Pantry Challenge Update and Ham Bone Soup

It’s hard to believe that we’re already in the fourth week of January, and nearly finished with our first month of the Three Rivers Pantry Challenge. We’ve been making some good headway eating through our freezer inventory, though it seems to ebb and flow. I take something up to use for dinner, and end up with leftovers that go back into the freezer. 

A great example of this was the ham bone soup that we ate last week (check out the recipe below). I thawed the bones, and made a huge pot of soup, half of which went back into the freezer as leftovers. Sigh. 

I’m getting ahead of myself though. Before we talk about the ham bone soup, let’s take a look at ways we can all be stretching our food dollars without necessarily lowering our food quality standards. In fact, in some cases you may even be able to buy better quality food.

Reduce Food Waste

According to Feeding America, over 119 billion pounds, or nearly 40% of all food in America, is wasted each year in the United States. Households account for roughly 39% of this, with the remainder coming from food waste on farms and in food service, manufacturing, and retail. While the USDA has a goal to reduce food waste by 50% by 2030, this really only impacts the food wasted before it makes it into our homes. 

The average American wastes roughly 242 pounds of food per year. That’s food that you paid for, and essentially just thrown away without using. Yes, there are numerous reasons that you may have thrown it away. It may have gone moldy, it may not have been to your taste, or you may have just gotten sick of eating it. Regardless of the reason, it was ultimately thrown away, which means it’s money you’ve wasted. 

One of the most common culprits of food waste is not understanding the “expiration” or “sell by” dates. It’s estimated that over 80% of Americans discard edible food because they misunderstand the expiration labels. Consumers should note that such labels are not regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

So how can you reduce your food waste? Here are a few suggestions:

• Buy only what you need on a weekly basis (or whatever your shopping frequency is)
• Use the FIFO method with your canned and dry goods. FIFO means first in, first out. Use the “best by” date to organize your shelves and put those items that are oldest towards the front so you use them first. Remember though that items are good well beyond these arbitrary dates.
• Donate what you won’t use. Still wigged out about food nearing it’s “use by” date? Donate it to a local food pantry. 
• Do a periodic pantry inventory and plan meals to use up the oldest items you have on hand.
• Store food properly, and freeze what you can. Knowing how to properly store your food can drastically prolong its shelf life. I regularly have an open block of cheese in my fridge that keeps for 3 months or more. Lettuce from my garden lasts into November, and we’re still eating apples that we harvested in October.

Use What You Have

After the holidays, who doesn’t have a ton of leftovers sitting in their refrigerator. I know I do. And often, one of those items is the holiday turkey. In doing research for this article, I was shocked to learn that an estimated 35% of edible Thanksgiving turkey meat is tossed. That adds up to roughly 204 million pounds of meat…per year! And overall food waste increases by 25% during the holidays thanks to unsold holiday products and discarded leftovers according to the US Department of Agriculture.

Instead of throwing away all that food, look for creative ways to use it. Do you have an abundance of mashed potatoes and turkey leftovers? Make a cottage pie and throw in some of the glazed carrots and other vegetables. I like to pick all the meat off the carcass, dice it up, and save it in 2 cup serving sizes for making turkey pot pies throughout the year. The carcass gets broken up and thrown into the freezer as well. Then once or twice a year I take all the carcasses and boil them, making my own bone broth.

Vegetable peels and tops throughout the year also get saved in the freezer at our house. These also get thrown into the stock pot when I’m making bone broth, unless I can make something from them. Carrot tops and onion tops can be used to make pesto. Leek tops get saved for soup making. You get the picture. I used to throw all of this into my compost pile until I came across The No-Waste Vegetable Cookbook. While I have not made many of the recipes in the book, it truly opened my eyes as to how I could be making better use of what I buy and grow.

Tips for using what you already have on hand:

• Meal plan based on what you have in the pantry and freezer
• Freeze what you can’t eat right away
• Get creative – make use of the entire vegetable of meat item
• Repurpose leftovers – turn them into casseroles, pot or cottage pies, and soups. One of our favorites is to make meat and potato hash. The base is always leftover meat and boiled potatoes, and we fill in with whatever else we need to clean out of the fridge. Add a little A1 steak sauce and some Worcestershire sauce, and throw a fried egg on top and dinner is served.
• Participate in the annual pantry challenge to use up all those odds and ends you have on hand

Buy Smart

Now that you’ve used up what you already have in the house, how do you keep good meals on the table while also keeping the grocery bill at a reasonable level? There are all sorts of options here from joining a wholesale club like CostCo or Sam’s Club, to clipping coupons. But not everyone has access to these options, and they often come with an additional cost in the form of a membership or subscription fee.

The simple answer to how to save on your grocery bill is to be a smart shopper. This starts with taking a few minutes to determine what you and your family eat on a regular basis, then looking at options for how you can buy similar or better quality but for a better price. It’s possible that the answer to this may require some extra work on the back end. Part of this exercise will be to also determine how you make it worth your time and effort.

I went through this exercise when lunch meat prices started to escalate. We regularly eat deli ham on our sandwiches, but at $8 per pound for the store brand, I was having a hard time justifying the cost. It was about this time that I noticed the ham loaves in the grocery store. Since I was also looking at buying a meat slicer, I decided to buy a ham and slice it up myself. The cost savings paid for my meat slicer in about three months. 

Shortly after I started slicing my own lunch meat, Easter hams went on sale. At our local grocery store we can register for their rewards program and get additional savings on certain items throughout the year. It was at this time I switched over to buying a full ham with the bone in it. It’s a bit of work to remove the bone, but these are cheaper than the ham loaves, and more often on sale. I slice up the large pieces for sandwich meat. This gets wrapped in plastic wrap in half pound amounts, and several of these packages are then placed in a vacuum seal bag and frozen. If I can’t get to the ham right away I put the whole ham in the freezer for processing another day. Currently I have a few pounds of sliced meat, and one whole ham in the freezer. I also slice up any leftover breast meat from the turkey or chickens that we eat and save these for lunch meat as well.

Once I have all the meat sliced up I’m often left with various small chunks of meat, along with the bones. This all gets packaged up and frozen for use in meals. The small bits of meat get used on our weekly pizza or in soups, and the bones are used for soup making.

Since I do a lot of home canning, we do not often buy canned goods. When I do, I try to check out our local salvage grocery store, 2nd Chance Goods. Salvage grocery stores collect food that is at or near the “sell by” date, or that is in dented containers and make it available to the public at a reduced price. There is nothing wrong with the food, it’s just not as prettily packaged as what you’ll find in the grocery store. Here’s a link you can use to find a salvage grocery store near you. 

Are there similar changes you and your family can make?

Tips for Smart Shopping

• Meal plan, and use it to make your grocery list. Make sure that you are using up anything previously purchased.
• Shop as infrequently as possible. Now that it’s just my husband and myself I buy groceries every two weeks. This greatly reduces the number of impulse buys I make (hello doughnuts, I’m looking at you!).
• Check out salvage grocery stores and buy what you can there. It’s often half price of the regular grocery store, and no membership required.
• Buy on sale, but only if it’s something that you know you will use (and you actually do!)
• Buy what you’ll use and use it…ALL of it. Use those leek tops, ham bones, and so forth.
• Leverage coupons, wholesalers, and any other opportunities in your area.
• Buy in bulk 

Pantry Challenge Update

We’re heading into week five of the Three Rivers Pantry Challenge, and so far things are going well. I shared our meal plan for week 1 and 2 in the 2023 Pantry Challenge article, and encourage you to see what we’ve been eating. There were a few items, such as the chicken pot pie and potato leek soup, that we simply didn’t make because we had so much left over from a previous meal. I’ve simply shifted those out to future dinners.

We were also on vacation for a week during this time, which always makes meal planning easier! Instead of making dinner ourselves we enjoyed eating out and exploring some new cuisines. 

Despite the changes in our meal plan, and not being home for a week, there is a sizable dent in our freezer. Most of this is thanks to removing the ham bones and cooking them down for soup. I also tossed in some leek tops with the bones to help flavor the broth. After eating our bellies full of the delish soup, we packed up the leftovers and froze them in 2 cup containers. Each container is roughly enough for one meal for my husband and myself.

Ham Bone Soup Recipe

The recipe below was inspired by the New York Times Ham Bone Soup recipe that I found online, but is entirely my own. Feel free to play with the ingredients when you make this soup. No matter what you throw into the pot it will taste amazing.

Soup Base

• Bones from a ham, most of the meat removed for sandwiches
• 1 bunch leek tops (use the green part)
• 1 – 2 Carrots
• Water to cover the bones and vegetables

I had to upgrade my pot as I had far more bones than I realized.

Directions

Simmer the bones and vegetables for at least one hour. The longer you simmer them the more collagen will be extracted from the bones, making your broth richer and more flavorful. If you don’t have time to watch the stove, simmer them overnight in the crockpot.

While the soup base is simmering, gather your other ingredients and prepare them. I went down to our root cellar and pulled out a selection of what we had on hand. These are listed in the soup ingredients below. You can use whatever sounds good to you.

Once the broth is done simmering, use a large colander to separate the liquid from the vegetables and bones. Set the solids aside, and pour the broth back into the pot. 

Soup Ingredients

• Allow bones to cool, remove any meat, dice and return to pot
• 1-2 cans beans, any variety
• 2 carrots, diced
• 2 – 3 medium potatoes
• 1 cup celery, diced
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 3 cloves garlic
• 2 cups frozen kale
• 1 small celeriac

Gather all your vegetables, clean and dice in ½ inch cubes. The quantities provided are approximate. I had a giant yellow carrot from my garden, so I only used one. My red onions need to be used up soon, so I grabbed a couple smaller ones for the soup. If all you have are yellow onions, those will work just as well.

My garden produced a ton of celery this year, so I pre-chopped a lot of it and froze it in one cup portions. This is a great thing to do with any leftover celery you might have from preparing the holiday stuffing.

Once all the ingredients are prepared, and the broth has been strained, return the broth to the pot and add the fresh ingredients. Allow everything to simmer for 30-60 minutes or until the vegetables are soft. Be sure to pick any meat off the bones and add this to the pot as well. We didn’t feel that there was quite enough meat so we added a cup of diced ham bits that we had in the freezer.

When you are nearly ready to serve the soup, taste it, then add any salt and pepper that you feel is needed. We found that our soup was plenty salty without adding any extra.

Bon appetit!

#threeriverschallenge

Resources

• The No-Waste Vegetable Cookbook: Recipes and Techniques for Whole Plant Cooking
• Resealable vacuum bags with pump