Vegetable Stir Fry

Clearance vegetables

Pear Salad

 Fresh fruit and vegetables are hard to come by when your food comes from food banks. In general, there are always apples, oranges, potatoes, and carrots. Sometimes there are sweet potatoes, pears, summer and winter squash. 

We put aside about $15 a week and go to our main grocery store, located in the next town, every Wednesday. The store sends us coupons in the mail for some of the more common things we purchase on a regular basis. We use the coupons with the clearance fresh foods. 

Their truck shows up on Wednesday, so the fresh fruit and vegetable areas are cleaned out and put in a clearance bin on Wednesday morning. We use our coupons and go to the store about 9am. We check the fresh food section, bakery, and dairy. 

We can stretch the ability to have and eat fresh fruit and vegetables each of the four weeks between social security checks using this plan. Eat the clearance fresh vegetables first. Some of our coupons are for a free bag of salad mix. We purchase a salad mix that is long dated with the free bag of salad coupon and eat that later in the week. 

Grocery store purchases and food bank items that are long lasting such as broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, cabbage, celery, apples, winter squash are used later in the week or month as they hold better. We store them either in the refrigerator or in a crate in the back room. Our back room doesn't have much heat and the floor is quite cold, so it acts like a cold cellar. 

We plan our meals according to what we have for fresh foods. A couple of times a month, we take the vegetables that are a bit past edible and put them in a pot with water in a rolling slow boil them for an hour. We use a potato masher to crush the vegetables, then pour the vegetable mash through a strainer, allowing the liquid to pour into a bowl. Divide the liquid broth into freezer containers. Use the broth for a vegetable soup broth base. The pulp that is left over is fed to the chickens. Nothing is wasted.