Monday Kitchen Management aka food prep

This  is ridiculous .  This particular blog is being written by my tablet keyboard.  I have said the same things so often that it writes itself.

Clean out the refrigerator and dump anything dead.  Staying on top of the fresh foods , especially these days when things go bad fast, is a  necessary chore.   Not a problem of you have enough kids and fruit.  Lol

My daughter got a box of free food.  It is a box of miscellaneous food.   A lot of artisan bread.   She gave a lot to others.  There was a lot of fresh cilantro and parsley about to go bad .  I put it in the dehydrator.  Things that were on the edge and needed to be eaten soon.  

The lesson here, is that by incorporating things that need to be used soon and things that are plentiful and therefore, cheap into your meal plans you can stretch your food dollar and eat well.    Dehydrated herbs are much fresher and greener than those you buy in the spice isle .  You can put them in water, but they still don’t last a long time.   The touch of bright green can make an otherwise boring looking plate pop and look more appetizing.   We eat first with our eyes .   Red peppers are another tricky idea. They, too, make things more appealing.

It is no secret that fruits and vegetables in season are cheapest and at their peek of freshness.  That’s hey we eat squash and pumpkin in the winter and berries in the summer.   On another note, we are hard wires to eat pumpkin in the fall and strawberry shortcake in the summer.  By breaking that idea, you can have good food dirt-cheap.  Countless times, we have found seasonal tastes almost free because it wasn’t “the season” at grocery outlet .  Grocery Outlet is a franchise in some states that is a store that sells over stocks and sometimes things that were produced for a test market, and didn’t fly.
Sometimes it was just that the item was marketed too expensive.  I remember a can on recipe sauce that was selling for more than the meat you out with it.  It would up at grocery outlet and the dollar tree for .50.   At .50 it was cheaper than scratch.  At 2.85, not so much.

Often, in summer, pumpkin things will be on sale for fractions of the original price.  They are till in the sell by range, but it’s summer.    I just bought bread studding for .50.  It has also been ..25.  Its nit time for thanksgiving, but you can still have pork chops or chicken breast on stuffing with apple and cranberries added for dinner on a Rainy summer day.  It’s all about good food CHEAP!

The goal is to put good food on the table all month long and have a small inventory for emergencies on four dollars a day budget.   It can be done, and we have dine it on less than four dollars a day for two and a half years now.