Cut Your Food Bills in Half

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Before you cook them, soak beans in water for eight to 24 hours (larger beans can soak longer). As they plump, the beans will release the gases that cause flatulence. Soaked beans can be simmered on the stove or in a crock pot, or you can cook them (very efficiently!) in a pressure cooker in less than 15 minutes. (And you don’t even have to soak the beans. If you start with dry beans, a pressure cooker can have them ready to eat in about half an hour.)

Choose pastured meat, dairy and eggs. Pastured products are not only more nutritious than industrial meat, but also more eco-friendly. (Visit the Safe Meat Landing Page for several articles about this, and watch for a groundbreaking article about grass farming in our next issue.)

At stores or direct from farmers, organic and free-range eggs, dairy products and meat do cost more than their conventional counterparts, but keep an eye on those prices — the gap is closing significantly as mainstream food costs surge upward.

Foods derived from healthy, humanely raised animals that enjoy sunshine and exercise are worth the extra cost as they provide added benefits when it comes to nutrition, food safety and basic morality. And if you buy locally, you can add the environment and your local economy to the list of beneficiaries.

For all these reasons, I gladly paid $2.55 a pound for the turkeys that a local organic farmer raised for me last year. The freshly harvested birds came with a hidden bonus: Simply having this caliber of meat in the house made it hard to make a case for a budget-busting lunch or dinner elsewhere.

Also consider that many homesteads can easily support a few dairy or meat animals, making laying hens, poultry, dairy goats or a family milk cow well worth their upkeep. The trick to producing your own eggs, dairy or meat economically is simple — stick with animals that earn a food profit vs. adopting too many as pets.

Improve your snacking smarts. In defense of snacking, it is possible that grazing one’s way through the day is more natural, biologically speaking, than sitting down to ceremonial meals three times a day. We were hunter-gatherers not so long ago, which is fine when you’re picking blueberries or eating fresh snap peas off the vine. But when the hunter compulsion has you tiptoeing through a dark kitchen to harvest a bag of chips, you may have a costly problem, in terms of both calories and cash.

I am quite familiar with this syndrome, which is why I have learned to turn the most affordable and humble of ingredients — flour, water and salt — into otherwise pricey snack foods such as pita chips, pretzels or toasted bagel slices. I dry lots of seasonal fruits, too; so even after adding purchased nuts, my ever-changing snack mixes cost 70 percent less than the store-bought versions. And then there is popcorn, and parching corn, and several millets and amaranths known for their roasting qualities — any of which may be a perfect fit to your garden and your favorite TV chair. You really can do better than chips made hundreds or thousands of miles away that cost $3 to $5 a bag.

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