This website features articles about how to eat healthier for less money. They are excerpts of and a companion to a book I'm writing about this topic. For more information, see my About page.
Eggs are one of those foods that the media have named angel, then devil and then angel again. What should we believe? Are they healthy or not? Spoiler alert! Deviled eggs aren’t the devil anymore.
I make about $6.40 per hour while watching TV by repurposing newspaper to make my own news pots instead of buying peat pots. You’d think newspaper would make flimsy seedling pots, but these pots are quite sturdy. My instructions are a little different (better! but I’m biased) than others I’ve seen on the internet.
A Thrifty Table reader asked if I could give her a calendar of activities for starting a garden. What a great idea for a post! Growing your own vegetables is enchanting and fulfilling. Eating your home-grown vegetables is certainly healthy. Follow me through my gardening year as I describe the ups and downs and present economical strategies for growing my own food.
The dead of winter is alive with citrus. It is sweet and juicy, being picked at the peak of ripeness. The simplest thing to do is just eat it. But if you want to take citrus a bit further and stretch your dollar a bit more, consider saving the peel and making it into candy.
Regardless of the headlines of the last 5 years or so, butter is loaded with saturated fat, which is not good for your health…but it tastes sooooo good! What to do? Read about why saturated fat is still bad for you (despite the optimistic press) and how you can still get that buttery taste while saving your arteries and your money. Now that’s hard to beat.
During the holiday season, I like to find ways to add a little special sparkle to my recipes without resorting to lots of saturated fat or sugar. Fried sage is a garnish that will make your savory holiday dishes taste richer with a bonus crunchy texture, but its 100% healthy. Delicious!
I talk to a lot of people who like the idea of vegetable gardening, but don’t feel they have the time to devote to it. I am a gardener, but this year, I didn’t plant and tend my usual patch. Still, I got quite a lot of produce out of my garden. How is that possible? Some plants just keep growing weather you tend them or not, and can give you free food for very little effort.
I repeated my June experiment pitting the farmer’s market against the grocery store for produce prices. Why? Because, as a scientist, I feel the more data, the better. The results really knocked my socks off because the farmer’s markets dominated the grocery store…both on quality and price!
The benefits of removing sugar from one’s diet go beyond those effects that people typically desire which can take weeks to months: weight loss for example or improvement in blood sugar numbers. Within two weeks, removing sugar from my diet helped me recapture a piece of my inner child.
On June 24th and 25th, I headed out to four of the largest weekend farmer’s markets in my home town of Colorado Springs to see what was available at this date, which is for us very early in the farmer’s market season, and what it cost. I then headed to the grocery store to see if I could find the same produce and do a head-to-head comparison. I checked prices both at our local regular-sort of grocery store, King Soopers, and then at the more upscale Whole Foods.
Since it’s summertime, here’s a tip for using your ginger peelings to make iced ginger tea. I just tried this recently.
Making my own cheese helps preserve my milk resources, saving me money, but also unexpectedly enriches my connection to history, evoking tales of the Italian countryside.
