Waste not, want not...

Everything is costing more and more, fuel where I live is currently close to $5 a gallon, and since everything where I live is far a part in distance, averaging around 20 miles between our towns, it is really making me think a lot about not wasting anything. 

I also am a child of a parent who was born and raised during the Great Depression of the late '20s and early '30s, you'd better believe I was taught all of my life not to waste anything. That goes double for food.

I will admit to occasionally tossing foods that I could have used, but for the most part, I'm pretty frugal when it comes to food. I like cooking and baking from scratch, give me a well stocked old school kitchen and I can put together a pretty good meal.

Today I was going through my fridge and discovered I had some bell peppers and green onions that were going south, they were still good but weren't going to last much longer. The onions were in worst shape, I had put them in a hidden place in my fridge and forgot about them, but it was easy enough to remove the bad layers, I had plenty left to work with.

I diced up the red, yellow, orange and green peppers and chopped the green onions, I sautéed them in a little butter and pink Himalayan sea salt, low and slow, I didn't want to brown them or cook them to a mush, but just until they were getting tender.

I placed them into 2 quart sized zip baggies that I labeled, I flattened them and popped them into the freezer. They will make a nice addition to whatever I choose to add them too in the future, and bonus, I will not have to sautée them again, just put them directly into the dish. I ended up with approximately 2 cups of sautéed veg in total.

Now, the green onion roots, most folk just toss those in the trash, not in this house, I have been taking the root ends and planting them in a built in planter on the east side of the SkyCastle in what we like to refer to as the "smoking lounge", a small semi-enclosed room just outside of the living room. I have been doing this for a couple of years now and each summer I have a perpetual source of fresh green onion tops to cook with. All from something that is normally tossed into the trash.

I don't generally have any issues with critters messing with the onions, it's too high off the ground for the ground dwelling critters to get to, rodents don't seem to be attracted to them, the only critter that messes with them, typically when I first plant them, are the Towhee birds (Link  Link Link) they seem to be curious about what is in the dirt and will pull them up, they don't eat or damage the onion roots, they just pull them out of the dirt, so when I first plant some I have to cover them for a while, once they start sprouting green shoots, the birds leave them alone after that.

It doesn't take long for the onions to sprout some green tops, they seem to be very happy in their location, anytime I need or want some fresh onion, I cut off some of the green tops from one or more onions, they quickly grow back in just a few days, and I have more than enough in my little onion patch to keep us in fresh onion tops. 

How are you being more frugal now that everything is more expensive? Tell me how you are saving money, reusing things or anything else that is a good tip!

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Wretha,

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