Things You'll Never Get to Eat Again

My grandmother was a terrible cook.

I say that with the utmost of love and respect. The fact that she rarely did it may have had something to do with it, but in the span of my life, I remember more disasters than dishes. There was the Thanksgiving stuffing that floated in a pool of muddy liquid with large chunks of garlic and onion floating on the top...the salty soap soup that she produced in mass quantities whenever one of us felt ill. She carted the soup in Ziploc baggies all the way to where ever we were living at the time. As bad as it tasted, nothing was to be wasted, and she ate bowl after bowl of whatever she created, without so much as a blink.

Understandably, we dinnered at the local diners most often, where she would hit the salad bar with abandon, topping cottage cheese with french dressing and pronouncing it "Delish" years ahead of Rachel Ray.

Man, I miss that woman.

There were a couple things, though, that would make your head spin and your mouth water...things that were just too good to believe. A chocolate bundt cake that took seven eggs..SEVEN EGGS and she would go on about the expense and decadence of using seven eggs, which would quickly fade into the pizzas her own mother would make during the Depression, and the veggies she grew in pots on the fire escape, and how, even when there was no money and no jobs her mom always had a meal for the hungry on hand, along with plenty of food for her own large family.

She also made this fantastic fried apple pie. It was flaky and crumbly and sort of, well, dry, as in it didn't have the kind of syrupy apple pie filling that you would normally think of when you think apple pie. They were fantastic, and my mother's favorite. It occurred to me in a rare moment of clarity during my wild twenties that I should ask her to show me how to make them.

It was too late. She was already far too ill and far too tired and sliding rapidly towards the end of her life. I may as well have asked her to climb Mount Everest.

I'll openly admit I don't often try to replicate the recipes. Seven eggs is ridiculous amount for one cake, and frying an apple pie is a bit like gilding the lily and twice as fattening. I choose rather to think about the amazing woman who used to make these things for me with such love and dedication and take a moment to miss her instead, knowing full well that the secret is probably something the adult me WOULD NEVER put in her mouth.

I miss you, Grandma. You were totally awesome.

Why don't you...

Plan leftovers for a fancy "gourmet" pizza or stromboli?

Some ideas:
Taco meat or chicken, or leftover chili +Cheddar+ lettuce+tomato+salsa= Mexican Pizza
Leftover pot roast or roast beef+ gravy + provolone+ peppers =french dip pizza
Sliced ham+ apples+ blue cheese, or Gruyere= something fancy, I don't know, but it's yummy.
Leftover cooked chicken+wings sauce or bbq+ jack (or pepper jack)= BBQ chicken pizza
Meatballs or sausage and Mozzarella
Leftover veggies and feta, or whatever floats your boat.

I love using Broa dough for this, but wegmans has LOVELY pizza dough if you haven't planned in advance.

I bake mine at 500 on a pizza stone- and dough is cooked at 200 degrees. So I use my probe thermometer.

Now, pat yourself on the back for saving 25 bucks on fancy pizza.

Monday Morning, Start Your Week Off With A Giant, Fabulous Roast

It'll save you a gzillion dollars.

Or maybe ten, I'm not sure. But it will keep you sane for the week if it's big enough. This week, in honor of my little sister's birthday, it was a large, fresh, organic turkey, purchased on sale for $1.29 (!!!!!) a pound.

It was truly a thing of beauty. I brined it, overnight, cooked it upside down, and then flipped it for the last half hour so the top would brown.

It was, well, Good Eats. I only use the salt, pepper, and brown sugar in the brine, and I don't get all crazy with the "aromatics" because this is NOT a Thanksgiving turkey. It's an every day turkey, and we eat enough of it, because Turkey is CHEAP.

Then, I cleaned the carcass...that's got to be the nastiest thing I've ever put into print...as carefully as could be, getting every bit of leftover goodness tucked away for the rest of the week, much to the chagrin of my dog.

I think she's finally gotten over it, but I've never seen a more pathetic looking creature..staring at me with deep, sad eyes the color of melted chocolate, brown with gold flecks. It was highly distracting.

She wimpered quietly as I took the bones out the door. It was a sad minute...I would love to give them to her...but they will KILL THE STUPID DOG. I felt so guilty about denying the dog turkey bones that I was driven to distraction...and tripped over her while carrying the quart size bowl of gravy.

Gravy evidently flies with a pretty decent velocity. It hit the ceiling, it hit the floor, it hit the dog full on in the face and a good bit landed on my head.

Turkey gravy evidently trumps lost turkey bones, and the dog went effing ballistic..tail wagging, groaning with joy, licking the floor and all the surrounding furniture.

I figured I'd let her, and washed the gravy out of my hair. My kitchen now smells like dog breath. Do you like how I'm taking care of that right now?

I'm mad, because I wanted that gravy for a pot pie for tonight, which is pretty simple...you take a couple of cups of leftover turkey, a bag of frozen mixed veggies, and moisten it with some gravy, and bake it in a pie crust. I make a homemade pie crust, but you could just as easily grab a store bought. It bakes for about 45 min at 375. I like homemade because you can trim the extra crust into fancy shapes like hearts and stars, and fix them on with a bit of heavy cream or egg wash, and then the kids freak out and eat it up.

No turkey pot pie. No turkey gravy. Sad face.

But that's okay...cooked turkey can be used in ANY recipe that calls for cooked chicken, so I'm feeling turkey and noodles, turkey and dumplings, turkey taquitos, turkey enchiladas, turkey divan... each assembled quickly and easily from a single night of cooking. It couldn't be simpler.

Why I'll never make it as a food blogger. But I'll keep trying.

It's the pictures. The pictures stump me.

I'm either going to have to start measuring things into pretty little containers, which I don't own, and thinking things out before I start, or take my husband's advice and videotape myself cooking, which is just weird, or stage photos AFTER I GET DONE.

Three words. Double the dishes. As it is, I pray to God every night for world peace and a house elf. Not necessarily in that order. I think the house elf may, in fact, help me achieve world peace.

But on to tonight's dinner, which was fabulous, and involved my soon-to-famous replacement for cream-of-whatever soup, the cornstarch based white sauce. I know I've talked about this before, but canned cream soups freak me out. They are just...weird. Chemical based badness. And of course, they are delicious, simple, and go on sale with big coupons all. the. time, so the temptation to load up my basement with several hundred of them is kind of strong. The force is strong with that one...but I am stronger...

So what you want to come up with, any time you've got a recipe that calls for a can of creamed soup, is about ten ounces of white sauce. There are actually some good recipes out there, but I just take about 1 1/4 Cup of milk, shake the bejesus out of it with three teaspoons of cornstarch, and heat it to a boil while whisking. Then I season it with salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, and whatever flavor I'm after-some diced mushrooms, some diced onions, some finely chopped broccoli, some chicken bullion. Probably about a half a cup of "flavor" And that's your cream soup. You'll have a little extra. It's okay.

So tonight's dinner was almost entirely assembled out of leftovers, and the kiddos loved it.

1 recipe cream soup (see above)
1 onion, diced,
1 clove garlic, minced,
2 T butter (wouldn't be a recipe of mine if it didn't have butter)
2 C leftover meat, in this case, ham, diced
1 sack frozen broccoli
6 ounces pre-cooked, whole grain pasta
1 C shredded cheese
1/4 C Italian seasoned breadcrumbs (Wegmans has a store brand whole grain that I like.)

Saute the onion in the butter lightly, until translucent, with garlic. Add the cream sauce.

Butter a baking dish. Layer the ingredients: Pasta, then ham, then broccoli, then cream sauce. Cover and bake at 400 for 30 minutes. Remove foil and spread cheese on top, then sprinkle with bread crumbs. No need to add more butter, but it would be yummy if you did.

Bake another fifteen to twenty minutes, or until cheese has brown bits all over and breadcrumbs are crisped. The original recipe called for cream of mushroom soup and nixed the noodles.

Next time I promise to take a picture of the sack of broccoli before I dump it. Or not.

The end of a bad money month...clean out the fridge soup.

It's been a bad money month.

Murphy's law reigns supreme of course. How bad, you ask? Not bad enough that I've lost a single wink of sleep, but we've had a couple of setbacks. A trip to the ER, lost days of work due to illness, bad tires.

Yeah, it's tight this month, so the grocery budget is tighter than it normally is, and I really want to make my grocery budget s-t-r-e-t-c-h.

So, what to make for dinner when I normally would have gone shopping on Friday but want to wait till next Friday?

Refrigerator Soup. It's what's for dinner.

That's what I call it when I produce a pot of soup out of what ever is lying around, and usually the results are so good that my family asks for it again. Of course, I'll never be able to make it again, because, I won't remember what was in the refrigerator, unless I write it down.

So here we are...
I had a lone chicken breast. Well, that doesn't go very far, so we added six strips of bacon. There was about a half a quart of homemade chicken broth, a bag of corn, a half a bag of frozen roasted red peppers diced, leftover pierogi filling and I'm never out of flour...

So, soup.

Start with the bacon- saute it in a bit of butter till extra crispy. Then save a bit of the drippings in the pot and drain the rest. Saute the chicken, diced, in the bacon fat, then add the red peppers and a diced onion. The heat is on medium at this point-you don't want the bacon fat to blacken. Sprinkle the whole thing with flour to make a paste, and pour in the chicken stock, corn, leftover potatoes, and one raw potato, diced. Season with tarragon, chives, salt and pepper.

Top with shredded cheddar if you've got it, and thank God for plentiful food, even when money is tight.

How to milk a chicken

Why more people don't make homemade stock, I'll never understand. It's so easy, cheap, and WAY better for you than the stuff you get in a carton at the store, too. Some of that stuff they've taken to calling "culinary stock" which basically means they splashed some white wine into it, or an herb or two. It's certainly not worth TWELVE DOLLARS a gallon. Yes. They are charging 2.99 a QUART for culinary stock at Wegmans.
 .
It's BONE WATER, people. TWELVE DOLLARS A GALLON FOR BONE WATER. If gas was that expensive, there would be riots.

So here's how never to get robbed blind again...
Since we've already established it's bone water, you need some bones. I keep the bones from whatever chicken roasts I've made. Yes, I know, I'm strange. But, it's an insult to the dead chicken not to get everything you can out of it, so I keep the bones. I simply toss the thing, with any remaining bits on the bones, including the aromatics in the cavity, into a shopping bag, and freeze it.

Once you get two or three, you can make about two gallons of stock out of them, or you can make about a half gallon out of one. Remember, people are willing to pay twelve bucks a gallon for this stuff.

We start with either a basic large pot for one chicken, or a five gallon pot for two or three chicken carcasses. (That's a nice word, isn't it?)

Now:
You need two-four stalks of celery, an onion or two, a handful or more of baby cut carrots, and optional, a whole chicken.

Put the carcass (yuck) and the whole chicken if you are making soup in the bottom of the pot. Cover completely with COLD water. Do NOT attempt hot water, the stock won't turn out, and you will have boiled chicken bones for nothing.  Toss in the rest of the stuff-go ahead and peel and halve the onions, break the celery in pieces. but there's no need to be pretty.

If you've got some whole herbs you like, go for it. I REALLY like tarragon better than just about anything, and sage is wonderful. Many recipes will tell you to add a bay leaf, if you keep those on hand, go ahead. I don't.

Turn the heat to low. Don't boil. Simmer. Little bubbles. That's it.

Now go. Clean your house. Sort your laundry. Write a blog five people are going to read. What ever you want to do. It's cool. Every once in a while, you can poke at it a bit.

It's magic. You will have broth in about two hours. If you are cooking the chicken, it can take up to five. Don't boil. Simmer. 

I save the salting till the end of the process. It will take A LOT. Like two tablespoons, if you are doing three chickens. But remember, stock is an ingredient you will be seasoning later, so don't go over board.

Now, chill the stock. Mine is sitting on the back porch right now because it's so cold. I don't worry about skimming all the funk as it goes, because I'm going to strain it. After the stock (or broth, if you cooked meat in it) is VERY COLD, chip the fat layer off the top, and poor it through a fine mess strainer. My colander counts. Discard the bones and veggies, and line the strainer with a coffee filter. Strain again.

Et, voila! If you want "culinary stock" pour the strained broth back into the pot, add a cup of white wine, and a bundle of whatever herbs you like, and bring it back to a simmer to cook off the booze.

Pour into quart sized containers, and freeze or refrigerate depending on usage plans. Congratulate yourself on saving twelve bucks a gallon. Or, make this soup. It's to die for.

Oh. My. Gosh. King Aurthur's Flour sells STUFF

Not just STUFF.

Baking STUFF.

Powdered cheese. Really. The kind to sprinkle on top of freshly baked cheddar crackers to give you the I've-just-eaten-a-snack-food coating on your fingers and here's the very best part, the most utterly fabulous news in the whole world: You can actually read and understand the ingredients.

Pain au chocolate sticks.  Perfectly shaped little sticks of chocolate to wrap homemade croissant dough around.  Baker's special dry milk...to make your loaves rise higher... The English muffin rings I've been looking EVERYWHERE for. I knew they sold FLOUR...I didn't know they sold STUFF. I should probably block the site right now and for at least two months after Christmas since my husband actually threatened to wrap flour up and give it to me as a gift...but it's a testament to my self control that I haven't loaded up a hundred dollar cart..or any cart at all.

I stumbled across this site looking for a decent recipe for goldfish...as in, to make them, not make something out of them, and well, I'm still looking. I've seen several...some call for baker's ammonia (eh?) some look kind of long, and some call for a food processor, which I don't have. So I'm still looking for a decent recipe, and marveling at the fact that I now find cooking tools as exciting as shoes.

Ok, maybe a little more exciting than shoes.

Ridiculously Easy Lemon Pastries

I love the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day series. It's got to be my number one favorite cookbook, and the fact that I actually COOK out of it tells you how good it is. Normally, I just read them for ideas and pass them on.

Well, I made my husband some lemon pastries this evening.

I have to say they are pretty darn amazing, even though the picture is a little funky.

So, here's what I did:

I took this recipe, added the juice of one lemon to the pastry cream, got rid of the apricots, and sprinkled the finished product with freshly grated lemon zest.

Heaven.

Where Food Stamps Fail

I just got back from the grocery store. I spent what I would consider an EXORBITANT amount of money filling our fridge and cupboards- anywhere from two weeks to a month worth of meat, fresh produce and supplies.

The meats will last two weeks. The supplies, like flour, vegetable oil, chocolate chips, diapers, and dish detergent will last a month or more. I have at least a weeks worth of produce, milk, and coffee. I'm on target to spend less than four hundred dollars for a family of five, including diapers for the month.

As I said, this a HUGE amount of money for us. There were some luxuries purchased. A fresh turkey, really a bargain at $1.29 a pound, heavy cream and real butter. Pomegranates and red peppers.  I really could have done the beginning of the month shopping for almost a third less if I really wanted to. I do like having the extra veggies and fruit on hand, and it's really good for the kids, and our bills are paid.

I will spend the next month baking bread, making homemade crackers, croissants, cakes, cookies, all of our meals and snacks. I'll pack a fresh meal each day for my husband to take to work, and we will eat really well.

For about four hundred dollars a month for five people.

The food stamp budget for a family of three maxes out at $406 dollars a month. And I've read articles all the time about how difficult it is to live on that. How moms are unable to feed their babies at the end of the month. How they are forced to go shopping at midnight so their babies can have breakfast.

I've spent a lot of time feeling really crappy about that. I can't help but picture my own babies when I hear about hungry little people. How they would cry.

My heart is breaking right now just thinking about it.

Which is why I looked into what the food stamp budget is. On the website, it says, "food stamps are not intended to be the entire source of grocery money."

And then the "supplement" maxes out at $406. For three people.

In a month where I am slightly less than frugal and buy heavy cream, and need everything under the sun, I don't spend that much on five people, including diapers, dish soap, toiletries, and everything else food stamps don't pay for.

I also spend a huge amount of time cooking. You know, producing food for consumption.

And this is where food stamps fail. America doesn't produce anymore. It consumes. Our culture is not accustomed to the production of much, rather we take, quite usually, the easy way out. Frozen dinners, drive through windows, pre-cut produce.

People who do attempt to cook will often turn to expensive and over complicated recipes that can cost almost as much as a restaurant meal to prepare, having watched the food network one too many times and glamorizing the entire cooking experience. Trust me, if it's got thirty ingredients, it's not cost effective, unless all thirty are things you normally keep on hand.

There is nothing wrong with cooking that way if you can afford it. It's fun, it's still better than eating out, and there's no real reason to deny yourself a good meal if your bank account is always happy.

However, for the rest of us, it's really necessary to learn to cook, whether or not we are partaking in a supplementary budget assistance program. And when I say cook, I mean, from the most basic ingredients. I mean, taking pride in being able to make it through to the end of the month on a limited  budget, with nice full bellies and happy babies. I mean, skipping the chips and soda when the budget doesn't work, and enjoying them as a treat when it does. I mean, planning out the entire month's budget, not just one week's budget, and then spending an entire week trying to figure out where dinner is coming from.

This is how our grandparents and our great grandparents survived. They knew how to make things stretch. They made broth out of bones and bread out of flour and bought things with cash. They didn't throw out huge amounts of food and restaurant meals were few and far between.

 They lived, quite simply, within their means.

And this, my friends, is where food stamps fail. It's a band aid on a growing cancer within our nations belly...meant to help people in a time of need, provide for their families, meant to keep little bellies full, and happy babies growing healthy.  Instead, it's just a mask on the real problem, the problem that Americans cannot adjust to a lifestyle any different from what they are used to. The proverbial tightening of the economic belt does not come easily nor naturally.

We don't take pride in making things work. Instead, we take sorrow in what we don't have. We purchase what we cannot afford at the beginning of the month, only to go hungry at the end.

What is the solution? As usual, it falls on education. Many people live this way because no one has taught them any differently. They simply do not know how to budget. I've seen at least a half a dozen people go through eviction proceedings that had a case of beer in the fridge.

If you don't have money for rent, you don't have money for beer.

I think a good temporary fix as far as the government goes would be to do the food stamp deposits once a week or every two weeks as opposed to once a  month, giving people a more realistic idea of what they have to work with. Also, I'd love to see a private charity (read: not government funded) do some classes on how to make do.

It used to be common sense.

My Caramel Nightmares

I like to think of myself as a reasonably accomplished cook. For crying out loud, I made homemade croissants yesterday. Today I will make braciole in the crock pot to serve with pasta and garlic broccoli, homemade bread, and noodles for chicken noodle soup tomorrow.

I'm not a kitchen dunce. I don't require recipes, for the most part, or fancy ingredients, and I can, for the most part, produce some pretty fabulous dishes.

Not caramel. Never caramel.

The method to caramel is so simple, so inexplicably easy, and yet, to date, I've been unable to produce one single, satisfactory pot. It's maddening. I've burned sugar, I've curdled the cream, I've used a pot too small and scraped hard cracked amber sugar off the ceiling. That was eight years ago, and was the final straw. I gave up. Completely and utterly. Along with polenta...caramel remains my Moby Dick.

Until last night. Last night, buoyed by my successful, flaky, buttery croissants, I decided to attempt the fateful recipe once more, in an attempt to have a lovely snack for my dear husband.

I chose a nice, big pot- two quarts for a single cup of caramel sauce, in preparation for the rolling, bubbling, steaming addition of the hot cream to browned sugar. I set all my ingredients in a row, so I wouldn't have to step away from the simmering sugar. I even had the butter cut into uniform little pieces to melt in at the end.

The only mishap occurred when my toddler broke through the barrier I erect whenever I cook something possibly explosive, but I kept her at bay with a well practiced, swinging leg, and ignored her angry chatter as I focused solely on the pot of liquid gold.

My technique- it was flawless. The cream bubbled predictably as I poured it into the hot sugar in small batches off the heat...whisking, whisking, whisking...I added the butter at the end, let it cool...said a prayer of thanks to the gods of the clean ceiling, and swirled the gorgeous mahogany sauce in the pan in admiration.

I did it. I finally managed perfectly smooth, perfectly gorgeous caramel. Knowing pretty well how hot caramel sauce is, I let it cool for fifteen minutes before dipping a tiny spoon in...and...

It was bitter as hell. Possibly burnt tasting. Not really sure what that flavor was, but it was definitely NOT salted caramel. More like... salted burned tires. It was, for lack of a better term, horrible.
 
 I couldn't stop tasting it. I didn't burn it. No sandy, undissolved sugar crystals. The sauce didn't break. There was no explainable reason why this caramel didn't taste like liquid gold.

 Unless you are counting the fact that I evidently melted half a plastic kitchen spoon into the sugar when I was first stirring. The recipe didn't call for freshly melted plastic spoon. In fact, I'm pretty sure it said wooden spoon, but you know, a lot of recipes are fans of the wooden spoon. I've never really found it necessary before. My favorite bread recipe wants to be stirred with a wooden spoon, but I always use my favorite long handled plastic spoon- half of which may very well be in my stomach right now from all of the diagnostic tasting. If only I'd washed the dishes before I tasted the caramel, I could have saved myself probably two hundred calories worth of dips and shudders.

 God, that's horrible.Hope I don't die of plastic poisoning.

Guess I'll try it again today with the wooden spoon.

handmade croissants- for my dear friends Franck and Suzanne

Some time ago, a dear friend bemoaned the cost of croissants at Wegmans, and I have to agree with her. At $1.50 a pop,  ten dollars does not quite feed my whole family. Not to mention that two minutes later, everyone is hungry again. And ready to have a heart attack.

Not a lot of bang for the buck.

Completely yummy, though.

 The thing about croissants, though, is the recipes are often long, complicated, tedious, and unforgiving. I've seen ones that take three days to make! The other thing, is that most of them call for the ritual banging of the butter into the dough.

You take a block of butter, and bang it with a rolling pin until it's thin and oblong, and then roll and roll and roll it into layers.  With three children, I'm not bloody likely to add to the noise in the house by banging butter.

And I have to wonder if the person who came up with the recipe owned a knife. Just curious.

So I made croissants today, using the first recipe at the link above. Easy, peasy, rice and cheesy. Instead of banging out the butter and giving myself a headache, I sliced the butter into thin pats and spread those over the upper two thirds of the dough. Then, I followed the recipe to a T, which was a mistake. I kept thinking, these need an egg wash. Really need an egg wash. I should gloss them up before I put them in the oven.

I forgot. Into the oven they went, and out they came.

Delicious. And not shiny. So next time, I'll beat an egg with two tablespoons of water and brush them before I bake.

I couldn't wait, and baked the last batch with egg wash- beautiful!

I feel so virtuous when I apply heat to food.

Why is that?

It doesn't make it healthier. It doesn't make it less fattening. In almost every case, it both leeches nutrients and adds fat. Last night, I decided to make Mr.Lovinangels a snack, and could have easily sliced some fruit and whole grain bread, and he would have been very happy.

Instead, I added a stick of butter, a mess of sugar, and an unquantified amount of white flour and made the perfectly healthy fruit into a crisp.

 And yes, Mr. Lovinangels was very happy.

I felt like wifey of the year, until I ran the recipe through Calorie Count, and now I'm left wondering when my subconscious decided it was time to murder my husband of five years via arterial blockage.Today, same situation, but evidently I haven't learned my lesson.

 The kids would have been perfectly happy with fresh bread, fruit and cheese for lunch, but it's cold and wet outside, so I feel like something warm is the way to go. Serving the kids bread, fruit, and cheese is lazy.  If I grill the bread and cheese, suddenly I feel like a good mom, and the reality is, all I've done is added two or three hundred calories worth of saturated fat.

 There's a crustless quiche in the oven right now. Because I couldn't have heated up the leftover vegetable soup. (That would have been too easy, don't they deserve better?)

 To make this even more ironic, it's likely that later on this afternoon, I will complain loudly about the amount of dishes I have to wash. Rather than napping to make up for last night's impromptu toddler-party-like-a-rock star all night event, I will bitch and moan and whine like a certain eleven year old denied  a trip to the opening night of Eclipse.

 Seriously, who made this mess? Me. By choice. The kids would have loved a pb and j. Loved it. Eaten it well, and gone to be bed happy with full little bellies. Instead, I'm fighting with a fussy three year old over a truly gorgeous spinach and bacon quiche.

 I blame the new house. Clearly my inability to control my culinary impulses is the fault of this new kitchen, with it's shiny  floors and newly redone cabinets. This kitchen that doesn't make me feel like an extra on Green Acres. (Like my last kitchen.)

Oh, look at me! I've mastered the American dream! You know, when you do something stupid, blame someone else.

Ten dollar meals crack me up! (and a real money saving meal)

Any amateur foodie has seen this.

A celebrity chef displayed prominently on a pricey magazine, with the heading "SAVE YOUR BUDGET! TEN DOLLAR DINNERS! The chef holds a plate that could have come from a five star restaurant, and smiles widely.

and PLUNK... there goes four dollars. I really like so and so... and ten dollar meals, wow... that sounds pretty good.

Except, ten dollars is a LOT of money for one dinner. Think about it, ten dollars a day on dinner alone is up to three hundred and ten dollars a month on JUST dinner. That doesn't include snacks, drinks, or well, other meals. We average a hundred dollars a week in groceries, with the biggest bill coming in once a month around a hundred and twenty dollars, when I normally need all the dry goods. Ten dollars a night would DOUBLE my budget.

And that's not the biggest downfall to the ten dollar myth. NONE of those recipes ACTUALLY COST ten dollars. You'll see things like, 1 T of tomato paste, .12. 1 T fresh minced ginger, .05. Seriously? I can't buy a nickel's worth of ginger, or one tablespoon of tomato paste. If the ingredients aren't something you are actually going to use, you've just spent a dollar on tomato paste and at least that on a chunk of ginger.

You can tell these people don't deal with a tight budget often (or ever).

Here's a budget saving SET of meals... for much less than ten dollars.

Start with the flavor base.
What's in your fridge...Do you have a couple of slices of bacon, thick cut ham?
Great, dice that. (it's optional)
Saute in some olive oil, and drain. You are gonna use a GIANT soup pot to do this. Take the meat out and drain.

While that's going on, take a look around.
Do you have a carrot, some celery, and an onion? any combination there of?
Chop those up, along with a couple of cloves of fresh garlic, if you've got it. Mince them pretty fine, toss them into the pot, with a little bit of the oil from the meat, if using. If not, just heat up some Olive oil, and sweat the veggies.

No fresh veggies? Skip to the next step.

Add 1 quart chicken stock and 1 quart beef broth to the pot. You can use a couple of bullion cubes if you don't have the stock on hand, or if this is a less than flush week financially. (the broth is the most expensive part of the meal if you don't have any on hand, and totals four dollars in my neck of the woods.) Add a large can of kidney beans, rinsed really well and drained. If you are going to really do this on the cheap, get dried beans and follow the directions on the package to soak overnight. I'm up to five dollars and nineteen cents.

If you've got a couple of potatoes, dice them up and add them to the pot. If not, forget about it, no big. Add one large can of crushed tomatoes. ($6.19)If you have a jar of spaghetti sauce and no crushed tomatoes, go ahead and use that. Taste and adjust seasonings. Depending on how cheap you've been thus far, you'll need to be pretty liberal with garlic, onion powder, and Italian seasoning. If you've got fresh onion and garlic in there, just go with the Italian seasoning, and some crushed red pepper. Turn this up and let it simmer for about a half an hour. If you've got a rind from Parmesan cheese, toss it in. These are really lovely for Italian type soups, and can be kept in the freezer until ready to use.

Put a pot of water on to boil, and cook up a half a pound of elbow noodles, ditalini, or another tiny soup pasta. Drain, and drizzle with a bit of olive oil. Taste the soup base and season with salt and fresh cracked pepper. Scoop out about a cup of beans and potatoes, and mash with a potato masher into a pulp, and stir back into the soup to thicken. Add the meat bits if using. If you've got some balsamic vinegar, stir a couple of tablespoons in.

Portion noodles into bowls and top with the hot soup. Top each serving with some grated Parmesan cheese, olive oil, and fresh cracked pepper. You should have eight servings worth of noodles, and about twenty worth of soup...

After your done with dinner, take a bag of frozen mixed vegetables, and empty it into the other half of the soup, and store it for lunch or dinner tomorrow. You can make more noodles, or some brown rice to add, and it's likely you will get TWO MORE MEALS out of this pot of soup, which has cost... Ten dollars, if you get everything and make it the most expensive way possible.

I can deal with three dollar dinners.

I've been dying a slow, painful death without my homemade bread.

I love artisan bread in five minutes a day. You mix the dough one day, filled with healthful whole grains...and then simply dip into the dough for up to two weeks to make pizza, pastries, bagels, and the prettiest bread shapes you can buy at Wegmans, for pennies a loaf.

And I've been on a baking hiatus for over two months due to the propane situation.

 I adore the smell of fresh baked bread...the crack of the crust, the look on the kid's faces, the fact that the little angels will eat multiple loaves in one day, and  I know EXACTLY what's in it. Oh, it takes me back...
 
To me attempting to teach myself to bake bread. I grew up in the 80's, we had instant everything. When my mom wasn't ordering take out or serving melt-away meat, it was On-Cor meals with a boxed side dish and a can of veggies. We did not have fresh baked bread, we had giant loaves of a white, mushy, cake-like substance, with the nutritional value of styrofoam. That's what people ate.

Baking is one of the ways I cement my anti-Mom status a couple of times a week. Perhaps the lack of propane was contributing to my poor moods as well. Tough to bake when you're trying to make three months of propane last four.

Today, I feel better. Much, much better.

I had forgotten that I can make homemade English muffins on my electric griddle, no oven or propane required...Check it out!

(You do have to scroll past the blueberry muffins)

I love Alton Brown