Skip to content

Waste Not, Want Not

There is a real joy in feeling resourceful, even with simple things. One of my favorite things to figure out is how to stretch the use of something and my least favorite thing is to waste food. The main focus of all this writing here has been how to eat well on a budget, but [...]

Don’t flip

One of my favorite meals is a quick dinner with rice and a frittata (the lazy man’s quiche….no crust). I’ve posted this before and it’s worth repeating. Makes dinner for two and lunch for two and even with the four dollar eggs I now feel compelled to buy ($4 per dozen that is) it works [...]

Roast it once, eat it twice, making Turkey Soup with Rice

We had banked on having leftovers for many days after attending two Thanksgiving dinners (the strategy in visiting different families) and doggie bags from restaurant trips over the weekend when no one felt like cooking. We forgot to factor in how quickly those leftovers would disappear when we had days of people over around lunch [...]

$oup

The poster dish for the concept of “a little goes a long way” good soup is something to master in any effort to live mind to mouth. While the dish can conjure up Dickensian “please sir may I have more” poor houses, depression era or homeless shelter soup lines, and scenes of poor families boiling [...]

Sauerkraut update update!

A simple, but untimely, google search revealed that in fact my sauerkraut did NOT fail because of the mold.
There are a lot of discussions about this out there about this.
Apparently when Alice Waters said to skim off scum she also meant mold? I think being specific about something so out of the ordinary in cooking [...]

Sauerkraut Update

Well- It’s a lesson in unsuccessful experimentation both with a homemade treat and fermentation. On this first try, I have failed at my attempt to make sauerkraut.
My first check up on my jar of not so briny cabbage (prepared using the Farmer John’s recipe) found a sweet and salty sort of dry mixture that tasted [...]

Getting to know your food and buying and cooking it wisely

The Art of Simple Food (by Alice Waters) and Farmer John’s Cookbook; the real dirt of vegetables and my two favorite cookbooks and here’s why.
For the most part the best food for you, whole foods (grains, beans, vegetables etc) are affordable. There is much discussion about this- clearly there are some highly processed, crappy food [...]