Recipes for a new year

Happy New Year, everyone! My New Year's resolution is to cook more beans, chickpeas, and lentils. (The added advantage is that they're one of the main crops near where I live, enabling me to eat locally and organically as well as cheaply. Ah, two birds with one stone--feelings of virtue and middle-class preoccupations!)

Here are some links to recipes from around the internet that I plan to try this year. As you know, I despise recipes that don't work, so I am a terrible snob about where I get my recipes from. Fine Cooking is 100% reliable, in my experience, so a lot of them come from there. Food Network is pretty hit-or-miss, but it depends on the author, and Nigella Lawson recipes are usually fine. Martha Rose Shulman's Recipes for Health in the New York Times are really good, and from time to time I find a Jamie Oliver recipe I like. I don't know anything about thekitchn.com, but their recipes look interesting, so I guess we'll find out. All these recipes look like they'll be reasonably cheap to make, and nutritious, and, I hope, delicious too.

So here goes:

In my neverending quest for the perfect vegetarian burger...

White Bean Burgers with Tomato-Olive Relish from Fine Cooking
Mexican Black Bean Burgers from Fine Cooking
Seared Turkey and White Bean Burgers from Fine Cooking

Soupy things, since it's soup season...

Jamie Oliver's Corn Chowder
Eggplant Ragout with Tomatoes, Peppers, and Chickpeas from Fine Cooking
Chicken Soup with Lime and Hominy from Fine Cooking
Chickpea Soup with Crispy Kale from Fine Cooking
Nigella Lawson's Rice and Tomato Soup

My other quest, which is to make myself like chickpeas...

Chickpea Casserole with Lemon, Herbs and Shallots from theKitchn
Chickpea of the Sea from theKitchn

...and a cottage cheese pasta recipe from the New York Times that I think Baby B would like.
...and Slow Cooker Black Bean Enchiladas

Happy cooking and eating! May the year 2014 be a good one!

The $15.01 grocery bill

No, I didn't push my thriftiness to new brilliance, but $15.01 was all I needed to spend because of the giant amounts of food I still have in the house. I had resolved not to buy food at all, but it transpired that I did need a few things. It's hard to feed a toddler when you don't have bread, and since I'd run out of both white flour and bread flour, I did need some more of those. (By the way, plain white flour works fine in bread, but the higher gluten content of bread flour improves the texture.) Also, eggs: Baby B loves a soft-boiled egg for her lunch, and it makes a change from the endless peanut butter sandwiches when we're at home for the holidays. Onions and garlic were necessary for most of our planned recipes, and the broccoli is so we don't get scurvy.

Planned meals:

1) We still have another vast container of creamy chicken spaghetti in our freezer. We've established that it tastes better when smothered in sriracha.
2) Mr. B will pan-sear some pork tenderloin, after tenderly anointing it with seasonings and so on. We'll have that with some broccoli, and bake some of the potatoes we have left from Christmas dinner.
3) I'll make Butter Chicken with the chicken thighs in the freezer. We don't have coconut milk, but I will substitute some of the cream left over from Christmas. Sides of basmati rice and broccoli.
4) I'm going to make a Shrimp and Pea Risotto, but with luxurious jumbo shrimp instead of the usual shrimp meat I use. (To be honest, I haven't bough shrimp meat for a while because I kind of stopped liking it. It simply doesn't have the flavor and bite of larger pieces. Jumbo shrimp will be heavenly, though.)
5) Tonight we made this Steak and Mushroom Cobbler with these (mysteriously named) Elvis Biscuits.
6) I also made a huge vat of Split Pea Soup and a loaf of Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread.

All of the above will have leftovers to tide us over so we don't have to buy any more groceries for a week. Ah, leftover leftovers, how postmodern, or something. Lunches will be soup and toast, eggs on toast, peanut butter sandwiches, leftovers from previous dinners, etc.

Observations: My goodness, the steak and mushroom cobbler was good. We wouldn't have bought flank steak if it had been up to us, because that stuff is expensive, but thank you, mother-in-law, we really enjoyed it. Baby B approved, too. Mr. B made the stew, and I made the Elvis Biscuits, my first foray into using lard. I assume they're called Elvis Biscuits because the tremendous amount of fat in them would probably cause you to meet an unfortunate demise like Mr. Presley's. I don't know why I experienced revulsion when I opened the container of lard, because it's really no different from using butter, and I've even used rendered bacon fat in baking in the past, but the unctuous white goo disgusted me. I cut it into the flour using a pastry cutter, but because it was much softer than butter, it was a little more difficult to work with. I'll admit that the biscuits were amazingly light and fluffy, but I doubt I'll be doing this again once the rest of the container is used up.

Today's groceries:

1.08 lb unbleached flour 0.36
1.01 lb bread flour 0.42
1.48 lb basmati rice 2.66
12 eggs 1.59
1 gallon Organic Valley reduced fat milk, 7.20
1.82 lb onions 0.87
1 head garlic 0.48
1.12 lb broccoli crowns 1.43
Total: $15.01

Split pea soup

Further to my resolution to cook more with beans and lentils, I present my much-experimented, hard-won split pea soup. I was raised on split pea and ham soup: I have many memories of my dad boiling up a ham bone to make the stock, and sauteing the mirepoix (a thing I actually don't bother doing). His soup tasted pretty good--salty, savory, comforting and filling on a winter's day.

However, I find that split pea soup is something that I tire of pretty quickly, because the texture of split peas can so easily become sandy and grainy, leaving a chalky taste in the mouth. So over the past several years, I've experimented with various add-ons to smooth out the texture and give it a better mouth feel. The ultra-smooth texture of the sweet potato balances the graininess of the split peas, the red lentils add extra softness and thickness, and the addition of a thick béchamel at the end gives it a creamy finishing touch.

Oh, and I found out something else that is pure genius: you aren't supposed to add salt to beans and lentils while they're cooking, because it can toughen them and make the finished product less soft. I had no idea! So that precludes using a homemade ham bone stock, which is a very salty thing. I used homemade chicken stock, but you could just as easily use water. I add a ham steak right at the end, and season the soup with salt once I've blended the soup and added the béchamel. (The animal-based ingredients can all easily be left out if you want to make this vegetarian or vegan.)

Speaking of flavor, I got the idea of adding allspice and thyme from an old recipe book, and I find that they give the whole thing a real depth and complexity of savoriness that you wouldn't otherwise get. However, if you're feeling really poor and hungry and don't have them, it'll still taste perfectly fine if you leave them out. Ditto the ham steak and the chicken broth. I love the flavors they provide, but good old salt is the main thing you need here, and most of us can still afford salt (just).

It's a funny thing; in the past, I used to read recipes that instructed one only to use unsalted butter and low-sodium stock, and I assumed that they writers were solicitously concerned with the health of my arteries. But now I realize that it's so that you can control the amount of salt yourself. On the rare occasions I buy chicken broth, it drives me bananas if I accidentally get the kind with salt in it. It's usually too salty, and because of that, I can't season my ingredients as I go for fear of the end product tasting like seawater. Oh, first world problems!

Last comment: I got an immersion blender for Christmas--thank you, darling husband!--and I was longing to try it out, so split pea soup was going to happen today, by hook or by crook.

Split Pea Soup

Ingredients:

For the soup:
1 cup yellow or green split peas, or a mixture of both
1/2 cup red lentils
10 cups of water, or stock: use homemade chicken broth, or, if you're buying the broth, get the kind with no added salt
2 onions, peeled and coarsely chopped
2 celery sticks, coarsely chopped
2 large carrots, peeled and coarsely chopped
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped medium
1 medium sweet potato, peeled and cut into rough cubes
1 ham steak, cubed (optional; leave it out if you're making this vegetarian)

For the béchamel:
50 grams unsalted butter (margarine would be fine if you're making this vegan)
1 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/4 cup plain flour
1 cup milk, warmed

Salt and pepper

Put the split peas, lentils, water, and vegetables in a very large pot and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down to a simmer, clap a lid on, and boil for about 90 minutes, or until the split peas are very soft. Add the ham steak, if using. Using an immersion blender, zap the soup until it's perfectly pureed. (If you don't have an immersion blender, you can whiz it in the food processor. When I didn't have either of these, during my student days, I would push the lot through a sieve.)

In a small pot, melt the butter. Add the allspice and thyme, and stir gently until fragrant. Add the flour and whisk until no lumps remain, and then start adding the warmed milk little by little to make a thick sauce, whisking constantly to avoid lumps.

Add the sauce to the soup, and whisk thoroughly to blend. Cook at a low temperature, whisking, for a few minutes to let the soup thicken. If it's too thick, add some more milk; if it's too thin, you can make a slurry with some cornstarch and milk and add it to the soup. Season generously with salt--start with a teaspoon, taste it, and keep adding more, up to about 2 teaspoons. (I know that sounds like a lot, but this recipe makes a lot of soup, so you need it.) Add pepper to taste.

Serve with toasted slices of whole wheat sandwich bread, or hunks of whole wheat-yogurt baking powder bread, or dear old grilled cheese sandwiches.

This recipe makes enough for three meals for our family of two adults and one toddler. Cooked split peas go bad quickly, so I typically eat it the day I make it and the day after that, then freeze the other third of it for another time. Because of the large amount it makes, and because of the cheapness of most of the ingredients, it's a very economical meal, super-filling, and really satisfying when it's cold outside.

New challenge: no shopping allowed!

Christmas came and went, and with it, my super-generous mother-in-law. I know we claim to be hard up, but really, we are so lucky to have the help of family. If it weren't for some pretty hefty handouts from both sets of parents, Mr. B and I would be in a pretty pickle.

My mother-in-law, in addition to showering us (and particularly Baby B) with gifts, also filled our refrigerator and freezer to the point of bursting. I think, at a casual estimate, that we won't have to shop for two weeks, giving our bank account time to recover a bit from Christmas and a larger-than-usual number of bills (health insurance, non-optional home repairs, etc).

The old Mr. and Mrs. B would have shrugged and said "Yeah, whatever," and gone shopping anyway, buying whatever struck our fancy, and wasting half of what was in there. Not any more! The new, thrifty, frugal Mr. and Mrs. B decided to set themselves a challenge: absolutely no grocery shopping at all until our Christmas haul is used up.

The only exceptions to this rule are:

• Milk (can't really get along without that when you have a toddler: doctor's orders)
• Essential bathroom supplies (you know what I'm talking about)
• If we run out of vegetables, I'm allowed to go and buy raw broccoli

The food we have includes:

• Stew beef
• Chicken thighs
• 2 lbs shrimp
• 1 pork tenderloin
• Lots of frozen vegetables
• Lots of frozen berries
• 1 package frozen dumplings, Chinese restaurant-style
• Enough frozen tomato soup for two meals
• Enough spaghetti with shredded chicken and cream sauce for three meals
• Fresh vegetables: mushrooms, arugula, carrots, celery, onions, potatoes, some fresh herbs
• Dairy: milk, cream, lots of cheese, sour cream, yogurt
• Fresh fruits: apples, grapes, oranges
• Baking supplies: flour etc
• Pantry staples: spaghetti, other pasta, brown rice, steel cut oats
• Etc.: nuts, dates, crackers upon crackers upon crackers, pretzels
• Odd things: lard. Ye gods, lard. 1 lb of my mother-in-law's homemade sugar cookie dough, plus a bag full of jars of frosting and decorations and cookie cutters, evidently to be a fun project for us to do with Baby B. (I admit, we have scandalously neglected her education in the art of cookie-baking. Is it un-American that we don't terribly love cookies?)
• Cans: chicken broth, beef broth, cream of something soup

In other words, not necessarily all the things we'd personally buy, but we're immensely grateful for them, and will use them all up.

Honestly, the thing that scares me the most is the canned cream soup. Cream of celery, I think. I've never cared for cream of anything soup in a can, because it seems salty, bland, and chemical-tasting to me. I know a lot of American casseroles start with a can of creamy soup, so there must be some way of making it better. One of the meals my sainted mother-in-law left was the aforementioned spaghetti with shredded chicken in a cream of mushroom soup-based sauce, which at first seemed like it wasn't really our sort of thing, but then we discovered that we had an ancient, almost-empty bottle of sriracha lurking in the back of the refrigerator, and that livened it up considerably.

Tomorrow night's dinner is going to be a recipe she left for us, which is called a pie but really looks as if it's more of a cobbler. You're supposed to make a beef and mushroom stew, and then bake it with biscuits on top. The biscuits are what the lard is for. 

Speaking of which. Lard! I've never used or knowingly eaten lard in my life, but the recipe calls for it, and my mother-in-law bought it for us, so I'm going to overcome my trepidation and try it out. I didn't know my mother-in-law ever cooked with it herself--I thought she was more of a Crisco fan--but she told me that Crisco is getting phased out because it has trans fats, and she thinks lard might work for her pie crusts and so on. I've also heard good things about coconut fat. I seldom make pie crusts, and when I do, I use butter, so I expect we'll probably consign the leftover lard to a murky corner until I can think up another use for it. (The old Mrs. B would have thrown it out; the new Mrs. B is determined to waste not, want not.)

So I'll keep you posted on all the things we're going to eat, as we plan them out.

The freeloader's Christmas

I would write a long post about how to make a thrifty Christmas dinner, but it would be a bit disingenuous of me given that our house is full of relatives, all of whom brought food with them. They also discovered our local organic and natural foods co-op, and shopped till they dropped. Our house is now groaning with food, most of it expensive. And we didn't have to pay for any of it, so it wouldn't be very truthful of me to start lecturing anyone on how to eat cheaply but festively in the holidays.

However, I have a few more blog posts planned for the coming days, because I have time off work and am feeling creative.

Topics I want to cover include:

• Baking with whole grains
• Special occasion baking for people on a budget
• Entertaining on a budget

Until then, merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Ways to make beans and lentils bearable

For a few years, during my student days, I was a vegan. It was mostly out of laziness and dislike of making an effort to cook fancy food for one. I basically ate the same things over and over again:

• Porridge for breakfast, usually with mix-ins such as grated apples, ground flaxseed, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and almonds. Topped with soy milk and more nuts.
• Dinners: usually some stir-fry combination of tofu or seitan with whatever vegetables were on sale, doused in soy sauce, over a bed of brown basmati rice or buckwheat noodles.
• If I wasn't caring about protein much, I'd happily subsist on spaghetti with tomato sauce, with a sprinkling of that alarming, rubbery vegan cheese on top. 
• If I was feeling especially lazy and rich (ha!), I'd eat processed vegan products, such as veggie burgers, Quorn products and so on.
• Lunches: microwaved leftovers from the night before, plus an apple or other fruits.

Notice anything missing that vegans are supposed to be madly fond of? Oh yeah, the beans and lentils. I rarely ate beans and lentils, because I didn't like them. I found them chalky and floury and overpoweringly...wholesome, I suppose, sort of like eating a bowlful of boiled knitting. 

I'm no longer a vegan, because I no longer really agree with the ideology. I was a vegan for environmental rather than animal cruelty reasons, but you can get around that if you make an effort, as Mr. B and I do, to seek out animal products that aren't completely trashy. Organic, grass-fed, that sort of thing. And I'm convinced that eating locally is more important than eating vegan. We are lucky to live in an area that has very fertile soil, and where local produce is easy to acquire cheaply. So there's that.

However, we are stupidly broke right now, and beans are cheap. Mr. B, bless him, refuses to eat tofu and seitan, so we need to find some cheap forms of vegetable protein. (All kinds of beans and lentils are grown in our area, so it's a great locavore option.) So I decided to figure out exactly what to do with beans. It's a work in progress, but I'm slowly finding some recipes that I wouldn't mind eating again and again.

Here are some things I've figured out that you should put in your bean and lentil recipes.

• Something acidic. For some reason, this brings out the savoriness of beans and lentils. In my Lentil-Sausage Soup, balsamic vinegar is the difference between something that tastes like boiled knitting and something that doesn't. In my Non-Disgusting Black Beans, the combination of balsamic vinegar and wine do something similar. Hooray!
• Lots of strongly-flavored ingredients. Onions, garlic, salt, pepper, spices, carrots, celery, green peppers, etc. My Crock-Pot "Refried" Beans recipe contains several of the above.
• Vegans may now get mad at me, but...meat. The crumbled sausage in Lentil-Sausage Soup gives it extra substance and really fills you up. I find it a bit low-fat otherwise. I know it's supposed to be healthy to keep your intake of fat right down, but lentils alone are so incredibly low-fat that I feel hungry again five minutes later.

More later, as I discover more!

Week's meal plan, December 14 2013

This week I made a concentrated effort to keep prices down. Christmas is coming, and Christmas eats money.

With this in mind, I tried to find a way to eat economically. So I asked myself: what things are absolutely dirt cheap, absolutely pennies at the supermarket?

The things I came up with were:

• Bulk flour. Can't really argue with 39 cents a pound. Even whole wheat flour, which is a bit more than white, is ridiculously cheap at 44 cents a pound. Even taking into account the cost of electricity from running the oven, homemade breads are cheap cheap cheap.
• Bulk steel cut oats. Cheap, delicious, about as wholesomely nutritious as you can get.
• Pasta. The cheapest kind is something like 70 cents a pound. Even the more expensive whole wheat ones are only about a dollar a pound. Our family typically eats no more than half a pound of pasta in one meal.
• Rice. I'm less happy about rice, because I prefer basmati and brown basmati, which are the most expensive (although they barely break the bank), but if I wished, I could get long grain white rice for practically nothing.
• Beans and lentils, any kind. The canned ones are bloody cheap; the dried ones absurdly so. I'm going to blog more in the future about making beans and lentils bearable if you're like me and have a rather limited ability to love them.

Obviously, we cannot live on carbs alone. So I'm also sourcing cheap protein, such as:

• Eggs. $1.67 for 12. So filling, so nutritious, so versatile. Gosh, I sound like a spokeswoman. I have misgivings about eggs (see Chicken, below). This is clearly something I need to work on, i.e. learn to love beans and lentils a great deal more.
• Chicken. Whole chicken, chicken breast, chicken thighs. I've blogged before about my misgivings about the morality of the whole poultry enterprise, but there it is.
• Sausage and other pork products. I have misgivings about pork too. This is why we're not eating meat every night.

And let's not forget vegetables. I guess we're lucky to live in a very fertile part of the United States, where seasonal vegetables are plentiful and cheap. We all have our favorite vegetables, but I tend to buy mostly what's in season, because that's cheapest. Right now, broccoli and carrots and celery are pleasingly cheap. We go through a lot of onions, carrots, and celery because we like to use a mirepoix for a lot of our recipes. Baby B loves broccoli, so I'm getting a lot of that right now. Zucchini seems to be pretty cheap all the time. But I'm increasingly feeling that it's silly to be a snob about frozen vegetables--they can taste really good if you get freshly frozen ones that aren't covered in freezer burn. Peas, in my opinion, actually taste better frozen (well, previously frozen). Green beans, edamame, and corn are also fine. I confess I don't care for frozen spinach. I really wanted to like it (after all, you can get one of those ten-ounce "bricks" of cut leaf spinach for practically nothing), but it always tastes gross to me. Luckily, fresh spinach is readily and cheaply available here.

So, ideas I'm trying for cheap weekly meal plans will look something like this in the future:

• 1 roast chicken dinner OR other form of meat with the bone in, so I can use the bones for stock. Stock makes everything better.
• 1 soup and bread meal (using stock from chicken bones). The soups I make usually make enough for at least two meals for the three of us.
• 1 (at least) pasta meal (using stock from the chicken bones to improve the sauce, or leftover chicken).
• 1 beans/lentils meal, probably with rice. May or may not have bits of chicken stirred in. Will have masses of leftovers.
• 1 eggs meal, such as quiche, frittata, etc.

With this in mind, this is what I've planned for this week.

Breakfasts: steel cut oats, yogurt, frozen mixed berries OR eggs on toast.

Lunches: peanut butter sandwiches, apples, cheese, raw vegetables

Dinners:

• Almost-Foolproof Roast Chicken with a side of roast zucchini (I put the zucchini into the dish with the chicken half an hour before it's ready, seasoning it first with salt, pepper, and rosemary).
• Cream of broccoli soup with homemade whole wheat-yogurt baking powder bread.
• Whole wheat spaghetti, homemade tomato sauce with sauteed sausage mixed in, side of sauteed spinach.
• Homemade calzone using half a recipe of my basic bread dough, leftover tomato sauce and sausage, spinach, and mozzarella.
• An adaptation of this Skinnytaste.com recipe, but using spinach instead of escarole (no escaroles can be found at my local supermarket, alas), and leftover chicken instead of chicken sausage, a foodstuff I do not love.
• A Self-Crusting Quiche using whatever leftover vegetables I have, and/or whatever frozen vegetables I can find in my freezer (which I'm trying to clear out before the chaos of Christmas).
• Leftovers. I always have lots of those.

This week's groceries:

Fruits and vegetables:

2 lbs carrots 0.98

1.81 lbs broccoli crowns (3 large) 1.77

3.22 lbs Braeburn apples 2.83

1 head garlic 0.48

16 oz spinach 1.38

4 zucchini 1.52
5 lbs onions 1.98

Bulk:
10 oz penne 0.48
1.44 lbs whole wheat spaghetti 1.44

Dairy:
Cheese Heads light string cheese 2.98
Tillamook Italian blend cheese 2.73
Nancy's low-fat plain unsweetened yogurt 2.37
Organic Valley 2% milk, half a gallon 3.60
12 large eggs 1.67

Meats:
1 small chicken 5.56
1 lb mild Italian sausage 2.68

Frozen:
Mixed berries 1.88

Cans:
28 oz crushed tomatoes 1.13

Misc.
Stash Jasmine Blossom green tea bags 2.40
Sara Lee multigrain bread 1.98

Total: $41.84

So pretty good. Except not that good, because obviously I still had things at home like dried white beans, chicken broth in the freezer, flour and yeast and sugar and salt and oil for the bread dough, etc, so the true cost of this week's meals is much higher.

Plus, you know what's NOT cheap? Dairy. I haven't quite figured out why we consume so much dairy. Maybe it's because we don't eat vast quantities of meat each week, so we want something fatty and animal-derived to make food taste good. I think we could cut string cheese out of our diets and not really miss it that much, don't you? Maybe we'll do that next time. We like the little scoop of yogurt that we have on our steel-cut oats porridge in the mornings, and yogurt is useful for baking breads, etc.