Basic Ingredients with Multiple Uses: Canned Tomato Paste

I've mentioned a couple of times that I use canned tomato paste in cooking. I bring this up again because tomato paste typically goes on sale in late summer and early fall as retailers clear out last season's canned goods to make room for this season's. I have found tomato paste to be so valuable for our meals. It's one of those foods that you may see on a shelf in the grocery store and wonder what it's used for or who buys it.

My mom always made spaghetti sauce with canned tomato paste, a spaghetti seasoning packet, ground beef, chopped onion, and water. A 6-oz can of tomato paste made enough pasta sauce for 3 to 5 people. When I began cooking on my own, I followed my mom's example and bought the seasoning mix and canned tomato paste. After a few years of making sauce this way, I figured out that I really didn't need the seasoning mix but could add garlic, salt, and a combination of oregano, basil, rosemary, thyme, and/or savory, saving some money while making a pasta sauce that was more flavorful than the seasoning packet could ever be. This was my introduction to tomato paste. Now it's a staple in my pantry.

Here are some of the ways that I use tomato paste.

1) Pasta sauce -- as mentioned above, pasta sauce can be made with a seasoning packet and tomato paste or with tomato paste, meat, onions, herbs, red pepper, garlic, salt, and any veggies that I want to incorporate.

2) Pizza sauce -- here's my standard pizza sauce using tomato paste, garlic, salt, oregano, sugar, and red pepper flakes. Scoop 1/4 to 1/3 cup of tomato paste into a microwaveable 8-oz measuring cup. Add 1 clove of garlic minced (or 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder), 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 to 1 teaspoon finely crushed oregano, a pinch of red pepper flakes, a pinch of sugar, then mix it all in. Next, slowly incorporate enough water to bring the sauce up to the 1-cup mark. Microwave for 1 minute. There's your super quick pizza sauce, ready to top 1 large pizza in under 5 minutes. In a pinch, I use this for pasta sauce, although I think adding onion, meat, and additional herbs is nicer for a pasta sauce.

3) Tomato soup and the tomato base for other soups or stews, such as minestrone, chili, or beef stew -- how I make tomato soup from tomato paste can be found in the comments of this post. Scroll down to my response to Christa. It's delicious, easy to make, and cheap, cheap, cheap.

4) Ketchup -- my homemade ketchup is simply tomato paste, vinegar, onions (or onion powder), sugar, salt, lemon juice, and water. Some recipes, (like this one on Top Secret Recipes), also call for corn syrup and garlic powder, and skip the lemon juice. Lemon is just my preference in tomato-based dishes.

5) Tomato juice -- we love tomato juice and tomato-vegetable juice in our home. The homemade variety can be as simple as tomato paste, water, salt, plus, if desired, a pinch of onion powder and a dash of hot sauce. (Tomato paste to water ratio  -- 1:4) Stir it all together and serve over ice.

6) Tomato paste salsa -- such as this recipe from the National Center for Home Food Preservation which calls for both fresh tomatoes and tomato paste. Tomato paste can thicken any salsa which is too thin, adding rich tomato flavor in the process.

7) Tomato sauce -- if your recipe calls for canned tomato sauce and what you have is tomato paste, you can combine 1 cup of water with 3/4 cup of tomato paste. Stir in a pinch of sugar, some salt, pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder. Voila, tomato sauce.


Tomato paste is almost always less expensive than these prepared foods that I make myself. It's a real budget-extender for us.

Best Fruit for Fruity Pancake and Waffle Syrup

The blackberries that we picked on Sunday were very soft (overripe) and juicy, the sort of berries that are best for fresh-eating and making syrup. The riper the fruit, the lower its pectin content, and pectin (along with acid) is what causes a jam or jelly to set, or thicken.

I have both low pectin and high pectin fruits at my disposal. When I want to preserve the high pectin fruits, I tend to make jam or jelly. And with the low pectin ones, I either freeze them or make a syrup. The obvious use for fruity syrups is poured over pancakes or waffles. But fruity syrups can also be poured over plain yogurt, baked custard, ice cream, or plain bread pudding. Fruity syrups can also be added to tea, plain water, or fizzy water, to enhance what would be an ordinary beverage.

When I first began my garden-fruit preservation journey, I knew nothing about pectin content in fruit. Everything I learned was by trial and error. We had wild blackberry canes just down the road from our apartment. On Saturday afternoons in late summer, we'd walk down with plastic shopping bags to fill. My son was young and as young children often are, picky about texture, so I thought blackberry jelly might be acceptable. Unfortunately, I had no idea that blackberry juice from very ripe berries wouldn't fully set. What I ended up with was a thickened liquid that would leak through a slice of bread. It then occurred to us that perhaps this would make better pancake syrup than jelly. And that began a 30 year tradition of late-summer blackberry syrup-making for me.

In general, I've found the following to be best for making fruity syrup (both juicy and low-pectin):

• overripe fruit that is also juicy (so mealy apples wouldn't work well in this application)
• blueberries
• strawberries
• ripe raspberries and blackberries
• elderberries
• sweet cherries
• Italian plums
• juicy peaches
• pineapple

To make syrup, I first extract the juice, using the technique described in this post. Once I have a juice, I cook it for about 5 minutes with sugar, using about 3/4 to 1 cup of sugar for every cup of juice. I taste the syrup to see if it needs more acid (lemon juice), water, or sugar, and adjust the taste accordingly. Once it's made, I either can or freeze the finished product.

Last night after dinner, I made 3 pints of blackberry syrup. This will be delicious for leisurely Saturday breakfasts in winter. 

More Berry Picking, Homemade Condiments and Christmas Shopping

A trio of financially-productive activities for me this weekend.


We've been picking blackberries as often as we can make ourselves get out. This is truly a group effort this year. It is taking all of us to push ourselves out the door. It isn't that blackberry picking is difficult or especially tiring. But more like we are now bored with picking. Doesn't that sound like a frivolous excuse not to harvest free fruit? We remind ourselves of that often. But the freezer is not full yet, so berry picking is still a task we feel we must do.

Sunday afternoon, the four of us went to a nearby lake to pick berries. One daughter had spied a bunch of ripe berries there earlier in the week, so we all thought it would be worth our time to go there. My husband wondered how much we are spending on gas in order to harvest the free berries. You know, the expense incurred to obtain a good or service for "free" is a good consideration. For us, the lake is quite close, so I estimated we were spending about $1 on gas, round trip. In exchange, we picked 4 very full ice cream pails of blackberries, which I guesstimate have a value of about $80, based on weight and price for frozen blackberries. We used family activity time for this excursion, so no one missed any paid opportunities to harvest berries. Even though we are tiring of berry picking, it's a good deal for us.

With so many berries, I decided it was a good time to make another batch of blackberry jam. While I had the canning equipment out, I put it to use to make other condiments. My husband had brought home a small amount of jalapenos that someone at work was going to toss, so I used some of our canned tomatoes, garden garlic, onions, spices, vinegar, and salt to make about a half-gallon of salsa. In addition to the salsa and jam, I took this opportunity to make a batch of ketchup, using canned tomato paste, vinegar, sugar, ground cloves, pickling spices, onion, and salt. I made about 3 cups of ketchup, enough to last us about a month.

The salsa was just a small batch, so I made it "by taste." Later this season, I'll make a large batch, enough to last the winter, and I'll follow the recipe in this post. This recipe makes 8 pints and uses canned tomatoes, so there is no messy tomato peeling to do.

Also over the weekend, I took advantage of a high value coupon and a sale to do a little Christmas shopping. I'll share what I bought this coming Saturday morning. Really good deals that I believe will be appreciated by my family members. Don't forget -- this coming Saturday (Aug.24), another live chat session from 9 AM to 11 AM (give or take), PDT, subject: Christmas/holiday frugal gift ideas and recipes. I have at least 6 ideas that I will share. I hope you have a few, too!


Another busy weekend -- here we are, it's Monday, I'm wiped out, and need another day off!

Cheap & Cheerful Suppers for an August Week

Friday
leftover chicken curry (Thursday's dinner) in homemade pita bread (see this post for pita how-to's)
watermelon (free)

Saturday
bean, lentil, barley, and vegetable soup
leftover pita bread, toasted
fresh blackberries (free)

Sunday cookout
hot dogs in easy, homemade buns
garden kale and onions, sauteed
garden tomato wedges

Monday
garden kale and onion frittata topped with quick marinara sauce
brown rice topped with marinara sauce
fresh blackberries with honey

Tuesday
bean, potato, carrot, and garden kale soup
bread and butter
fresh blackberries with honey

Wednesday
homemade cheese pizza using this recipe, taking half of dough for pizza and half for a loaf of French bread)
tossed garden salad with lettuce, beet greens, cucumbers, and marinated cooked beets in a creamy vinaigrette (all veggies form garden)
garden summer squash, sauteed
blackberry cobbler

Thursday
egg, rice, yogurt, and garden greens casserole
blackberries with honey
bread and butter


We had  a good week of frugal meals, despite being busier than usual. I went blackberry picking on 3 days this past week, so preparing dinners each day tok a bit of advanced planning.

Grocery-wise, we've had a couple of bonuses this week. So, you remember that a the woman my daughter cat-sits for gave us a whole watermelon, right? That lasted us about a week. Then this week, the same daughter came home from her regular summer job with 2 bags of garden produce from a co-worker -- kale, collard greens, and summer squash. In addition, I was checking out a new dollar store in our town, just to see what they carried. While there, I found 64-oz jars of peanut butter for $2. A bit skeptical, I bought 3 jars. We tried it right away and discovered that it was pretty good. So, I stopped in another day and picked up 2 more jars. That's 20 pounds of peanut butter! Now these jars have a sell-by date of Jan. 2020, so I didn't want to go overboard. I'm pretty confident that we'll use up what I did buy by the end of December. If not, I know someone who will be baking a lot of peanut butter cookies for the freezer. Do you suppose peanut butter freezes very well? I may be finding out. Right after stopping at that dollar store, I went across the street to Walmart, where I found 2-lb boxes of angel hair pasta for 75 cents. That's 37 cents/lb for pasta! I had been considering a sale of 62 cents/lb for pasta at another store. Glad I didn't buy that pasta! What amazing deals and blessings this week!

With all of this peanut butter, I decided to try making a peanut butter salad dressing for my lunch salad yesterday. This dressing was amazingly good. I used peanut butter (softened in the microwave), vinegar, oil, soy sauce, ginger powder, red pepper flakes, sugar, and garlic to make this dressing. I'll be making this again for my family this week. For tomorrow's dinner, I'm planning on angel hair pasta in peanut sauce. Yummy, easy, and cheap.

Another busy weekend coming up for me. What's on your weekend must-do list?

Next chat session opportunity
And speaking of weekends -- how about a chat session on Saturday morning, 9 AM to 11 AM (PDT), August 24, topic: Christmas/holiday foods and gifts? Gifts can be homemade, semi-homemade, or just bargains and where you found them or how you managed the deal. An example -- maybe you bought something in-store, using a coupon off of that store's website, or shopped at a particular discount online specialty retailer, or have found a great flash-sale store. For the homemade and semi-homemade gifts, please include brief instructions and/or a link to your inspiration. If you have photos that you'd like to share, you can email them to me (lili.mounce *at* gmail.com) and I'll upload them into the post.

I am still in the collecting-ideas phase, as I know many of you are, too. September is just around the corner. Be thinking about ideas that you've used in the past or have found for this coming holiday season. Also, be thinking about questions you have for the rest of the group, such as needing gift ideas for a particular age/gender or recipe for a holiday dish. Since Thanksgiving in Canada is not too far off, and then it comes so quickly in the US, too, let's include Thanksgiving food ideas, as well. Sound good?

Have a great weekend, everybody!

Goals, Blackberries, and the Grocery Budget

So, I like setting goals for myself. Goals keep me motivated. Often times, I set my goals just slightly out of reach, if I were performing at my normal and comfortable level. This can be a really good thing for other people who are depending on me, because I think I'm a pretty hard worker, and others get to enjoy the benefit of my hard work. For me, personally, it's a mixed blessing. yes, I get the satisfaction of doing well on a job. But also, hard work is hard work, and I do get exhausted. Despite this, I don't really know how to be any other way. I do try to give myself time off when I've exhausted myself.

For this summer, my goal-setting is a good thing. I've goaled myself to fill the small freezer with blackberries and other free produce. In specific, my goal is for our family to fill 20 ice cream pails with foraged blackberries. This is far more than we've ever picked in one summer. These blackberries are completely free for us, only taking our time and energy. And my whole small family (4 of us) is on board with picking all of these berries. We have gone out picking just one or two of us as well as all four of us. This week, we've been out picking on four days. So far, we have filled 14 ice cream pails with blackberries. We are definitely within reach of our goal. If the four of us go picking together on Sunday afternoon, we should add another 3 pails. That leaves just one more afternoon of picking some day next week.

We've consumed about 1 to 2 ice cream pails as fresh berries, filling our need for much of our fresh fruit for this month. The rest have all gone into the freezer or made into jam. And how does my small freezer look? It is filling up rapidly, too. It is almost all blackberries in there. We'll be able to use these berries in homemade yogurt, smoothies, baked goods, jam, pancake syrup, and for upside-down pancakes. I'm pretty proud of how hard my family has been working on this.

About our grocery budget -- it's going well for the month. And, I think we have enough in our overall budget that I can increase our grocery spending by a small amount, $10 per month beginning next month. For 6 months, we only spent $125 to feed the four of us. Beginning in September, I'll allocate $135 per month. If this goes well, and if our overall budget can give a bit more, then I'll be able to increase the grocery budget by additional small amounts. In the past 6 months, we've learned that we can push ourselves further than I ever believed possible. I remember when we combed the budget and set grocery spending at $125. I wondered if this was even possible. It was. The bonus in all of this is I am so much more disciplined in my spending than I ever was before. My plan is to continue with discipline and use that extra $10 on basic ingredients, and not convenience foods. Thanks for all of your good thoughts for me and my small family. Your support has gotten me through rough moments. Thank you.

A Couple of Hacks You Can Use in the Comments' Field, If You Want

I just thought I'd show you 2 hacks that may help make the "Comments" section flow better, especially since I changed the format to a continuous stream, in order to allow more of us to participate. If you remember, you used to be able to add a comment to someone else's comment, as in children comments placed just beneath a parent comment, regardless of the time passed since the parent comment was published. There appears to be no way to do that with this current set-up. You may find a comment near the beginning of the comment-stream to which you really want to reply but feel like your reply won't relate to the discussion very well if it's placed at the end of the comment-stream.

The work-around, then (for me at least, and maybe this will work for you, too) is to include a relevant quote from the comment of the person to whom you'd like to reply. Even better is if you can bold the quoted comment, to indicate that the quote is not your comment. To add bold type to the comment field on blogs requires the use of HTML tags, angle brackets before and after some letters/symbols that don't show up in the published type, but indicate a command to the computer to format your type in a specific way.

The tag to add bold-type to a comment looks like the following: to make "Lili said" display in bold type, I would add  <b> directly before "Lili said" and </b> directly after "Lili said." This is how I would type that command into the text box for my comment --  <b>Lili said</b> 
The first tag uses just the lower case b between the angle brackets and the second tag which closes the bold-type command uses a / followed by the lower case b. It's important that there be no spaces between the tags and the text that is to display in bold type.

You may have noticed that I've been using a quote from others' comments when I reply. I copy and paste a person's comment (beginning with their name) into my own comment box, edit it down to what is pertinent to my reply, then add the HTML tags before and after the part I want to bold to indicate I'm quoting this comment. I don't think it's always necessary to do this. If there are relatively few comments or if my comment will follow the comment to which I want to reply, then I think we an all quickly figure out to whom I'm replying. But I will use this technique when I want to limit confusion, or the need for us to scroll up and down to figure out the meaning of my reply. You're welcome to do this, too. Adding bold type can also be used in a comment when you want to add weight to a word or phrase.

I hope I explained this all well enough. I'm not a techie kind of person, so this is new territory for me.

So, now the other HTML tag that I've been using, to add a link in the comments. Previously, when I wanted to add a link to another site or one of my blog posts, I've just left a cut and paste web address. No big deal, but it is just a tad extra work for anyone to cut, then paste into an address bar. Since we're talking about having another chat about Christmas/holiday ideas and we may be wanting to add links to images or directions in the comments, being able to post clickable links in the comments could be helpful for us.

To make a link clickable in the comments, you'll need to add both the web address to which you're linking and a brief description or title to that link between some tags.

If I were to add a link to a post in the comments, from when I wrote on making a crazy quilt Christmas tree skirt that has a web address of http://www.creativesavv.com/2012/12/im-sentimental-fool-my-crazy-quilt.html, I would need to add <a href=" directly before the full web address, follow with "> plus the words Crazy Quilt Tree Skirt and the closing tag </a>. 

And remember, no spaces in between your elements of the command and your instructions (web address and title/description).


So, in my comment text box before I hit submit, it would look like this:

<a href="http://www.creativesavv.com/2012/12/im-sentimental-fool-my-crazy-quilt.html">Crazy Quilt Tree Skirt</a>

After I hit submit, it would publish looking like this:

Crazy Quilt Tree Skirt

And that title would be clickable. The color of the type would differ slightly from the rest of the text; when you hovered above it with your cursor, it would appear underlined, indicating that you could click on it.

These are just a couple of tools that may simplify the comments for us, and I thought I'd share. Like I said, I'm not techie at all. So, I hope I explained this well enough. And if you'd like to quote someone's comments in a different way (simple quotation marks work, too), or don't care to use bolding for emphasis, and/or you'd rather link to another site or post with a cut and paste link, that's totally fine. I just like trying new stuff from time to time and thought some of you might like it too.

Now, my brain has had enough for today. Time to go make a pizza!

Thanks for Joining Me

This is just a quick not to say thanks for joining me in a chat session on Saturday. Whether you participated actively or just read along, it was fun and informative. I learned a lot and I hope that you did, too.

If there's interest, I'd like to do this again. Ruthie had mentioned the possibility of doing this with a themed topic -- Christmas gifts. I had the same thought, so this would be awesome to share all of our Christmas/holiday gift or special foods ideas that fit within a frugal framework. I've been putting together my own list and will share what I've come up with so far.

I'll look over my own schedule and see if this is doable on a Saturday in a couple of weeks. I'll give you all more advance warning this time. I had been thinking of hosting a chat session for a while but my fears of what if no one participates would put me off of the idea, time and again.

So, be thinking about your favorite frugal gift or food (homemade, store-bought, or semi-homemade) for winter holidays. If there's something that you've made before, if you can either link to instructions or provide simple how-tos, that would be great. If it's just something that has inspired you and you'e thinking about making/doing it, provide a link or a screen shot of the item. I've got a few of those, too, on my list.

Again, thanks for being there. A lot of fabulous ideas and shared knowledge!

How I Menu Plan for Everyday Meals

I was thinking about how I menu plan and find inspiration for meals this morning and solidified some of my ideas. We all go through ruts in planning meals, so I thought by breaking my method down into concise steps, it might help someone else.


There seem to be 2 basic approaches to planning regular meals. One approach involves thinking of the meals you'd like to prepare and finding appropriate recipes, then making a shopping list to purchase the foods that required. This sort of menu planning approach is most often done on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. The other approach flips these processes, so that the individual responsible for planning meals first stocks the food storage, then plans from what is abundant at home. To do this economically, one stocks up on basic ingredients when found on sale, making sure to have an adequate supply of the majority of ingredients that would go into the family's favorite meals.

Both approaches might use weekly circulars, either for inspiration or making up the shopping list. Both approaches can be money-savers. Both approaches can result in tasty meals that satisfy the family. And both approaches are lightyears better than the haphazard approach of "gee, what would we like to eat this week? I'll just figure that out when I'm at the store."

I'm attracted to both approaches for their different merits. Menu planning a week or more in advance satisfies my desire to control future events and feel more organized. Stocking the kitchen before planning appeals to my creative side -- the side that loves a challenge, loves taking 5 seemingly unrelated ingredients and making a tasty meal from them.

I tend to favor the second approach -- stocking the kitchen the planning meals a day or two in advance.

The second approach has a longer tradition in food preparation. In early human development, there wasn't the option to plan ahead what you might want to eat and then go out and acquire those foods. Your meals revolved around what you were lucky enough to obtain. In agrarian times, those obtainable foods were seasonal, tied to harvest and animal slaughter and preservation seasons. Whatever kept the longest was what you had to work with in late winter through spring.

1) Surpluses to inspire a meal plan
While I don't have to rely on ancient food preservation techniques, I do tend to think of what I have in surplus. By surplus, I mean fitting one of two descriptions. Surplus could mean I simply have a lot of the one ingredient, and by a lot I mean more than enough to last several weeks. Surplus can also mean that whatever amount I have currently will not keep very long and so is surplus in the sense that I have so much of the ingredient in a fragile state that it will spoil unless it is used in every or near every meal in the immediate future. It is surplus relative to its lifespan. I may not know what ingredients are surplus more than a few days out at a time. With a garden, a surplus can surprise me overnight. In addition, a great sale on peanut butter can also surprise me without warning. My primary shopping motivation is to buy as much as possible at the lowest possible price. As a result, I typically stock up wildly when I see a stellar deal.

So, step one in my meal planning is to survey my ingredients for surpluses.

2) Thinking of food groups
Step two involves identifying some basic food groups amongst the surpluses. When planning a dinner, I try to incorporate 1 protein source (or a combination of protein sources that will equal a serving of protein), 1 grain or starchy vegetable, and 2 fruit and/or vegetable servings. I don't adhere to this rigidly. If we have a quiche that has a grain-based crust plus rice, that's fine. We could also have an entree-sized salad that was heavier on the produce and lighter on grains or starches. And once in a while we have a "fun" meal of hot dogs or burgers and fried potatoes or chips, no fruits or vegetables. In the overall scheme of our diet, these meals are okay, as we generally eat pretty healthy. But anyway, this is the second step, finding the ingredients that will fill the protein, grain/starch, and produce requirements amongst the surpluses in my stock.

3) Using ethnic/period cuisine to help put the ingredients all together
The third step is where some thinking comes in -- how to put these assorted ingredients together in a pleasing way. Since our family enjoys foods from a variety of cuisines, I tend to think ethnic when it comes to planning dinner. We enjoy Italian, Mexican, Greek, Asian, Middle Eastern, Indian, and perhaps not ethnic but period, early American. In my mind, I'll run through the different possibilities with my identified surplus ingredients, and think of some of my family's favorite ways to eat those foods. Sometimes the ingredients lend themselves to particular ethnic cuisines, such as snow peas and Asian dishes or avocado and Tex-Mex meals. Other times, the ingredients are a little more ambiguous. Pureed pumpkin could be made into something period or regional American, like pie or a sweet souffle. Or, pumpkin can be the basis of a Mexican or Latin soup, with the addition of cumin, peppers and corn. I also like pumpkin as the base for an Italian pasta sauce, adding garlic, sage, and Italian sausage. If I was in the mood for an Asian meal, I could also use pumpkin cut into thin slices and added to a stir-fry. Often times, making a particular ingredient work for a specific cuisine is just a matter of using the seasonings that I find in other foods of that cuisine. I know from experience that chili powder and cumin work well in Mexican meals. So, if I take whatever surplus food that I have and treat it with with those seasonings, there's a good chance I'll have something that resembles foods from that ethnicity. Same thing with Asian meals. If I add garlic, soy sauce, ginger, and maybe a pinch of sugar, my meal will taste somewhat Asian. These meals won't be "authentic," but we're just talking about family suppers where authenticity doesn't matter nearly as much as tasty.


Here's an example from my life: we currently have a surplus of eggs (bought 15 dozen in a case a week ago), rice (bought in a 25-lb bag a couple of months ago), tomato paste (was frozen once already and has been thawed and in the fridge for over a week, so needs using ASAP), kale in the garden, and foraged blackberries. When one item seems unrelated to the others significantly enough than flavors would just no go, I separate out that one item and serve it on its own. In this case, it's the blackberries. I don't think the blackberries would go well in a main-dish prepared with the rest of the ingredients. So, I could serve the blackberries as dessert, like topped with honey or sweetened yogurt. That leaves me with eggs, rice, tomato paste, and kale. My family enjoys even-baked frittatas and they are easy for me to make. (I saute whatever veggies I have and put into a buttered pie plate along with beaten, salted eggs and milk, then bake in a low oven for half an hour. Cut in wedges and serve.) So a kale and onion frittata that is seasoned with salt and garlic will fill both a protein and vegetable need. Since I have tomato paste needing to be used, I'll make a quick tomato sauce with water, garlic, salt, and oregano to spoon over the top of the frittata in the last 10 minutes of baking -- bonus on the veggies with this meal. I have lots of rice. I also have 2 new loaves of French bread. I consider the rice more of a surplus ingredient because I have more rice than we can consume in the next several weeks. Whereas with the bread, it would take me additional labor to add to our bread supply when we run out in a few days. Even though we have a lot of the ingredients to make more bread, I factor in the labor that is required. So, although we enjoy bread more than rice, I tend to include a lot of rice in our meals because it is easy on my labor. This is my meal plan for tonight. I really love Italian cuisine, so my inspiration for using my ingredients comes from Italy. I serve something similar to this almost every week. It's an easy meal for me to think of and takes relatively little hands-on time  to prepare.

Here's another example from my life: we also have a surplus of beans and lentils, barley, carrots, garden kale, blackberries, plus the above-mentioned tomato paste. There was leftover cooked barley and lentils in the fridge from a previous night, both of which needed using soon. It was my husband's night to cook and his cooking skills and ambition are more limited than mine, so he chose to make a soup as the entree. He combined cooked lentils and barley with tomato paste, water, chopped carrots, onions, garlic, and Italian herbs/spices (oregano, basil, red pepper flakes), and salt and made a very respectable soup. He served this with fresh blackberries sprinkled with sugar and leftover pita bread. I'd say this was a Mediterranean-inspired meal with a PNW dessert.

Here's one last example from my real life: Asian-style ham and egg fried rice, using surplus cabbage, garden snow peas, garden garlic, leftover brown rice, and ham from Easter, plus blackberry pie. The day that we had this meal, I had a surplus of previously-frozen eggs (now thawed and on their last day or two), leftover brown rice, an aging head of cabbage, and a whole bunch of snow peas in the garden, plus the usual bucket of blackberries. When I have eggs that need using plus leftover rice, I usually think of fried rice. It's an easy one-dish meal to prepare -- throw everything into a skillet and just like that, you have dinner. When I'm experiencing a drought of ideas for dinners, fried rice is one of the first meals I think of. On this day, since I knew that throwing together the main dish would be easy, I  was able to focus my kitchen time on baking a pie. I satisfied everyone.


While I've identified two different approaches to meal planning, these two don't need to be exclusive. A lot of people use a hybrid approach. They keep most of the basics in stock at all times, but use flyers and cookbooks to plan a week's or month's worth of meals before making a shopping list. They will look at their current stock in addition to what they find on sale or determine what they need for particular dishes. I do this occasionally, too. I may have a particular recipe that I want to make or we may have a celebratory meal in our week, so I'll think of the foods I want to make, then add the ingredients that I am lacking to my grocery list. The hybrid approach can provide increased variety to the week or specialness to a single meal. We are blessed to live in a time that a hybrid approach is possible. We have salaries that allow for the purchase of ingredients (instead of relying solely on what you can produce for yourself), we have retail outlets that stock a variety of foods year round, and we have a constant flow of information that exposes us to lots of new ideas for meals. When you pair these with the relatively new concept, the warehouse store, large quantities of any ingredient can be had at a discount, leading to many people unintentionally or intentionally stocking up on the basics and giving them some surpluses in their kitchen stock. This is a blessed time and place for meal options.

Anyways, these thoughts were jumbled in my mind and I thought I'd share them, like I said, in case my thoughts can help someone else, or in case my thoughts could spur more discussion on the topic. Speaking of food and meals, I need to eat some lunch! Have a good rest of your day!

7 Ways I Saved This Week and Asking for Help to Save Even More

Hello, friends!

If you're reading this while I'm online (9AM to 11 AM, PDT), that's great. But if not, that's okay, too. If you have a question, just leave it in the comments and I'll check back over the weekend, then read and  respond.

So, grab your favorite beverage, pull up a chair or fluff up those pillows, and join me for a couple of hours. Say "hi" in the comments and let me know you're here, if you want. Ask questions, share tips, or post a link to a favorite recipe.

To start, Ruthie asked about making pita chips the other day. I told her I'd post a recipe for homemade pita bread. It's pretty simple to make and would really bring down the cost of homemade pita chips. This batch of pita bread costs about 80 cents, including the electricity for the oven. It makes about 1  1/2 pounds of pita bread. If baking this into pita chips after making the bread, the cost per pound would be about 75 cents per pound for pita chips, including the oven use. Commercial pita chips cost over $6 per pound at Fred Meyer. Homemade chips from homemade pita bread is a substantial savings. If making the pita bread only for the chips, you can freeze the baked pita bread, two or 3 together, enough for making chips for 2 or 3 people.

If you've ever made flour tortillas, then you can definitely make pita bread.

1) Pita Bread (for Ruthie and anyone else)

1 envelope (about 2 and 1/2 teaspoons) active dry yeast
1  1/4 cups warm water (about 105 to 110 F or 40 to 43 C)
3  1/4 to 3  3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup shortening (I used a scant 1/4 cup of vegetable oil - it's cheaper)
1  1/2 teaspoons salt

Soften yeast in water in a large bowl. Add 2 cups of flour, the salt, and shortening. Using a mixture, beat on low speed for 30 seconds, then 3 minutes on high speed. Alternatively, beat with a large spoon for about 3-4 minutes.

Stir in remaining flour. Turn onto a lightly floured board or countertop and knead for 3 to 5 minutes. (if your bowl is large, you can knead the dough right in the bowl. That's what I do.) The dough should be a soft dough, only sticks when you leave it in one place for a while. Return dough to the bowl and grease all sides of dough with a little oil. Cover and set in a warm place (80 to 90F degrees) for 15 minutes.

On the countertop or floured surface, divide the dough into 12 portions, smoothing each into a ball. Cover with a damp cloth and allow to rest for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, re-flour your surface and gently flatten each ball. Allow to rest another 10 minutes.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.

Taking one ball of dough at a time, lightly roll into  6 to 7-inch circles, working the rolling pin from the inside of the circles to the edges. Place as many dough circles as will fit on an un-greased baking sheet.

Bake for 3 to 4 minutes, until inflated, then turn each over and bake for 3 additional minutes.

Remove from the baking sheet immediately, stack on a plate, and cover with a tea towel (this holds in moisture). When cooled, wrap in plastic. You can slice pockets into one end, or halve the pita and slice pockets through the cut edge (making 2 half-pita pockets).

Occasionally I pierce a pita when flipping it over, so that it has a hole which could leak a filling. These pitas can be used for flatbread pizza or as a wrap, gyro-style.

To turn into pita chips, here are 2 links:
One for no extra oil chips, just baked. And a second one, for chips that are brushed with a little oil just before baking. The second variety will be crispier than the dry-baked ones.

2) Jam Milk, Jam Tea, and Jam Lemonade

This was a jam-making week for me, using up some of the foraged blackberries. When my son was a little boy, I would make him a special treat if he could entertain himself in a corner of the kitchen while I made jam using fruit from the trees in our rental's yard. The treat was very frugally-made with the empty saucepan after I poured the jam into sterilized jars and a cup of milk. There's always jam that sticks to the interior of the saucepan, and I hated to just waste that wonderful flavor. So, I would rinse out the pot with a cup of milk and let my son have this as his afternoon snack, The jam would both sweeten and flavor the milk. I never bought stir-ins for my children, like Nestle's Quik, so flavored milk was really a treat.

I still use the jam pot for making sweetened, flavored beverages, even though my "kids" are not so little. Instead of rinsing the saucepan out with 1 cup of milk, I now rinse it out with about 2 to 2  1/2 cups of water and make jam tea or jam lemonade.

To make jam tea, pour 2  1/2 cups of water into the near-empty jam saucepan and bring to a boil. Stir the jam off of the sides of the pan and into the water as it heats. When the now-flavored water reaches a boil, remove from heat and ad 1 tea bag or some loose black, green, or herb tea, and infuse. Strain tea leaves as needed and serve.

For jam lemonade, follow the instructions for jam tea, but instead of adding tea or herb leaves, use the flavored water for making lemonade. For lemonade, to the flavored water, add 1/4 cup of bottled lemon juice, and a scant 1/4 cup of sugar. Delicious, flavored lemonade. Nothing wasted.

The other day I made a pot of blackberry jam tea, using lemon balm harvested from my garden. This may be hard to see in the photo, but the pink color of the tea is a near match for the pink in the dishes. Beautiful, delicious, and virtually free (okay, I did have to pay for the 2  1/2 cups of tap water).

3) Watermelon Rind to Use in Savory Dishes

I finished making watermelon rind pickles for the season, so I was mindlessly tossing any watermelon rinds into the compost. Well, I was brainstorming ways to make chutney and I thought about watermelon rind chutney. Yes, there is a recipe for that! When looking up that recipe I came across a link to a recipe for watermelon rind curry. Now, you may have noticed, my family is going through a curry phase. This sounds like a wonderful use for something that I was composting. Check out this link for watermelon rind curry. And while you'e checking sites, the same site has that recipe for watermelon rind chutney that I just mentioned. Anyway, I still have a quarter of a watermelon in my fridge that has a fair amount of rind on it. Here's my thinking with regards to using the rind: every time I use something that I salvage or forage, I save on something else that I have to work to produce or buy. It just makes sense to use as much of a watermelon as possible.

4) Saving Some of the Current Batch of Yogurt to Use as Starter in Future Batches

Now that I have a good supply of milk again, I was able to make a new batch of yogurt. I let my yogurt incubate overnight. Then the next morning I refrigerate the jars. The day after that, I scoop yogurt into containers for the freezer, about 1 cup of yogurt per container. I did 4 containers the other day, marking each as yogurt starter, along with the date. This will be enough starter yogurt for 4 more batches. No need to buy fresh yogurt to use as starter. I save $14.16 per year by freezing 2nd-day yogurt to use as my starter.



5) Scoring More Fuel Rewards by Buying Gift Cards

Fred Meyer had a 4 X the fuel rewards deal going on with gift card purchases this past week. That means that instead of getting 50 fuel reward points for a $50 gift card purchase, I got 200 fuel rewards with a $50 gift card purchase. 200 fuel rewards will save me 20 cents per gallon on a purchase of gas. If I buy 10 gallons, I will save $2.


So, I don't go overboard on loading up on gift cards. But when Fred Meyer has this promotion going on (they do this 3 or 4 times per year), I assess our close future spending and determine the amount of gift cards we would need to make purchases in other stores. We're working on a landscaping project this summer and getting our supplies from Home Depot. I estimated that we will spend about $60 for the remaining supplies for this project. Therefore, I bought 2 $25 Home Depot gift cards, which will be used this month. For an extra 2 minutes of my time picking up the gift cards while I was doing my other shopping, I saved us about $2.

6) Free Trash Bag for Our Kitchen Garbage Can

Do you see what I see? This package of bathroom tissue is just about the same height and width as our kitchen trash receptacle. By cutting off one of the smaller end panels with a pair of scissors, I have a perfect "bag" for our trash can. Saved 6 cents, and I did something environmentally-responsible.




7) I've been Christmas shopping this week. While at Fred Meyer on Senior Day, I picked up a food item that I know one of my recipients will love, using a high value coupon. Basically, I bought this item for half-price! And this wasn't an impulse buy, but something I had planned on buying for this individual.

Suggestions For Patching or Repurposing a Pair of Jeans

These are my favorite around-the-house jeans, and sometimes running-casual-errands jeans. My question -- how to make them not so indecent and still okay for running to the store or bank? The fabric has a dark side that is not the same color as the front. The dark side is just threads and you can see through them when I'm wearing the jeans. What do you think? Would you patch them from the inside (and have dark threads showing on the outside), or patch them on the outside? Would you use an iron-on patch, then stitch around edges, or would you try something else? Would you abandon the idea of patching the jeans and make them into something else -- jeans' skirt? a bag? go in the scrap pile for something else? My first choice is to patch them, as I don't want to spend the money to replace them right now.

Need a Recipe for Rhubarb Chutney that has a Bare Minimum of Ingredients

We just ran out of homemade plum chutney. We'll have a very limited amount of apples and plums from our garden this year, and I don't want to spend the money to buy raisins or other dried fruit. I do have rhubarb that I could use. Has anyone made a rhubarb chutney that did not call for raisins or dried cranberries? I could maybe sacrifice one apple from our trees for a batch, plus I will have onions, spices, vinegar, sugar, and molasses to use. I'm looking for a recipe that I can can to keep for a year or two. Any recipes or links?

What's on your mind this morning? How was your week? Any frugal successes this week? Did you try any new recipes? Do you have any questions for me or anyone else who is here today? I'll be here to answer any questions just before 9 AM, PDT, and will stay online until 11 AM.



Related articles that may interest you:

More on freezing yogurt to use as starter

How to know when your jelly is done
Making jelly without added pectin
Extracting juice from fruit to make jelly
What to do when your jelly doesn't jell

Making flour tortillas

Cheap & Cheerful Suppers for the First Week of August

one of my lunches during the week, using up leftover baked beans,
garden produce for a salad, gifted watermelon, and the bread
that was badly over-baked and had to have the sides trimmed 

Friday
baked beans (using the leftover chicken barbecue sauce from Thursday's dinner, plus onions and cooked pinto beans)
scratch corn bread
green salad with garden lettuce and tomato
blackberries with honey

Saturday
leftover baked beans
fried cornbread
green salad (using garden kale, garden lettuce, and some onion in a homemade creamy dressing)

Sunday cook-out
hot dogs in homemade buns
homemade French fries
green salad using garden lettuce and kale
garden tomato wedges

Monday
spaghetti with beefy marinara
blackberry pie

Tuesday's dinner

Tuesday
lentil and barley salad, along with with garden greens, garden tomatoes, and garden cucumber, topped with boiled egg slices
crackers (my daughter bought the crackers at Dollar Tree for our dinner -- it was her night to cook. They tasted great with the salad!)
blackberry pie

Wednesday's dinner

Wednesday
garden beet green, garden garlic, and onion frittata, topped with marinara sauce
brown rice topped with marinara
beet salad (using the root of the garden beets from which I plucked the beet greens, some leftover sweet pickle juice, chive blossom vinegar, and salt)

Thursday
chicken curry (using chicken leg quarters, canned tomato paste, onions, homemade plum chutney, garden kale, seasonings, coconut milk)
brown rice
pears from our trees


A delicious week, with an abundance of garden produce, several meatless entrees, and lots of variety.

When I was cleaning the kitchen, one day earlier this week, I decided to get out the fall tablecloth. I'm not pushing summer out the door, exactly, but ushering in a season of harvest and thanksgiving. (Plus, the summer table runner and straw mats were needing a good cleaning.) We have so much for which to be thankful.

Live Chat Opportunity
For anyone interested, I will be online and live tomorrow morning (Saturday, August 10, 2019) from 9 AM to 11 AM, PDT with a post of miscellaneous "stuff" from this past week and to answer any questions you may have about how I do things, what my days' schedules look like, particular recipes you'd like, or even to ask a question of another online friend, here. I also have a couple of questions of my own for which I'd like to get some suggestions (one having to do with how to best patch or salvage jeans with a hole in a bad/indecent spot, and the other needing a recipe for rhubarb chutney that uses ingredients that I have on hand -- I'll specify those ingredients tomorrow). Ruthie, I'll type up my recipe for pita bread in this post tomorrow morning. Anyway, if you can drop by, say hi tomorrow morning from 9 to 11 AM PDT. I'd love to chat with you all. If you can't be there, then, I'll check back on the comments over the rest of the weekend.

Have a great weekend, everybody! Hope to hear from some of you tomorrow!

The State of August's Grocery Budget

I am very thrilled to report that the grocery money is stretching really far this month. I have shopped at the restaurant supply (SmartFoodservice/Cash & Carry), Fred Meyer, and Walmart and have spent $90.24 so far, leaving $34.89 remaining of my $125.13 for the month. The only other store at which I will definitely shop this month is WinCo. However, I only plan on spending $5.67 there. I will have $29.22 leftover for making stock-up purchases as I find great deals.

What I bought:

25 lbs of rolled oats
1 gallon of mayonnaise (a stock-up item for winter)
50 lbs of all-purpose flour
15 dozen eggs
1 lb of butter (stretching this butter with oil, making soft butter to get us through August)
8 gallons of 2% milk (for drinking -- I'll freeze what we don't use for September)
3 gallons of whole milk (for making yogurt)
1 jar of instant regular coffee
1 jar of instant decaffeinated coffee
2 cans of tuna fish (a stock-up item for winter)
1/2 gallon of coconut milk (for my non-dairy use plus a couple of nights of curry for the family)
2 packages of hot dogs (for 4 small cookouts in August)
10 lbs of chicken leg quarters
3 cans of frozen orange juice concentrate (a stock-up item for winter)
3 lbs of vegetable shortening (for pie-making this summer and fall)

I plan to buy:

12 oz of chocolate chips
80 corn tortillas
$1.50 worth of cocoa powder (a stock-up item for fall and winter)


You will notice that there is no mention of buying any fresh produce. That is because we simply don't need any this month! Yay! We were given a whole watermelon, and we've been picking blackberries, pears, and apples for our fruit. And we still have rhubarb! For veggies, we have tomatoes, lettuce, Swiss chard, kale, beets, cucumbers, snow peas, garlic, and watercress that we're harvesting right now from our garden. We still have about 5 pounds of carrots, some onions, a little cabbage, and a few potatoes left from previous months. The summer squash and green beans will be ready to harvest in about one week, and the potatoes, winter squash/pumpkin, plums, and more pears, apples, and a few ever-bearing raspberries will be ready in September. I nixed the bananas and any other produce purchases for August, unless I come across a stellar deal.

As you can see in my list of purchases, I'm already stocking up (little by little) on some foods for fall and winter. I'll continue to buy what I can, here and there, as I find good prices. So, that's the state of our grocery budget for August. We're doing well and feel so blessed.

Freezing Blackberries in Bulk and on Trays

My two daughters and I went out foraging for blackberries Monday evening. We brought 3 ice cream pails with us and each filled one. We plan on doing this three or four more times this month. That's a lot of blackberries! These berries will supplement any fresh or canned fruit that we buy this fall and winter.

The way that we use the frozen berries dictates how I freeze them. We have two main ways that they are used: one, I bake a dessert for the entire family or make a small batch of jam; and two, we add just a few berries at a time to foods like smoothies, homemade yogurt, or to add just a bit of color or flavor to foods like applesauce.

The most expedient way to freeze the berries is just washed, then scooped into quart-size freezer bags or containers. This method takes the least amount of hands-on time. The berries tend to clump together, so these bags of berries are best-suited to uses that call for an entire quart at a time.

fresh berries not yet frozen

The second method is to wash them, then spread on a baking sheet lined with waxed paper or parchment paper. I freeze the entire tray full of berries, then after a couple of hours they are frozen enough to transfer to a gallon-sized freezer bag. With these berries frozen individually, we can easily pour out however much we want at a time.

Two jelly roll sheet pans fill a gallon-sized ziploc bag

The first method can also be used to get just a few berries at a time, but it involves whacking the bag on the counter's edge to break up the clump, and risks damaging the freezer bag. I wash and reuse all of our freezer bags until they're falling apart, so by preparing the berries in such a way that whacking is completely unnecessary, I extend the life of each bag. Plus, my daughters are super pleased to have everything easy for making smoothies or adding to jars of yogurt. And I like making things easier for everyone else.

The bonus in using the second method for freezing is that the berries actually freeze faster and preserve more of their nutrient value. That's always a good thing.

I will still freeze about half of the berries in clumps in quart-sized bags, as that's easy for me, and I can use those berries in many recipes. It's one of those things that doesn't have to be all or none. I can do some each way and still come out ahead.

Basic Ingredients with Multiple Uses: 5 Different Ways to Use Rolled Oats

If you've been reading my grocery shopping plans for the past several months, you will have likely noticed that I buy basic ingredients and transform them into a diverse repertoire of meals. My pantry stock-up plan for this fall includes buying stock-up quantities of several different grains and legumes. These basic ingredients are some of the most affordable foods that you can buy, making them the  center of my plan for a spartan grocery budget. Eating the same basic ingredients can become a tad dull, however. To keep these interesting, I implement a variety of ideas in their use, trying to see new possibilities for familiar ingredients.

You may have noticed that in August's grocery plan, I planned to buy a 25-lb sack of rolled oats. The 25-lb bag was on sale at Cash & Carry, motivating me to brainstorm the many ways that I use oats.

A lot of websites will feature articles on XX number of ways to use a particular ingredient. In looking closely, a lot of the recipes are just variations on a theme. For instance, you may find a dozen recipes for baked goods when looking up what to do with oats. That type of information is definitely helpful; but what I wanted to explore was how to see an ingredient in a different way and find less traditional uses for it. Today, I'm going to look at rolled oats.

First thoughts include cooked oatmeal as a breakfast cereal, homemade granola, and oatmeal cookies. I know from my own experience that rolled oats can be used in many more ways than this.


As a beverage
Maybe you're already familiar with the non-dairy, milk-substitute beverage, horchata. My daughters first introduced me to horchata. They were studying Latin American culture in school and were tasked with preparing something Hispanic for the rest of their class. They chose to make oat horchata. While horchata is often made with rice, almonds, and/or coconut, there is also a version that uses oats, sometimes known as Agua de Avena (oatmeal water). There are lean versions (including only oats, water, cinnamon, and a small amount of sweetening) and rich versions (the above along with the addition of some sweetened condensed milk) of this beverage. For the rich version, you can take a look at the recipe on this page. When my daughters made this, and when I subsequently have made it, I've added a bit of vanilla extract to the cinnamon or omitted the cinnamon altogether and flavored with almond extract.

You can also simply make oat milk to use in savory dishes and sauces, omitting the cinnamon and sweetening. Soak 1 cup of rolled oats in 3  1/2 cups of water for 30 minutes to 1 hour. Then process in a blender with a pinch of salt added until the oats are pureed. Strain through a sieve lined with cheesecloth. Refrigerate the strained liquid until needed. Stir the oat milk before each use. Oat milk will keep in the refrigerator for about 1 week. If cooking with oat milk, for instance to make a sauce, keep in mind that oat milk, as grain-based, will thicken as it cooks. When making something like a cream soup or cooked sauce, you would want to reduce any other thickeners (like flour) that are called for in the recipe.

Once you have the plain version of oat milk, you can easily add flavors to it, such as almond or vanilla extract, chocolate syrup, cinnamon, and sweetenings like honey, stevia, or cane sugar.

I've made this for myself when I've been out of soy, almond, or rice milk. It tends to have sediment that settles to the bottom of the container, but otherwise it works very well and I especially like it as the base for hot cocoa for myself.

Obviously, oats have a different nutrient make-up than dairy milk. But oat milk does make a good substitute in a pinch or to replace other commercial non-dairy milks. Beyond just an emergency replacement, horchata is delicious in its own right and worth giving a try some evening when you're preparing a Hispanic meal.


As a flour
All out (or almost all out) of all-purpose flour? You can make flour with rolled oats. Simply process unflavored rolled oats in a food processor, blender, or coffee grinder until the consistency of flour. Pulsing the machine will result in a more uniform texture without burning out your motor. Every 60 seconds, take the lid off of your machine and stir up the particles then pulse again. This helps redistribute any particles which keep missing the blades.

You can use oat flour in quick breads (non-yeast breads that rely on baking powder or baking soda plus an acid like buttermilk and/or egg for leavening) or yeast breads.

My favorite baked good for using homemade oat flour is oat scones. I substitute oat flour for about half of the all-purpose flour in a scone recipe. They bake up nice and crumbly (just the way I like scones) with an oat-y flavor.

Oat flour also makes tasty muffins. Egg, oil, and milk help bind oat flour in the muffins, so oat muffins do turn out less crumbly than scones.

Another way that I enjoy using homemade oat flour in a quick bread is loaf-style, either as a free-form loaf of scone dough patted out into a mound on a buttered baking sheet, or baked in a buttered loaf pan, as in this honey-oat bread. For the scone bread, just like making individual scones, adding some all-purpose flour will help hold the baked bread together. Oat loaf breads are the type of thing that goes well with a pot of soup for a warming supper.

You can also use oat flour in banana bread, using about 1/2 oat flour, 1/2 all-purpose flour. If you google "oat flour banana bread," you should be able to pull up several recipes that use oat flour in the bread.

In addition to baking quick breads, oat flour can also be substituted for a portion of the wheat flour in a yeast bread. Since oat flour holds moisture so well, limit it to 1/3 of the flour called for, with the remaining flour as all-purpose flour. I've used a basic white bread recipe, substituting oat flour for some of the all-purpose flour, and the resulting bread has been very delicious. Oat flour seems to have a naturally sweet flavor, which I think makes this a great bread for toasting.


In place of breadcrumbs
Rolled oats can also stand-in for bread crumbs when making meatloaf, meatballs, or bean patties or loaves. If you pulse some dry oats in a blender or food processor for a few brief seconds, the result should be a coarse meal, which is about right as a breadcrumb substitute.


As a savory dish
Rice isn't the only grain in the pantry to be used for savory sides. For a quick savory breakfast, lunch, or supper, oats can be added to eggs, such as in this Indian Oats and Scrambled Eggs, or as the grain-base for topping with a fried egg and veggies, such as in this Tex-Mex fried egg, salsa, cheese, and avocado topped oatmeal. There is nothing remotely "nursery" about these oatmeal dishes. They are robust, full of flavor, and filling enough to stand in for a quick meal at any time of the day.

Once you're on-board with the whole savory oats as a possibility, then you're ready to try risotto-like dishes made with oats. Most oatmeal risotto recipes call for steel cut oats. However, this recipe, here, uses rolled oats, along with mushrooms, onions, stock, wine, and cheese.


As the basis for a patty
When you have leftover cooked oatmeal, here's an option for using it up that won't look or taste anything like a bowl of porridge. This recipe from SparkPeople uses egg, pepper, and salt mixed in with cooked oatmeal to make a basic savory patty.  Spruce this up with some minced onion, minced mushrooms, green pepper, bits of ham, and some garlic and you have something extraordinary.

Here's another patty suggestion, from the Prudent Homemaker. It's a rolled oats patty that is seasoned with sage, poultry seasoning, and dried onions. The patty is then smothered in a gravy made from Cream of Mushroom soup and milk. I think you could also make a simple pan gravy after frying the patties using any oil left in the pan, supplemented with other fat (perhaps saved chicken fat), flour, chicken soup base/bouillon, sage, and milk and/or water. Thanks to Gaila in the comments for calling attention to this recipe.


Here are 5 non-traditional uses for rolled oats. This should keep me going with my 25-lb sack for a while. How else can they be used?

Can This Be Salvaged? Over-Baked Loaves of Bread

Saturday afternoon, I began a 4-loaf batch of whole wheat sandwich bread, enough to last my household about 10 days. I had just picked up a large bag of all-purpose flour, so I could blend whole wheat and white to make a fluffier loaf than we'd been using for the month of July. I worked at kneading this batch to result in a light texture to the finished bread. The raised loaves went into a hot oven around 6 PM. About 6:10 PM, we received a phone call which put us all into emergency action. I completely forgot about the bread in the oven. However, I did take a couple of minutes to check and lock all of the doors and make sure the stove was turned off. We were gone for over 2 hours. Our urgent errand was taken care of and all was well, with one exception. When we walked in the door, the timer on the oven was ringing and the air had the smell of burnt toast, lots of burnt toast.

This is what very well-done bread looks like. Not only were the 4 loaves very brown on the outside, but they were very lightweight, and had shrunk away from the pans' sides considerably.

Odd thing, I went online and did an image search to see if other people had burned bread this badly, and if that bread could be salvaged, yet the only loaf that I could find pictures of online that were worse-looking than mine was a loaf that was found in Pompeii and had been carbonized by the lava flow.

After a half-hour of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to try cutting away some of the hardened crust from one of the loaves, and this is what I found. Inside, the bread was not that bad. It's a little dry, but once you cut the hard and thick crust off, it's edible, palatable, and salvageable. I estimate that we'll lose about 1/3 of the bread by removing the burnt crust, but a one-third loss is better than a 100% loss.

I like to think of this as pre-toasted bread.

Cheap & Cheerful Suppers for the End of July

Friday
frittata with garden Swiss chard and onions (I'm now using eggs that I had frozen in June, they're working great)
brown rice
steamed carrots
freshly-baked blackberry pie

Saturday
brown rice and beans
green salad with garden lettuce and kale plus cucumber in homemade vinaigrette
blackberry pie

Sunday
bean and cheese burritos in homemade whole wheat tortillas
cole slaw

Monday
scrambled eggs
baked potato topped with steamed garden kale and cheese sauce

Tuesday
leftover refried beans
sauteed garden kale and onions
homemade French bread and butter
fresh blackberries

Wednesday
ham and egg fried rice, with cabbage, garden snow peas, garden garlic, and leftover brown rice (ham was from Easter)
freshly-baked blackberry pie

Thursday
barbecued chicken leg quarters (Walmart's 59 cents/lb in 10-lb bags)
brown rice
green salad with garden lettuce and tomatoes
freebie watermelon
blackberry pie

Looking over our menu, I noticed that we ate blackberries on 5 nights. That's a lot of blackberries!

It was a low meat consumption week -- not planned, it just worked out that way. But it's appreciated as this preserved our meat stores. Most of our produce was either free or fairly low-cost, such as cabbage at 49 cents/lb, carrots at 44 cents/lb, or onions at 28 cents/lb.

For breakfasts, we had toasted French bread, homemade granola, and homemade blueberry muffins (with blueberries from our garden).

Lunches were whatever anyone wanted to prepare for them self. I had a lot of salads, some pesto or leftover cheese sauce on French bread, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, and my dinner leftovers when I couldn't eat everything. It was a good and frugal week.

What was on your menu this past week?

Where's Your Blessing This Month?

I'll show you one of mine. Even though I feel that making our grocery budget on a shoestring work is an impossible task, I can see that we will have blackberry pie all August long. Yes, that's a blessing! My pantry, fridge , and freezer may sometimes look skimpy to me, but the Lord has provided an abundance of blackberries, a big bag of sugar, and the makings for pie pastry. How I can I feel neglected by God if I can have pie every night, if I want?

My daughter picked an ice cream pail full of blackberries on Tuesday, so I made this pie for Wednesday and Thursday desserts. Being able to have blackberry pie all month long feels truly indulgent.

Where have you found your blessings lately?

Are You Bad With Money?

"You must be bad with money." "I'm good with money." Our culture likes to divide itself into heroes and villains. Maybe there's really no such thing as good with money or bad with money. Maybe it's really all about how we approach money, based on our background, life experience, and even genetics. (Yes, I do believe that some personality traits are heritable.) We each reach adulthood with baggage that infuses our money responses.

In a similar vein, I've observed that people generally fall into one of three categories when it comes to how we respond to unexpected bills. There's the person who freaks out and can't wrap their head around a bill, whether it's a $25 co-pay at the doctor's office or a multi-thousand dollar repair bill on our home or car. The unexpected bill itself hits their pain buttons pretty hard. Then there's the person who isn't fazed in the least when they receive these bills. The dollar amount is just a number to them. They've got it lucky. And then there's the rest of us, myself included. When they/we receive an unexpected bill, at first we freak out, but then we come around to the idea that this work needs or needed to be done, or that life has it's bad along with the good. This is totally me.

What brings this up is we've had a car repair need for a little while. When I first heard a ball-park estimate, I did freak out. "Where will I find the money?" "How could something possibly cost that much?" But I came around to the idea of the bill and accepted that car ownership has its costs. When I actually did take the car in to get a real estimate, the number was nearly double what I had anticipated. But do you know what? I didn't freak out, not even for a minute. Do you know why? Because I had already come to grips with the thought of a "big bill" to get the car fixed. In the real-life moment, it didn't seem to matter how much bigger that amount was. I had accepted it and was ready to move to the next step. This doesn't mean I'm "good" with money. It just means that for whatever background reasons, I have been blessed with the ability to accept this kind of bad news.

Sometimes in relationships, both partners are either the type B or type C with regards to accepting big bills. In those cases, life's unplanned emergencies don't rifle their financial feathers too much. But in other cases, one partner is definitely a type A and the other is type B or C. This can be a challenge for both partners. How would you like to feel that you were always being "forced" into spending more money than felt comfortable? Or how would it feel to be on the other end, always trying to "shock" your partner into "reform?" It's tough for both partners. I can imagine it's pretty uncomfortable to be a type A when it comes to response to unexpected bills. I'm glad that I don't have to deal with that all of the time. So, what can you do if your partner is the type A and you're a B or a C?

Be a compassionate leader in this area.
Pick your moment carefully as to when to reveal unexpected expenses. And choose your words with even more care when that moment of reveal comes up. No one wants to or should be shamed for responding to bills in "their normal way." And remember your own humanness with humility. You may be well-suited to handling difficult financial situations, but you certainly have weaknesses in other areas. I can never, ever remember which way to screw anything. My mind begins to zone out when someone explains anything technical to me. I have an irrational fear of dental appointments. I lose my temper far too easily. I am impatient. And the list goes on. My partner needs me to be understanding and careful of their financial pain points. I will never be the one to "enlighten" him to the ways of unexpected bill acceptance. And maybe that's a good thing. We balance each other out. Knowing what I know about myself and him, I can just take charge in this one little area and get stuff that needs doing done, without bringing unnecessary stress into his mind. He, on the other hand, can help me think through a financial situation and assess whether or not work/repairs/help really needs doing. I don't succumb to his fears or reactions, but carefully take a second look. It's a partnership, right? It's not at all about me being good with money or him being bad. It's just a matter of our backgrounds influencing our gut reactions.

If you happen to be a type A with these bills, it's not a moral or character flaw. There may be work you can do with yourself, so that you can remove some of the emotion when these situations arise. That could make your financial life feel a whole lot better, I'd imagine. If you're both type As, this may be something you could work on together. But if it's not, you could still be the one to lead your union through treacherous financial waters, with personal work or maybe with a therapist who deals with money response and baggage. It's painful to be either a type A or type C, so practicing a little compassion and patience, plus choosing words and moments wisely can go a long, long way. I'm neither bad nor good when it comes to money. My responses are not indications of character, simply the sum of my background. I try to remember that.