Cooking for a Crowd - Episode 11: Tomato Soup

Tomato Soup. Of course.

Actually I didn't originally plan to serve it this soon after making it, but I knew we were going to have a very crazy weekend which in turn would leave me not wanting to spend much time cooking.

I was right. Friday we were up super early and spent the day at my brother-in-law's place making applesauce. (Read about last year's applesauce day here.) It is always a huge production, and this year was certainly no exception. We broke the record and made over 1100 quarts in 8 hours. Some of that applesauce was saved aside for Sunday, when we were planning to turn it into apple butter. So Sunday was another early morning and long day. We were able to get 120 quarts of apple butter! If you've been reading the previous Crowd Cooking posts, you'll remember that Sunday is the day I serve these meals. So on apple butter Sunday, I was in charge of feeding everyone, on top of my husband and I being in charge of the whole apple butter event. But you know, we tend to attract crazy, and the whole lack of sleep and desire to cook didn't matter. I had tomato soup.

Two good things about the fact that we have a basement full of soup is this: it's cheap, and all you have to do is heat and serve. To go along with the meal, we made the classic grilled cheese sandwich, and a salad for the side. Here's the rundown on what we used, along with the expenses.

Tomato Soup -  I opened 12 quart jars, and we ended up with 2 quarts left over. Cost per quart was 50 cents x 12 = $6.00.

Grilled Cheese - The bread came from Aunt Millie's Bakery Thrift Store, where I got two giant (1.75 lb!) loaves of Italian bread for $0.89 each. I also got two regular sized loaves of wheat bread at $0.50/each. Total cost on bread was $2.78. The cheese was a large block of mozzarella that I got at our food service store for $2.19/lb. They can slice it on the spot, so I had them do that for me. The block of cheese was just over 6 pounds, and cost 13.40. I estimate I got around 80 slices out of it. We used about 3.5 pounds and had 2.5 pounds leftover. The butter was some I had in the freezer that I purchased this summer at $2.50/lb. We used 1.5 pounds of it, so the total butter cost was $3.75.
With bread, butter, and cheese, our total cost into the sandwiches equals $19.93, but if I subtract the leftover cheese ($5.40 worth), our sandwich expense is at $14.53. I had brought a loaf of homemade bread in case we needed more, but we ended up with enough of the bought bread leftover that we could've made a few more sandwiches.

Salad - 2 heads of lettuce @.97 each = $1.94, 1 cucumber @.50, 1 orange pepper @ 1.67, 1 bag croutons @$1.79, and several tomatoes that I had a free coupon for. For the salad dressing I had two jars of my homemade french and ranch, and also had 2 partially used store bought bottles of Italian and Thousand Island. We went through less than $1 worth of dressing total, but I'll call it a dollar for our figures. We ended up using only 1.5 heads of lettuce, and had a couple servings of salad leftover. Cost into the whole salad was $6.90.

Cost between all three parts total up to $27.43. This is an incredible number for the amount of people we were feeding (40). Our cost per person is at a low 68 cents! This is the lowest cost crowd meal since last December (which was .67 per serving)! I am rather pleased that the cost was this far under a dollar a serving. It helps make up for some of my higher months this summer.



Note: You can read more about the home-canned tomato soup here.

Canning Tomato Soup

Ah yes, I have more to tell about my last produce auction buy. Remember the acorn squash? Those were a great deal! The other buy I haven't mentioned, is the tomatoes. Lots of tomatoes!

Where I live, our first frost is generally the second-to-last week in September. This has been SO different, in that we just got our first frost the last week in October! This extended our growing season a substantial amount. I just brought in the last of my spinach a few days ago, and that completed our garden. So at the October 13 produce auction, there were plenty of tomatoes. Since most people don't expect to find them this late in the year, their canning had been done months before, in the peak of tomato season. So with there not being a market for them anymore, they were going really cheap.

Our tomatoes did terrible this year. The deer ate off most of the plants, too much rain killed another one, and there just weren't many blossoms left after all that. We were able to get enough to keep us eating fresh, but our canning tomatoes came from elsewhere. A friend of mine let me come clean out her tomato patch after she was finished with her canning, and I ended up getting several bushels! From that, I was able to cross a few items off my "we need to can this year" list. I was even able to can a pot of tomato soup - something we had been wanting to do since we were married, but weren't able to get ahold of the recipe until now. Yeah, we could've found someone else's recipe, but this tomato soup is different, and so much better than any either Aaron or I have ever tried. We figured we could go through at least a quart a week easy, so the batch I made from the friend's tomatoes wasn't quite as much as we figured we could go through in a year.

Produce auction to the rescue!

I mean, since they have been going for a mere $1 a box at the end of the season, I could easily get a few boxes and finish off what we needed. Get double that, and we wouldn't have to can any next year! Since we're all over not having to can everything every year, this sounded like a great plan. So I bid and I bought. The problem is, I didn't know how many quarts I could get per bushel. It never even occurred to me until after I brought them home. That might've been a good thing to know ahead of time. I mean, the two of us have canned several bushels of tomatoes in one day before, so I didn't think much of it. But then we started counting.... and figured I had just brought home about 11 bushels of tomatoes.

It still didn't faze me. I was excited, I hadn't spent a whole lot of money, and we were going to get our tomato soup that we wanted! After I brought Aaron out to see my purchase sitting there in the bed of the truck, we came inside and he asked when I was going to can it. Of course I said "Today!" I've always known tomatoes to be a more fragile fruit, so it's best not to let them sit and rot. They are so much easier to work with fresh. So I was going to start canning that afternoon. My amazing, supportive, go-with-the-flow husband jumped right in and assumed he was going to help me with it. I wasn't going to ask for his help, but all of a sudden he was working along side of me. His next question was asking where I planned to do it all. And of course, I said my kitchen. I mean, where else do I go to cook? But him being smarter than me said "Look, my brother has a huge commercial kitchen with a 10-burner stove. We could go over there and whip this stuff out in no time!" We have a tiny kitchen. I only have two stock pots, can only use one of them on my stove at a time, but have a two burner outdoor propane stove that we could use. Still, with our limited countertop space, this would be a huge task, so my visionary husband hardly needed to twist my arm before we were loading up jars, ingredients, canning equipment, and the kids to head on over to the canning kitchen.

Besides all the stove burners, stock pots, and stainless-steel countertops, another perk was that we could hose everything down when we were done! It hardly made a mess, but still, its nice that we didn't have to worry about tomato getting onto everything. 

The soup was pretty easy to make. We took the whole tomatoes (skin and all), and chopped them into a stock pot, and added a couple finely chopped onions to it. Let it cook down until soft and run the mixture through the Squeezo (or Victorio) strainer. The strainer is what separates the good stuff from the pulp. To make things go faster (and to save our arms), Aaron hooked his drill up to the strainer. He managed the tomato washing, soup straining, and canning. We both chopped the tomatoes and stirred the simmering pots, and I prepared the onions, mixed up the rest of the ingredients, and washed the dishes. A couple of nieces and nephews came out to watch, which led to them begging to try running the Victorio! The few minutes of extra help freed up some time for Aaron to get the canners going.

This is by far the biggest cooking pot I've ever seen! It holds about 15 gallons. It's so big, my 6-foot husband could hide behind it! 

Because we didn't get started until mid-afternoon, we could only get about half of the tomatoes finished. The rest of them looked to be in good enough condition that they would hold a few more days pretty well, so we went back two days later (Aaron's next off day), to finish them. All in all, we ended up with 191 quarts! This was um, more than anticipated. I was hoping for like 100. Looking on the bright side, we won't have to can tomato soup again until after the year 2022. Another good thing was the fact that I already had that many jars washed and ready in the basement, so that cut down on some time in the canning prep. The first summer we were married we went out and bought dozens upon dozens of jars in all sizes for an amazing price, and we still have a couple hundred of those jars sitting in the basement unused. 

Also, while the tomatoes were cheap, there was other cost into the rest of the ingredients, like onions, spices, salt, etc. Calculating all our expenses and dividing it 191 ways, we figure we made it all at 50 cents per quart. That's not bad at all for a can of soup. If you went out and bought a small can of Campbell's soup (which isn't even comparable in flavor) at retail, you'd be spending more than that! With that being said, if you're in the market for some tomato soup, I might be able to work out a deal for you. Otherwise, don't be surprised if you happen to find some under your Christmas tree.

Pumpkin Sales

Now that pumpkin growing season is officially over, it's time for a report on our crop!

You may remember that we started our pumpkin plants from seed this year in hopes of getting an earlier harvest. We used our mini greenhouse during some of the cooler spring days and nights, and ended up losing a few plants from accidentally leaving the heater on during the day once. I have since bought a light timer, so that should prevent this from happening again in the future. 

I planted three different varieties of pumpkins: Howden, Jack O'Lantern, and pie pumpkins from seeds I had saved a couple years ago. This was my first year branching out and trying anything other than a pie pumpkin. I was aiming to try a couple new varieties, while also getting a nice range in size. I'd say I had the best success with my pie pumpkins. The yield was much better on these than each of the other kinds. I harvested almost as many pie pumpkins as I did the other two varieties combined. The Howden did the second best. It gave nice, uniform fruit with really pretty grooves. They are more round and robust in shape, making for a nice decorative autumn squash, rather than a taller and narrow(ish) pumpkin like you would normally see carved. The Jack O' Lantern variety didn't leave me too pleased. These pumpkins did really well at the beginning of the season, growing big and fast, but they seemed to stop growing halfway through the summer, and never filled out. If you look at the picture I had posted earlier this summer (I'll post it again below), it's the one on the left. See how long it is? It was a good 12" long when I took the picture, but didn't grow beyond that! The skin was pretty tough, and they had a hard time turning orange. I probably got 7-8 of these long pumpkins (from several plants!), and only picked one orange one, and one other that had turned color only halfway. The rest sat out in the garden doing absolutely nothing. I'm not sure if there were a few defective seeds in the bunch or what, but they honestly don't even resemble pumpkins to me. They remind me more of an elongated green spaghetti squash.

In this image, you can see the one longer pumpkin there on the right. Isn't it weird looking?

My goal in planting pumpkins was to set them out at a farm stand in front of our property and sell them to help cover my garden expenses for the year. Unfortunately not only did the yellow cucumber beetles appear early in the season, but we had a terrible infestation of gray squash bugs, as well. I felt like I was battling a war against them, and there being hundreds of them to one of me, they got out of hand fast. These bugs killed about half of the buds, so ... we lost almost half of our pumpkins. 

In order to hit the busy buying season, I needed to start selling them by the middle to end of September. I had a few orange ones picked and ready by then, but didn't get my stand up until October 2nd. We live on a fairly main road heading into town, so I knew there would be plenty of people driving by, but when a day had past and nobody stopped I started getting discouraged and thought maybe my price was a little high. I had priced them competitively, but wondered if I needed to have them a bit lower just to get people to make a special stop just for pumpkins. While I procrastinated and thought about it, I got my first and second customers, and then felt like if I lowered the price at that point, those buyers might feel like they got a bad deal, so I just left the prices alone. Over the next two weeks I sold quite a few more pumpkins. The most common amount spent at the stand was $3-4 per customer, but there were a few that spent between $5-12 and bought more of the larger ones. 

When I was out picking the pumpkins, I had a few that lost their stems in the process. That really bugged me, because in general, people go for the ones with stems. I felt like I was losing a dollar every time one of the stems popped off. Because I didn't have a huge crop of pumpkins compared to what I was hoping for, I put the stemless ones out there anyway, to add bulk to the table. As the old farmer's market saying goes, "Pile 'em high, and watch 'em fly!" I ended up selling all of the ones I had out there without stems! They didn't go right away, but eventually someone chose them for their own. I sold that funny long pumpkin, too!

As I mentioned earlier, I tried to price them competitively. The pie pumpkins all went for $1, and the largest pumkins for $4. I had some in between ones that I had marked at $2 and $3, depending on size. The $1 pie pumpkins and the $3 medium-large ones were gone the fastest. I had a container out there so it was a self-serve, help yourself stand. A few people must not have felt comfortable leaving their money out there, so they knocked on my door to hand the money right to me. That works for me too, but it's nice not having to feel like I needed to be watching the driveway all day long. I ended up selling all the pumpkins out there, with the exception of one greener funny-looking long pumpkin that I put out later in the season. My total earnings off pumpkins came to $57! I was not expecting to do that well, especially with such a piddly little crop. I am super excited to have a reward at the end of the somewhat stressful gardening season. It makes it all feel worth it. This has more than covered the cost of seeds for 2017, and will cover next year's as well. Seeing how much I was able to make off a mini pumpkin patch has gotten me a touch ambitious for next year, and I may have been planning my next garden already.... If I can do that well on a few pumpkins, what if I expand the stand a bit and sell some more produce next year? Or, if you read my recent post titled "Deal of the Week", you heard about my other business idea; selling at the produce auction. 

Find of the Week

Over the weekend I happened upon a yard sale out in the country, so as one might expect, curiosity made my car turn into the driveway. I was sure it was way past sale season, being that it's the end of October, but on a warm 70-some degree morning it just felt right.

The sale was a very small one, and I learned it was made up of leftovers from a yard sale they had earlier that summer. I was met with a good morning and a "Just ignore the price tags. Everything is name-your-price today." Just walk by her table, barely say "Would you take..." and she would say yes. I left with a few old Taste of Home and Quick Cooking magazines, since I love browsing recipes and am eager to try a few new ones this winter. I had been meaning to get to the library to borrow some but this deal was even better, because I don't have to worry about returning them, I can cut out recipes if I feel like it, and I don't have to stress out about my kids getting ahold of them. The other thing I found was something I have had on my yard sale "to-find" list for two years. I've been wanting a jar tall enough to store dried spaghetti noodles. My pantry is all on open shelving in my kitchen, due to a tiny house and very limited storage and cupboard space. I didn't realize how hard it was to find a tall jar until I decided I wanted one! In the picture above I have a gallon jar standing next to it for comparison. These gallon jars have always been the tallest jars on my shelves; they are even taller than Ball half-gallon jars. The new spaghetti jar towers over them all, and is absolutely perfect for what I need!

Have you found any exciting-to-you deals lately?

Deal of the Week

All summer there has been a produce auction going on just down the road from us. The auction is held twice a week, and I have been a frequent goer, to browse, bid, and enjoy a little bit of fresh air away from home to help keep me sane.

Being a former farmer's market salesperson, business manager, and hired hand, I heard plenty about food/produce auctions from other vendors, but didn't really know how they worked. It got my curiosity though, and with my love for food, this became something that I wanted to experience for myself. So when the auction opened up here in my town last summer, I was pretty excited! Being that I live in Amish country, it is owned and operated by a couple of amish families. There are lots of vendors from the community that bring all sorts of things to sell- from flowers to green beans to fresh homemade pies and butter. 

Now that I'm a housewife and am in charge of purchasing groceries, I have found it very helpful to keep on top of the going rate for fresh produce, and have enjoyed expanding my education in this department especially being a gardener myself. Dreaming of running a little roadside stand one day, I now have an inside peek at what people pay for wholesale produce, and can measure how much profit they might be making when they resell at their own stand. While I have no desire to resell other people's produce, I DO have an idea how much I could get for my own vegetables, should I have an abundance and decide to take it to auction to be sold. 

Our current gardening/canning plan is to pick a couple staple products to grow each year, but plant enough to last us for a few years. For example, next year we will need green beans. Instead of planting enough for us for a year, we plan to grow a large patch of beans, can enough to last three years, and then not have to worry about them for awhile. We planted three rows of beans the summer of 2015, and they will last us until spring 2018. If we plant four rows of beans, we'll be able to take at least a bushel to auction every week, earning us a minimum of $20 per week, for not much extra effort. (According to this year's going rate of $22-36 per bushel of green beans. Auction keeps 10% of earnings.)

Okay, I've gotten a little sidetracked here. While some prices raised my eyebrows at the auction, there have been other times I've found great deals on things I could use. Last week, well... if I was trying to watch my spending, I should've not taken the checkbook, and only limited myself to the amount of cash I had on hand like I normally do. But I did have it along with me, and I ended up needing to use it. Even though my grand total spending for the day was high, I stocked up on some great deals. 

Eggs. I bought 24 dozen eggs for $0.50-.75 less than I normally pay per dozen. Yes, 24 dozen is a lot of eggs for a family of two adults and two small children, but we can go through an easy 3 dozen a week. Because these are fresh eggs, they will last much longer than any you'll find on the grocery store shelf. I now have enough to last us into December, but I saved between $12.00 and $16.00 doing so. To me, this is a HUGE savings. 

Acorn Squash. This is my favorite. It has great sentimental qualities to me, as this is the squash variety I grew up on. My mom would cut them in half and bake with a pat of butter, chopped walnuts, a dash of cinnamon, and a splash of maple syrup, and it was the most delicious thing ever. Aaron however, grew up on Butternut squash, and that is the only variety he really cares for. Since I'm a general squash lover, I gladly grow his variety to feed us all through the winter. But at the auction I got a box of 40 acorn squash for $0.10 a piece! At that price, I decided it would be an excellent way to feed Adam and me lunch on the days Aaron works away from home. I can put the squash halves in the crock pot and have an easy meal for two for less than 50 cents, including the cost of the toppings! (I will omit the walnuts, to keep cost lower.) That's better than sandwiches, because the bread alone would cost the two of us about 40 cents per meal.

I spent a bit more on produce that day, but that will be another post for another day. It's a big story.

Cooking for a Crowd: Episode 10 - Sloppy Joes

It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon. I stepped outside to enjoy a breath of fresh air and a leisurely walk to check on the garden. Feeling the soft green grass beneath my feet, everything in me is set to ease in the calm, quiet outdoors. Walking past the rope swing hanging down from a tall but weathered tree, I remember. Crowd meal tomorrow.

Oh yeah.

Oops. Somehow even though it was written on my calendar in black letters, which I had seen previously in the week, it had slipped my mind, and I had the rest of my Saturday to throw something together. 

I'm such a wing-it person. It seems like these last-minute things are attracted to me. I try to plan ahead, but somehow ... it just doesn't work for me. I'd love tips and tricks, if you all wouldn't mind filling the comment box below to help me out. I need help.

My original plan (from months ago), has been to make a certain yummy summery casserole for my next crowd meal, but that plan kept getting shoved off month after month due to either lack of time, or lack of desire to use the oven for cooking. Well, this particular weekend we had record-breaking, sweltering hot temperatures. In fact we - north-central Michigan - went on record as the second warmest place in the United States that weekend, at 91*. This being said, it was no time to be slaving away in a hot kitchen. Thus our decision to put off that casserole yet another month, and find something more friendly to warmer weather. 

I wasn't prepared, so my meal had to be fast enough to throw together in an evening (or the next morning), and I had to be able to find everything locally for a half-decent price, regardless of sales. We decided on sloppy joes, since that was something I could heat in the crock-pot, and also went well with cold sides. Aaron really wanted potato salad, so the sloppy joe meal idea was kind of formed around that. :) 

Main Dish

I was hoping to find meat for around $2.00/lb, so I went to the "cheap store" in town. It just opened this summer, and I have been there twice to get meat on sale, both times around $1.79/lb. So while I was hoping for a sale, I figured their non-sale price couldn't be too much more than that. Unfortunately it was not ground beef sale week, so I paid full price, which I believe was $2.39/lb. My goal was to get 10 lbs and spend $20 on meat, but I ended up getting closer to 9lbs and spending $20.82. I had a few pounds of cheap ground beef in the freezer at home, but I wasn't sure exactly how much and didn't want to have to wait for it to thaw before I could get started cooking. I need to gather all those random containers and compile them for my next beefy crowd meal. If I can remember to plan ahead. Anyhow. The worst thing about buying cheap meat at a non-sale price, is that this stuff was 73/27 beef-fat ratio, which means over 1/4 of it disappeared when I cooked the meat. I really, really dislike buying meat at this ratio, even if it is a half okay price, because I feel like whatever money I'm trying to save all drains out in grease. By the time I added my filler ingredients to actually turn the meat into the meal, my cost into the sloppy joe was around $23.50. I was able to find hamburger buns at retail for a nice low price of $1.09/package, which isn't much higher than the Aunt Millie's Bakery Thrift Store, but I get an extra week shelf life! I bought 6 packages of 8, totalling $6.54.

Sides

For sides, we went simple. Aaron got his potato salad, and we decided on baked beans as the second option. Looking back, I wish I would've gone with something of lighter fare, like watermelon or a veggie tray, just to give the meal more variety. This actually really bugged me. A well-rounded meal should not consist of only heavy foods. At least not on a super hot day. My cost into sides was around $12.05 between the salad and beans. I used 4 28-ounce cans of beans, in case ya'll are trying to calculate numbers for your own event. 

Leftovers

There was quite a bit of food leftover, due to less people eating than originally anticipated. I'd say there were 25 mouths to feed. We brought home half of the sloppy joe meat, two packs of buns, and several servings of potato salad. It was at least $14 worth of leftovers, and was enough to feed us for two suppers with both salad and sloppy joe and a couple more lunches of sloppy joe. 

In conclusion, my total bill for the meal was $42.09, which is a couple dollars over what I try to spend when cooking for 40. I'm not really sure how to calculate the per serving cost here. Do I divide the total expense by 40 [$1.05/person], or by the 25 [$1.68/person] I actually served? Do I subtract the cost of leftovers, and divide the remainder [$28.09] by 25 mouths [$1.12/person]?

Cooking for a Crowd: Episode 9 - Applesauce Cake

I always ask Aaron's opinion when I'm planning a crowd meal. He is so good at giving me ideas and suggestions, and helps me not to stress over it all, even though the popular answer I seem to get from him is "Baby, I don't know! You're so much better at figuring out food than I am." Other times, he pops out with whatever is the first thing that comes to mind, and often it's a delicious, fairly easy meal to make. I don't think he realizes what a help he is when it comes to meal planning.

Maybe dessert is a little easier for him to come up with ideas though, because this was one of the times that he had an immediate suggestion: 

Applesauce cake.

Now I've never made applesauce cake before, so this was a completely random idea. Maybe by now you've gathered that I'm the kind of person who likes making new foods, so this suggestion seemed like good advice to me. I asked how he likes his applesauce cake, and he proceeded to tell me that it's simple to make and - just like how he eats every spice cake/bread- it has to be served with applesauce. I didn't have a recipe for the cake from his [growing up] farm days, so I began doing some research. It didn't take me a minute and I had a recipe to try! 

The day I was scheduled to serve dessert, we were expecting to serve around half the usual number. Normally I would need to make several pans (or at least a half-sheet pan) in order to provide enough to go around, but since we estimated 20 guests, a 9x13" pan would be sufficient. Of course, I can't make a new recipe without testing it first, so I doubled it and ended up putting 1+1/2x in the 9x13 pan, and put the other 1/2 recipe in a bread pan so we could sample it. 

***Pause typing*** Husband just called and asked if I could make some more this afternoon.

Okay, I'm back. Maybe that will get the point across on how seriously addicting this stuff is!

The day the meal was being served we had other obligations, so we didn't stick around long for dessert. When we left, around half of the pan had been consumed. I had cut it in 18 pieces, and from what I observed, it seemed to be just right for the smaller crowd that day. I did serve it with applesauce as well, but am unsure of how many quarts were eaten. We took over either 2 or 3 quarts.

This recipe is another one I hope to share with you one day, but I have some tweaking to do before that happens. Somehow one recipe isn't enough to fill the pan size it says, and also the baking time seems to be off. I need to make another batch (which clearly shouldn't be a problem) and try to work it out for you all.

My cost into ingredients I figured out at $2.08. The recipe called for walnuts, but I omitted them partially because I didn't have any, but also because it would be a huge added expense. Tack on two quarts of applesauce at .50/jar, and the dessert cost comes to $3.08. Divide by 18 pieces, and that leaves us with a cost of $0.17 per serving. I use fresh farms eggs that I get here locally, which are a considerable amount more than grocery store prices. Had I bought cheap store eggs, I could've reduced my total cost by 51 cents, bringing our cost per serving down to $0.14/piece.