Well, here I am in week one of my New Year's Resolution to include more beans, lentils, and chickpeas in our family's diet! This week's goal is to make myself like chickpeas. I'm really not that excited about chickpeas, you know. Apart from hummus, which I moderately like, you can pretty much keep chickpeas, as far as I'm concerned. Falafel seems kind of bland and oily. Channa masala? It's ok, but if I'm going to an Indian restaurant, I'd rather have sag paneer or something like that. Chickpea burgers and other earnest, worthy health-food things tempt me not.
With this in mind, I'm going to cook up a large vat of chickpeas in my slow cooker and attempt two of the recipes I found on the internet: this chickpea casserole and this chickpea spread that claims to be just like a tuna spread, only better. Considering that I don't like canned tuna (ugh, the smell), most things would be better than that, so I have high hopes.
This week's meal plan:
Breakfasts: steel cut oats with frozen blueberries and a scoop of yogurt
Lunches: toast made from my homemade whole wheat sandwich bread, with eggs (boiled, scrambled, fried, whatever), with an apple.
Dinners:
Roast chicken with green beans and a slice of homemade bread
Chicken leftovers into Chicken Pot Pie Soup from Skinnytaste.com
Martha Rose Shulman's Creamy Pasta, side of steamed peas
Chickpea casserole (link above) with a side of sauteed spinach
Chickpea spread (link above) on homemade bread
Leftovers (there will be lots of the soup and the casserole)
Snacks:
Slices of cheese (I have stopped buying grated and individually wrapped cheese products--blocks only from now on. Duh, what was I thinking? So much cheaper, so much healthier and so much nicer to have freshly-sliced or freshly-grated cheese.)
Desserts: apples, grapes.
Drinks: milk for Baby B, tap water for all of us, iced black tea or hot black tea for Mr. B and me.
This week's shopping list (not a complete list for what you need for the above recipes, because I already had quite a lot of frozen fruits and vegetables, yogurt, eggs, whole wheat flour, mayonnaise, etc):
Fruits and vegetables:
1 lb red grapes 2.78
3 lbs Braeburn apples 2.94
10 oz bag of spinach 1.98
2 heads of garlic 0.96
1 bunch parsley 0.58
3.66 lbs onions 2.49
8oz brown mushrooms 1.88
Bulk:
1.61 lbs steel cut oats 1.01
1.35 lbs dried chickpeas 1.42
1 lb whole wheat rotelle 1.09
1.33 lbs basmati rice 2.39
1.26 lbs unbleached white flour 0.42
1.26 lbs white bread flour 0.53
Dairy:
Darigold cottage cheese 1.88
1 gallon Organic Valley 2% milk 7.20
1/2 a gallon Organic Valley 1% milk 3.60
1 wedge Stella parmesan 4.48
1 lb block Tillamook cheddar 4.98
Meat:
1 whole chicken 6.12
Frozen:
1 lb green beans 0.78
Misc.
100 Red Rose plain black tea bags 3.49
Total: $53.00
So a pretty good total, although I still had so much food at home from my mother-in-law's Christmas gifts that the true cost would be greater.
I can't believe it only occurred to me this week that buying cheese in blocks would be better than getting the pre-shredded kind. Where I grew up, cheese was only available in blocks, so when I was an adult and realized you could buy it pre-shredded, I was overjoyed because I hated grating cheese by hand. For some reason I always got my knuckle with the grater, which was painful, messy and disgusting.
Fast forward to this week, when I found out that not only does the pre-shredded kind come with all sorts of nasty fillers to keep the cheese shreds separate from each other, but it's more expensive if you actually examine how much it all costs ounce for ounce. Not drastically more expensive, but enough to keep thrifty Mrs. B from buying it any more. I noticed long ago that freshly grated Parmesan is far nicer than the stuff in containers, and of course freshly grated cheddar, or mozzarella, or any other kind of cheese, is going to taste better than the bagged stuff. Also, the fact that I detest grating cheese so much will probably lead to our eating less of it, which will be both more economical and healthier. Hooray!
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