Yesterday, I prepared the first batch (oh, a half dozen or so) tomatoes for making sauce. They’re in the freezer, waiting for the day all the tomatoes have been harvested and cool enough to have the stove going for hours to cook the sauce.
Now, I’m looking for recipes for pizza sauce that will freeze well.
We did a very small vegetable garden this year, putting the plants in the front bed along with the flowers. We just picked our first batch of produce. 
What you see here are green bell peppers, some sweet Hungarian peppers, a couple jalapenos (hiding in there somewhere), along with a bunch of basil.
We planted nine tomato plants – six good for sauces and three for slicing tomatoes. The tomatoes in the bowl are sauce tomatoes. I’m going to blanch them quickly so I can remove the skins, then get rid of the seeds and much of the liquid, then throw them into the freezer. Once they’re all ripe (and the weather is cooler) I’m going to make a huge batch of tomato sauce and can it. Most of it will be for pasta, though part of it will be seasoned for pizza sauce and stored separately. I’m not sure if I’ll can the pizza sauce or put it in the freezer in the Bell freezer containers.
So many recipes made around the Christmas holidays call for crystallized ginger, and it’s so gosh darn expensive to buy. I decided to make some from scratch – I was able to make 2.5 cups of crystallized ginger for half the cost of a 2 oz bottle bought at the store!
I started with Bruce Moffitt’s recipe, but made some minor changes. They’re listed below:
I love all things lemon. Lemon cake, lemon candy, lemon tea, the works. Lemon curd is a special favorite of mine, but it’s made with so much sugar, and I thought I’d have to give it up forever. Not so!
I found a low carb, sugar free lemon curd recipe, played around with it, and this is what I ended up with. It’s full of lemony deliciousness, though not as sweet as most people might be used to. If you prefer it sweeter, just add more sweetener.
And lemon curd’s not just for desserts anymore! Check out my Lemon Chicken recipe that uses it!
Now, I won’t pretend to say I’m doing the once a month cooking thing. Not ready to do that yet. Still, that doesn’t mean I didn’t think to take advantage of the great meat deals I got this week. I was able to get 3.5 pounds of Certified Angus ground round, 1.5 lbs of Certified Angus ground chuck, and a center cut whole half loin today. We’ll be getting 8 meals out of that, making an average cost of $1.87 per meal.
It’s all been prepped. The ground beef separated into 1 lb packages and put into the freezer (one’s in the fridge to make beef “sausage” tonight for supper). The pork loin was divided into 3 (each section about 2 lbs); two were sliced up into strips for use with Spicy Pork Stir Fry, and one was cubed up for use in Onion-Apple Pork Stew (or something similar).
Tomorrow I’m going to be baking and getting the veggies all prepared. The Spicy Pork Stir Fry takes a lot of peppers and onions, mainly because I love it with lots of peppers and onions.
I also packed of 12 cups of home made chicken broth into 2 cup portions. Tonight I’m going to be roasting two chickens (got them for $0.87/lb), then shredding the meat and setting the carcasses aside to make soup – which I’m going to freeze. We use a lot of chicken broth over the winter, in chowders, to cook rice in, and other yummy stuff. Those two carcasses should get me about 16 to 20 cups of broth. That should last me until whole chickens are on sale again.
What do you do to help save money and make meal prep easier for you and your family?
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