Eat Well Cheap

Food prices are in the news these days—and on everybody's mind. But rising food costs don't have to stop you from eating fresh, natural, lovingly raised food. In fact, by making a few changes in the way you shop and cook, you can soften the blow of rising food prices and make your meals even more delicious at the same time. What's the secret? Making the best use of both the food's time and your time.

Keep an eye on the calendar
Start with the food's time: The best way to save money on wonderful local produce is to follow the seasons. But there's a trick to this. Don't splurge on those first gorgeous ripe tomatoes. Everyone wants them, and the price is high. "Wait until the season's in full swing or even almost over, [then] buy in the glut," says Rose Prince, a British food writer who specializes in cooking high-quality food without busting the budget. With fall approaching, now's the time to look for bins of over-ripe peaches and big bags of dirt-cheap tomatoes that farmers are struggling to sell before the first freeze. In another few months, apple prices will drop as farmers try to sell as much as they can to save storing them over the winter. Buy as much as you can when it's cheap, cook or freeze it, and you'll have the makings of dozens of quick meals all winter long.

Yes, that means some extra cooking. But you don't have to slave for hours to get a meal on the table. You just need to think ahead a little, doing bits of cooking when you do have the time. "People think cooking from scratch takes time," says Prince. "But I would argue that it buys you time." Turn those over-ripe tomatoes into sauce, as Prince does (A Cooked Tomato Store), and you can produce anything from soup (Tomato and Spelt Soup) to pasta to barbecue sauce for grilled meat in a matter of minutes. Or cut them in half, add some chopped garlic, olive oil and pepper, and roast them in a 250 degree oven until they're wrinkled and a bit charred, then freeze them in bags. They're delicious all by themselves on pasta or bruschetta and give a stew much more flavor than commercial canned tomatoes ever could. Apples are equally versatile: Peel and core them, cook them with a bit of water, lemon juice and sugar to taste, and you'll have not just applesauce, but a sauce for pork or the filling for a pie.

Plan Ahead
To minimize the extra work, do some extra planning. Figure out when you can most easily fit in little jobs—cutting up the meat left on a roast or running stale bread through the food processor for breadcrumbs. Even making broth from scratch can be done in bits and pieces; you can start it on a Saturday morning, cover it and turn it off when you go out that afternoon, and finish up the cooking Sunday afternoon while you're watching the game, checking during commercials to make sure it's not cooking too fast. Or combine cooking jobs. If you have to keep an eye on the tomato sauce simmering in one pot, you might as well have applesauce simmering in another.

And here's one of the key tricks: Always think about more than one meal at a time. You don't have to plan a week's worth of food—in fact, too much planning can crimp your imagination. But always be aware of the other ways you could use the food you're cooking. Cook some potatoes to go with a roast, for instance, then make a salad of the rest of them (Bacon and Potato Salad with Green Celery Leaf and Cider Vinegar) a few days later.

Reconsider your portions
To save even more money, try changing the way you think about what makes a meal. Take dinner: It's meat, vegetable and starch, right? But meat doesn't have to be the center, and in most of the world's great food cultures, it isn't. Using meat—most of the time—as a seasoning, rather than a main dish, will save you big bucks on your food budget.

How to do that without a steady diet of pizza and pasta? Explore the amazing variety of grains and beans available at your local health-food store or from online suppliers like Kalustyans.com. Pizza isn't Italy's only great food gift to the world; risotto is quick, flexible and not nearly as difficult to cook as most recipes make it sound. If you add beans or cheese to a soup or salad (Beet, Red Cabbage and Goat's Cheese Salad) and serve it with a loaf of good bread, you've got a meal in minutes.

If cutting back that drastically on meat is too dramatic a shift for you to make all at once, what about exploring the wonderful dishes you can make with the cheaper cuts of meat? A slow-cooked stew can be left alone for hours, and for a quick meal, there's a lot you can do with ground meat besides make hamburgers (Skewered spiced lamb).

Leftovers
Another way to shift your thinking about food—and save a lot of money—is to stop throwing it away. According to the EPA, Americans put a staggering 14 million tons of food into the garbage every year. That's about 100 pounds a person. Halting that waste, Prince says, is probably the most valuable and fundamental shift you can make in your thinking about food. "Pause before you go to the rubbish bin with a turkey carcass or shrimp shells or your peelings or a dry crust and ask yourself if it has another life, and what that other life could be."

Sometimes that's easy and often even intentional, like when you buy a bigger roast than you can eat in one meal because you plan to make sandwiches later. But the real fun is in dreaming up new uses for unintended leftovers. Bread can be turned into breadcrumbs, and bones, shrimp shells or that head of celery you've only used two sticks from can be turned into stock (Celery Stock). Even tiny bits of leftover meat—from a roast or even from hamburgers or skewered lamb—can find a second home in stuffing for vegetables or in risotto.

Once asking your leftovers what else they could be becomes a habit, you'll look at your refrigerator in a whole new way. Instead of going into the trash, dry crusts of bread will go into a bag in the freezer, ready to be made into crumbs or croutons to liven up pastas (Breadcrumbs and Garlic with Pasta) and salads. Odd bits of leftover beef can be cooked with mushrooms and served over rice or other grains for a quick main dish (Braised beef and Fungi). Try pulling every last bit of meat off a chicken carcass and you may be surprised to find you've got enough for a chicken salad (Cold Chicken, Mustard, Dill and Cucumber).

When you start shopping and cooking this way, you may discover that that the benefits go way beyond savings on your food budget. When you ask the farmers at your local farmer's market about the food they sell—how long the season lasts, and how to cook it—you'll not only learn a lot, but you'll make friends. A trip to a farm where you can pick your own fruit can be a fun excursion for the whole family, and making a few months' worth of jam together afterwards is a great way to get the kids interested in cooking. If you join a food coop, you'll save money, but you'll also meet people who share your food values—and maybe some of your other values as well. And when you invent ingenious new ways of using food you might otherwise have thrown away, you won't just stretch your budget. You'll stretch your imagination.

The recipes in this article are adapted from Rose Prince's The New English Table (2008, Fourth Estate) and The New English Kitchen (2006, HarperCollins).

A Cooked Tomato Store
4 1/2 lb. over-ripe tomatoes
3 peeled garlic cloves
8 tablespoons olive oil
Basil leaves
3 tablespoons tomato paste
Salt and pepper
Sugar if needed
Halve the tomatoes and put them in a pan with the garlic, six tablespoons of the oil, and a few basil leaves. Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer and cook for 30 minutes. Add the tomato paste and the remaining two tablespoons of oil, bring back to a boil, and simmer for another 30 minutes. Taste and season with salt and pepper, adding a little sugar if the sauce is not sweet—this is often the case with tomatoes that have ripened in a box and not in the sun. Put the sauce through a food mill or whiz in a food processor until smooth. Store in bags, jars or containers in the fridge or freezer until needed.

Bacon and Potato Salad with Green Celery Leaf and Cider Vinegar
20 new potatoes
8 slices of bacon
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
6 fl. oz. olive or sunflower oil
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
2 tablespoons water
A handful of celery leaves, finely chopped
2 shallots, chopped
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Cook the potatoes in boiling water until just tender but not too soft. Drain, cut each one in half and set aside. Meanwhile, cut the bacon slices in half and cook over a medium heat for about ten minutes, turning once or twice, until crisp. Put the sugar, mustard, oil, vinegar and water in a bowl and mix until well combined. Stir in the celery leaves and shallots. Taste and add salt if necessary, then season with black pepper. Put the potatoes in a big bowl, throw the bacon slices over the top, and pour over the dressing. Mix well. It doesn't mater if the bacon slices break up—that way it just tastes better. Serves four.

Tomato and Spelt Soup
Heat equal quantities of tomato base and stock or water (about a half cup of each per serving). Add two ounces spelt per person, simmer for 20 to 25 minutes, then season to taste and ladle into bowls. Serve with grated pecorino or Parmesan and a splash of olive oil.

Skewered Spiced Lamb
2 1/2 lb. ground lamb, not too lean
2 green chilies, deseeded and chopped
A large handful of coriander, chopped
A large handful of mint, chopped
2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger
1 tablespoon raisins, chopped very fine
1 garlic clove, chopped

Combine all the ingredients, making sure that the herbs and spices are evenly spread through the meat. Wrap the mixture around skewers, then barbecue or grill on a high heat. Serve with pita or other flatbreads and plain yogurt with more chopped mint and coriander.

Beet, Red Cabbage and Goat's Cheese Salad
8 medium beets, whole, with a bit of stem
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 small red cabbage, cut into thick slices, then shredded into 1/4 inch pieces
7 oz. goat's cheese with an ash rind, sliced and broken into bite-sized pieces
A little extra virgin olive oil
Crushed dried chilies
Sea salt

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Put the beets, untrimmed, in a roasting tin and add the vinegar and oil. Roll the beets around the tin to coat them with both, then cover with foil and bake for 45 minutes. Remove the foil and continue to bake for another 15 minutes, until burnished and tender. Allow to cool. Divide the shredded cabbage between four plates. Slice the beets—there is no need to peel them—and pile them on top of the cabbage, then scatter over the goat's cheese. Pour a little oil onto each salad, scatter a pinch of the crushed chili on top, and finish with a little salt. Serves four.

Celery Stock
Chop the celery, and put it, especially the leaves, in a big pan with a tablespoon of butter. Cook over a medium heat for about five minutes, then add about a quart of water and bring to a boil. Simmer—not too fast or the water will evaporate—for about 30 minutes. Part-liquidize it, then strain, pushing every bit of juice through the sieve. The stock will not have all the flavor of a slow-made meat stock, but it will be useful for other soups, and better than using water. You will also have used up that bendy celery.

Breadcrumbs and Garlic with Pasta
(If possible, use orecchiette pasta for this dish because the little, saucer-like shapes catch the breadcrumbs so neatly.)
1 lb. broccoli, broken into florets
1 lb. short pasta
2 garlic cloves, crushed
5 tablespoons fresh or dried breadcrumbs
5 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese, to serve

Bring a large pan of water to the boil and add salt. Put in the pasta. Five minutes before it is done, add the broccoli. Fry the garlic and breadcrumbs in the oil until golden. Drain the pasta and broccoli and return them to the pan. Stir in the breadcrumbs and garlic, season with salt and pepper, and serve with grated Parmesan.

Braised Beef and Fungi
For four people, fry about one pound finely chopped cooked beef with one finely chopped onion and two chopped garlic cloves. Add two pinches of dried thyme, a wineglass of white wine, and a handful of dried porcini that have been steeped in boiling hot water until soft (add the soaking water too). Simmer for an hour or so and serve over cooked grains. (Use fresh mushrooms instead of dried, if you wish, and add a mugful of stock.)

Cold Chicken, Mustard, Dill and Cucumber
Approximately 14 oz. cold cooked chicken
1 cucumber, peeled, deseeded and sliced

For the dressing:
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon brown sugar
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
5 fl. oz. olive oil
Leaves and any soft stalks from 6 sprigs of dill, chopped
Sea salt and freshly ground pepper