With the effects of the pandemic starting to make a real economic impact, I thought it a good time to write about how to make the best of life with more limited means. Thrift has gone out of fashion somewhat, but I believe it is time for a revival. Saving money by avoiding waste benefits us all. Even if you are financially secure, the planet will thank you for taking steps to reduce your demands upon it.
Though many of our outgoings, like the mortgage, are fixed, many are much more flexible. Since food is one of our greatest expenses, it seemed a good place to start.
Waste not, want not
As you have probably noticed, I love food. Making savings on our food bill should not in any way impact on our ability to eat well. Ironically, making the most of our food and thinking carefully about how we use it is likely to lead to more imaginative dishes and healthier meals.
In the UK, the average family throws away £700 of food per year. (BBC) More shocking still is the environmental impact of all this, since all that food represents growing resources, food miles and packaging.
There are numerous ways to avoid wasting food, and just a few are suggested here. The key methods are to shop carefully using a list for planned meals, avoiding specials on items you cannot consume on time and reusing left-overs in imaginative ways. Stale bread made into croutons or bread and butter pudding is delicious; extra pasta can happily be eaten cold in a salad; those slightly limp vegetables in the bottom of the fridge will make an excellent soup. For oodles of ideas, I’ll refer you to the BBC Food website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/could_you_cut_your_food_bill_by_a_third
A more unusual way to use ‘waste food’ was something I found on a YouTube cooking site. Here, left-over scraps were turned into fruit vinegars. My early apple windfalls were just chopped up and fermented into a delicious cider vinegar. I thought her strawberry tops idea especially good, so here’s the video!
The same site showed how to revive vegetables and I had great success with my lettuce. Simply by placing the bottom part of a little gem in water (leave about an inch or so) it will develop roots and can be replanted. This applies to an astonishing number of vegetables. It’s a fun exercise with kids if nothing else. Here’s mine.
Little gems – but not as we know them! Image: Karen Costello-McFeat
Grow your own
The most economical way to cut food costs is to grow your own. A packet of seeds seldom cost more that £3 and they are often given away with newspapers and magazines. My husband is hoping to economise even on this by drying the last beans we grew to replant. The cost of it is really your time, and it is time consuming; however, it is a great source of exercise and you save on gym fees!
I appreciate that not everyone has access to a vegetable plot or the ability to garden it, (my role is more supervisory than anything), but we can all enjoy what I call micro gardening. Seeds and sprouts can be grown in an old ice-cream carton; potted herbs from the supermarket can last for months if watered carefully and enough of the plant left to thrive. (A friend managed to divide her Greek basil into three lovely plants – one of which I sacrificed for pesto). Salad, one of the most wasted of foods, can easily be grown in small containers or in a grow-bag on the porch. Just pick the leaves you need and let it regrow. This can also be done through much of winter by choosing hardier varieties or leaving them under glass or even a giant plastic storage box!
Food for free
When I was rather more fit, I took some courses on wild foods. They were probably the most fun classes I have ever taken and I urge you, if you are interested, to do the same. The amount of foods available to us on our doorsteps is rather mind-boggling, but a word of caution here. Foraging for lesser known foods should only be attempted with an excellent food guide and ideally an experienced forager. Some rather innocuous looking plants can be deadly.
That said, even the most urban of us can recognise a blackberry and no autumn is complete without a bramble expedition. Where I live, damsons, sloes, elder flowers and berries, hawthorn berries, and rose hips are abundant. I’ve picked and frozen my sloes ready to make sloe gin and plan on harvesting a crop of rose hips for cordial. I’ve dried elder flowers for tea, but sadly missed the berries – though my friends all impressed me with their cordials and jams.
Books such as Food For Free is a classic and readily available. When on a country walk, pack a small plastic bag in your pocket. You may well return home with a feast!
Preserving
Our grannies certainly knew how to use food wisely. They would buy in season when prices were low or pick from the garden and preserve. In an age of microwave dinners, I fear that some of these skills will be lost and hope to encourage everyone to restore them.
Preserving can take a number of forms, with some considerably easier than others. Freezing is by far the simplest, so if you find you have too much of something fresh, put the extra in the freezer for another time.
Though some vegetables require blanching (briefly boiling then plunging in cold water), many do not. I didn’t do this with my beans and they were perfect. I even found a way to freeze summer squash!
I routinely dry herbs and that requires binding the stems and hanging them upside down in a paper bag. When they are completely dry, remove from stems and store in a jar. Some herbs, such as parsley can be successfully dried in the oven on a cooling rack. Either way, you will have much fresher and more delicious herbs than you would ever get in the supermarket. Drying fruits as fruit leathers is both tasty and an effective way to store perishable fruits.
Pickling is a little more complicated (but not much). I was able to pickle my rainbow beetroots and plan to be much more adventurous next year! Making my own vinegars for salad dressings gave me hours of entertainment and something unique to eat.
I confess that canning is beyond me, but I decided to make jams again. Sugar is so ridiculously inexpensive that a lovely jar of homemade jam is unlikely to cost more than 50p. Using my windfall apples and frozen fruits, I made endless batches of jam to last us the year.
Food gifts
All these make lovely gifts. If money is short, this is the perfect way to show your love by what you have made rather than what you have spent. Taking a little time to add personalised labels adds another unique and thoughtful touch.
Care with imaginative packaging can make the humblest of gifts something special. Since so few of us actually need anything, I urge you to give a scrumptious consumable instead.
With the abundance of food so readily available to us in the West, it is easy to forget how precious access to food really is. (When you’ve tried foraging for it and grinding acorns, you soon have greater appreciation for the supermarket.) By enjoying our food, sharing it and avoiding waste, we are honouring those who have given their time and energy to produce it. So let us give thanks for all the food we enjoy and bon appetit!