeze, then microwave (no thawing necessary). Examples: burritos, ?, ? I'm trying to fill my freezer with examples of both for when my new job starts. In my old job, I could set my own hours, so I was able to be a lot more flexible with what I ate and when I ate it during the work week. Because I was able to set my own hours before, I didn't worry about freezing and mostly made items with no more than 6-7 servings. So not much went into the freezer besides stock. Now I'm feeling the crunch of time! Any cheap ideas besides pierogi and burritos? I really have no clue what freezes well versus horribly, and I've gotten to the point where I trust GWS more than any other culinary resource out there (is that sad?). For the love of god, no suggestions for beef stew or chili, I have ODed on those dishes for the next year. The cheaper, the better obviously!
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Jul 7, 2012 19:16
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neogeo0823 posted:Bah... My gf is partly stubborn and partly insane. She doesn't want to make stew, chili, or anything that would be "too thick". This eliminates a lot of crock pot cooking. The unfortunate bit is that we're down to $15 to last us till the end of the week. Are you making fun of me for being tired of beef stew and chili?  I just posted that 3 posts before yours.Grill burgers, roast a bird + have fun with leftovers, make some soup, rice+beans.
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Jul 7, 2012 23:48
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neogeo0823 posted:EDIT: ^^^ One thing I've seen done for flattening dough balls into really flat things is to rig up your own tortilla press. Take 2 sheets of wax paper, and put your dough ball in between. Then, take a large, heavy, flat bottomed pan and press down until desired thickness. Works the same way as the press, but for less cost. neogeo0823 posted:...Actually, how about this: Anyone know any good, cheap recipes that use chicken stock? We could have some of the chicken with a side of veggies one night, then make chicken stock with the bones and use that for some sort of bulk recipe. If you've got enough bones, make stock. (If you don't, stick the bones in the freezer until you have enough to make stock.) Any recipe that calls for water, you could probably replace with stock to change the flavors (do this for rice). Any thing that you make on the pan that requires browning, you could add stock to make a pan sauce. You can pretty much do anything with it. Edit- $5 per chicken? That's probably cheaper than the price of raw chicken. Use leftovers with that chicken to make chicken salad. You may already have the ingredients to make bread lying around your house. Congrats, now you have chicken salad sandwiches for another meal!
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Jul 8, 2012 16:15
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 13:01 |
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In the spirit of the end of the year, Budget Bytes posted a best-of-2012 list. While I don't always like the recipes posted, some are pretty good. Many of 'em are freezer friendly, which is the big awesome thing about them. On another note, I'm going to be really sad if all the articles about milk costing $8/gallon come 2013 end up being right. There's probably a huge ethical storm surrounding this issue, but still, it will suck if milk ends up pricey enough to be "special-treat-buy-a-drop-only" instead of "normal-way-to-consume-calories". I really enjoy milk.
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Dec 28, 2012 07:41
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