4 Must-Visit Websites for the Frugal Cook

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

Cooking in batches

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.

Recipe: Chive Butter Toast

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.

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