Cheap Vacations

The Cheeseparer has been paring cheese, vacation-wise. First in Washington, DC and then in Europe? Europe, you say? How can you pare cheese in Europe?

You can use frequent flyer miles if you have them, which is what we did. We flew off-season, and enjoyed some nice spring days in Germany. Who knew?

You can visit relatives if you have them, which is what we did. You can limit purchases to stuff that is cheaper in Europe, which won't be much, but we can home with a few treasurers: jam, mustard, plastic notebook sheets. Well, that's about all.

You can find hotels out of town where you can stay for 79 Euros including breakfast. No hair dryer and "Tricky Ricky" soap and shampoo (I am not making this up) but a big room and a good breakfast with the chickens crowing and the sheep bleating. How cool is that?

We found good buys on meals, too. A bratwrust in Thuringer on the street fills one up for the rest of the day and is cheap. If you need a bouquet to take your hostess, that is even more reasonable.

Of course if you have no miles or relatives, it would be best to stay home or whatever. We're having chicken and vegetable soup tonight. There are numerous good quick breads that can be made from Bisquick. We will also eat a fruit salad which is moderate and healthy. Don't ever discount your health.

I do hope you're going to plant a garden this summer, even if it's only a few patio tomatoes and some pots of herbs. We'll discuss this in more detail in a few weeks.

By the way, I actually stood in the kitchen where the photo for this blog was taken.

The Cheeseparer

Use What's On Hand

Do you have ingredients on hand leftover from your Christmas baking? You do bake for the winter holidays, don't you? I will be really upset if you buy store bought cookies loaded with everything but flavor. Get thee behind me, transfats.

I was in a mood for dessert last week, and we didn't have any cookies. Thought I might bake some, but I told myself I couldn't go to the store. Thumbing through the cook books, and guess what I found? Chocolate pecan pie?!

Zowsa! I had everything or I could do an easy no-brainer substitution. It was soooo good. And we were good, too. We sliced it into ten slices and had 5 days worth of desserts. At no cost. The chocolate and pecans were still on hand from Christmas. It was rich; it was delicious and the price was right. If you have butter, sugar and flour on hand, you can always make shortbread. A few nuts or raisins or dried cranberries and your options expand.

So: stay away from store-bought and bake cookies or pies. Life will be good.

Paring Cheese Tonight

The supermarket had breakfast sausage links for $2.89 a pound. I found a BOGO on cherry tomatoes. Two nice-sized potatoes left from the 5 lb. bag I bought a while back. We're on for dinner!

I make cherry tomatoes fines herbes. I still have my rosemary growing in the living room window, and I dried oregano from the garden. Add to that, dried chives, thyme and chervil with a couple of finely chopped scallions and some olive oil and we're good to go. The tomatoes brighten any table and are even good for you. What's more amazing they have FLAVOR!

The sausage I fried in a non-stick skillet.

For the potatoes, I chop a small onion and a clove of garlic and put that to soften in some bacon fat. Then I chop up the potatoes and add them to the hot grease. At the end, I beat up two eggs and pour on top the potatoes and cook until done.

This is a tasty meal and we have enough sausage and tomatoes for breakfast tomorrow, along with the English muffin I forgot to toast tonight.

This week the New York Times had an article about how people have gone back to such stalwart old favorites as cube steaks. Remember cube steaks? They had a recipe and I was salivating. I used to cook cube steaks when my kids were little. Hey, the kids are gone, but the idea was tempting.

Today, Shaw's in Mansfield had cube steaks--a generous package and it was a manager's special with $3.00 off. Couldn't resist. Looks like it will make two dinners. They had mushrooms for a dollar, so I grabbed a package of those, too, to saute and serve on the cube steak.

Cheap eats can be both quick and tasty. The cherry tomatoes would also be great with the cube steaks. And we have a nice acorn squash which wasn't cheap.

It's hard to save on produce, so one has to bite the bullet sometimes. I'll let you know how the cube steaks tasted.

We're been getting adequate beef (and therefore zinc) all winter, and so far, no one has been sick although we've been exposed plenty and we take public transporation. (see prior post)

Friday night the Green Line of Boston's MBTA was packed so tightly that if someone had sneezed, twenty-four people would have caught cold.

Wash your hands and eat some beef. It doesn't have to be a lot and it can be nice and lean.

The Cheeseparer

Cook At Home versus Eat Out

Before the economy tanked, we ate out about once a week, everywhere from The 99 to upscale downtown Boston haunts. Now we eat out half as often, and we're very choosy about where we drop our dimes. Would they were only dimes!

Of course for the cook, fewer meals out means more work: shopping, food prep and (Yuck!) clean up. However, the right attitude and compiling the savings can work wonders. Instead of our weekly meal out, we have a nice, FAST dinner at home.

Last night we had scallops, and I have to tell you that instead of paying $120.00 (food, 2 glasses of wine, tax and tip), we spent about $20.00 for everything. The most expensive item was 3/4 pound of scallops for $12.07. I could have eeked by with 2-3 ounces less. We had scallops provencal (from the Food Network recipe of the Barefoot Contessa), fresh buttered broccoli, herbed rice, and mesclun salad with cucumer and tomato. We each had a glass of red wine. I calculate the whole meal cost less than $20.00.

The whole dinner went together in a half hour, and I had two pots, a skillet and the salad bowl to clean up. Not too bad.

Steak is another option, especially when it's on sale. Asparagus is on sale this week. I buy Basmatic rice in five pound bags, and it lasts for ages.

We would have had leftover valentine's day port wine ice cream, but the scallops were really filling. All that lean protein. Great herbs in the rice. Yum!

A roast chicken is also a good option, as is shrimp. All can be low cost healthy fare.

I believe in red meat twice a week winter and summer for keeping your immunity high. This is my RX for getting through winter, especially. That and a flu shot and washing one's hands regularly. Sleep a lot. Eat plenty of fresh fruits and veggies.

When oranges are on sale, we stock up. An orange sliced on a bed off lettuce with a drizzle of dressing makes a great salad. Add a few slices of avocado and yowza! I don't buy avocados when they are 2 bucks a pop.

Avocados were 4/$5 at the supermarket yesterday. We get two meals out of one, which puts it into the cheap range. Healthy oils, too. Do not neglect healthy oils.

If you have an ice cream maker, you can enjoy premium ice cream, sherbet, ice milk and frozen yogurt for half of what you pay in the store, and so much better. It makes a very special dessert.

Tonight I am taking a lemon poppyseed cake to a potluck. It will cost less than $2 to make, and serves 12. Pick your recipes.

By the way, I am very big on Penzey's Spices. http://www.penzeys.com/ Penzey's has a great web operation, catalog and some stores. The best thing is that you can buy spices in all sizes from minute amounts to big jars depending on your individual use. Or without jars. They have some great rubs and mixed blends for marinades and grilling.

Once you're a customer, you get a free sample in each order. The vanilla and peppercorns are soooo reasonable, and the prices make up for the postage. Be really smart and split an order with a friend or two or some folks in the office.

Living cheap is living creatively. It can even be fun. And definitely tasty.

I'm making cauliflower soup with a curry flavor. We eat it an lunch with some breadsticks. Cauliflower was on sale. Buy chicken broth on sale and some good curry powder from Penzeys. You can also make your own curry powder if you have a fully-stocked spice cabinent. Remember, creative is the operative word. Pare that cheese

Bon Appetit!

The Cheeseparer

Winter is the Time for Cheap Eats

Along with snow, cold temperatures, icy roads and sidewalks, wet boots and mittens, winter offers possibilities for eating on the cheap.

First there is soup, made-from-scratch soup: pea soup, bean soup, lentil soup, chicken and noodle soup. Soup with sausage, soup with cabbage. Dark chili, white chili. Yum! Don't stop there, think of hearty stew! Nourish yourself and your family.

Beef stew, pork stew, goulash, coq au vin, and my god, there's pot roast! And ribs! When meat is on sale, stock up, especially the BOGOs. The Russian dish, bigos, is a winter dream as is the Russian soup, Shtshi. (google it!) Those Russkies know a thing or three about hearty winter fare.

Most of these dishes make a big pot or casserole and won't break the bank if you consider the number of portions and the fact that all you need is maybe a salad and some homemade bread. If you feel lazy, make biscuits out of Bisquick. Be creative. Corn bread is great with chili. Find the 300 year old recipe with no white flour and no sugar. It rocks!

Shop the specials! The photo is Boeuf Bourgignon, AKA Burgundy Beef, an excellent and reasonable choice for a dinner party. I cut up a roast that was on sale instead of buying the more expensive cut of meat. A dish for 8 cost about $20.00 including the wine. I only needed noodles (cheap) and a salad (red leaf lettuce and home made dressing) to complete the meal. Dessert was a home made mocha cake that I only had to buy a small bar of chocolate and some yogurt to make. Look around the pantry and use what is on hand.

Appetizer was bacon-wrapped breadsticks, another cost-paring choice. We have noticed that the burgundy cheese balls coated with almonds are almost always cheaper than anything else at the cheese counter. They're tasty, too.

Eating well is the best revenge. Cook from scratch. Less salt, less chemicals and better taste.

The Cheeseparer

Teach Frugality

Seen on the web:

http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2009/01/12/2009-money-moves-teach-people-to-bake-bread/

I bake a no-knead food processor bread that requires only a bit of measuring and a thermometer for the warm water. It rises, it bakes and you eat. Makes two loaves. In the rare instance, that it becomes stale/hard you can make French toast or bread crumbs or croutons. Waste not, want not.

The Cheeseparer

The Ham Bone, Symbol of Eternity

Is it weird to blog a ham bone? Not the dance, but the real thing? The photo shows the ham bone just beginning to cook in the pot of bean soup. This is a frugal meal. Note large sprinkling of black pepper. Zowza!

We had a ham for Christmas instead of the prime rib roast beef that we usually cook. Actually, it was half a ham. Cost $14.00 instead of the $40+ dollars the beef would have set us back.
2 main meals for 3 people, then a few sandwiches, then ham for breakfast. After a few days, there was a big meaty bone and I removed enough for a ham and broccoli casserole--made with a cheese sauce and quite yummy.

Cooked the ham bone with some pea beans, lots of onion, garlic, some carrot and celery and a little fat (my bad!) and broth I'd saved from the baking of the ham. Add more chicken broth and a few springs of fresh rosemary and some dried thyme from the garden. Lots of black pepper. Yum! Cut the meat off the bone (ate some in the process) and had so much I put some aside for ham and eggs (2 meals as things evolved) and back went the chopped ham into the soup.

Died and gone to heaven. 8 servings, plus two breakfasts, and the casserole still to come. 4 servings there. Have we lost count? That $14 just keeps on giving. Double zowsa!

I think I've counted 32 servings here, folks. I've also got a good ham, potato and broccoli casserole recipe, but since we are in quasi-diet mode, I'll skip the potatoes.

So living it up with the ham has been a cheeseparing activity.

A wag once described eternity as "two people and a ham." My mom never saw the humor in that. She thought two people and a ham was great.

As ever,

The Cheeseparer