Savings in the Kitchen

Here are two things that came to mind the past few days that I thought were worth sharing.

Heavy Cream:

We don’t use as much heavy cream as you would think after reading this paragraph. Vince doesn’t drink coffee every day but when he does, he puts just a bit of heavy cream in it. When I make ice cream in the Ninja Creami, I use a bit of cream. I almost always use less heavy cream than the recipe calls for because often, it feels like there’s a buttery film in my mouth after eating ice cream with too much cream and, I don’t make ice cream even once a month. I do use cream in some recipes. I use it in my tomato soup. I made a recipe with mushrooms last night and it called for 1/4 cup of heavy cream and I used it.

At Walmart, a quart (32 oz.) of their brand heavy cream, is $5.67. Aldi has their brand for $5.95. These were the prices as of Saturday. Sam’s Club has a half gallon (64 oz) for $8.88. Heavy cream freezes and defrosts well and I don’t think you could tell the difference in the cream that has been frozen and defrosted vs. fresh, never been frozen cream.

I pour the half gallon into pint jars and I don’t fill them completely full. I put the jars in the freezer without a lid until it has frozen solid, then I put lids on the jars. When it’s getting to be a day or two before we’ll need one of these, I transfer the jar to the fridge and let it defrost in there.

That’s a pretty good savings. Two quarts/one half gallon at Walmart would be $11.34 at Walmart, and $11.90 at Aldi, compared to $8.88 at Sam’s.

Beans:

I love dry beans (cooked) and I don’t mind adding beans to omelettes for breakfast. We really do have them often but I sometimes feel like Vince is thinking . . beans AGAIN? so I’ve been having them only two or three days a week. Yesterday Vince asked me what we were having for lunch and I told him. It was a chicken recipe served over rice and we were having salad. He asked for beans. I grabbed a jar of black beans I had canned and heated those. During lunch, Vince said “I think we should have beans at least once a day. That was music to my ears.

That conversation got me to thinking . . instead of cooking two different types of beans each week and having those several times, I could can beans – a variety of beans, and that would be way more convenient.

I don’t think this is an approved method of canning dry beans but I rinse them and pick out any bad beans, add 1/2 cup of beans to a pint jar, 1/2 tsp. salt and fill with boiling water, leaving one inch head space. My plan is to can several different kinds of beans, put a variety of beans in each box of 12 jars and that will make it so easy. In each case, I plan to put 2 jars of cranberry beans, 2 jars of great northern beans, 2 jars of cannellini beans, 2 jars of Anasazi beans, 2 jars of pinto beans and 2 jars of small red beans. Because we use so many garbanzo beans, I’ll probably keep a case of garbanzo beans and a case of black garbanzo beans canned. We eat garbanzo beans in salads and hummus, as well as in other recipes. This site has some good garbanzo bean recipes.

Yesterday I canned 10 pints of Anasazi beans, 2 pints of black beans and 6 pints of cannellini beans. Today I plan to can 14 pints of garbanzo beans and 4 pints of black beans. The big canner holds 18 pints so it won’t take me but a few days to have a nice stash of canned beans. It takes just a few minutes to fill the jars and get them loaded into the canner – probably less than half an hour. By the time the canner gets up to pressure and cooks 60 minutes, then cools down, that’s probably close to 2 hours but it doesn’t require much attention. To get 18 pints with less than 3 hours work . . that sounds good to me.