Frugalities, 2024 Style

In the early years, our blog had a lot about cooking, homeschooling, crafting, clothing our family, and generally living life on a tight budget. It feels like this might be a good time to start up some of those posts again.

Part One: Peppers

What actually kicked that off today was a stop at the grocery store, where we were looking for canned soup on sale. Although we often buy store-discounted meat and bakery things, I've never been a big fan of the last-chance vegetable cart, mainly because of the inevitable cloud of fruit flies. But as I walked by it today, I noticed a big bag of red and yellow peppers for two dollars, and, from what I could tell, they all looked pretty solid, not mouldy or black. We had already picked up a bag of "Crunchy Taco" salad mix, to have alongside some chicken, and I thought at least some of the peppers (if there were enough good ones in the bag) would go well with that too.

Actually, all the peppers were just fine, so I chopped them all up. The bowlful on the left is for tonight's dinner, and the two small trays were ready to go into the freezer. (Small trays because we didn't have enough room in the freezer for one big one.)

And here's what we ended up with a couple of hours later: one quite-full medium Ziploc bag full of peppers, for chili or stir-fries or whatever.

So, the point of all that is: never say never when you're looking at the discount stuff.

Part Two: Plums

This little carton of yellow plums wasn't discounted. Plums are coming into season, and they should have been great, but their texture was poor, and the nice sour yellow-plum flavour wasn't there.

Well, if I wasn't going to waste two dollars' worth of peppers, I wasn't going to throw away several dollars' worth of plums, either. I browsed around online, and settled on a really simple recipe: cooking them down with a bit of sugar, spice, and lemon juice. I got rid of the worst ones, cut the rest in half, took out the stones, and put them in a pot with the sugar etc.

Here's what I ended up with: a couple of cups of cooked fruit and syrup. It's not too sweet, which I like. What will we do with it? Maybe have some over ice cream, and then put the rest in a freezer bag. We could eat it fresh, but we have a couple of other things to eat up as well, so this might be better frozen and used later.

Part Three: Pizza

Since we're talking about food anyway, one of our favourite cheap meals is homemade pizza. We make a pound and a half of very basic dough (in the bread machine), divide it in two, stretch the pieces out on a baking sheet, and top with canned sauce, cheese, and anything else we have around, including salami and grilled chicken. We don't have a fiery oven or a fancy pizza stone, just a good baking sheet and 425 degrees for twenty minutes. 

And there are usually enough leftovers for lunch the next day.

So, there's a snapshot of the Treehouse kitchen these days. I hope to post a few more frugalities soon.