More Cheap Eats

Blessings, Darlings!

Since we're still digging out from moving expenses (not only was moving more costly than we had figured, but when you're self-employed all that time spent packing, loading, unloading, unpacking you don't earn a penny!) my choice for February is to either have a working cell phone or food.  And my cell phone isn't that expensive... so it's going to be a very low food budget month.  Like $200 for the month.

So last Friday I did shopping that will get us thru' 2 - 4 weeks, with some fresh food added at times.  I bought 15 pounds of white flour (I grind my own whole wheat flour already, but husband and son aren't yet hungry enough to eat 100% whole wheat everything), two dozen eggs, two gallons of milk, lots of sale priced apples and oranges, two pounds of carrots, a bunch of celery, three pounds of frozen green veggies, cat litter, and a few other things. I do wish I could have afforded more veggies and a few cans of cream of mushroom soup, but I just didn't have the money.

I figure we can get thru' February spending maybe $40 a week on food and such.  That would be $8 on milk, $15 on produce, $15 on meat, and $5 on 'misc'. "Meat" includes eggs and cheese, for those keeping score at home.

Oatmeal with dried milk and raisins for breakfast.  Soup and maybe peanut butter sandwiches for lunch.  Lots of cabbage and carrots featured in dinners.  I've 2 1/2 weeks of dinners planned, and we'll see what meats may or may not go on sale for meals later in the month. Sunday night we had shrimp yaki soba (the shrimp was a BOGO purchase, and we used bean sprouts and cabbage in it), Monday night we had a little sausage with cole slaw and buns, Tuesday pot roast leftovers became a stew that will double as a lunch later this week, tonight is veggie/cheese omelets and home made rolls......

Of course, as this hits it has also become clear that the bag of mung beans I've been using for sprouts are past their prime - the sprouting ratio has dropped.  Instead of getting 3+ cups of sprouts from every 1/4 cup of dry beans I barely got 1 1/2 cups the last time.  I've one more bag that's about the same age - we'll see how that goes - but I also have two newer bags I bought this fall.  They should still be in good shape. 

Chocolate

Blessings, Darlings!

I've been on a chocolate binge lately.  Chocolate frosted yellow cupcakes, hot cocoa, chocolate pudding, moon pies, candy bars, sleazy Hershey's Kisses (TM), you name it - if it has any chocolate in it I've been eating it.

This has happened to innumerable people before, and will continue to happen in the future.  No news there.

The only thing new was that I made chocolate pudding from scratch. This was ENTIRELY the fault of @jmfield on Twitter, who tweeted "Cheffirmation: I am never more than 15 minutes away from homemade chocolate pudding. :)".  Well!  I took that as a challenge.


In fact, it took me 18 minutes - mostly because my husband or son had put my whisk away in .... well .... a place I would NEVER had put it, and it took me FOREVER to find it.


One of the many joys of chocolate pudding is that the ingredients are mostly pantry-stable.  I could have used powdered milk instead of fresh (and, while looking at recipes, I saw that the 'instant chocolate pudding' recipe by America's Test Kitchen uses powdered milk), I suppose I could have used baking chocolate instead of cocoa powder and butter (yes, the cocoa powder is shelf-stable, but the butter isn't), the flour and cornstarch and salt and vanilla the recipe called for last forever.


It was fast to make.  It was easy.  It tasted WONDERFUL.


Everyone to the kitchen, grab that 2 to 3 quart saucepan, set your timer (so you can see how fast this really is), and GO!

            CHOCOLATE PUDDING - served the 3 of us because we showed some restraint

1/2 cup white sugar                         2 3/4 cups skim milk

3 tablespoons dutched cocoa          2 tablespoons butter      

1/4 cup cornstarch                          1 1/2 tablespoons amaretto

Into that saucepan you grabbed, add all the dry ingredients.  Whisk them a bit to make them as smooth as possible, it helps reduce lumps later.  Add the milk.  Heat at medium (medium high on my stove, but your stove will vary!) until boiling, stirring constantly.  Reduce to a simmer, keep stirring. Soon it will be thickened.  Take off the burner, add but butter and amaretto (you may prefer the more traditional vanilla).  Try to let it cool long enough that you don't burn your tongue.  Can be served warm or cold. 

We tasted it before the amaretto was added - it was nice, but 'flat'. Amaretto and butter kicked it up wonderfully.

Frondly, Fern

Spicy!

So, in reading one of the hundred or so blogs I read on occassion (for I sure don't have time to read 100 blogs regularly!) this guy was raving about a chocolate cake a friend of him Mom's had brought over. Turned out it was chocolate cake mix plus a can of canned pumpkin. No eggs, oil, water, buttermilk, whatever.

So I tried that with a very old box of spice cake mix I had in the house. Okay, I have the Spawn, so no cake mix here is REALLY old, but it had been around longer than any other cake mix in the house. So it being 'old' and a boxed mix, I added more spices when I tried this experiment.

My goodness, that cake rocks. AND it's lower fat (but still has way too much sugar) and has more fiber and lots of carotene.

Obviously we're still at the point we're having pumpkin with at least one meal a day. I've only dried 3 of 'em so far, have 7 more to do. But now I have another range of options on what to do with the meat.

Pass the cream cheese frosting, please.

Frondly, Fern

Frenzied Fern

Blessings, Fronds!

I'm way behind in my blogging, because there's so much to do in the 'real' world off-line. I've been planting more veggies, I discovered a bee hive in my compost heap while trying to get compost for said garden, husband's and my home business has has issues including but not limited to the main development computer's hard drive going bad, I'm working on a line of Mastermind groups I want to give, and I need to get a real web site up (which means husband and I spend quality time debating the relative merits of WordPress vs Joomla.)

Meanwhile, I still have the Mastermind training classes I'm in, the regular business training classes, meals have to be put on the table, clothes have to be washed, spawn has to be nagged to do lawn and clean bathrooms and I've lost his shopping slavery because he's working with husband to re-install all the software on the new hard drive while husband works on content for the main home business web site.

AND
On top of all that, and the expected drop in income, and the extra expenses for computer and car repairs - at our current main client, another very small company, the head engineer is out with a life threatening heart problem. Which is messing up HIS life, his family's life, their business's income, and thus OUR income even more than it was before.

SO
While I should be using this blog to plug the Mastermind groups starting now, instead mostly there's going to be silence and short posts. Because I'm busy hanging laundry, baking break, learning Wordpress, creating web sites and web site content, and finding new and different weeds - er - wild plants to eat.

Tomorrow night is Dolmades for Dinner - greek stuffed grapes leaves. I ain't paying for the grape leaves, and the filling is mostly rice (storage food) and mint (herb garden supplied). Tonight's dinner is lamb stew (3rd meal from leg of lamb, lots of potatoes that were on GREAT sale last week) in home-made bread bowls. All leftover lamb is going to go into soup for lunches this week.

Frondly, Fern

Yogurt making

NEWS FLASH - MONEY IS TIGHT

Okay, no 'news' in that news, is there? One of the distributors of our (home business) product has been slow in paying us at the same time we've been doing more 'prep for future' than 'immediately paying work'. We knew that our choices would reduce income for a while, so it's okay.

But it means that I'm doing even more cooking from scratch, at the same time that my husband wants to buy more goodies at the local Farmers Market. We're compromising - he gets to buy 1 loaf of artesian bread (UpTown Bakers rock!) but we have to make cookies/muffins/etc at home, as well as the rest of our bread.

Today I'm baking a lovely loaf of bread and some blackberry muffins. But I don't have all the ingredients that the muffin recipe calls for!

FLEXIBILITY & SUBSTITUTION

Actually, the husband and spawn want blueberry muffins, but I have blackberries, not blueberries, in the freezer to use up. So that's substitution #1.

Substitution # 2 is for some of the 1 1/2 cups of plain yogurt that the recipe calls for. I don't have that much. If I had planned ahead (as I SHOULD have) I'd have made more yogurt by now. Instead, I've got some sour cream in the freezer left over from something or other, and I'll use that - no need to worry about it separating in baked goods.

Of course, I'm still going to have to make some more yogurt, since I like the stuff and use it for all manners of things.

YOGURT MAKING - YOU KNEW I'D GET TO THAT EVENTUALLY.....

Making yogurt is incredibly easy. Heat milk to about 115 degrees. Add starter yogurt - some left from your previous batch, or half of cup of plain yogurt from whatever brand you usually buy (so long as it brags about live cultures). Keep the mix warm for a few hours. Poof! It's yogurt!

I'm going to rotate my dry milk for this. Since I mix the powder with hot water (it dissolves better that way) it will heat the milk in the same step. About 1 quart of warm milk, 1/2 cup of starter, tuck it into the hay box cooker, and ignore it till later today.

I'm VERY good at ignoring things.


Enjoy!