BUILDING A BURGER

Old Mother Frugal was tidying up the kitchen when a jar of brown lentils was almost overlooked because there were so few of them inside the jar.

When measured in a cup, there were half-cup of brown lentils. Not worth the space it was taking up on the shelf… so began the hunt for a recipe.

Unsure of what to do with them, veggie burgers came to mind.

Plant-based foods seem to be a popular dietary option these days for both health and budgetary reasons. Plant-based burgers being very popular.

Having no time to complete the entire process in one day, the lentils were cooked one day and the burgers assembled the next day. Lentils don’t need to be soaked which is a great time saver. Rinse. Cook. Done.

Old Mother Frugal really doesn’t like to waste ingredients and since this was an experimental recipe, only half the recipe was made. 

Not to mention there were only enough brown lentils to make half the recipe!

The other bean in this recipe, garbanzo beans. Only one-quarter cup was needed.  There was a small amount of leftover Minestrone Soup in the fridge. Spoon in hand, Old Mother Frugal picked out all the garbanzo beans for the lentil-chick pea burger recipe.

Once assembled, these three burgers went into the fridge to firm up for easier handling.

The next morning, one burger was pulled out for breakfast. Laid on a bed of greens and topped with a poached egg, it was an attractive and delicious breakfast item.

Lunch time came along and a burger was removed from the fridge and served on a sandwich thin “bun” with tomatoes, pickle slices and ketchup. Another successful meal!

With one burger left, it found its way to the freezer to experiment on how well plant-based, homemade burgers freeze. If it passes the test, the next time this recipe is prepared, making the full recipe will become an option. Use what is needed, freezing the rest.

They were good. They were versatile. They were inexpensive. They will be worked into the rotation of budget-friendly, health food options in the future!  Shout out to the website of Cookie and Kate for their Lentil-Chick Pea Burger recipe!

SOUND THE BUGLE! Today’s tip: Another use for brown lentils is to make them as Sloppy Joes. Much more affordable than using ground beef when having Sloppy Joes on your menu!  Lentils also work well mixed with ground beef to stretch a meatloaf mixture. Beyond cost, there is the bonus of added fiber and nutrients in your diet as well.

BONE-US MEALS

Old Mother Frugal has been making soups for years and they always start with a homemade broth.

Making broth came from a need to save money. Boxed and cans of broth were too expensive given the amounts needed to make soup to feed a family of five.

As the years progressed, a secondary cause for a ‘make you own’ (MYO) broth came to light.

Health.

The amount of sodium in a serving of box and canned broths is staggering. 

When Old Mother Frugal was told to limit salt, reading labels became a new hobby. Lower sodium broths are still high in sodium. Just less high!

Using shrimp tails and water to cover them, MYO fish broth. This adds a depth of flavor to clam chowder or any fish chowder in place of plain water.

Using ham bones, a ham broth can be made for cooking dry pinto beans. Served with cornbread, it’s a favorite meal in the southern states.

Beef bones roasted, then cooked in water, makes a great beef broth. Seldom made in Old Mother Frugal’s kitchen as beef is expensive and so are beef bones!

Oxtails. It’s amazing that years ago, around the time of the Great Depression in the US, they were throw-a-ways or of very little cost. Today, these are delicacies and very expensive to buy. Have never made oxtail soup…but hear it is delicious.

Old Mother Frugal uses pork bones from pork butts/shoulder to flavor her Italian Red Sauce for spaghetti. However, a pork broth would be a great base for gravy.

Broths from chicken bones and turkey carcass are the most frequently made broths in Old Mother Frugal’s kitchen.

Over the years, Mother’s Little Helpers have willingly contributed to the freezer supply of turkey carcasses and ham bones.

Returning from a most recent visit to one of Mother’s Little Helpers, a cooler contained three turkey carcasses and a ham bone for the drive home.

This weekend, two of the three carcasses were defrosted for the slow cookers. Yes, you read that right. There are multiple slow cookers in Old Mother Frugal’s kitchen cupboards.

Why?

Sometimes large ones are needed, sometimes small ones. Sometimes oval shaped when other times round will do much better. They are relatively inexpensive at thrift stores.

The meals that are created from bones are called “bone-us” or bonus meals. They are free meals created from pantry staples in the kitchen.

Let’s break down how two turkey carcasses can feed Old Mother Frugal and her Journeyman hubby.

Meal #1 was Turkey Noodle Soup using 2 cups of turkey meat removed from the carcass and broth made earlier in the month. There were homemade noodles in the freezer along with a sandwich bag of cooked pinto beans. Served with salad and 3 dinner rolls.

There is leftover soup for lunch.

Meal #2 was a Turkey Burger/Patty dinner using 1 cup of turkey meat from the carcass to make two turkey patties. One patty sitting atop a mound of smashed red potatoes with gravy, and a salad.

Two cups of turkey bits and pieces still were in need of a recipe so Cheesy Turkey-Bean Burritos for Meal #3 with leftovers for lunch.

Two slow cookers full of turkey broth for Minestrone Soup and Pasta e fagioli down the road. These are Meals #4 and #5.

Remember, Old Mother Frugal has not had any out-of-pocket expense making 5 dinner meals and leftover lunches. These are created from staples in the pantry.

Five wonderful dinner entrees and lunch leftovers… from what many would have routinely thrown in the trash. 

Yes, it is true.

One person’s trash is Old Mother Frugal’s treasure! It can be yours too!

SOUND THE BUGLE! Today’s tip: Ask family members for their turkey and ham bones during the holiday season if they have no plans to use these for themselves!  Larger families may not reap as many meals as feeding a family of two, but five cups of meat and two pots of soup from two turkey carcasses are quite a “bone-us” to extending those food budget dollars!

OLD MOTHER FRUGAL DOES MATH

Browsing for marked downs, “Manager Specials” and clearance items is what Old Mother Frugal does. It’s her “jam” as the current generation of kids likes to say.

Not quite sure when that fruity spread on peanut butter sandwiches became something other than a fruity spread but apparently it did.

Back to the discounted items. This type of shopping does save money which extends the grocery budget but occasionally requires outside-the-box thinking.

Strategy #1 is to think “can this item be deconstructed” to create other meals?

For example, last summer a grocery store was selling ‘gourmet bleu cheese burgers’ at half price.

There were some solid pieces of bleu cheese in that burger. It was one, ample half-pound gourmet burger but Old Mother Frugal needed to feed two adults.

Plucking out the cheese for another meal which required cooking (was not going to eat raw cheese that came in contact with raw ground beef) was the first step.

Bleu cheese used as a stuffing with spinach, asparagus or ham in a chicken breast enhances the flavor of the chicken breast for an elegant yet inexpensive stuffed breaded chicken breast dinner because the expensive cheese was free.

With the remaining ground beef, two ‘quarter pounders’ were constructed as dinner for two. That is how Old Mother Frugal solved the problem of how to buy one, marked-down gourmet bleu cheese burger and turn it into four separate dishes. Two stuffed chicken breasts, two quarter-pound hamburgers.

Strategy #2 is to speculate if there are alternative uses for the food item.

Is a box of Earth Mother’s Organic Barley Baby Cereal just for babies? Is its sole purpose just to be eaten as cereal? Can this 59 cent marked-down box of barley cereal be useful in Old Mother Frugal’s pantry? It sure is.

Multiply out the serving size with liquid component and there is no reason why Old Mother Frugal can’t have a bowl of this cereal for breakfast. In most cases, one-quarter cup of uncooked cereal with about ½ cup of water/milk/whey over heat equates to an adult serving of hot cereal.

Other ‘outside the box’ uses for barley cereal is a substitution for bread crumbs or oatmeal in meatloaf. Want different grains in your multi-grain pancakes? Use barley cereal!

Strategy #3 is sorting. Old Mother Frugal looks towards the frozen food section for bargains too and once home, the sorting begins.

Frozen mixed vegetables? Separate out the broccoli from the cauliflower. Those bags of California Blends…separate out the multi-vegetable sliced carrots, green beans, red peppers, etc into smaller sealed plastic bags. It’s a mindless task; you can do it while watching TV. Grab a packet as you need one for your meals.

Frozen pasta meals are good for two different meals. Old Mother Frugal emptied a bag of a chicken carbonara and counted no less than 22 pods of garlic-butter in the bag. Removing half the pods and returning them to the freezer, Old Mother Frugal has instantly created sauce for another pasta meal.

Add leftover chicken or ham pieces to the pasta, one of those frozen vegetable bags mentioned above (green beans or peas) with the garlic-butter packets and presto!

The only technique to make this meal faster to put on the dinner table is to make the pasta in advance and freeze it.

The next time you are in your grocery stores, reflect on these Old Mother Frugal strategies of deconstruction, alternative uses and sorting to see added value to your purchases.

SOUND THE BUGLE! Today’s tip: Add, subtract, multiply or divide when you buy an ingredient or an entire entry to extend its use. You will create a bonus meal which in turn extends your grocery budget dollars!

YOU CAN DO IT - PART II

Are you experiencing déjà vu? Are you thinking that you have already read this post?

You are not seeing double nor re-reading an old post.

This is the sequel to last year’s original post entitled “You ‘Can’ Do It”.

The premise of that blog post was to meal plan for a week using cans in Old Mother Frugal’s cupboards.

Old Mother Frugal did it again.

Welcome to the next installment of meal planning using canned goods.  

The accomplice to the cans was a rotisserie chicken. It was a freebie from Sam’s Club making this week of meals very economical and inexpensive yet still healthy.

The canned items in Old Mother Frugal’s cupboard and pantry are numbered with a Sharpie marker. The number indicates the month in which it is best to use the contents of the can.

Stored properly and without damage, canned foods may be used beyond their ‘best use by’ dates. Given two cans from which to choose, Old Mother Frugal prefers to use the older cans first, saving cans with a later ‘best use by’ date for a future meal.

That’s the back story.

Here is the list of cans under consideration…

-       Clams (2) 6.5 oz each

-       White Chicken Chili

-       Red Kidney Beans

-       French – style green beans

-       Mushrooms

-       Asparagus (large and small cans)

-       Cut sweet potatoes

-       Baked beans

Two cans of clams were used with broth made from shrimp tails and fresh potatoes to make a pot of Clam Chowder. This pot was served as an entrée for one dinner and a side dish for a second dinner.

To extend the amount of chicken that was pulled from the rotisserie chicken, a can of White Chicken Chili was incorporated into the Cowboy Beans with Chicken recipe as well as a can of red kidney beans. A can of sweet potatoes and French-style green beans were scheduled to be served but instead it was served over rice with fresh fruit.

That moves canned sweet potatoes and French-style green beans for meals later in the week.

About twice a year, Old Mother Frugal makes a batch of crepes. A batch will yield about 20 crepes. Using five for this meal, 15 crepes are ready to be used for future dinners and desserts. This meal was Chicken with Mushroom and Asparagus Crepes using the cans of mushrooms and asparagus. It was served with free croissants.

Using a larger can of asparagus, classic Chicken Divan was made subbing asparagus for the broccoli. This was a casserole layered with asparagus as the bottom layer, a layer of sliced chicken breast in the middle and parmesan white cheese sauce on top. This was served with the can of sweet potatoes.

Two rotisserie chicken drumsticks were deboned and used to make Chicken Patty Burgers. These were served on burger buns with a can of Heinz Baked Beans, pickles and a cup of soup.

Another entrée created from the rotisserie chicken was Chicken Paprika. This was served with egg noodles and the unused green beans from earlier in the week.

The final meal made from the chicken but required no canned ingredient was a Fruited Chicken Salad.  Old Mother Frugal was able to cull enough chicken scraps from broth made from bones and chicken wings. This meat, combined with diced celery and chopped grapes, made just enough chicken salad to fill two croissants served with fresh fruit and leftover soup from the prior week.

A free chicken valued at $4.98 and 10 cans of food from Old Mother Frugal’s pantry fed two adults for a week. The price of the cans ranged from a low of 27 cents to a high of 99 cents. These meals for a week would have been budget-friendly even if Old Mother Frugal bought the rotisserie chicken!

SOUND THE BUGLE! Today’s Tip: Check the mark-down and clearance areas of your grocery store when stock-piling your pantry. You can see a savings as much as 50% in your grocery bill by taking advantage of merchandise that has been priced to sell. If can beans are not available, consider dry beans as a cost-effective substitution.