Kitchen weekend

My pantry is looking a little empty.  There are certain foods I try to keep supplied because I use them so often.  One of those is mushrooms.  I eat mushrooms in just about everything.  I was down to my last two jars when I spotted these at Kroger.

Those became one canner load of half pint jars.  By the way, has anyone noticed that the mushrooms are not in one pound containers anymore?  The large are only 14 oz, the small only 7 oz, and the price is much higher than they have ever been. These were 50 percent off the regular price of $3.38 and $4.78.  Only about a year ago the price would have been $.99 for 8 ounces and $1.99 for a pound.

I saved a few to freeze for stuffed mushroom when I want them.  Well dang it!  I read the new Meijer ad that came out today.  Their mushrooms are on sale 10 for $10.  Just my luck.

I found these cauliflower on the discount table of Meijer.  Shelf price for these was $3.99 each.  Or was that per pound?  I forget. Anyway, I got these for one dollar apiece.  Yes, they do have dark spots on them but those are easily cut off.

I started to put them in the freezer but decided to pickle them instead.  I used the recipe from the Ball blue book which is a sort of sweet-sour taste.  Similar to the sweet-sour of bread and butter pickles. I will use these in place of pickle relish or eat them as is on sandwiches.  I sure hope I can find more.  I still want some for the freezer.  My small water bath canner holds 9 half pint jars.  The red top one was put into the fridge to become refrigerator pickled.

At Kroger I bought 6 pounds of ground chuck at $6.99 a pound.  I sure hated to spend that much but I haven’t been able to find any on discount lately.  There are just some meals which call for ground beef and nothing else will do.

I bottled it in half pint jars too.  Its about half a pound per jar before cooking which is just right for me.  I’ll be using these very sparingly.

Everything has gotten so much more expensive lately.  The old standby scrap food items I remember from my youth are now called “delicacy” and sold higher than everything else.  Chicken backs and necks or beef marrow bones which we could pick up for pennies or free are now higher priced than regular pieces of meat.  Pig ears and chicken feet were given to anyone who wanted them back then.  Now there are restaurants specializing in selling those.  Its become very difficult to fix frugal meals.  The times are a changing.  I’ll be glad when I can get back to the food bank again.

*** UPDATE  I looked back through some of my old posts and saw that mushrooms and cauliflower were about the same price back in 2013. They had come down in price for awhile but are back to those high prices again.