Monday Morning

I thought I had a recipe in mind for today but I can't remember what it was to save my life.  I'm having a braindead sort of day.  Tomorrow is grocery day which means things are a little tight in the kitchen.
Yesterday I made graham crackers out of nothing but graham flour since I had no other wheat flour in the house.  They are good.  Have a sort of coconutty texture and flavor to them which was weird since I had only thought about adding coconut flour.  I'm guessing that the graham flour lends a sort of coconut feeling.  I left out the spices so they are rather plain and cracker like but we were going to make s'mores (until we discovered the buckets of candy my dad brought for Easter).  I did make marshmallows, opting to use frangelico in place of the vanilla.  It didn't really change the flavor but we'll see how they roast. 
Let's see what else do I have to share.  My dad made an amazing ham for Easter.  I'll get his glaze and share.  He always uses a recipe so it's easy to get them from him.  I know the glaze had mustard and maple syrup.  I used the drippings on my mashed potatoes - what an amazing meaty sweet sauce it made.
Speaking of ham, that's got some good prices right now.  All the Easter sales carry on until tomorrow so we'll be shopping in the evening of a work night.  I prefer shopping on the weekend so I have time but we want to hit the remaining sales.  One store has butter for $1.69 a pound so we'll be stocking up.  We're moving away from the Nucoa.  We're reinvestigating my husband's dairy allergy since he hasn't gotten any healthier staying away from the dairy.  We'll be on the lookout for a local milk that I know has been sold in the area before.  I just can't remember the name so that's my mission for tomorrow.  We'll be buying hamburger from the co-op.  It's local beef and ground there at the store.  If you buy 3 packages it's $2.59 a pound.  Slightly higher than my $2 a pound limit but I have discovered that it's not working.  We are so sick of chicken thighs.  We're also worried about all the new discoveries they are making when it comes to meat products.  The co-op also sells chickens for $1.99 a pound but at the moment it's whole chickens so we'll look into that next month.
Still working on researching foods and I think we're moving in the right direction.  We're back to butter and getting rid of the plasticy Nucoa.  We've been investigating coconut oil.  At this moment, we haven't switched because the best price is mail-order and I'm just not ready for that yet.  I make lotions and soaps so having large quantities of coconut oil is good (the stuff I have now I'm not sure is good for eating so when that is gone, we'll be buying new stuff that will be food-grade).  I'll share more on that when we get around to the order.
Safeway has the whole white wheat flour on sale for $4.69 (new regular price $4.99) until tuesday.  My son didn't think 30 cents was much of a sale but when we started explaining that last month we paid $5.09 but prior to that we paid $5.39, it feels like a much better sale.  Still not $1.99 like white flour but we'll take what we can get. 
We're skipping the bountiful basket this week because of the season.  It's just hasn't been a great selection and we're so full of apples and pears that we want to wait to get into a new season of foods before buying again.  We may get one next week or wait until towards the end of the month.  We've gotten a little back-up with some of the produce so it gives us a chance to use everything up.

Weekend Planning

I had to come up with something. I've been terrible this week. Menus for yesterday - Breakfast was grits with bay seasoning, Lunch was hash browns with eggs and tortillas and carrot sticks. Come the evening, my dad invited us over for Pizza. He was out and about and decided to get Papa Murphy's but he can't eat the whole thing. I know he could buy smaller but he likes the company. We talked him into coming over to our house so I could work on stuff that didn't happen (we ended up with more company and it was nearly nine when everyone left - oh well).
The thing about the weekend is that it's a chance for me to play with recipes and work on projects. I like going into the weekend with a plan. Maybe not concrete because things happen but a list of recipes I can play with.
Tonight is movie night so it's spaghetti night with my dad. Saturday will be different since my son and I will be in Moscow all morning. I have a craft jury to attend (cross fingers because this could be a good money maker for us and an opportunity to do something fun). While there, we plan on spending our time doing the community scavenger hunt. If you get 15 items, you get a $5 gift certificate. I think I might use that to buy us something for lunch since we'll be there a long time.
My husband already has dinner ideas - we're doing stir fry with barley. Barley has become his favorite grain. Maybe we'll make the hulled barley and see how that compares.
Sunday brings Sunday dinner. We try to attend church but I haven't been feeling well and my husband is working all weekend so we'll be staying home. A great time to cook up those pears and lemons that I want to work with. Next week, I should have great recipes to share. I'm thinking a lemon focaccia and more pear breads (oh and lemon curd of course).
We're not great with our meal planning and that's something we need to work on. Maybe we'll sit down and plan the weeks meals. I hope to make up some pizza dough. Dough freezes well so I could mix it up ahead of time and have it ready. I could bake it too and have it be completely ready for use - so many ideas, now I just need the time and energy to follow through.

Menu for Wednesday

I've been feeling poorly lately. I was diagnosed with high blood pressure last October and have been struggling to balance all the things I need to for my health. We think my feeling poorly is due to the medication but I don't know. What I do know is that I am exhausted all the time which makes keeping up with this blog tough. I don't have enough energy in the evening to experiement with recipes nor do I have much of an appetite lately.
I'm grateful that I have such a wonderful husband who is willing to take over the cooking part of the household. He's doing a great job, now I just need him to read my mind about what recipes to experiment with and how to do it and I can keep up with this blog without a problem.
Yesterday, we had fried eggs on homemade brown bread (toasted). I love starting the day with a fried egg. Because we use cast iron we use very little oil to fry the egg so it's not a bad food to eat. We always eat the whole egg because research shows that the two parts of the egg balance each other perfectly. I know there is concern about cholestoral and the egg has gotten a bad reputation but science is always proving that whole foods are best.
Lunch, I opted not to eat the beautifully packed lunch my husband made me. I just wasn't up for it. My stomach was a little queasy so I got soup at the local cafe, along with a maple bavarian doughnut because those are my super weakness. I was sorry later because all that sugar made me feel more sick to my stomach. This doesn't affect my budget because I work hard to earn points for various programs to earn free gift cards. My soup and doughnut were thanks to a gift card from my insurance company.
Dinner my husband made chicken thighs with cornflake crusts. I'll have to get the recipe to share because it was wonderful. Then he made mashed potatoes (he calls them boiled potatoes) with garlic and a lovely salad from our bountiful baskets. It was so good I was a little sad there were no leftovers for my lunch.
We finished the night with a little homemade cocoa. We've gotten this down to where it's almost healthy. Last night, he added a splash of the irish cream coffee syrup which did increase the sugar content slightly (we've got it down to 1/4 cup for 3 servings). We like cocoa on cold snowy nights - did I mention it snowed yesterday? So much snow and I so desperately want spring.

Menus and Peppered Bacon and Pear Scones

I was talking with my mother on Friday and we got to talking about keeping a record of what we eat especially when it comes to how we use the foods we forage. I've been struggling a little with this blog because I haven't found a good way to share how we survive the month with our food budget. I have shared recipes and grocery budgets but that doesn't touch the day to day ways we stretch our food and the mistakes we make. Starting this week, I will be sharing our daily menus as well as recipes and tips. It may need some tweaking so please be patient while I figure out how best to share this information.
Sundays are a family dinner day and consists of a sort of potluck centered around a theme or main dish. Currently, we are down to just us and my dad. Sometimes we get more family and weird combinations as people just bring something to share.
This Sunday we wanted to do something Irish in honor of St Pat's day but no corned beef. My mother had given us a roast that she found in her freezer - she wasn't quite sure what it was or what condition it was in but we're forever scavengers so we gladly took it.
We got our Bountiful Baskets on Saturday. In the basket we had - romaine lettuce, tomatoes, spring onions, some kale looking leafy green (that no one was able to identify), potatoes, granny smith apples, 2 english cucumbers, carrots, oranges, melon, and 2 cabbages. I think that was everything.
We centered our meal around the roast and his basket (since it's really just him, he likes to use it when we eat with him). We cooked the roast in the crockpot for 6 hours. We had covered it onion soup I had made weeks before (we froze the excess). It was amazing. My dad made a salad of lettuce, shredded carrots, chopped cucumbers and tomatoes. Then he grated Cougar Gold Cheese over the top. Then he chopped up a cabbage and sauteed it with garlic and soy sauce. We microwaved some potatoes while I made a gravy out of the onion soup (1/2 stick butter, 1 cup flour and all the soup). We finished the meal with some cupcakes my father made (cake mix, frosting and grated coconut).
That was dinner. I had made breakfast late in the day so we only had the two meals.
Breakfast was Peppered Bacon and Pear Scones. We have some overly ripe pears that need to be cooked so you'll be seeing a lot of pear dishes this week. I had come across a recipe for Peppered Pear Scones and thought they would be wonderful with the peppery bacon I had purchased this month. These have no added sugar and just a touch of fat making them fairly healthy and super tasty.
Peppered Bacon and Pear Scones
2 cups chopped over-ripe pears (removing core and seeds but leaving skin)
2 cups whole wheat white flour
2 teas baking powder
1/4 teas baking soda
4 slices thick cut peppered bacon
2 eggs
1 TB Molasses
1/4 cup milk
Bake bacon in the oven (lay bacon on a cooling rack over a cookie sheet) at 350 until crisp. Meanwhile make batter. Add flour to a bowl with baking powder and baking soda. Beat in eggs and molasses. Mix in pears, taking care not to break them down too much. Using scissors, cut bacon into 1/4 inch pieces and drop into bowl. Add 1 tablespoon bacon grease, try to get the meat drippings and extra pepper in the process. Mix thoroughly. Drizzle in milk, 1 tablespoon at a time until the batter is wet. Pour onto a baking sheet and smooth out until an even 1/2-3/4 inch. The batter will be rather wet.
Bake at 375 for 10-15 minutes or until cooked through. Serve warm with butter.

A new experiment

Life in the northern states can be rough when it comes to food. For the winter months, much of our food has to be imported from somewhere. There is little here in the way of local fresh foods because of our short growing season and cold winters (that start in October and last until June some years). This makes eating on a budget really difficult. We've watched our limited home stores dwindle over the past 2 months. It's been hard to maintain a healthy diet on a tight budget. We did up our budget from $100 a month to $150 to accomodate 2 Bountiful Baskets every month and some additional bulk fruit/vegetable purchases. Our goal is to still keep the cost as low as possible but January did not come out as well as we hoped as we maintained our normal shopping patterns for our $100 budget (we got 2 bountiful baskets and 1 big box of tangerines with our extra $50).
So we thought we'd try something interesting while waiting for spring. Our new plan is to eat like a "normal" American. Attempt to feed our family on our budget without regards to nutrition.
Normally when I plan a meal, I plan nutrition first and then find a way to find a budget into my plan. This time we are budgeting solely based on cost. I'm not sure how this will work but I get tired of people saying they can do a better budget (no complaints here on this blog but I have seen it elsewhere) because they feed their families bean soup and top ramen. We didn't stoop quite that low even though I did buy some top ramen because my teen begged for it (who can resist eating something that comes out to 22 cents per meal or 44 when he's extra hungry).
We planned for a lot of soups. We swapped out our more expensive wheat bread for the cheaper white bread (with the hope I can find a recipe that makes the perfect loaf of bread). We bought family sized cream soups. We planned for lots of soup this month because it's cheap to make. Tonight we start with Chicken and Dumplings (one of the more expensive meals because I bought the ingredients last month to experiment with the baking mix). We have cheap cereals because we hit a great cereal sale.
The bountiful baskets will provide some variety while we try to stretch our budget further with package soups that were given to us.
We have onions and potatoes for more soups.
I may hate soup come March but we have to come with a better plan to get us through these winter months. I feel like a pioneer. Our harvest was not great last year and we're still learning all about the foraging (which had some good and bad harvests last year). we'll be stocking up on fish and crawdads (hopefully) this summer so the winter will not be so bad but we have to wait and see how the weather goes. Maybe this year my garden will grow like crazy.

Vegetarian Meals Once a Week

There's a push to encourage families to eat vegetarian at least once a week. Each group has their own reason why from cost to environment. Eating vegetarian once a week can stretch your budget a little more if done right. The problem is that vegetarian cooking can actually cost more than your average American meat based meal if you start to substitute like for like.
It's very difficult to give up a food you like. Whether your reason is economical, health or any other. When you have to give up a food, you begin to crave it. You want it or something like it. I felt this way when our family went gluten free. We worked hard to include gluten free breads, pastas and other grain based foods into our diet but we were not satisfied. We spend a great deal of money trying to preserve a diet we could no longer eat.
When I started to learn how to change our minds, things improved. There were still meals I wanted and would try to re-create but I found more success in creating new dishes.
The same goes for eating your vegetarian meal of the week. The idea is to find an inexpensive alternate dish not a vegetarian substitute for a favorite meal. For the purpose of stretching the almighty food budget, a good vegetarian meal can help. Meals that use beans or legumes as the focus instead of more expensive meat. I have shared a few since the beginning of this blog and more will likely follow.
Don't get stuck in a rut, try new things and remember that new doesn't have to mean expensive and inexpensive doesn't mean suffering. My family has recently discovered the joy of cooking lentils. So far, they've been without meat.
Brainstorm and see what you can find. Tomorrow I'll share a few vegetarian resources. It's never a bad thing to learn how to cook differently.