Day #5 Friday (March 25, 2011) UWKC 2011 Hunger Challenge

  Breakfast: getting creative

Well, enough oatmeal, time for a little something else.  Today’s breakfast is scrambled eggs topped with sautéed mushrooms and diced chicken liver (set aside from Wednesday’s roast chicken). Toasted buttered baguette slices and a pink grapefruit half keep the eggs company. ALL OF THE ITEMS IN THIS MEAL, except the seasonings (salt, pepper and the squeeze of fresh lemon juice in the sautéed mushrooms) WERE ON SALE at Fred Meyer this week.  Score.

 

 Dinner:  Home-made Chicken noodle soup =Comfort Food

Again, not a soup from the ubiquitous can. There is real nourishment in this soup, limited salt and maximum flavor. Take that Campbell’s!

My homemade chicken soup has lots of vegetables including turnip, carrots, onion, minced celery and frozen baby peas, added at the end. Again, take that Campbell’s!  Flavorings, beside salt and pepper, are sage, bay leaf, and a lemon slice, with peel (my secret ingredient).

The liquids in this soup are the clay pot cooking juices with the fat skimmed off, two cans of canned chicken broth and a little water.  This is a rich soup; it can be stretched the old fashioned way if unexpected guests arrive at dinner time, by adding some more water. “Come in, join us for dinner. There’s plenty!” for Home Food hospitality.

The chicken pieces are hand-picked from the bones of the roast chicken. Tear into bite-sized pieces, but don’t put in until the very last minute or the flavor will leach out. The hand-made noodles, which are cooked separately in boiling salted water, also go in at the very last second.

Wish I could give you actual measurements for the ingredients, but I don’t measure for this soup. The soup ingredient amounts depend more on what I have on hand and what I feel like that day. I don’t even taste as I go along anymore. The soup always seems to turn out well though; bet that’s why chicken soup is considered to have miracle properties.



Day #4 Thursday (March 24, 2011) UWKC 2011 Hunger Challenge

A crazy cooking frenzy today

I must be recovered, because today I was inspired to cook up a storm.  Making up for time lost earlier in the week, I guess. Homemade tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, home-baked oatmeal cookies and from-scratch egg noodles topped with lemon sage sauce for dinner. Phew.

Lunch: Tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich = the dependable American classic

Why make tomato soup when it comes in a can and is cheap? You get what you pay for; canned tomato soup is way over-salted.  Not only is the excess salt unhealthy; in my opinion, the salt is a cheap substitute for the flavor that should be there, but isn’t.  Tomato soup is surprisingly inexpensive and easy to make.  This soup recipe is a “The Best of America’s Test Kitchen” magazine of Spring 2010.  I substituted one minced Jalapeno pepper for the pepper flakes. It’s a really good soup.

A classic accompaniment to tomato soup is a grilled cheese sandwich.  This sandwich contains slices of roast chicken from Wednesday along with cheddar cheese. Half a sandwich is ample, this is a filling lunch.

Oatmeal cookies and guests may drop by.

Dorie Greenspan is my go-to girl.  I made her peanut butter cookies for the fourth day of the 2010 Hunger Challenge  http://dhomefood.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/thursday-12810-day-4-learning-cuisine-rapid-fast-food/   and they were great.  If it’s possible, her oatmeal cookies are even better.  I learned with last year’s Challenge that having cookie dough in the fridge, so a few cookies can be baked every day, makes some of the week’s other deprivations more bearable.  The smell of baking cookies warms a home and creates a welcome for guests.  Eating the fresh cookies is good too. Now that’s Home Food, comforting, welcoming and eminently edible.

The cookie recipe is on Dorie Greenspan’s blog, http://doriegreenspan.com/2009/10/-i-was-delighted-to.html    and is called “Mary’s House Oatmeal Cookies”. Pay attention to Greenspan’s notes at the end of the recipe.  She makes the cookies smaller, so the recipe goes further. She also spaces them further apart on the cookie sheet, because as she says “they’re spreaders”. Spreaders they are; my first batch turned out one big (delicious) cookie.  Oh yeh, I added a half cup of chopped walnuts to the recipe, just because.

 

Dinner:  Homemade egg noodles for chicken in lemon sage sauce

Friday’s chicken soup calls for egg noodles. What to do? Money for egg noodles wasn’t in the budget this week. Suddenly a thought, I have all the ingredients, bought for other menu items, why not make my own egg noodles? So I made a big batch of egg noodles, half for soup tomorrow and half for sauce today.  

The lemon sage sauce is also the happy result of combining some of the ingredients I had purchased for menu items on other days.  It is a basic white sauce (milk, flour, butter and a dash of half & half). Flavoring is sage, salt, pepper, fresh lemon juice and lemon zest. The sauce is enriched with a handful of grated mozzarella cheese.

More grated mozzarella cheese tops the egg noodles, which are covered in the lemon sage sauce, chicken cubes and sautéed mushroom slices. The assembled dish is browned under the broiler.

Day #3 Wednesday (March 23, 2011) UWKC 2011 Hunger Challenge

Roast Chicken, The Meal That Keeps on Giving = Ancient Roman Home Food

Whoo hoo, Fred Meyer…roasting chickens for $.88/lb.; I got one for $4.23 and is it going to work hard.  Cooking-from-scratch is the way to go for thrift, but is it ever time consuming, so any way I can save time and effort = great!  Ta da, enter my Romertoph Clay Baker.  Actually, this is a reentry, as I haven’t used my Clay Baker for several years; it took me some time to find it in the back of the cupboard.

Dinner: Core Meal #2 Roast Chicken    

 

Dinner Prep on Wednesday, Hunger Challenge Day #3. Roasting chicken in my faithful clay baker. Seasonings are salt, pepper, lemon, garlic and in the plastic bulk-buying bags: sage and bay leaves. The chicken looks a bit odd because I’m experimenting; the chicken is going to cook breast down in the clay baker.

   

 Tried an experiment with my clay baker, I cooked the chicken upside-down, with the breast on the bottom. Done with the breast up the result is a gorgeous brown, crispy chicken.  My experiment was a success; the result wasn’t as gorgeous looking but was it ever delicious! The meat was so moist and flavorful.  The breast meat was essentially poached.  My daughter declared it the best ever.

Accompanying the roast chicken were oven roasted root vegetables. In keeping with tonight’s minimizing time/effort theme, they can cook on an open pan in the 450 degree oven with the chicken. The cut-up vegetables were seasoned with salt & pepper and tossed with clarified butter (couldn’t afford the oil normally used, but clarified butter is great).

Dinner tonight was a huge success. Simple, thrifty and really good. Plus a lot of leftovers for more meals. Yup, this is Home Food at its best. The clay baker saw its day a few years ago as a trendy item, then it was forgotten. I’m going to keep mine at the front of the cupboard now, the result tonight was that good. Apparently the ancient Roman Army created their own clay bakers by encasing a fowl in wet mud then cooking it in a campfire.  That’s good enough for me; the clay baker is actually a classic, rather than a trend.

Day #2 Tuesday (March 22, 2011) UWKC 2011 Hunger Challenge

Italian Home Food:  Pasta Carbonera with peas

Finally felt well enough to get my big shopping at Fred Meyer done today, so there are more choices in the fridge.  For both breakfast and lunch I fell back and Monday’s menu: Breakfast = oatmeal and apple with milk, Lunch = toast with peanut butter and half a banana.

Dinner on Tuesday, Hunger Challenge Day #2. Whole wheat pasta Carbonera with peas. Green salad and baguette slices topped with mashed black beans.

Dinner was what an Italian friend of mine calls “Italian poverty food”.  I fixed a simplified variation of my version of Pasta Carbonera with Peas.  My friend saw a lot of this dish during his Bronx, New York childhood. Apparently it was his mom’s fall-back dish when money was tight.  Italian peasant culture really knows how to put together a filling, delicious meal from a few simple ingredients.

The dish is basically a cooked pasta (whole wheat spaghetti in this case), dressed with an oil (olive oil is best, but as I didn’t have it, clarified butter. A combination is also good) and a grated cheese (Parmesan is good, but as I didn’t have it, shredded mozzarella).  Salt and pepper to taste. Thawed frozen baby peas are added at the very last minute; the peas are already blanched, so they don’t need more cooking,just a gentle warm-up,  plus you want them to retain their bright St. Patrick’s Day green color.

Accompaniments are a green salad and French bread baguette slices with some of last night’s black beans.  They look a bit odd, but trust me, they are delicious. The idea is from Lucida Scala Quinn’s “Better with Beans” show (see Day #1}.  After toasting the baguette slices, scrape a halved garlic clove over the top, butter well and add the mashed beans.

Day #1 Monday (March 21, 2011) UWKC 2011 Hunger Challenge

Simple meals today (still recovering) and it’s Meatless Monday

Luckily, I love oatmeal and eat it happily year-round. So a breakfast of just oatmeal with milk and apple, though modest, is fine with me. That was Monday’s breakfast and will probably be the favored breakfast this week.

Lunch was a half banana on toast with peanut butter.  Simple, fast and nutritious.

Dinner was my version of Cuban Home Food…black beans and rice. Black beans are one of the most nutritious of the legume family. Also, when you pair a legume with a grain (tonight = rice) or a dairy (tonight = grated cheddar cheese) the amino acids are completed and the result is a complete protein. Much cheaper than animal protein and suitable for Meatless Monday.

Making a batch of black beans from scratch, with the recipe Martha Stewart’s protégée, Lucinda Scala Quinn http://blog.madhungry.com/2011/02/recipes-from-todays-show-better-with-beans.html demonstrated on her February 28, 2011 show, “Better with Beans”, was quite easy.  The resulting batch of beans is generous enough for several meals and gets tastier as it sits in your fridge. She had other good bean ideas on that particular show too.

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Here are the beans soaking, a necessary pre-cooking step. I brought the beans to a boil, and then let them soak for one hour. I also could have just let them soak overnight in the fridge, but I didn’t have time. Also in the picture are the flavorings I used: garlic, onion and jalapeno pepper.

Here’s the bean recipe: http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/pot-of-beans  I did the basic one, without olive oil, because I didn’t have any. The result was still good.

Dinner on Monday, Hunger Challenge Day #1. Black bean on rice, topped with grated cheddar cheese, accompanied by a green salad and Roquefort dressing.

With a salad, topped with my Safeway coupon Roquefort dressing, black beans and rice makes a very satisfying dinner.

Pre Day #1 – A Late start

Real life intrudes on my plans to plan.
Originally I wanted to get organized the weekend before (March 19-20) the 2011 Hunger Challenge by putting together menus, assembling a spreadsheet shopping list and actually doing most of the shopping. Then Monday morning I’d be set to cook and blog. It was not to be.
Gripped by the grippe, plus a rant
Friday night I was feeling a little funky and by Saturday I was laid low by the grippe (former name of the flu). My major shopping trip across town to Fred Meyer (FM) had to be postponed, but I was able to make a small fill-in trip to my neighborhood Safeway, even though it is more expensive. I’d read the grocery ads and knew FM offered sale prices and coupons I could really do something with, as well as their bulk foods, but a trip to FM called for more energy than I could muster.
Food Stamp cooking makes no allowance for illness. Cough drops, Kleenex, and analgesic remedies certainly can’t be purchased with Food Stamps. How do people manage if they get sick? If you’re feeling too ill to put in the extra effort that the cheaper, basic ingredient shopping requires, and can’t do the necessary cooking-from-scratch…good luck. Convenience foods, which let you rest and recuperate, don’t fit easily into a budget for two of $12/day.
Grocery shopping for two core meals
After a slow start, I’m surviving and gaining ground. By Tuesday I felt better and made it to FM for my major shopping trip. The meals for the week are organized around two core dinners, black beans and roast chicken. A variety of other meals can be made from the leftovers of these two meals. Both are genuine Home Foods!

Core meal #1 Black beans
My fast-prep, go-to dinner is a big pot of beans. Easy to make, tasty, filling and they go a long way. The ingredients for a batch of black beans are what I picked up at my neighborhood Safeway as well as a few breakfast/lunch items. Also got one coupon score at Safeway, a bottle of Roquefort salad dressing for $.99. This was a dubious accomplishment, because to use Safeway ad coupons you must spend a minimum of $10.00. Not helpful to a limited income.

I spent nearly three hours shopping at FM on Tuesday; bulk foods take time, grab and go is not possible.
Core meal #2: Roast chicken
In honor of my case of the grippe, I planned several meals around FM’s sale on whole chickens ($.88/lb). Perfect for a roast chicken, followed later with that miracle cure…chicken soup! I feel better just looking forward to it. A roast chicken really stretches; after a roast dinner and pot of soup, there will also be meat for sandwiches.

United Way of King County Hunger Challenge 2011

This is our second year of participation in United Way’s Hunger Challenge. Last year my daughter and I managed to buy all of our food, except salt and pepper, for five days using the $60 Food Stamp allotment for two people. We learned a lot, about ourselves and about being in another’s place. Even though the experience was difficult, it was worthwhile. We hope to expand our learning experience this year.
Good luck and good eating everyone!

Hunger Challenge 2010 Day 5: Friday, 1/29/10 – A Big Finish with Creative Solutions

Today is the last day of Hunger Challenge 2010. Wow, it’s been quite an experience. It seems that some of my most creative menu items were prepared today. Necessity being the mother of invention and all. Both the Banana Brown Sugar French Toast Topping and the Apple Oatmeal Jam Squares are my solutions to using ingredients I purchased to take the place of food items I couldn’t fit into the budget. In the long-standing tradition of Home Food, creative invention can result in tasty meals.

Challenge #9: No Syrup? Create a Substitute.

French toast is such a comforting, nourishing menu item. It is inexpensive, filling and a fast entree for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Problem: it needs a topping and syrup was not in my budget. What to do? Solution: look at what I purchased and combine creatively.

Breakfast is ready. French Toast with Banana Brown Sugar Topping.

Banana Brown Sugar Topping

I did this by eye & instinct, so there are no measurements. Melt butter in small saucepan; then combine with brown sugar. Keep on low heat and stir until brown sugar melts. Be careful or the result will be hard candy. Slowly stir in a little water, until mixture reaches the consistency of thin syrup (it thickens as it cools). Add sliced bananas and stir until they are coated.

To my taste this syrup is better than my long-time favorite, Mrs. Butterworths. So long Mrs. B. We’ve had many good years together. Now I’ve got a new favorite and plan to prepare it with other fruits such as apples or pears.

Day 5 Meals:

Breakfast was French Toast with the above Banana Brown Sugar Topping. Really good.

Lunch was chicken salad sandwiches of cubed Thursday’s leftover chicken, mixed it with mayonnaise, diced celery and toasted chopped walnuts.

Mac and Cheese with roasted green peppers, garnished with tomato. Oven roasted winter vegetables.

Dinner was a jazzed up version of the ultimate down-home comfort food, macaroni and cheese, accompanied by oven-roasted vegetables. I grew up loving those small cartons of neon orange Kraft mac & cheese. Discovering how much better and easy it is from scratch was quite a revelation.

The Mac & Cheese recipe I used came from page 208 of “Joan Lunden’s Healthy Cooking” (ISBN 0-316-55726-9). Joan’s cookbook, published in 1996 when she was co-host of Good Morning America, has a number of simple to prepare, nutritious recipes. This is a basic Mac & Cheese made with a thin white sauce and grated cheese. Changes I made included swapping out the macaroni noodles for mini Farfalla (pasta bow ties), mixing in chopped roasted green pepper and garnishing with diced raw tomato pulp.

Roasted winter vegetables, tossed in oil then blasted in a hot oven to caramelized perfection, are one of my very favorite Home Foods. They have it all: thrifty, satisfying, nutritious and oh-so-very-good. Oil, that basic pantry item, was not in our budget, so I used clarified butter. The vegetables tonight were onion, potato, carrot, zucchini and turnip. Results were great, especially the turnip, which oven bakes to surprising sweetness. Learned something here, in future I plan to continue to use a mixture of vegetable oil and clarified butter.

Dessert: Apple Oatmeal Jam Squares, warm from the oven, was the finale of our Hunger Challenge week. This dish is the improvisational result of watching an inspiring cooking show, but not having all the ingredients. Only the fruits were changed to protect the budget.

Challenge #10: Adapt a Recipe to Ingredients at Hand

Earlier this month I watched a chef on a Canadian Living TV show prepare Oatmeal Blueberry Squares. Homey, wholesome oatmeal squares are a total Home Food, and did the ones she fixed ever look good. See for yourself: http://www.canadianliving.com/food/blueberry_oatmeal_squares.php

However, blueberries are out of season here and even at Grocery Outlet a 3 lb bag of frozen berries is $5.99. Luckily, apples are in season, inexpensive (Fuji apples, $.49/lb Hau Hau Market) and they go well with oatmeal. I tossed in a layer of raspberry jam (Fred Meyer house brand $1.00, on sale with coupon) for color and as a flavor nod to old-timey Oatmeal Jam Bars.

Apple Oatmeal Jam Squares fresh from the oven.

Apple Oatmeal Jam Squares

Use the above Canadian Living Blueberry Oatmeal Squares recipe with the following changes:

1. Make the oatmeal topping with 1 ½ tsp grated orange rind (from the orange that’s juiced for the filling) rather than 1 T.

2. Substitute 3 C diced apple for the blueberries (I leave the apple skin on). Eliminate the cornstarch. Reduce sugar if apples are particularly sweet. Simmer apples, sugar and orange juice until apples are tender but have not lost their shape. Stir in a good pinch of cinnamon.

3. Assemble by placing half of topping in bottom of pan, then apples, then ½ C jam or preserves (strawberry or raspberry are good choices). Finish with remaining half of topping.

Thank you

Something sweet to end this five day week of living “as if” on Food Stamps. It’s been quite an experience. Our family has slightly more options but many have much less. Gratitude to United Way of King County for sponsoring Hunger Challenge 2010 to increase awareness of the aching need that walks among us. Keep-on, keeping-on and much thanks UWKC.

United Way Hunger Challenge Day 4: Thursday, 1/28/10 – Learning and Cuisine Rapide (Quick Food)

More homemade Peanut Butter cookies with a ready cup of milk.

Cookies and Milk

The peanut butter cookies are still going strong.  I’ve baked at least one cookie sheet a day since I mixed up the batter on Monday.  Still have more batter in the fridge too. We’re enjoying PB cookies and so are our friends, postman and auto mechanic. Home Food to share…it doesn’t get better than that!

Challenge 8: Getting Schooled On Grocery Prices

Glad I kept some money aside for necessary purchases during the week because we ran out of milk  (probably because of the cookies).  Thanks to the Hunger Challenge I’ve started comparing the prices of the basics like the 1% milk I purchased today.  The results surprised me.  Prices last week varied considerably at my favorite stores:

Half Gallon 1% Milk

Fred Meyer $1.59

Safeway $1.69

Grocery Outlet $1.79

I’m a careful price-watcher, but this one got by me.  Until now I’ve been thinking that the discount store, Grocery Outlet, would be the cheapest, because they are cheaper for so many items.  Well, I’ll be.

My price notebook and the basic tools to get the best prices.

Why does this matter? We use at least a half-gallon of 1% milk a week, often more.  At a price difference of $.20 each this means a potential savings of a least $10 a year by always buying the least expensive choice.  I wonder how many of our usual items have this kind of price differential?  From now on I’ll be using the little notebook I started to record price comparisons for this Challenge.

Final Shopping Tally; total spent $58.68

Bought a Safeway bakery baguette ($1.29) for dinner tonight with the milk ($1.69), at a total cost of $3.08  Spent $55.60 earlier in the week for a total spent of $58.68  This leaves $1.32 from my original $60 budget for two people. Not enough for a cup of Starbucks coffee. Oh well.

Day 4 Meals: A Culinary Stutter Followed by Cuisine Rapide

Because we were going out, I had to swap around today’s menu plan with Friday’s so we could have a fast dinner tonight. That meant a culinary stutter, the same breakfast and lunch today as yesterday.  Hey, they’re favorites, so it worked out.  Breakfast was oatmeal with raisins.  Lunch was grilled cheese sandwiches with orange slices.

A fast dinner: Grilled chicken on Assiago topped baguette. Garden salad topped with creamy avocado lime dressing.

Dinner was a fast fix: grilled chicken sandwiches on fresh Assiago cheese topped baguette and a green salad.  I’ve found that these fresh supermarket baguettes ($1.29 Safeway) make a very nice dinner sandwich with a little mayo, lettuce and tomatoes to go with the chicken.

Made a new flavored mayonnaise salad dressing. This one contained a mashed avocado ($.69/ea), a juiced lime ($.25/ea), a minced garlic clove ($.34/head) and a little milk.

Avocado Salad Dressing:

http://www.bestfoods.com/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=2401&Version=1

The bread loaf was actually larger than we need for two sandwiches, so I’ve frozen the remainder to make croutons for future soups or salads.  Freezing is necessary because this bread is lovely and moist when fresh, but it will dry out while you are looking at it. No preservatives maybe? I wonder.

I Heart George Forman

Cooked the chicken on our large George Forman Grill with the removable grill plates.  It has to be one of my favorite cooking implements. Have already worn out two others with non-removable plates; this one is the best.  It’s fast and does a fabulous job, especially with vegetables like peppers, mushrooms and sweet onions.  Fish and chicken are really good too.  I’d take this appliance with me to a desert island if the island had electricity.

United Way Hunger Challenge Day 3: Wednesday, 1/27/10 – Starbucks Temptation = Oh no! Broccoli Again?

Things still going okay; am actually getting into the rhythm of this. Breakfast was dependable and microwave-quick; oatmeal again, this time with chopped apple and cinnamon. I need to further explore all the things you can add to vary oatmeal.

Challenge 6: Can’t Afford Tomato Soup For Lunch

A gooey grilled cheese sandwich on whole grain bread with crunchy apple slices.

My original menu called for homemade tomato soup to go with the grilled cheese sandwiches I planned for two lunches. I have a fabulous recipe. Grilled cheese sandwiches just call for tomato soup; it’s a winter tradition. I researched the ready-made canned tomato soups at the grocery store, and even though they were inexpensive, they are loaded with salt. Just one cup of canned soup contains 30% of an adult’s recommended daily salt allotment? I don’t think so. Sometimes cheap is not a real bargain.

Over the weekend, when my fabulous spreadsheet added up all my planned purchases for the week, I was over-budget. Something had to go. What got jettisoned was my homemade tomato soup. Sigh. Well, at least the grilled cheese sandwiches were good.

Challenge 7: Starbucks, why did you do this to me?

Happened to pass by a Starbucks in-store counter today. While I was breathing in the coffee aroma and reflecting on how this was as close as I was going to come to delicious coffee this week, since it is not in the budget, I spotted small free sample cups on the counter. Without thinking, I dived in…oh joy, a sample of a flavored coffee beverage! At the very last second I put my little cup down, as I suddenly remembered, no free food.

Dinner: Broccoli Reappears in a Frittata

Frittata of onion, potato & broccoli topped with cheese. Chevre cheese crumbles and dressing on green salad.

Frittatas are my go-to dinner choice. This versatile, inexpensive and delicious Italian peasant dish is real Home Food. I usually set aside a few vegetables and potatoes during the week to make a Frittata. This week I had an extra baked potato from Monday and you guessed it, extra broccoli from Tues. I can’t help it, broccoli is a winter crop and it’s in-season, all bright green and frost-sweet.

Actually, a frittata can be made with any combination of vegetables you happen to have on hand, I have made some odd combos that have turned out well. In my opinion, the critical vegetable to include is onion. Precook it until it is soft and sweet. Caramelization, created by pre-browning most of the vegetables, especially the onions and potatoes, is your friend here.

Then arrange the warm vegetables in a non-stick (essential or you get scrambled eggs with veg) omelet pan containing melted butter. Pour on some beaten eggs to bind it together. Turn when brown, then season. Top with grated cheese and brown bottom side. Thanks to the onion, the broccoli is only a bit player; you hardly know it’s there. But it is, making its nutritional best effort.