Mailbag: All Of Your Grocery and Cooking Questions, Answered
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Hey everyone, I'm Jean Chatzky. Thanks so much for joining me today on Her Money. Today we are bringing you a mailbag all about the best ways to shop at the grocery store, what best-by dates really mean, and other burning questions about how to save money on food. If you listened to our Wednesday episode this week, you know all about Ali Slagle and why she truly believes you only need

40 ingredients forever to make endless meals. Her book, Just a Reminder, is also called I Dream of Dinner So You Don't Have To. Go check it out if you haven't listened yet to the episode and be sure to check out her sub stack as well. We asked our Her Money Facebook community what questions they had about cooking.

Got some amazing ones. Allie, thanks so much for being here again. Thank you for having me. Our first couple of questions come from Chris. They're about shopping and meal prep to save the most money. I'll read them and we can just go to it. Sound okay? Let's do it.

What is the best way to shop per meal each week in bulk depending on the items to save the most money each month? And what's the most economical way of cooking? Large batch, double protein for multiple recipes, batch cook, meal prep a few days a week. Those are some really interesting questions.

They are, and they offer a lot of opportunities for cooking when you can't necessarily cook every single night. I think the answer to the question is really thinking about how cooking can fit into your life. So if you love to go to Costco, which I know we both do, Costco is a great place to stock up on the pantry things that you use really often. For me, that's canned chickpeas or olive oil. If you have space to store those things, that's a great way to save money.

In terms of cooking, I like to make a big batch of something that I know I can use in a bunch of different ways. So maybe that's cooking beans from dried or cooking a whole grain. Something that would take a long time on a Tuesday night, but that I might have time to do while I'm working or over the weekend or something like that. When you say you use beans a bunch of different ways, if you make a pot of beans, right? You just cook up some beans with some onion and garlic, say, or carrots.

whatever chicken broth maybe whatever you put in them how would you use those in different ways

That's funny you ask, because on my sub stack, I was just working this morning on kind of a big batch white bean that then you can use three different ways for three different meals throughout the week. So in one of them, it's kind of a lunch salad with broccoli and dates and Dijon mustard. So you just take the beans out of the bean liquid and add them cold. Another one is a bean dip for...

that I put some crispy lamb on top of. So it's kind of a room temperature dip, but because you already cooked these beans and they're well seasoned, you just kind of have to mash them up to make the dip. And then another one is kind of keeping them in their broth and having them warm as a side for some fish and broccoli. Delicious. I'm a little bit cowed when it comes to beans. I know what to do with them in soup.

but I often don't know what to do with them otherwise. I have to up my bean game, I suppose. Another way to think about beans is they actually have a similar texture to me as pasta. So in many ways where you use pasta, you could use half pasta and half beans or all beans. Okay, so sort of a pastafisial kind of a approach to things. Yeah.

Or even in a pasta, like if you're making a pasta with sausage and kale, you could use beans instead of the pasta. So you have beans, sausage, and kale. Okay. All right. I can try that. And do you always cook your beans from scratch or do you have canned beans in the house? I have a lot of canned beans in the house. Okay. So it's not cheating.

No, definitely not. One more question from Chris. Chris wants to know, how far can we push the best by date when we're cooking? This is a real point of contention in my house. When it hits that date, I am getting rid of it and my husband would eat it for another month.

So the New York Times wrote a great article about this, which kind of debunked everything I thought I knew about best by dates. And the article written by Kenji Lopez basically said that the best by date means that the quality is the best at that point, but that after that point, it doesn't mean it's bad. It's just that its quality will be deteriorated.

So you can keep stuff for a really long time. For some things, some pantry things, he says you can keep it for months and months after that Best Buy date. What can't you keep for months and months? I mean, what about things like dairy products? So I think once they're opened, it's kind of a different story. And also, I think you need to use your nose and your eyes. If it smells kind of funky, if you're put off by it, please don't eat it.

Okay. Angie has the next question. It's all about ingredients that she needs to have on hand. What are the best meals to freeze and then reheat later or batch cook?

So the freezer is an amazing place where food stays good for a really long time. The tricky thing about a freezer is that when water freezes, the water expands. So in a lot of cases, whatever food you have, its structure will be lost by that expansion of water. The best things to freeze are things that kind of don't have a structure, like a soup or a stew or a casserole.

Similarly with frozen vegetables, if you try and take a frozen broccoli and roast it, it's probably going to be a little soggy because its structure is gone. So put it in a soup. Put it somewhere where it can be mushy and soft. The answer to the freezer is go soft. Go soft. So when you say has a structure, things that have a structure, you're talking about have a structure in nature already? So something like a crispy fried chicken,

all of that crisp will get soggy in the freezer. So anything that you expect to be crispy or chewy even, like a pasta, will get soggier in the freezer. So you really want something where its texture won't change too much in the freezer. And in most cases, that's kind of a soup or something with a lot of liquid. Okay. And...

In terms of keeping things at their best in the freezer, we were talking about Costco, you bring home a big thing of chicken parts and you want to portion them out so that you can use them when you use them and you don't have to defrost the whole big thing.

What do you need to do in order to safely wrap and store without laying down the money to buy a vacuum sealer? Yeah, I don't have a vacuum sealer. You don't need one. I don't have one either. And what I do is I put whatever parts I'm freezing out on a sheet pan, preferably a parchment lined sheet pan, and freeze that until all of the pieces are solid.

That could take an hour or two depending on how big the pieces are. And then I just put the pieces right in a zip top freezer safe bag. So they won't stick together in the bag and you can just pull out whatever you need. Does that work for all proteins? I also do it for like cooked grains or cooked lentils. You just spread them out on the sheet pan, freeze them, and then you can add kind of frozen rice or frozen lentils right to your soups. Fantastic.

What are some, this is our same reader, she'd like to know, what are some pantry staples to always have on hand so I don't always go to breakfast for dinner or frozen pizza as the default? I got to say breakfast for dinner is my favorite default. No dissing breakfast for dinner, but clearly she needs some alternatives. I would say, well, I'm surprised that you don't love canned chickpeas because that was going to be my answer.

I think beans, having beans on hand, basically having a cooked protein on hand is a really easy way to kind of jumpstart your cooking. I think having some sauces that are really flavorful from the start. So maybe that's your rouse tomato sauce. Maybe that's a Thai curry paste or something like that. But those are just really quick ways to add flavor to your canned bean or your pasta dish.

What do you do with the chickpeas? Let's dig into this. And this is from our earlier conversation earlier in the week. Allie was saying having chickpeas are on her list of top five. And I've tried to do the thing where you roast the chickpeas and they get crispy. I fail every time. So maybe it's just frustration with that. And the fact that I like hummus, but I don't love hummus.

What do you do with the chickpeas? I mean, I feel like, what can't you do with chickpeas? To start, I love just putting them in salads. I think they're a really nice texture. When my mom was in college, she would...

truly just drain a can of chickpeas and add balsamic vinegar and oil and it is really suspiciously good like I don't know why that's really all you need but I think it's it's great I love to add them into soup so if I'm doing just a simple vegetable soup and I want something a little bit heartier I'll add the chickpeas and the benefit of the chickpeas is you can kind of smash them on the side of the pot and add the creaminess to the soup that would otherwise kind of take a long time to simmer

I like to just saute them with spices. I have a recipe on the New York Times where it's just burst cherry tomatoes with chickpeas and curry powder. And you put that over yogurt. They're just like pops of creaminess in whatever you put them in. Okay, that one I'm definitely going to try. Before we take our last two questions, we're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsor.

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We are back with Ali Slagle. We've got a question from Elizabeth. Elizabeth writes, what are food items that we typically purchase at the store that would be easy to start making at home instead? So speaking of Rouse sauce, marinara sauce, I was thinking about this just today because on Rouse,

My times online, there is a recipe for a homemade marinara sauce that is being featured. I always judge these recipes by the number of stars, but also by the number of comments. And this one has a ton of five-star ratings and a ton of really good

glowing comments that you often don't get at the Times. I find the Times commenters are just very eager to change these brilliant recipes that you all put so much time and energy into writing. But this one was like, "No, you should make it just as written." A couple people said, "And I'm Italian, so you should trust me." The Times commenters are a really fun batch, and it makes our job really fun because they have a lot of opinions.

Marinara sauce is an interesting one because rouse is much more expensive than canned tomatoes. And you could very well just add some garlic and oil to a canned tomato and make a sauce. But there's something about the rouse that's extra good. I also think salad dressing is an interesting one because if you already have oil and vinegar and mustard at home or some lemons, it's much cheaper to make your own salad dressing than to buy salad dressing.

I think hummus is another one where you could certainly buy it, but also making it is very simple and also just really fun. Like you can make it taste exactly how you want it to taste.

Those are some good ones. I stopped buying salad dressing a long time ago. I used to buy Good Seasons, the one that you would mix up in the cruet, and then I realized how much sugar is in that, and that's why I like it so much. So now when I make my own salad dressing, I just add some honey, and I like it just as much. We've got one more question. This one comes from Kim, and I'm going to put a rule on her question. She says, what are some...

cheap ways to get more protein. We've already talked a lot about beans. What are some cheap non-bean ways to get more protein?

This is a great question because most likely a lot of people's grocery receipts, the most expensive thing on the grocery receipt is probably meat. And so finding plant-based proteins is a cheaper way to get protein and just kind of is fun, I think, to think about other ways to get protein. Do you count lentil as a bean? No. No, you can slide with the lentils.

So I think lentils are kind of underappreciated because you have to cook them, but they take 20 minutes. They don't take as long as a dried bean to cook. There are so many different kinds of lentils. There are black, green, brown, red. And I think they just offer a lot of different opportunities for a lot of flavorings. So I would say lentils are inexpensive. They're really fast and easy to cook and they're full of protein.

And where would you put eggs on the list of a value proposition? I know they're expensive these days compared to what they used to cost. But I always feel like if you're looking for an inexpensive protein, there's really...

nothing that is much cheaper than a couple of eggs. I totally agree with you. If you think about the price of a pork chop in comparison to three eggs, even right now, the eggs will still be cheaper. So I think eggs are a great way to get protein and they just offer so many interesting textures. So I'm pro-egg for sure.

pro-egg. Allie Slagle, thanks for being here. Thanks for answering all of our questions. Thank you, Jean. Just a reminder, Allie's sub stack is called 40 Ingredients Forever and her book, I Dream of Dinner So You Don't Have To. We'll see you next time.

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