24 Apple Cakes To Make: {Recipes}
This week’s Recipe Hit List is a collection of two dozen recipes for making an apple cake that I’ve handpicked from around the ‘net…plenty of inspiration here so you’ll never get bored making this old favorite. This popular cake is typically easy to whip together and always impresses (it’s a great way to use up [...]
- Also See These Tips:
- Simple Baked Apple Recipes
- 12 Yummy Zucchini Cakes To Make: {Recipes}
- Apple Crisp Recipe
Continue reading 24 Apple Cakes To Make: {Recipes} …
From TipNut.com.
35 Things To Make With Pears: {Recipes}
This week’s Recipe Hit List offers plenty of inspiration and ideas for cooking up and preserving this year’s pear harvest, around half are baking recipes but I’ve included a few canning recipes and other goodies too. I’ve handpicked and bookmarked these from around the ‘net and they each look delicious, can’t wait to try them [...]
- Also See These Tips:
- 10 Recipes For Homemade Pear Butter
- 21 Tempting Coffee Cake Recipes
- 10 Homemade Applesauce Recipes To Make
Continue reading 35 Things To Make With Pears: {Recipes} …
From TipNut.com.
35 Things To Make With Pears: {Recipes}
This week’s Recipe Hit List offers plenty of inspiration and ideas for cooking up and preserving this year’s pear harvest, around half are baking recipes but I’ve included a few canning recipes and other goodies too. I’ve handpicked and bookmarked these from around the ‘net and they each look delicious, can’t wait to try them [...]
- Also See These Tips:
- 10 Recipes For Homemade Pear Butter
- 21 Tempting Coffee Cake Recipes
- 10 Homemade Applesauce Recipes To Make
Continue reading 35 Things To Make With Pears: {Recipes} …
From TipNut.com.
Summer Meal Series #5: Chicken-Broccoli Crepes
This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen.
Hey, look, homemade crepes!
OK, before we get going, it should be noted that this meal is pretty much as easy to prepare as you want it to be – and at almost every turn, we chose the more difficult route.
Actually, to be more specific, Sarah chose the more difficult route. She did most of the preparation of this recipe and was the one that made most of the difficult choices. I’ll be using the adjective “we” to describe the effort because there was some trade-off here and there, but she did most of the effort for this recipe.
What difficult choices did we make? Rather than buying a package of crepes at the store, Sarah chose to make the crepes from scratch. Rather than buying a package of pre-shredded Swiss cheese, Sarah chose to buy a chunk of Swiss and shred it herself. In both cases, the result was a tastier and healthier and less expensive meal, but it certainly added to the prep time. Those two things alone more than doubled our prep time, turning a meal that could probably be in the oven in fifteen or twenty minutes into something that involved more than an hour of work.
So, let’s dig in and see how we got there.
The inspiration and model for this meal came from this cookbook, Low Cost Cooking, that we came across in a yard sale for $0.25 (the cover has a $0.50 sticker on it, but we came late to the sale). Can you guess when it was published by the cover design and heavy use of earth tones? If you guessed “late seventies or early eighties,” you’re a winner! It was published in 1980 and is apparently long out of print.
Yes, we shop at yard sales and consignment shops for cookbooks. They’re actually great sources for cookbooks. I’d estimate half of our cookbook collection is from such sales.
Anyway, on to the recipe…
Here are the ingredients for everything including the crepes. One of the advantages of making things like crepes on your own is that you can choose what goes into them – organic milk and farm eggs, in this case.
I’m going to mark off the making of the crepes in their own section. If you wish, you can simply buy a package of crepes at the grocery store instead of making your own.
Making Crepes
Here’s what you need just for the crepes.
1 cup all-purpose flour ($0.15 or so)
1 1/2 cups milk ($0.30 or so)
2 eggs ($0.15 or so)
1/4 teaspoon salt ($0.02 or so)
1 tablespoon cooking oil ($0.05 or so)
In other words, you’ll be making about 16 crepes for about $0.65 – or about $0.04 per crepe. If you buy them, they’ll be substantially more than that.
Making crepes is really easy. Just mix all of the ingredients in a bowl until they form a batter, then heat a small skillet over medium heat with just a drop of oil spread all over the surface of it. Put about two tablespoons of the batter in the middle of the skillet, then lift the skillet and tilt it to spread the batter evenly. Let it cook over medium heat for about a minute or so (or until the top face looks solid instead of liquid), then flip the pan over on top of a paper towel and (maybe, depending on how it cooked) scrape the crepe from the pan with a spatula.
Voila.
Now just repeat it about fifteen times or so and you have your crepes. You might ruin one or two along the way as you get used to the right heat setting, but don’t sweat it – you’ll have plenty of crepes.
Now for the filling…
Making Filling
Here’s an ingredient list for the filling. Obviously, specific choices vary a lot in price, so I’m just using the prices we paid for this stuff. If you aren’t hitting a sale or are buying premium items, the price per ingredient might be higher.
1 10 oz. package frozen broccoil ($1.19)
2 tablespoons margarine or butter (about $0.05)
2 tablespoons all purpose flour (about $0.02)
1/4 teaspoon of salt (about $0.02)
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg (about $0.02)
1 1/2 cups milk (about $0.30)
3/4 cup shredded Swiss cheese (about 3 oz.) (about $0.60)
2 cups finely chopped cooked chicken (we used roughly a pound) (about $2.50)
12-16 crepes
So, our cost per crepe – assuming we make 16 of them, which we did – is about $0.34 per stuffed crepe. We’ll talk about that again at the end.
The sauce Melt the margarine/butter in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat, then add the flour, salt, and nutmeg. Stir it a bit to make a nice roux, then add the milk all at once. Cook and stir this until it’s thick and bubbling a bit. Keep cooking and stirring for about another minute, then add the Swiss cheese and keep stirring it until all of the Swiss cheese is melted. Sit the sauce aside.
We like to grate our own cheese, even though it takes a bit longer than buying a bag of pre-grated cheese. You have much more control over what kind of cheese you buy and what ingredients are in it, plus with freshly grated cheese, it’s actually fresh and much more moist (bagged cheese often has corn starch to prevent it from sticking to itself over a long shelf life). Even better – it’s usually cheaper, too.
The filling First, cook the broccoli according to the directions (you can use fresh if you wish – if you do, just steam it after chopping it into small pieces). You’ll also need to cook the chicken – we cooked up some chicken breasts for this dish, though you may want to use other portions of the chicken.
You can see a bit of spilled crepe batter on the stove top there, as well as one of the finished crepes off to the side. (I think that was the one we sampled as we made the crepes).
Anyway, once you’ve cooked the broccoli and cooked and chopped the chicken, combine the chicken and broccoli and one cup of the cheese sauce in a big bowl and stir it until it’s consistent.
Then just lay out a crepe with the unbrowned side up, spoon about 1/4 of a cup (or a bit less) of filling into the middle of the crepe, and roll up the crepe and put it in a 13″ by 9″ baking dish. Repeat with all of the crepes that you can fit in there (we fit in about 16):
Then, pour the remaining cheese sauce on top of the crepes. Preheat your oven to 375 F (about 190 C), cover the crepes with foil, and bake for 20 minutes or so.
Here’s our pan of crepes, freshly pulled from the oven:
… and here’s what my final dinner plate looked like:
The fruit side dish was incredibly simple: we just had some blackberries that we bought in bulk that we washed, put a few in a small dish, and spooned a bit of raspberry yogurt on top. It was a delightful side.
As I mentioned, each crepe cost somewhere around $0.34 to make. Thus, three crepes would cost about $1 in ingredients – I ate two and was perfectly happy with dinner. Add in the fruit and yogurt and even the small glass of wine and the cost of that meal for me was about $1.
Yes, it took some time, but you could greatly reduce the time (and add a bit more cost per meal) by simply buying your own crepes.
Was it tasty? Our usual rule of thumb is that if all four of us – myself, my wife, my four year old son, and my two year old girl – all enjoy the main course, we’ve got a recipe we’ll use again in the future. We all liked it. In fact, the kids each ate two crepes – they requested more crepes instead of more fruit after their plate was empty, a completely unexpected result.
Continue reading Summer Meal Series #5: Chicken-Broccoli Crepes …
From The Simple Dollar.
Summer Meal Series #5: Chicken-Broccoli Crepes
This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen.
Hey, look, homemade crepes!
OK, before we get going, it should be noted that this meal is pretty much as easy to prepare as you want it to be – and at almost every turn, we chose the more difficult route.
Actually, to be more specific, Sarah chose the more difficult route. She did most of the preparation of this recipe and was the one that made most of the difficult choices. I’ll be using the adjective “we” to describe the effort because there was some trade-off here and there, but she did most of the effort for this recipe.
What difficult choices did we make? Rather than buying a package of crepes at the store, Sarah chose to make the crepes from scratch. Rather than buying a package of pre-shredded Swiss cheese, Sarah chose to buy a chunk of Swiss and shred it herself. In both cases, the result was a tastier and healthier and less expensive meal, but it certainly added to the prep time. Those two things alone more than doubled our prep time, turning a meal that could probably be in the oven in fifteen or twenty minutes into something that involved more than an hour of work.
So, let’s dig in and see how we got there.
The inspiration and model for this meal came from this cookbook, Low Cost Cooking, that we came across in a yard sale for $0.25 (the cover has a $0.50 sticker on it, but we came late to the sale). Can you guess when it was published by the cover design and heavy use of earth tones? If you guessed “late seventies or early eighties,” you’re a winner! It was published in 1980 and is apparently long out of print.
Yes, we shop at yard sales and consignment shops for cookbooks. They’re actually great sources for cookbooks. I’d estimate half of our cookbook collection is from such sales.
Anyway, on to the recipe…
Here are the ingredients for everything including the crepes. One of the advantages of making things like crepes on your own is that you can choose what goes into them – organic milk and farm eggs, in this case.
I’m going to mark off the making of the crepes in their own section. If you wish, you can simply buy a package of crepes at the grocery store instead of making your own.
Making Crepes
Here’s what you need just for the crepes.
1 cup all-purpose flour ($0.15 or so)
1 1/2 cups milk ($0.30 or so)
2 eggs ($0.15 or so)
1/4 teaspoon salt ($0.02 or so)
1 tablespoon cooking oil ($0.05 or so)
In other words, you’ll be making about 16 crepes for about $0.65 – or about $0.04 per crepe. If you buy them, they’ll be substantially more than that.
Making crepes is really easy. Just mix all of the ingredients in a bowl until they form a batter, then heat a small skillet over medium heat with just a drop of oil spread all over the surface of it. Put about two tablespoons of the batter in the middle of the skillet, then lift the skillet and tilt it to spread the batter evenly. Let it cook over medium heat for about a minute or so (or until the top face looks solid instead of liquid), then flip the pan over on top of a paper towel and (maybe, depending on how it cooked) scrape the crepe from the pan with a spatula.
Voila.
Now just repeat it about fifteen times or so and you have your crepes. You might ruin one or two along the way as you get used to the right heat setting, but don’t sweat it – you’ll have plenty of crepes.
Now for the filling…
Making Filling
Here’s an ingredient list for the filling. Obviously, specific choices vary a lot in price, so I’m just using the prices we paid for this stuff. If you aren’t hitting a sale or are buying premium items, the price per ingredient might be higher.
1 10 oz. package frozen broccoil ($1.19)
2 tablespoons margarine or butter (about $0.05)
2 tablespoons all purpose flour (about $0.02)
1/4 teaspoon of salt (about $0.02)
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg (about $0.02)
1 1/2 cups milk (about $0.30)
3/4 cup shredded Swiss cheese (about 3 oz.) (about $0.60)
2 cups finely chopped cooked chicken (we used roughly a pound) (about $2.50)
12-16 crepes
So, our cost per crepe – assuming we make 16 of them, which we did – is about $0.34 per stuffed crepe. We’ll talk about that again at the end.
The sauce Melt the margarine/butter in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat, then add the flour, salt, and nutmeg. Stir it a bit to make a nice roux, then add the milk all at once. Cook and stir this until it’s thick and bubbling a bit. Keep cooking and stirring for about another minute, then add the Swiss cheese and keep stirring it until all of the Swiss cheese is melted. Sit the sauce aside.
We like to grate our own cheese, even though it takes a bit longer than buying a bag of pre-grated cheese. You have much more control over what kind of cheese you buy and what ingredients are in it, plus with freshly grated cheese, it’s actually fresh and much more moist (bagged cheese often has corn starch to prevent it from sticking to itself over a long shelf life). Even better – it’s usually cheaper, too.
The filling First, cook the broccoli according to the directions (you can use fresh if you wish – if you do, just steam it after chopping it into small pieces). You’ll also need to cook the chicken – we cooked up some chicken breasts for this dish, though you may want to use other portions of the chicken.
You can see a bit of spilled crepe batter on the stove top there, as well as one of the finished crepes off to the side. (I think that was the one we sampled as we made the crepes).
Anyway, once you’ve cooked the broccoli and cooked and chopped the chicken, combine the chicken and broccoli and one cup of the cheese sauce in a big bowl and stir it until it’s consistent.
Then just lay out a crepe with the unbrowned side up, spoon about 1/4 of a cup (or a bit less) of filling into the middle of the crepe, and roll up the crepe and put it in a 13″ by 9″ baking dish. Repeat with all of the crepes that you can fit in there (we fit in about 16):
Then, pour the remaining cheese sauce on top of the crepes. Preheat your oven to 375 F (about 190 C), cover the crepes with foil, and bake for 20 minutes or so.
Here’s our pan of crepes, freshly pulled from the oven:
… and here’s what my final dinner plate looked like:
The fruit side dish was incredibly simple: we just had some blackberries that we bought in bulk that we washed, put a few in a small dish, and spooned a bit of raspberry yogurt on top. It was a delightful side.
As I mentioned, each crepe cost somewhere around $0.34 to make. Thus, three crepes would cost about $1 in ingredients – I ate two and was perfectly happy with dinner. Add in the fruit and yogurt and even the small glass of wine and the cost of that meal for me was about $1.
Yes, it took some time, but you could greatly reduce the time (and add a bit more cost per meal) by simply buying your own crepes.
Was it tasty? Our usual rule of thumb is that if all four of us – myself, my wife, my four year old son, and my two year old girl – all enjoy the main course, we’ve got a recipe we’ll use again in the future. We all liked it. In fact, the kids each ate two crepes – they requested more crepes instead of more fruit after their plate was empty, a completely unexpected result.
Continue reading Summer Meal Series #5: Chicken-Broccoli Crepes …
From The Simple Dollar.
Summer Meal Series #5: Chicken-Broccoli Crepes
This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen.
Hey, look, homemade crepes!
OK, before we get going, it should be noted that this meal is pretty much as easy to prepare as you want it to be – and at almost every turn, we chose the more difficult route.
Actually, to be more specific, Sarah chose the more difficult route. She did most of the preparation of this recipe and was the one that made most of the difficult choices. I’ll be using the adjective “we” to describe the effort because there was some trade-off here and there, but she did most of the effort for this recipe.
What difficult choices did we make? Rather than buying a package of crepes at the store, Sarah chose to make the crepes from scratch. Rather than buying a package of pre-shredded Swiss cheese, Sarah chose to buy a chunk of Swiss and shred it herself. In both cases, the result was a tastier and healthier and less expensive meal, but it certainly added to the prep time. Those two things alone more than doubled our prep time, turning a meal that could probably be in the oven in fifteen or twenty minutes into something that involved more than an hour of work.
So, let’s dig in and see how we got there.
The inspiration and model for this meal came from this cookbook, Low Cost Cooking, that we came across in a yard sale for $0.25 (the cover has a $0.50 sticker on it, but we came late to the sale). Can you guess when it was published by the cover design and heavy use of earth tones? If you guessed “late seventies or early eighties,” you’re a winner! It was published in 1980 and is apparently long out of print.
Yes, we shop at yard sales and consignment shops for cookbooks. They’re actually great sources for cookbooks. I’d estimate half of our cookbook collection is from such sales.
Anyway, on to the recipe…
Here are the ingredients for everything including the crepes. One of the advantages of making things like crepes on your own is that you can choose what goes into them – organic milk and farm eggs, in this case.
I’m going to mark off the making of the crepes in their own section. If you wish, you can simply buy a package of crepes at the grocery store instead of making your own.
Making Crepes
Here’s what you need just for the crepes.
1 cup all-purpose flour ($0.15 or so)
1 1/2 cups milk ($0.30 or so)
2 eggs ($0.15 or so)
1/4 teaspoon salt ($0.02 or so)
1 tablespoon cooking oil ($0.05 or so)
In other words, you’ll be making about 16 crepes for about $0.65 – or about $0.04 per crepe. If you buy them, they’ll be substantially more than that.
Making crepes is really easy. Just mix all of the ingredients in a bowl until they form a batter, then heat a small skillet over medium heat with just a drop of oil spread all over the surface of it. Put about two tablespoons of the batter in the middle of the skillet, then lift the skillet and tilt it to spread the batter evenly. Let it cook over medium heat for about a minute or so (or until the top face looks solid instead of liquid), then flip the pan over on top of a paper towel and (maybe, depending on how it cooked) scrape the crepe from the pan with a spatula.
Voila.
Now just repeat it about fifteen times or so and you have your crepes. You might ruin one or two along the way as you get used to the right heat setting, but don’t sweat it – you’ll have plenty of crepes.
Now for the filling…
Making Filling
Here’s an ingredient list for the filling. Obviously, specific choices vary a lot in price, so I’m just using the prices we paid for this stuff. If you aren’t hitting a sale or are buying premium items, the price per ingredient might be higher.
1 10 oz. package frozen broccoil ($1.19)
2 tablespoons margarine or butter (about $0.05)
2 tablespoons all purpose flour (about $0.02)
1/4 teaspoon of salt (about $0.02)
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg (about $0.02)
1 1/2 cups milk (about $0.30)
3/4 cup shredded Swiss cheese (about 3 oz.) (about $0.60)
2 cups finely chopped cooked chicken (we used roughly a pound) (about $2.50)
12-16 crepes
So, our cost per crepe – assuming we make 16 of them, which we did – is about $0.34 per stuffed crepe. We’ll talk about that again at the end.
The sauce Melt the margarine/butter in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat, then add the flour, salt, and nutmeg. Stir it a bit to make a nice roux, then add the milk all at once. Cook and stir this until it’s thick and bubbling a bit. Keep cooking and stirring for about another minute, then add the Swiss cheese and keep stirring it until all of the Swiss cheese is melted. Sit the sauce aside.
We like to grate our own cheese, even though it takes a bit longer than buying a bag of pre-grated cheese. You have much more control over what kind of cheese you buy and what ingredients are in it, plus with freshly grated cheese, it’s actually fresh and much more moist (bagged cheese often has corn starch to prevent it from sticking to itself over a long shelf life). Even better – it’s usually cheaper, too.
The filling First, cook the broccoli according to the directions (you can use fresh if you wish – if you do, just steam it after chopping it into small pieces). You’ll also need to cook the chicken – we cooked up some chicken breasts for this dish, though you may want to use other portions of the chicken.
You can see a bit of spilled crepe batter on the stove top there, as well as one of the finished crepes off to the side. (I think that was the one we sampled as we made the crepes).
Anyway, once you’ve cooked the broccoli and cooked and chopped the chicken, combine the chicken and broccoli and one cup of the cheese sauce in a big bowl and stir it until it’s consistent.
Then just lay out a crepe with the unbrowned side up, spoon about 1/4 of a cup (or a bit less) of filling into the middle of the crepe, and roll up the crepe and put it in a 13″ by 9″ baking dish. Repeat with all of the crepes that you can fit in there (we fit in about 16):
Then, pour the remaining cheese sauce on top of the crepes. Preheat your oven to 375 F (about 190 C), cover the crepes with foil, and bake for 20 minutes or so.
Here’s our pan of crepes, freshly pulled from the oven:
… and here’s what my final dinner plate looked like:
The fruit side dish was incredibly simple: we just had some blackberries that we bought in bulk that we washed, put a few in a small dish, and spooned a bit of raspberry yogurt on top. It was a delightful side.
As I mentioned, each crepe cost somewhere around $0.34 to make. Thus, three crepes would cost about $1 in ingredients – I ate two and was perfectly happy with dinner. Add in the fruit and yogurt and even the small glass of wine and the cost of that meal for me was about $1.
Yes, it took some time, but you could greatly reduce the time (and add a bit more cost per meal) by simply buying your own crepes.
Was it tasty? Our usual rule of thumb is that if all four of us – myself, my wife, my four year old son, and my two year old girl – all enjoy the main course, we’ve got a recipe we’ll use again in the future. We all liked it. In fact, the kids each ate two crepes – they requested more crepes instead of more fruit after their plate was empty, a completely unexpected result.
Continue reading Summer Meal Series #5: Chicken-Broccoli Crepes …
From The Simple Dollar.
Sweater Mittens Tutorial & Patterns: {Sewing}
Waiting for inspiration to bring out those lovely old sweaters you’ve been dying to use in crafting? Today’s feature fits the bill with this project from Five Green Acres Sweater Mitten Tutorial:
The patterns were given to me by a kind and generous woman in Northern Wisconsin who whips out dozens of them each year, both [...]
- Also See These Tips:
- Pincushion Cuff Tutorial: {Sewing}
- Quilt-In-A-Day Tutorial: {Sewing}
- Scrappy Armrest Pincushion Tutorial: {Sewing}
Continue reading Sweater Mittens Tutorial & Patterns: {Sewing} …
From TipNut.com.
Crafters Medley: 27 Neat-O Projects To Make (February 2010)
Tutorial: Puffy Pouch: (As seen in picture above) What a lovely, unique little pouch to sew!
Circular Needle Clutch: Nice fabric organizer to make for circular knitting needles.
Cosmetic Bag Tutorial: Nice boxy shaped pouch to whip up for your cosmetics (or anything else you like). Also see this list of makeup bag patterns for more inspiration.
The [...]
- Also See These Tips:
- Crafters Medley: 30 Neat-O Projects To Make (February)
- Crafters Medley: 27 Neat-O Projects To Make (January 2010)
- Crafters Medley: 15 Neat-O Projects To Make (September 2008)
Continue reading Crafters Medley: 27 Neat-O Projects To Make (February 2010) …
From TipNut.com.
Yurts: Living in the Round by Becky Kemery
I know I said I would do reviews on Sundays, but this book became a part of my personal recovery, so I thought I would include it here.
Dan only checked the mail once while Daniel was in the hospital, even though he came back to town to go to work several days. In the stack of mail when we got home was this book for me to review.
My first thought was, “How silly, as if I want to read a yurt book right now.” I hadn’t read anything while in the hospital, except a few Reader’s Digest funny pages, which were really read to me by my husband. I stared at books, open in front of me several times, but I wasn’t reading anything.
I somehow started reading this. This book about yurts became an escape. It pulled me out of my sorrows, showed me my goals and got me dreaming again.
The book weaved through the history and modern applications of yurts, or round tent-like homes. Yurts have been used in many parts of Asia for millennia and the author even gave yurts credit for much of Genghis Kahn’s conquests. Now, in America, they are popping up as anything between a portable dwelling, as they were in Asia, made of modern materials, to an inspiration for modern architecture.
This book got me thinking about a lot of things. As someone interested in portable housing, yurts have an appeal to me. Modern fabric yurts can be built in a day, and taken down to be moved in a day. They can have all of the amenities of a modern home and can be heated more efficiently than a house with corners.
One thing I was most interested in was how round living impacted one’s social life. The book told about how, for many people, being in a round space allows a group to have a closeness, opening up to one another. The book took it in a spiritual direction about being in touch with the earth that didn’t suit me, but everything that it said about group gatherings in yurts seemed most applicable to my life and seemed like a setting that would be desirable to our family.
The book was well written and sucked me in an unexpected way. Most books about architectural structures don’t have you dreaming about warriors one minute and sleeping under the stars the next. The pictures were phenomenal as well.
I would recommend this book for people that are interested in energy-efficient housing, small homes (although yurt-homes can be made to be quite large), portable housing and affordable housing. This book has a lot of info and resources to look into. Even though I’m not sure we’ll go the yurt route, there was a lot of info that has inspired some new ideas in me.
TIP: If you are a blogger interested in reviewing a book, contact the publisher. Politely tell them that you blog, how many visitors you get, and that you’d be willing to do a review for your blog if they sent you the book you are interested in. I also committed to putting my review on Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com as well. This is a reader tip that works.
Continue reading Yurts: Living in the Round by Becky Kemery …
From Under $1000 Per Month.
Foraging For Food In My Kitchen – Frugal Challenge
Some frugal challenges are born of inspiration, as the recent challenge that I joined. My friend Christine from TheMenuMom.com had a freezer and kitchen full of food to eat up and challenged her readers to join her in cleaning out their kitchen before they go shopping for food. Click here to see how Christine’s challenge began.
I took that challenge and invited my dear readers to join me. Click here to see my challenge. The response has been great. Many of us are finding that when we dig through the food we have stockpiled in our freezers, refrigerators, and pantries, especially after a holiday cooking extravaganza, we’re finding enough food to serve our family without skimping at all.
This exercise in frugality has been very useful in many ways. 1) I’m cleaning out my freezer, and 2) I’m cutting back on my grocery bill. Yes, the food in my kitchen was bought with money at one time and we did always intend to eat it, but the grocery bill still seems to be shrinking. Perhaps those impulse purchases every time I’m in the grocery store really do add up. I’ll have to watch that from now on!
As the weeks go on, I’ve only had to resort to “outside food sources”, aka the grocery store, once or twice for milk, eggs, etc. However, as of last week, even that luxury has fallen by the wayside. Our convenient run to the grocery store when we need something has been severely limited by a reduction in our family’s mode of transportation – in other words, our car broke down.
With this little chink in the armor of our plan, we have had to make certain adjustments. For instance, we actually do HAVE to eat whatever we have in the kitchen. There is no planning a menu around some ground beef and leftovers if there is no pound of ground beef. I can’t throw some chicken broth into anything to make soup if I don’t have the chicken broth. Some of the simplest meals are out the window because I don’t have those simple ingredients. I have had to rethink my entire plan this week until we get the car back from the shop.
I’ll share with you just a few meal creations that have come from necessity – not creative dishes necessarily, just filling meals.
(Note: Mind you, I didn’t plan on the car breaking down. Those darn things just tend to do that sort of thing out of the blue. So, don’t judge me too harshly when you wonder why I would let my refrigerator supplies dwindle so – down to 2 eggs and 1/2 cup of milk. I thought I could run to the store. Silly me.)
To continue; I considered that the eggs and milk would be best served to stretch as far as possible into a filling meal. That’s how they ended up in pancakes. We were fortunate to have a large supply of potatoes, so with the help of some flour and cornmeal, we created delicious potato pancakes with crispy cornmeal coating. We also have a jar of applesauce in the refrigerator which was the perfect compliment. I whipped up a very large batch of potato pancakes because I knew we could eat them again the next day in another meal.
The next day the potato pancakes did come in handy. I broke up the pancakes that were left and put them in a cast iron pan to start frying. I added a few diced pieces of leftover green pepper and onion. Once the potato pancakes were getting crispy, I added a few pieces of diced ham that was left from ham sandwiches the previous week. I stirred that all together to form a sort of hash. I always have cheese in the house so with a few sprinkles of cheese, we had a warm and filling dinner. Luckily I keep powdered milk on hand as well as some sort of chocolate, so I made chocolate milk and the family was happy and fed once again.
In the dark corner of my pantry, I retrieved a bag of beans and rice that I received as a gift awhile back. With just a few pieces of fried bacon, the last of the diced ham, and a little water, I finally transformed that gift into a nice, hot meal. Because this was really a complete meal in one pot, I decided to save any leftover vegetables I have for another meal and just find something for a beverage. The few lemons and the one orange we had left in the refrigerator would serve as a refreshing lemon-orangeade to go with our beans and rice dinner.
With my head buried deep in the freezer, I started to realize I had to grab whatever I could and let that be my muse – no matter what it was. With a good supply of turkey broth still filling most of the freezer, that’s what I grabbed first. Now, turkey broth, or any broth for that matter, shouldn’t be too difficult to turn into a meal. That is, of course, if you have access to any ingredients you want. In this case, my challenge was to thaw the turkey broth and start grabbing other items without too much thought about a recipe. Remember, I had already been in this challenge for a couple weeks so my pantry was dwindling a little. Couple this with the fact that we’ve already had our fill of turkey casseroles and turkey soups and the turkey broth didn’t seem too appealing. But, I knew it was loaded with nutrition and flavor so I had to give it a try.
What supplies could I forage? A half a big can of crushed tomatoes, some odd pieces of cheese, onions, potatoes, celery, and assorted bread. Once the turkey broth came to a boil, I turned it down to simmer and started foraging. First, I cut up some onion and celery and threw that in. Then, the addition of the crushed tomatoes. It was already taking on a Gumbo appearance… oh, yes, I do have a half a bag of frozen okra as well as some diced leftover turkey meat. With the addition of those ingredients I have a pretty tasty Gumbo that will be filling. The okra will thicken it a bit, but if not, I can always cook up some potatoes and smash them in there for a more hearty soup. I saved the cheese, bread, and potatoes for another meal.
Since I already thawed out some turkey meat, it appears that a turkey casserole was in order. I made a layered casserole using the turkey with sliced potatoes. I still had onions so I added those. And, in my pantry, ignored for months, was a can of cream of asparagus soup. Well, you never know until you try. I added that to the layered casserole. I seasoned the layers pretty heavily with paprika and the results were very tasty. The asparagus and turkey flavor combination was surprisingly good. Something I wouldn’t have know if I hadn’t been forced to try it.
Anyway, this is how the days went. Foraging in the kitchen for meals was an entertaining and educational experience. Our car will be repaired and running again tomorrow, but even when I can run to the grocery store again at will, I think this lesson has taught me something. We have resources we don’t even know we have when forced to challenge ourselves.
But, it’s also humbling to realize how many people in the world don’t even have the basic food they need and would consider even the simplest supplies a windfall. I’m sure you’ve been thinking the same thing as you go through this challenge.
Take care and I wish you luck with this frugal challenge in your own kitchen.
p.s. What sort of basic food items have you been turning to as your supplies are dwindling? Please share your thoughts with us here if you would. I’d love to hear from you.
Continue reading Foraging For Food In My Kitchen – Frugal Challenge …
From Hillbilly Housewife Blog.