Tag Archives: food

Swine dining

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I don’t mean to blow my own horn here (and, really, who amongst us is flexible enough for that anyway?) but sometimes I do like to brag…. thus:

So..I’m in Albertson’s and I do my usual patrol through the meat department. Sitting on the shelf are four pork whole tenderloins, marked down from $4.99/# to $2.99/#. Now, that’s all well and good, but Zero can do better. Those four (and keep in mind that number ‘four’) tenderloins are also marked down an additional 30%, knocking it’s per pound price down to about $2.09/#. Thats not bad for animal protein. But…Zero can do better.

Me: “Hey, you’ve got these pork tenderloins marked down 30%. If you mark them down to 50% I’ll take ’em.”
Him: “They’re already on sale at $2.99 from $4.99.”
Me: “I know, but Im the kinda guy who needs to feel like he’s really getting a deal, you know? Mark ’em down to 50% and I’ll take all of them.”
Him: “All of them?”
Me: “Sure. All of them.”

Here’s where the wheels flew off my grand plan. Remember that number four from earlier? Well, there were, in fact, four pork tenderloins sitting on the top shelf marked down to 30%. What I did not notice, were the other twenty packages sitting below it, also marked down to 30% off. And…I just committed myself to taking them all.

Uhm. Well.

The happy ending is that in the final analysis I wound up paying $1.50/#. The more interesting part is I wound up with almost 60# of pork tenderloin. The really interesting part is that I had one hell of a time re-arranging the stuff in my already overloaded freezer to accommodate it. I literally cannot fit any more food in my freezer. And, yes, I’m thinking about purchasing another freezer.

Can NOT be re-assembled to make a complete pig.

My normal procedure is to line a baking tray with foil, season one of these things with some sort of spice blend (Old Bay is actually rather nice), cook it up, slice it thin, and snack on it cold. But, lately I’ve noticed that glazing it with sweet chili sauce is actually pretty darn good.

Anyway, I think this counts as a pretty sweet score. I could literally stop buying meet for the next several months and be just fine. Oh, and mind you, there are two tenderloins in each of those packages. Yum.

Adventures in food storage

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Well, let’s pull some stored-for-a-while food off the shelf and see what happens:

An eight year old pound of spaghetti purchased from Costco. Storage conditions? Put into a plastic tub with a lid and sat on a wire shelf in my basement for the last eight years. Results?

Absolutely fine. Cooked up just as you would expect.

I’m not surprised. There are foods that you need to very deliberately and carefully package away for storage and there are some that are just….bulletproof. My experience has been that pasta, kept dry and vermin-free, keeps pretty much indefinitely. In this case, I just proved it’ll last at least eight years.

Another food that requires, basically, zero babying is rice. I kid you not, I had a 15-gallon blue barrel full of rice from my Y2k stash and ten years later it was just fine with the only attention in its packaging having been to pour it into the barrel and screw on the lid. I would bet you that rice poured into a clean jar with a tight fitting lid would last virtually forever.

Does that mean these are the optimal ways to store these particular items? Heck no. But what it does mean is that you can sock away pounds and pounds of a staple food that goes a long way towards helping to stretch out your other foods and do it without a lot of effort.

My experience, and your mileage may vary, is that in my climate and in my house I can take these plastic sealed packages of pasta, stuff ’em into a plastic tub with a tight fitting lid, tuck them away on a shelf in a cool dark place, and it stores just fine.

I suppose if you live in the south or some other equally humid environment its a different story, same if youre in an environment that is known for creepy crawly things, but where I live it’s practically a high-altitude desert.

The point, if there is one, is that some foods just lend themselves to longish storage periods without a lot of fancy prep and packaging.

Seasons Meatings

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Minding my own business, wandering through the meat department…….

Well…let’s see…thats $3.33/# at 50% off. So it’s really $1.67/#. But…27% fat means, in theory, you lose 27% of that in cooking… so you’re really paying $2.28/# for the actual meat you pull out of the oven. But, for beef, $2.28 is still a good deal. In reality, this is getting mixed with a bunch of 93/7 that was similarly marked down, resulting in an 85/15 blend which is what we normally use for burgers and the like. So…meatloaf. (and , yes, I know in practicality you don’t lose the whole % of fat when you cook it. I just like the numbers game.)

When it comes to animal protein, it turns out that chicken is usually the least expensive. Pork is next least. Beef is the most expensive unless you somehow have a hankering for lamb. As a result, I tend to not eat much beef except for cheeseburgers. However, I do love me some meatloaf and if I can get the meat on sale….meatloaf.

Normally I would say that this is all going in the freezer but I’ve decided to take advantage of the sub-freezing temps outside to move all the frozen food outside in milk rates and defrost my freezer (and organize it). So, thats definitely an agenda thing today.

I didn’t go hungry in 2018 and I’m going to try and keep that streak going in 2019. Sales like this let me do that.

And, finally, a few people kicked in a few bucks with the donation button and wished me a happy holiday. I appreciate it, and I thank you very much. Every little bit goes towards keeping the lights on here at the blog, as well as sometimes allowing me the purchase for a piece of gear to beat the crap out of. Im sure someone is going to chime in and say “…and Rugers”. Nope. I actually keep a pretty tight rein on blog income/expenses versus my own expenses. Any money that comes in goes to hosting, domain registration, backup software, that sort of thing. On the extremely rare occasions that donations actually exceed those needs, I usually mark it for things that I can review and bring the results to you guys.

 

 

Butter

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Well, I suppose that unless I take a sudden interest in French cooking, 20# of butter should last a year, right? I mean, thats a quarter stick of butter every 5 days. Seems like plenty.

In my experience, freezing butter, as is, from the store with no special packaging other than what it comes with is fine. But…better safe than sorry, y’know? I’ll vacuum seal each 1# brick just to err on the side of overcautiousness.

Yeah, there’s canned butter out there. Good stuff to have, no doubt, in a prolonged emergency but for my day-to-day needs, the stuff I buy at CostCo will do fine. Of course, if I was stocking some remote cabin or somesuch it would be a different story.

Anyway, this stuff will go off to the deep freeze and we’ll see if it lasts to next December. I suspect it will.

Gobble gobble

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There is a LOT of turkey,  Butterballs marked down 50%, going into the freezer this week. I actually had to do some shuffling around to fit them all in there. Vacuum sealer is getting a workout. Yay turkey!

And thats just the first trip to the store…..

Long term turkey dinner

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Hmm.. the turkey was from November 2016, the box of stuffing was from 2013, the can of corn was from 2017, and the instant spuds were from 2008. And…it all tasted (and digested) just fine. I was tempted to break out some of the freeze dried blueberry cheesecake from 1999 but was too lazy.

The take away? You can do a fairly appropriate Thanksgiving meal out of food storage and the deep freeze.

And today? Post Thanksgiving turkey bargains, m’friend.

ETA:

I have a $25 gift card to purchase Butterball products.
My local Albertsons has Butterballs marked down to $0.99/#

Mathematically, it is within my ability to purchase a 25# turkey with absolutely no out-of-pocket cost to me. And I just checked…they have a bunch that are close to that weight.

Turkey soup, turkey chili, turkey sandwiches, turkey gumbo.
It’s about to happen.

Adventures in food storage

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Todays “Lets See What Happens” episode is a six year old can of corned beef hash. Nominal ‘best by’ date was three years ago. So….how is it?

Fine. Of course.

Properly canned food lasts pretty much indefinitely. This can features the pre-scored ‘pop top’ feature that don’t really like in canned goods. If you drop the can or pressure is applied against the pre-scored region the can will fail more often than if it were not pre-scored. But, unfortauntely, these small single-serve cans were not available without the pop-top features. But…they held up just fine.

Storage conditions? Just sitting in the back of my kitchen cabinet for six years. Nothing special.

And that’s sort of the point. While I fully appreciate the nitrogen sealed, ceramic lined #10 cans filled with freeeze dried meats that will last longer than I will…..I also appreciate that modern food canning processes, by first world companies, do an awesome job of creating a product that will last a long time. Sometimes there is a need for a $40 can of freeze-dried pork chops, but sometimes you’ll get along just fine with a case of Kirkland canned pulled pork. It just depends on a few other things like if you plan to transport it, what the storage conditions will be, etc. I love me some long-term food but, really, you can put together a very reasonably long-term food supply without breaking the bank on ‘survival food’.

I bet the folks in whats left of Florida would be happy to have some hash and eggs for breakfast after a long evening of clearing debris and unblocking roads. A case of this stuff, a #10 can of powdered eggs, a case of instant oatmeal, a case of fruit cocktail cups, a jar of Tang, instant coffee, some hash browns, and you’ve pretty much got a breakfast that’ll last five-ten years.

As I’ve mentioned, around this house the food storage paradigm is short-, mid-, and long-term storage. This stuff counts as ‘mid-term’ storage….it’ll be good for more than a year or two but probably not out at the twenty year mark. I wish I had written the price down, I’d be curious to see where the price went.

For science!

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Well, I can’t say Im surprised but Joel over at TUAK called it quits on his storage food experiment after a couple days. Yes, I kinda predicted it but you gotta give the man credit for giving it a shot.

The big takeaway from all this is that, like first aid kits, you’re probably better off building your own ’30 day kit’ rather than stocking up on an under-caloried, over-salted, under-flavored, and over-priced packages.

Here’s a website that I really found fascinating: Safely Gathered in: Recipes. The recipes all use foods that store well and are therefore excellent candidates for your pantry.

Sadly, they haven’t updated in a while, but the info there is, in my opinion, highly useful.

By the case? Buy the case….Pt IV

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About 18 months ago my local Albertsons had a good sale on pasta and I took advantage of it like Bill Clinton takes advantage of interns. Well, that sale came back and I decided i could use a few(!) cases of rigatoni.

Shopping carts are for amateurs. When the Zero stocks up, he goes deep.

Savings? Well, according to my receipt, what normally would have cost 238.80 came out to sixty bucks. (Got careless, forgot to ask for the 10% case discount.)

The apocalypse will be a fairly carbohydrate-heavy experience what with all the rice and pasta in storage, it seems.

In actuality, this is mostly my desire to have a large amount of day-to-day use items on hand in case some sort of financial donkey punch occurs. When you show up at work one day and your boss says “We’re being bought out by another company. This office will close in three weeks. Good luck.”, you really want to have some of the expensive niggling details (like food) locked down. Also, I just feel calmer and more at peace when I look at the shelves and see boxes and cans of food, racks of toiletries, paper towels, soap, detergent, and all the other consumables that keep my quality of life above that of some Third Worlder.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to stockpile the cash instead of the food if I am worried about such things? Well, yes…except for that part about the fabulous sale. Lets put it this way: You have $60 cash in hand..save it or buy food? If you’re worried about a job loss, for example, and you’ve tied that $60 in food, then you only have that one thing (food) covered. But if you keep the $60 in cash, you can use it to buy food..or fuel..or electricity. So does that mean it makes more sense to stick that $60 in the bank? Nope.. heres why: I didn’t buy $60 worth of food. I bought $240 worth of food and paid $60. Or, put another way, if I stuck that $60 in the bank, when I used it in the future I’d get only $60 worth of food. In this particular case, my purchase power today was 4x what my purchase power would be with that same $60 later.  (Disregarding inflation, which would actually make todays purchase more than 4x the purchasing power.) The more clinically minded of you will say “Wait, we’re drifting into Time Value Of Money country..” Yes. Yes we kinda are.)This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put money away as part of your preps…it just means that you need to think about things past the obvious. Maybe you already do that..I didn’t used to. Preparedness is really about resource management in regards to risk reduction – we try to get the most for our money when we take steps to protect ourselves from future problems.

Regardless, I’m pleased with todays purchase. It’s more food on the shelf and one less thing I have to worry about acquiring when/if I hit an economic rough patch.

Meat

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I really think the meat department manager sees me enter the store and he goes to hide in the freezer rather than deal with my bargain hunting.

But…his lackey was not so fast. So….93% lean ground beef. $5.99/#. And then it was on ‘sale’ by.50/#. Okay, so now we’re at $5.49/#. Thats no bargain. BUT….since today was the last day of expiration, it was marked down an additional 30%. Now it’s time to try and set the hook…

“Hey…I see you’ve got all this ground beef marked down 30%.”
“Yeah, it expires today.”
“If you mark it down 50%, I’ll take all of it.”
“Uh..let me go in the back and check. I think the manager is in the freezer.”

And he comes back with a roll of ‘50%’ off stickers and starts applying them to the dozen trays of beef. End result? About 20# of extra lean for around $2.75/#… not great, but quite respectable.

It’s these little victories that add up. Anything that gives me an excuse to heave 20# of meat into the freezer is a good thing. Add in the pasta and spaghetti sauce sale from last year, and I can make a giant pot of rigatoni with meat sauce for $4.25, which comes out to less than a buck and a half a meal for three extremely generous (read: unhealthy) portions.

So, 93/7 isn’t great for burgers, but….blend it with the outrageously fatty 73/27 I got and you wind up with about 85/15…which is pretty much right where you wanna be for a cheeseburger.

Food is no laughing matter, man. I remember a time when I literally had nothing in my fridge except ketchup and not much else. When I can load up the freezer without unloading my wallet….well, you better believe I’m gonna jump on that.