- This topic has 2 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 11 years, 2 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
I have to admit, there have been times (back in the day when money was not as tight!) that we have been guilty of throwing food out occasionally.
Now, with 4 little mouthes to feed we have to make the most of the food we buy and we do our very best not to throw food out. We’ve gotten quite good at using left overs and wanted to get a thread going on this so you can add how you use your left overs creatively!
Roast chicken dinner – Instead of buying a medium sized chicken, we buy a large chicken and this gives us a good bit over to use the next day. If we have a good amount, we make a curry with it and if its not so much, we use it to make sandwiches for lunch. None of it gets thrown out!
Stew – When we make a stew, we make it extra large, adding lots of potatoes, carrots and an onion or two with the meat, which we buy from our local butcher. We have it for dinner and the next day, we give it to the bigger kids as an after school snack and to the little one for her lunch for a couple of days. It lasts about 4-5 days in the fridge so we get lots of meals & snacks from it because we make a huge pot of it. Its much better for baby than giving her store bought jars etc and its cheaper and tastier and we know what has gone into it, so no need to worry about preservatives.
Spaghetti Bolognese – I make a huge pot of this and to make it thrifty (and tasty tbh) we load it up with veg including garlic, onions, tonatoes, shaved carrots, mushrooms, peppers and courgettes. If your kids are not mad on these kinds of veg, whack it all in a blender before you add it to the mince and they won’t even know they are eating veg. Our butcher does a special on steak mince, 2lbs for 6.99 so we use 1lb for a spag bol and freeze the other 1lb for another day. When the meat & sauce is cooked, we use half of it for dinner and freeze the other half which we can use another day. All we need to do is heat it gently and make some pasta to go with it. Easy.
Anyone got thrifty suggestions for making food go that bit further??
coming to end of the week when you’ve got fruit or veg that haven’t been used:
Fruit – make smoothies – our girls love them andthey’re a great way of getting fruit that they may not be overly fond of eating. Some weeks we fly through the fruit and other weeks they may not be as interested so we end up with left overs.
Vegs – dh uses veg that may not last too long into vegtable soup and freezes – and i use it for lunches for me in work – great especially in these cold winter monthsWhen I cook…. I cook bulk….. from stews, to pasta sauces, casseroles… you name it…. so we always double / treble / quadruple our recipes… and then we freeze in "family meal" size quantities…. We could land up with 4 /5 meals of a particular type in the freezer….
Then in the morning, we take it out…. defrost and that night we are set for a good home-cooked meal.We have just reached the end of our freezer supplies…. we had about 20 different cooked meals frozen…. 😀
so easy… and we don’t waste….
Time to head back to the butcher to stock up on supplies for the next lot of batch cooking!
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.