What’s a frugal trick you’ve chanced upon recently?
I accidentally semi-reinvented the “trencher”. Basically, in medieval times, food would be served on a slab of bread and that would kinda be the plate. Or, you know, bread bowls for soup and the like.
I have an air fryer, and I’ve learned I can line the basket in a large flour tortilla, and it generally keeps whatever I’m cooking/warming up from getting the pan too dirty aside from some easily knocked-out crumbs.
I hate washing things, and I hate wasting paper liners, so it lets me cut down on those, and I can just eat the tortilla.
Pretty basic
Buy in bulk and freeze what you don’t need immediately.
I bought one of those giant Costco ground beef packs. I think it was like 10 lbs or something for $30.
I packed it into patties and seasoned it immediately. I stacked them with parchment paper and threw them into the freezer. They turned out great.
I’ll follow this up with a recommendation to buy your bread and freeze it. We never go through a loaf or a pack of buns before it starts to go bad. Just grab a few right out of the freezer and pop it in the toaster. Comes out great. Will eventually get freezer burn and have soft spots, but we can usually work through a pack before then.
We put our bread in Ziploc bags (which we reuse) and then into the fridge. A loaf will last at least a month in there. Then it’s easier to eat since you don’t need to toast it as long
I freeze bread. I go through loafs too slowly otherwise, and they go bad.
Note: If you REFRIGERATE bread, it’ll go dry and stale. You actually have to freeze it. I’m sure there’s some sort of bread science behind “why”, I just don’t know what it is.
I’ll buy the family pack of ground meat and then just transfer it to three containers where each is about 0.5kg, which matches the required amount for a lot of recipes/kits, like the club house sloppy joes/tacos or hamburger helper.