This and that: what might have ended up in the garbage . . .

Things I salvaged this week

Some paper doilies from one of the church teas. They were used once, each, under plates of cookies. About to be tossed out, I quickly snatched them to take home, knowing I could use them again. I'll be using one of the larger doilies under my daughters' birthday cake next week.

The plastic outer wrap from a 20-roll pack of bath tissue. Fits our kitchen step-can perfectly, as a liner. I also use the large plastic bags that the 25 lbs of dried beans and 12.5 lbs of popping corn come packaged in, for liners.

The tail end of a loaf of sourdough that just didn't turn out well and became hard as a rock. It still tasted good, but was far too chewy to really enjoy. After slicing thin, I cut the slices into strips, then dices, and ran through the food processor. It still didn't become small crumbs, but more like barley-sized lumps. I added these bread lumps to a batch of chili at the last minute, and declared them a "meat substitute", as they kept that chew-texture for the first few minutes of eating the chili.

The scrapings from another pan of homemade cornbread. I can get one or two tablespoons of crumbs from each batch of cornbread. I scrape them into a container for the freezer, then when I have a half cup or so, add them to any recipe calling for bread crumbs. These were added, along with the rest of the freezer container-full, to a batch of bean burgers.


How about you? Did you snatch something up, just before it got tossed, this week?

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So I baked a cake . . .

I was desperate for a chocolate bar yesterday afternoon. I had errands to run, and the thought to stop and pick one up kept running through my mind. Although this would be a treat, it would still come out of the grocery budget.

To save that $2 on a chocolate bar, I decided to bake a cake once I returned home. It's not a fancy cake. Just an ordinary, weekday cake.

Part of the draw to the decision to baking a cake at home is the cake batter. Yeah, you know what I mean! Who here has never baked a cake with the primary motivation being to eat some of the batter?! Cake batter is one of the perks of being the baker, I say.

Since what I was wanting was chocolate with fruit (one of my favorite chocolate bars has chopped dried cherries and roasted almonds in dark chocolate), I decided on a chocolate cake with homemade cherry preserves and chocolate-almond frosting between the layers, and the top and sides covered in more of that chocolate frosting.

I baked two layers. I used one of the layers for last night's cake, and wrapped and froze the other for another day when I'm craving chocolate again.

I handled a craving which would have required me to spend more of the grocery budget, instead with a homemade treat using my supplies at home. I'd say that's a success in the financial column, but a failure in the diet column. Oh well, I'll start my diet on Monday. Yeah, right. . . .

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Getting every last scrap of meat off of the chicken bones

Picking the meat off of bones is not one of my favorite chores. In fact, sometimes I get downright lazy about it and just figure, "oh I got enough meat off of this batch of bones", when in fact there is still more there.

But I am proud to say that I put the effort in this week, to really get these bones ready-for-science-project clean! Not that I intend to use them for a project of any sort.


Recently, I've been able to get 3 good meals from a whole chicken for our family. This time, I was able to get 4 entire family meals from this one whole chicken, two nights of chicken and gravy,

one night of very chicken-y soup,

and this Club Chicken Casserole, in the freezer right now, to be used for an easy on me, Sunday supper this week.

After slicing and pulling as much meat as I could off the carcass, I simmered the bones for a couple of hours, and was able to pick another full cup of meat off, even from the backbone area. I find that if I hold backbone pieces, loosely in my hand, the small bones fall apart from each other, revealing a small lump of meat between each pair of bones.

It wasn't pretty, and my hands smelled like chicken for hours afterward, but I was able to get an extra night's worth of meat to feed my family from this last of my whole chickens. Pretty satisfying.

I think that knowing this was the last of our chickens from the freezer, really gave me the impetus to glean as much from this one as possible. Do you feel that way about things, ever? It's the very last of something, so you try and get the most from it?

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