- 42 minutes ago
Stop throwing away food you could have saved and turn your freezer into a real money-saver. These practical freezer tricks show how to make groceries last longer, reduce food waste, and stretch a grocery budget by buying cheap, in season, or on markdown and putting food by the right way.
The video breaks down old-fashioned household wisdom alongside simple modern kitchen habits: blanching vegetables before freezing, drying herbs, braiding garlic, storing onions correctly, saving scraps for broth, and keeping grains and flour in tight containers with a bay leaf to help protect the pantry. It also explains how to judge food by your eyes and nose instead of tossing it just because a date passed.
You’ll also learn why labeled, ordered storage matters, how to rotate food oldest first, and how to turn overripe bananas, stale bread, and vegetable trimmings into something useful instead of waste. This is practical food storage and freezer organization for anyone who wants easier meal prep and fewer groceries in the bin.
Created for viewers searching for freezer hacks, food storage tips, reduce food waste ideas, pantry organization, meal prep shortcuts, and budget kitchen advice. It’s useful for home cooking, grocery saving, and anyone interested in old-fashioned preserving methods, freezer organization, and smart ways to make groceries last longer.
The video breaks down old-fashioned household wisdom alongside simple modern kitchen habits: blanching vegetables before freezing, drying herbs, braiding garlic, storing onions correctly, saving scraps for broth, and keeping grains and flour in tight containers with a bay leaf to help protect the pantry. It also explains how to judge food by your eyes and nose instead of tossing it just because a date passed.
You’ll also learn why labeled, ordered storage matters, how to rotate food oldest first, and how to turn overripe bananas, stale bread, and vegetable trimmings into something useful instead of waste. This is practical food storage and freezer organization for anyone who wants easier meal prep and fewer groceries in the bin.
Created for viewers searching for freezer hacks, food storage tips, reduce food waste ideas, pantry organization, meal prep shortcuts, and budget kitchen advice. It’s useful for home cooking, grocery saving, and anyone interested in old-fashioned preserving methods, freezer organization, and smart ways to make groceries last longer.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00The average family throws away a small fortune in spoiled food every single year.
00:06Hundreds and hundreds of dollars straight into the bin.
00:09The brown bananas, the moldy bread, the wilted greens, the forgotten leftovers,
00:14while all the time buying the same things again at full price.
00:19And here is the thing that would astonish that family.
00:22The old folk, our grandmothers, fed big households through long, hard winters
00:28and wasted almost nothing, and they did it with no cold machine humming in the kitchen at all.
00:34They kept a whole year's food by the old ways, the cellar and the jar and the drying line and
00:41the crock,
00:41and by a handful of plain habits that meant nothing was ever thrown away.
00:47So today I am going to show you those old ways of keeping food,
00:51the buying cheap and putting by and wasting nothing,
00:54the way it was done before ever there was a machine to do it.
00:58So you can cut your food bill and throw almost nothing away.
01:02Let me show you.
01:03Here is the thing to understand first,
01:05for it is the whole spine of keeping a household fed cheaply,
01:09and once you have it, every trick I give you follows.
01:12You do not buy your food a little at a time,
01:15at whatever the price happens to be the day you are hungry.
01:18You buy or grow it when it is cheap and plentiful,
01:21in its season or on a good markdown,
01:24and you put it by to keep,
01:26so that all year you are eating at the lowest price the year offered,
01:30not the highest price of the moment.
01:32That is the whole game,
01:33and it is the opposite of how most folks shop now.
01:36The store is glad to sell you a little at full price every few days,
01:40and glad to see your food spoil so you buy it again.
01:43But the woman who buys the glut cheap and puts it by,
01:47and wastes nothing,
01:49eats all year on what the wasteful pay in a season.
01:52So the two halves of it are,
01:54buy or grow cheap and in season,
01:56and keep it well and waste none.
01:59Now let me give you the old ways one by one.
02:01Quick word before we go further.
02:03My name is Esther Yoder,
02:05and the old household ways handed down to me,
02:08the kind I am sharing today,
02:09and a great many more besides,
02:11are far more than I could ever fit into one video.
02:15I have gathered the whole of them into a book,
02:17and you will find it at EliasYoder.com.
02:20If today's tips serve you,
02:22that is where the rest of what my mother and grandmother taught me lives,
02:26all in the one place.
02:27Now, to the keeping of food.
02:30My grandmother had a saying that fits this exactly,
02:33that waste not is the first half of want not,
02:36and the woman who keeps her food keeps her house.
02:38She meant that the not wasting is not a small virtue,
02:42but the very foundation of a household's plenty,
02:45that a family is fed not only by what it buys,
02:48but even more by what it does not throw away,
02:51and that the keeping and the thrift are half the feeding,
02:55and her whole kitchen ran on it.
02:57So here is her kind of waste not keeping,
02:59the old ways of putting food by and using every scrap,
03:03without a machine in sight.
03:05First, the pudding by itself,
03:07the great old ways of making food keep.
03:10When a food is cheap and plentiful, in its season,
03:13you do not eat only what you need and let the rest go.
03:16You preserve the surplus to eat all winter.
03:19And the old ways are three.
03:21You can it, sealing cooked or raw food in jars
03:24that keep for a year and more on the shelf,
03:26the beans and tomatoes and fruit and even the meat.
03:29You dry it, drawing the water out in the air and the sun
03:33until it will not spoil, the fruit and the herbs
03:36and the beans and the peppers, keeping in a jar for a year.
03:39And you cellar it, storing the roots
03:41and the keeping vegetables and the crocks
03:43down in the cool, dark cellar,
03:46as I have shown you with the potatoes packed in sand.
03:49Can it, dry it, or cellar it.
03:51Those three old ways keep a garden's glut
03:54or a market's markdown right through to spring.
03:57That is the heart of the pudding by.
03:59Now, a most important word on that blanching
04:02for the vegetables, since folk get it wrong
04:04and lose the lot.
04:05If you would keep your fresh green vegetables,
04:08the beans and the peas and the greens,
04:10whether by drying them or by canning,
04:13you must first blanch them, dip them a minute or two
04:17in boiling water and then straight into cold.
04:20Why?
04:20Because there is a thing at work in a fresh vegetable
04:23that keeps working even after picking,
04:26slowly ruining its color and texture.
04:29And the quick blanch shuts that down,
04:31so the vegetable keeps its good green and its firmness.
04:34Skip the blanch and your kept beans go gray and mushy.
04:38Blanch them first and they keep near as good as fresh.
04:42Two minutes of blanching is the whole secret
04:45of a good kept vegetable.
04:47Now the herbs, for here is a trick
04:49that saves the parsley and basil
04:51that always rot in the crisper before you use half.
04:54When you have a good bunch of herbs,
04:56more than you will use fresh,
04:58do not let the rest slime away.
05:00Dry it for the year.
05:02Tie the herbs in little bunches
05:04and hang them upside down in a dry, airy place
05:07out of the sun till they are crisp.
05:09Then crumble them into a jar
05:11and you have your own dried herbs all year for nothing
05:14in place of the dear little jars from the store.
05:17Or chop the fresh herbs and pack them down in salt
05:21or in a little oil kept cool to hold their fresh flavor.
05:25Dry your herbs or salt them.
05:27Never let a bunch rot in the drawer.
05:29And the garlic and the onions,
05:31which keep beautifully the old way with no cold at all.
05:34Do not let your garlic dry out and go stringy in a drawer.
05:38Cure it and braid it.
05:39Plate the whole heads together by their tops
05:42and hang the braid in a cool, dry, airy place.
05:45And it keeps for many months,
05:47a head pulled off as you need it.
05:49The onions the same,
05:50cured and kept cool and dry and airy
05:53in a mesh or hung, keep for months.
05:56And keep your garlic and onions
05:57apart from your potatoes, mind,
05:59for they spoil each other, as I have told you.
06:02Braided and hung cool and dry,
06:05your garlic and onions keep half the year.
06:07Now, the saving of every scrap,
06:10which is where a household truly stops wasting,
06:12and the first and best of these is the broth pot.
06:16Keep a crock or a covered pot,
06:18and into it all week,
06:19you put every kitchen scrap that has flavor in it.
06:22The onion ends and skins,
06:24the carrot peels,
06:26the celery tops,
06:27the parmesan rind,
06:28the bones off the dinner plates,
06:30and the chicken carcass.
06:31And when it is full,
06:33you tip the whole lot into a pot with water
06:36and simmer it an hour or two and strain it.
06:38And there is your broth,
06:40rich and real,
06:41made free from the very scraps
06:43you are about to throw away
06:44in place of the dear salty boxed stuff from the store.
06:48Save your flavorful scraps for the broth pot.
06:51It is the very picture of waste not,
06:54making food from what was bound for the bin.
06:56And the food that is going past its best
06:58but is not yet spoiled,
07:00which folk throw out too soon,
07:02is not garbage but the makings of something.
07:05Those brown spotty bananas nobody will eat fresh?
07:08Those are not garbage,
07:10those are banana bread,
07:10or a sweet loaf,
07:12for they mash up better and sweeter than fresh for baking,
07:15so buy the spotty ones cheap on purpose and bake them.
07:19That bread going stale?
07:21Not garbage either.
07:22It is bread crumbs for your coating,
07:24or croutons toasted up,
07:26or a bread pudding,
07:27or the thickening of a soup.
07:28The old kitchen had a use for everything a day past its best
07:32and threw almost nothing away for being a little old.
07:35Look at the too ripe and the stale not as waste
07:38but as the makings of the next good thing.
07:41Now, the dried goods,
07:43the flour and the grains and the meal,
07:45and the little moths that ruin them,
07:47for there is an old way to keep them bug-free
07:49with no cold at all.
07:51Those little pantry moths and weevils
07:53that show up in your flour and your rice
07:55most often come home already in the bag
07:58as eggs too small to see
07:59and then hatch out and ruin the whole cupboard.
08:02The old way to keep them off is this.
08:05Keep your flour and grains
08:06in tight metal or thick glass containers
08:09with good lids,
08:10not the paper bag they came in,
08:12which they chew right through.
08:15Keep the pantry cool and dry
08:17and tuck a bay leaf or two
08:18right into the flour and grain bins
08:20for the bay leaf's smell
08:22keeps the moths and weevils off.
08:24Tight jars, a cool dry pantry,
08:27and a bay leaf in the bin.
08:29That keeps your grains sound without a machine.
08:32Now a word on the two things folk believe
08:35that make them throw out good food,
08:37for the plain truth saves you money.
08:39The first, a date stamped on a package
08:42is very often about the best quality,
08:45not about safety,
08:46and folk toss perfectly good food
08:49because a date passed when the food is fine.
08:51So do not throw a thing out for a date alone.
08:55Judge it by your own eyes and nose.
08:57But hear the honest other side,
08:59for this matters.
09:01With home canned food,
09:02you must be careful
09:03and you judge it by the real signs.
09:06A canned jar that keeps its good seal,
09:08that is not bulging nor leaking,
09:11whose lid is still down tight,
09:13that smells right when you open it,
09:15is good,
09:16and canned food keeps a very long time.
09:19But a jar with a bulging or unsealed lid,
09:22a broken seal,
09:24a bad or off smell,
09:25or that spurts or foams when opened,
09:28you throw out at once and never taste,
09:31for spoiled canned food can be truly dangerous.
09:35When in doubt, throw it out.
09:37That is the firm rule with canning.
09:39So, do not waste good food to a mere date,
09:43but judge your canned goods by their seal and their smell,
09:46and when in doubt, throw it out.
09:48And here is the plainest habit of all,
09:51the one that saves more than any trick,
09:53and it is simply this.
09:55Keep your stores in order and eat the oldest first.
09:59Most food is not wasted because it spoils.
10:02It is wasted because it is forgotten,
10:04pushed to the back and found a mystery a year later
10:07and thrown out.
10:08So, label your jars and your stores
10:10with what they are and the date you put them up.
10:13Keep them in order on the shelf,
10:15and always put the new behind
10:17and take the old from the front,
10:18so you are ever eating the oldest first,
10:21first in and first out.
10:23A labeled, ordered, rotated pantry
10:26wastes almost nothing,
10:27for you eat a thing before it is forgotten.
10:30Order and rotation, oldest first.
10:33That is the habit that saves the most.
10:35Now think a moment about why we came to shop
10:38a little at a time at full price
10:40and watch a fortune in food spoil in our kitchens every year,
10:44when the old way was to buy or grow cheap and in season,
10:47put it by and waste not a scrap.
10:49It is worse than a plot,
10:51for no one had to arrange it.
10:53Every pound of food you throw away
10:55is a pound you buy again,
10:57and the store does not mind your bananas going brown,
11:00for that is another bunch sold.
11:02And the deer-boxed broth and the little herb jars
11:05and the canned beans
11:06are all things you could put by yourself for pennies.
11:09Nobody schemes it in a back room.
11:11It is only that a household that wastes food
11:14shops more and pays more.
11:16So the plain old knowing
11:18of buying the glut cheap
11:19and putting it by and wasting nothing
11:21just stopped being handed down,
11:24because no one profits
11:25by your keeping a full pantry from a cheap season.
11:28My grandmother filled her cellar and her shelves
11:30in the plenty of summer
11:32and fed her family through the winter on it
11:34and wasted not a crust nor a peel,
11:37and somewhere between her day and ours
11:39we were taught to shop small and full price
11:42and throw the rest away.
11:44The mending of it is the old buying
11:46and keeping and wasting nothing.
11:47You buy or grow your food cheap
11:49and in its season and put it by,
11:52canning and drying and cellaring the glut
11:54to eat all winter,
11:55blanching your vegetables first.
11:57You dry your herbs and braid your garlic
12:00and keep your grains bug-free
12:01with tight jars and a bay leaf.
12:03You save every flavorful scrap
12:06for the broth pot
12:07and turn the too ripe and the stale
12:09into the next good thing
12:10rather than the bin.
12:12You judge your food by your eyes and nose,
12:15not a mere date,
12:16but throw out any doubtful canned jar at once.
12:19And you keep your stores labeled and ordered
12:22and eat the oldest first
12:24so nothing is forgotten.
12:26And you feed your household all year
12:29on what the wasteful pay in a season
12:31for pennies without a machine.
12:34That is how it comes home.
12:36One jar put up,
12:38one scrap saved at a time.
12:40The keeping of your own table
12:42back in your own hands.
12:44So here is what I would ask of you.
12:47This week, start with just the one easiest thing.
12:52Begin a broth pot, a crock,
12:55or a covered dish in the cool
12:56and into it put the very next onion end
13:00and carrot peel instead of bones.
13:03And when it is full,
13:04make yourself a pot of free broth
13:07and come back and tell me in the comments
13:09how it turned out
13:11and what else you have stopped throwing away.
13:13For I do love to hear of a household
13:16that has stopped feeding the bin.
13:18And tell me too, while you are there,
13:21your county and the age of your house.
13:24For the old houses have the cool cellars
13:27and pantries made for just this keeping.
13:30And I learn from every one of you
13:32how the keeping goes where you live.
13:35And if your own mother or grandmother
13:38had a way of putting food by
13:40or saving a scrap that I have not named here,
13:43tell me that most of all.
13:45For that is how this goes.
13:47We share what we were given.
13:50I read every comment
13:51and I learn from you
13:53the way the old women learn from one another
13:56across the fence line.
13:57One season and one full pantry at a time.
14:02Next time, I will show you the old way
14:05of getting a whole week of meals
14:07out of one bird or one cheap cut.
14:10The stretching of a little meat a long way
14:13with the cellar and the broth pot
14:16and the pudding by.
14:17So that between the buying cheap
14:19and the keeping and the stretching,
14:22your grocery money goes twice as far as it did.
14:26There is a right and an old way
14:28to keep a household fed
14:30that runs on buying the glut cheap
14:33and putting it by
14:34and wasting nothing
14:36rather than shopping small
14:38at full price
14:39and feeding the bin.
14:41But this week,
14:42you start with the not wasting.
14:45You begin your broth pot
14:46and save your scraps.
14:48You look at the too ripe and the stale
14:51as the makings of the next good thing.
14:54And you resolve to buy
14:56the next glut cheap
14:57and put it by.
14:59And you will understand
15:01as my grandmother did
15:02that waste not
15:04is the first half of want not.
15:06That a family is fed
15:08as much by what it does not throw away
15:11as by what it buys.
15:13And that the old ways
15:15of the cellar and the jar
15:16and the drying line
15:18and the crock
15:19kept a whole year's food
15:21with never a machine
15:23on the plain wisdom
15:24of buying cheap,
15:26putting by,
15:27and wasting nothing.
15:29The household kept
15:31the plain old way
15:32is the one that remembers
15:34to fill its shelves
15:35in the plenty
15:36and waste not a scrap.
15:38And so is fed all year
15:40on a season's cheap bounty.
15:43And that is a thing
15:44we are only just starting
15:46to remember.
15:47and this is a big
15:47it was a real
15:47example of