V: Save a Step!

{I first published this as a Google document, mainly because I wasn’t going to have any pictures to go with it, and you know I like posts to have pictures. My thought was that this should be something easy for you to print out and put in your menu binder. But now Google has messed with things, so I’m just posting it.}

Go here for Worksheet I.
Go here for Worksheet II.
Go here for Worksheet III.
Go here for Worksheet IV.

Worksheet V. ~ Save-a-Step Cooking

Buy low, sell high.

Did you notice in Worksheet III how few dishes I cook from scratch on a given day, although all my cooking is “scratch”? This is Save-A-Step cooking!

Menu-making with an eye to the marginal benefits of any particular dish or process will streamline your dinner preparations and make cooking an enjoyable part of your days rather than a huge chore. I touched on this in Worksheet III and elsewhere, and I’d like to really delve into it here.

If you are clever, you can schedule your week so that only on one or two days do you put in a big cooking effort – at the most – and usually you will take advantage of some time-saving steps you’ve done when it’s convenient and efficient. You still make everything you want from scratch, but efficiently!

I think of this as “buy low, sell high” as applied to the precious commodity of time. Use your time when it’s plentiful – say, on a day when you are home for at least a morning, rather than doing errands all day, to build up a food stash for a day when you have little time (when time is “expensive” for you). Use the hour that you are already making a roast chicken to roast two chickens (or three!). This costs you no more in time for the actual roasting, and only a little more for cutting the extra cooked chicken up and adding the bones to the stock pot. Later, when you need cooked chicken or chicken stock for a recipe, it’s already there for you.

In another economics image, you are applying efficiencies of scale by using your means of production to increase output. So, for instance, if you are already making bread, you increase the dough and make a couple of loaves to freeze. Even an extra pan of rolls in the freezer takes the edge off the work of a future meal.

In contrast, the idea of bulk cooking has you taking many steps all at once – shopping for many meals, cooking many different kinds of foods – for later. Realities of life in a large busy family don’t get factored in – nursing a baby, illness, extra guests… I would call that “buy high, sell high” – not sound advice!

In Save a Step Cooking you do whatever you are doing now, only you see how you can use the existing set-up to give yourself a little edge later. In just a couple of short weeks, this system will pay off, and you will have even more free time to create efficiencies in even more areas as they occur to you.

Use your menu planning.
Now, concretely, the menu planning stage is the place to do most of this thinking. I find it interesting that mothers of the past did what I’m suggesting as a matter of course, because they were very busy with many activities, many children, and few resources. Ladies like “Ma” of Little House books would make their roast (if they had one) on Sunday, and then use the bounty in the coming week. Even without freezers they had a stash of stale bread that awaited clever use in many dishes. They used up the less stable items first, and then moved on to those that kept. They had common sense!

Here are some ways to get started on this today. You will think of lots of others. My point is – don’t do it all at once. Do it as you go, saving your steps along the way.

1. Plan for roasts on Sundays at least two Sundays a month.

It’s fairly easy to do, and everyone loves a roast with gravy. The frugal way to do this is to make whatever roast or large piece of meat is on sale. Try to get a roast that is at least a bit larger than what you would normally buy, or two chickens if you usually roast one, three if you usually roast two. It will repay you many times in the coming days! You can prevent people from eating too much meat by serving enough side dishes, along with hearty rolls. Make them take those first!

You don’t have to take care of the leftovers right away. You can cover the pan with foil and put the whole thing in the fridge (if you have enough room!) and deal with it the next day – often it’s easier to cut up meat when it’s cold. However, once you get used to cooking this way, you will find it doesn’t take that long to divide leftover meat into slices, chunks, and bones.

Wrap the meat up separately, labeling clearly. Either wrap the bone up for freezing, or go ahead and start a stock pot as your family helps you clear up after dinner. Just throw the bones and any handy onion, carrot, and celery in and set to a boil. If you want, you can just do the bones and add vegetables at another stage. There is not really any precision to this! Do set the timer for two hours – many is the time I’ve boiled down a pot of broth after leaving the kitchen! That’s not thrifty!). Adding a couple of tablespoons of vinegar helps dissolve the excellent nutrients in the bones and connective tissues.

This broth will be the lynchpin of your food stash, saving you not just one, but many, steps in the coming weeks. You can add leftover gravy if you won’t be using it in the next two days. It will enrich the broth nicely.

Once the broth has cooked (the bones will be soft or, in the case of big meat bones, all the connective tissue will have boiled into the liquid, and any meat in there will be bland to the taste), pour it through a colander into a bowl large enough to allow quick cooling. Put it into the refrigerator until the next day. If you have ever tried vainly to get the fat off stock in a rush, you will thank yourself many times over for doing it this way.

The next day (or the next, no rush), scrape off the fat (or lift it off in one piece, depending on the type of broth) and throw it away. Spoon the congealed broth into containers, leaving head room, and label clearly. I just write with a Sharpie right on my plastic containers. New writing goes right over old, no problem.

Now, any recipes on your handy Master Menu List that call for already cooked meat are a breeze for you. Barbeque pork sandwiches? Check. Chicken enchiladas? No problem. Ham and bean soup? Yup. Turkey pot pie? Got it. You haven’t got the whole thing, of course, but you are well on your way, without having knocked yourself out on an all-day cooking spree.

2. Make more of whatever you are making.

Let’s say that you have scheduled roast sweet potatoes in their jackets for a side this week. (Sweet potatoes are my favorite food. I love them so! Nothing could be easier, either. Just choose a bunch in a uniform size, put them on a sheet of tinfoil on a baking tray, and roast them at a high heat – at least 425*. They make an awful mess as they ooze their sugars, so do use the foil. Then serve, split open, with a little butter and salt. Heaven!) Just put in twice as many and let the extras cool completely. Cut them out of their skins, slice them into a container, and freeze. Another day you can have sweet potatoes as a side dish, premixed with butter and salt, without the hot oven or messy tin foil.

Making a pot pie? Can you make another one, even if it’s smaller? I could never face making pot pies on a day I was also making every other meal for the month, but if I’m already making one, it’s not that hard to make another. It will come in handy on a day when Dad has taken the boys somewhere and there are not as many people around for supper.

Making more is particularly important with baking. Making a pie? Make an extra crust or two – it will freeze perfectly if wrapped well, and then your pot pie is that closer to realization.

Homemade bread freezes beautifully. When it’s defrosted it tastes just like you baked it that day. You can wrap it in paper towel and microwave it in a pinch, and it’s just fine. It’s always worth it to freeze at least a loaf or enough rolls for a meal.

If you are making cookies, scrutinize the recipe. It’s almost not worth doing if you are not going to make extra. It takes so much time to get the ingredients out and mix them. Go ahead and make a quadruple batch! You can freeze the dough if you can’t get to making them all now.

A lot of things can be frozen that you wouldn’t expect. So go ahead and make more!

3. Save a Step on basic recipe building blocks.

Don’t get caught out without bread crumbs. Any lame dish is made so much better with a topping of bread crumbs, let alone how much you use them in recipes.

Save all the bread ends and bits lying around and put them in the food processor. I used to balk at doing this because I didn’t want to have to wash it out after such an insignificant use. Then I realized that either the crumbs are so dry and inert in terms of anything else I would put in the processor that a simple wipe would do, or I was going to use the processor soon after for something that would not be affected by my having made crumbs, and then wash it.

Put the crumbs in a zip bag, press out the air, and keep in the freezer.

Almost every conceivable savory dish calls for chopped onion, chopped garlic, and perhaps chopped peppers. Go ahead and sauté up double, triple, or more, freezing the extra for next time. Go another step: if the recipe calls for doing all this with ground beef, do a large amount and freeze the extra! I can’t count how many times my skin was saved, dinner-wise, by having this mixture in the freezer ready to go. You can make spaghetti with meat sauce, chili, sloppy joes, meat enchiladas, burritos – all without firing up the skillet.

Most recipes using boneless chicken breasts are enhanced by pounding the breasts first. If I’m making boneless chicken breasts, it’s almost by definition that I’m in a rush! So when I buy them, I take them out of the package, pound them all, and repackage them in sets of 3 with a layer of plastic wrap in between the sets. They store all flat in a zip bag and are ready to go out of the freezer – much better than trying to handle them half frozen and all sort of bunched up.

Chopping nuts for a recipe? Why chop up ½ cup? Go ahead and chop up the whole package, and then store the rest in the freezer.

Even cutting up carrots and celery can get you a step ahead when you make your broth. If you have the little odds and ends in a zip bag in the freezer, you are all ready to go on Sunday evening when you get out that stock pot. By the way, mushroom stems, parsley stems, and parmesan cheese rinds are great additions to the stock pot. Just pop them in that handy bag as you acquire them.

Making mashed potatoes? Drain the cooking water into a bowl, and then transfer into a clean jar. Any bread recipe is enhanced by substituting potato water for some of the liquid. It keeps a week or so in the fridge.

Cooking bacon? We have bacon at least once a week. That’s a lot of bacon fat to throw away! Drain the fat into a clean jar and keep, covered, in the fridge. Use it to make your pancakes and as the shortening in savory pie crusts. If you decide one day to do a deep fry, use the bacon grease! It’s so tasty.

4. Store things so they will help you later.

Did you make too much soup? Put it in a container and freeze it.

Put whole grains, nuts, and spices in the freezer. Left out, they go rancid and stale quickly.