What's for supper? Slow Cooker (Chicken) Burrito Bowl

Tonight's dinner menu:

For those who eat meat: Slow Cooker Chicken Burrito Bowl  (thanks, Heather)

For those who don't: Hillbilly Housewife's Taco Style Lentils and Rice, minus the bouillon cubes and with more lentils than rice

Taco toppings, whatever seems to be in the fridge: cheese, sour cream, chopped vegetables, salsa, some blue-corn tortilla chips we bought last week

Last night's Applesauce Spice Star Muffins.

What's for supper? Un-chicken chili

Tonight's dinner menu:

Saving Dinner's vegetable chili, in the slow cooker (photos from the last time we made this)
Leftover chicken and rice, to mix with the chili as desired
Tortilla chips, sour cream, cottage cheese

The Hillbilly Housewife's Cinnamon Raisin Bars.

Raisin Squares for a church potluck

RAISIN OR DATE BARS (More with Less Cookbook)

Today we are having a potluck lunch at church.  We're taking some sandwiches, a quinoa-black bean salad, and a batch of these raisin bars, which I call Raisin Squares because they're different from the Hillbilly Housewife's Raisin Bars (those are more cake-type, these are like date squares but without all the chopping).

Make one of these fillings:

Raisin Filling:
  2 1/2 cups raisins 
  3/4 cup water 
  1/4 cup sugar 
  3 tbsp. lemon juice 
  2 tbsp. cornstarch   

Date Filling:
  3 cups chopped dates 
  1 1/2 c water 

Combine filling ingredients and cook over low heat until thick.  The recipe says to let the filling cool, but I don't usually have time and they still turn out fine.

Crust/Topping:

  3/4 cup margarine or equivalent in preferred fat or oil
  3/4 cup brown sugar 
  1 tsp. salt (seems like a lot, you could try less)
  1/2 tsp. baking soda 
  1 3/4 cup flour 
  1 1/2 cup rolled oats (I use the quick type)

Mix well until crumbly.  Firmly press half the crumb mixture into a 9 x13" greased pan. 
Spread cooled filling over top; it may seem like not quite enough, depending on how thick your filling is, but just do your best to get it spread around.. At this point I like to sprinkle the filling with a spoonful of cinnamon-sugar, but that's optional.  Cover with remaining crumb mixture, patting down lightly. 
Bake at 400 [F] for 25-30   minutes. (I bake them at 375 degrees because our oven runs hot, and they are usually done in about 20 minutes, so watch them.) Cut into bars while warm. 

How to cheap some soup

We have been making the Hillbilly Housewife's recipe for Taco Style Lentils and Rice since discovering the site several years ago.  I usually make it in the slow cooker, and use it as a substitute for refried beans at a tortilla meal. There are other versions of the lentil-rice filling out there, some much spicier than that one, but I like Miss Maggie's simple (kid-friendly) combination of seasonings.  One change I do make is to use a cupful of lentils to half a cup of rice, rather than equal amounts.  I don't usually have beef bouillon cubes around, either, so I just leave that out.

The recipe does make quite a bit, and we usually end up eating about half of it and either freezing some or turning it into Creative Leftovers.  This time around I had quite a bit left, so yesterday I made Mexican-Style Soup. Amounts of ingredients depend on what you have:

About half a recipe of lentil-rice taco stuffing
Enough water or broth to make it soupy (I used water plus some chicken broth powder)
1 can pinto beans, drained
Some frozen corn
Half a cup or so of salsa

I brought the water and leftover lentil-rice mixture to a boil, then added the pinto beans and let it simmer a bit.  The corn and salsa were last-minute additions, but they really improved the texture and flavour.  It was even better (as most things are) leftover for lunch today.

Fancy Fruit Bars: Vegan or Not

I made some unintentionally-vegan fruit bars tonight, using the Cinnamon Raisin Bars recipe on the Hillbilly Housewife website.  The vegan part was because somebody had eaten the last egg; but as the recipe says, it works pretty well without.  The fancy part?  I got a bag of mixed dried cherries, blueberries, and cranberries as a Christmas gift, and I used those instead of raisins, along with a few chocolate chips.  The dried berries work well in this recipe because you pour a cupful of boiling water over them (or the raisins) and let them sit a few minutes while you mix the other ingredients.

Cut in bars, eat for dessert, and send some back to university with returning offspring.  And remember to buy eggs.

Making it from scratch: Stephanie's spice mixes

We've been following A Year of Slow Cooking since its first year.  It's still among my top ten (maybe top five) favourite food sites.  I've also bought the two Make It Fast, Cook It Slow cookbooks.  Not all the recipes have been winners here, but several have become regulars.

The site has a couple of hidden bonuses.  One is pretty obvious: all the recipes give gluten-free options.  This isn't something that currently applies to our family, but it's good to know anyway, especially if you might be cooking dinner for a gf friend sometime.

The other bonus is that, because of the gluten-free recipes, there are alternatives given for things like taco seasoning mix.  This is a good thing for us in several ways.  First, homemade spice mixes are lower in sodium, which is still something we're trying to watch around here.  Some Squirrels also get sick from eating MSG. 

Second, although seasoning packets aren't terribly expensive, mixing your own is probably a better deal.  I also find them a frugal option since they help to make a tasty meal out of other simple ingredients.  Ground beef plus spices makes taco filling; then you add whatever other bean, cheese and vegetable toppings you have, and wrap in tortillas or serve over rice or corn chips (for taco salad).

Plus you don't have to remember to buy taco seasoning, or sloppy joe spice, if you already have the makings for it on the spice shelf.  And, if you're really organized, you can even mix up extra and store it in sandwich bags to make it all as easy as ripping open a packet.

And the last good reason, for us, is that Steph's spice mixtures pretty much suit our cupboard staples and our tastes (with the exception of rosemary, which two Squirrels can't eat).  When you find something that works for you, you stick with it.

So I'm passing on the links to a couple of Year of Slow Cooking mixes that have worked for us, plus the spaghetti sauce mixture that I worked out from a Hillbilly Housewife recipe.  Thank you, Steph!

Sloppy Joe Seasoning  I used this a few nights ago to make a Hamburger Assistant-type meal in a skillet:  a pound of ground beef, a can of tomato paste plus water and seasonings, leftover cooked pasta, and a bit of cheese.

Taco Seasoning.  This one is in More Make it Fast, Cook it Slow under "Taco Dip," but the spice mix doesn't appear on the Year of Slow Cooking website. It's the same recipe as the one in this blog post, minus the teaspoonful of salt.

Enchilada Sauce

Mama Squirrel's Diner-Style Spaghetti Sauce

What's for supper? (so hot out)

It just kept getting hotter and hotter today, so what might have been an oven meal became a mostly stovetop one instead.

Tonight's menu:

Swojska sausage and sauerkraut
Frozen perogies
A can of baked beans
Leftover coleslaw
Beer Bread (made with non-alcoholic beer), baked in the toaster oven (link updates 2020)
Vanilla milkshakes

Menus this week: fun in the kitchen

This week's menu started out by accident.  I printed out a sample menu page from the Hillbilly Housewife's free PDF Menu Planning 101, and left it in the kitchen.  The Squirrelings saw it and got all excited about the Quick Cinnamon Rolls, Garlic Breadsticks, and other things I haven't made for awhile; they were disappointed when I said it was just a sample I'd printed out.

Aww.

Well, we do have most of the ingredients called for, if we shifted some of the meals around, and I think most of us would like most of the meals.  But it's going to be kind of a crazy week, with different people in and out for different things.  How about everybody helps cook this week, when they are home, so that we get to try some new things/old favourites?

Okay.

To make it easier, Mama Squirrel printed out every single recipe from the menu and put them into a three-pronged folder.  Everybody responsible for a particular dish can easily find the instructions.  And if we want to do the same meals over again, it will be easy.

So here's this week's menu plan, with most recipes available on the Hillbilly Housewife website:

Sunday (Father's Day):  Breakfast:  Banana muffins, fruit, cereal.  Lunch:  Dad's choice.  Dinner:  At a relative's (that was easy).

Monday (a day when a couple of people have to leave early in the morning):  Breakfast:  Cereal and toast.  Lunch:  Macaroni salad.  Dinner:  A skillet rearrangement of Company Chicken Casserole, served with rice or maybe perogies.

Tuesday:  Breakfast:  Homemade granola or other cereal.  Lunch:  Vegetable Lo Mein, or it might turn into fried rice.  Dinner:  Impossible Cheeseburger Pie, vegetables.

Wednesday:  Breakfast:  Cheese Pancakes.  Lunch:  Pigs in a Blanket.  Dinner:  Green Spaghetti (my own addition--I have the ingredients for that, but not for the Stuffed Peppers originally on the menu), Garlic Bread Sticks, Bean salad, Peach Crisp.

Thursday (a day when people are eating at odd times):  Breakfast:  Hot or cold cereal.  Lunch:  quick sandwiches.  Dinner:  Italian Beans and Rice, Cheese Puffs.

Friday (we have a church event in the evening):  Breakfast:  Peanut Butter Bread for those who can eat it, other options for those who can't.  Lunch:  Banana Carrot Salad and leftovers.  Dinner:  5 Can Bean Soup (with bacon added), leftover bread sticks and cheese puffs, fruit.

Saturday (the adult Squirrels have to have a quick dinner because of another event):  Breakfast:  Cold cereal, and maybe the Quick Cinnamon Rolls.  Lunch (after grocery shopping):  Maybe hummus with vegetables, maybe sandwiches.  Dinner:  Either Slow Cooker Pulled Pork Sandwiches (from A Year of Slow Cooking rather than the Hillbilly recipe), or Sloppy Joes, and cookies.

What's for supper? Diner-style spaghetti sauce

Last night's dinner menu:

Diner-Style Spaghetti Sauce, with wholegrain spaghettini
Green salad with apples and sunflower seeds
Canned green beans

Peanut-butter-cereal squares

I know there are lots and lots and lots of recipes for spaghetti sauce, so who needs another one?. But this is something I adapted from the Hillbilly Housewife's Easy Seasoned Italian Sauce, and the way it came out reminded me of the way one of our favourite diner-style restaurants makes their spaghetti. More American-style than authentic Italian; but still good. It tastes like spaghetti and meatballs, only with broken-up meatballs, if that makes sense.

Mama Squirrel's Diner-Style Spaghetti Sauce
 1 lb. ground beef
About a cupful of sliced mushrooms (optional)
1 28-oz. can diced no-salt tomatoes, undrained (you can substitute two cups of homemade tomato puree)
1 small can tomato paste
1 tbsp. dried onion flakes
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. dried basil
1/4 tsp. oregano
2 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
One or two slices slightly dried (or toasted) bread, diced (optional--my kids didn't like this addition as much as I did, so I have been leaving it out)
Fresh parsley, chopped and added near the end (optional but pretty)
Hot pasta, Parmesan cheese, etc. for serving

Brown the ground beef, breaking up the meat as it cooks; add the mushrooms just before it's finished browning, and let them cook a few minutes. Drain the fat if necessary. Add all remaining ingredients except for the bread, and simmer until slightly thickened and it smells good. I added the diced bread near the end because I thought the sauce was still a bit liquid; it turned out to be a good addition (don't overdo it, though). Parsley too, if you have some (I just grabbed a bit from the garden).  Serve over hot spaghetti.

We had quite a bit left over (I never know where to stop with spaghetti), so tonight we're having Spaghetti Pie.

And what's for dessert? Raisin squares, with one frugal addition

Tonight I made a pan of the Raisin Bars from the More-with-Less Cookbook.  These are not the same as the Hillbilly Housewife's Raisin Bars, which are also very good but which are more like flat muffins.  The MWL version is just date squares but made with raisins.  You make a filling on top of the stove by simmering raisins, water, cornstarch, a bit of sugar, and lemon juice until thickened and soft; then sandwich between two layers of oatmeal-based dough, as for date squares.  Bake for half an hour at 375 degrees, or until the top dough is the right shade of brown (the recipe says 400 degrees, but that's too hot in our oven).

The frugal twist?  I had a bit of cranberry jelly in the fridge, left from Easter, so I mixed that into the raisins at the end.  I also sprinkled the mixture with a spoonful of cinnamon-sugar before adding the top layer of dough.  It made the bars taste a bit like mince pie, but I kind of like it that way.

If you cut them and eat them while they're still warm, you'll probably have to use a fork.  If you let them sit longer, they'll cut better.

Ricotta desserts, and ricotta whipped topping

"Bettina" might not approve of putting ricotta cheese to use in desserts, and usually it is too expensive for us to recommend it as a frugal ingredient; but our local supermarket occasionally runs specials on an Italian-style brand of dairy products--their Parmesan, their ricotta and so on--and that's when we pick some up.

We haven't made frozen Tortoni for awhile, but we do sometimes make Cocoa Ricotta Cream when we have a container of cheese on hand. It's very good, but you don't want it after a heavy meal--ricotta desserts aren't usually sweet, but they are rich.

Tonight we had one of those sale-priced 2-cup containers in the fridge, and Father's Day company coming (just Grandpa Squirrel, but he's important), and strawberries and raspberries to make shortcake with, but no whipped cream. We could have used plain yogurt, or just had the fruit on top of the plain biscuit cake, but there was the ricotta, and Mama Squirrel remembered a recipe for Ricotta Topping in the Goldbecks' American Wholefoods Cuisine. So that's what we did. Short version: run the ricotta cheese plus some yogurt plus some honey plus a little vanilla through the food processor, or beat with electric beaters until fluffy. The recipe also called for a bit additional cream cheese, but that seems optional if your ricotta is already pretty creamy.

An option to make all this more frugal would be to use a homemade version of ricotta cheese, like the Hillbilly Housewife's version. I've made it and used it in main dishes, but haven't yet tried it in desserts. If I do, I'll let you know.

What's for supper? (Hold the tomatoes)

That subject line wasn't referring to throwing them--just eating them. To avoid the distress that pasta sauce causes to some Squirrels, Mama Squirrel made a spaghetti dinner tonight without tomato sauce. General recipe: brown a pound of ground chicken with chopped celery and mushrooms. Cook half a box, or a whole box, of spaghettini. Drain the pasta and put into the slow cooker. Top with the chicken-vegetable mixture, including all the pan juices. Season with pepper and oregano and add some cheese on top (we used uncoloured old Cheddar). Cook until the cheese is melted (if everything's already hot, it only takes an hour or so in the slow cooker). (If you'd rather put the whole thing in the oven, you can do that instead. Or just serve it immediately from the pan, if you're ready to eat. We weren't. We were busy shovelling snow.) Scoop it all out as is, or scoop the top part out into a serving bowl so that you can pull the pasta out separately.

If you don't want to dump everything in together and then have to unmix it afterwards, then just keep the pasta separate from the chicken and vegetables; cook it separately when you're ready to serve it.

We had this with the Hillbilly Housewife's Garlic Bread Sticks (leaving out the extra salt), carrot sticks, and sliced kiwi fruit for dessert.

How to make a Barbie house

Just in case you ever need to know this:

Two temporary versions:

Foamboard and Duct Tape Barbie Size House, at Frugal Abundance (that's Miss Maggie's blog)

Cardboard Barbie House at Filth Wizardry

And one fancier one:

A Barbie House Made From "Trash," at Proverbs 31 Living

Eating with a Smaller Mouthprint: Part Two

This is the second part of the class session on making eating more a matter of faith (as one of the women in the class put it). (Part One is here.)The list was given in a shorter form as a handout; this is my expanded version, but some of it's still in point form because I was just listing ideas as we went along.

A (Not-So-Standard) List of Things People Could Do

1. Co-operating: to ease the burden on our many small households, on older people and singles. Try co-operative shopping, cooking, sharing meals. Trade tools. Invite people to eat regularly with you. Cook a little extra and freeze small portions for older people you care for.

2. Reading: If you have children, read books that give insight into what people ate in other times. In some of our children’s books, it’s made plain that meals years ago were often quite different—for instance, in All of a Kind Family, a picnic at the beach consisted of bread and butter sandwiches, tomatoes, and eggs; and the girls were amazed to find that their mother had brought some small cakes as well. In On the Banks of Plum Creek, Ma left a lunch of milk, molasses and something called corn dodgers (like corn pones). You can also find food quotes in your own books. One that always reminds me to keep a positive attitude came from John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, where a man was praising his wife and said something like: “If we have meat, she cooks it along with the beans; and if we don’t have meat, she just goes ahead and cooks the beans anyway.” I also saw something recently in the Little House Cookbook, that said that Laura never complained in later years about the monotony of pioneer food; only hunger was monotonous.

Look at older cookbooks for low-cost meal ideas, and MCC’s various global/justice-type cookbooks—nice gift idea too. Or you can read newer books such as The 100 Mile Diet.

3. Rethinking recipes—cutting back, using less; substituting, filling in with less expensive foods, cooking multiples, using shorter/simpler recipes; “gathering up the fragments.” Having one or two basic things to do with each food item, especially if it's something that you tend to have a lot of. Examples of this that I have used:

Hard pears—cut up and bake with a little apple juice, they’ll get soft in half an hour to forty minutes
Apples—core and bake two hours in the crockpot; make applesauce; slice for dessert
Canned pumpkin—add honey and spices, make pumpkin butter
Bananas—freeze whole & use for baking; freeze and put through the food processor
Sour cream—put in muffins.
Muffins—freeze them.
Canned pineapple—same dessert as bananas (can also use combination)
Piece of cabbage—shred and mix with favourite dressing
Canned/fresh green beans and/or other canned beans—mix with bean-salad dressing
Bits of barley or brown rice—cook overnight as hot cereal

4. Ignoring much of the mainstream shopping advice—such as not shopping with children, shopping only the periphery of the store, and shopping only according to a pre-written menu. (We briefly discussed the pros and cons of each of these ideas.)

5. Shopping with justice and the earth in mind. Consider the energy, transportation and pollution costs as well as supermarket prices; consider the time needed to shop, prepare, cook, clean up—energy costs make cooking even more expensive. Buy vegetable boxes that support local agriculture. You can get involved with fair-trade importing; you can lobby governments, represent those treated unjustly, fight for fair economic policies, food safety, and agricultural issues.

6. Limiting—creating margin around splurges. Maybe limit some foods to celebrations. Just something to think about.

7. Experimenting—have an experiment week. Eat what’s in the cupboard, or spend only an agreed-upon amount. Try new foods. Use your kitchen tools more creatively (use library books about slow cookers, pressure cookers, etc.). Use your freezer too.

At this point we will stop for a little entertainment:

You had for breakfast: two pounds bacon,
Three dozen eggs, one coffee cake, and
Then you had something really awful,
Four kippered herrings on a waffle.
Nine English muffins, one baked apple,
Boston cream pie, Philadelphia scrapple.
Seventeen bowls of Crispy Crunch.
Then you said, "What's for lunch?"—Allan Sherman


OK--back to work now.


8. Studying, working, volunteering— Think about all the ways that you could influence the world through work in chemistry, biology, improving food crops, food additive safety; selling food; even studying or teaching less-directly related subjects like law and urban planning. Those of you with home kitchen experience could run food teaching programs, food box programs (co-ordinating pickup of produce boxes), collective kitchens, breakfast programs, soup kitchen outreaches, seniors’ lunches—teach people to have more food awareness and confidence, feed their families better, depend less on food banks. I’m saying this especially to older people, those of you who are no longer raising families: many people grow up now without even basic kitchen skills; your creativity and patience are badly needed to teach nutrition and budgeting, gardening, preserving food. Let your experience teach the rest of us.

9. Backyard farming (and the kitchen food factory)—join the backyard-hen movement.

10. Budgeting and planning—Do the math and compare, because prices change. (Right now there's about a 20-cent difference here between a litre of fluid milk and the equivalent in store-brand powdered milk--not really enough to make us give up fluid milk, but just enough to make baking with powdered milk worthwhile. But that could change.) Check the unit prices (sometimes bulk is not cheaper). Keep a notebook of what different stores charge. (I noticed a $2/kg difference for yeast recently between two different stores. I know, who buys yeast by the kg?--but it's the principle of the thing.)

Also, use cheaper forms of food. Following Miss Maggie's directions, I bought 1 lb. of dried pinto beans for $1.50, added a few cents’ worth of seasonings, and for that price plus the cost of a few crockpot hours (and almost no effort), I had a whole crock full of refried beans, cheaper than canned.

11. Being realistic—Don’t insist, hard-and-fast, on always having to make everything from scratch. Sometimes it is a blessing to have a bag of cookies or a frozen pizza on hand. People didn’t always expect to have to make everything themselves—that’s why bakeries were invented.

12. Eating potatoes. And other simple foods, without needing to dress them up. (I told a story that I think came from the La Leche League book The Heart Has Its Own Reasons: a mother said that she had bought some berries and they were sitting on the counter. Her preschooler asked what they were for, and she said, in a patient Mommy-voice, "Mommy hasn't quite decided what to do with them yet." The boy asked, "Well, why can't we just eat them?" Duh, light goes on. So they did. )

13. TRUSTING—Many of us have health concerns now with what we will eat—worries about local and organic vs. imported food, contaminated tomatoes, allergy-related and other medical concerns, worrying about whether things are low fat, wholegrain, have additives—and at the same time we’re trying to eat economically and responsibly—sometimes it makes you want to throw up your hands and give up. But even if our situation seems unique, God can provide what we need. And again--nobody can do everything--but anybody can do something.

(If this post seems a little unfinished, it's because at this point I shut my mouth and let some other people talk. So it's your turn--comments?)

You use what you have (meditations on what's in the fridge)

One essential element of being frugal is that you use what you have, the best that you can. Other people have said this over and over too--Amy Dacyczyn said that she didn't want to print her recipe for pumpkin-blueberry muffins because those things were cheap/free for her but not necessarily for other people. (And yet people are still after her to write a cookbook.)

And that's one reason it's difficult for me to plan menus ahead of time, because the leftovers from pre-planned dinners have to get accounted for too. Coffeemamma just posted a very sensible week's plan and notes that it's based on what's available to her this time of year. We are in that same kind of waiting-for-the-fresh-stuff place right now.

I find the type of groceries we have really varies, depending on where we've been shopping. Last weekend the weather was bad, Mr. Fixit wasn't feeling well, so we were limited to a Giant Tiger trip plus a stop at Bulk Barn. I wasn't about to pay $2.89 for celery at Giant Tiger (although I've noticed that it's expensive at other stores right now too), and for the rest of our vegetables I had to settle for frozen peas, a can of mushrooms, and a head of iceberg lettuce. (I already had carrots and onions.) I knew we'd stock up better later on, but that was what we had to work with for at least a couple of days. Anyway, all that is to say that we had a few a-la-can dinners this week, which isn't necessarily a problem--it's just that sometimes what you have is fresh, sometimes it's frozen, sometimes it's packages, and you have to plan your meals on your feet, so to speak. (Remember my food-box menu plan? In a similar vein, I like what the new Hillbilly Housewife is doing with the Angel Food Menus, based on what's being distributed through another food box plan.) One night we had Giant Tiger's frozen cabbage rolls, plus a package of wieners that I put, frozen, into the oven with a bit of barbecue sauce over top; later I added a can of baked beans. Last night we had chicken spaghetti, with a salad made out of the iceberg lettuce, grated carrot, and sunflower seeds.

And sometimes you just do what makes sense. I've had a bunch of things to do today plus I have a meeting tonight and I don't want to leave a lot of pots and pans. (The Treehouse doesn't have a dishwasher.) We have ground turkey and I was going to make turkey loaf and maybe have mashed potatoes and vegetables with it...then I thought of the loaf of bread that just came out of the breadmaker, and the homemade cream-soup-mix in the cupboard, and the bag of frozen Japanese-style vegetables we bought last night (we did go on another grocery trip--worth a post in itself), and I thought--Hot Turkey-Vegetable Sandwiches. Or Turkey a la King on fresh bread, or whatever you want to call it. It's not a meal I'd make all the time, it's just what works today. (I also had a gi-nor-mous sweet potato from last night's trip, and I cut that up (so it wouldn't take forever to bake) and put it in a pan in the toaster oven.

That's not exactly a leftover story, but leftover-using-up works the same way. Last night's dessert was a what-do-we-have story: plain yogurt (frozen in cubes but mostly thawed by dessert time), one small blueberry yogurt cup, some frozen blueberries and mixed berries (leftovers of each), and graham crackers. Recipe: break up the graham crackers and layer them in a glass bowl with the yogurt and fruit. Let sit until defrosted but not entirely mushy. Call it trifle.

I could have skipped dessert for tonight, but I had some crushed pineapple getting forgotten in the fridge, and part of an orange that nobody finished at lunch. I cut up two bananas, spread the fruit all out in a small pan, and stuck it in the freezer. At dessert time we'll run it through the food processor--instant sherbet.

(Well, I guess that does leave a few dishes. But you get the point.)

Pan pizzas

I don't make homemade pizza too often, even with a food processor around to mix the dough. Whatever I do or don't do to it, it never seems to turn out with the right "heft," or to be baked just the way I want. (And no, I don't own a pizza stone or any of those things that assure great pizza.)

But last night we made individual pizzas from the Hillbilly Housewife's Pizza Page. I made the Make-Ahead Pizza dough (you mix the yeast dry with the flour) and was pleased to note that it Was Not Sticky--that's a nice change. I rolled out and par-baked five pie-pan-sized pizzas as she recommends--don't overdo this, the last one I put in got a bit too toasty. When Mr. Fixit came in he thought I had gone out and bought pita bread, because that's what the crusts looked like when they were cooling.

I also made up a double batch of the Almost Instant Pizza Sauce (there's a little typo in the sauce--you only put sugar in once), grated some cheese, sliced up some mushrooms and salami, and opened a can of pineapple; then let everybody decorate their own pizzas. And that was it; and "YUM- honest," as Coffeemamma says.

Stuffed shells, yum

Remember my experiment making Miss Maggie's ricotta cheese for stuffed pasta shells? Well, this week I had to do a double Miss Maggie in the same recipe: ricotta cheese (curds and whey) for the stuffing, and Quick Cheap and Easy Seasoned Tomato Sauce to go on top, because I was also out of pasta sauce but had two cans of tomato paste and everything else in the sauce recipe.

And it all turned out just fine--I think stuffed shells are even tastier sometimes than lasagna. If I'd had some parsley (still out of that), it would have tasted even better mixed with the ricotta cheese; what I did add (to one batch of cheese) was some salt, Parmesan cheese, and a beaten egg; also a bit of store cottage cheese because I had gotten the ricotta a bit dry and I thought it needed a bit of moistening. I cooked the shells (20 shells served us along with a salad) until they were flexible but not mushy, stuffed them, and put them on top of a layer of sauce, in a greased casserole. I covered them with some shredded cheese (sharp, uncoloured Cheddar, but Mozzarella would have been fine if we'd had some) and most of the rest of the sauce recipe--it made a bit more sauce than I wanted for the pasta so I just kept the rest.

And I baked the whole thing with the lid on for about half an hour. I sprinkled a bit of Parmesan on when it came out of the oven.

Thank you, Miss Maggie--couldn't have done it without you!

Yogurt-making trick

I made yogurt yesterday and wanted to pass on something that's working for me.

I've been an on-again, off-again yogurt maker for years, trying directions from some of my favourite frugal people: The Tightwad Gazette, The Common Room, The Hillbilly Housewife. I've had mixed results using different incubation methods including a quickly-turned-off electric oven--we didn't own a heating pad until this year (we found a brand-new one at a yard sale).

But recently I found a way that clicked for me and does produce very eatable yogurt. The Sea-bird Chronicles posted the idea of heating the milk right in the jar, in a big pot of water. No messy pot to clean up, no burnt milk, not as much hovering--when the water starts bubbling, it's time to check the temperature of the milk as well. I used two pint jars instead of one large one because that's what I had--just divided up the extra milk powder and starter (frozen yogurt cubes) between the two jars after the milk cooled a bit. Then I left the jars for six hours on the heating pad, and voilà.

The other different thing I'm doing--for the time being--is using regular 2% milk rather than trying to make yogurt entirely from powdered milk. Maybe I'll try that again once I've had a few more successful from-fresh batches and I know I'm not doing anything else wrong--but the last just-powdered batch I made was runny and sticky. :-& And what we have now is really pretty good. So if it's not broke...

Food Hamper Gourmet

[updated because I forgot to squash the bread]

A long time ago (when the Apprentice was a preschooler), I took some training to be a Community Nutrition Worker. CNWs are “peer support workers” (rather than professionals). They’re usually hired by community centres or other outreach programs to run co-op kitchens or other food-related programs. My career as a CNW was fairly short-lived, but I did learn quite a bit—not so much from the nutritionist who taught the course, but from the other women taking the training. Which is probably the way it should be.

One of the class assignments was to take the contents of an emergency food hamper and explain how it might feed two adults and two children for three or four days. (I think the original assigment was three days, but I wrote menus for four.) There were rules about including three out of four food groups in the breakfasts, and all food groups in the other meals. I don’t remember whether we were allowed to assume that there was any food already on hand or whether there was some cash allowed to buy a few groceries; but I did end up including a few other things which I noted.

I don’t pretend that this is as good as the Hillbilly Housewife’s emergency menu. In some ways, it’s not nearly as good. The food we were given to work with wasn’t particularly economical; it's mostly canned goods and other common food bank items, rather than the bags of flour and dried beans that the HH and the Deputy Headmistress recommend. It reflects a different need: using what you’ve been given, even if that wouldn’t be the smartest way to spend your own money; and (I’m trying to be careful about the way I say this), it also reflects the fact that a lot of food hamper recipients don’t yet have the skills to bake bread or deal with dried beans. Sure, I know those things are not hard to learn; but a lot of people who might be in the situation of getting a food hamper are still a bit intimidated/freaked out/uninterested by the idea of cooking food that doesn’t come in cans. [Update: again, that's not meant to be a condemnation, just an observation. I know there are plenty of very resourceful and savvy people who get into tight spots and need occasional help too.] That was supposed to be the aim of the food programs that CNWs might run at community centres or one-on-one: to gently introduce better economy and nutrition in a supportive environment.

Most of the recipes I used for that assignment came from a 1975 book called The One-Burner Gourmet, by Harriett Barker. I don’t know whether, ten-plus years later, I’d produce the same menus I did then. I wasn’t allowing for what I think of as the “ick factor,” meaning that some people would not care for the idea of mixing things together the way I did. Even in an emergency, I’m not sure I’d be able to eat canned peas straight up, knowing how relatively little nutrition they have for the amount of stomach-clutching it takes to swallow them. But this is what I came up with, plus my notes from then and now. Your comments are welcome.

Contents of a Basic Food Hamper (estimated for 2-3 days use)
[note that this is not a government assistance hamper but something put together by a local charitable organization; the goal would be to have all these things in each box, but that depends on the supply at any time]

Pork and Beans, 2 [cans] per person
Vegetables (Green and Yellow), 2 per person
Mac and cheese, 2 per person
Jam/Honey, 1 per hamper
Soup, 2 (cans?) per person
Juice (48 oz), 1 per hamper
Peanut butter, 1 per hamper (size unspecified)
Cookies, ½ (1/2 of what?) when available
Crackers, ½ (ditto?) when available (I guess they broke open the packages)
Fruit, canned, 1 [can?] per person, (fresh when available)
Potatoes, 5 lb.
Powdered milk, “1 per hamper” (size unspecified, I assume a supermarket-sized bag or box)
Margarine, “1 per hamper” (size unspecified, I assume a pound container)
Pasta/sauce “when available”
Cereal, “1 when available” (size unspecified)
Meat, “3 lunches, 3 suppers, when available” (kind of meat is unspecified—Spam? Tuna? Something not canned?)
Bread, “1 per person” (1 loaf?)
Donuts, when available
Buns, when available

Baby needs on request.

[Just for fun, I priced out the contents of the food hamper using the lowest local prices I could find. It came to approximately $55 Canadian (in the prices of ten years ago), which didn’t seem to be very economical for a weekend’s food.]

Grocery list: peppers or celery, onions (or dried onion), rice or pasta if they weren’t in the box, and tomato sauce if it wasn’t in the box. [Update: I think a dozen eggs would have been a good addition as well, but I was trying for bare necessities.] Food on hand: Mayonnaise or generic white salad dressing, salt and pepper.

We were supposed to suggest snacks, but there wasn’t a lot to work with beyond the obvious bread, crackers and cookies in the box. I said that if honey was provided, they could use it with the dried milk and peanut butter to make peanut butter balls.

Wednesday
Breakfast: 4 oz. juice (per person), cereal with milk, toast and jam or peanut butter

Lunch: Macaroni and cheese (2 or 3 boxes), with 1 can meat (Spam, tuna etc.) chopped in; 2 cans peas. (The One-Burner Gourmet suggests browning the Spam or similar product in margarine first, with fresh or dried onion if you have it, and then adding it to the cooked macaroni.)

Supper: Bean Chowder, made of 2 cans of pork-and-beans, 1 can of tomatoes or tomato sauce, a green pepper or celery, an onion, some margarine (to saute the vegetables first), and salt. Serve with bread (or toast) and milk.

Thursday

Breakfast: 4 oz. juice; toasted peanut butter and jam sandwiches; milk

Lunch: 2 cans soup with crackers; sandwiches made with a can of fish or other meat, plus the mayonnaise or other moistener

Supper: “Lunch Meat and Noodles,” a recipe from the One-Burner Gourmet. You cook these things together: 1 can cream soup, ½ cup milk, 1 can of luncheon meat (cut in strips), ½ a green pepper, chopped (or celery), 1 tsp. dried onion (or some fresh), 1 can peas (use the liquid to add to the dry milk), and 1 tsp. salt. Simmer all this while you cook some noodles or other pasta (you could save out some of the boxed macaroni), and add this to the pot as well. Rice could be substituted. 2 cans of fruit for dessert.


Friday

Breakfast: Fried lunch meat and potatoes; toast; milk

Lunch: 2 cans pork and beans; boiled potatoes; bread, milk, cookies.

Supper: “Soup and Vegetable Chowder,” another One-Burner Gourmet recipe. The success of this would depend on what cans were in the hamper. The recipe calls for 2 cans cream soup, 2 cans chicken soup (like chicken noodle, chicken with rice, etc.), 2 cans corn, 1 can lima beans, 1 can milk (or dry substitute), salt and pepper. You are supposed to add everything together except the milk, simmer for 10-15 minutes, and then add the milk just before serving but don’t boil it. Dessert is something I used to make when I was younger; you cut the crusts off bread, [update: flatten each piece with a rolling pin or something similar], roll them up with jam or peanut butter, secure with a toothpick, and spread a bit of margarine on the outside. Bake them in the oven for a few minutes until they’re toasty. Not fancy, but little kids like them. (Think jam burritos.)


Saturday (the bonus day if the food holds out)

Breakfast: 4 oz. juice; cereal with milk; toast and jam or peanut butter

Lunch: Tuna and Green Bean mixup: A can of cream soup, a can of tuna, a can of vegetables, and enough milk to moisten; doubled if enough food is left in the box. Serve with toast and cookies.

Supper: Whatever’s left: could be potatoes, pork and beans, canned vegetables, and bread. Milk if there’s still some left.

Blinky-blink Carrot Cake (trying to get it right)

I used to keep a scrapbook-cookbook with cartoons pasted in among the recipes. One of my favourites showed a lady baking something in her kitchen, and a lot of rabbits hopping around the table and more coming through the window. Her husband comes in and says something like, "What the blinky-blink are you making?" She says (of course), "Carrot cake." The carrot cake recipe I've used for the last while is...okay. It's fairly healthy, if a bit dry and slightly boring; you can eat it for breakfast without guilt. It reminds me a bit of The Hillbilly Housewife's Cinnamon Raisin Bars (which are very tasty), with carrots instead of raisins. But it isn't CARROT CAKE...do you know the kind I mean? The kind you'd make a trip to Mother's Pizza for when you weren't even having pizza; the kind smothered in cream cheese icing; the kind that's moist and carrotty and nutty all at the same time; the kind my mom baked for our wedding. So I pulled out about five different recipes for carrot cake, from the sweetest, highest-fat '60's version to more recent Betty Crocker and Canadian Living recipes. And I think I have the basics pretty much figured out, along with the reasons why the one we've been making is a bit on the austere side (besides the fact that I don't ice it). The basics of a "regular" carrot cake seem to be: 2 cups flour; 1 1/2 to 2 cups sugar (can be half brown); either 3 cups grated carrots or 2 cups carrots plus 1 cup drained crushed pineapple; 2 tsp. cinnamon; a bit of salt (anywhere from a pinch to 3/4 tsp.); 3 to 4 eggs; 1 tsp vanilla; around 1 cupful of oil; and something to raise it with (which seems to be a point of debate). Some people add chopped nuts; some add 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg. You mix the dry and wet ingredients separately and bake. The "something to raise it with" varies from either 1 to 2 tsp. baking soda, alone, to 2 tsp. baking powder plus a tsp. of baking soda; to 2 tsp. of each. Other than making a lot of test batches, I have no way of proving which is the best combination, other than the fact that Canadian Living's "best" recipe calls for 2 tsp. baking powder plus 1 tsp. soda. (Link is broken! Yes, I know. Correction in progress.) Maybe it doesn't matter a whole lot. The pan sizes given vary a lot too, in spite of the fact that all the recipes I compared were based on 2 cups of flour. I've been baking our less-fat recipe in a 9 x 13 inch pan, but some of the recipes say to use an 8 or 9 inch pan instead (which makes sense, because when I bake a standard batch of muffins in a square pan it comes out right). That might be part of the problem right there--the cake's getting more spread out and a bit dried out. The recipe we've been using is also from Canadian Living, but it was designed to be lower fat; the oil is cut to 1/3 cup and you add a cupful of applesauce to make up the difference. The flour is increased to 2 1/3 cups (half whole wheat), which might explain why it's a bit dry; but the sweetener is cut to 3/4 cup of brown sugar, and the carrots, for some reason, are cut to 2 cups (without any pineapple). Maybe if you added in the pineapple, it would taste better even without the added fat and sugar. But no guarantees. I think I'm going to try it (in a square pan)with 1 1/2 cups sugar and 3/4 to 1 cup oil, plus the pineapple, and we'll see if we have to beat off the rabbits.