Sweet Potatoe Fries Perfected!

I mentioned we ate a LOT of sweet potatoes in the fall and I thought I would share some of the recipes we discovered to use them up. Our absolute favorite was sweet potato fries, my kids still love them, even after eating so many.
The hardest part for me was figuring out the best way to cut them, it is a tedious chore to make a big pile for your hungry family with just a knife--doable, but better for a smaller scale side dish than trying to push other more expensive ingredients off your plate.
I started off trying to cut them with a Mandolin slicer--epic fail. I gave it a herculean effort but I just didn't have the muscles to push them through hard enough. My first three potatoes turned out the best and after that my muscles turned to jelly. And I'm not exactly a wimp--not a weight lifter, but I'll take on any other Mom in my play group in a round of arm wrestling :)
Next I tried a commercial french fry cutter. Surprisingly this wasn't much easier, although far more of the potato turned into fry (with the mandolin I was left with a lot of chunks that were too small to try without losing a finger).
So off to Google I went, surely SOMEONE must have figured out how to make the perfect sweet potato fries at home! Not that I could find--lots of how to bake them, how to season them, almost nil on how to cut them. I did see one obscure reference to prebaking them on a message board but with no additional details given as to temperature or time so I set up the Test Kitchen. My regular baked sweet potato recipe calls for baking them at 400 for 40-50 minutes. So I prebaked my first batch at 400 for 15 minutes. These cut like butter--but also made a nice bowl of baby food in the process with all the mushy bits on the edges. Next I tried 400 for 10 minutes and 350 for 10 minutes. 350 for 10 minutes was a winner for me--it still required a bit of muscles to push them through the cutter but without even a tiny bit of mushing--all of the sweet potato turned into gorgeous restaurant-esque fries. Success! (and if you have a friend over to help you lean on the handle you won't even break a sweat, this is a great buddy cooking project)
No french fry cutter? They cost about $40 at your local restaurant supply store--not super expensive, but an extra piece of kitchen equipment to store.  Don't bother with the flimsy metal one at the local kitchen supply outlet, it won't give you the results you want, my Mom had one growing up and it struggled to cut regular potatoes, let alone a denser/harder sweet potato.  Part two of this post will address cutting them in a cuisinart (I have their thickest slicing blade on the way to try out, it's only $20, far smaller to store, a super versatile). I also plan to test out another reference I came across to putting them in the dehydrator for a short time after cutting/before baking. They said this would make for crispier sweet potato fries by removing some of the moisture prior to baking. Sounds logical so I'll test that out as well. I just recently purchased 2 bushels of sweet potatoes fresh from the field of a local farmer for 50 cents a pound so I have plenty of potatoes to experiment with :) I'm also going to look into some other dehydrator/sweet potato combos--I remember my Mom making Pumpkin Apple fruit leather as a kid and I'd like to try something similar with sweet potato puree.

For today, the take away is **PREBAKE SWEET POTATOES @350 FOR 10 MINUTES BEFORE SLICING INTO FRIES**

Place Holder for Recipes that I've been meaning to share

Stay tuned for some really tasty cheap recipes I have found over the past few months, I've got some winners you'll want to add to your frugal repertoire!

Success or Failure?

Wow, lets just say I'm not cut out to be a blogger! lol I gave it a real good shot for all of two weeks and just couldn't afford the minimal time commitment it required. I so enjoy reading others blogs and I will never know how you do it. I can compose eloquent blog posts in my head while I'm washing dishes in the morning but by the time the kids are tucked in and I have a moment of quiet every coherent thought has long since fled. :) So this will be my summary post on the Ketchup Soup experiment. I will still occasionally post something here if I come across an amazingly cheap recipe or something uber frugal worth sharing, I have a couple recipes that I really wanted to share that haven't made it up, but for now here's the results of the $60/month spending:


September--We came in pretty close to the $60 amount, I was sure we'd do better the following month. Gave up our Costco membership in anticipation of spending very little on groceries for the next six months. In hindsight, this was a really smart move--from now on we will have a year of membership and then let it lapse for as long as possible before renewing. My mother in law just gave us a gift membership for my birthday and I am surprised at some of the bulk things we are just now using up, even with the challenge.

October--Spent the entire $60 on perishables (milk, eggs, veggies, bread), and rather quickly. Realized that even with a huge pantry reserve I would be hard pressed to buy healthy food for my family on $60 a month. Sure, I could feed them Ramen until they puke but no ones health or well being shall be compromised for the sake of this experiment! Cleaned up a LOT of food in the freezer, veggies, fruit, meat, first time in months you could open the freezer without something falling out and crushing your toes. Finding the weekly meal plan rotation to be very helpful, getting *into* a 'rut' is actually helping me be more creative by focusing my thoughts on variety within the sub-category (spaghetti last week/shells this week, stir-fry rice last week/casserole rice this week etc.)

November--Did surprisingly better this month, starting to really get creative in the pantry. Pumpkin brownies anyone? Yes they are tasty, and healthy! Well, you know, sorta healthy in a chocolatey kind of way ;) Hardest part of this challenge has been not spending money on chocolate. Not that I'm a total chocoholic, but when I crave it I really really crave it and there is nary a crumb to be had. (Yes, I already gobbled the Halloween chocolate, the kids know the chocolate is for mama!) Eating a LOT of eggs. Aldis has them for 49 cents a dozen, limit four. We are averaging two dozen a week. The kids are eating hard boiled eggs for lunch (made with Bento egg molds, Google them, SUPER cute!), my husband is taking egg salad sandwiches to work, I am eating egg white 'omelets' with leftover veggies, garden broccoli or salsa.  And we still have one of our standby egg recipes every Wednesday (Egg Puff, Eggs ala Goldenrod, or Fried Egg Sandwhiches).
The garden...well, it tried valiantly but I believe our timing was a little off when it came to planting. The broccoli excelled and was thoroughly enjoyed, everything else put forth effort but yielded very little. No cucumbers, no peppers, no beans, no snow peas, THREE cherry tomatoes, a couple handfuls of baby zucchinis. (Looking forward to trying again this month, soon as the snow melts!)

December--In which we eat a LOT of sweet potatoes. At 25 cents a pound the week of Thanksgiving, we bought a three months supply. I plan to sell some of the kids outgrown things sometime before next sweet potato season so I can buy one of those restaurant style french fry cutters. My kids like my baked sweet potato fries, and I would make them far more often if they took seconds to prep instead of a half hour of chopping. (It will take until then before I'm ready to look at another sweet potato though.)  Still over on our spending, but very consciously over, for things like veggies and bread, no junk food spending. It has been eye opening to question every purchase, especially as the dollars in the envelope dwindle each month. Do we really need cereal? We still have oatmeal. Can we buy another bag of flour instead of another loaf of bread?

January/February--Unexpected visit from the inlaws necessitated a mattress purchase so we pooled January and February's cash and used it to buy a mattress. (We needed to buy one for our daughter in the next year or so anyhow so we decided not to go the airbed route and rather put that money towards a real mattress) So the experiment ended two months early. It hurt to quit but I didn't want to let my pride stand in the way of common sense...and my family was ready for Oreos again :)

And that is that--technically, the experiment was a failure, I was unable to live within a $60 a month budget. But I learned a lot and we saved a lot (debt free Christmas, paid down debt) and I lost a lot--10 pounds!  So I'm chalking it up as a success! :)

Pasta with Red Sauce Sunday: Sausage Spinach Toss ($2.29)

I found this recipe on Kitchen Stewardship last year and it's one of my favorite pasta dishes. My bag of Aldis spinach is starting to get old so I decided to cook it up instead of serve it as a salad with todays meal. The spinach makes it a bit over my $2 goal, but cheaper than adding that spinach to the compost pile in a few days would be :)

2 cups pasta (.25)
1/2 lb sausage (.50)
1 can diced tomatoes (.44)
1 cup mozzerella (.25)
1/2 bag spinach (.85)

Brown sausage, stir in undrained tomatoes and spinach. Meanwhile cook pasta and add with cheese to the sausage mixture. (Full directions at the link above.)

Eggs: Breakfast Tacos ($1.50)

We've been cleaning the leftovers up nearly as fast as we make them so it's eggs again today. Since I haven't had a chance to make bagels yet we decided on breakfast tacos.

tortillas (.48)
cheese (.31)
eggs (.21)
sausage (.50)

In other frugal news, I've been digging compost into the new garden like mad, trying to get the beds prepared for planting on Monday or Tuesday. We plan to plant spinach, garlic, leeks, scallions, broccoli, and ...I'm not sure what else, I've never gardened in Texas before so this will be an adventure. We have a small cold frame so we are going to attempt to make the most of the fall/winter gardening season. I'd also like to plant some herbs if there are any that are cold hardy or can be planted in the fall to die back and regrow next year.  I'm banking on this spinach for our winter greens, its something we eat a lot of that's just not in a $60/month budget. Anything else that grows will be gravy :)

I was supposed to attend a ladies-night-out tonight with a snack to share but my oldest developed a fever at the last minute so we'll be eating our chocolatey goodness for snacks at home this week instead :)  I had originally planned to make deviled eggs with the amazing deal on eggs I got at Aldis last week but then I came across a recipe for Cake Balls that made me drool. And since it didn't use anything from the pantry except empty calories, I didn't have to worry about using ingredients I might need for real food in a few months.

Super Easy Chocolatey Cake Balls

Bake one cake mix according to package directions (I used german chocolate).
Dump hot cake into mixing bowl and stir in one container of frosting (I used coconut pecan).
Stir until it makes a homogenous dough.
Roll dough into balls and store in the fridge.

You are supposed to dunk the balls in almond bark but I didn't have any and they are delicious without it, just not quite as pretty. My local grocery occasionally puts cake mix and canned frosting on outrageous sales so I keep it on hand so I never have to pay full price, but I don't even like cake so it can sit in there forever sometimes. Maybe not anymore now that I have a way to turn it into chocolatey goodness! :) I think this cost me $1.50 to make but it's been so long since I bought the ingredients I can't remember...if anything it was less expensive, not more.

Pasta & White sauce Friday: Pork Chops ($2.07)

I've been going through the freezer taking stock of what's in there and there are quite a few meal-size bags of porkchops (from the last pork loin I bought, not the bags I added last week) so that's what I fixed for our main meal today. This is an adaptation of a recipe I found awhile back on Allrecipes  Normally I scatter some lightly sauteed mushrooms, red bell pepper slices, and onion on top of the porkchops, but having none of those in my crisper I had to make a stripped down version.

3-Pork chops ($1.50)
1-can of cream of mushroom soup (.40)
1/2 bag of small shells (.15)
1/4 cup of milk (.02)

Place thawed pork chops in the bottom of the crockpot, spoon a can of soup over top (undiluted), cover and cook on high for three hours. Remove porkchops to a serving plate. Whisk milk into the soup in the crockpot. Stir in cooked pasta and serve.

After lunch we went to the farmers market and came home with two big red peppers and a small cucumber--for $1! I love the farmers market but can't afford most of the produce (although having pulled weeds for hours as a kid I would say it's probably way under priced!) So I normally go in the afternoon when the crowds have dispersed and see if there's any deals to be had.  My daughter got the cucumber for being cute--she was in awe of the piles of produce and the vendor gave her a small cucumber to carry. I wish I could have purchased something from her for her kindness but they were selling bushels of produce, not by the piece. I'll for sure remember her stall though, that was a great way to earn my future business! :)  One of the peppers will find its way into my sons lunchbox this week, the other I hope to roast and make some homemade hummus. I've never tried making it before but my kids both love the roasted red pepper hummus we get from Walmart. It cost $3 for a small tub and I figured I ought to be able to make it for half that. I'll let you know how it turns out next week. :)

Soup and Bread Thursday: Winter Corn Chowder ($2.64)

Todays recipe was adapted from Desperation Dinners and turned out great! Similar to a chicken/corn soup I usually make but cheaper--light on meat and without the canned soups my normal recipe calls for. Next time around I'll try it with fresh potatoes but I didn't have any and did have leftover hash browns that needed to be used up.



1/4 lb thick cut bacon, chopped small (.50)
1 1/2 cups chopped onion (.25)
2 cups hashbrown cubed potatoes (.75)
2 cans corn (or 3.5 cups frozen) (1.00)
2 cans broth (or prepared stock/boullion) (.10)
1 tsp worcestershire sauce
2 dashes Tobasco
1 tsp salt
3/4 tsp onion powder
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp dry mustard powder
1/4 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp marjoram
1/2 cup milk (.04)


Brown bacon in dutch oven. Stir in onions and potatoes, set to medium high heat  and cook uncovered without stirring three minutes. Add broth and use a metal spatula/turner to scrape all the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Add everything else *except the milk* and boil on medium for 12 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in milk. Serves 6.

Eggs: Ham Puff ($1.50)

I got this recipe from my Mother-in-Law, it's not only cheap, it's fast, easy, and delicious!

1/2 cup butter (.50)
1 cup water (free)
4 eggs (.20)
1/2 cup shredded cheese (.15)
1/2 cup chopped ham(.55)
1 cup flour (.10)

Melt the butter, stir in water, beat in eggs, stir in cheese and ham, and finally stir in the flour. Pour into a greased 8x8 or 9x9 pan and bake for 35+ minutes at 350 until it starts to get a bit brown around the edges. To double the recipe, bake in a 9X13 and increase bake time to 45-50 minutes.

Frugal tip: I normally make it with a lot more ham. Today I used chopped/shaved deli ham so it still looks like there's a lot of meat without there actually *being* a lot of meat.  In an effort to make this dish even cheaper, I substituted oil for half of the butter because I have oodles of oil. It was ok but I could tell the difference--we still polished it off but I won't make that substitution again unless I have to. Maybe next time I'll try it with half butter and half margarine and see if that's any better. We love our butter!

Bread Based Tuesday: Honey Garlic Chicken Pizza ...and a small shopping trip

Lunch was Honey Garlic Chicken Pizza from A housewife's Tale.
I used one chicken breast and a half recipe of her garlic sauce. No onions in the house, green or otherwise.
I need to check prices at the store to figure out the cost of the sauce ingredients as I haven't purchased them recently, I'll do that soon, but it was pretty cheap :)

Crust/toppings:
flour (.20)
water (free)
yeast (.10)
salt (.01)
sugar (.01)
oil (.04)
chicken (.50)
cheese (.50)

Recipe for honey garlic sauce
1 cup water (free)
1/2 cup light brown sugar (.) {24 tsp/227 tsp in 2lb bag}
3 tablespoon soy sauce (.) {3 Tbsp/126 Tbsp in 2qt jug}
1 tablespoon honey (.10)
3 cloves garlic minced (free--gifted from Gardening Great Aunt)
2 tablespoon cornstarch (.) {6 tsp/56 tsp in 1lb}
(whisk everything together and boil, when it comes to a boil, turn heat to low and continue whisking till thickens)
Add 2 tablespoon of Kraft bbq sauce (.02)

*********************************************************************

Nothing worth buying from the grocery store sales this week so I spent a few dollars at Aldis on milk, eggs, and bread. They had a great sale on eggs, .49/dozen so I stocked up.  A dozen eggs weighs a pound so that's some crazy cheap protein!  I'm going to a ladies night out at my church this weekend and need to take a snack to share, looks like I'll be making deviled eggs! :)
I am not sure what we will decide to do about bread for this challenge. I made my own whole grain super healthy bread last week, and while it was tasty I don't think it saved us any money--we polished off one loaf fresh out of the oven, even the baby ate a slab. Delicious! Oops, did we really eat an entire stick of butter in a half hour?!? That alone cancels out the savings on ingredients! On top of that nobody liked it for sandwiches, and we make 3-5 sandwhiches a day in our house. (I made the remaining loaf into whole wheat croutons, they turned out pretty good!) Aldis whole wheat bread puts two slices of sandwhich bread at 12 cents, or $18.60 a month for bread if we eat five a day--nearly a THIRD of our grocery budget! Eating tortilla wraps would save  three cents a sandwhich, but they are not whole grain and I'd prefer we eat as many whole grains as possible. This week I plan to make whole wheat bagels in an effort to take another crack at this dilemna.  My kids think mini bagel sandwiches are super cool, and the individual nature of them would serve as portion control. We don't generally butter bagels when we buy them from the store, so that would save money on butter for sure. And I have several jars of Barley Malt syrup in my pantry that I believe are a key/expensive bagel ingredient--my husbands favorite barbque sauce recipe calls for it so I keep it on hand but I don't forsee us eating ribs anytime in the next six months so he won't miss it. I'll price them out when I make them, I need to purchase more whole wheat flour first though as I used up the last of mine on last weeks bread. I do still have quite a bit of white flour but again, nutrition is more important than empty calories. My husband and I both have twenty pounds we'd like to lose over the next few months,  hopefully being more mindful about our eating/spending will help with that.

Pantry Inventory

Wow, that took longer than it should have! It's hard to pull everything out of the pantry with little ones underfoot, I had to take a shelf per nap to get it finished :) Here's the pantry inventory, I'll get started on the freezer next.

A frugal experiment: Whole Wheat Bread with Wheat Germ and Rye

I've always heard that homemade bread was more economical than store bought so today I decided to bake some super healthy bread. I chose a recipe from The New Best Recipe cookbook because I have yet to cook a flop when using it and I didn't want to mess this up. I have a few other favorite bread recipes I've used, but none that are exceptionally healthy.

Whole Wheat Bread with Wheat Germ and Rye

In mixer combine:
2 1/3 cups warm water (free)
1 1/2 Tbsp instant yeast (.11)
1/4 cup honey (.38)
4 Tbsp butter, melted (.25)
2 1/2 tsp salt (free)

Stir in:
1/4 cup rye flour (.07)
1/2 cup wheat germ (.75)

Stir in, half at a time, alternating flours:
3 cups whole wheat flour (.48)
2 3/4 cups all purpose flour (.28)

Knead with dough hook 8 minutes. Cover and rise 1 hour, form loaves, rise 30 minutes, bake at 375 for 35-45 minutes...more detailed instructions in the book or by request :)

Total cost: $2.32/two loaves, or $1.16 per loaf
All ingredients were purchased in bulk except the wheat germ, rye flour, and salt, your mileage may vary.

So was it worth it??? Well, I guess it depends. It came in three cents under a loaf of whole wheat bread from Aldis. Better taste, a lot more time involved. I made one loaf into whole wheat croutons and those DEFINITELY saved me money over store bought, I can't even normally afford whole wheat croutons, let alone on $60/month. Now that I know how easy they are I'll definitely be making them on a regular basis. The other loaf of bread my family polished off hot out of the oven in one sitting with an entire stick of butter. I guess it was a cheap meal, figuring another 50 cents for the butter brings the total to $1.66.  But not a very balanced meal, no fruit or veggies, but maybe next time we'll eat it with some homemade applebutter instead, its almost apple season! :)

Leftovers

Today is leftover day so no cooking today, we're eating some leftover baked penne I made earlier this week with ingredients from the pantry/freezer. Half a box of whole wheat penne (.25), half a pound of sausage (.50), one cup of mozzerella (.25), one big jar of mushroom Ragu ($1), total cost $2 and it made enough for two meals. All items were purchased on sale/with coupons or as loss leaders...if I had to pay full price for the ingredients I imagine the meal would have come in closer to $5.
Today I plan to inventory the pantry so I can take stock of what is in there, besides vast quantities of ketchup ;)

Pasta and White sauce Friday: Shell Mac with Broccoli and Mushrooms ($4.39!)

Shell Mac with Broccoli and Mushrooms
Today's meal was adapted from "Family Feasts for $75 a week" by Mary Ostyn. She suggested adding shrimp which my family doesn't care for so I added a half package of imitation lobster instead. While this was tasty, I will only make this one more time (to use up the remaining half package of imitation lobster) as the price came in at double my daily amount. I justified this because there were leftovers but it's still a bit of a splurge meal on our current budget.

12 oz shell pasta (.60)
2 cups chopped broccoli (.65)
1/4 cup butter (.25)
1 cup sliced mushrooms (.80)
1/4 cup flour (.03)
1/2 tsp garlic powder (.05)
2 cups milk (.16)
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese (.65)
1 tsp dried parsley (.05)
1/2 pkg. imitation seafood (1.15)


Cook pasta, add broccoli to the pasta for the last 5 minutes of cooking, drain. Saute mushrooms in butter, add flour/spices, stir in milk, add cheese, pasta, broccoli and seafood, combine/heat through.

*****************************************************************************

Three days into September and a big chunk of the $60 is already spent! I thought I would ration it out evenly, week by week, but a local grocery store had a couple loss leaders I couldn't pass up this week--$1/lb peanut butter and boneless/skinless chicken breasts,  $1.35/lb lunch meat and cheese, $1.69/lb pork loin and of course a Labor day sale on Pepsi for my husband. I hear that collective gasp, SODA? In a frugal budget?!? Yup, for this month anyway, one can a day while he weens himself of the addiction :)  I made myself a pitcher of tea today, which I normally don't care for, but will learn to enjoy as a cheap source of caffeine. The rest of the money I spent at Aldis for perishables; milk, eggs, bread, spinach. I'll do better at posting receipts and such next month, for now I'll give you my running total.

Remaining Balance: $21.05

Frugal tips from this shopping trip: 
If pork loin goes on an amazing sale, check and see if your butcher offers free cutting service. I have mine cut the loin into chops, and sometimes they're also willing to grind a portion of it for me if their machines aren't set up for beef at the time (something about cross contamination). Ground pork gives great flavor and texture to meatballs and meatloaf, and if you buy it as a pork loin and have it ground it is often cheaper than ground beef.
Right now there's some printable coupons available from Hormel that made this an extra good deal for me, you can get yours here: http://hormel.com/updates/coupons/

And now, reality sets in

I need a plan, and a careful one if I am to succeed at this challenge. $60 a month is $2 a day.  Is that even possible? That's what they live on in third world countries isn't it? Well, I do have the blessing of a fully stocked pantry and freezer. Not a ginormous chest freezer unfortunately, just a normal side-by-side style Frigidaire, but it is mostly full of meat. My pantry, well that's a bit of a joke among friends--it is FULL. When I find an amazing sale (like the ketchup!) I stock up. I'm by no means a couponing guru, don't even get the Sunday paper, but I do hate to pay full price and try to buy enough to last me through to the next sale.

Anyhow...after some thought and pantry inventorying, here's my preliminary meal plan, to be fluffed out and filled in with recipes as we go.

Sunday: Pasta with a red sauce
Monday: Rice based meal
Tuesday: Bread based meal
Wednesday: Egg based meal
Thursday: Soup and bread
Friday: Pasta with a white sauce
Saturday: Leftovers or an egg based meal
...and repeat!

Ketchup Soup? Surely you jest!

Why blog about it you ask? Partially to keep myself accountable but mostly to share my frugal tips, recipes and "aha!" moments with others. I will be scouring the internet and pick the brains of wiser folks to succeed at this challenge. I have yet to find a delicious (or even real) Ketchup Soup recipe, the staple food of empty pantries--if this blog produces nothing else I promise an America's Test Kitchen style recipe for Ketchup Soup! ;) Oh, and yes, I do have an obscene amount of ketchup to use in the endeavor--anyone else hit Walmart's Memorial day $1/jug Heinz ketchup sale? Lets just say I have enough to supply a hotdog cart for days! :) (thanks to Mercedes for the heads up on the Ketchup sale!)