Frugal Foods Blog
Thrifty Menus, Cheap Eats, and Cost Cutting Cooking Tips
The Frugal Foods Blog gives you a steady stream of thrifty cooking ideas and helps you save money on your grocery bill. Follow along with our everyday eating as we share how we eat well for less.
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Freeze Onions
Can you freeze onions or will they last chopped in a container in the refrigerator for a week? If you can freeze them, do you just put them in raw? I tried
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Cheap Breakfast Ideas
Cheap breakfasts always throw me for a loop. I never know what to fix that my kids will eat. I don't have a lot of time. I need some ideas for foods that
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My Favorite Frugal Food -- Soup
Soup is one of my favorite frugal foods. Start with a basic broth or cream base and add pretty much whatever you have on hand in the line of vegetables, meats, and/or grains.
Happy Easter
Here's wishing all of our Frugal Foods site visitors the Happiest Easter ever!
However you celebrate the day, we hope it is filled with good food, joy, and blessings.
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Home Baked Bread
It's 10:30 in the evening. I'm finishing up a few website updates before I head to bed.
Bob's sprawled out on the bed with whatever book he is reading. One cat and the dog are napping near him. The other cat has settled in on his chest. It's a wonderfully peaceful and homey site.
And...the aroma of baking bread fills our entire cabin. When we got home this evening, I did a few household chores that needed doing. Bob threw a batch of bread in the bread machine.
We'll go to sleep with this wonderful smell permeating the place. And, we'll have all natural, whole grain, home-made bread ready for breakfast in the morning.
Certainly this home baked bread will be more satisfying and frugal than any bread from the grocery store.
Chicken Breasts Cook Up a Batch For Frugal Convenience Food
Chicken breasts are one of those foods that look expensive at first glance, but are actually thrifty. Buy a family size bag of them and cook them all up at once. And there you have convenience food!
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Frugal Meals and Thrifty Menus Save Grocery Money with Coleen's Cheap Cooking
Frugal meals mean you can save your grocery money for something else. Join me in cheap cooking, with these mostly easy to fix, practical, thrifty menus. Real food eaten by real people.
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Chicken Melt Sandwiches: Frugal Leftover Chicken, Gooey with Cheese
Chicken Melt Sandwiches were the mainstay of today's frugal lunch. Grilled and gooey with cheese, they didn't taste frugal or like leftovers. This whole menu was cheap and easy -- and good!
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Pork Roast and Vegetables, an Easy to Fix, Frugal Meat and Potatoes Meal
Pork roast and vegetables star in tonight's frugal dinner. It's especially good when the "meat and potatoes" crew is tired of casseroles. They don't need to know it is any easy to fix, one pot meal.
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Sea Stick Scampi: An Easy, Frugal Take on Seafood Scampi
Sea Stick Scampi starred as last night's frugal main dish. With leftover pasta, this one comes together in a jiff. It's one of my favorite ways to use imitation crab legs.
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Corn Chowder: Thick and Satisfying Soup, Topped with Crisp Bacon
Corn chowder. Tonight's frugal supper was steaming hot, richly satisfying chowder. I asked my husband what he'd like that included bacon. I knew before he answered. It's his favorite hearty soup.
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Enchilada Salad Plate Frugal, Tasty, Healthy, and Easy
Enchilada Salad Plate started with one of those bagged, ready to eat salad kits. We made the most of it by adding Mexican restaurant dinner leftovers. Frugal to the core! Tasty and super healthy, too.
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Halibut Dinner Free Food From the Entertainment Budget
This halibut dinner includes herbed fish, sweet potatoes, and broccoli. The fish and sweet potatoes come out of the entertainment budget. From the food budget perspective, they are free food.
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Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese Sandwiches A Classic Frugal Supper
Cream of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. Tonight's frugal supper is a classic. Some thrifty meals never go out of style and this easy to fix soup and sandwich staple is one of them.
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Frugal Foods Thrifty Ways To Spend Less On Groceries and Still Eat Well
Frugal Foods gives you easy to fix, inexpensive (cheap) meal ideas, money saving menus, and advice on cooking and cutting food costs. Be thrifty and spend less on groceries, and still eat well.
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Thrifty Food Tips Just What You Need to Cut Your Food Costs
Thrifty food tips are little nuggets of info, hints to help you spend less on food. You can eat well, and have easy, nutritious meals, and not spend a fortune at the grocery store. These will help.
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Each Frugal Food Tip Adds Up to Save You a Bunch on Groceries
A frugal food tip is a little thing. But, it can make a huge difference in how much it costs you to feed your family. Use these hints and see how much easier it is to spend less on groceries.
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Each Thrifty Food Tip Here Can Free Up Money to Use for Something Else
Put a thrifty food tip to use and watch your food savings grow. The money you save being frugal in the kitchen can be buy other things you need -- or want. Free up those dollars for something else.
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Money Saving Food Tips to Help You Stay Within Your Budget
Use these money saving food tips to spend less. Little savings here and there really add up. Try these hints and helps and see how much easier it is cut your food budget.
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Frugal Food Tips -- Easy Ways to Cut Your Food Expenses
Frugal food tips to help you spend less on groceries. Hints to cut your grocery expenses and keep more money in your pocket. Each tip can save you money.
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Food and Cooking Tips to Save You Money and Make a Frugal Life Easier
Food and cooking tips you can really use. See how easy it is to be a thrifty cook. Give these frugal hints and thrifty kitchen tips a try. Save money on groceries. Fix easy, great tasting meals.
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Fresh Alaskan Salmon
Bob just came home with three freshly caught salmon. These are pinks. While they aren't the prized King or Red Sockeye salmon, they are still mighty fine to eat. I typically sprinkle them with salt and pepper and then fry them in a bit of olive oil. The salmon that we don't eat right away, we can. Since he enjoys fishing, we can look at this as free food.
Thrifty Ground Beef
Get the family pack of ground beef. Fry up hamburgers patties one night for dinner. Fry the rest of the burger, breaking it up into pieces as you do. You can keep clean-up to a minimum by using the same pan for both. The scrambled beef is good to use casseroles, tacos, chili, etc.
Frugal Foods from Baked Sales
Sometimes it makes more sense to buy something already made than it does to make it yourself. Case in point are the baked goods from fund raiser bake sales.
At a recent bake sale, I bought a loaf of date nut bread for $1.75. There's no way I could have purchased the ingredients for that price. Coupled with milk, it made a fine and frugal breakfast for us.
You do need to watch, because at some sales, the prices are outrageously high. Many times, though, you can get some frugal deals.
Label Your Frozen Foods
Label the containers you put into your freezer with the date and contents. I use a white board erasable marker. It washes off when I wash the container.
Today's Frugal Lunch: Pork Chop Soup
Today's frugal food is soup made with leftovers from a pork chop dinner. The extra pork chops, rice, carrots, cabbage, and onions all went into the Crockpot. If they were bigger than bite size, I cut them into smaller pieces. After adding water and seasoning it looked thinner than I wanted it, so I added some frozen corn. I had some for lunch and it was delicious!
50 Cent McDonald's Cones
McDonald's is celebrating something and ice cream cones are now only 50 cents each. I'm not a big fan of fast foods, but this is a frugal deal not to be missed by any ice cream lover.
Big Savings Buying Fruit on Sale
How much can you really save by waiting for fresh fruit to go on sale before you buy it? We bought sweet, dark cherries yesterday. The regular price rang up at over $14. The adjusted to the sale price, they were only about $5.00 That's $9.00 savings on only one item.
Save Money When Buying Meat
Split up "Family Size" or "Economy Size" packages of meat for different uses. Buy the large, family packs of pork chops. Most stores put the pretty ones on top and the not-so-pretty ones underneath. Use those top ones to fry and have with a pork chop dinner. Cook the others in a slow cooker with BBQ sauce or with sauerkraut as you would pork hocks. Or, just cook them and then take the bones and fat out, leaving nice little pieces of great pork that you can use in chile verde, cook with rice, add to casseroles or baked beans, etc.
Frugal Foods Musing of the Day
Being frugal is such an ordinary, everyday thing to us that it is sometimes difficult to think of what we are doing as frugal. Much of the time, we don't go out of our way to be thrifty; rather, it is just how we are.
Take breakfast this morning. We had fruit, cereal, and milk. The fruit choice was a plum -- because plums were on sale when we bought groceries last week. The cereal was "Morning Mix" -- another name for corn flakes, o's of oats, cinnamon flavored squares, and a few granola clusters that were all dumped into a large glass jar when there boxes were close to empty. The milk was 2% (not skim, 1%, or whole milk) because 2% was reduced for a quick sale because it only had a few days left before the "sell by" date.
How to Spend More On Food
Want to spend more on groceries? Here's how: Make out a list of what you'd like to eat for the next week, then go to the store and buy what is on that list. Don't stray from it, even if what you want is expensive and something else is a bargain. Don't buy anything extra, not even if it is on a great sale and you know you'll need it next week. Don't make substitutions, not even if the fruit on your list is out of season and expensive and in-season fruit is much cheaper.
Five Frugal Food Snacks
Five frugal-foods snacks
1. Homemade soup
2. Popcorn
3. Saltine crackers spread with peanut butter
4. Carrot sticks
5. Toast with fruit spread
A Mistake - The Not So Frugal Dinner
Last night's dinner can only go in the not-so-frugal-foods category. We had dinner at a local Oriental restaurant in Homer, AK. The $12.95 buffet price seemed high to begin with, but was compounded by questionable food and poor service. Even those of us who are experts in being frugal make mistakes and last night's dinner choice was one of them.
The frugal part of the evening was stopping at McDonald's for ice cream cones on the way home. Even here in Alaska, they were only 50 cents each. For $1.00, all three of us (Bob, myself, and our dog) enjoyed the treat.
Frugal Foods Tip of the Day:
Simple foods are just fine. People tend to complicate things, spending more time and money than necessary. Case in point: We were heading off to the car races and I took along sandwiches for the pit crew. Those that I made in a hurry, with a dab of mustard and a slice of bologna on a hamburger bun, were chosen before the more elaborate ones.
Frugal Foods Tip of the Day
Skip the $4.00 a cup coffee. Make your own that's better. Brew up a batch of regular coffee, add a touch of extract flavoring, and some cream. You have rich tasting cup of joe at a pauper's price.
Coupons Make Dining Out Less Spendy
We went out for dinner last night at Don Jose's Mexican and Italian Restaurant. We go out to eat for entertainment, enjoying the outing as much as the food.
There's a frugal bend to our entertainment, too. We used a coupon from the Northern Lights coupon book. I wish it had been a buy-one-get-one-free coupon, but it wasn't quite that good a deal. This one was for $8.00 off the price of the second dinner.
Frugal Beefy Pasta Sauce
We had spaghetti with homemade sauce last night for dinner, along with green beans, garlic bread, and milk. The sauce got rave reviews -- and it wasn't your traditional spaghetti sauce. It was a frugal concoction created by cleaning out the fridge. Here's the recipe: Saute part of an onion and a couple cloves of garlic with a little oil Add leftover canned spaghetti sauce and some leftover beef gravy. Put about a cup of water into an almost empty ketchup bottle, shake vigorously, and pour the contents into the sauce. Add a few shakes of Italian seasoning. Adjust consistency by thickening a bit with a spoonful of cheese soup and sauce mix powder. Simmer for a few minutes and serve over hot pasta.
Grow Garlic
If you have garlic that is starting to sprout, plant it. Separate it into cloves. Each clove should produce a head of garlic. In the spring and early summer, I plant them outside, and even here in Alaska, they are ready to harvest in the fall. In the fall and winter, they can be planted and kept inside.
Don't Want Leftovers? Recycle.
Recycle your dinner. Funny how much difference the term we use makes. A friend won't serve "leftovers." But, she excitedly told me her new strategy for spending less on groceries. She is now recycling in the kitchen and she doesn't mean reusing the grocery bags. She now takes the meatloaf that remains after dinner, cuts it up into chunks, adds a can of spaghetti sauce, and serves it over pasta for the next day's dinner. If she cooks too much pasta, she takes what they don't eat for dinner, adds a can of tuna, sweet pickle relish, and salad dressing -- and has just recycled it into tuna salad for the next day's lunch.
Check Your Receipts
Check your grocery store receipt to see that you are being charged the correct prices -- before you leave the store. Mistakes are common.
The store may have the wrong price entered into the computer. Or, they may have forgotten to input the sale prices. If the item needed to be hand entered the cashier could have hit a wrong number. And, in the case of produce, she may mistaken one kind of produce for another.
Another mistake, this one on the shopper's part, is grabbing the wrong item. Our local Fred Meyer had Fred Meyer canned vegetables on sale a couple weeks ago. As the receipt was being processed, I noticed that I didn't get the sale price on two of them. Well, it turns out the mistake was mine. I'd grabbed two cans of Green Giant vegetables instead of the store brand. Those two cans were $1.00 more each than the ones I meant to get. I took them to the service desk to exchange them, saving over two dollars. Had I not checked the receipt before leaving the store, I probably wouldn't have bothered to return them.
Frugal Food Tip of the Day
Don't believe everything you read on a website. Just today, I read that you should never eat leftovers that are more than 24 hours old. I think that is plain and simple nonsense and it was a good reminder that anyone can post most anything to a website, even if they have no idea of what they are talking about. We routinely cook something today, take a break from it tomorrow, and eat it again the day after with no ill affects.
Frugal Foods Tip: Use It All
Save parts of food items that you don't eat for other uses -- feeding birds, compost pile, or potpourri (citrus rinds, apple peels).
Frugal Foods Tip of the Day:
Use what's left of one thing to make another. Example: The horseradish and cream cheese spread you used along with thin sliced ham to make roll-ups today. Tomorrow, take what's left of that horseradish cream cheese spread and add some crumbled bacon or bacon bits. Use it to stuff celery logs.
The Secret to Keeping Bread Fresh in Not Refrigerating It
One of the joys of homemade bread is that it has no artificial preservatives. That, however, means it will get moldy quickly if left at room temperature. Putting it in the refrigerator will keep it fresh longer -- but it will also dry it out. Bread a little on the dry side is okay for toast, but not so good for sandwiches. The answer is to freeze it overnight, the first day you bake it. Remove it from the freezer the next morning. It will thaw to be fresh. And, it won't mold nearly as quickly.
Frugal Entertaining Shouldn't Mean Your Guests Pay for Your Party
Invite guests over for a meal or a party -- and then ask them to bring food or drink. That's not being frugal. That's being, oh, what words come to mind... disgusting, rude, obnoxious, despicable, awful, and simply in poor taste.
Serve what you can afford to serve. Don't expect your guests to cover the costs of your party.
Specially Marked Packages
Watch for specially marked packages. These are the ones that have a lower than normal or special price printed right on the package. Or, they may be a special size, where it is printed on the package that you get extra ounces free.
Today's Frugal Breakfast Quaker Cereal and Milk
This morning's frugal breakfast was cold cereal and milk. Oddly enough, the cereal was Quaker brand Maple and Brown Sugar Life. Bought on sale using the coupon in the store sales flyer, it was cheaper than the store brand. If this breakfast was to get us through until lunch, it would have needed more protein. However, being a holiday, we're headed out for brunch. So, this was something to tide us over until we have a full meal.
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