Free soup

Now that should  get some people’s attention....lol l

I recently watched some videos  on making broth or stock.  The buzz word these days is bone broth.  Whatever you call it, our great grandmothers did it for years.  Rumor has it that our great grandmothers had a pot of broth working on the back of the old wood stoves all day.  The wood stove kept the house warm, the broth was the start of soup and the steam hydrated the house.

Now, we have slow cookers.   April Holly Smith (u-tube) turned me on to the fact that you can start broth before you go to bed and have it done in the morning.   The older I get, the more I like passive cooking,   You can still have scratch food, but not slave over a hot stove all day.

I watched another lady make broth from bones, vegetabke clippings including the peels from garlic and onions and carrot tops, etc  and water.   She also added the powder that was a byproduct of the vegetables she grew in her garden.   She took the tops of her vegetables and dried them and made them into powder.   Please note not all vegetabke greens are edible,  tomatoes, for one, are poisonous.
She also took the skins  amd pulp from when she made tomato sauce to can and dried them for tomato powder.   Now, that’s being resourceful.

Beef, chicken and vegetable stock is costly.   It bumps up the cost of homemade soup  to the cost of canned soup or more. It also adds sodium and preservatives to your diet.  Throwing your ‘garbage’ into a slow cooker before  you go to bed seems like a quick, cheap alternative.

Another way to save is to throw bits of things on the freezer that could go on a pizza.   If you dedicate a part of a freezer shelf to pizza toppings, they won’t get lost on the black hole every freezer has.

It is surprisingly simple and the concept can save money.  You can eat well on less than four dollars a day, it just takes effort to take advantage of every trick you can use.

I was surprised when I bought special buys at QFC this week.  I had gone threw and clicked all the digital coupons that I thought I might use.  They are sitting in cyberspace waiting to be used.  I rarely buy anything that isn’t a good price.  That’s the secret of low cost food budgets.  I bought cottage cheese and sour cream because  it was a buck.  The surprise was that there was a .40 coupon hiding in cyberspace.   The same thing happened when I did a epic lean cuisine haul. It made my lunches .49 a day for a week and the bonus is that they are all really low carb.

Sometimes a little time can produce a lot of savings.  You can hit a computer screen in a few minutes while watching TV. You can make bone broth while sleeping, or make free money clicking a few UPC codes while you put  away the groceries.  I almost have a free amazon card and I haven’t even tried very hard.  One lady has hit a thousand dollars.  I suspect she tried a bit harder than I have!

It’s what you do when you have more time than money.