Are there things you don't think of as food that could feed your family and be tasty? I'm not talking about offal (which we do eat, and I encourage you to take a chance on it), or bugs (which it sounds like our government and food industry is). I mean things that you already bring into your home, but discard.

We discovered that cornsilk (trimmed of the dry ends) is quite tasty, and can be used like sprouts on sandwiches and in salads. We turn the corn cobs from eating corn into a broth that will be welcome in the fall and winter, when a hearty corn chowder will both warm and fill us. We just put them in the stock pot with some other vegetables and herbs (from my handy stock bag in the freezer), cover with cool water, a little salt and a few peppercorns, and bring it to a low boil, then simmer for about an hour. Strain and store in the freezer. I understand that you can make a corn cob jelly if you don't add the other vegetables and herbs, and instead simply boil and simmer the cobs in the water, strain and use as the juice for jelly, which looks and tastes remarkably like honey. However, we really prefer the real thing on honey, and prefer to save our sugar usage for other jams, jellies and preserves.

But, did you know that you can eat the greens from your carrots? They can be used like parsley, turned into a soup, added to other rice or bean dishes. We used to toss them to our chickens. If you leave them on the carrots, they will continue to sap the nutrients from the root, and will shrivel it sooner. On the same sort of principle, we always remove the greens from beets. They are exactly the same species as the Swiss chard you get at the store or farmers' market. They just weren't bred to be quite as large and sturdy as the varieties raised for chard. In my opinion, chard is superior to spinach in basically every application. So, we save those greens and use them as chard, or in place of spinach. I think I have mentioned before how we also use the stems, either by chopping them and cooking them a little earlier and longer than the greens, or saving them to use like we use celery in salads, stews, bean dishes, sautées, and so on.

Little things like this will stretch your budget and help you use up everything you bring into your home. If you already have been trying to make the best use of your food, you probably already have a stock bag, so whatever cannot be used as part of a meal can still be put there, but if you garden, you can put those scraps that won't be useful for stock into your compost, rather than down your garbage disposal (where basically nothing is supposed to go, anyway, as far as I can tell) or into your trash. This will help you grow more food yourself (or just beautify your yard with flowers and shrubs, even), and for less money, with a lower impact, in fact making an improvement, to your soil. We are a family of nine at home and we use the smallest trash bin our trash company offers. For a while there, we were only using every other week delivery. That is how little trash we made (we've been doing a ton of remodeling and decluttering, so we had to go back to the weekly pick up, but we are aiming at going every other week again by the New Year). So, using up everything we can, putting the remainder in our stock bag (giving us free nutrition), feeding our chickens, ducks, turkeys, pigs, with it (they turn that into eggs and meat!), or putting it into the compost (improving our soil fertility and increasing the yield of our garden) not only makes the most of what we spend and bring in, but it also reduces our trash and associated costs. We are saving money there, as a result of saving money in our food budget.

Here is a bonus tip: Since we buy in bulk as much as we can, we also don't usually have a lot of packaging to dispose of, but as we live in the country, the cardboard cartons go down on the grass and weeds in the garden plot to kill them, and break down into the soil for later years, and paper sacks and smaller cardboard bits get used as firestarters in our fireplace and for our firepit. It's about time for me to put out the fire bins for the kids, where we put empty toilet paper rolls, and junk mail, or mail with account information on it, and tissues and all the rest, that we just toss into the fireplace instead of our garbage. They cut our garbage bill and our power bill, since we can heat most of our main floor with our fireplace.

Previous Posts:
Make it at Home
Grocery Shopping
Waste Not, Want Not
Soup
The Celery Stalks at Midnight
Use What You Have
Combining Trips
Storing Bulk Purchases
Turn It Off
Grow Your Own
Buying in Bulk
Gleaning
Entertainment on the Down Low
Finding Fun Locally
Holiday Shopping
Reconsidering Convenience
More Bang for Your Grocery Buck
Preserving the Harvest
Revisiting Kitchen Strategies
Extreme Frugality
Bargain Getaways
Cultivating or Curating Abundance
Making Your Own Snacks and Treats

Labels: Family, Frugality, Homemaking, Recipes, Tales from the Kitchen

// posted by Ranee @ Arabian Knits @ 3:48 PM