January 30, 2013
@ShaiUnfiltered is the best Pinterest dealer ever. I’ve refused to start another Social Media thingie, but she pins all kinds of recipes and shares them so I can still exult in the amazing Must Tries.
Chocolate Chip Banana Bread, PiC refuses to be in the presence of these amazing creations though.
Lemon Chicken and Red Quinoa Soup, I have got to expand our spice drawer a little more. Also, I wonder whether red quinoa is strictly necessary.
Grilled Shrimp With Avocado-Mango Salsa, I haven’t made salsa in a while but this looks delicious. Any excuse for mangos, really.
Amish Cinnamon Bread Alternative, it’s not often you hear me object to ingredients on the basis of their identity but in this case: 1 cup of butter and 2 cups of sugar?? I probably shouldn’t make a habit of something like this with that much of both. Because I totally would.
Roasted Cauliflower and Aged White Cheddar Dip, thanks to a long-time favorite – Kevin from Closet Cooking.
~~~ ~~~
via Nicole and Maggie, People who hate perfection are exhausting. N&M are so much better at being neutral. I’m pretty sure my response would have become “Oh SHUT. UP.” right about the third comment. I’m being fed delicious pastries and my kid’s being entertained? Thank the entertaining gods there’s someone with the energy to do that. I love people who are awesome. They give me something to strive for (in my area of interest or not) or remind me that there is always something better out there which is neat.
Meet Sam the cat. He has ‘brows.
I wasn’t an ardent follower of Regretsy but when and where an amazing post popped up, I appreciated it. Sadly, the site will be shutting down soon.
The answer to finding oneself? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s not a bad idea.
Questions I am or was pondering:
What does FPO (of the military shipping addresses) stand for? My first guess was stupid. Apparently it’s Fleet Postal Office. Two thirds right is still wrong.
Did you get a flu shot? I didn’t and was doing well with my new hermiting ways. Until, thanks carrier monkey, the germs rode their way into the household.
Should we get Doggle a dog friend? He’s so indifferent.
Should we get ME a dog friend? Doggle’s so indifferent. To me. (I still love him.)
I think we all know the answer to the last two questions is yes, don’t we?
If it was imperative to persuade USA stop playing Law&Order marathons instead of NCIS and ruining my day, how would I go about doing this? Just … you know … asking. For me.
Downton Abbey – Spoilers Below if you haven’t seen Season Three
I’ve only seen a few episodes that happen to be freely available but so far it’s pretty dramatic. There were a few favorite moment as the dramas added up in Season Three:
“Edith dear, you’re a woman with a brain and reasonability. Stop whining and find something to do.” I’m tickled. It’s a useful principle.
“Other people have normal families!” I feel ya, dude. The sentiment, not necessarily the belief that anyone’s normal.
“You’re not wearing white tie, what did you dress up as?” HORROR. Absolute HORROR.
I’m not sure that I’m in love with the show but I think it’s remarkably well done anyway.
November 18, 2012
There’s been a lot of jaw-setting, teeth-gritting as a coping mechanism of late. November’s become my least favorite month. October catches short shrift for being a close neighbor. So while I’ve been searching for a way back, I’ve been just holding on. Holding still and keeping quiet.
The tougher things have been, the more we’ve been eating out. The spending sort of bothered me but I always knew it was really symptomatic of larger problems. Not the fact of eating out itself, but the listlessness with which I went along with it. I’ve always had a line in the sand when it came to the cooking:eating out ratio, both because I don’t like restaurant food that much, and it’s costly. It was fitting that it felt like there was a small turning point with trying a new recipe for the sake of experimenting, for the sake of pulling together the pantry. Baby steps.
The Quinoa and Spinach Pie
I modified this formerly gluten-free recipe to a From the Pantry version.
Personal Edits: With a search-and-advice assist from @zenvar on Twitter, I soured up some 2% milk with a tsp of vinegar to replace the Greek yogurt that wasn’t on hand, and measured out a Cajun spices mix instead of the dried thyme and chili powder our spice cupboard never has. Surprisingly, we did have breadcrumbs so we didn’t go without a crust, though it wasn’t the fancy sesame seeds.
Ingredients:
Fresh baby spinach (~ 1 lb), blanched
1 cup quinoa to cook, makes 2 cups
1 cup milk/vinegar replacing yogurt
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
3/4 tsp. sea salt
1/2 tsp. ground pepper, used black but white was called for
1/2 tsp. Cajun spices, replacing thyme and chili powder
1 shallot, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
Preparation:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Grease a baking pan and line with breadcrumbs.
3. Cook quinoa.
4. Prep an ice bath and boil a pot of water for blanching the spinach. Blanch the spinach to a bright green (no more than 8-10 seconds) and transfer to ice bath, then set aside on a paper towel.
5. Saute garlic, shallots and spices in olive oil until translucent; transfer to a medium sized mixing bowl to be combined with remaining ingredients: spinach, quinoa, milk, eggs, sea salt and pepper.
6. Pour into baking pan and bake until golden brown, up to an hour.
I served this with roasted Lime Chicken thighs and roasted onions. Optional: burning your hair stovetop. But that did add some spice to the night.
PiC loved the pie, calls it a quiche, but I’m on the fence. It’s good, but with a sort of critical taster’s opinion, maybe it could have used double the spices and it’s possible the yogurt was more important than just as a dairy component. Next time!
Posts for Perusal
This post about the manipulation of creatives (via Cloud) details a familiar journey from the perspective of a workaholic.
In my earlier years, my triggers were as easily flipped (though eventually some money followed) to overwork, to overcommit, and to make trade-offs that went against the grain dictated by the myopic “Accountants.” Though in my case, it was more frequently a would-be Creative preoccupied with playing god instead of Accountant, instead of seeing a bigger picture and so utterly failing to make the right decisions to steer the company in a positive and productive direction so that our work would be meaningful, reducing our efforts to nothing more than one sad punchline after another.
Luckily, my clarity came after just a few years and my trajectory wasn’t . Of course, I was bearing the burden of more than just my own ego so I had to snap to, pretty quick.
Because professors surely want to be even bigger babysitters than they’re already forced to be, a few universities are piloting new eTextbooks that will track student usage of assigned readings. Thinking fondly of FrugalScholar, Funny About Money, Nicole and Maggie, among other professorial bloggers.
eemusings is watching her Indian friends live life under a marriageability microscope. My parents didn’t force the matchmaking issue but they definitely asked me to “play along” when their friends did. There was more than one old village acquaintance who’d sidle up and propose a marriage alliance, and more than one awkward meeting with a proposed groom. I tried to be a good sport about it for the most part so endured no end of cackling from my parents over the traps their friends would lay to lure me in as I was notoriously busy and shy to boot. Since they never took it seriously, though, I didn’t worry about being pushed into anything I didn’t feel right about. Maybe it would have been less awkward if it were still a completely accepted practice or totally out of date but in the even more awkward phase of generational and cultural gaps, we just shook our heads and all sort of humored each other.
Speaking of gaps, Vanessa’s Money, Bridget and a few other bloggers had some things to say about the recent post by Shawanda grossly generalizing whether women should work in male-dominated workplaces.
One of the major issues I took with the article was the spurious logic and sweeping generalizations, as evidenced by the lumping in of STEM with blue collar jobs as “dirty,” “physically-demanding” and “masculine” as the reasons given for women choosing not to be in male-dominated professions. As if women don’t already face enough sexism in the workplace generally, women in the sciences, leaving out E on purpose here because I’ve seen many friends succeed in E, face a huge uphill battle with basic sexism, so much so that a recent study shows that there is an inherent bias against hiring and promotion of women by both men and women, all else being equal. Some areas of science are equally represented by men and women, but most areas are still male dominated and patriarchal.
For the record, this isn’t my field but I do see the results of that behavior frequently, I follow bloggers who do work in the sciences and have to deal with it, and it’s horrifying that we continue to have to fight for what I’d consider the right to make basic decisions for ourselves. Why are these questions even being debated on a political stage? /digression. My point is: The well worn mental image that women are delicate, women are weak, women would much prefer not to be taxed, let’s protect the poor little women is still out there.
For people, much less women, to be perpetuating any part of this utter gender-based bullshit on behalf of all women is not just insulting, it’s frustrating considering the kind of opposition we already have to fight. Like Alison said, we have people whispering defeatist messages in our ears at a young age, telling young women to worry about looking too smart, worry more about their appearance and not their accomplishments.
Do we need to keep feeding fuel to these same old fights too? It’s exhausting.
August 28, 2012
I’ve used Steamy Kitchen’s Hainanese Chicken Recipe in the past, but returning to it this week, I realized that the way the recipe was organized had me running back and forth so much that I was wasting a lot of time in the kitchen. I’ve reorganized it with some of my own tweaks. (I actually never make the chili sauce. Sriracha and I are not friends.)
While I was cooking tonight, as is usual at the end of a few recipes, we ended up with a scoop and a half of leftover rice and I borrowed the broth from the recipe below to reconstitute it. Figured I had enough green onions to jazz it up a little bit as well. As I was mincing, it occurred to me that the paltry scoop of rice wasn’t going to do much for either of us, so I tripled the broth and brought it all up to a boil. My mind drifted back to a story my parents told me, of days more than thirty years gone.
Facing grinding poverty once the war was over, all the economic opportunities diverted to the hands of the Communists leaders and those who fought on the “wrong” side jailed, my family fled the country to build a better life for their children. The journey was terrible, every step of it. A forced stop in Malaysia, beached in the open air while the pirates and what passed for government at the time traded fire over their heads, sometimes as a game with the captive humans as their target practice. They were provided food in the form of a tiny sack of rice, perhaps a few pounds’ worth, per family once in a while, and a family unit was considered any size from three to ten people at the whims of the distributors.
To make the rice stretch, they cooked rice porridge. Not like I cooked tonight, not like my parents cooked when they sometimes told this story, a nice thick fat grained rice porridge. It started the same way, with cooked rice, thinned it out with water, and cooked down further so that the rice would puff up and “grow” as the colloquialism goes.
But then they would thin it out even further than that, and the added water would take on the taste of the rice. The porridge would become a gruel after enough cooking, a small bowl of rice would stretch to a pot, and feed a family with the rice portion going to those who had to truly eat something and the watery portions going to those who didn’t truly need as much.
It’s been a while since I cooked a porridge but I always remember that story.
It was just a memory for them, but I can’t take food for granted and my parents never chided about starving children anywhere. I just think about all those months they waited and did without to survive until they regained right of safe passage.
Hainanese Chicken Recipe
Ingredients
Whole chicken
kosher salt to clean the chicken
1 teaspoon kosher salt for the rice
4” section of fresh ginger, in 1/4” slices
1” section of ginger, finely minced
2 stalks green onions, cut into 1″ sections (both the green and white parts)
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
2 tablespoon chicken fat or 2 tbsp vegetable oil
3 cloves garlic, finely minced
2 cups long-grain uncooked rice
2 cups chicken broth, reserved from cooking chicken
1/4 cup dark soy sauce
Few sprigs cilantro
1 cucumber, thinly sliced or cut into bite-sized chunks
Chili sauce
1 tablespoon lime juice
2 tablespoon reserved chicken poaching broth
2 teaspoon sugar
4 tablespoon sriracha chili sauce
4 cloves garlic
1” ginger
a generous pinch of salt, to taste
Directions
Prep the ginger and garlic: peel 5 inches of ginger. Take 4 inches and slice in 1/4″ slices. Mince remaining inch of ginger. Mince ginger. Slice green onions in 1″ pieces.
Rinse rice and set aside to soak.
Prep the chicken: Clean the chicken with a small handful of kosher salt. Rub the chicken all over, getting rid of any loose skin and dirt. Rinse chicken well, inside and outside. Season generously with salt inside and outside. Stuff the chicken with the ginger slices and the green onion.
Cooking the Chicken
Place the chicken in a large stockpot and cover chicken w/1 inch of water. If the chicken is smaller than the width of the pot, fill with less water. Bring to a boil over high heat, then turn down to simmer.
Cook for about 30 minutes or less if you’re using a smaller chicken.
To check chicken: See if the juices run clear or check temperature (170 F) when the time is up.
Prep ice bath for the chicken.
When the chicken is cooked, turn off the heat. Transfer the chicken into a bath of ice water to stop the chicken’s cooking and throw out ginger and green onion.
Reserve the broth for your rice, your sauce, and the accompanying soup. There should be at least six or seven cups of broth reserved for soup.
Cooking the Rice
Drain the rice. Heat 2 tablespoons of cooking oil over medium-high heat. Add the ginger and the garlic and add in your drained rice and stir to coat, cook for 2 minutes. Add the sesame oil, mix well.
Stovetop: Add 2 cups of the reserved chicken broth, add salt and bring to a boil. Immediately turn the heat down to low, cover the pot and cook for ~ 15 minutes. Remove from heat and let sit, covered, for 5-10 minutes.
Rice cooker: Combine fried rice, ginger and garlic with 2.5 cups of chicken broth and salt in rice cooker. Follow rice cooker instructions.
Chili Sauce
Blend all chili sauce ingredients in a blender until smooth and bright red.
Serving
Remove from the ice bath and rub the outside of the chicken with the sesame oil. Carve the chicken and slice tomatoes and cucumbers for serving. Heat up the broth and season with salt to taste.
Serve the chicken rice with chili sauce, soy sauce, tomato and cucumber slices, and a bowl of hot broth garnished with scallions.
April 22, 2012
PiC scheduled me for a pain therapy massage last weekend. As usual, I felt like a completely spoilt brat every step of the way.
There’s this oddly named Chinese restaurant nearby that has an awesome lunch special that goes until mid-afternoon so my appointments can be obscenely late and still squeeze in a delicious cheap meal afterward. This time I had a solo lunch including my favorite bowl of hot and sour soup. It’s always almost too hot and too sour but juuust on this side of tolerable. Usually I steal PiC’s too so I had to settle for just the one bowl, and my own meal. 🙂
When I walked into the spa, one of the ladies at the front desk greeted me by name, asking if I’d gotten her message that my requested masseuse could see me. It took me completely aback, startled that she recognized me. She just laughed and waved me through. Snuggled into my warm, freshly laundered robe and slippers, I had a drink of fruity water and an unnecessary brownie.
My favorite therapist checked with me about what I needed this visit and we settled in. As always, she asked after my comfort level with the pressure some time into the massage even though it wasn’t necessary – she’s always spot on whenever I let her know what to do from the beginning and she still always checks. After our appointment, I felt as close to pain-free as I have felt in years. Amazing. It lasted about 6 hours but it was still absolutely lovely.
Posts for Perusal
SingleMa mostly unraveled IRA contributions for High Income Earners. I hadn’t even touched IRA contributions this year because I had no clue what PiC and my combined MAGI would be. Heck, at this point I still don’t know. *shakes fist* Complications!
Ella describes Maternity Leave in Norway. It was a big surprise though, made me really sad as I responded with what we have in the US. Wow. We … we suck. Yet another reason I’m having some trouble imagining motherhood. I don’t think I want to stay home a year, to be honest, but to go back in six weeks if I were to bear a child also feels rather too short.
Nicole and Maggie asked what I’d been asking myself quietly: what would you do if you didn’t have to have a job?
Interesting. I’ve been secretly griping of late, overwhelmed with waves of fatigue and pain that feel unstoppable and so tempted to just … stop. And I wondered, what if I could? What if I found myself somehow able to not need to work? What would I do with myself? Eat, sleep, cook. Play with the dog, play on the internet, work on the internet. Probably actually manage to write like I mean to several times a week but never have time to. I’d need to find more animals to play with, groom, do something helpful with. But then I would get bored and want something more. Or maybe I would start healing and getting better. Who knows. Or bored. In which case…
Travel, yes. Friend time, yes. More of what I was doing during that unemployment stint minus the fretting about being unemployed and trying to find a new job. Gardening because I wouldn’t be taking this time unless we’d gotten out of this place and into a place with a yard so Doggle could roam and I could garden. All in all, things productive. Plus some elusive project that would likely generate income because we all know I have a complex about not being income positive. What would that be? What would you do?
Donna’s revelation about her war with her body is strikingly similar to how I’m feeling right now. Hence the massage that I wasn’t bright enough to schedule for myself.
A recipe
@clareyt led me to her bestie’s site Whit’s Amuse Bouche which had the most mouthwatering chicken and dumpling recipe I’ve ever seen. Sadly, my hands were simply not up to manually making the dumplings and we don’t have even the most basic of kitchen implements any self-respecting cook should have so I had to figure some alterations that would preserve the deliciousness.
Chicken N’ Potato Stew
(6 servings)
Ingredients:
1 roasted chicken, shredded
4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons flour
1 onion, diced
1 large carrot, diced
2 celery ribs, diced
Salt to taste
Pepper to taste
5 cups chicken stock
1 cup heavy cream
3 small potatoes, diced
Directions:
To start, shred your roasted chicken, and set the meat aside. (I did this last.)
Melt the butter and add the flour, cooking for about 2 minutes to create the roux. Slowly add the chicken stock, constantly whisking to avoid lumps. Add the carrots, celery and onion, and simmer for 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Add the heavy cream, and bring to a simmer.
Add diced potatoes to the pot, place the lid over the pot and gently simmer for 20 minutes while shredding roasted chicken. Add the chicken, and cook for 5 more minutes.
April 8, 2012
A change is as good as a rest. But a change and lots of rest is WAY BETTER. It’s been a year since our last break from work. I haven’t taken more than a day off, if that, barring regular holidays which tend to be eaten up by chores and obligatory trips home that are like work, for that long. That’s leaving aside SDCC which is All Things Wonderful but also go-go-go, so I forget what it’s like to be without an agenda, without a schedule and without early mornings unless you really really want them.
This year between vacations strategy is Doing It Wrong. It’s making me really really want my fat cushion of vacation time back so that I don’t feel like I have to wait a year to squish together enough days for a respectable amount of time off. Of course that was because I didn’t take more than two days off in 3 years or something like that in the first place… ew. There must be a better way to store it up like a barrel of nuts for winter.
I’ve been drained to the verge of breakdown for weeks, nay months, now and a rest was really very much the ticket. I always forget how much that can help.
And go figure, someone, not sure who but my boss ‘fessed up as a possible culprit, was a disease vector for small child germs which we all know are 150x more potent than adult germs. *eyeroll* If it’s not one thing ….
Anyway, with the exception of one set of numbers I’m still waiting on (shaking fist in PiC’s general direction), I could finish our taxes but since I can’t, I’m actually considering filing an extension. That’s pretty depressing for someone who’s always filed by February 15th. Le Sigh, another victim of marriage compromises: my above average tax filing sprints!
Posts for Perusal
Little Miss Moneybags is about as good at answering the door as I am. (Minus a big brave dog peeking between her legs.) And then forgetting about it about ten minutes later. We must be cousins!
A Recipe
Thanks to @ShaiUnfiltered’s Pinning, I was introduced to this revelatorily simple Crusty Bread recipe. I even got to break in the new Le Creuset, the Lamborghini of our kitchen that has been in the cupboards for months because I couldn’t think of anything good enough to try. Go figure, I’d use it for the world’s simplest bread recipe. Note: It’s flippin’ heavy. (The pot)
Ingredients:
3 cups unbleached all purpose flour
1 3/4 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon yeast
1 1/2 cups water
Directions:
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together flour, salt and yeast. Add water and mix until a shaggy mixture forms. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and set aside for 12 – 18 hours. Overnight works great. Heat oven to 450 degrees. When the oven has reached 450 degrees place a cast iron pot with a lid in the oven and heat the pot for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, pour dough onto a heavily floured surface and shape into a ball. Cover with plastic wrap and let set while the pot is heating. Remove hot pot from the oven and drop in the dough. Cover and return to oven for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes remove the lid and bake an additional 15 minutes. Remove bread from oven and place on a cooling rack to cool.
March 11, 2012
Once in a while, you need home-and-hearth friends. The people you shared everything with, or friends on whose doorstep you could show up, wander in, help yourself to a bowl of something and know that’s a prelude to a good chat or a good comfortable silence, not getting kicked out. The days when we could easily do that are long past now, but the friends aren’t. Everyone’s pretty far away.
Speaking of far away, there’s a chance that one of the old gang are considering an international wedding. To keep the guest list down because the bride and groom will be paying for the whole thing. I wouldn’t have thought that between the travel and all it’d be that much cheaper but the prospective guest list is apparently just as daunting as mine was. So this family dodging is a more common theme these days than I expected. Thank goodness for the early warning so that I can start setting aside money now in case it does happen. The destination sounds intriguing, PiC’s definitely interested, and it’s going to cost … ooooh… moneymoney.
Posts for Perusal
~ This guy has creating things and networking down to a geeky science. Beautifully simple!
~ Ask a Manager was asked how to be an awesome hardass. She answers.
I agree with so much of it. As you start out in your nascent career, you won’t be as confident and that’s fine, you’ll build it over time. She also points out that if you are projecting confidence well ahead of your abilities, it’s generally less well received. This is true. I have managed a couple of those who don’t have the knowledge, experience and performance to back it up. And it annoys me. I end up having to be much harder on them than usual because they have unfounded belief in their abilities and performance and rather than honestly evaluating strengths and weaknesses, they’re spouting absolute nonsense when they sit down and tell me that they are the equal of so-and-so. There’s a huge difference in believing that you will do your best and learn to be truly competent and thinking that you can snow a manager into believing you’re already there. And if you’re blindly pretending you’re already there, you’re spending very little precious time developing the abilities that would actually get you there.
Confidence coupled with actual competence is one thing. Faked confidence without anything behind it? Eh.
~ StackingPennies chats along the same lines about the difference between being a girl and being a woman.
~ Suba of Wealth Informatics raises the question: why are women not in more leadership roles?
I saw a ThinkProgress stat tweeted that cites “FACT: Women perform 66% of world’s work, produce 50% of the food, earn 10% of the income and own 1% of the property (via @OECD) #icymi”
Interesting in and of itself, though I would like to see the data behind it. Without needing to say that, I know that while I think there are women are just as competent, confident, capable, and desirous of leadership positions as men, if not more, in a general comparison there is plenty of evidence that our social and cultural norms are still not in any way open having women lead. This is why consciously or not, women don’t put themselves forward for leadership, why women aren’t as supported in leadership roles, and why women aren’t as commonly confident as leaders.
Watch the differences between the way men and women are treated in politics today and note how men are attacked for their politics unless their personal scandals are brought to light, while women are attacked for everything else on a regular basis. Women in politics are synonymous with their personalities, their families, their looks and their voices. Men? They can be any number of personally negative things: fat, slobby, lazy, cheating, lying, drug abusing, a law-breaker, but that will just be a blip on the radar if it comes to light at all; women can’t expect anything less than to be called the most vile names and come under ad hominem attacks throughout their careers simply for conducting business. And depending on the severity of the issue, men can just apologize for their sins and move on, if their spin doctors are good enough.
If this isn’t an environment that isn’t openly hostile to women, I don’t know what is. Add to that, women who want to succeed have been complicit in this hostility to women, excusing or ignoring the transgressions and abuses of their own parties against women while decrying the same from the opposite parties.
I don’t discuss my personal politics here but I do have political opinions. Yet regardless of my political beliefs I do not support ANY candidate or ANY individual who feels ad hominem attacks are appropriate. I don’t care which party you belong to, wrong is wrong.
~ Welcome home from Africa, MoneyMateKate! She reminded us a couple months ago to tip on the whole bill but I’m really hoping for that post on saving on malaria.
A Recipe
I’m trying to figure out where I found this originally, but I’ve stopped having to use a recipe for it by now which means it’s finally been ingrained even in my long-term memory and it’s that delicious.
Red potatoes and green beans
serves 4
Ingredients:
1 lb new red potatoes*
1 lb green beans
1 tbls salt
1 tbls sugar
minced garlic**
1-2 tbls butter
Directions:
* If you can find the tiny ones for a good price, great. I just use the regular red potatoes and cut them up into about 1.5 inch chunks. A couple always break up a little at the end, no big deal.
** to taste; if you like garlic, one clove. If you love garlic, three or five cloves. We love garlic so we want it to cover every bite of the veggies.
Use enough water in the pot to boil the potatoes and to add the green beans to the pot as well. Start boiling the water with the sugar and salt. Boil the red potatoes for about 15 minutes. I love my green beans crispy so I add the green beans to the pot at the 15 minute mark and boil both together for another 4 minutes. They stay bright green and crunchy.
Dump both into a colandar to drain. Transfer into a serving bowl immediately and toss the butter and minced garlic in. Use a serving spoon to gently mix the beans and potatoes and coat both with butter and garlic.
December 20, 2010
After some months in which PiC was so over-generous in treating his family that I cannot even write down the numbers here, PiC and I are well into our new quest to keep our grocery and eating out bills down to an almost unimaginable $400/month.
Much like 444 Express, we’re making an effort to go through the foods in our cabinets, and I’ve been keeping certain staples in stock for our new go-to recipes that are delicious, versatile and last a heck of a long time.
I adapted this Full-Bodied Tomato Soup from Not Quite Nigella, tripling the garlic because we loooove garlic. Dropping the meatballs keeps the cost down to about $5 per large pot of six or ten servings and we really didn’t notice any difference. We did add a half cup of orzo to the last batch and it took over the entire soup like a mad mutation. By the third bowl, it was just a pasta dish. I’m not sure we should do that again.
I’m sort of considering adding some of our 99 cent per box tofu to the next serving, just to see if it’s weird or if it works. Thoughts? In original form, the soup was excellent by itself or as a side to my constant stream of cheese quesadillas. Mmm….
Managing to continually rotate a menu that includes fresh produce without wasting food due to spoilage is tougher than it should be with modern conveniences, but between a busy work schedule and my inherent laziness about eating balanced meals if I’m tired, I admit to failing more often than not of late. Still, we’re fighting the good fight, and the more new recipes I find, the more interested and invested I can be in the process.
