Warning: Undefined variable $show_stats in /home/jdqespth/public_html/wp-content/plugins/stats/stats.php on line 1384

Category: Food

Food flailing

I have food, but it’s not the food I want.

I had a cold last week, and my throat is still all kinds of raw as a result.

I want soup.

And yet I have a whole bunch of apples, two mangoes, a lot of sweet potatoes and sales this week on chicken leg quarters, london broil, and bolar roasts.

I could make a nice mango salsa and marinade and grill the chicken legs… only that’s not something I want to eat right now.

I have pork stock, which isn’t recommended as stock for soup but does make an excellent starter for red beans and rice. I should put some beans to soaking. Maybe I’ll want to eat that in three days, when it’ll be finished (soak beans overnight, cook beans, cook a second day).

I want spicy, sour thai soups.

I have a recipe for a sweet and sour red cabbage soup that will use two (maybe three) apples.

I have a duck carcass to turn into stock and then baby bok choi to put in the soup. But I’d need the pot I’d be using to make beans – so one or the other, but not both.

Food lists

So I haven’t had much interest in cooking the past couple days. This is a problem, since I have a lot of lovely produce waiting to be eaten… or go bad. I’m hoping some lists will get me more in the cooking mood.

lists! of food!
Produce
onions
last of the farm grown tomatoes
a couple small turnips
hot peppers
a few tomatillos
red potatoes
collard greens
spinach
2 zucchini (now grilled)
carrots
turnip greens
1/3 butternut squash
grapefruit
most of a can’s worth of refried beans

dairy
greek yogurt!
sour cream
gorgonzola
italian seasoned cheese (open)
mild cheddar (open)
2% milk (shouldn’t last much longer)

meat
cooked chicken (1 meal)
cooked ground beef (1 meal with a extending)
ground beef
chicken stock (about 8 4 cups)
(and chicken breasts are on sale this week, so I’ll buy some of those)

Meals
I want to focus on gravies and cream sauces: a) because they are tasty, and b) because I’m about to pitch about 3lbs worth of store-brand flour because it was cheap and makes nasty bread.

Hee – let’s call this Chicken Florentine:
Creamed spinach – clean and cut all the spinach, cook an onion and some garlic in 2T butter, add 1 heaping Tablespoon flour, make roux, add spinach.
I can add the cooked chicken to that. And a hot pepper.
I could add pasta to that to make a real meal, or I could just eat it with a spoon. I’m thinking spoon.
ETA: Done. Wasn’t as tasty as I had hoped. No idea what went wrong.

Soup:
I’ve been wanting something bisque/chowder-ish with corn. And I have corn in my freezer. So onions, white roux, and then… how about butternut squash chunks? Roasted garlic. The rest of the roasted bell pepper I have in a jar with oil in my fridge. And some collard greens cut into thin ribbons. Sound decent? Does it need anything else? I could roast the turnips and tomatillos for a side dish. This sounds like it needs fresh parsley.
ETA: Started. I have the cream base with squash in it. I have a sprig of rosemary floating in it today. I roasted some hot peppers yesterday, so maybe I shall add them as well.

Hamburger Helper:
Shut up – it makes a great starting point.
Onion, garlic, ground beef. Zucchini. Collard Greens. And shred cheese on top and slices of tomato.

Kenyan Collard Greens:
greens, tomato, rice. (get my 5 spice powder back from my mother’s)

What’s left? Tomatoes, Potatoes, Turnip Greens, Refried beans, chicken stock – and I haven’t made use of the greek yogurt that was so hard to find!

All right – here’s a thing. These are fresh and tasty tomatoes, so I don’t want to cook them. I refuse to use the last tasty tomatoes in a dish where canned would work just as well. I’ll probably just end up eating them while I cook other things… but still.

Ummm… how about open-faces quesadillas – I know those have a name.
Tortilla, topped with a thin layer of refried beans, topped with shredded cheese, topped with tomatoes. With sour cream. Probably I won’t be able to eat enough to use up the refried beans, but maybe put a dent in them.

greens. Ummm… More soup? Turnip greens, diced potato, and carrots in chicken stock. That actually sounds rather dire.

Ummm… I could pickle the rest of the turnip greens and wait until I have leftover roast pork to make more of the excellent soup I made last night. My parents have a roast to make, so that should be soon.

Freeze the chicken stock.

Okay… Moussaka?
Layer a casserole with a mixture of ground beef and eggplant and potato slices, use lots of seasonings, pour a can or two of tomatoes over all, and serve with yogurt on the side?

That should do.

Swap one for the other

The original Battlestar Galactica, you know – the one with Lorne Greene, is so much better than the new one.

Driving on highways during the daytime is always worse than driving at night. Driving at dusk, dawn, and 3am joyous.

Dairy products are interchangeable.

The key to running an economic kitchen is just the right amount of storage space – too much, and those exotic sauces and fancy jams start looking sexy; too little, and you can’t stock up on sales. It’s the freedom to be able to buy the six boxes of pasta for $3 that saves you from running out of pasta and getting stuck with a box for $2.50. It’s knowing that you have enough meat in your freezer that you can wait for good sales and never pay more than $2/lb for any kind of meat (and can stubbornly wait for some to get even cheaper – like chicken thighs below $.50/lb, whole chicken and pork shoulders or picnic ham roasts for $.80 – and if you live somewhere these are cheaper, that alone will be enough for me to spend at least 5 good minutes considering moving there). Produce is pure luck, though – luckily, I have people selling lots of good produce cheaply off the back of a truck.

Sewing your own clothes from scratch doesn’t save a dime.

People think I can garden even though most of the pots on my porch are empty. The pots are empty because I have been systematically killing the plants that were passed to me when my neighbor moved out of state. They think I can garden because I have pots.

Applesauce

I have a huge jar of applesauce.

Seriously, you could feed a nursery for two weeks on this jar of applesauce.

No, I wasn’t stupid enough to buy it – my mother did. See, my father will only eat pork two ways – roasted in a pita with lots of condiments and roasted with applesauce on the side. Therefore, applesauce.

Now I had a few jars of tiny applesauce running around, and when I saw that my mother had a HUGE jar and only call to use a small amount of applesauce three times a year, we swapped.

I figured that I am brilliant and creative and always willing to try new food things.

But I can not come up with a single thing to do with a giant jar of applesauce besides starting in with a big spoon.

So it has languished unopened in my refrigerator.

But this is getting ridiculous.

So either I need a LOT of applesauce recipes (and none of that baking stuff, because they always seem to use applesauce as the magic low fat ingredient, and I don’t trust that logic), or I need someone with an applesauce fetish to take it away and have a delightful weekend. Probably the former.

ETA: Suggestions in the comments to this post included: baking; muffins; boil a cup or two of the stuff til it’s syrupy and pour it, still hot, over ice cream; a good addition to newfangled baked bean type things; buy some potatoes and onions and make a lot of latkes; pumpkin bread; curried chicken and apple stew, with a jar of applesauce in that as part of the gravy; pork roasts in a crockpot and instead of adding juice/wine/water added a jar of applesauce and some sauerkraut.

I have a muffin recipe that uses applesauce, but not as the magic low-fat moisture enhancer, oh no! My recipe uses applesauce as a tart substitute for buttermilk, to make the baking soda go BOOM and create fluffiness

I have an awesome set of friends.

This *is* my pious face

So I snuck out for lunch and ate at a restaurant so that I wouldn’t have to discuss whether I was or wasn’t eating with the other people in the staff lounge. While I was there, not only did I write a bunch more, but I also had three cups of tea.

Now I really want more tea – but people will see me.

Yes, it is very silly and I am kind of enjoying that aspect.

As for heartwarming traditions – My family was never very good at the whole fasting thing, so every year for Yom Kippur we would remove ourselves from the temptation. We’d all pile into the family car and go for a long drive north (and sometimes west toward the mountains) so that we could catch the best of the autumn foliage. We’d go by back roads, and occasionally we’d accidentally end up in another state, and then we’d turn around and head home in time to stop (almost always a little early before dark) at whatever restaurant looked new and interesting.