Reconciling scratch-cooking and the busy lifestyle, batch by batch

In my post, “Finding foodie fulfillment” , reader Angela directed me to Jamie Oliver’s TED speech, which is brilliant.  I have a lot to say on the matter, but I thought I’d focus on documenting my own strategy to make eating good, nutritious, delicious food a consistent part of my lifestyle.

Jamie’s speech (and his series’ such as Ministry of Food and School Dinners) reveal that for many American and British families (and I would argue that many Canadians are following suit here,) food is no longer a part of family routine and ritual.  Many children are not learning how to cook, and culinary traditions are losing out to fast foods and mass consumption that goes hand in hand with a need for instant gratification. Instead of cooking and eating together, families are alienated from one another as they eat in their cars or in front of television sets.  But another part of the problem is that working long hours are not always conducive to long hours spent in front a stove.  So for a while now, I’ve wanted to share my own strategy for making scratch-cooking and scratch-baking possible within the confines of a busy lifestyle and full-time work.  (And being single).

When I first heard about batch cooking, I pictured women slaving away in a kitchen all day, cooking a week’s worth of meals for a large family, and thought, “that’s not for me.” But now batch cooking is an integral part of my strategy to eat well.

Eating food that is high in taste and nutrition is important to me, and I don’t like relying on convenience foods, as my readers well know.  I prefer to skip buying foods that I can make myself, such as bread, cookies, crackers, cereal, desserts, dips, hummus, salad dressings, sauces, salsa, snacks, etc.  I know this sounds like a lot of work, but I’ve actually got it down to a fine art now, so that I spend minimal time in the kitchen and simultaneously reap the rewards of a DIY approach to food.

Batch cooking is usually touted as a way to save on your electric bill, because you use the oven to make multiple batches at once, and it’s also commonly argued to be a great way to save time.  I’d argue that batch cooking accomplishes both of these goals and more.  For one thing, it is a tremendous weight-loss aid, because it creates meals that are always on hand - quick, healthy, homemade convienience foods.  When I get home from work, I’m usually pretty hungry.  Rather than having to snack before I start the long process of making dinner, or giving into cravings and picking up fast food or junk food, I am able to heat up or prepare a healthy meal within minutes, subverting the instinct to give in to unhealthy cravings.  It’s hard to justify stopping at a fast food restaurant when I know that preparing my own meal at home would actually take less time than stopping at the drive through.  Most of my weekly meals require re-heating, or perhaps require me to just make some rice, cook some pasta, dress a salad, or make some kind of simple addition to the meal.

So, how is batch cooking accomplished? My strategy is to make a few meals and snacks at once on Saturday or Sunday.  I choose my meals based on what I have available to me.  If I have eggplant, tomatoes and cheese on hand, I might make spaghetti sauce, eggplant parmesan, vegetarian lasagna, and/or pizza, all which require eggplant, tomatoes, and cheese.  If I have a head of cabbage, I might decide to make a cabbage & white bean soup, and simultaneously make a minestrone soup.  I will slice the rest of the cabbage to make cabbage roll skillet, or add to a salad, later in the week.  If I make pizza, I almost always make two at once, and the same goes with quiche.  I eat one while it’s fresh, and the freeze the other.

Homemade spaghetti sauce with roasted garlic

If you think this means you’ll spend a week eating nothing but eggplant or cabbage, fear not.  My strategy is to keep a small portion to eat throughout the week and freeze other portions, so that I can enjoy more selection.  You can also come up with different ways to eat leftovers. (For example, leftover cabbage roll skillet is great when wrapped in a tortilla and served with sour cream; eggplant parmesan is delicious on a crusty baguette and served with extra marina sauce, just like you’d eat a meatball sub.)  When I make soup, I frequently make at least two soups at once, because they usually require many of the same ingredients, such as garlic, ginger, onions, celery, carrots, and potatoes.  But depending on the main ingredients (say, Butternut squash, or Carrot and Ginger, their tastes can be quite different.)

I’ve heard different things on the merits of cutting up vegetables in advance of eating them.  Some say that they lose their nutrition as they lose their freshness. Personally, I like to cut-up veggies and keep them crisp in water, because it means that I’m more likely to eat them as snacks or as an addition to a quick lunchtime meal.  If I have a batch of homemade hummus in the fridge, it’s easy to reach for the ready-to-eat veggies and enjoy a healthy snack. If I have to go to the trouble of cutting everything up, I likely won’t bother.  So you have to weigh the risk of a slightly-less nutritious carrot stick versus the risk of not eating the carrot at all, and reaching for some chips, instead.  For the same reason, I like to wash and tear my lettuce in one go, rather than a little at the time.  If I prepare a few days’ worth of salad and salad dressing, I’m much more likely to have a salad at dinner.  I look at it as protecting myself against my own laziness.

When batch cooking, remember to take advantage of the oven’s heat to roast some garlic.  If you love roasted garlic like I do, a great strategy is to roast it while you’re baking at a similar temperature (around 450).  When done, pop the garlic out of its skin and mix it with some olive oil right away.  Keep it covered in the fridge, and it’s an instant topping for pizza, pasta, garlic bread or flatbread, and also works well in salad dressings throughout the week.  You can also use the residual oven heat to dry tomatoes or herbs.  All of these tricks require minimal effort but make delicious additions to your meals, and are environmentally-friendly solutions to using less electricity.

The benefits of this strategy have been numerous - I maintain a healthy weight effortlessly, I enjoy great tasting food, I don’t have to rely on convenience foods or fast foods, and I eat foods that are very healthy.  If I had to start from square one every night and cook a whole new meal from scratch, I guarantee I wouldn’t have the patience to do it, and I’d be snacking on junk food a whole lot more.  The final benefit?  A low cost meal plan. For the last four months I’ve averaged $121 a month on food. That includes personal care items, and works out to be less than $30 a week!

What are your favourite strategies for saving time in the kitchen?

Making crackers, eating through the freezer, and generally being odd

So I’ve been challenging myself to eat through my pantry and freezer.  I’m waiting to go shopping until my next garden fresh box arrives at the community centre.  My best money-saving and waste-reducing shopping strategy is to wait until my garden fresh box arrives, and then plan my meals and pick out my items at the grocery store based on what food is in the box.  I’ve also been wanting to eat through the freezer/pantry because I don’t want any food to get feezer-burnt or stale, and as a single person who buys and cooks in bulk, it’s easy to let food go to waste if you don’t consistently eat up what you’ve got.

I’ve lost count of how long it’s been since I last went grocery shopping and I can’t believe how many meal ideas I’ve been able to come up with, solely focusing on what I have.  I’ve had lots of tasty, nutritious soups, lasagna, and cabbage rolls (all made from scratch by yours truly) and I ate up some meat and vegetables that I had preserved from January’s fresh box.

I also had plenty of baking supplies.  Why go out to the store to buy crackers, bread, and pizza dough when I had all the ingredients to make these items?  I made them all myself - delicious bread, outstanding pizzas, and Alton Brown’s seedy crisps.  These crackers are super easy to make.  I made a couple of mistakes - I used hard whole wheat flour, added a touch too much salt (I think Alton’s recipe is a tad too salty) and would probably increase the amount of sesame seeds and make extra sure to roll the crackers as thin as possible.  That being said, the crackers had potential, and were fun to make, so I will try making them again.  With some blue cheese and honey, they were still salvageable.

There is so much joy in using up what you have.  It really pushes you to try new things.  Another tasty gem was my homemade pizza, topped with roasted garlic and olive oil (my go-to substitute for pizza sauce when my pantry is devoid of tomato paste), with sweet corn, green beans, tuna and sundried tomatoes. Drool-worthy.

I also made up a couple of soups.  I discovered a container of frozen black beans in the freezer (I like to soak an entire bag of beans and freeze what I don’t immediately need for easy use - it’s much more convenient than doing it batch-by-batch) and turned it into black bean soup, a la Martha Stewart (omitting the garlic-pepper sauce for garlic, onions, and spices such as cumin, coriander, pepper and cayenne) and I made my favourite carrot ginger soup, using up January’s supply of carrots.

I’m probably an odd person.  Most people seem to crave convenience and choice.  Entire companies and industries are devoted to maximizing convenience and choice for consumers. For some reason, I seem to thrive by limiting both convenience and choice when it comes to cooking.  I guess I like the challenge.  I like being pushed into DIY, where I get to try something new, learn new skills, and use my creativity to come up with a meal seemingly out of nowhere.  Maybe that makes me a little strange, but it also means that I get to enjoy freshly-baked pizzas with roasted garlic, and “seedy crisps” with honey.

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!

Saver Queen’s summer salads

This past winter, my main trick for eating healthy and tasty food on a budget was to make a lot of hearty and yummy soups.  Now that spring and summer are here, I’ve moved on to salads.  Making salads that combine protein and veggies are easy. A few combinations and you have yourself an entire meal! The best part? It’s an incredibly frugal way to eat nutritious foods.

I found this one by googling for barley and discovered a great recipe from Whole Foods (see below).

Ingredients

3 cups water 
1 cup pearled barley 
1/2 cup chopped green onions 
1/2 cup diced red bell pepper 
1/4 cup flat-leaf parsley leaves, chopped 
1/3 cup basil leaves, chopped 
2 tablespoons mint leaves, chopped 
1/4 cup avocado oil or canola oil* 
1 clove garlic, minced 
1 to 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice 
Sea salt and freshly ground pepper

Method

In a saucepan, combine water and barley. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low and simmer until barley is tender, 40 to 45 minutes. Drain barley and set aside. 

Place green onions, red pepper, parsley, basil and mint in a large bowl. Add cooked barley and toss to combine. 

In a small bowl, whisk together oil, minced garlic and lemon juice. Season to taste with salt and pepper, then drizzle over barley salad, stirring to combine well. Taste and adjust seasoning with salt and pepper. Serve at room temperature or cold.

Saver Queen’s adjustments

I lacked lemons, green onions, red pepper and basil, so I subbed in green pepper, mushrooms, tomatoes and just used mint, parsley and bottled lemon juice instead. I also used olive oil instead of canola.  The recipe has 4g of protein per serving, which is not bad for a vegetarian dish! I have served this before with salmon, but it would also work well with a few other salads. 

I love digging out staples hiding in the pantry, like barley, lentils, and dried or canned beans, because they can usually be combined with whatever veggies you have around to create a great dish.  These frugal staples are not only cheap, they are tasty and nutritious.  It’s a great way to pull together a light, meatless summer meal that’s easy on the budget.

What’s your favourite summer salad?

Homemade junk food, part one: Pizza Pops

As I mentioned in part one of my series, How to cut your grocery bill in half, I try to avoid buying processed foods or junk foods. Instead, I enjoy making them at home.  Last week I fell off the wagon many times and resorted to fast food and coffee on the go; this was mostly due to a hectic schedule that involved traveling out of town.  Last weekend I resolved to do some cooking and baking to help myself to stay on track.

Eating a healthy diet means that every so often I run up against insurmountable cravings for salty, fatty, late night snacks.  One of my favourite guilty pleasures are Pizza Pops, or miniature frozen calzones.  Last weekend, I decided to try making them myself.  I’m not sure what the cost-per-unit is; but if you purchase your baking supplies at a low cost, buy cheese on sale and pick up affordable veggies like green pepper and mushrooms, these little snacks can end up being incredibly affordable indulgences.

The recipe I  used was from Recipe Zaar:

Ingredients

CRUST

• 1 cup lukewarm water
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• 1 tablespoon instant yeast
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup oil
• 2 1/2 cups flour

SAUCE

• 1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
• 1/2 cup fine diced onion
• 1 teaspoon basil
• 1/2 teaspoon thyme
• 3 tablespoons water

Saver Queen’s tip: Add a pinch of salt.

Directions

1. Mix yeast with 1 cup of flour. Add all the rest of the ingredients and beat well.
2. Knead in the rest of the flour. I am not sure of the amount of flour here as I do it by feel of the dough. The dough should be soft and elastic, not too dry.
3. Let rest 15 minutes.
4. Cut into 10 balls and roll out into 6″ circles.
5. Top with equal amounts of sauce on half of the circle leaving 1/2″ at edge clear for sealing purposes.
6. Add your choice of fillings. I love pepperoni, mushroom and cheese. Pinch edge well to seal.
7. Prick tops and you can also brush with an egg wash mixture.
8. Bake on cookie sheets at 350′ for 30-35 minutes.

Saver Queen’s tip: remember that you can stuff these with lots of fillings, because the bread expands, leaving a large pocket inside.

These freeze really well. Package them in individual ziplock bags or wrap in plastic.  Then, simply re-heat them for about 15 minutes at 375′ on a baking sheet, or preferably, a pizza stone.  If not heated all the way through, you can also microwave them for 20 or 30 seconds, but they lose their nice crispy crust. These make a great late night snack!

How to cut your grocery bill in half (Part two)

In my last entry, I noted that a great way to reduce your grocery bill is to simply reduce your intake of highly processed foods. The second most important thing that you can do is reduce the amount of food waste you produce.

If I want to know how much I am really spending on food, I calculate the cost on a per-serving basis.  If you make sure to use every bit of what you buy, your per-serving cost lowers dramatically.

In general, I have a few tips for reducing edible food waste:

Learn about the best ways to store and preserve your foods. For example, herbs and salads last much longer if they are washed, dried, and then stored in the crisper, in-between pieces of paper-towel. 

Plan meals around what you have in the fridge.  Even if you feel like you can’t possibly pull together a meal based on what you’ve got, forage through your freezer, pantry and refrigerator and think about what you might be able to make with those ingredients.  Look at it like a fun challenge.  By planning meals based on what you’ve already got, you will reduce the number of trips you take to the store. For example, usually find carrots, potatoes and baking supplies are still hanging around when almost everything else has been eaten - this means a hearty supper of soup and dumplings can still be arranged.

Check your fridge frequently to see what is on its way out.  By monitoring expiration dates and checking your fruits and veggies regularly, you will catch foods before they go bad.  I recommend doing this before you decide what’s for dinner.  In other words, do this every day or as often as possible. 

Use any foods that are past their prime, but still edible, in soups, stocks, stews, casseroles or in other creative ways you can think of.  

An example: On Friday, before I left the city for a weekend to go to a wedding, I surveyed my kitchen.  There were three beautiful tomatoes that had already ripened and were unlikely to last the weekend.  Similarly, I had a full bag of mushrooms that were just started to go bad.  I decided to turn the tomatoes into a really lovely bowl of tomato soup (pictured above) and use the mushrooms in a mushroom and barley soup I had been wanting to make.  Neither was difficult to make, and they provided a meal before we left and upon our return.

For more suggestions on how to reduce your edible food waste, check out my earlier posts:

How much should your food really cost?

Reducing waste and eating well for less

And now for the tomato soup recipe:

(Please keep in mind, this was just done on a whim, without a recipe.  So please feel free to improvise, taste and modify as you go along.)

Ingredients

12 vine-ripened or roma tomatoes, seeded and cut in halves or quarters

4 cloves garlic

2 red peppers, cut into strips

2 onions, sliced

4 cups water (approx)

1/2 cup cream

olive oil 

s&p

parmesan cheese (optional)

Directions

Cut the tomatoes into halves, or quarters if larger tomatoes, and scoop out their seeds. Then place in a large roasting pan, along with the garlic, onions and red peppers.  Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Put in 400 degree oven and roast until the tomatoes start to caramelize and turn colour (approximately 30 minutes.) When done, empty contents in blender and puree until smooth. Then add to a large pot at low-medium heat and simmer.  Thin with water, adding slowly and stirring to get the consistency right.  Simmer gently until heated through and flavours have melded together.  Remove from heat, add cream and stir.  Add more s&p if necessary.  You may also want to add a little extra olive oil and parmesan cheese, and/or parsley if you desire.  (The picture above shows all three.)

This tomato soup was unbelievably delicious.  And while it’s not the cheapest recipe (tomatoes can certainly be expensive, especially when out of season) it is an example of how to use up ingredients around the house.  This soup can also be used with imperfect or bruised tomatoes.

How have you prevented food waste this week?

How to cut your grocery bill in half (Part one)

I’ve heard some friends ask recently how to cut back on their grocery bill.  I have many ideas, so here is the first of a series on how to trim back your grocery bill.

Choosing the right store, stocking up on sales, and using a local food box are great ways to start. 

But it doesn’t just matter when or where you shop, it matters what you buy. And maybe even more importantly, what you don’t buy.

 
The best way to cut back on your food bill is to eat a simple but healthy diet of rustic foods and foods made from scratch.  The more processed foods you buy, the more expensive your bill.

Here are a few of the foods that  I consistently buy when I go shopping:

- Local & cheap veggies including potatoes, carrots, celery, broccoli, aromatics and apples.  These kinds of foods are versatile, affordable and easily turned into hearty meals.

- Beans (dried are the cheapest but we also buy cans because of the convenience factor) as well as dried lentils and canned tomatoes that can be turned into soup bases, curries, pasta sauce or pizza sauce.

- Rice

- Whole grain crackers 

- Dairy (I usually have coupons for milk, yogurt, butter, sour cream and certain cheeses) and eggs.

- One or two cheap cuts of meat

- Baking supplies

What I don’t buy (and make from scratch, instead):

- Bread, pitas

- Snacks, such as hummus, guacamole, salsa,  granola bars or dips

- Muffins, cookies, desserts

- Sauces & Salad dressings (such as curry sauces, pasta sauces, gravies, cooking sauces, etc)

- Canned soups, chicken or vegetable stock

- Junk food (chips, chocolate, pop)

- Cleaning supplies

Eliminating processed foods, especially the ones I mentioned here, such as the junk food, deserts, and pre-made sauces that have high mark-ups, can save you money right away. 

This cabbage & white bean soup recipe, described below, is the perfect example of a rustic, homemade meal, complete with homemade bread. Thanks to 101 Cookbooks for this easy, cheap and very tasty recipe! It’s one of my favourites!

Rustic Cabbage Soup

Ingredients

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
a big pinch of salt
1/2 pound potatoes, skin on, cut 1/4-inch pieces
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 large yellow onion, thinly sliced
5 cups stock* Saver Queen’s note - use a homemade stock for a super-cheap soup, or buy beef broth instead!
1 1/2 cups white beans, precooked or canned (drained & rinsed well)
1/2 medium cabbage, cored and sliced into 1/4-inch ribbons

Stir in the garlic and onion and cook for another minute or two. Add the stock and the beans and bring the pot to a simmer. Stir in the cabbage and cook for a couple more minutes, until the cabbage softens up a bit. Now adjust the seasoning - getting the seasoning right is important or your soup will taste flat and uninteresting. Taste and add more salt if needed, the amount of salt you will need to add will depend on how salty your stock is (varying widely between brands, homemade, etc).

Warm the olive oil in a large thick-bottomed pot over medium-high heat. Stir in the salt and potatoes. Cover and cook until they are a bit tender and starting to brown a bit, about 5 minutes - it’s o.k. to uncover to stir a couple times.* Saver Queen’s note: I recommend cooking at a lower temp, or else the potatoes might burn.

Serve drizzled with a bit of olive oil and a generous dusting of parmesan (or blue!) cheese. Serves 4.

What do you buy and what don’t you buy when you go to the store?

Spicing things up

On Friday, I received a nice surprise: a big box of spices showed up at my door from The Spice House.  Well, it wasn’t a total surprise.  Josh and I ordered a great big bunch of spices there earlier this week.  As you may or may not know, you can order fine quality spices online at affordable prices.  The Spice House is Alton Brown’s store of choice, which is why we decided to give it a try.  The shipping was expensive - almost $30 US - so I’m not convinced that it is the most frugal option ever, but I was certainly impressed with the quality of the spices.  I decided that since I am cooking more and more at home, I should enjoy the flavour of real spices, not the tasteless, stale and pre-ground kind you find at the grocery store. 

Now that I have my spices I need to figure out how to make a frugal spice rack.  One option is to make an Alton Brown style spice rack by attaching velcro to the spice jars and to the inside of a cupboard.  Or I suppose I could display my beautiful spices in cute jars.  Any suggestions of where to find affordable spice jars or spice racks? Or perhaps you have a good idea about how to build your own spice rack?  Please share!

Reducing waste & eating well for less

I realized that until my Fresh Box arrived, we had only spent $155 on the last four weeks of groceries (less than $39 a week).  Now granted, I had been absent for one week while on vacation.  Josh also bought his lunch quite a number of times.  But apart from that, we ate really healthy, delicious meals at home and almost never went for out to a restaurant.

How did I manage to feed two people on $155 a month?  I chalk it up to stocking up on basic and versatile ingredients, being creative in the kitchen, cooking with inexpensive foods, and reducing waste.  I have been aiming to produce zero edible food waste since writing What Are You Wasting on February 25.  Apart from a few cilantro leaves and half a baby eggplant that got tossed against my will (after which I promptly listed of all ways I was planning on using that eggplant) I achieved my goal.

Here are some ways I reduced waste during the last several weeks:

• Froze parmesan rinds, basil roots and even cauliflower greens for vegetable stock
• Used up cilantro stems in a cilantro chutney
• Made a chicken and vegetable stock 
• Used up stale pitas by making them into pita chips
• Discovered that shriveled ginger is fine, when the edges are peeled off

Because I want to eat really delicious, nutritious food, I worked hard to come up with great meal ideas using only the ingredients we had. This led me to try some new tasty recipes, like curried cauliflower soup, green lentil and vegetable curry, vegetable barley and red bean soup, homemade pizza from scratch (with a variety of delicious toppings) quiche with goat cheese, spinach, sun-dried tomatoes and bacon, whole-wheat pasta with vegetables and parmesan, salmon-potato cakes,  carrot-ginger soup (I doubled the ginger and doubled the flavour this time) and deserts such as eggless oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, lemon loaf and apple crisp.  Although I was pleased with how much I saved, I was actually even happier about the fact that I am learning how to cook good food and am experimenting in the kitchen.

Other ways I reduced waste:

• Rewashed ziploc bags (thanks for my readers’ tips on how to dry them)
• Repurposed an empty tea box into a cute gift box
• Discovered that you need far less dish-detergent when your water is soft; I have reduced the amount of dish-detergent I use in the dishwasher by almost half
• Cut the amount of laundry detergent I use by about half, upon realizing that it really does not make a difference
• Learned how to put our Drobo to sleep during the day, so it doesn’t use so much energy when not in use (I’m convinced this thing wastes a ton of energy, since it’s constantly whirring and is always lit up.)
• Reused tea bags (I found that each tea bag is good for at least 2 cups of tea.)
• Josh fixed our dryer (it was taking forever to dry the clothes) and he cleaned out our vacuum cleaner too, resulting in less energy waste
• Used the dishwasher for small items and handwashed large items, to avoid excessive use of the dishwasher

What is your favourite tip for reducing the waste of food, electricity or other resources?

Medicine or tasty snack? Homemade candied ginger does it all

Ah, ginger.  It’s a wonderfully cheap way to add delicious flavour to almost any dish.  Chopped and added to hot water, it makes a calming tea.  And it prevents nausea, even when traveling. 

I enjoy snacking on ginger candy - not just because it tastes great, but because it helps to aid digestion and soothes an upset tummy.  Unsurprisingly, when I discovered that good old Alton had a recipe to make homemade ginger candy, I had to try it.

After all, it makes good economic sense.  Ginger is unbelievably cheap; we bought a pound of it for about $2.00.  And sugar is also plentiful in our house.  And that’s it - those are the only required ingredients.

I love that the leftover ginger sugar can be reserved and added to coffee or on top of ginger snaps or other cookies.  Nothing goes to waste here!

Here is Alton’s recipe for Candied Ginger: 

Ingredients

Nonstick spray
1 pound fresh ginger root 
Tip: Buy ginger that is as young as possible.  How can you tell?  It will have a much lighter, yellow colour and will probably be smaller as well.  Ours was a bit older, (darker brown) and subsequently had a stronger taste.  The younger your ginger, the better (and more mild) the taste.
5 cups water
Approximately 1 pound granulated sugar

Directions

Spray a cooling rack with nonstick spray and set it in a half sheet pan lined with parchment.

Peel the ginger root and slice into 1/8-inch thick slices using a mandoline.

Tip: You do not need a mandoline.  Sure, it might be handy to have, but if you have to go out and buy a lot of equipment, it kind of defeats the purpose of making homemade candy, doesn’t it?  I prefer to use what we have, and so Josh and I simply took turns cutting the ginger with our best Japanese chef’s knife into thin slices.  It worked!

Place into a 4-quart saucepan with the water and set over medium-high heat. Cover and cook for 35 minutes or until the ginger is tender.

Transfer the ginger to a colander to drain, reserving 1/4 cup of the cooking liquid.

Weigh the ginger and measure out an equal amount of sugar. Return the ginger and 1/4 cup water to the pan and add the sugar. Set over medium-high heat and bring to a boil, stirring frequently. Reduce the heat to medium and cook, stirring frequently, until the sugar syrup looks dry, has almost evaporated and begins to recrystallize, approximately 20 minutes.

Transfer the ginger immediately to the cooling rack and spread to separate the individual pieces. Once completely cool, store in an airtight container for up to 2 weeks. Save the sugar that drops beneath the cooling rack and use to top ginger snaps, sprinkled over ice cream or to sweeten coffee.

I had to laugh when Gravol came out with their “Gravol Ginger natural source” pills.  Why would anyone pay for processed medicine when you can go straight to the source?  This is certainly the most enjoyable way (not to mention frugal) way to quell your nausea. In fact it’s incredibly pleasant to eat when you feel fine!