Oh, leave us alone and let us eat

The Deputy Headmistress posted a response to this article, "The Joy of Cooking?", which is an academic-style paper with this as its abstract:

"Sociologists Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott, and Joslyn Brenton offer a critique of the increasingly prevalent message that reforming the food system necessarily entails a return to the kitchen. They argue that time pressures, tradeoffs to save money, and the burden of pleasing others make it difficult for mothers to enact the idealized vision of home-cooked meals advocated by foodies and public health officials."

The DHM made several comments ("Aliens in the Kitchen") based on the body of the article, but I could stop right there with the abstract. I don't cook for either the foodies or the public health officials, any more than I homeschool for the magazine publishers or the school board. My inspiration these days is mostly my own inclination and imagination, combined with what we are able to buy in an increasingly expensive food market, and my motivation is my family.

And yes, besides living on a limited income (for anyone who doesn't know, my husband has been self-employed for two years and we were living on one rather low salary for years before that), I have cooked and continue to cook for picky eating, food intolerances, adolescent meal-skipping, and medically-required diet adjustments.  Not to mention a budding vegetarian and some vegan extended family members. Let me put it this way: as one of the main family cooks and grocery shoppers,  I have my own set of challenges; you probably have yours.  I meet mine as best I can, and I limit myself to occasional gripes when prices go too high or something I sweated over turns up the family noses.

Big deal. That's how you cook for a family.  We have food in the fridge and the freezer and the cupboard.  All the food groups are there.  It's more than enough to keep us going.

And it's only when I start listening to the "foodies" as the authors call them, or to the so-called public health experts, that I get out of whack.  Those public health experts, would those be the ones who want to ban not only peanuts (I'm okay with that) but dairy and other so-called problematic foods from the school system? Leave us alone and let us enjoy our occasional quart of chocolate milk.

As far as preparation goes, North Americans have never had it easier. Low budget or not. See the little casserole dish above? Can you identify the contents?  I bet you can't.  That's butternut squash "butter," like pumpkin butter or apple butter.  I made it last night with a containerful of leftover squash, mixed with some honey and spices. You put it in a pot on the stove or in your slow cooker, and cook it on low for awhile, then mash or puree it to your liking.  What did I really have to do?  I pulled the cooked squash out of the fridge and put it in a pot. (I didn't even have to grow the squash, although I know people who do.)  I squished the honey out of a plastic container.  I stuck a teaspoon into the cinnamon jar and the ginger.  How hard is that?  Not exactly a burden.

And if I didn't want to make squash butter myself, I could have made the choice to go to the store and buy something else to put on my bagel.

But it's only when researchers make what we eat too complicated that we suddenly think we have a problem.  It's not about enacting anybody's idealized vision, it's just about eating.

Related posts:
Keep Your Nose Out of My Lunch Bag
This Doesn't Tug My Heartstrings
I'm Not an Anomaly, I Just Make Dinner
On Not Throwing Out Food, or, Let's Rustle Up Some Grub

What's for supper?, asks Cheerfully Frugal

Tonight's dinner menu:

A skillet dinner, one of those non-repeatables because it was made with what we had; but it turned out pretty well anyway.  I browned a pound of ground chicken, added diced onion, a bit of garlic powder, and the last of a bag of frozen vegetables (the old kind with carrots, peas and lima beans); stirred in a bowlful of tomato soup and what was left of last night's vegetarian gravy (milk, water and soy sauce thickened with cornstarch). And three stalks of celery, chopped.  So more or less what you might put in chicken pot pie; more gravy-flavoured than tomato.  I cooked a potful of twisty pasta, the kind that is sometimes labelled Scoobi-Doos; when it was cooked but not overdone, I stirred enough into the chicken mixture to turn it into what looked more or less like tuna casserole.  I also added a few spoonfuls of Parmesan cheese, and let the whole thing sit with the heat off, lid on, for another ten minutes.

Dessert was a can of crushed pineapple and a can of mandarin oranges, frozen and run through the food processor.

Five thrifty food tips from Mama Squirrel

As I've posted before, and as Peg Bracken liked to say, you don't always need fancy recipes, and sometimes you're better off without them.  Peg wrote, "Worst of all, there are the big fat cookbooks that tell you everything about everything.  For one thing, they contain too many recipes.  Just look at all the things you can do with a chop, and aren't about to!  What you want is just one little old dependable thing you can do with a chop besides broil it, that's all."  (The I Hate to Cook Book)

Well, we are not broiled-chop people, but you get the drift.  My own "little old dependable thing" for meat has usually been putting whatever-it-is on a layer of sauerkraut, and either baking it or slow-cooking it.  I have an "old dependable" basic muffin recipe, a meatloaf recipe that suits us, a favourite way of making macaroni and cheese, and a few other fall-back, no-fail things that keep us functioning. 

But it's the flexy-recipes, patterns rather than strictly-enforced lists of ingredients, that help us make the most of what's around.  These can turn out delicious, or they can be flops.  Experience has a lot to do with that.  Here are a few hints we've learned along the way.

1.  Size and shape:  The other night, I made what was basically spaghetti-and-meat-sauce but with a chunk of leftover roast beef.  The wrong way to do this would be to cut large chunks or slices of meat and to use long pasta like spaghetti.  That is one recipe-for-messy waiting to happen.  Better idea:  cut the chunks quite small, and also use small pasta like shells or fusilli.  We also glued it together, so to speak, with a bit of mozzarella melted on top.   Rule of thumb:  things that go on the fork at the same time work better when they're approximately the same size.  Stew, big chunks.  Soup, small pieces.

2. Seasoning: the above-mentioned pasta dish could have been very flat, but I used the spaghetti seasonings here (more or less--less sugar), and added beef broth as part of the liquid. If you're using low-or-no salt ingredients (such as no-salt-added tomatoes) and a little salt isn't a medical problem, then you might want to check for that.

3.  Don't put things in that don't belong.  We had some gravy left over from the roast beef, but that would have made the spaghetti sauce taste terrible.  It's not a crime not to use every last available ingredient.

4.  Colour.  Seventh-grade home ec teachers love this one, but it's true.  Sometimes you can't help the food at your meal being mostly one colour, but if you can add a bit of contrast (even if it's frozen peas), it cheers up the plates.  Some vegetables lose colour in cooking, so you might want to add them (or cook them) at the last minute.

5.  If you're not sure which foods go together, try making up a name for your dish based on the flavours and ingredients you're using, and see if it sounds like something you'd order off a menu.  If not, you might want to rethink.  For instance, Banana-Cherry Muffins sound tasty; Pumpkin-Cherry, not so much (although many people obviously disagree with me on that).  Beef-Mushroom Pasta Skillet sounds good; Beef-Turnip Pasta Skillet, no.

Photos (except for Peg Bracken) by Ponytails.  Copyright Dewey's Treehouse.

Raspberry Ripple Muffins--your style

How do you make Raspberry Ripple Muffins?

1.  Make a regular muffin batter, or buttermilk muffin batter, or sour cream muffin batter, or cake-mix-clone batter, mixing in some rolled oats for texture.  Don't make it too thin, because you'll be adding fruit.

2.  Mix in a leftover cupful of the raspberry sauce that you very quickly concocted for last night's dessert (frozen raspberries, microwaved with a globule of jam that had a spoonful of cornstarch stirred in).  Don't mix it too hard or you'll lose the ripple effect.  If you don't have said cupful of fruit puree, you can always cook some up fresh.

3.  Bake in muffin papers until firm and just a bit browned.  Eat while fresh, or store in the refrigerator (I think--I wasn't sure about leaving them on the counter).

4.  If you don't want muffins, you could try this with pancakes.

That's all!

What's for supper? (Day before groceries)

Broccoli quiche, made with Parmesan cheese, yogurt, leftover vegetables, powdered milk, eggs, and a whole wheat pat-in crust
Leftover sausage and a bit of perogy casserole
Baked potatoes
Rye bread
Carrot and celery sticks, canned black olives

Peach crisp with milk or yogurt (canned peaches and peach jam)
Extra cookies and fruit, because we ended up having a friend stay to supper

On not throwing out food, or, let's rustle up some grub

Sometimes saving money on groceries is as easy as not buying what you know you won't eat. This assumes, however, that you know not only what you are going to eat but also what you, if you're the cook, are going to cook, and how you're going to cook it. It also assumes that you're going to need the whole piece or package or pound of whatever it is, or that you have a plan for the rest that won't involve even more leftovers.

Since this is not a perfect world and we are not clairvoyant at the supermarket, this does not always happen, at least in our treehouse. Factor in time pressures, unexpected events (people not home, flu bugs, fridge dying) and a certain amount of sheer laziness, and it's even more likely that at least some of what we buy is going to end up not getting consumed before it's green/blue/brown, stale, or freezer-burnt.

The way around this is not just more meal-planning, although that helps, but combining the planning with flexible recipes AND a personal repertoire of easy things you know how to do with whatever-it-is. One year during university I shared an apartment with roommates, and one of the visiting parents left a six-quart basket of tomatoes. That basket sat in the corner of the kitchen until...well, let's just say it wasn't too attractive by the end.

I'm not saying that we should all have gone out that weekend, bought cilantro, and canned the tomatoes into salsa. But we could probably at least have made a decent pot of chili out of them. Still, they weren't my tomatoes, so I stayed out of it (and away from it).

Over the years I've had my share of similar use-it-up challenges. Did you ever notice that certain things are hard to use up just because they're either not attractive or accessible in their usual state? Humorist and homemaking writer Peg Bracken pointed out that leftover cake is not a problem, because what you do with leftover cake is eat it. Same with leftover cheese, leftover chocolate, and so on.

But what about the dried beans, the too-large bag of carrots, the cantaloupe you bought on sale, the jar of sauerkraut, the half-head of cauliflower, and all those frozen blueberries? Our hungry ancestors would have been delighted to have had this problem, and you know how they would have solved it? Cooking it up, and eating till it was all. (All gone.) It didn't matter if it wasn't on the menu--whatever it was would have been sliced and put on the table, or put into the soup or the pie, and it would have gotten eaten.

So if you want to use stuff up, that's your first strategy: put it out with whatever else is for supper, or what's in the lunch bag. This is especially important if your family's at all polite or shy about eating what's in the fridge. Put it out there and let people enjoy it.

Strategy two, especially useful if you have young children, is to put it in a form that's easy to eat. That means melon balls, chunks, or slices, instead of a whole cantaloupe staring sadly from the fridge shelf. At that point you might also notice that you have two bananas and an orange, and there you go, fruit salad. Fruit kebabs. Or just eat the cantaloupe; the point is to eat it. I have found a peculiar thing about those big round rice cakes: they often get left in the cupboard UNLESS I quarter them (sharp knife, be careful) and put them out on a plate or in a bowl with other snacks. Somebody must have had the same idea, years ago, when they invented the idea of eating raw turnip sticks.

In the same way, make half the bag of carrots into carrot sticks. Cook up the beans and freeze them.  Get things ready to eat, or to add to future meals.

Strategy three is the what's-in-your-hand principle, the same one that the great-greats used. I recently followed a recipe for sweet-potato salad, and thought I would try it again if I had extra sweet potatoes. This week I had a large head of cauliflower in the fridge, so I used half of that, along with just one sweet potato, to make the same salad recipe; and it also turned out fine.

Sauerkraut is an easy one for us--we use it as a base for cooking chicken breasts or any kind of pork, in the slow cooker or in the oven. If you're a vegetarian, you can try it with potato chunks.  Omnivores can combine all three.

Frozen fruit is likely to go into a crisp-type dessert, or the sort of thing I made earlier in the week (graham crackers, vanilla yogurt, and blueberries), or as fruit sauce on top of pancakes.

A final tip: know your particular food foe, and figure out a way to defeat its demise. Bags of potatoes that rot before you remember to eat them? The other half of the cauliflower? Leftover meat? A half-gone package of cream cheese? Don't look for complicated recipes to use them up; find simple things that you will actually do and that your eaters might actually eat. If you don't like sour things, or don't have a friend who does, or aren't going to a potluck anytime soon, then making bean salad with leftover beans is not a solution. But bean soup might be.  Making a potato casserole uses up as many potatoes as you have...and "potato casserole" could be as simple as cooking cut-up (sliced or chunked) potatoes in some broth or milk, and adding a little seasoning...and that could be in a pot, in the oven, or in the slow cooker.  Add some of the carrots and an onion, and you're on your way to stew.

To misquote Bloom County's Milo, "it's food and we're going to eat it."  There's not much simpler than that.  And happy Canadian Thanksgiving.

This post is linked to Festival of Frugality #301 and The Common Room: Four Moms Discuss Keeping the Food Budget in Control as Prices Rise. 

What's for supper? Really cleaning out the fridge

(Groceries tomorrow)

4 bone-in chicken breasts, cooked in the slow cooker with sauerkraut, Thousand Island dressing, and leftover carrots--it tasted like roast chicken
Mashed potatoes
Leftover bean-pepper salad
Tightwad Gazette Cuban bread (a homemaking lesson from this morning)
Applesauce

Dessert: choice of pears cooked in apple juice (with yogurt or milk), canned pineapple, bran muffins, pumpkin cake  (I had a can to use up)

What's for supper? St.Valentine's Day Dinner

Garlic bread rounds (cut from a submarine bun, spread with margarine and garlic powder, and broiled in the toaster oven)

Salad (lettuce, celery, apple,  homegrown sprouts, and dried cranberries for colour)

Chicken Cacciatore with fusilli (recipe below)

Cocoa Ricotta Cream in fancy dessert dishes, with star sprinkles (left over from a birthday)


Chicken Thighs Cacciatore

I put about eight partly-thawed boneless chicken thighs in the Crockpot, and added about a cupful of diced canned tomatoes, half a chopped onion, and a generous sprinkle (at least a tablespoonful) of tarragon dressing mix.  That cooked on high for about five hours, until the chicken was cooked through but not yet falling to pieces.  About an hour before dinner, I added a package of fresh mushrooms and a can of tomato paste...the tomato paste could have been added earlier, but I wasn't sure how much thickening the sauce would need.

We served sauce and pasta separately, but you could combine them for serving if you prefer.  We also had grated Mozzarella cheese  on the table for topping--no deals on Parmesan lately.

What's for supper? Bratwurst and bits and pieces

Tonight's supper menu:

Bratwurst sausages, cooked in a skillet with enough water to steam
About a third of a bag of perogies, boiled and then added to the skillet
A bit of sauerkraut, added to the skillet at the end

Mixed sweet potatoes and black beans from last night, spread in a pan and breadcrumb topping added--an improvement on plain reheated leftovers
Applesauce, cottage cheese

Dessert:  whatever's around.

When the fridge is empty...or full...(What's for supper?)

The week after New Year's is sometimes a strange one, grocery-wise. As Cardamom Addict pointed out, you may be using up the last of unusual holiday ingredients; in our case, we're also short on/out of a few things. Groceries tomorrow.

So what was in the fridge/freezer/cupboard for supper?

Well, there was quiche, left over from last night. But I was also thawing a package of ground chicken. My plan was just to cook it with a can of no-salt tomato sauce, and serve it over spaghetti. Easy if not inspired. But there wasn't anything extra to put into meat sauce--no mushrooms or peppers. So what about some kind of a white sauce? There was half-and-half cream, the last bought-on-sale grated Romano cheese, sour cream, mixed herbs that I had put together for a food gift (what was left afterwards), Scoobi-doo pasta, frozen peas...all of that went together in a skillet dish loosely based on Chicken Alfredo. It didn't look as fancy as Chicken Alfredo, but it tasted good. It could have maybe used a stronger dose of the herbs, but I was being cautious. Mr. Fixit added hot sauce to his.

And there was a head of iceberg lettuce, bought for economy, not for taste. The middle of the head was too yellow to eat, but the outside was fine. There were half a dozen carrots rolling around the crisper; I sliced one thin for salad and made carrot sticks out of the rest. To the lettuce and carrots I added the last of a bunch of celery, and a sprinkle of sunflower seeds. I also opened a can of no-salt chick peas and put them on the table for them that wanted.

There was a rare can of refrigerated crescent rolls, bought last week when the supermarket had them for 99 cents. Ponytails put those together.

I wanted to make cookies today, but we are out of butter and close to the end of the margarine, so it had to be an oil-based recipe. So I mixed up a batch of Sesame Cookies, made without the raisins but with chopped candied ginger added instead. (I used the end of a box of raw sugar too.)

There was some leftover gingerbread cake. And canned peaches if anyone had wanted them, but we were all full enough.

Sometimes you feel like you're starting with nothing. But you end up with something...and leftovers as well.

What's for dinner? Stuffed Peppers with chili sauce (or not)

Green peppers have been unexpectedly cheap at the supermarket lately.  Mama Squirrel bought five smallish ones on the weekend.  Tonight she cut them all in half, took out the seeds, and arranged them in a large glass baking pan.  She stuffed the halves with the following mixture:

Ground beef, somewhere between a pound and a pound and a half
1/2 cup frozen bread crumbs
1/4 cup milk
1 good squirt Worcestershire sauce
1/4 tsp. pepper
1 egg

There was a bit of mixture left, so Mama Squirrel added two custard cups to the pan and made two no-pepper servings along with the ten pepper halves.  (Like mini meatloaves.)

Then she took half a jar of chili sauce--about a cupful--and poured most of it into the bottom of the pan, trying to distribute it evenly.  She poured a bit of it over a few of the peppers, but not all of them, because not all of us like or can eat much chili sauce.

The pan, covered with foil, went into the oven for about an hour; the meat was done when Mama Squirrel checked, so she took them out and sprinkled some of them with Parmesan cheese.  We also had a butternut squash, cut up and baked in a covered casserole with a bit of water; and couscous (add boiling water and let it sit covered for ten minutes).

What's for supper? Sausage pasta with cherry tomatoes

This is Mama Squirrel's lighter version of a recipe that Canadian Living ran last November and that we adapted as well. I guess you'd call this the summer edition...small fresh chard leaves instead of big hoary late-fall ones...tiny fresh tomatoes instead of diced...and done in a skillet instead of baked.

Sausage Pasta with Cherry Tomatoes

Ingredients:

Two or three mild Italian sausages, uncooked, sliced (although you could use leftover cooked ones)
Several fresh mushrooms, sliced thin
A bowlful of very sweet, fresh cherry tomatoes
Half a can of no-salt chickpeas, drained and rinsed
A small bowlful of baby chard leaves, with the accompanying earwig discarded, rolled up and sliced thinly (EWW correction: discard the earwig, slice the chard!)
Cooked fusilli or other spiral pasta, enough to feed about four people
Some grated mozzarella or Parmesan cheese...you don't need too much

In a nonstick skillet, start cooking the sliced sausage; cook until all the pink is gone. Add cherry tomatoes and sliced mushrooms; cook for several minutes and drain off excess fat/liquid. Add chickpeas and continue cooking until everything is pretty much done the way you want; stir in pasta and chard, top with grated cheese, and let it all heat through for a few minutes. If you turn the heat down or off, it can sit for a few minutes without complaining too much.

You will notice that this is not a very tomatoey dish. If you insist on more tomatoes, you could add part of a can of sauce.

You will also notice that there isn't any extra seasoning added; this is because the sausage we get is already pretty flavourful. Otherwise I would have added some pepper.

(What's for dessert?)

When it's better the second day (dessert)

We had some of last night's steamed pudding left--mostly a thick fruit mixture (raspberries, rhubarb, peaches) and just a bit of the cake part.

This is what I did with it: in five fancy dessert glasses, I layered plain yogurt, leftover pudding (making sure each serving had a bit of cake), a smaller blob of yogurt, and then a spoonful of grated chocolate. (Mr. Fixit buys bittersweet chocolate bars at the downtown grocery store where they don't cost much.)

Better than your average leftovers.

What's for supper? (Mama Squirrel muses on sweet potatoes)

The Deputy Headmistress noted today that the subtitle of Martha Rose Shulman's 1982 cookbook Fast Vegetarian Feasts says something more about today's fast-fast-fast culture than was intended at the time: "Delicious, Healthful Meals in Under 45 Minutes!"

Wow, have things changed that much? I spent an hour puttering on tonight's supper and didn't think a lot about it, especially because I was doing other things as well while things cooked...but then we wash dishes by hand here too. To me that's just how long dinners take, unless you're having scrambled eggs or it's already in the slow cooker. I mean, even waiting for a pizza to come takes forty minutes.

What was tonight's supper? Kind of a smorgasbord, more food than we needed but some of it needed to be cooked and used up, so I cooked it.

Baked salmon fillets (the only thing that went in the oven, and that was the toaster oven)
Leftover sweet and sour turkey meatballs
Sliced sweet potatoes cooked on the stove top and with some chard leaves added at the end
The last bit of yesterday's bread (first time I've used the bread machine in awhile)
Fresh cherry tomatoes and cucumbers
"Steamed Pudding," made with frozen raspberries, fresh rhubarb, and a couple of peaches (it's not really steamed like Christmas pudding--you heat the fruit in a pot and then drop a pancake-like mixture on top, cover the pot and simmer for twenty minutes)

We like to eat, okay? And if it takes awhile--that's fine too. That's what at-home time's about. How hard is it to peel a couple of sweet potatoes, slice them and put them in a pot? It's not like you have to flambe them. How hard is it to slice a cucumber and arrange it on a plate around a bowlful of baby tomatoes? (Total time about two minutes?) How hard is it to put some fruit in a pot, mix about five batter ingredients, plop them on top, and then let the magic of electricity do its thing?

I don't think it's just that people are lazy these days, that cooking has become a thing that comes out of a package. I think it's partly that cooking is presented as too hard by people who are too snobby, who make you worry too much about what goes in the pot with the sweet potatoes, exactly how you're supposed to cut them, exactly how done is done and all that, especially if your mother never showed you how to cook sweet potatoes. People cooked food before they had critics to tell them they were doing it wrong. Unless you burn them black because you forget to add any liquid, you cannot do it wrong, as long as they're the way you like to eat them when they're done. If you like mushy sweet potatoes (I don't), cook them to mush. If you like them cut very thin, cut them very thin. You're the boss of how you want to cook your food--now isn't that more empowering than opening a jar?

Just saying.

Sugar, sugar: improvised butterscotch sauce

We had some maple icing in the fridge, leftover from Mr. Fixit's birthday cupcakes (which were really banana muffins). Actually it was more butter than sugar--I got the proportions a bit off. I had the idea of thinning it down and using it in rice pudding, but we were out of rice.

We also had some leftover butterscotch pudding, the instant kind--something Crayons had asked for, but we didn't eat the whole package.

I combined the chunk of icing and the pudding with a bit of water in a large measuring cup, microwaved it for a minute, stirred it, and microwaved it for another minute.

Instant warm butterscotch sauce. Good over plain cake, muffins-in-a-pan, or something else not too sweet.

Not that I'd expect that everybody (or anybody) out there would have leftover maple icing and leftover butterscotch pudding, but when you have potentially compatible leftovers, it's always worth a try.

Cooking without recipes: Summer Edition

What's for supper?

Pizza Pasta. I had thought of making Pizza Roll-ups, but it was too hot to turn on the oven. So this is what I did: browned a pound of ground chicken in a non-stick skillet, added some cut-up pepperoni, a few mushrooms, a chopped green pepper and a bit of canned pasta sauce, and let all that cook while I cooked a potful of fusilli. Just before the end I melted some mozzarella and cheddar over the top of the skillet.

BTW, one of the best frugal and energy-saving tips I've tried recently from the Tightwad Gazette books is the pasta method from the late Mary Leggewie of HomeschoolChristian.com. Bring the water to a boil, add pasta, bring it back to a boil, turn off the heat, cover the pot, and cook for about twenty minutes, stirring a couple of times to keep the pasta from sticking. It really works!

Raw vegetable plate: cucumbers, zucchini sticks, a few carrot sticks.

Chocolate Microwave Cake with Raspberry Sauce. (our post about microwave cake) The raspberry sauce was made like this: I partly thawed some frozen raspberries (a couple of cupfuls?). In a saucepan I combined two cups of water, two tablespoons of cornstarch, and a couple of good spoonfuls of raspberry fruit spread; I cooked that until bubbly and then added it to the berries, and we drizzled the sauce over slices of chocolate cake.

What's for dinner? Pizza. It's not hard.

Pizza is supposed to be complicated. At least that's what it always seems like to me--because all the best-ever recipes swear that you're going to get something exactly like restaurant pizza, which isn't even really possible unless you've got a mighty hot oven and a pizza stone and all that. Or at least unless you're very ambitious.

But is it okay to just have "pretty good" or "very good" pizza without it having to be international-pizza-competition quality? Sure. You don't have to have a Pampered Anything. You can even have an uneven oven like ours, and store-brand mozzarella cheese, and the simplest possible sauce (thinned-down tomato paste with a sprinkle of dried basil and oregano). And you know what, you can still make pretty good pizza that saves you a phone call and the best part of twenty bucks. (That's what two mediums with delivery go for here.)

This is what we had for dinner:

Two pizzas, made with 2 lbs. of bread-machine pizza dough, the above-mentioned cheese and sauce, a little piece of pepperoni, a bit of deli ham, a few mushrooms, and canned pineapple tidbits. The Squirrelings did most of the putting together. We have no strange magic for the baking--we just put them in at 425 degrees, which is probably hotter than that in the top and at the back of the oven, so I switched them partway through. Bake till somewhat brown on the edges. Let cool a few minutes before slicing.

Soup, made with 4 cups of chicken stock, 2 cups of water, 1/2 cup green lentils simmered in the stock/water, then some cooked rice, leftover chopped potato, and frozen mixed vegetables added and cooked until it was soup. You know it's soup when it stops looking like a potful of water with vegetables and lentils floating in it.

Ponytails' special Pineapple-Juice-Gingerale-Orange drink, made partly with the drained pineapple juice.

Giant chocolate cookies, made from an on-sale chocolate cake mix+egg/oil/water, with a cupful of oatmeal mixed in. (Everybody's seen that recipe, right?) And grapes.

Life outside of homeschool posts: thinking dinner as you cook

Dewey's Treehouse has always been somewhat eclectic--we go through seasons of posting mostly frugal stuff or food stuff, and other times when we're more about homeschooling or something else. If you're not into reviews or Charlotte Mason, thanks for your patience.

Yesterday we got home from an errand at shortly after four; I had an hour to get dinner on the table and I wasn't sure yet what I was going to do with the pound of ground chicken that I had left thawing in the fridge. I started it browning while I preheated the oven and mixed up a large pan of brownies, since we didn't have even one cookie or anything like that in the house (well, there was some Jell-O in the fridge, that I'd made up from the other package I bought for the disastrous Gummy Worms experiments). I also cut up some sweet potatoes and put them in a casserole, sprinkled them with pepper, drizzled them with olive oil, and added water to the bottom of the pan; they went in with the brownies. (I should have cut them even smaller because they were still a bit hard at the end; I had to finish them quickly in the microwave.)

When the chicken was pretty much cooked, I added part frozen green beans, one chopped-up cauliflower, and this combination of sauce ingredients: 1/4 cup white salad dressing (what we use instead of mayonnaise), 1/2 cup of cottage cheese (because the recipe I was thinking of calls for sour cream or yogurt and I didn't have either), a bit of garlic powder, and a teaspoonful of chicken bouillon powder. I put the sauce stuff on top of the vegetables, and it didn't look like much, but I was figuring there would be some liquid from the chicken and the frozen beans. In the end I did add a bit of milk: not enough to be soupy, just enough to keep it moist. I just let this cook for awhile on the stovetop until the cauliflower was cooked and it smelled done. I also added in the measly bit of cheddar cheese we had in the fridge. (We are not starving, we just need some groceries.)

And I cooked a potful of Basmati rice.

So: Cheesy Chicken Cauliflower Un-Casserole; baked sweet potatoes; rice; brownies; and the remains of the Jell-O. That was dinner, and the Squirrel family approved it.

What's for supper? (Leftover pork and a twist on banana cake)

What we had to work with: leftover pork, leftover perogies, leftover roasted potatoes, leftover gravy. Frozen vegetables. Two frozen bananas and a cupful of mango-yogurt freeze.

What we did with them:

Scalloped Pork Casserole

Cut the pork, potatoes and perogies into smaller pieces. Combine in a large casserole and cover with gravy (adding extra liquid if you don't have enough gravy). Add a chopped onion if you're going to be baking it long enough to cook the onion through--otherwise you might want to saute the onion first. Sprinkle with paprika. Bake until everything is cooked/heated through and most of the gravy is absorbed. Add some sour cream if you want, and let that heat through as well. You could also do this whole thing on top of the stove.

Frozen Green Beans

Put beans in water. Bring to a boil. Eat.

Canned Beans in Sauce

To stretch the meal and make the youngest Squirreling happy. It also kind of went with the pork.

Tangerines and Mango-Banana Cake

I made a guess about whether to use the standard 2 tsp. baking powder or switch to the baking powder/soda combination that you use for more acid mixtures; I think I guessed right because the cake rose well and had a good texture. We have a few pieces left for breakfast too.

Ingredients:

2 bananas (I used somewhat thawed frozen ones) and 1 cupful of mango/yogurt puree, somewhat thawed
1 egg
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp. vanilla extract
Small amount of additional liquid
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
3/4 cup brown sugar

Mash, cut up or otherwise combine the fruit, and blend it with the egg, vanilla and oil. Mix the dry ingredients separately and add to the fruit, adjusting liquid as needed. (I added just a little water.) Bake in a greased 8-inch square pan for 30-40 minutes at 350 degrees, testing with a toothpick. (This one took about 40 minutes.) This could also be baked as muffins, at 375 to 400 degrees for about 20 minutes.

A ketchup kind of meal (What's for dinner?)

Dinner's from the freezer--we're low on fresh things.

Frozen cabbage rolls (a small package--they were on sale at Giant Tiger)
Frozen mini-sausages
Baked potatoes (last of the bag--they were getting soft)
Carrot sticks, sour cream, applesauce etc.
Fruity Oatmeal Muffins and Mango Freeze (recipes below)

Fruity Oatmeal Muffins, because the oven was already on at the right temperature:

2 scant cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup rolled oats
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 egg
1 cup milk, swished with the bottom bits of two jars of peach and strawberry jam

Mix dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients. Correct flour if needed (I added a bit more.) Combine gently, scoop into muffin pan and bake 20 minutes at 375 degrees.

Mango Freeze:

Part of a bag of frozen mango cubes (frozen fruit was on sale a couple of weeks ago)
3 small fruit yogurts

Run through the food processor until smooth and fluffed up. If you do this ahead of time, scoop into small dishes or one larger bowl and put back into the freezer until you want them.