Mailbag: All Of Your Grocery and Cooking Questions, Answered

Summary

HerMoney with Jean Chatzky – Episode Summary: "Mailbag: All Of Your Grocery and Cooking Questions, Answered"

Release Date: February 21, 2025

In this engaging episode of HerMoney, host Jean Chatzky teams up once again with culinary expert Ali Slagle to tackle listeners' burning questions about grocery shopping, meal prepping, food preservation, and affordable protein options. Below is a detailed summary of their insightful discussions, complete with notable quotes and timestamps to guide you through the episode's key points.

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1. Saving Money with Bulk Shopping and Economical Cooking

Questions from Chris: Best way to shop per meal each week in bulk and the most economical way of cooking.

Jean opens the episode by addressing Chris’s queries about optimizing grocery shopping and cooking to save money.

Ali Slagle emphasizes the importance of aligning cooking habits with personal lifestyles:

"[...] the answer to the question is really thinking about how cooking can fit into your life." (02:05)

She recommends bulk shopping for frequently used pantry items at stores like Costco, suggesting staples such as canned chickpeas and olive oil. For cooking, Ali advocates preparing large batches of versatile ingredients that can be incorporated into multiple meals throughout the week. For example, cooking a big pot of beans or grains can serve as the foundation for various dishes, enhancing both convenience and cost-effectiveness.

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2. Understanding Best By Dates for Food Safety

Follow-up question from Chris: How far can we push the best by date when cooking?

Jean brings up a common household debate regarding the interpretation of "best by" dates on food packages.

Ali Slagle references a New York Times article by Kenji Lopez-Alt to clarify:

"The best by date means that the quality is the best at that point, but that after that point, it doesn't mean it's bad. It's just that its quality will be deteriorated." (05:34)

She advises that many pantry items remain safe to consume well past their best by dates, focusing instead on quality. However, she cautions that opened items and perishables like dairy products require more careful consideration. Ali underscores the importance of using sensory cues—smell and appearance—to determine the edibility of foods beyond their labeled dates.

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3. Freezing and Batch Cooking Techniques

Question from Angie: Best meals to freeze and reheat later or batch cook.

Jean and Ali delve into effective freezing strategies to maximize food longevity without compromising quality.

Ali Slagle explains the science behind freezing:

"The tricky thing about a freezer is that when water freezes, the water expands. So in a lot of cases, whatever food you have, its structure will be lost by that expansion of water." (06:07)

She recommends freezing foods that maintain their integrity despite structural changes, such as soups, stews, and casseroles. These dishes typically contain high liquid content, which minimizes texture loss. Ali advises against freezing items that rely on crispness or specific textures, like fried chicken or roasted vegetables, as they tend to become soggy upon thawing.

For portioning large quantities of meat or grains, Ali suggests the following method without needing a vacuum sealer:

1. Freeze Individually: Spread the food items on a parchment-lined sheet pan and freeze until solid (07:55).
2. Bagging: Transfer the frozen items into a zip-top freezer-safe bag to prevent sticking and allow easy portioning (07:57).

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4. Homemade Alternatives to Store-Bought Items

Question from Elizabeth: What store-purchased food items can be easily made at home?

Jean shares an interest in homemade marinara sauce sparked by a highly-rated New York Times recipe, leading into Ali’s recommendations.

Ali Slagle highlights several cost-effective and customizable options:

"Marinara sauce is an interesting one because Rao's is much more expensive than canned tomatoes and you could very well just add some garlic and oil to a canned tomato and make a sauce." (13:18)

She also suggests making homemade salad dressings and hummus as excellent alternatives. By preparing these items at home, consumers can tailor flavors to their preferences and reduce reliance on store-bought versions that are often pricier and may contain unwanted additives.

Jean echoes this sentiment, sharing her personal switch from commercial salad dressings to homemade versions sweetened with honey for a healthier alternative.

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5. Affordable Protein Sources Beyond Beans

Question from Kim: Cheap ways to get more protein besides beans.

Addressing the rising costs of meat, Jean and Ali explore budget-friendly protein alternatives that are both nutritious and versatile.

Ali Slagle underscores the value of plant-based proteins:

"Lentils are kind of underappreciated because you have to cook them, but they take 20 minutes. [...] they're really fast and easy to cook and they're full of protein." (14:17)

She highlights lentils as an excellent option, available in various types like black, green, brown, and red, each offering different culinary uses. Additionally, Ali advocates for the affordability and versatility of eggs:

"If you think about the price of a pork chop in comparison to three eggs, even right now the eggs will still be cheaper. So I think eggs are a great, a great way to get protein and they just offer so many interesting textures." (15:09)

Jean concurs, pointing out that despite recent price increases, eggs remain one of the most cost-effective protein sources available.

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Conclusion

In this episode, Jean Chatzky and Ali Slagle provide valuable insights into smart grocery shopping, effective meal prepping, understanding food labeling, and identifying affordable protein sources. Their practical advice empowers listeners to make informed decisions that balance budget constraints with nutritional needs, all while maintaining culinary enjoyment.

For more detailed tips and personalized advice, consider subscribing to HerMoney or exploring Ali Slagle’s Substack, 40 Ingredients Forever, and her book, I Dream of Dinner So You Don't Have To.

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Notable Quotes:

• "The best by date means that the quality is the best at that point, but that after that point, it doesn't mean it's bad." — Ali Slagle (05:34)
• "The tricky thing about a freezer is that when water freezes, the water expands." — Ali Slagle (06:07)
• "Lentils are kind of underappreciated because you have to cook them, but they take 20 minutes." — Ali Slagle (14:17)
• "If you think about the price of a pork chop in comparison to three eggs, even right now the eggs will still be cheaper." — Ali Slagle (15:09)

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Resources Mentioned:

• Just a Reminder / I Dream of Dinner So You Don't Have To by Ali Slagle
• HerMoney Newsletter
• Ali Slagle’s Substack: 40 Ingredients Forever

Produced by Hayley Pascalides. Music by Video Helper. Distributed via Megaphone.

Transcript

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[Jean Chatzky]

Foreign hey everyone, I'm Jean Chatky. Thanks so much for joining me today on Her Money. Today we are bringing you a mailbag all about the best ways to shop at the grocery store, what best buy dates really mean, and other burning questions about how to save money on food. If you listen to our Wednesday episode this week, you know all about Ali Slagle and why she truly believes you only need 4:40 ingredients forever to make endless meals. Her book, Just a Reminder is also called I Dream of Dinner so you don't have to go check it out if you haven't listened yet to the episode. And be sure to check out her substack as well. We asked our hermoney Facebook community what questions they had about cooking. Got some amazing ones. Ali, thanks so much for being here again.

[Ali Slagle]

Thank you for having me.

[Jean Chatzky]

Our first couple of questions come from Chris. They're about shopping and meal prep to save the most money. I'll read them and we can just go to it. Sound okay?

[Ali Slagle]

Let's do it.

[Jean Chatzky]

What is the best way to shop per meal each week in bulk depending on the items to save the most money each month. And what's the most economical way of cooking? Large batch double protein for multiple recipes, batch cook meal prep a few days a week. Those are some really interesting questions.

[Ali Slagle]

They are. And they they offer a lot of opportunities for cooking when you can't necessarily cook every single night. I think the answer to the question is really thinking about how cooking can fit into your life. So if you love to go to Costco, which I know we both do, Costco is a great place to stock up on the pantry things that you use really often. For me that's canned chickpeas or olive oil. If you have space to store those things, that's a great way to save money. In terms of cooking. I like to make a big batch of something that I know I can use in a bunch of different ways. So maybe that's cooking beans from dried or cooking a whole grain. Something that would take a long time on a Tuesday night, but that I might have time to do while I'm working or over the weekend or something like that.

[Jean Chatzky]

When you say you use beans a bunch of different ways. If you make a pot of beans, right, you just cook up some beans with some onion and garlic, say, or whatever, Chicken broth, maybe whatever you put in them. How would you use those in different ways?

[Ali Slagle]

That's funny you asked, because on my substack, I was just working this morning on kind of a big batched white bean that then you can use three different ways for three different meals throughout the week. So in one of them, it's kind of a lunch salad with broccoli and dates and Dijon mustard. So you just take the beans out of the bean liquid and add them cold. Another one is a bean dip that I put some crispy lamb on top of. So it's kind of a room temperature dip. But because you already cooked these beans and they're well seasoned, you just kind of have to mash them up to make the dip. And then another one is kind of keeping them in their broth and having them warm as a side for some fish and broccoli.

[Jean Chatzky]

Delicious. I'm a little bit cowed when it comes to beans. I know what to do with them in soup, but I often don't know what to do with them. Otherwise I have to up my bean game.

[Ali Slagle]

I suppose another way to think about beans is they actually have a similar texture to me as pasta. So in many ways, where you use pasta, you could use half pasta and half beans or all beans.

[Jean Chatzky]

Okay, so sort of a pasta Fischer kind of a approach to things.

[Ali Slagle]

Or even in a pasta, like if you're making a pasta with sausage and kale, you could use beans instead of the pasta. So you have bean, sausage and kale.

[Jean Chatzky]

Okay, all right, I can try that. And do you always cook your beans from scratch or do you have canned beans in the house?

[Ali Slagle]

I have a lot of canned beans in the house.

[Jean Chatzky]

Okay, so it's not cheating?

[Ali Slagle]

No, definitely not.

[Jean Chatzky]

One more question from Chris. Chris wants to know how far can we push the best buy date when we're cooking? This is a real point of contention in my house. When it hits that date, I am getting rid of it, and my husband would eat it for another month.

[Ali Slagle]

So the New York Times wrote a great article about this, which kind of deep debunked everything I thought I knew about best by dates. And the article written by Kenji Lopez Alt basically said that the best by date means that the quality is the best at that point, but that after that point, it doesn't mean it's bad. It's just that its quality will be deteriorated. So you can keep stuff for a really long time for some things, some pantry things. He says it can. You can keep it for months and months after that Best Buy date.

[Jean Chatzky]

What can't you keep for months and months? I mean, what about things like dairy products?

[Ali Slagle]

So I think once they're opened, it's kind of a different story. And also, I think you need to use your nose and your eyes. If it smells kind of funky, if you're put off by it, please don't eat it.

[Jean Chatzky]

Okay, Angie has the next question. It's all about ingredients that she needs to have on hand. When what are the best meals to freeze and then reheat later or batch cook?

[Ali Slagle]

So the freezer is an amazing place where food stays good for a really long time. The tricky thing about a freezer is that when water freezes, the water expands. So in a lot of cases, whatever food you have, its structure will be lost by that expansion of water. The best things to freeze are things that kind of don't have a structure like a soup or a stew or a casserole. Similarly, with frozen vegetables, if you try and take a frozen broccoli and roast it, it's probably going to be a little soggy because its structure is gone. So put it in a soup, put it somewhere where it can be mushy and soft. The answer to the freezer is go soft.

[Jean Chatzky]

Go soft. So when you say has a structure, things that have a structure, you're talking about have a structure in nature already.

[Ali Slagle]

So something like a crispy fried chicken, all of that crisp will get soggy in the freezer. So anything that you expect to be crispy or chewy, even like a pasta, will get soggier in the freezer. So you really want something where its texture won't change too much in the freezer. And in most cases, that's kind of a soup or something with a lot of liquid.

[Jean Chatzky]

Okay. And in terms of keeping things at their best in the freezer, we were talking about Costco. You bring home a big thing of chicken parts, and you want to portion them out so that you can use them when you use them, and you don't have to defrost the whole big thing. What do you need to do in order to safely wrap and store without laying down the Money to buy a vacuum sealer.

[Ali Slagle]

Yeah, I don't have a vacuum sealer. You don't need one.

[Jean Chatzky]

I don't have one either.

[Ali Slagle]

What I do is I put whatever parts I'm freezing out on a sheet pan, preferably a parchment lined sheet pan, and freeze that until all of the pieces are solid. That could take an hour or two, depending on how big the pieces are. And then I just put the pieces right in a zip top freezer safe bag so they won't stick together in the bag and you can just pull out whatever you need.

[Jean Chatzky]

Does that work for all proteins?

[Ali Slagle]

I also do it for like cooked grains or cooked lentils. You just spread them out on the sheet pan, freeze them, and then you can add kind of frozen rice or frozen lentils right to your soups.

[Jean Chatzky]

Oh, fantastic. What are some. This is our same reader. She'd like to know what are some pages? Pantry staples to always have on hand. So I don't always go to breakfast for dinner or frozen pizza as the default. I gotta say breakfast for dinner is my favorite default. No, no dissing breakfast for dinner. But clearly she needs some alternatives.

[Ali Slagle]

I would say. Well, I'm surprised that you don't love canned chickpeas, because that was gonna be my answer. I think beans, having beans on hand, basically having a cooked protein on hand is a really easy way to kind of jumpstart your cooking. I think having some sauces that are really flavorful from the start. So maybe that's your Rao's tomato sauce, maybe that's a Thai curry paste or something like that. But those are just really quick ways to add flavor to your. Your canned bean or your pasta.

[Jean Chatzky]

What do you do with the chickpeas? Let's dig into this. And this is from our earlier conversation. Earlier in the week, Allie was saying having chickpeas are on her list top five. And I've tried to do the thing where you roast the chickpeas and they get crispy. I fail every time. So maybe it's just frustration with that and the fact that I like hummus, but I don't love hummus. What do you do with the chickpeas?

[Ali Slagle]

I mean, I feel like, what can't you do with chickpeas? To start? I love just putting them in salads. I think they're a really nice texture. When my mom was in college, she would truly just drain a can of chickpeas and add balsamic vinegar and oil. And it is really suspiciously good. Like, I don't know why that's really all you need, but I think it's, it's great. I love to add them into soups. So if I'm doing just a simple vegetable soup and I want something a little bit heartier, I'll add the chickpeas. And the benefit of the chickpeas is you can kind of smash them on the side of the pot and adds a creaminess to the soup that would otherwise kind of take a long time to simmer. I like to just saute them with spices. I have a recipe on the New York Times where it's just burst cherry tomatoes with chickpeas and curry powder. And you put that over yogurt, they're just like pops of creaminess in whatever you put them in.

[Jean Chatzky]

Okay, that one I'm definitely going to try. Before we take our last two questions, we're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsor. I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve.

[Ali Slagle]

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[Jean Chatzky]

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[Ali Slagle]

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[Jean Chatzky]

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[Jean Chatzky]

Requires Google Gemini account. Results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy. We are back with Ali Slagle. We've got a question from Elizabeth. Elizabeth writes, what are food items that we typically purchase at the store that would be easy to start making at home instead? So speaking of Rao's Sauce marinara sauce, I was thinking about this just today because on my Times Online there is a recipe for a homemade marinara sauce that is being featured. I always judge these recipes by the number of stars but also by the number of comments and this one has a ton of five star ratings and a ton of really glowing comments that you often don't get at the Times. I find the Times commenters are just very eager to change these brilliant recipes that you all put so much time and energy into writing. But this one was like, no, you should make it just as written. A couple people said, and I'm Italian, so you should trust me.

[Ali Slagle]

The Times commenters are a really fun batch and it makes our job really fun because they have a lot of opinions. Marinara sauce is an interesting one because Rao's is much more expensive than canned tomatoes and you could very well just add some garlic and oil to a canned tomato and make a sauce. But there's something about the rouse that's extra good. I also think salad dressing is an interesting one because if you already have oil and vinegar and mustard at home or some lemons, it's much cheaper to make your own salad dressing than to buy salad dressing. I think hummus is another one where you could certainly buy it. But also making it is very simple and also just really fun. Like you can make it taste exactly how you want it to taste.

[Jean Chatzky]

Those are some good ones. I stopped buying salad dressing a long time ago. I used to, I used to buy good seasons, the one that you would mix up in the cruet. And then I realized how much sugar is in that and that's why I like it so much. So now when I make my own salad dressing, I just add some honey and I like it just as much. We've got one more question. This one comes from Kim and I'm going to put a rule on her question. She says, what are some cheap ways to get more protein? We've already talked a lot about beans. What are some cheap non bean ways to get more protein?

[Ali Slagle]

This is a great question because most likely a lot of people's grocery receipts, the most expensive thing on the grocery receipt is probably meat. And so finding plant based proteins is a cheaper way to get protein and just kind of is fun, I think, to think about other ways to get protein. Do you count lentil as a bean?

[Jean Chatzky]

No, no lentil. You can slide with the lentils.

[Ali Slagle]

So I think lentils are kind of underappreciated because you have to cook them, but they take 20 minutes. They don't take as long as a dried bean to cook. There are so many different kinds of lentils. There are black, green, brown, red. And I think they just offer a lot of different opportunities for a lot of flavorings. So I would say lentils are inexpensive. They're really fast and easy to cook and they're full of protein.

[Jean Chatzky]

And where would you put eggs on the list of a value proposition? I know they're expensive these days compared to what they used to cost, but I always feel like if you're looking for an inexpensive protein, there's really nothing that is much cheaper than a couple of eggs.

[Ali Slagle]

I totally agree with you. If you think about the price of a pork chop in comparison to three eggs, even right now the eggs will still be cheaper. So I think eggs are a great, a great way to get protein and they just offer so many interesting textures. So I'm pro egg for sure.

[Jean Chatzky]

Pro egg. Ali Slagle, thanks for being here. Thanks for answering all of our questions.

[Ali Slagle]

Thank you Jean.

[Jean Chatzky]

Just a reminder, Ali's sub stack is called 40 ingredients forever and her book I dream of dinner so you don't have to. We'll see you next time. If you love this episode, please give us a five star review on Apple Podcasts. We always value your feedback and if you want to keep the financial conversations going, join me for a deeper dive. HerMoney has two incredible programs, finance Fix, which is designed to give you the ultimate money makeover, and Investing Fix, which is our investing club for women that meets bi weekly on Zoom. With both programs we are leveling the playing fields for women's financial confidence and power. I would love to see you there. Her Money is produced by Hayley Pascalides. Our music is provided by Video Helper and our show comes to you through Megaphone. Thanks for joining us and we'll talk soon.