After tweaking your budget in Day #2 of this series, you’ve probably noticed this: food is one of your largest expenditures, if not the largest. This is especially true if you have a family or if you usually eat in restaurants or order takeout.

So to minimize your largest expense, it’s time to learn more effective and affordable cooking.

Today’s Task: Level Up Your Cooking Skills

Note the keywords “level up”. This means that whatever cooking skills you have, take this as an opportunity to improve them. I’ve listed some resources below to help some of you get started.

Note that these are only suggestions. You’re the only one who can decide what you mean by “leveling up”.

For those who are inexperienced with cooking:

• Beginner cooking techniques from ReluctantGourmet.com, and don’t forget to try their basic recipes
• Random cooking tips at Lifetips.com
• Some helpful videos:
  • Tips to crush, chop, and mince garlic cloves
  • How to chop an onion the right way
  • How to measure rice proportions with your finger (which is why it’s funny to me to see foreign cooking shows talking about cups of water and cups of rice) and How to cook rice
  • How to debone a fish from InYourKitchen
    
  • How to portion a chicken from InYourKitchen

If you’re already an advanced cook, why not try to learn the following skills?

• Batch cooking
  • Batch cooking and freezing guide from Netmums.com
  • The Five-day Freeze: Batch cooking for the rest of us from Wisebread
  • A handy freezer storage chart that tells you how long food stays good in a freezer
• Canning and preserving produce – here’s a detailed guide
• Or, simply learn to cook 3 new dishes.

Also, check out The Insider’s Guide to Frugal Food and Fitness at Squawkfox.com. Many of the mentioned ingredients are expensive here, so I’m kind of tempted to write a similar free resource for Filipinos.

Why does this lead to healthier finances? If you’re the type who often resorts to dining out, by learning how to cook more efficiently, you’ll save a lot of money without much hassle. If you’re already experienced with cooking, new skills such as batch cooking and learning how to preserve food can also decrease your expense. Who knows, if you enjoy cooking enough, you might just end up with a small side business.

Image by lusi from sxc.hu

Lately I’ve been thinking about what I can do to lower our energy consumption at home. We don’t have many appliances, but if there’s a way I can lower my bill and lessen my home’s negative impact on the environment, I’d love to try it. This made me consider using solar energy.

When people think about harnessing solar energy, the first thing that comes to mind are photovoltaic panels — but this is hardly the best choice.

Here’s the problem: First of all, most solar panels are not that environment-friendly. Some use a very rare metal called indium, and if we continue to use indium at our current rate, we’ll only have a 10-year supply of it left.

Using solar panels to power your home can also be impractical. You’ll need several modules or panels to produce a workable amount of electricity, not to mention the space to hold them. Plus, they are just too expensive for the average Filipino consumer.

We have to look at solar energy from a different angle, then.

Solar Ovens

One way to utilize solar energy for your home is to build a solar oven. Basically, these ovens run on nothing but the light and heat of the sun. Here are the advantages of doing this:

• You can’t burn anything. Soft vegetables may overcook though, if left in too long, but this just means they have to be the last thing you’ll add.
• It reduces your LPG or electrical consumption used for cooking, since you’re directly using solar energy to cook.
• It uses less water. Since the cooker is enclosed, moisture is retained in the food, it doesn’t evaporate. Usually, you don’t need to add extra water to your meat or vegetables.
• It’s environment-friendly. No harmful emissions and pollutants result from using this oven for cooking.

Solar ovens also have a few disadvantages.

• It takes longer to cook with a solar oven. This means it’s not a good setup if you’re in a hurry to eat. Because of this, cooking this way is only ideal for lunch, merienda, and dinner (to be reheated later). To shorten cooking time, set up your oven as early as possible and cut your meat, fish, and veggies into small pieces. If you’ll be cooking a lot of food, it’s better to use two or more smaller pots than one large pot.
• Some cookers need to be adjusted to face the sun every half hour or so. But the effort of that is minimal compared to constantly watching your meal on a stove.
• Of course, you can’t cook this way during the evening or cloudy or rainy days.

Here are some additional resources on solar cooking:

• The Wikipedia article on solar cookers provides a good introduction.
• Solar oven do-it-yourself plans from SolarCooking.org. For something large, check out the cob solar oven (PDF). If you want a portable solar oven, try this collapsible one.
• A list of common questions about solar cooking at the solar cooking wiki. (Explore the rest of the wiki. They’ve got a lot of handy instructions there.)
• Some video demos in YouYube:
  • Solar oven pot roast – the guy in this video just used two glass bowls and a large plastic screen.
  • Solar box oven cooking in the winter.  Pretty inspiring. Kung pwede magluto ng roast chicken (at 300+ Fahrenheit) via the sun during winter in Canada, paano pa kaya sa rainy season dito sa Pilipinas?
  • Stewed chicken and cornbread made via a solar oven

Solar cooking is a topic that I’m very, very interested in. By the time I start living in the province, I want to be very good at setting up solar ovens so that I can build them and give them away to my partner’s relatives there. This will lessen their LPG, coal, and other cooking expenses. (I actually made a makeshift oven based on one of the videos above. I’ll be posting about that next week.)

Natural Light

To maximize sunlight and avoid turning on light bulbs during the day, make sure that the high-activity rooms of your house have ample windows and other source of natural lighting. These rooms include the kitchen, a home office, or the dining room. It may sound like common sense, but many people forget this when planning or remodeling their homes.

Here’s an example: I’m in my home office for the greater part of the day, so I need it to be well lighted while I work or read. It’s fortunate that I have a large window on one wall and a sliding glass door on another wall – I never have to turn on a light bulb between 6am to 4pm.

Our kitchen/dining room also maximizes natural light. There are doors on both ends of the room, and both of them have a secondary screen door. Our ceiling also has two skylights made out of the typical translucent plastic “yero”.

If you have the budget,you can try installing tubular light (also known as sun pipes or sun tubes) in your house. I don’t know where to get these locally, though. Frankly, I think the other natural lighting methods I mentioned above should be enough for the typical Filipino home.

How about you? Do you have other frugal ideas on how to use solar energy? Have you tried any of the above methods?

Additional Sources:

• “Renewable Energy Solar Cells Ain’t So Renewable” by Kit Eaton, FastCompany.com

Image by flaivoloka from sxc.hu

I’ve always loved cooking my own meals at home. Not only is it cheaper, but it’s a great way to bond with your family, experiment with different ingredients, and personalize dishes according to your taste.

If you love cooking just as much as I do, you’ll benefit from checking out the following websites listed below. They prove to be good references whenever I need answers to my storage, preparation, and other cooking questions.

Still Tasty is a website that tells you the shelf life of food items in your house. Apart from telling you the shelf life, you also get some tips on how to store these items properly so you can keep them fresh.

I’ve mentioned Super Cook in the past, but I’m including it on this list because it’s one of the most useful cooking sites out there. Basically, you input the ingredients you have and the site tells you what you can cook with it. It comes in handy during those late night snacks or rainy days where you can’t go out to the grocery.

Want to cook your main meals just once a month? The Freezer Cooking Guide contains the basic things you need to do to plan once a month batch cooking. This site is especially helpful for busy professionals. The guide doesn’t contain recipes though. For those recipes, you can visit the batch cooking section of BigOven.com.

How about you, do you have any frugal cooking sites to share? Please post them in the comments section

My partner and I celebrated our 29th monthsary the other day, which called for a romantic dinner for two. She was craving a cream-based pasta with crab sticks, so she “invented” the Spicy Kani Linguine, which ended up being really, really good. I’m posting the recipe here as it’s a relatively cheap dish that is easy to prepare.

This recipe serves 2 to 3 people.

Preparation time: 30 minutes

Ingredients:

• half a pack of kani/crab sticks – Cost: P42.50 (a whole pack costs P7o to P85)
• 100 grams Mushrooms – Cost: P30
• 200 grams of linguine – Cost: P28 (P60 to P70 for a 500 gram pack)
• 250 ml cream – Cost: P37
• 2 tablespoons of butter
• 3 to 4 pieces of red chili peppers – Cost: Free from garden
• garlic
• salt and pepper
• parsley – I got this free from my garden as well.

Remember that you can change the quantities of the mushrooms, pasta, and crab sticks based on your preference.

Estimated total cost of meal: P140 to P260. Not bad, considering that pasta dishes for 2-3 people can cost more in restaurants.

Directions:

1. Boil the pasta in water with oil and salt.
2. Mince the garlic and slice the kani sticks crosswise.
3. Saute the garlic, butter, and  chopped kani in 1 tablespoon of butter. Set aside.
4. Finely chop the red chili peppers.
5. Heat the cream in a sauce pan and gradually mix the remaining butter in. Throw in the chopped chili peppers. Salt and pepper the sauce according to your taste.
6. When the pasta is done, mix it in with the cream sauce and the sauteed mushrooms and kani. Top the dish with chopped parsley.

Notes:

• The mushrooms and kani are sauteed separately and then thrown in with the pasta in the end to avoid the dish from tasting too monotonous. If you throw in the kani too early into the sauce, the seafood taste will dominate the sauce, making the dish predictable and flat.
• If the cream sauce tastes too sweet, add a bit more butter until it has the “saltiness” you need.

If you enjoy cooking as much as I do, then there are always those recipes that you’re dying to try.  The downside is that you might not have the ingredients on hand, or the recipe might include expensive ingredients.  If you only need a tablespoon of red wine vinegar, for example, it doesn’t make sense to buy an entire bottle if you don’t think you’ll use it in everyday cooking anyway.

This is where substitution comes in.  Sometimes, expensive ingredients can be replaced with cheaper, easy-to-find alternatives.  Here are some examples:

Sour cream.  This costs around P75 if you buy it from a store. If you just get the regular cream (P35) and gradually add vinegar or lemon juice as you stir it, you’ll get the same effect.  Just use your taste buds to judge the quantity, but 2 to 3 tablespoons of vinegar to one cup of cream should do the trick.  Sometimes I add a bit of mayonnaise if I’ll be using the sour cream in a dip.

If you don’t want to do all this mixing, you can also use yogurt in the same amount as the sour cream.

Cream cheese.  It’s P115 a block, so if you’re only going to use small quantities, you can use these suggestions from AllRecipes: the same amount of yogurt, strained with a cheesecloth overnight.  I haven’t tried this yet, though.

According to the article I mentioned earlier, you can puree some cottage cheese (same as the needed amount of cream cheese), but the price difference would be smaller, because the last time I checked, cottage cheese was P95/cup.  I generally just buy cream cheese rather than do substitutions, since it goes well with almost anything.  If for some reason you can’t find it (they don’t have it in the grocery nearest my house), then by all means try these substitutes.

Parmesan cheese.  If you have some leftover queso de bola from the holidays, you can grate that and use it instead of buying parmesan.

White/red wine vinegar.  The substitution depends on what you need the wine vinegar for.  If it’s the acidity that’s needed, then you can simply use any vinegar you have – just add it gradually and judge it with your tastebuds until it has the level of acidity or sourness you need.  Since red wine vinegar is generally milder, you can halve the quantity required in the recipe.

White/red wine.  For white wine, you can substitute chicken or fish broth (depending on what you’re cooking). According to an article I found at About.com, you can also use ginger ale, or canned mushroom liquid.  If you’ll use it as a marinade, you can mix 1/4 cup vinegar with 1 tbsp sugar and 1/4 cup water.

For red wine, you can substitute grape juice.  If you’re using tetrapack or powdered juices, they might be too sweet, so diluting them with broth or water might help.

Here are some additional ingredient substitute lists I found online:

• from E-cookbooks.net
• That’s My Home substitution list
• FoodSubs.com (this one is the most comprehensive, as it even lists substitutes for kitchen tools)

Do you use substitutes for expensive ingredients?  Are there any tips you’d like to share with us?

Image by Steve Woods from Sxc.hu

With most meat and fish costing more than P100/kilo, I can’t help but ask myself if it’s cheaper to be a vegetarian.  Check out the prices from various markets/stores below:

Balintawak Market in Quezon City:

Tomatoes (1 kilo) – P25
Kalamansi (1 kilo, big size) – P20
Carrots (1 kilo) – P30
Potatoes (1 kilo) – P28
String beans (per super fat bunch) – P10
Lettuce (1 big head) – P15
Saba (biggest size) – P1.80 per piece
Coconut (biggest size) – P15
Squash (medium size) – P20 per piece
Pechay (1 kilo) – P20
Broccoli (per kilo) – P40
Pineapple (medium size) – P15
Source: MoneySmarts

At the Marikina market:

Eggplant – P50/kilo
Red onions – P82/kilo
Ampalaya – P80/kilo
Squash – P10/ large slice
Okra – P32/kilo
Broccoli (one large stem with leaves) – P 48
Potatoes – P 28/kilo
String Beans – P 20/kilo
Lettuce – P20-P28 per head or P60 per kilo

At Makro:

Eggplant – P49/kilo (for a 2 kg pack)
Cucumber – P39/kilo (for a 2kg pack)
Ampalaya – P72/kilo (for a 2kg pack)
Squash – P17/kilo (for 3kg and above)

What would make vegetarianism exponentially cheaper is that if you buy in bulk and store most of your purchases in a chest freezer.  But not all vegetables freeze well – especially those delicate veggies that have a lot of water.  For example, you shouldn’t freeze lettuce, cabbages, and other leafy veggies, tomatoes, and cucumbers.  I’ve found a very helpful page with instructions on how to freeze specific vegetables.  Here’s an excerpt on how to freeze eggplant:

 Cut into slices, sprinkle with salt and allow to stand 30 minutes. Drain off excess liquid and fry gently in butter or margarine until just tender. Cool and pack into plastic containers. Seal and label. Keeps up to 3 months.
(Source: Freezing Vegetables from Garden Guides)

Vegetable prices may be cheaper than meat, but there are some ways in which vegetarianism might actually cost more.  It especially depends on the types of vegetables you buy, among other things.

When is it more expensive to be a vegetarian?

• When you’re shopping for a household that can’t live without meat.  For example, a family of 5 where only 1 or 2 members will be vegetarian.  In this case, buying vegetables for the vegetarians and mostly meat for the omnivores will just add to the overall household expenses (and overall cooking hassle!).
• When you’re dining out.  Generally, vegetarian restaurants tend to be more expensive than their non-vegetarian counterparts (not always, but usually).  This is probably because they are seen as “specialty” restaurants.  However, if you eat a vegetarian dish in a regular restaurant, the veggie dish might be cheaper compared to the other meat-based meals they offer.

So, the answer to my question is: it depends.  If you’re simply feeding yourself or an entire household that is willing to make the switch, then it’s definitely cheaper, especially if you’re buying in bulk and freezing the vegetables.  In my case, I have yet to convince my entire household of 4 to switch completely, but I am making more vegetable purchases than usual.

Do you think it’s cheaper to be a vegetarian?  How much of your diet is made up of veggies?

In a previous post, Goal for the month: No Fast Food, I wrote about the benefits of cooking your own meals vs. dining or eating out. Frugal Pinoy reader Jinoe sent the following comment:

I would love to do this also for similar reasons (esp #4). But lately Im in a rush. Cooking my own food takes more than an hour plus cleaning up. So fastfood was an option.

If you still want to cook for yourself, but don’t have the time or energy to do so every day, you can cook in batches.  On weekends, days off, or whenever you have a lot of free time, cook one big batch of food that you will heat up for the rest of the week.   (An exception to this might be the rice, which you can cook once daily with no hassle using a rice cooker.) Here are some pointers:

• It requires a bit of planning.  Since you’re cooking food in big batches, you need to plan ahead.  This includes ingredients, what meals you’ll be having, and the quantity of food.
• Use your freezer.  Most of the food you’ve cooked should be stored in your freezer to prevent spoilage.  Just pop them up int he microwave or heat them up in your stove when you’re ready to eat.  It’ll take roughly 5 minutes to do this per meal for one or two people.

Click here for a very informative article on batch cooking.  It includes notes about shelf life of certain foods, a list of foods that don’t freeze well, recipes, and more tips.  It’s like Batch Cooking 101.

These slices of Chive Butter Toast accompanied my Valentine’s day dinner with Scout.  It was yummy.  Here’s the recipe (again, not exact measurements).

Ingredients:

• 3 slices of bread, cut in half
• 3 onion leaves (chives), cut into 1/2 centimeter pieces
• 1 small clove of garlic, minced
• 1/4 of a block of butter

Directions:

1. Slightly melt butter (in a microwave, saucepan, whatever) but take it out of the heat while it’s still a bit lumpy.
2. Add the chives and garlic in the partially melted butter.  Mix well.
3. Spread butter mixture onto bread slices.
4. Toast bread slices until light brown.

This is great when eaten with soup or pasta, or used as croûtons in salad.

For Valentine’s Day, Scout and I had pasta in tomato, basil, and mushroom sauce accompanied by chive butter toast. It was obviously delicious, as there was none left over. Here’s the recipe along with the approximate price of each ingredient.
(Note: Since some ingredients were “cut” from a bulkier amount, I’ve reduced some of those prices according to the portions we took. Halimbawa, kung kalahati lang nung pack yung ginamit namin, kalahati rin lang yung presyo.)

Ingredients:

• 1 pack tomato sauce (P 14.00)
• 1/2 can of mushrooms (P 19.00)
• roughly 90-100 grams of cut macaroni (P 14.00)
• a handful of crushed fresh basil (P7.00, would’ve probably cost less if I had my own plant)
• some butter
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• salt, dried oregano, pepper (preferably the course type – yung di masyado durog)
• cheese

To be honest, these measurements aren’t precise – I’m not that kind of cook. I just go with my tastebuds and come up with the measurements on the spot. I don’t follow exact recipes, and I encourage you to add/subtract the measurements of the ingredients as you please.

Also, you may omit the mushrooms for a minimalist sauce.

Directions:

1. In a pot of water, boil pasta with a tablespoon of oil and some salt.
2. In a saucepan, saute the garlic in butter until light brown.
3. Stir in the mushrooms and fry them until they’re a little crisp on the edges. Add some salt and pepper in desired measurements. I add some of the oregano in this stage, too.
4. When the mushroom, butter, and garlic mixture is hot enough, slowly add the tomato sauce. I said “slowly” because it’ll be harder to mix it with the butter if you dump the tomato sauce all at once.
5. Wait until it boils then let it simmer for 5-8 minutes.
6. Stir in the basil.
7. Taste the sauce. If it’s too sour, then add some butter until it suits your taste. See, the sourness comes from the tomato, and the butter counteracts that. If it’s too bland, add some oregano and basil. If it lacks “oomph”, add pepper.
8. When the pasta is done, take it out of the pot, drain it, and mix it with the sauce.
9. Serve on a plate and sprinkle with cheese, according to your preference. For this particular meal, we used grated parmesan (the affordable but ok kind, not parmigiano reggiano from Italy).

Total cost of dish: Main ingredients cost P54.00 You can add an additional 10-20 pesos for miscellaneous side expenses such as the salt, pepper, garlic, butter, water, oregano, cheese, and the gas that was used. So the total cost is roughly P64.00 – P74.00

Not bad, especially since it got to feed 3 people with really generous servings.

If you notice the toast next to the pasta, it’s chive butter toast, but it merits its own blog entry. Click here for the recipe of the chive butter toast.

Did you have a special meal with a significant other (or by yourself) this Valentine’s Day? If so, what did you have and how much did it cost? Share it with us in the comments.

I hate to admit it, but I fall into the fast food trap every so often. Especially when fast foods come out with their coupons. (Hello McMoney!) The temptation is always there – they have 24 hour delivery services, my school is next to a mall, my friends always entice me with the phrase “Kain tayo!“ And I just really, really love to eat.

I have to stop eating at fast foods. Mc Donald’s, Jollibee, Pao Tsin, Chowking, etc. Anything. If I’m to eat anything while I’m at school, it has to be something I brought with me.

Why am I doing this?

It’s healthier. Oftentimes, fast food has extenders, preservatives, and probably a lot of stuff you don’t want to know about. Have you seen Supersize Me? Plus, the food I make at home is often just veggies and fish, and I’m sure it’s freshly made.

It’s cleaner. I try my best to be a clean cook. See, I had amoebiasis last year, and it was the worst experience ever. It’s much easier for me to get a relapse, so I try to avoid questionable foods. (I miss isaw!)

It’s cheaper. A cheeseburger roughly costs P35.00. If I make the same thing myself, I assume it’d cost roughly P20.00. Plus, it’s customizable! I can put whatever I want on it. Someday I’ll make my own cheeseburger at home, do the math, and show you folks the difference.

My cooking tastes better. At least I think so. I have to be honest that the taste of fast food has its own charms, but most of the time I prefer my own cooking. Especially when it comes to spaghetti.

This is the 3rd time I’ve tried this goal. I hope I’m more successful with this attempt. I’s probably save at least P800.00/month (based on previous months) if I stay away from fast food. Deadline: March 30, 2008. I’ll let you know my progress.

It’s going to be much harder – fast food has such a big hold on me. When I was a kid, my parents always took me to Jollibee or Tropical Hut. When I was in high school, my friends and I often had fast food delivered to the dorms. I have such a big history with it that it’s hard to let go.

Do you eat fast food? If so, do you think you can give it up?