Making meat affordable

As I’ve written about before, I tend to eat a semi-vegetarian diet, cooking with meat perhaps once, maybe twice per week. My strategy for purchasing meat is usually to buy large packages of meat when they go on sale. For example, Food Basics and FreshCo have had many sales recently of bone-in chicken thighs or drumsticks for $5; each package yields about 8 pieces of meat. This is a good price, but because I may eat just one or two pieces of meat per serving, I end up eating the same dish over and over again until I’m absolutely sick of it.

In response to this, I first tried making two dishes out of one package of meat. For example, I split up a recent purchase of Italian sausages to create two dishes; one, a slow-cooker dish of Kale, Sausage and Tomatoes, the other a Stir-fry. But this still meant that I was still eating meals containing sausage all week long.

So I adjusted my strategy: Buy a large package of meat, and then repackage it and freeze in small portions – putting 4 pieces of meat in one bag. This allows me to cook 2 – 4 meals at a time.

I find that when the meat is incorporated into a larger meal including lots of vegetables and grains, one or two pieces of meat is all that is necessary, and this leads to meals that are very low on the cost-per-serving ratio. Some of the meals I’ve calculated have come out to less than $2.50 per serving. This includes: Honey-Mustard Glazed Drumsticks with Roasted Carrots & Potatoes, served with Cauliflower Soup & homemade Garlic Croutons (about $2.30 per serving including the soup) and Chicken & Basmati Rice Bake with Peppers, Onions, Tomatoes & Green Beans (about $2.60 per serving.) Another meal I made with the drumsticks was a hearty Black Bean & Chicken slow-cooker Stew. All of these meals, by the way, were delicious.

When possible and depending on the dish, I may separate the chicken from the bones and put them into a freezer bag. Once I have enough bones (coupled with vegetable scraps like onion peelings, celery leaves, broccoli stocks, etc.) I make a delicious chicken stock, which can then be used for soups or infusing rice with more flavour.  Considering this eliminates the need to buy chicken stock from a store (and improves the flavour as well as the nutrition of the stock), this makes the meat purchase even more economical.  It’s this “minimal waste” philosophy that lets me eat for $150 – $175 a month. For example, the Cauliflower soup I mentioned was made with a cauliflower on sale for $1.49 and homemade croutons with leftover stale french bread and my own window-box herbs.

I also repeated this same strategy when buying stewing beef to make meals like Goulash and Beef Coconut Curry. These items are easily frozen so it makes sense to make a large batch and then freeze is smaller portions.

A final tip? When buying the chicken, I pick the greatest weight, since all packages are the same cost.

If any meal I’ve mentioned especially appeals to you, let me know and I will post the recipe!

What is your favourite money saving tip for buying meat?

Calculating carbon: a frugal household is a green household

Shopping Golightly at The Thrifty Chicks encourages us to count carbon, just as we count calories. I wish I could take a literal approach to her idea. In particular, I wish there was a really good carbon footprint calculator out there that would let us track our monthly or yearly progress.  Sure, carbon footprint calculators are easily found on the internet, but most of them are too simplistic to give an accurate, complete picture.  A good many of them are only accessible to United States citizens, but even those that are applicable to Canadians are limited to calculating factors like transportation, gas, electricity and so on.  I have yet to find one that takes a variety of lifestyle choices into consideration.  Tracking progress and seeing results is such an important component to success; whether we’re talking about dieting, saving money, or putting extra hours in at work, we need to know that what we are doing is making a difference. It helps us to stay motivated.

I’m starting to wonder about what kind of inadvertent (positive) effect my frugal choices have had on the environment.  For example, I thrift instead of buying retail – in fact, during the last 6 months, I’ve only purchased three items of clothing from retail stores – the rest of my purchases have been made at thrift stores. I eat vegetarian about 80% of the time.  I usually drink coffee at home instead of buying out. I use the Garden Fresh Box program and frequently shop directly from market vendors or farms, which means that the bulk of my produce is local, and I rarely require plastic bags.  After learning a few tricks from my readers, I have reduced my electricity consumption and now air dry most of my laundry and dishes, avoiding the drying cycle in the dishwasher altogether.   After my old clunker of a car kicked the bucket, I bought a new, more efficient vehicle.  These are more obvious choices that help to reduce environmental impact – but what about waste reduction in the kitchen? My efforts to create a DIY-kitchen, with homemade foods of all kinds – including snacks, cereals, sauces, and junk food – means that I am less prone to buy ready-made food products that come a box, can, or plastic wrapping. In fact, I used to rely on a lot of pre-packaged, often individually-wrapped, wasteful products, which I now make from scratch.  What kind of impact is this having? Although it might be small, I wouldn’t doubt that the accumulation of this kind of living has got to make some kind of an impact over time.

Included in the carbon footprint calculator should be a question related to how many pets you have and what type.  I recently read in The Star that feeding a medium sized dog for one year has twice the environmental impact of driving a luxury SUV for 10,000 kilometres.  I must say that I question the research behind this finding – according to the article, the researchers “based their calculations on the amount of acreage needed to sustain the dog’s diet of 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals in a year.”  But most dog food, if I’m not mistaken, does not use “meat”, it uses animal by-products. By-products include the leftover feet, necks, intestines and other “nasty bits” that are not considered usable meat.  So although it obviously takes energy to grind and process the by-products, we should not count the total amount of energy required to raise livestock.  The livestock would be raised for other purposes anyway – if we didn’t use the by-products for dog food, it would probably be thrown away.  This, I’m guessing, significantly reduces our pets’ carbon pawprints, so don’t feel too guilty about having your pet just yet.  Nevertheless, it is still another mouth to feed, and if we want to be realistic, we would want to include our pets as part of our households. So far I’ve yet to see a calculator that takes a dog or cat into account.

Which brings me to a final rant, ahem, point.  Pets are worth having. Children are worth having. I hate it when we get into these debates about whether or not we should just kill each other or off ourselves in order to save the planet. The point, I think, is that we need to rethink our values.  My frugal philosophy is to reduce waste and focus my financial resources on lifestyle choices that are consistent with my values.  Likewise, animals and families are worth fighting for – we don’t want or need to eliminate them altogether; quite the contrary.  The whole point of environmental sustainability is to keep on living, and living joyfully.  We need to sacrifice the things that matter less in order to keep the things that matter.

A frugal household, it seems, is a greener, less wasteful household.  I’d like to find a way to track just how much less wasteful it is.

Help me eat up my veggies!

I picked up another Garden Fresh Box from the Guelph Community Health Centre yesterday – check out these delicious looking vegetables! All this for only $10.  What you see above is a “small” size. It looks like it will be more than enough produce for the rest of the month.  

Meal planning is very different when you are handed a big box of vegetables.  You need to come up with meal ideas based on what’s in the box.  I like the challenge, and I like knowing that my meals are based around fresh, local, seasonal vegetables.  Here are a few ideas I’ve come up with so far, based on these ingredients:

• Corn and jalapeno soup
• Curried root vegetable soup (using the potatoes and carrots in the picture, as well as the sweet potatoes and summer squash I have in the fridge)
• Warm spinach and chickpea salad with sundried tomatoes
• Kebabs with homemade tzatziki sauce (using the garlic and cucumber)
• Salad of cucumber, green pepper, tomato and green onion with tzatziki
• Potato salad with dill
• Corn on the cob with lime and hot paprika
• Rutabaga and apple casserole

If you have any ideas of other food items I can make with the ingredients you see here, feel free to share! In particular, I am interested to know what I could make with the rutabaga.  Other than the casserole, I’m pretty much clueless. My only other idea is to make English Brown Pickle (Branston Pickle) which I used to eat adoringly in Somerfield’s “cheese plougman’s” sandwiches when I lived in England.  But these require quite a bit of work in addition to several ingredients I don’t have.  So any ideas you have are more than welcome.

In addition, I have no idea what to do with the red kale.  Normally I would put it in a stir-fry, but after all my soups and salads are made, I won’t have many other ingredients left over for a big stir-fry.  What are your favourite recipes using kale?

If I can’t figure out a way to eat the kale quickly, I will likely freeze it, along with some of the spinach. Although it’s difficult to tell from the photo, that is one massive bag of spinach!   There is a good description of how to freeze greens at pickyourown.org. 

Finally, the little ziplock bag you see is full of chickpeas and what I believe are mixed beans. They are beans with little sprouts attached.  Apart from soaking and then cooking these beans and mixing them with some kind of rice dish, I’m clueless.  Do these beans all require the same amount of cooking time?

I can’t wait to hear your suggestions!

Does eating locally mean increasing cost?

Crunchy Chicken has a sustainability challenge starting this month to find out if eating sustainably necessarily means spending more.  

So far I’ve certainly found ways to integrate local eating while reducing, not increasing cost.  As I’ve mentioned before, some local options for meat and eggs may be more costly, but veggies can be cheaper and so can other products, like flour.  Recently I stopped by the Arva flour Mill (a rare original flour mill in SouthWestern Ontario) and picked up a bag of whole wheat flour – it was certainly no more expensive, perhaps even cheaper than what you would find in a grocery store for similar quality flour. 

Plus, I love the simple packaging it comes in – a simple brown bag with white stitching.  

Now for some gratuitously cute shots of someone who was incredibly curious about this new bag…

While I won’t be taking Crunchy Chicken’s challenge, it’s an ongoing exploration to see how I can eat frugally yet sustainably.