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

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.

It’s two days away from Valentine’s Day! Are you prepared? If you’ve got someone special I have a suggestion – forget the usual rose bouquet and expensive chocolates.

Honestly, I pity the nervous and sweaty guys and girls who panic at the last minute and go out and buy the most expensive flowers, stuffed toys, or chocolates they see at the store. Valentine’s Day should be a happy, relaxing day for lovers – not a cause for stress.
Here are more wallet-friendly ways to spend Valentine’s day:

Write something. Whether it’s a card, poem, or letter, creating something with simple pen and paper is so rare these days that this kind of effort would be appreciated.

Cook a meal together. Not only is it cheaper than a romantic restaurant, it’s fun too. Besides, with a few candles and a small table set up perfectly, you wouldn’t be lacking in ambiance. What if you don’t have the funds to buy extra ingredients? Check out SuperCook. It’s a great site that gives you recipes based on the ingredients you already have at home. If you make mistakes, that’s fine You’ll have something funny to talk about for the rest of the year.

Handpick and arrange flowers yourself. If you have a garden (or have access to one), it’s much more creative to handpick flowers yourself. Roses are so commonplace during Valentine’s day that it’ll probably be refreshing for your significant other to receive something else. Besides, the prices of roses tend to skyrocket during Valentine’s Day.

Speaking of flowers, if you find scattered petals laying around (or if the flowershop would be willing to give you some for free), you can use these. Whether it’s to decorate a bathroom, bedroom, or dinner table for V-day, they’re beautiful and cost-effective.

Take a walk together. Never mind going to Baguio or Tagaytay and spending thousands of pesos for lodging (I have a friend who spent P10,000 on just an overnight stay!) A nice walk or hike around UP, Antipolo, and some grassy areas in Marikina can lead to great conversations. If you prefer an indoor walk, there are several museums you can visit. The Vargas Museum in UP Diliman currently has a Florante at Laura exhibit you shouldn’t miss.

Watch DVDs. True, you can watch a movie in a mall theater, but so will every couple in Metro Manila. It’s bound to get crowded – which is hardly romantic or private. Odds are, you and your significant other have some unwatched DVDs. Now’s the perfect time to finally watch them. Or, you can rent DVDs from a video store.

What are your plans for Valentine’s Day? How much has it cost you in the past?