Today's post will hopefully give you a few hacks that can help you save money.
We are getting ready to take a trip in a few days, so my first order of business is to take stock of the fridge and deal with what is there.
My last post featured chicken soup, and I still had chicken stock and chicken meat in the fridge. So I started there. You always want to be aware of what proteins you have in the fridge, since they are generally the most expensive and also the first to go bad.
Last night we had chicken soup again, but I changed it up and came up with Chicken Bacon Ranch Soup with broccoli.
The recipe started the same way as the Provençal soup in my last post. Instead of laughing cow cheese, I added reduced fat cream cheese to the stock and cauliflower in the blender, and a handful of cooked bacon bits from the freezer to the pot. I changed the herbs to more of a ranch flavor with dill, thyme, black pepper, and garlic. I topped this S soup with shredded cheddar.
Moving on... I have a couple more proteins in the fridge: egg whites in the carton and cottage cheese. I will probably use them up before we leave, but if I don’t, I will pop them both into the freezer when we depart.
Now, on to my perishable vegetables. I generally buy lots of them, so I really have to make an effort to use them up.
We were invited to a friend’s house for dinner tonight, so I looked at my giant bag of fresh broccoli spears and offered to bring the salad... Broccoli and Bacon Salad. Remember the bacon I cooked and froze a few posts back? It came in handy today.
I like to steam my broccoli briefly, and then chill it right away under cold water. It brightens it up and softens it a bit. To the drained broccoli, I added chopped onion, chopped yellow pepper, grape tomatoes, and cooked diced bacon. For the dressing, I started with mayonnaise and added fresh lime juice and stevia. Normally I add nonfat Greek yogurt to my dressing, but I was out. So to cut out fat elsewhere, I eliminated the shredded cheddar and the nuts from the salad. It turned out quite delicious! To avoid a crossover, I didn't add any dried fruit to this S salad.
What’s next? Ok, limes. I buy them at Costco in 5 pound bags. Almost every day, I make this drink with them: fresh lime juice, stevia, and plain or bubbly water. That’s it! It is so refreshing, and chock full of vitamin C.
When the limes in the bag start looking like they have seen better days, I use my handy beloved kitchen tool, the citrus squeezer. I cut the limes in half and squeeze the juice into a glass bottle, where it will keep for a long time in the fridge.
I have other veggies on hand that will need to get eaten over the next couple days: lettuce, peppers, mushrooms, and green beans. These should not be a problem. I foresee a pepper and mushroom sauté in my near future. And a batch of green bean fries from the Trim Healthy Mama cookbook.
The only veggies I won’t worry too much about are my carrots and onions, which last a long time.
Next, I will look at things in jars. Oops, I discovered some applesauce hiding behind the pickles from my granddaughter’s last visit. Too old - out it went. It’s okay though; I have about 6 million jars of it down in my root cellar.
Here is another handy trick that will keep your food fresher much longer: move it into smaller containers as you use it up. This gets rid of the extra oxygen that will cause your food to oxidize and spoil faster. This goes for most everything: soups, casseroles, pickles, half and half, or whatever. You will be amazed at how much more life you get out of your food this way.
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| Fermented veggies preparing to move |
When I leave for a trip, the one thing I make sure to leave in the fridge is eggs. They are not going to go bad, and it is oh-so-convenient to whip up omelets when we get home and are tired and hungry. Serve your omelets with fermented veggies on the side, and you will get just about every nutrient under the sun.
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