What's Cooking?

Budget cooking 1

No picture yet, but I might take a picture of the salad tomorrow when the lighting is better. I thought I'd post what we (the kids and I) had for supper tonight, with a cost break down included. It's become a cliche, but times really are getting tough, and food is an easy way to cut back on expenses. It can't be said enough, but shop local if you can, buy from local producers where possible, and think about the cost of driving a distance to get a bargain. I'm all for shopping loss leader sales - that's usually the stuff listed on the front and/or back page of the flyer - but sometimes it doesn't all add up to a great deal. It IS possible to eat frugal, cheap even, and not give up on quality or resort to Mr. Noodles and Spaghetti O's (I don't think we can get those in Canada, but I know what they are).

We had lasagna for supper tonight, with a salad and garlic toast on the side. The noodles were purchased at the local grocery store. The beef, though, came from a local beef farm, and the flour for the cheese sauce and the bread came from the Arva Flour Mill, a mill within 60km of my house which mills locally grown grains. The lettuce came from the grocery store - that's something to work on, I guess!  I made the bread for the garlic toast, using the Light Whole Wheat recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. It's incredibly easy, and it really does only take five minutes per day. 

The cost breakdown is on the next page ....

Meat Pie

This recipe started out as the best of intentions to make a tourtiere for the site. However, after I started cooking the meat and onions I realized I didn't have any of the spices needed to make a tourtiere. So this is simple a meat pie, or meat tart, really, since I cheated and used some frozen pre-made tarts I found while digging in my freezer.  The meat pies turned out really well - a total winner with the kids!  They all loved them, so these are definite keepers. There are some ... well, herbs and herb blends that I couldn't identify and that I used on the meat, so it's not a cut and dried recipe, but a bit of a creative instruction.  This meat pie or meat tart also fits in with the $35 per week challenge, which is always on my mind if not on my blog.

A special note about the tortiere this was supposed to be: my mom's original recipe does not use beef. She would be appalled to see I used it at all, but I have 100 pounds of ground beef in my freezer, so I'm going to use it any chance I get!! And the spices I've used have nothing at all to do with a real tourtiere, so don't let them be any sort of guide at all.

Hawaiin Ham, the redux

It occurred to me tonight, as I made Hawaiin Ham, that this is nothing like the Hawaiin Ham my mom made when I was a kid!  So I thought I should take a picture of my variation.  I have posted this recipe before - you can find it here - but I'll post it again with all the additives and changes I've made since the last time I posted it!

My  mom's version of this recipe is completely different than mine.  I actually had to dig up a recipe book she gave me as a bridal shower gift many, many years ago, just to see the actual differences.  I'll post both recipes so you can do your own comparison, but in my own defense, I think I added all the extra veggies both to stretch the dinner, and to make it a little more 'healthy'.  I'm air-quoting that just in case she ever logs in here and reads this.  The veggies make sense though: carrots and pineapple are a great combination, green beans and pineapple AND green beans and pork are great together, ham and pineapple are complementary, and, well, the green peppers were called for in the original, so I had to keep them in.  Take a look, see what you think!

Emergency pasta sauce

Tonight was one of those "oh my god I have no sauce and the pasta is in the pot already" nights.  

I like to have a bag or five of frozen ravioli and tortellini on hand in my freezer, for nights like tonight.  I had school last night until 9:30, a great visit with a friend, then worked all day today, then home at 6:00pm to cook supper for three incredibly  hungry kids.  It's a long couple of days, that's for sure!  And the thought of cooking at the end of them is just not my favourite thing to think about.  It's even worse when I've realized I've dropped the pasta in the boiling water, and there is no sauce to be found!

This is a recipe for a very simple tomato sauce that I made in a hurry for tonight's ravioli. Simple, natural foods are my favourite thing, and I may have just converted my kids from quickie canned sauce to this simple marinara type sauce.  Now, I do have a great meaty spaghetti sauce that I'll never share the recipe for (see mom, I told you I wouldn't), but for a quick weeknight meal, I've always just opened a jar of whatever-was-on-sale pasta sauce.  This sauce tonight was so easy and tasted so good though, that I may just use this from now on!  This is probably a half recipe of it, so just double it if you're feeding more than one adult and three children.

Whole Wheat Carrot Pineapple Muffins

Whole Wheat Carrot Pineapple Muffins are sort of a 'creation from leftovers' special.  New Year's Eve here at my house was a family friendly affair, and we made eight different kinds of homemade pizza for all the kids and adults.  One of the pizzas we made was a Hawaiin pizza (we'll talk about the steak dinner pizza later!), and I ended up having a half can of pineapple tidbits leftover.  From the veggie tray, I managed to salvage a few carrot sticks - and the inspiration for Carrot Pineapple Muffins was born.  I added in some whole wheat flour, mainly because I have some lingering around, and I thought it would add some flavour and 'healthy' to a nice treat.  The amount of whole wheat flour can be adjusted up, if you'd like more whole wheat in your muffins, but in my experience, a little white flour is needed to lighten them up. If you do try all whole wheat and they turn out great, then let me know, I'd love to hear about it. To get the crushed pineapple called for in the recipe, I whizzed the leftover pineapple tidbits in my food processor until I had something probably more correctly called pureed or pulverized pineapple, but it worked.

For the New Year's Eve party, we had a Nintendo Wii competition for the kids, and a Playstation2 Sing Star competition for the adults!  I highly recommend Sing Star - what a hoot!  I'm pretty confident saying we all had a great time, and I can't wait for the next party.  

Baked Ham - photo

Here is my picture for Adrienne's Mulled Ham, which I made tonight for my kids and I.  It looks pretty good, doesn't it?

Now, if you've read Adrienne's recipe for the Mulled Ham, you might have noticed MY ham is missing a few things.  Like the pineapple.  And the poaching liquid. And the brown sugar.  There's a story behind that, of course.  I dropped the ham - not once, but twice. The first great drop landed on my fuzzy slipper (ew) and then bounced to the floor. The kids were on the Wii, so I quickly scooped it up, carefully set it back on the plate, picked it up - and dropped the whole thing again.  I didn't want to waste a good ham, so I cut off the outside, threw out the pineapple, ditched the poaching liquid, and put it back in a hot oven to fix it.  

So here is my version of the Mulled Ham - I call it 'Megan's Beat-up Ham'.  Enjoy!!  The link to the Mulled Ham recipe can be found here.

Mulled Ham, by guest author Adrienne Charlton

Hi everyone. This is a recipe for Mulled Ham (a ham baked in orange juice and mulling spices), by guest author Adrienne Charlton. No picture of it yet, but if I manage to bake a ham in the next couple of days, I will get a picture up!

From Adrienne (who is from Ottawa, Ontario originally, and is currently living in London, England):

Being in Britain, I am surrounded by remembrances of the wartime slogans like "make due and mend" and "keep clam and carry on;" so, when I was unable to find cloves for my Christmas ham I steeled myself and found a solution. The resulting flavour was so complex and seasonally appropriate that it definitely bears repeating. I hope you enjoy the recipe.

Peppermint Patties

No picture yet, as I'm in the process of making these! But these are the best and easiest holiday candies to make, in my opinion, and they taste so, so, so good. AND they're a four ingredient recipe (yes, 4 ingredients!) so that makes them even better.  These peppermints have a creamy centre, more like York peppermint patties, and not like an After Eight peppermint.

Easy Everyday Beef Stew

 

Tonight - it's peasant food again! This is my everyday go-to standard beef stew, that I throw in the pot and ignore for a while. It uses some ingredients that I call 'by-product' ingredients: bacon fat, ketchup swish (more on that later), and beef stock. Ok, beef stock may not be a by-product to everyone, but I found a great cookbook at a garage sale, called "Hazel Meyer's Freezer Cookbook". This is an excellent book for learning to extend the table, so to speak, or to cut back on grocery bills. Hazel says in her book that pretty much everything can be frozen; just fried hamburger in the pan? Well, add a cup or so of water to the 'empty' pan, give it a stir, and you've got stock! This works if you're browning or roasting anything - leftover gravy also makes an excellent base for stock. Put it in a container or freezer bag, and thaw it out next time you need a bit of stock. Ketchup swish is the same idea. It's about a 1/4 cup of water swished around in a nearly empty ketchup bottle. Perfect for this recipe, and lots of other things! We're all tight for money these days. Groceries are an easy way to help cut back on living expenses, and using ingredients you don't have to buy makes it even easier. Next year I think I'm going to start scavenging for food, although scavenging food for a beef stew could be a bit challenging. I'll keep you posted anyway :)

Apple Pie Muffins

 

It's been a while. Thanks to the power of Facebook and a little apple spice muffin bragging, here I am posting a new recipe. I was actually craving an apple pie, but that seemed like too much work, so I did a little hunting and came up with this recipe. It's an old recipe I had around, but hadn't made in a long time - I'll definitely have to keep it in the roster. There's a great topping on these, sorta like the top of a Dutch Apple Pie. Enjoy! These are really moist, yummy apple spice muffins. They taste good coming out of the oven, but they're even better the next day.