Guest Post by Tiffany from Another Texas Family
I have always been frugal, used coupons, and shopped with cash only, but lately I have been inspired to save more. Our family is in the midst of saving for an adoption, and we have a dream of paying off our home in three years, so every little penny counts as one step closer to our BHAG.
As with everyone else, our food budget is where we are able to save the most money; therefore, I plan menus without fail, cook from scratch, and shop sales fliers. We eat leftovers regularly for dinner and lunch; however, we still end up with a few odds and ends being thrown away after meals.
On my quest to save more money, I read about a brilliant idea in The Tightwad Gazette and put it into practice a few months ago. Stick a bowl into your freezer and any sort of leftover from a meal gets dumped into the bowl to make into a soup at a later date. (Note: this is not food leftover from someone’s plate, which can spread germs and bacteria). It may include a few carrots left in the pot or stock leftover from soup, but it all gets dumped into the “soup bowl”.
I kept my practice of doing this a secret from my dear hubby, afraid of how the soup would eventually turn out. After a few months of gathering “ingredients” and after our first cold front blew in I gave the soup a try.
I dug through my freezer and pulled out all the leftovers I had collected:
::Tomato soup broth- leftover from a beef stew
::4 cups pinto beans — I cook whole beans and then freeze them for later use.
::4 cups black beans
::2 yogurt containers full of chicken, noodles & veggies
::Bag of carrots
The only two things I added from my pantry were corn and a packet of taco seasoning.
After cooking the soup I ladled it into bowls, added a little cheese, and then waited for my husband to arrive home. When he walked in the door he said, “Dinner smells great! What are we having?”
“Dave Ramsey Soup,” I replied, “Also know as ‘Get out of debt quickly soup’!”
He had a look of horror on his face when I told him what it was, but when we our first bites it was delicious! What I loved most is it cost me about $0.50 total and it lasted our family three nights plus lunch leftovers. I calculated it to cost about $.05 per serving with the cheese. Now that is what you call frugal!
Tiffany is a wife and mom to two preschoolers, where she is dipping her toe in the water as a first-year homeschooling mom. She lives in Texas where she blogs about all things family and shares her heart about adoption at Another Texas Family.com
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Great idea!! This Dave Ramsey girl loves the name too!
Good idea!
If you throw in cabbage or Brussels sprouts remains the entire batch will be rank, so keep those seperate until the last minute and then add them. The immersion blender method for making it all into a “cream” soup hides the vegetables and makes it very hearty, but even with that cabbage and sprout remains can ruin it.
We also keep a bag with all the apple cores and skins and when we have several freezer bags full I boil them with just enough water to cover them. When they are total mush, strain them through cheese cloth and you have apple juice or the basis for apple syrup or jelly. It also adds great flavor to apple pie, as long as you don’t add too much and make the pie runny.
I can’t believe I haven’t seen one comment yet calling this “Stone Soup”.
I used to teach preschool to some pretty finicky eaters, but after we read the book Stone Soup and made some in class from ‘a little of this and a little of that’ and made a big production of adding the (clean of course) stone at the end EVERYONE wanted to have some! The kids had a blast helping to make it too.
We just read that book too!
We have done this for years in our family. Our youngest calls if “freezer soup”. It is never quite the same but always good!
Wow! I have never heard of this idea before, but I think you just won me over to trying this out. Great article, and thank you for inspiring me.
We save all of our veggies too and add the following in a crockpot in the morning:
2 boxes of chicken broth
2 or 3 small cubes of vegetable boullion
2 tsp sage
1 potatato peeled and cubed (optional)
Cook on low all day in crockpot and add a cup of 1/2 and 1/2 to soup right before serving. It makes it really creamy and we get rave reviews.
If you want to spend a little more, add a frozen chicken breast to the mix in the morning and pull apart (and stir in) before serving.
I guess this isn’t as cheap as the “Dave” version but it’s still only a few dollars and it tastes great.
To make your version cheaper, make your own chicken stock and your own vegetable stock. I do this by cooking my chicken breasts with a few pieces of celery and carrots and water ( I do mine in the pressure cooker but I am sure you could adapt this to any method of cooking chicken in water such as in your crockpot). To make the vegetable broth, I save all of my vegetable juices from the cans or from the water that I cooked the veggies in. I put these in freezer containers for use in later cooking such as the leftover soup.
I wrote a guest post that was published today, and I advised people to do the same thing!
http://www.workathomemarket.com/7-tips-for-turning-your-trash-into-cash/
All my veggie ends and peels, onion skins, etc. go into a bag in the freezer. When it’s full; it’s time to make veggie broth. My family loves it.
When I was a little girl our family called it ” the soup bank”. All the leftover vegetable cooking water (where a lot of vitamins go) was kept to flavor, vitamin boost and be the next soup base.
We call this “Must Go” soup. You open the refrigerator (or freezer in your case) and everything must go!!!
I’ve been doing this for a few years now except I call it “kitchen sink soup”. Everything goes in it except the kitchen sink. It’s always fun to clean out the freezer and a surprise as to how the soup will turn out. Suddenly I have more room in my freezer and I find all my leftover bowls. Most of what we throw out is whatever is left on my kids plates. Most everything else either gets eaten or gets put into the soup bowl in the freezer.
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