If you are reading this article, Mother’s Day will have come and gone, so it will have to be a “Women Day” piece.
As I was taking care of the left-over ham from Easter, I was thinking about what I paid for it and how many meals I will have gotten from it. I do this quite a bit with food I have bought and prepared, and also restaurant meals (Gary and I always take a “doggie” bag – even though our doggie is long gone, and we have become the doggies!). We find it kind of fun to see how we saved, or did not, and of course we were in the era of “waste not…..”
Now back to the ham. I splurged this year on the ham because (1) all the family was going to be together (usually some are traveling, working, etc.) and (2) a friend of mine said the hams from Brault’s Meat Market in Troy, VT, were wonderful as they do all their own smoking and prep. Of course, this comes at a higher price than the local supermarket, but I went for it. It was wonderful (if hams can be wonderful), and the day was wonderful though no egg hunts as all are over 20. The cost was $4.74/pound, and I bought a 17.2 lb. ham. There were 12 people eating, and I sent home enough ham for three meals to each family (3). I have since made seven meals for Gary and I and have frozen enough for — have to guess as it would depend on what I make, i.e., soup, casseroles. Boiled dinners? Another eight to10 meals. I have figured the cost per person, when all is said and done or, should say, cooked and eaten, comes to about $1.20/per person for about 70 meals.
Now I am finally getting around to the point of my article, the women who taught me (a lot) about how to prepare food for less money. Things like if you have a turkey (which are quite often on “special” at the holidays), you can make a tremendous number of meals from that one bird. If you buy a steak, it will feed one or maybe two people, but cut it up and add vegetables, rice or potatoes, and you can feed maybe six to 10.
The women I am, with GREAT fondness, remembering are my mother, Gary’s mother, my grandmother, and Gary’s two grandmothers. They all lived through the Depression and learned and, thankfully, passed on the knowledge that was needed in that awful time to feed the family. I will say they had the advantage of living in rural Vermont where they had, in some cases, a small farm but all had access to land that provided them with a place for a big garden. They all grew their vegetables, raised chickens, cows (never more than a dozen), baked their own bread, and what they did not have, they either went without, made substitutions, traded, or bartered with someone who had what they needed.
So as prices seem to rise, I do not feel I need to panic because I had good teachers on what to do in “tight” times and just hope I’ve passed some of this knowledge on to the next generation, and the next.
Leave a Reply