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!