Chocolate Coffee Marble Coffee Cake – indulgent, mayhaps.

Tags

baking, breakfast, cake, chocolate, coffee, coffee cake, marble, vegetarian

So, this recipe is just pretty much a combination of every addiction it’s socially acceptable for me to indulge in before noon: caffeine, chocolate and cake.  It always makes me think of this Jim Gaffigan stand up bit about our very American love of cake.

I always save my leftover coffee, you know that half a mug’s worth that nobody seems to drink.  When it adds up I try to make something out of it, and quite serendipitously, I saw a recipe in the most recent issue of Southern Living that used coffee in their icing.  It looked so good that I wanted to make a coffee flavored coffee cake, with a little chocolate thrown in for good measure.

This recipe uses the same basic recipe as the Cinnamon Streusel Coffee Cake I made a few weeks ago.  It’s just dressed up a little differently, but I still went for that ‘streaky’ look in my coffee cake.  This breakfast cake (let’s not lie to ourselves, love it, embrace it!) has a delightful coffee flavor, sweet and crunchy crust and happy little chocolate chip chunks; if it doesn’t start your day off right, I don’t know what will.

Chocolate Coffee Marble Coffee Cake

Makes one cake or loaf – cost approx $1.78 per cake or loaf

Makes 8-12 servings

Ingredients

• 3 fl oz. milk ($.07)
• 4 fl oz. coffee ($0 if you save your leftovers!)
• 4 oz. (one stick) butter, melted ($.25)
• 2 eggs ($.20)
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 10 oz., approx 2 cups, All Purpose flour ($.31)
• 5 oz., approx 2/3 cup, granulated sugar, plus more for coating the pan ($.20)
• 3/4 oz., approx 1-2 Tbs, baking powder
• pinch salt
• 1/4 oz, approx 1 Tbs, cocoa powder
• 1/4 cup chocolate chips ($.25)

Icing

• 1/4 cup coffee
• 1-2 cups powdered sugar ($.25)

Preheat your oven to 375 F.  Prepare your bundt pan (or loaf pan or muffin tins!) with spray oil, making sure you get in all the nooks and crannies, then coat with sugar.  This gives a nice sweet crunchy exterior to your baked goodies.

Mix all the dry ingredients for the cake, except for the cocoa and the chocolate chips.  Then separately mix all the wet ingredients.  Next combine the wet and dry ingredients until just incorporated.  Here’s where the ‘marbling’ action comes in.  Separate your batter in half into separate bowls and mix the cocoa powder into one of the halves.  Now you have one half that looks coffee flavored and one half that looks chocolate flavored.  Now drop batters in large spoonfuls into your prepared pans, alternating colors and sprinkling the chocolate chips in at your whimsy.

The last step for the batter is to get a chopstick (or a barbecue skewer, or the handle of a fork, just something long and skinny) and swirl gently, slightly mixing the two colors of batter.  When I’m done, I like to give it a good tap or two onto the counter so that gravity helps smooth things out a bit.

Ready to bake!  Making a bundt pan took about 25 minutes, muffins will take less time, a loaf pan may take more time.  It’s ready when the top is lightly golden and a toothpick comes out clean.  Let cool on the counter, which is a great time to make the super simple icing.  You just whisk the coffee and powdered sugar together until it’s the consistency that you like.  I always make mine thick enough I could write a letter in it before it fades away.

See? The letter ‘O’, because other letters are too hard to do while taking pictures too…

Invert your cake onto a plate or cake stand and drizzle with the coffee icing.  Now it’s ready to slice into and devour.  See all the beautiful swirly marbled cake, so delicious.

Mushroom Phyllo Triangles – better than StateFarm…

Tags

appetizer, baked, curry, phyllo, triangle, vegetarian

I’m really lucky in many ways, but one that I’m particularly happy about of late is my awesome neighbor.  I’ve heard so many horror stories about neighbor feuds, and now that we’ve put down roots here in Lake Tahoe, I’m so glad that in addition to being on good terms with the neighbors, that we’ve become friends as well.  My neighbor, Michelle, helped me immensely with getting into blogging and taking pictures of my food.  Also, as both of our sweeties travel for work frequently, we’re sometimes left alone to defend our homes against bears (ok, we’re more likely be defending our trash cans against raccoons) so occasionally we’re a two-woman-support-group.

One thing that I’ve noticed about Michelle is that she’s a classy version of Katherine Hegel’s character in ’27 Dresses;’ after getting through a rash of bridal showers and bachelorette parties in the past few years she has now began throwing a few baby showers for her friends, ever the gracious and fun hostess.  She’d fit right in in the south!   Her latest one is a ‘BaByQue’ (so cute!) theme shower, and we collaborated on a ‘make-freeze-bake’ style appetizer that would be easy to make the day of as well as a tasty vegetarian treat for the Mamma-to-be.

We had a great time with a girls bloggy night.  (She has barbecueforlife.com, you know, the people with the awesome broccoli salad recipe!)  We cracked a bottle of chardonnay, made some party appetizers and took some fun pictures!  These little appetizers are a curried vegetable salad wrapped in flaky and buttery pastry dough.  So tasty, don’t worry, we taste tested.  My fireman even showed up for the tasting, surprise!

He had fun posing for photos and pretending to be my boss 🙂

Mushroom Phyllo Triangles

This recipe I would call ‘worth the splurge,’ and what you’re buying with your extra money is buckets of convenience, this one is so quick and easy the day of your party!  About $.25 per appetizer is a good price point though, about what you can expect to pay for appetizers at a catered event.

Makes 32 triangles – cost approx $7.48 per batch or $.23 per triangle

Ingredients

• 3 oz dried shiitake mushrooms ($3)
• 1/2 head napa cabbage, thinly shredded ($1)
• 2 carrots, grated ($.25)
• 1 bunch scallions, thinly sliced  ($.50)
• 1 tsp curry powder
• salt/pepper – to taste
• 1 tsp fish sauce
• 1 tsp rice wine vinegar
• 1/3 cup mayo ($.20)
• 1 package phyllo ($2)
• 4 oz (one stick) butter ($.25)

First off, make sure your phyllo is thawed.  (I made that mistake once.)  Warm up a few cups of water and soak the dried mushrooms for about 30 minutes.  Mix the cabbage, carrots, scallions, seasonings and mayo.  When the mushrooms are soft, slice them thinly and add to your mixture.  Melt the butter in a small pan over low heat.

Such happy colors!

Now to assemble your yummies.  Get a damp towel or paper towel, unroll the phyllo dough and lay the damp towel over it.  Phyllo is lots of extremely thin sheets of pastry, which is what makes it so flaky and delicious.  So, first lay one sheet down in your workspace and brush it with a little butter (no need to go crazy with it).  Repeat this until you have three buttered phyllo sheets stacked up on top of eachother. Remember to keep the damp towel over the un-buttered phyllo stack so that it doesn’t dry out.

Layering phyllo dough with butter

Now cut it into four equal sections (If you remember grade school, it’s hot dog style)  and put a tablespoon of your curried vegetable mix at the base of each phyllo section.

Assembling the triangles, you make four at a time.

Fold the phyllo over itself to form a triangle, repeat with three remaining sections.  Folding the phyllo over itself adds up the number of layers your pastry has, for example, instead of having just three layers you will have nine layers if you folded a total of three times.

Once you have assembled all your mushroom phyllo triangles you can bake them right away or freeze them and bake at your leisure.  If you’re freezing the triangles, freeze them on a sheet tray and then transfer them to a zipper bag when they’re frozen, that way they won’t stick together.  When you’re ready to eat them, (if they’re frozen, let them thaw 15 – 30 minutes at room temperature on your baking sheet) bake at 375 F for about 15 minutes or until golden brown and delicious.

Home Made Stock – saving everything = saving money

Tags

basics, food, home made, ingredients, stock, vegetable scraps, vegetarian

Here’s another installment of my ‘S’ series, with today’s theme being ‘saving,’ meaning that saving every ingredient equals saving your money.

My kitchen DVR is full of cooking shows (and episodes of General Hospital, I think my mom was a soap opera user while I was in the womb, I’m addicted like a crack-baby!) and some of my favorite TV chefs had two really great quotes/ideas on this topic that stuck in my penny-pinching mind.  Perhaps my favorite personality on FoodNetwork is Anne Burrell and on her ‘Secrets of a Restaurant Chef’ show she always mentions that in both her home and her restaurant if she paid for an ingredient, she is going to get every bit of flavor and use out of it before she throws it away.  In concert with Chef Anne’s idea, Melissa D’Arabian once said on ‘Ten Dollar Dinners’ something to the effect of: “The most expensive ingredient is the one you throw away.”  Good food for thought, huh?

Having zero waste in the kitchen is impossible, we all have had our disasters that simply didn’t ‘turn out’ which got thrown out or given to the dog.  I had one particularly bad incident with discount chicken from an Asian market, in which my fireman spent a few bites pretending the meat wasn’t ‘off’ before I tried some then immediately began snatching our plates away and ordering a pizza.  But, failed experiments aside, there’s no excuse for letting perfectly good ingredients go bad; to me it’s like the difference between making a risky investment that doesn’t end up panning out and just flushing your money straight down the toilet, in the first case, at least you tried!  If I have something in the fridge that needs to be utilized in a hurry there are lots of alternatives to tossing it in the garbage.  I would much rather find a way to extend its life by freezing or preserving it, or even going out to buy more groceries to make a dish around it, rather than throw it away.

• Any sort of good vegetable scraps, like onions, carrots or celery, go into a gallon zipper bag in my freezer for making stock and any ‘not so fresh’ looking vegetable scraps go into my compost bin.  Although I do want to do right by the environment, I see all those scraps as money put towards nourishing my next years’ garden.
• Animal bones, cooked or uncooked, can be made into stock with your saved veggies.  Many stock recipes call for browning bones in the oven before using them, and there’s even a fancy French term, ‘remoulage,’ for using an already cooked bone for making stock.
• Any type of bread that is going stale can become croutons, bread pudding or breadcrumbs.
• Coffee grounds also go into the compost, and leftover coffee gets saved until I have enough for coffee ice cream, grown up coffee milkshakes, tirimisu, or red-eye gravy.
• Milk that’s about to expire is great for making yogurt, creamy soups and sauces and an un-ending number of baked goods.
• As for cheese, rinds of hard cheeses add depth and flavor to soups and creamy sauces, just remember to take them out before you serve.  Also the government says that if there’s mold on your cheese it’s absolutely okay to just cut the moldy part off, you better bet that’s what restaurants do.
• See, the list is endless!

Pretty much everything that’s organic is put to use until its bitter end in my kitchen, and I learned from the best.  In Tuscany, my adopted Nonna scolded me many a time for going to throw something away or even into the compost.  Some scraps went to the chickens, who knew that laying hens love watermelon rinds and tomato skins?  Used pasta water was never put down the drain, it went into the pig’s trough!  Sometimes the ‘frugal’ culture feels more disconnected here in the US, since hardly anyone is still alive who struggled through the Great Depression, but in the ‘Old Country’ it is still in living memory the times when Italy was occupied by Nazis and parents were scavenging in the hills for chestnuts and mushrooms so their children wouldn’t starve.  That’s not to say that American’s don’t struggle to put food on the table or have food security issues anymore, there’s a huge current crisis with ever changing government food assistance programs and urban food deserts; it would certainly change my perspective if I had to put my (hypothetical) kids on a bus with me for 45 minutes each way just to get to a store that even sold fresh vegetables.  So, before you put anything that you paid for in the trash, be thankful that you have that option and make damn sure you can’t find some use for it.

Saving money and making sure you aren’t letting good food go to waste doesn’t have to be depressing, or a guilt trip about bad times and the less fortunate, I try and think of it as a game pitting my little dollars and my clever mind against the grocery stores.  And let me tell you, winning that game is freaking great!  To me, it feels like putting someone in checkmate when you only started with a handful of checkers pieces.

Making and Storing Home Made Vegetable Stock – If you save your scraps in the freezer from your daily cooking, this one is $0 F-R-E-E!

Ingredients/Hardware

• One large zipper bag of vegetable scraps and trimmings – good scraps are onions, carrots, celery, bell peppers, mushroom stems, tomato, garlic, leeks… pretty much anything!
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 tsp black peppercorns

• large pot or stock pot
• small sauce pot
• ladle
• fine strainer
• ice cube tray or jars or plastic storage containers.

 

Put the veggies, bay leaves and peppercorns in the pot and fill to cover with water.

Bring to a boil and reduce to a simmer, continue to simmer uncovered for 30 -45 minutes, the liquid will be brown and smell lovely.  Now you have regular vegetable stock that will be good for 1-2 weeks.

Stock is liquid gold!

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have room to store 12 cups of stock in my fridge and I might not use it all within a few weeks.  For me, the next step is turning the stock into concentrated stock, which you can store much easier in jars in your fridge or freezer, or in cubes in the freezer for easy portioning.

Put the small sauce pot on another burner on medium heat and ladle scoops of hot vegetable stock though the strainer and into the small sauce pot.  Let the small pot come to a boil.  As the level of liquid in the pot drops, keep straining in stock into the small pot until your full large pot of stock fits entirely into the smaller pot, approximately 2 cups.  Let the concentrated stock cool a bit then pour into the ice cube tray or into jars, then put in the fridge or freezer.  If you use the ice cube method, when the cubes of stock are frozen pop them out of the tray and put the cubes in a labeled container in the freezer, ready to go whenever you need them!

Stock cubes, all ready to go!

One cube (about 2 Tbs, if you’re keeping the concentrated stock in the fridge) equals the flavor of 1 cup of regular strength stock.

If you want to make meat stock, you can use the exact same procedure, just add your bones.  Chicken stock will need to simmer for 1-2 hours.  Beef or ham stock will need to simmer for 2-4 hours.  If you don’t have the time, you can simmer your stock in the slow cooker while you’re out and about too.

Tre Colore Lasagne – a discourse on versatility

Tags

cheese, Italian and Mediterranean, lasagna, pesto, vegetarian

I’m so happy to have my best friend (and her Ma!) come and visit me, even though she’s a Bears fan.  (Go Packers!)  Since her and I graduated from high school a few years back, we haven’t ever lived within 500 miles of each other. Luckily, we love to travel and plan trips to visit one another or go somewhere new together.  Our most notable adventure was certainly a very sweaty backpacking trip through Italy in August.  Also, thanks to her, I got to go to Boston last year and see Harvard (where she’s a neuroscience researcher! I love to brag about my genius friend.) and devour a lobster on the harbor.

Lob-stah! She made me wear the bib, I acquiesced only for the photo…

My friend has been a vegetarian since before we met, she’s not a health food nut or animal rights activist, but she simply doesn’t enjoy eating meat.  I think that’s really unique, and I really love how she doesn’t try to play it any other way.  It has always been fun for me to come up with yummy, meat-free dishes for us to share whenever we get the chance to spend time together.

Since I’m cooking for a varied crowd, for her visit I made two versions of a pesto lasagna:  one had shredded chicken and the other had fava beans and roasted red peppers instead.  Dry lasagna pasta is more expensive than other pasta, and because I had the time, I made the pasta my self.  If you don’t have the time, this dish would be excellent as a baked pasta with any sort of dried pasta, like penne or rigatoni, instead.  This recipe could make two large thin pans of lasagna or two smaller and taller pans; I ended up making one 9″ x 9″ pan of vegetarian lasagna and one 9″ x 13″ pan of chicken lasagna and feeding three people dinner with the large one, and three people lunch from the small one.  There’s no limit on what you can or can’t put in this dish based on what you have on hand, what’s on sale and who you’re cooking for, it’s the very picture of versatility!

Tre Colore Lasagne – it’s the colors of the Italian flag, green pesto, white sauce and pasta with red onions and red peppers!

Serves six – approx $1.37 per serving

Ingredients

Home Made Pasta

• 3 cups All Purpose Flour ($.50)
• 3 eggs ($.30)
• 3 Tbs olive oil
• salt
• water

Mix about a tsp of salt in with the flour and make a well.  Put the eggs and olive oil in the middle with about 3 Tbs water.  Mix with a fork until it starts to come together.  You may need to add more water, just remember that it’s a lot easier to add a little more than take some out.  Knead for 15 – 25 minutes or until smooth.  Let rest, covered in plastic, for 1 hour or up to 24 hours in the refrigerator.  If you’ve never done this before, I would recommend watching some youtube videos or a TV chef do it first.  Roll out into very thin sheets with a pasta machine or rolling pin and boil in salted water for about a minute.  Now it’s ready to be layered up as delicious lasagna!

If you don’t want to bother with it, I don’t blame you, it’s really time consuming!  Substitute 1-2 lb of whatever sort of pasta tickles your fancy.  In my case, when making my own pasta, the ratio of 1 cup all purpose flour to one egg to one tbs of olive oil works well for me.  Would you all like to see a photo tutorial in the future on making pasta from scratch?

Beschamiela – Italian beschamel sauce, very traditional in Northern Italian lasagnas

• 2 oz butter ($.12)
• 2 oz flour
• 2 cups milk ($.37)
• bay leaf
• salt/ pepper
• pinch nutmeg
• Parmigiano Reggiano rind (optional) – my work throws these away, so I give them a good home instead…
• 2 cups pasta water

Brown the butter in a small sauce pan, whisk in the flour and cook for 1-2 minutes.  Add the milk and let the sauce thicken.  Add the bay leaf, salt and pepper to taste and nutmeg and Parmigiano rind.  Whisk in the pasta water to loosen up sauce if it gets too thick.

Mix-ins

• 12 oz mozzarella, shredded ($2.25)
• 2 red onions, thinly sliced and caramelized ($.40)
• 1 cup pesto ($2)
• 1 cup favas (or lima beans) -for vegetarian version only ($.50)
• 1 lb shredded chicken, cooked – for meat eaters version only ($1)
• 1 cup roasted red peppers – I used my peppers I canned earlier in the summer ($.50)

Assemblage: Put a little of the beschamiela sauce on the bottom of the pans (to lessen any sticking to the pan) and layer up the pasta with your desired mix ins, making sure you add a little more beschamiela sauce and a couple spoonfuls of pesto in every layer.  After you put the last sheets of your pasta down, pour over any remaining beschamiela and pesto sauce.  Bake covered at 350 F for 30 minutes to 1 hour depending on the thickness of your lasagna.  Maybe serve with some fresh bread and vino, if you’re feeling frisky 🙂

Lasagna and good friends = lunch time heaven! A couple of rum runners by the lake doesn’t hurt either…

Chocolate Zucchini Bread – summer’s end

Tags

chocolate, food, freezing, preserving, quick breads, summer, vegetarian, zucchini bread

During my first few years of college, I worked seasonally in a small but busy bakery in my parents’ home town who needed extra help around most of the major holidays.  Although getting to work at 2:30 am and scooping out hundred pound batches of uncooperative dough was challenging, we had a lot of fun too; I particularly enjoyed listening to reggaeton (Spanish language rap) and silly pop music from Spain with my awesome early-morning co-worker before we opened.  We made a ton of amazing breads, but my favorite that I saw there was definitely this chocolate zucchini bread. What I enjoy the most, aside from the delicious flavor of course, is how unique the idea is!

I tend to make this zucchini bread more frequently in the summer when zucchini are cheap and friends and neighbors are trying to get rid of the stuff. I wasn’t able to have a garden this year, with moving up to Tahoe and its challenging climate for vegetable growing, but I did get a few pounds on sale at the farmer’s market a few weeks ago and shredded it and froze it in 2 cup portions in zipper bags.  Actually, freezing is the strategy that I use for almost all of the summer produce I can’t can or pickle.  For things that I want to have not in one big clump I freeze them on a sheet tray then transfer to a zip top bag.  For ingredients that I will use in small portions, like hot peppers, I freeze them in an ice cube tray so that I have approximately 2 Tbs portions.  Lastly, if I’m lucky enough to get a good deal on meat or have a good day fishing I’ll bust out my food sealer.

Some items got a little photo shoot while I was ‘playing tetris,’ i.e. trying to fit everything in my tiny freezer that I have to share with the other residents of the house…

Currently hanging out in my very full freezer are bags of sweet corn, cubes of jalapenos, blackberries ready for pie and cobbler, mixed fruit for sangrias, and a jar or two of pesto.  Canned up in my pantry are roasted peppers, Mexican escabeche pickled veggies, blackberry jelly and preserves, pears in lavender syrup, preserved strawberries, strawberry syrup, a little applesauce (hopefully more to come as my fireman promised me a fall time date to Apple Hill!!!) and spicy tomatillo salsa.  I love preserving summer’s yummy flavors to brighten up the chilly winter months, and since this will be my first winter in the snow, I think I’m going to need it…

While the sun is still shining, soak it up, enjoy the last few days at the beach, and make yourself a loaf of this sweet and chocolatey zucchini bread!

Chocolate Zucchini Bread

One loaf costs approx $2.09

(*note, I weighed out a cup of flour to be approximately 5 oz and a cup of sugar to weigh approximately 7 oz, but it’s just a guess because measuring by weight is always more accurate, so use the scale if you have one!!!*)

Ingredients

• 7oz or 1 1/4 cups All Purpose flour ($.24)
• 1/2 oz 1/4 cup cocoa powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• pinch cinnamon
• pinch nutmeg
• 2 large eggs ($.20)
• 1 1/4 cup sugar, plus 1/4 more for coating the pan ($.35)
• 2/3 cup vegetable oil ($.50)
• 1 cup shredded zucchini ($.30)
• 1 tsp vanilla flavoring – extract or imitation, whatever you have on hand
• 1/4 cup chocolate chips ($.25)

Preheat the oven to 350 F.  Mix all the first six ingredients.  Mix all the remaining ingredients separately.  Combine the two sets of ingredients just until incorporated.  Spray a loaf pan with non-stick spray (or maybe save your butter wrapper papers and rub it down with that.  Thrifty cooks are always thinking!) and pour in the reserved 1/4 cup of sugar and coat the entire surface of the pan.  This gives your quickbreads a crunchy and sweet outer crust.  Pour the batter into your prepared pan and bake for 45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.  *Remember, I live at 6,500 ft elevation so your baking time might be different from mine!*

Trout with brown rice pilaf and broccoli slaw

Tags

barbecue for life, broccoli, brown rice, coleslaw, fishing, food, trout

A great thing to be knowledgeable about in order to improve both your life and this big ol’ world we all share is to keep your meals ‘seasonal.’  I’m not kidding, the more I think about it the more I think I’m saving the world by cooking seasonally, not to mention that it’s healthier and cheaper!

In my opinion, fresh, local produce is the key to unlocking all these benefits.  If you’re buying in season, your money is going to the farmer and not towards the cost of transporting the veggies from a hot house three states away or from another country.  When you spend your hard earned scratch at a farmers market or a store that supports local producers, you help to support your local economy and reduce the amount of evil released into the environment by the trucks and planes shipping produce around the world.  Also, when your fruits and veggies don’t have to travel so far, they are picked riper and their wonderful nutritional qualities are much closer to their natural peak, rather than an apple that was picked a month ago and gassed into maturity in a hot house.  If you’re interested in learning more, go check out Slow Food International, they’re my heroes.

I always try to spread my budget around, spending my money on dry goods and staples at a discount grocery store and using the leftover for something seasonal at farmer’s market.  Because you’re not paying for the $4 per gallon gas it took to drive it across the country, when produce is in season is when its the cheapest!  So, stock up when the getting is good; can tomatoes when your garden explodes in the summer, go berry picking in the late summer, buy citrus in the early spring, and look forward to seeing root veggies at farmers markets in the fall.  I’ve been having so much fun preserving the summer’s bounty, including jars of pickled and roasted peppers, home made jams and jellies, canned fruits in syrup, and a freezer full of nature’s goodies.

We had good luck blackberry picking earlier this summer 🙂

Living in the mountains, like I do, isn’t so easy for local produce, but we’re happy to pay a little bit more at our farmer’s market that producers from the Sacramento valley come to.  But one thing we do have locally is some good fishing!  After a season of getting largely skunked, I finally had a bit of luck.

(Later in the week, as an additional nod to seasonal ingredients, I’m going to put up my recipe for chocolate zucchini bread!)

For this dinner, I seasoned my trout with Spanish paprika, salt and black pepper then seared them on a hot griddle.  I paired it with a filling and nutty brown rice pilaf and a fresh broccoli coleslaw, based on a recipe that I absolutely loved from my friend who has an awesome barbeque blog.  (the original recipe: http://barbecueforlife.com/simple-broccoli-salad-great-and-affordable-side-dish-for-parties-picnics/)  I got a great deal this week on a bunch of broccoli, and after using the florets for other meals I wanted to use the the stems, and the flavors in my friend’s recipe are killer.

Since I got the trout for free, the total meal cost only approximately $1.03 per serving.

So colorful! It’s like confetti in your mouth!

Broccoli Slaw

Serves 2 – costs approx $.67 per serving

Ingredients

• 7 oz broccoli stems, peeled and cut into matchsticks ( $.33)
• 1 lg carrot, peeled and cut into matchsticks ($.16)
• 3 scallions – sliced thin ($.20)
• 2 Tbs raisins – ($.10)
• 2 Tbs dried cranberries – ($.10)
• 2 Tbs mixed nuts – I had a bag of mixed sunflower seeds, pinenuts and almonds on hand, but any would be great on their own ($.20)
• 1 Tbs apple cider vinegar
• 1/4 cup mayonnaise
• 1/2 tsp lime zest – Optional, you could substitute any citrus juice or zest, remember that the rest of that lime is good for salsa, margaritas, gin and tonics, whatever…
• salt/pepper – to taste

Directions: mix everything together, taste and adjust seasonings.  Easy and yummy, can’t be beat!

Cheesy Chorizo Hash – a cultural debate

Tags

casserole, chorizo, Mexican, one dish meal, sausage

This is largely unrelated, but I’m really proud of myself, I caught my limit yesterday!  Look forward to some more trout recipes next week!!!

I had to fight the ducks to get them to leave my trout alone!

Now, on to today’s topic: Before my honey was an American-hero of a fireman, (You know, saving baby deer from wildfires and such.) he worked for many years, in both high school and college, on a Bay Area construction crew, on which Caucasians like himself were a vast racial minority.  From spending so much time on a mainly Mexican crew, he now possesses the skills of swearing like a Mexican construction worker and eating entire jars of pickled jalapenos in a single sitting.

I, on the other hand, studied Spanish in the classroom for eight years, was on and off with a charming, yet non-committal Spaniard throughout college, and spent a summer eating and drinking my way through Madrid.  I admit it, I speak Spanish with a noticeable Castillian lisp.  Needless to say, although my fireman and I are both nearly fluently in Spanish, it is very very different in both slang, grammar and accent.  On one notable occasion, I embarrassed the ba-jesus out of him when ordering ‘cho-ri-tho’ in our local Mexican restaurant, and was subjected to much (good-natured) ridicule and impersonations of my silly accent.

I recently got a good deal on some chorizo, re-sparking our little debate over the pronunciation of this pork-tastic sausage.  Really, there is a huge difference between Mexican ‘cho-ri-so’ and Spanish ‘cho-ri-tho;’ with the former being a loose, fine ground sausage with spices and oozing with fantastic red mystery grease and the latter being a hard sausage flavored mainly with pimenton (smokey Spanish paprika) and garlic.  Both are different and delicious, like a studly Mexican vaquero pulling you onto his horse and riding off together into the desert sunset and a suave Spanish Antonio Banderas type pouring you a big glass of sangria at the end of a long day.  But, I digress…

Cheesy Chorizo Hash

Serves 2 – cost approx $1.53 per serving

Ingredients

• 10 oz roll of Mexican chorizo ($.99)
• 1 lb russet potatoes, unpeeled 1/2 inch dice ($.25)
• 12 oz sweet potatoes/yams, peeled 1/2 inch dice – the orange ones ($.50)
• 1 lg onion, sliced ($.20)
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 Tbs jalapenos, minced – Use more or less depending on your taste!
• 1 cup/ 4 oz frozen corn ($.25)
• 1 tsp oregano – mine came fresh from my garden!
• 1 cup shredded mild cheese ($.62)
• salt

Preheat your oven to 425F.  Begin my browning the chorizo in an oven friendly pan (I used my cast iron, I love it!!!) over medium heat.  Par cook your potatoes and sweet potatoes till they’re about half way cooked, I microwaved mine because I was short on time, you could also bake or boil them.  Remove the sausage when it is cooked, leaving the red grease in the pan.  Add the onions and saute, when they are translucent add the garlic and jalapenos.  After a few minutes, add the frozen corn, par cooked potatoes and sweet potatoes, oregano and reserved sausage.  Mix everything together and season to taste.  Now pop it all in the oven for 10 – 15 minutes, letting everything get a little brown, then top with the cheese and return to the oven for another 5-10 minutes or until the cheese gets melted and bubbly.  Enjoy!

Before your masterpiece goes in the oven…

All done!

 

Biscuits and Gravy – The Usual

Tags

biscuits, breakfast, country, gravy, greasy spoon, Red Hut, sausage

As far as late-night texts go, I think my favorite one that I have ever received was one that I got last week saying simply ‘I want you to make biscuits and gravy.’ That put a big ol’ smile on my face.  The text was from my college buddy, Sasha, who I met during incidents which probably involved running from the campus police in the wee hours of the morning.  Since then we have both matured a little bit and now are successfully impersonating real adults; adults who happen to indulge themselves with somewhat gratuitous foodie talk when the mood strikes.

As a Texan, I’m quite partial to biscuits with a delicious, peppery, white gravy and was all to happy to indulge my friend’s request; this post will have to suffice until he comes to visit me this winter and I can make it for him for real!

This meal is also an homage to my favorite spot to get diner breakfast at the Red Hut here in Tahoe.  They serve ‘The Usual,’ which is biscuits with sausage gravy, hash browns and two eggs, all for dirt cheap.  I love this breakfast so much that I crave it for dinner too! If you ever find yourself in South Lake or Stateline, I would highly recommend stopping into the Red Hut on Kingsbury Grade, it’s usually got a few less tourists than their other locations.  All the firemen on my sweetie’s crew like to go here on winter mornings if they need a good stick-to-your-ribs breakfast before work, so I doubt you’ll ever leave there hungry.

Money-shot!

Flaky Country Biscuits -this recipe is adapted from Chef Scott’s recipe, my instructor for baking and pastry at Le Cordon Bleu, it is excellent with cheddar cheese in it too!

Makes 6 large biscuits – cost approx $.96 per batch or $.16 per biscuit

Ingredients

• 9 1/2 oz All Purpose flour ($.30)
• 1/2 oz salt
• 1/2 oz baking powder
• 3/4 oz sugar
• 3 1/4 oz cold butter, cut into small cubes ($.20)
• 6 1/2 oz milk or buttermilk ($.13)
• 1 large egg ($.10)

Preheat oven to 375 F.  Mix all dry ingredients, then smoosh the butter in with your fingers or a pastry cutter until all pieces are smaller than a pea and the mixture is a little mealy looking.  Beat the egg and milk (or buttermilk) together then mix into the dry ingredients, knead gently until a loose dough forms.  If the dough is still sticky, add a little more flour.  Gently roll out the dough and fold it in thirds, wrap in plastic wrap and let sit in the refrigerator for 15-30 min.  After the dough is cooled, roll it out and fold it into thirds again, then put it back in the fridge.  Repeating the rolling and folding procedure helps make the biscuits flaky.  When you’re ready to bake, roll the dough out to about a 1/2 inch thick and cut into six even squares.  (I like squares because that way there’s no wasted dough.)  Bake for 15-25 minutes, or until golden brown and delicious.  ***I live at altitude, so my baking time may be different from yours, so check often because there’s nothing worse than a burned biscuit!***  Also, If you’re making the whole breakfast, you can bake your potatoes with the biscuits ahead of time like a clever cook 😉

Kitty likes to help, i.e. jump on counters when I’m not looking

The Usual – Biscuits with sausage gravy, hashbrowns and two eggs

Serves 2 – cost approx $.77 per serving

Ingredients

• 8 oz breakfast sausage ($0 I got it for free with coupons!)
• 1/4 cup flour
• 2 cups milk ($.32)
• salt and black pepper
• pinch nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp ground sage
• 1 lb potatoes, baked ($.25)
• 4 eggs – cook these however you like them best, whether that’s scrambled till they bounce, runny yolk fried goodness or anywhere in between! ($.40)
• 2 Flaky Country Biscuits ($.32)

Cook the sausage over medium heat in a cast iron or sturdy sauce pan and crumble them into bite size pieces.  Cook until browned and the fat has rendered then remove the sausages.  Add the flour to the fat and whisk for a few minutes to cook the rouix.  Next, whisk in the milk, making sure there are no lumps.  Season with the salt and black pepper, nutmeg and sage, when it comes to a gentle simmer, add back the sausage.  This is quite happy to simmer on the back burner while you’re making the hashbrowns and eggs, if it gets too thick you can always whisk in a little water to thin it out.

As for the hashbrowns, I’ve yet to perfect the recipe but this has worked best for me so far.  (If you’re a fan of frozen hashbrowns, by all means use them instead.)  Heat a non-stick pan on medium high, coat with some sort of spray oil, such as PAM. Grate the potatoes on the larger holes on your box grater and put into the hot pan.  Now, and this is the hard part, just leave them be for 5 whole minutes!  It’s physically impossible to not touch them, so I try to just limit myself to poking at the edges and shaking the pan to make sure they’re not sticking.  Perhaps it’s my impatience keeping me from the perfect hashbrowns…  Really, go fold some laundry, or unload the dishes or something.  When it’s all browned and cohesive, flip the potatoes gently with a spatula and let them be undisturbed for another 5 minutes.  Season with salt.  Something good to keep your mind off touching the potatoes would be cooking the eggs now.

See? I can’t help but mess with them…

Yay, now it’s time to assemble, get out your favorite hot sauce, and dig in!

Birthday Steak – the ‘S’ series for savings

Tags

steak, sweet potatoes

I had an amazing trip to Wyoming, where the only way I could describe the scenery would be to say that it was breathtaking.  Let me show you!

The view from my bedroom’s window

Bison in Yellowstone

Lower Yellowstone falls, with some Mountain Harebell wildflowers. You learn things when you go with a botanist!

Old Faithful

Fishing on Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park

In the theme of words that begin with ‘S’, I’m going to begin a series of posts about what, I guess could be called ‘grocery-acquiring techniques’ that I use to meet my $10 per week grocery budget.  I’m planning on posting on the topics below every Monday for the next month, paired with a delicious recipe of course!

Keep your menus ‘seasonal’

Shop only on ‘sale’

Learn to be an urban ‘scavenger’

‘Save’ everything.

For starters, today’s ‘S’ is ‘Special.’  It was my honey’s birthday this weekend and he requested steak for dinner.  Every now and then an indulgence is nice, and it actually fit into the budget.  I got a great deal on a t-bone, which is a New York Strip steak and a Filet Mignon, and since my fireman doesn’t like bones in his steak, I just separated the two cuts before hand with him getting the man-sized New York, and myself getting a dainty and quite rare filet.  I really liked the combination of sides with a sweet ‘sweet potato’ (go figure) and the spicy hot peppers in the sauteed veggies.

Birthday Peppercorn Steak –with sauteed vegetables and baked sweet potatoes

Serves 2 – cost approx $3.27 per person *note: for my cost calculations I usually include $.25 for the cost of basic ingredients and seasonings used in small amounts.*

Ingredients

• 1 lb sweet potatoes – actually, I can never keep yams and sweet potatoes straight, whatever the orange ones are is the ones I like. ($.66)
• 2 oz butter, divided use ($.13)
• 1 T-bone steak – be sure to pick one with relatively even portions if you’re splitting it into two cuts, some have more NY then Filet Mignon depending on where on the cow it came from ($4.58)
• black peppercorns
• 1 large onion, sliced ($.20)
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 summer squash, cut into ribbons with a peeler, discard/compost the seedy middle part ($.59)
• 1-3 hot peppers, roasted and peeled ($.12)
• 1 tsp green onions, sliced
• Salt

Preheat the oven to 375 F.  Wash the sweet potatoes and poke each with a fork several times.  When the oven comes up to temperature, roast the potatoes until tender, approx 45 min.  I did this first and they were done around the time the other components of the meal were finished.

Melt half the butter over low heat and slowly caramelize the onions, takes about 30 min.  While the onions are cooking, prepare the steaks.  If you’re separating the steaks, save the bone for making stock! Salt the steaks to your liking.  Take a few tablespoons of peppercorns (more or less depending on how peppery you like your steaks) and roughly crush them in a mortar and pestle or smack them with a pan and put them on your happy little steaks. Heat a heavy pan and sear the steaks on each side to your preferred level of done-ness, then let rest for a few minutes while you finish up the vegetables.

No that your onions are brown and your house is smelling amazing, add the garlic, summer squash and roasted peppers to the pan add salt to taste.  Since the squash is so thin and the peppers are already cooked, it should cook up within a few minutes.

Use the remaining butter and the green onions to garnish your sweet potatoes and dig in!

Roadtrip Vacation

This week my friend and I are taking a road trip to Wyoming to visit her family and see some of the more beautiful parts of the US of A. Perhaps also a detour to see Yellowstone, which is one of the things on my bucket list. It will be nice to take a vacation from budgeting and cooking and indulge in some fast food. (In case you were worried, I left my fireman with lots of leftovers and casseroles.)

I am hoping to do some relaxing, writing and to practice some photography (you all know that I need it!). While I’m gone, I would absolutely love for you to give me some feedback about what you’d like to see in the blog. What dishes or cuisines are you interested in? Would you like for me to include my price breakdowns for ingredients? More shopping strategies to get the best deals? Thank you! Without you all, I’m just a bunch of ones and zeroes floating around cyberspace, I love my readers!