Food Blogging on the Cheap

The phrase “cooking on a budget” helps to sell a gazillion magazines a year. But do you know what? Those “cooking on a budget” magazines are a contradiction. Those magazines at the checkout are ridiculously expensive. So, if you can afford to buy a six dollar magazine about “cooking on a budget” than you’re not really on a budget. The rest of us know that the six dollars could buy such glamorous items as a small 4-roll package of toilet paper and ½ pound of swiss cheese. So, I want to amend that phrase to simply “cooking and still being able to afford a 4.99 bottle of wine to go with dinner.” (From here on out that will just be referred to as, “casbataa4bowtgwd.”)

But, food blogging when you are functionally in a lower financial class can be a tad bit more challenging than just cooking alone.

A few weeks ago my mother said to me, “You use such expensive ingredients on your food blog!”

And I didn’t want to contradict her because – well, she’s my mother and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

But, the “expensive” ingredient area is a pretty gray one. We use expensive ingredients like goat cheese occasionally, but we’re far from able to replenish those ingredients regularly. So, we’ve come up with tricks to make some wallet denting ingredients go a long way. Here are a few of them.

Trick#1: Use it all

For instance, a fresh fennel bulb costs 3 dollars and the typical wisdom is that you just use the bulb, and you strip the outer layer, leaving about an inch of usable fennel. But, the entire thing is edible, (and delicious) so we use the fronds for photographing a dish with fennel and we use the less pretty stalk in the recipe. (And we keep the fronds and stalks in the freezer until ready to use in a broth.)

Trick#2: The staples

As long as you have olive oil, flour, potatoes, carrots and celery you can make almost anything. And they’re cheap.

Trick #3: Freeze them

For instance, we bought a package of lovely, local bacon a couple of months ago and we promptly put the (gulp) eight-dollar package in the freezer. When we want to splurge we pull it out and chop bits of it into a dish. (“Bits” = “lardons” if you want to be “fancy.”) To date, that one package has gone into eight meals and I’m pretty sure I can eek out another three.

Trick#3A: Herbs

Fresh parsley, cilantro, mint and basil don’t freeze well, because they take on water and look limp when they defrost. (Although you can freeze them, and they still taste great.) But almost every other herb freezes perfectly, and looks gorgeous defrosted.

In our freezer I currently have: summer savory, dill, rosemary, thyme, sage and lemon basil. Just pull out the amount of herbs that you want, and by the time they’ve gone from your hand to the counter they are defrosted. It’s an excellent way of buying herbs on the cheap in the summer and making them last through winter.

Trick #3B: Cheese

A lot of cheese freezes really well, with the exception of cheddar, which just turns to crumbles. But crumbled cheese has it’s uses, and if you see some cheddar on sale grab some and freeze it. It certainly won’t make creating a cheddar cheese sauce difficult. Swiss and provolone slices freeze like a dream. Just stick a layer of wax paper between the slices, or shell out a couple of dollars more for the resealable packages that already have the paper dividers. Feta is great, because you can just thinly slice it when it’s still frozen and pop it back in the freezer before it defrosts at all.

Trick #3C: Raw food is freezer-friendly too

Other freezer-friendly foods include: raw cherry tomatoes, hot peppers, garlic and ginger. Ginger is the coolest. I just scrub the bejesus out of it when I get it home from the store, dry it and freeze it. Then when I’m making a curry or stir-fry I don’t even mess with peeling it (there’s nutrients in that skin!) and I just grate it over the pan. When you are making a stew, soup, or spaghetti sauce you can just drop in frozen cherry tomatoes and they defrost nearly instantly. Hot peppers take about 5 minutes to defrost at room temperature. Frozen garlic takes about 15 minutes to thaw, but how cool does it look while it’s still frozen? It’s translucent. You can almost see through a whole, peeled clove. (See photo above, to the left of the knife.) Cut off a thin slice and hold it up to the light. It’s strange. Still tastes like garlic.

But as much as I love freezing things can we please, please, retire that ridiculous tip that everyone cheerfully offers for pesto storage? I’m NOT going to buy an extra ice tray to freeze pesto in. First of all the pesto cubes would be stupidly small, and if you were serving four people that would pretty much use the entire tray. Second – I don’t know who much room you have in your freezer, Dear Pesto Cube Lovers, but I have room for 2 ice trays in the freezer compartment. I’m not going to sacrifice 50 % of that space for a pasta sauce. And the third reason I wouldn’t do that, is because if we have friends over ice is at a premium – and no one wants whiskey over pesto ice.

So there you have it, food blogging doesn’t have to be expensive. You can eat and still be “casbataa4bowtgwd.”

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