Tuesday
chicken, chinese cabbage, and soba noodles – stir fried
Wednesday
butternut squash, risotto – with or without tomatoes? is it kosher to make curry risotto? I still have two pieces of pita bread to eat with this. (note: yes, I know it sounds weird, but why not experiment?)
Thursday
ground beef – in something
Friday
Italian Market
I have a small apartment, and in some ways it has been a good idea to limit my available storage space. I will fill anything… and that will just make it harder to move in the future. But I love my apartment, and I’m likely to stay here for a while.
So I am trying to figure out what to do with my available floorspace.
Option 1: Nothing.
Bonus: It keeps me from accumulating a whole lot of extra crap.
Option 2: Shelves
Can hold my cookbooks and extra pantry stuff… and, if the shelves end up sturdy enough, I could finally bring my mixer from my parents’ home.
Minus – omg, I already have enough food staples stored to hold out against a seige for a fortnight… but they could be in more visible locations so that I’d use them up… *cough* yeah, right, like I wouldn’t just fill the space because it was there… but I would move it all to a level where I didn’t need a stepstool to get to the ketchup.
Option 3: Chest freezer
I can steal all the 8 year old beef that is filling the bottom of my mother’s chest freezer and I can have more room to store my own stuff without having to keep 40 lunches at work.
Minus – I will hoarde food and possibly not get around to eating it, either. And what’s the point of having room to get free meat, if I’m going to spend $150 to get it? Also, it doesn’t solve the book storage problem. Do they make hutches to go over chest freezers, like an etagere?
Food
meat
1 leftover rib roast (beef)
1 leftover steak
1 leftover lamb shank w/ lots of meat
miscellaneous fajita leftovers
ETA: 12 chicken leg quarters
veggies
mushrooms
spinach
broccoli
red bell peppers
potatoes
Meals I can make out of that
Hash – rib roast and potatoes
Lamb Korma – lamb shank, mushrooms
Meat & Rice Gooshie – fajita leftovers, broccoli, steak (if fajitas were steak, too), jar of salsa, cheese, spinach, bell peppers
I cooked 3 leg quarters in cranberry juice and froze one.
The cooked one can go with rice and a reduction of the sauce in which it was cooked.
Things I need to buy at Fresh Grocer on the way home
cranberry juice
cheese
jar of salsa
So end result:
1 qt of chicken stock frozen for my mother
48 ice cubes of chicken stock put up properly in my freezer
1 1/2 quarts of chicken stock in my fridge waiting to turn into ice cubes
1 1/4 quarts of duck stock in the fridge
I think I need to get everything frozen before I leave the house for a week.
And both refrigerators at work will have maintenance done over break, so I can’t store the leftover lunches I have put together and frozen. It’ll be a fine trick to fit everything in.
I think I can do it, if I leave the ice cube trays out of the freezer after I empty them and just put the containers in whole. Things *should* fit.
I made macaroni and cheese for the first time tonight.
Yes, I do have weird holes in my cooking experience.
So I need to talk about money –
What would you do right after realising your financial management is way out of line? Right – go shopping.
I spent today in the Italian Market.
I bought $27.92 worth of meat for [redacted] (which is excellent because I got almost everything she wanted despite having instructions to stay below $40 – I am a great food shopper)
For myself, I bought miscellaneous chicken bits (backs and necks and stuff) for stock – a 5lb bag for $1.85. I also bought 3 chicken leg quarters ($1.38) and butter ($2.49).
Then I made a strategic error, I think, in going to Fante’s. I bought some paper tea infusers because my teaball was too small to make my tea strong enough ($5.99) — but it cost the same as the teaball I use at work, but they were out of that one. I made tea when I got home – at least the bags work well. I also bought a magnetic hook ($6.49) so I can hang my measuring cups from the range hood instead of having them just hang out on the back of the stove because they don’t fit in any of my drawers.
Trip back and forth took two tokens ($3.30?).
And then I went to the produce truck and bought a bag of potatoes and some celery ($2).
Feeling bizarrely virtuous (aside from the Fante’s part) I went to the thrift shop to see if they had a bigger stock pot so I wouldn’t have to make stock in small batches. No pot, but I ended up with a $2 sweater.
That’s all the money I spent today.
Food: $7.72
Travel: $3.30?
Miscellany: $14.48
I mean, that’s not much and kind of awesome… but on the other hand I am so not good at keeping track at all.
