Free Food, Sun and Wind at the Back Door

I know this is going to be an obvious one, but a conversation with a good friend who was virtually clueless about construction and horticulture led me to believe that maybe more people than I assume are just not in the know about backyard money saving. I have done two very different things this summer in my own backyard that have not only cut my bills, but have dramatically increased my quality of life as well.
The first, of course, is the garden. Lisa has tried to get me to plant a few ornamental things, and I have complied in a couple areas, but largely I try to only plant things that will have a utilitarian purpose. As a result, I have fresh strawberries, cherries, and raspberries for breakfast each morning, and I haven't had to buy herbs for cooking since the frost. Last night we grilled (too hot to cook in the kitchen) some really tasty chicken thighs we got at Cub for $1/lb, and everything else we needed to make a Buffalo sauce and salad we either had in our cupboards already or picked out of the back forty:


The salad is arugula from the garden, the dressing was a vinaigrette with feta, the Buffalo sauce was hot sauce with some spices out of the herb beds and a little lemon juice (I had no idea it was so easy to make from scratch), the biscuits were an impulse buy, but they were forty cents per tube, and the Concord Grape Jelly we made last fall and it's been in our basement ever since.
The second thing I've done is this:


For twenty dollars invested in a metal clothesline anchor, I don't have to run my dryer until sometime in October when it finally starts freezing again. I can't tell you how downright pleasant it was to fall asleep that first night in sun-dried sheets. The Bounce Company would like you to believe they can recreate the smell of freshness, but they don't even come close. My freedom of choice has been somewhat diminished (I have to wait for a sunny day to do laundry), but I'm willing to make that sacrifice to don a shirt that smells like a Midwestern summer afternoon.

Set it, Forget it.

For my first post back from my sabbatical, I've chosen to highlight my new favorite money-saving kitchen item, the slow cooker. This thing is magical. You toss in some meat or veg with a little liquid and a chopped onion, and eight hours later it's delicious!
My impetus for devoting a post to it is that Lisa was in a national grocery chain the other day and discovered they were selling (on special!) one pound of pulled pork for sandwiches or tacos for 15, count 'em, fifteen dollars. We thought this odd, since we'd recently hosted a multitude of friends for pulled pork tacos over Memorial Day. What we payed was $7 for five pounds of pork butt. Granted I had to get up early before going to work to toss it in the Crock Pot with a quart of salsa, some chili powder and cocoa powder, but after that I could set it, speed off to work, and by the time I got home, we were ready to go with barbecue pulled pork - five pounds of it, I reiterate - with only the shells and fixings left to set out. Here's how it turned out:





Over the last few months we have discovered some excellent, cheap, and above all easy recipes that involve a minimal amount of cash and effort but yield a ludicrous amount of food. Most feed us for several days on a single afternoon of hands-off preparation.
Some of our favorites from around the web are the KC Stuffed Green Peppers, which you can find here. It's ground beef centric, but could easily be altered to use ground turkey or even some sort of mock-something for those of the vegetarian persuasion. We also really enjoyed the Autumn Vegetable Beef Stew, which can be found here.
The basic principle is this: you don't want expensive cuts of meat, because when you cook it for so long you want all that fat and connective tissue to intensify the flavor and make it so tender it'll just fall right off the bone. This is what makes it really conducive to budget cooking. One of my favorites is for barbecue beef sandwiches. You buy three pounds of chuck roast, one of the more collagen-heavy, cheaper beef cuts, and rub it with flour. Toss it in the slow cooker with a can of tomato sauce, a chopped onion and a clove of minced garlic, a handful of brown sugar, maybe a pinch of mustard powder, chili powder, whatever you like, and a couple cubes of beef bouillon. Eight hours later you have the most delicious barbecue beef that falls apart as you put it on a toasted bun, and all your friends will thank you for it. Or you can keep it for yourself and it'll feed you for damn near a week's worth of bag lunches.
Slow cooker, I sing praises to thee.