Guiltless Freezing

I just recently discovered that freezer bags are recyclable! I have yet to try it, but it sounds like you can turn clean and dry freezer bags in at grocery stores that recycle plastic shopping bags. 

Washing them can be done inside out in a dishwasher, or by hand. We aren't lucky enough to have a dishwasher in this house, but it's only a matter of seconds to squish some soapy water around in it and hang it in my drying rack on a spatula.

I was looking into alternatives for freezer meal containers that are better for the environment. There are some affordable options out there...

For example:

Wide mouth mason jars

Freezer paper

Plastic freezer containers 

 Plastic wrap and aluminum foil

...but I still feel that zippered freezer bags are the most flexible for most freezer meal applications. They allow you to reduce freezer burn by pushing out air, and can be stacked neatly and tightly together if frozen flat. 

However, I am hardly ever able to reuse them. They develop pinholes and leak when defrosting, get contaminated with raw meat, or sometimes I just get impatient and rip them open to defrost things (like soup stock) in a pan. Now I don't have to feel as wasteful because I can take them in to be recycled!

Ziploc even has a rewards program, which you can check out here (no, I'm not affiliated with them in any way):

I'm still interested in getting some reusable freezer containers eventually. What are your favorite ways to store your freezer meals?

Freezer Meals 1

So, I mentioned a while back that I'm in freezer cooking mode, right? I loooove the idea of Once a Month Cooking (OAMC) which has been a big deal in the circles I frequent on the internet (*cough*Pinterest*cough*) lately. However, I haven't quite leveled up to the point of making 50 meals in 2 hours, or whatever these amazing women do.

Instead, when I sit down to do my weekly meal planning/grocery list composing, I try to make one or two of those meal ideas something freezable. Then I just make double or triple and freeze the extra. It hardly takes more time than cooking the meal in the first place, and having those meals ready to go has been helping us quash the urges to eat out on those lazy nights.

Here are a few of the things we have frozen lately:

	Sausage and Jalapeno Chili I've made a few tweaks to this recipe to suit our taste. I leave out the ground beef and use 1 lb beef kielbasa, sliced into about 1/4" thick semi circles. I change out crushed tomatoes for diced. I cut the brown sugar in half. And I add 2C cooked kidney beans at the end (about a can). Defrost in the fridge and serve with warm corn bread. Mmm.
	Indian Chicken Curry This is my favorite fella's specialty. He also dices the chicken, adds diced potato and carrot, and uses tomato sauce in place of stewed tomatoes. Serve over rice, and feel free to add extra veggies (zucchini is good).
	Chicken Enchiladas There are tons of recipes for enchiladas out there. Mine are pretty basic chicken with (usually) canned green sauce. I bought a few cheap 8x8 metal pans for freezing stuff that can go straight into the oven. Just prep, line with plastic wrap and then foil, and write the baking instructions on the foil. No need to thaw (just make sure you remove the plastic), and I like that they aren't disposable.
	Poverty Meal This one made me laugh because my family ate it all the time when I was a kid, but I never had a name for it. Pretty appropriate! I "fancied it up" a bit by using rotini instead of macaroni.
	Spaghetti Sauce This chunky, vegetarian spaghetti sauce is so easy to double or triple and freeze. The only change I had to make (to make my fella happy) was to shred the carrots so they weren't as noticeable. I have also been experimenting with adding hot Italian sausage seasonings, such as garlic, fennel, and red pepper flakes. I'll post a recipe if I ever figure out the best measurements. :)
	Soup Stock It's soooo easy to make and freeze your own broth. I've used this vegetable soup stock recipe a few times, but it's really as simple as learning what you like in broth, cleaning and rough-chopping the veggies, chucking it all into a soup pot with herbs and seasonings, covering with water, and simmering for a few hours. Strain out the solids, and you have broth! I save bones from roast chicken and meat in my freezer for when I have an afternoon at home to keep an eye on the stove. You can also add (clean) eggshells to add calcium.

Do you have any favorite freezer recipes? I'm always on the lookout for new healthy and tasty recipes. Please share!

Dog-Proofing and Lasagna Gardening

My Dog Likes to Garden

When I first started this blog, my intention was to chronicle my attempts to learn to garden. Then we got a puppy. 

A puppy who liked to dig. 

What dirt?

She dug under the wire fence I had so carefully built around my new garden, and trampled and gnawed every last plant. Needless to say, I was pretty discouraged at that point. Fast forward to two years later... I've been daydreaming of having a garden, but there were a couple of obstacles keeping me from starting. The first was still the dog. I filled in her holes, but the lure of that mysterious, off-limits place was too much for her, and she'd just dig them right up again. 

Finally it occurred to me to dig-proof the base of the garden fence the same way I had the fence at the back of the yard. I bought a cheap roll of foot-wide chicken wire and some long metal stakes with hooks on one end from the local hardware store. 

Chicken Wire and Wire Stakes

I rolled the chicken wire out flat along the base of my garden fence and staked it down. Then, after she still managed to dig between the fence and the chicken wire the next day (gah!), I filled the dirt back in and used some more wire to tie the near edge of the chicken wire to the base of the garden fence. It's been several months and, as far as I know, the garden area has remained untouched by canine paw. 

Taming My Jungle

Next roadblock... weeds that are taller than I am. And yes, that leafy thing to the far left is a tree. Did you know trees could be weeds? I sure didn't! 

And this is after I spent an hour hacking at it earlier this week

I've put off starting a garden so far this summer because of the immense amount of work I imagined it would take to pull up all those weeds and turn over all of that heavy soil. I don't know why I didn't think of searching the web for an easier way to prep a garden bed before, but I'm sure glad I finally did! 

I came across something called Lasagna Gardening. It requires no digging and sounds just about my speed. Start out by chopping or ripping out the biggest weeds. Then, put down a layer of newspaper (I'm going to use phone book pages, since we have several of those laying around that I haven't quite gotten to recycling). The paper kills the remaining weeds and prevents new ones from sprouting up by blocking out the sun. Plus, it is biodegradable. And, my favorite, free! Then, you put down layers of "green" and "brown" plant clippings and vegetable scraps to form a compost lasagna. 

Depending on what time of year you start your lasagna garden, you can plant your seeds right in it or let it break down into fluffy, nutrient-rich soil for a few months first. My first attempt at a compost heap did not go so well, so I will leave the details to the experts. Here is the website that explained it to me. 

Have you ever tried lasagna gardening? What do you do to make gardening less work and more fun?

Cleaning A (Really Yucky) Stove Top

This one's a mini post. I wanted to get some pictures to add to my hamburger post, and realized that my stove top was pretty gross! I'll save you from a picture, but just know it had a few layers of stuff baked on around each burner.

I got started on it with my favorite cleaning method, and thought I'd share. This is a very simple technique I ran across a couple of years back using household items (table salt, white vinegar, and baking soda). Take a look! There really isn't anything that I need to add to this video. Thanks so much for sharing, autonomess!

How To Make Regular Ground Beef Leaner

The last three months have been full of celebrations and travel. It's been so fun, but I still haven't quite got the hang of budgeting for special occasions. So, now we're going into frugal mode while our finances recover. That means lots of Googling for money-saving DIYs and freezer food recipes, so I can take full advantage of the small deep freezer I bought a few months ago.

I rarely buy ground meat since it costs so much more per pound to get lean ground beef or turkey than it does to get (unground) chicken. Plus, I assumed the high fat content of regular ground beef outweighed the lower price tag. 

Google to the rescue!

I found two great articles on lowering the fat content of regular ground beef on Hillbilly Housewife and Democratic Underground. The first article is cool because Mrs. Housewife posted a chart that shows how much weight each type of ground beef loses while cooking (regular to super lean). It turns out that even though regular ground beef (30% fat and 70% lean) costs less than half as much as super lean (7% fat and 93% lean), you lose less than 2 oz. more per pound while cooking (12 2/3 oz remaining versus 11 oz). Half the price for 90% of the meat? Sold!

Stock pot filled with regular ground beef

Hillbilly Housewife Method

Her method is to brown the meat, drain the fat, then put it in a colander and run hot water over it to get even more fat out. You could then season it or put it back in the pan to cook with your favorite aromatics (garlic and onions <3) and/or freeze for later use.

I was also impressed by the comment left by Damie about running the cooked beef crumbles through a food processor along with your favorite meatball ingredients, forming the resulting mixture into balls, and browning them in a pan. I am planning on trying this out on freezer meatballs for lazy dinner nights.

Boiled hamburger spread out on a cookie sheet to cool

Democratic Underground Method

I liked lildreamer316's method on Democratic Underground for defatting ground meat even more for its frugal creativity. She (had to guess on the pronoun here) puts about an inch of water in the bottom of a pan, adds 5-6 lbs of ground beef, brings it to a boil, and stirs it around until it is no longer pink. 

Less work and clean up is good. But I liked even more that she reserved the broth. I make soup stock pretty regularly, and will likely post about it another time. In case you haven't done this before, when you cool the broth in the refrigerator, the fat floats to the top and will form a solid layer that you can easily lift off and throw away.

Look at the amount of fat I lifted off the reserved beef broth the next morning!

Your Method

Do you have a favorite method to make your ground meat healthier? What other frugal food tips do you have to share? I love hearing about this stuff!

A New Beginning

I think I might take another crack at this blogging thing. It's been floating around in the back of my mind for a while now. My interests have always changed pretty quickly (hence the boxes of various crafting tools and supplies around my house), so I think I may have limited my subject matter too much on previous attempts. This time I'm just gonna have at it with whatever my favorite topic of the day is, and see what happens.

This is a blog about learning. And probably about mistakes, too. I love finding out how things work, how things are made, and why things are done. I have really always been that way, but these days technology makes it so easy that I sometimes wonder if it's becoming unhealthy... 

Naaaaah! 

Does anyone else get twitchy when you aren't able to Google random questions that pop into your head?

Nuts and Bolts

My Mistake

There hasn't been much to report on in a while. Things just keep getting bigger and bigger. I'm really enjoying watching my plants grow so successfully--much better than I had expected for a first attempt. I guess the soil here is forgiving.

It turns out that the butternut plant that was growing so fast last month is actually a sunflower! It's nearly as tall as me now (about 5 feet) and I think I can see the beginnings of a flower peeking through.


However, I do have a lovely baby butternut squash peeking out from between the leaves lying along the ground of an actual butternut plant, as well.

Tall Lettuce??

I also learned about bolting this week. Apparently once some plants believe they have reached maturity, they grow really tall and fast so they can spread their seeds. The cilantro started growing upward really fast with tiny leaves and then sprouted tiny white flowers. But I'm going to leave it be so I can harvest the seeds for corriander. (Mmm.. chai tea... :) )

My lettuce is also really tall! I just thought it was something the variety did, but my taste buds disagree. Last night I made a beautiful salad with the leaves from my 3' tall lettuce plants and it was so bitter we couldn't eat it. *sigh* I read that it has something to do with the hormones the plants release when they bolt. I may try planting some more. There seems to be a debate on some of the forums I checked about whether you can actually grow good lettuce during the summer heat or not. Let's see what happens, shall we?