Queercents

The Fourth of July is right around the corner. That means it’s time to light up the grill. And does it honestly get any more lesbi-licious than a dyke standing over a grill? I don’t think so! We’ve actually been firing up the grill since the beginning of May. Pretty much all of our dinners are cooked outside these days because it’s just too damn hot to turn on an oven or stand over a pot at the stove.

Here are some of my favorite vegetarian recipes for the grill. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Grilled Corn on the Cob
Ears of corn
Butter
Parmesan cheese Read the rest of this entry »

I love strawberries. Seriously. When I go to the farmers’ market and see the strawberry lady who drives all the way from Oxnard, CA every week, I want to marry her and have her strawberry babies. OK, not really. Oh wait, yes I do!

Strawberries are particularly cheap this time of year. You could get a whole flat of these red beauties at the grocery store for pennies. But how will you use up all that fruit before it starts to rot? I mean, a girl can only eat so many pieces of strawberry shortcake, right?

One way to use up the fruit is to slice it all up, put it in a mixing bowl, sprinkle it with a little sugar, then bag it up in quart-sized storage bags. Label it with the date, then stack these in the freezer. You could also do this with peaches, blueberries, or raspberries. Just be sure to rotate these out of the freezer before they get freezer burn, and you’ll have fruit for smoothies, fruit salads, and sangria.

Homemade jam is another way to utilize seasonal fruit. Read the rest of this entry »

Summer is here! We’ve been really lucky that so far the summer seems to be pretty mild here in Arizona. We can actually enjoy our dinner out in the arbor, and it’s not already 100 degrees at 10:00 AM. Our garden is really going bananas, and we’re already up to our ears in tomatoes and zucchini. Our watermelon vines are about to take over the yard. And pretty soon we’re going to have our own homegrown corn. Summer doesn’t get much better than this.

One of the greatest things about summer is fruit. If you don’t have your own fruit trees, you’re bound to get amazing deals on peaches, strawberries, blueberries, and everything else under the sun just by taking a stroll through your local farmers’ market. Here is one of my favorite summertime recipes that utilizes seasonal fruit.

Blueberry Peach Cobbler - Get ready for a party in your mouth!
Filling
2 1/2 pounds ripe but firm peaches (6-7 medium)
1 cup fresh blueberries
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp cornstarch
1 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
1/4 tsp cinnamon
Pinch salt Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s edition of Stretch Your Food Dollar is about to depart from the usual format. I’m not offering shopping tips or recipes this week. Instead, I want to ask our readers a question that was spurred by an IM conversation I was having yesterday with a friend. My friend is a grad student who is slaving away for less than pennies to finish up her dissertation. When I asked her how she was doing, she said “OK, just struggling to put food on the table.” She admitted that she went to the food bank earlier in the week to get groceries, but then said she felt there were people who were more deserving of the assistance. I told her she was a starving student who is woefully overworked and woefully underpaid. If she’s not one of the “deserving poor,” then who is?

Our culture is permeated with a Puritan work ethic that deems the poor to be “lazy” and “undeserving.” But here’s the rub - people are loosing their jobs by the thousands and home foreclosure rates continue to rise. Our homeless shelters are over capacity, and it’s not because people are on the street due to laziness. They’re full because people have lost their homes, despite their best efforts to keep a roof over their head. Anyone who has been following Alex’s Financial Implosion series probably has a good idea that a lot of people are on the brink of homelessness due to forces entirely out of their hands.

So here’s my question for Queercents’ readers. If you’re having a hard time stretching your food dollar, are you willing to go to the local food bank for assistance? Or do you feel like other people are more “deserving” of aid? How “poor” do you have to be in order to be “worthy” of a helping hand?

Eating on a tight budget is nothing new for Queercents readers. We’re all trying to stretch that food dollar. Author Jerry Kolber is really taking that challenge to the extreme. In his new book $3 Dinner, Kolber shares recipes and shopping tips to help you make 30 dinners for under $3 a piece. The majority of the recipes feature organic ingredients, because Kolber says, “I was getting tired of seeing everyone talking about organic this, and healthy that, and all from this mildly elitist perspective that organic somehow equals luxury. Organic food is what we used to just call food, and it should be readily available to everyone without having to spend $20 on a book and tons of money on ingredients.”

I caught up with Jerry last week to ask him about the book. Here’s what he had to say:

1. You say that “organic food” used to just be called “food,” and that you shouldn’t have to spend a ton of money to eat healthy. I couldn’t agree more. But what tips do you have for people who don’t have a farmers’ market they can go to for cheap produce?
Cheap organic produce is definitely the hardest thing to come by in some parts of the country, especially where there are not plentiful farmers’ markets or organic selections at grocery stores. Besides farmers’ markets, I suggest looking into Community Supported Agriculture, in which a number of city dwellers pool their resources to receive weekly delivery of fresh, local, organic produce from a small local farm. It not only gets you cheap produce, it supports the farmer. This week - a LIGHT early season week - I received 4 heads of lettuce, 3 pounds of greens, fresh herbs, bok choy, and assorted other produce, at about 50% of the price of a farmers’ market. If you don’t have a CSA, you can start one. Another option is a food co-op. You can check out both of these at www.localharvest.org. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to admit a secret, ya’ll. During my first semester of college, I survived on $10 a week for groceries. I’m not proud of this. I subsisted on ramen noodles and butter sandwiches. But boy, could I stretch a food dollar! An entire semester of eating ramen noodles will teach you to get creative. If you’re living in a dorm or in a dumpy college apartment and you don’t know how to get through the summer without your financial aid disbursement, here’s how to get the most bang for your ramen noodle buck.

Here’s a cheap recipe - try making a stir fry with ramen noodles and some frozen vegetables. The seasoning pack and a little bit of soy sauce is really all you need to season up the dish, and half a pack of frozen veggies and a pack of ramen noodles will feed a hungry college student for under $2 a meal. If you can throw in a fresh vegetable, you’re really in business.

Add ramen noodles to a green salad. I like to combine spinach, canned mandarin oranges, and almond slices. They give the salad a nice, crunchy texture, and they’re a heck of a lot cheaper than those other crunchy Asian noodles you can get in a can at the grocery store. Read the rest of this entry »

An article in yesterday’s New York Times made me smile. Food companies are shifting the focus of their advertisements and trying to convince consumers that convenience foods can help families stretch their food dollars. According to the article:

Kraft and Nestlé, which make those products, are among the growing ranks of marketers playing up the perceived value of packaged foods. They are seeking to capitalize on the opportunity presented by consumers’ dining out less.

But shoppers eager to save money are trading down from full-price, brand-name fare to cheaper private labels and store brands. That means advertisers concerned about losing market share must make persuasive arguments about the value propositions of their wares.

If you’re a Queercents regular, you’re probably already doing this yourself. Your pantry is most likely stocked with store-brand canned goods and bulk varieties of dried goods like beans and pasta. Hopefully you’ve started putting a little extra aside for a rainy day. You probably even rotate canned fruits and veggies into your weekly menu to keep your stock up to date. If not, here are a few recipe suggestions to help you get in the habit. Read the rest of this entry »

In last week’s edition of Stretch Your Food Dollar, I introduced the topic of food storage. Stocking up on canned goods and dried food is a really important piece of the food budgeting puzzle. If you add a little bit at a time, you can slowly build up your reserves for a rainy day. It’s really as simple as buying 2-3 extra cans of green beans when they go on sale, or picking up an extra package of pasta on your weekly shopping trip.

But how do you figure out how much food you need to store? A general rule of thumb is that you should store 25 pounds of wheat, rice, and other grains, and 5 pounds of dried beans an other legumes per person, per month. Let’s use my household as an example. There are two of us, and we need to have 3 months of food storage on hand to get us through the summer. That means we need 150 pounds of grains, and 30 pounds of beans/legumes. Holy crap, that sounds like a lot!

This traditional formula for food storage is missing several items. Notice that fruits and vegetables are not on the list. Neither is sugar, cooking oil, vitamins, salt, or yeast. So my recommendation is that you use this as a general guideline and that you adjust the total amounts to reflect the needs and food preferences of your household. Keep in mind that you want 1 carb, 1 vegetable, and 1 protein at every meal. This, I think, is a more realistic (and simple) way of calculating what you need to have on hand in case of an emergency. Read the rest of this entry »

Times are really getting tough for folks, and more and more families are having to curtail their spending habits. In lean times, food storage is a total blessing. I grew up in a Mormon household, where having a year supply of food was considered just as important as believing in Jesus or paying tithing to the church. Our family was on welfare for a substantial portion of my childhood, and the canned goods from our food storage and our trips to the food bank enabled our family to never go hungry.

There must be something about growing up with enough canned goods to last a year that leaves a permanent mark on your psyche. I haven’t considered myself a Mormon for over a decade, but I still keep my pantry stocked. I feel better knowing that if a zombie uprising occurs, we’ll still be able to feed ourselves. Summer is an especially lean time for us because my partner doesn’t receive financial aid during the summertime. We’re going to be eating a lot of canned peaches and fresh veggies out of the garden. But at least we planned ahead.

You don’t have to have a lot of money to start a food storage. In fact, the whole point is that food storage is supposed to help you reduce your food budget. If you live in an apartment, you might not have a lot of storage space. However, you can always find a corner in your closet or a nice space under the bed. Those flats of green beans from Costco slide right under the average bed frame. Here are a few tips and tricks to building up your own food storage. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been writing the Stretch Your Food Dollar series for almost a year. During that time, we’ve talked about a lot of things:

• How to Set a Food Budget For Your Household
• Shopping with a List
• The Benefits of Frozen Produce
• Canning and Preserving
• Making Your Own Bread
• Proper Food Storage

One thing we haven’t talked about, though, is coupons. I often wonder if clipping coupons makes sense. For example, my partner and I subscribe to the Costco newsletter. Every month we get a flyer with coupons. I dutifully make my shopping list and then look through the flyer to see if there is a coupon for something I need to buy. With only a few exceptions, when I actually get to Costco and do a price comparison of the brand that has a coupon versus another brand, it’s usually cheaper to just go with the brand without the coupon, even with the savings. Read the rest of this entry »