Lately I realized that buying mixed frozen veggies is largely a waste of money. I decided that I can just buy a whole lot of fresh ones, chop them, make my own mix, and freeze everything, with the advantage of saving money and being able to decide the types and amounts I want.
So I went over to the grocery store and grabbed some vegetables
I think tomorrow I’ll spend a couple of hours just chopping lol
I also saw some fresh octopus and it looked good enough to try it. Boiled it and ate it with rice and tomatoes cooked with browned onions in olive oil. Yummy
Frozen veggies are usually blanched and is something you should probably do,
Blanching (scalding vegetables in boiling water or steam for a short time) is a must for almost all vegetables to be frozen. It stops enzyme actions which can cause loss of flavor, color and texture. Blanching cleanses the surface of dirt and organisms, brightens the color and helps retard loss of vitamins.
Our supermarket does the same- pick 5 for 19:95, seriously awesome deal. That deal means that I could get 2 weeks worth of meat for $20! Unfortunately,
good thing too because veggies are ridiculously expensive
There are 2+lb packages of chicken drumsticks/thighs, which works out to about 4 days worth of meat, add eggs, and Costco canned salmon- I’m golden.
I might even have the budget for the occasional luxury! (yes, I’ve literally spent hours at Giant Eagle figuring out how I will budget for next semester and beyond )
Same, same, but different. With our grocers, packs of meat rarely expire. They keep their inventory superbly well in this regard. If it’s about to expire though, it’ll be subject to a rather aggressive price-cut, but in no way would you ever be able to stock up for two weeks through this mechanism.
The “for sale”-fridge is usually cakes that they’ve baked but haven’t been able go sell, dairy and products that aren’t… main-line, and charkuteries. After the new year it was stocked to the brim with all of the luxury items they hadn’t been able to sell that they’d brought in because people swing for those things that time of year.
As food prices are highly regional, here a kilo of sweet potatoes is almost 6 dollars, I’m probably not well-located to give out any advice but have a look at whole chickens and how they’re priced. They’re a steal here at least. About half as expensive as frozen chicken breasts. Granted also a lot fatter, but that’s not inherently bad.
Timely subject, as my wife relayed to me that Aldi’s had chicken that was nearing its date marked down at 75% off.
I’m like “Then why don’t we have like 50 lbs. of it in our freezer right now?”. I love those. The past couple of pork and sauerkraut crock pots I’ve done were from a sale like that, and I have like 10 lbs. of turkey breast in the freezer right now from one.
Speaking of all this, a question. A friend posted on Facebook that her milk “would go bad soon,” so she made all sorts of stuff with it; pudding, mac and cheese, etc.
And I was completely grossed out. Wouldn’t bad milk make for bad food? I get using chicken before it’s expiration date, but milk?
Excellent question. Is your friend refering to a sell-by date or a use-by date?
On second thought, I’m not sure that it matters. I’m just regurgitating what I’ve been taught here, but consider two scenarios,
You cook something that’ll be reheated using milk that will have “gone bad” if you hadn’t during the life-time of the left-overs (that’s still within reason of how long you’d store said left-over). I’m guessing mac & cheese is one such example
You cook something that will not be reheated. I guess pudding is one such example.
In the first scenario, the left-overs should still be good to eat. In the second scenario, I’d exercise more caution (sniff test).
Bad milk a case of microbial growth, or at least that’s what I was told. If the microbial growth is the growth of lactic bacteria, you’ll wind up with yoghurt. If it’s something else though, you might be less fortunate. The prescence of lactic bacteria, as far as I’m aware, actually reduces the likelyhood of other bacteria appearing.
If you haven’t seen Michael Pollan’s Cooked on Netflix there’s an episode that features Sister Noella, and I’m not primed to adequately regale the story but TL;DR: she was making cheese in wooden vats, the FDA shut this down, she proved that there was a higher incidence rate of harmful bacteria when cooking with steel vats as these did not retain the lactic bacteria between batches and was allowed to resume making cheese the way she was making it.
I’ve always been told that if you drink milk that’s gone bad, you’ll know about it pretty quickly. It’s unlikely to cause you much long term harm because your body will just throw it straight back out the way it came.
It’s coming out violently at one end or the other. The consequences of which is probably not too bad for anyone in good health, but the elderly and tiny ones are at risk.
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