This is so dead simple as to not really be a recipe. Take a quantity of cooked poultry product¹, enough to feed however many people you’re feeding. Add some quantity of fruit². Add just enough yogurt³ to wet the mixture, and add a quantity of nuts⁴, more or less depending on how much you and yours like nuts.⁵ Serve up with some sort of starch.⁶ Quick, easy, and fairly cheap, depending on the ingredients you use.

1. I roasted a chicken this afternoon. Poached chicken parts would work too. Ditto for turkey. This is also a fine treatment for canned turkey or chicken.
2. We prefer grapes, but they were crazy expensive, so we chopped up part of an apple. Dried cranberries or raisins would be good too.
3. Plain or vanilla.
4. We tend towards cashews, but really, whatever you like will likely taste fine. I’m not sure how peanuts would be, though.
5. If the cook likes nuts as much as I do, hide them quickly after the addition, lest they all get eaten.
6. Homemade rolls, in our case.

Meal: Crockpot barbecue ribs, smashed potatoes
Cost per person: $1.50
Time: about 25 minutes, 10 of which was hands off
Leftovers: a small lunch portion of ribs
Local ingredients: beef ribs, potatoes
Organic ingredients: sugar, tomato puree, lemon juice

Last night we did beef ribs in the crockpot with homemade barbecue sauce. That sounds intimidating. We’d tried homemade barbecue sauce once last summer, but I’d been guessing at a recipe instead of finding a good one, and it was a flop. This time, I started with a good recipe (I’ve also gotten much better at looking at a recipe and judging how it’s going to be and what I can substitute or leave out without negatively affecting it) and it was amazing.

The sauce recipe came from The New Low-Country Cooking: 125 Recipes for Coastal Southern Cooking with Innovative Style, that I have checked out of the library.

The original recipe calls for:

- 2 tbs vegetable oil
- 3 celery ribs, finely chopped
- 1 red bell pepper, seeded and finely chopped
- 1 green bell pepper, seeded and finely chopped
- 1 onion, finely chopped
- 4 cups coarsely chopped ripe tomatoes or tomato ketchup
- 1.5 cups firmly packed dark brown sugar
- 0.5 cups prepared yellow mustard
- 0.25 cup Worcestershire sauce
- 0.25 cup fresh lemon juice
- 2 tbs garlic powder
- 2 tbs ground ginger
- 0.5 teaspoon chili powder
- 0.5 teaspoon cayenne pepper
- 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 1 teaspoon salt

Heat the oil over medium heat; add the celery, peppers, and onions, and cook until they’re softened, just a few minutes. Add tomatoes and brown sugar. Reduce heat and simmer until the sugar dissolves. Add everything else, cover, and cook on low for an hour, stirring as needed. Taste and adjust salt or other seasonings as needed. Let cool and store in an airtight container in the fridge. The author says that this “will last for months” and that the recipe needs 4.5 cups.

Then there’s my version. Yesterday, I didn’t need 4.5 cups of an unknown sauce recipe; also, if you’ll remember, someone isn’t fond of cooked vegetables. Finally, I needed something quick - I needed to put the sauce together, get everything into the crockpot, and make haste to my office hours. So, the expedited version:

- 1 cup tomato puree
- 1/4 + 1/8 cup brown sugar (there’s a trick that you can use if you don’t have brown sugar on hand but do have molasses. Mix a tablespoon or so of molasses with however much sugar you need - or a little more, until it’s the desired color - and you have instant brown sugar.)
- 2 tbs yellow mustard (next time, I think I’m just going to use mustard powder)
- 1 tbs Worcestershire sauce
- 1 tbs soy sauce (we ran out of Worcestershire sauce)
- 2 tbs lemon juice
- 0.5 tbs ground ginger
- 0.5 tbs garlic powder
- a touch of chili powder (I didn’t measure)
- a smaller touch of chipotle powder (again, didn’t measure)
- a generous grind of black pepper
- a generous dash of salt

I heated the tomato puree, added the brown sugar until it dissolved, then added everything else. I stirred until the mustard was well combined, and that was it. This went into the crockpot with 1.3 pounds of beef ribs (on sale a couple weeks ago for $1.25 a pound). Prep time was 15 minutes. They sat on low for 8.5 hours, until I got out of class. When I got home, we threw a couple of potatoes in the microwave for ten minutes, mashed them up with a little milk, salt, and pepper, and ate the ribs and sauce served over the potatoes. This sauce was so, so seriously good, it’s making me hungry writing about it, and I’m already plotting the next time we can have it. I’m thinking that next Monday night, there’s going to be a meeting between this sauce, a package of stew beef, our crockpot, and the hamburger rolls…

Saturday night, we had salad. We were having a power down weekend, because we both spend far too much time online, so we had scheduled salad. At some point, we decided that the prohibition against using the stove wasn’t really what we were after this weekend (which was getting us offline) so I used the stove to make up a couple of boiled eggs, and the toaster oven to turn the last hamburger bun into croutons (that may sound weird, but these buns are much heftier than what you would buy in a store. It made fantastic croutons.) The salad had local hydroponic lettuce, local hothouse tomatoes and green peppers, organic carrots, and local eggs and cheese, and absolutely hit the spot Saturday night. Tossed salad is one of our favorite things, and we’ll be eating more of it as the weather warms up.

Sunday night, we did homemade pizza. Easy, tasty, and just what was called for. I ate an organic Florida orange along with mine.

So, things have gotten a little behind here at Chez Nitty Gritty. Let’s see how quickly we can recap this past week and get it caught up.

Sunday, we did tossed salad. Local hydroponic lettuce, local greenhouse tomatoes and green peppers, organic carrots, local hard-boiled eggs, and homemade croutons from the tail end of a loaf of bread machine bread. (I don’t think I’ve talked about croutons yet. Cut up whatever old, stale bread you have that’s not green yet into cubes - I like large, restaurant style ones, but one of the great things about making your own croutons is that you can do whatever you like - and toss on a baking sheet with a little olive oil and whatever spices you care for. Bake in the oven somewhere between 350 and 400, depending on what else you need to bake, for 10 to 15 minutes, or until brown and toasty. Dead easy, and much cheaper and better for you than croutons from a box.) Dinner was around a dollar apiece and took about 20 minutes to put together, including boiling the eggs and making the croutons. Jeff also had some leftover lasagne.

Monday night, we did chili in the crockpot and cornbread. Monday was a late class night for me, so I made the cornbread in the morning before I headed up to school.

- 1.25 cups milk, buttermilk, or yogurt (you can fake buttermilk by mixing 1.25 cups milk, gently warmed, and 1 tablespoon white vinegar. It’ll sour in about 5 minutes)
- 2 tablespoons butter, olive oil, lard, or bacon drippings
- 1.5 cups cornmeal
- 0.5 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- 1 egg

Heat the fat in a small skillet, and pour into your baking dish (I used an 8×8 Pyrex, which I put into the oven at 125 to keep the fat warm.) Meantime, combine the wet ingredients in one bowl and the dry ingredients in another; mix the wet into the dry until everything is combined well (if the mixture seems a little dry, add a little more milk). Pour over the fat in the baking pan, set the oven for 275, and bake about 30 minutes, until the whole thing is slightly browned and firm.

This was pretty good; it wasn’t perfect - my ideal cornbread is more moist and sweeter than this turned out. However, it wasn’t at all bad. We have about half the pan left, that I think I want to turn into cornbread stuffing for lunches this week.

The chili was as simple as chili gets - about a pound of ground beef in the crock pot with half of a 28 ounce can of tomato puree, a little water, and some garlic powder, salt, pepper, and chili powder. There was just enough left for a lunch portion the next day, and Jeff said I should make more next time. The beef, milk, cornmeal, and egg were local, and the flour and tomato puree organic. Total active prep time was 15 minutes, and it ran about $3.50 for the two of us, including the leftovers.

Tuesday, we did a repeat of the tofu salad tacos, along with wild rice and a simple carrot and apple salad. Organic ingredients included flour, tofu, carrots, and apples, and the lettuce was organic. The rice was some that we’re using up from our previous eating habits, so I’ve no idea where it was from. Cost was comparable to the last time we did this dinner, but the time was longer, partially because the rice takes awhile to cook. I wasn’t tracking the time very well, because I drafted my cousin into helping, and we were socializing while we cooked.

Wednesday was a pseudo-new recipe. I say that because it wasn’t much of a recipe. I took a 3/4 pound pork tenderloin, sliced it up into medallions about a quarter of an inch thick, and pan-fried them in a little olive oil, along with a liberal dousing of black pepper, salt, and thyme. I served the medallions up with a topping of garlic butter and sides of roasted potatoes. The potatoes, pork, and butter were local (from our own homemade butter). Active prep time was about half an hour, mostly accomplished while the potatoes were baking. There were enough leftovers for me for lunch the next day and for breakfast the day after (I minced the pork finely, and tossed it and the potatoes in with a bunch of other stuff and two scrambled eggs), and the whole thing cost about $7.

Thursday, I was supposed to have a late class, but class got canceled. We did tossed salad again.

Friday, we were scheduled originally for pizza. However, our cheese vendor wasn’t at the market by the time we got there on the 24th, so we decided to do beef ribs, which had been on sale. However, we had friends coming in from out of town, and the flight got rescheduled from a midnight arrival to noon, and our package of ribs was just enough for two people, not four. We updated to taco pie, and decided to just bite the bullet and buy some decidedly non-local cheese, before one of our merry band remembered that another of our merry band doesn’t much care for ground beef. Being picky on a few select food items myself (I hate beans, to name one), I try very hard to serve people food that they like. We decided to fix lasagna. However, as it approached dinner time, a sudden craving for Thai food descended, and so our friends took us out and fed us a veritable feast at a locally owned non-chain Thai restaurant. Dinner was delicious.

Last night, Saturday (the 3rd), there might have been a frozen Tombstone pizza incident, but if there was, I’m not telling. :) If there was such an incident, it was our first in about 6 months. Plans are underway to experiment with making our own frozen pizza, since that would be infinitely superior to Tombstone. (One good thing about the Tombstones is that they don’t use hydrogenated oils.)

This week I’m on spring break, which means that blog posting (hopefully) won’t be neglected, email will be caught up on, and there’s some new recipes coming up. The week after, we’re going to do a week of make ahead meals with mostly local and organic foods, which should prove interesting.

Thursday night, I wimped out. We were scheduled to have salad, but by the time I got home from class, we weren’t up for chopping up anything (I should start keep salad stuff premade in the fridge.) We had scrambled eggs and leftover mashed potatoes (actually a very tasty combination.) It worked (I’d had salad for lunch, so there’d already been some greens in my life today) and in five minutes and for effectively 40 cents, since the leftover mashed potatoes had been calculated into the previous night’s dinner, we had supper. It’s hard to complain about that.

Breakfast for meals that aren’t breakfast is one of our favorite things. We did pancakes for lunch yesterday, along with fresh butter than we had churned just to the point of being whipped but not until it actually separated into butter and buttermilk. It was the best lunch we’ve had in awhile.

We ate some pretty simple meals at the beginning of the week, so I forgot to take pictures.

Saturday night we did salad and leftover twice baked potatoes from Friday night. The greens were organic, the carrots and dressings still leftover from Tday 2, the green pepper local, the egg slocal. It took 15 minutes of hands off time to boil the eggs, and 15 minutes of hands on time to put together the salads and microwave the potatoes. Quick and easy; there’s something to be said for simple meals and leftovers.

Sunday night we did enchiladas. I skipped the potatoes this time, and just did all beef. The sauce, instead of being a cheat with a bit of jarred sauce, was half a can of organic tomato puree with half a package of fajita seasoning and a little water thrown in. Total cost was about $7.50 for the batch (more beef and cheese than the last batch of enchiladas) which made dinner 2 nights for each of us, and lunch today for Jeff, so $1.50 a serving.

Supper Monday night was leftover enchiladas. I got out of class at 9, and it was very nice to just walk in the house, pull the Pyrex out of the icebox, and have dinner 5 minutes later. I think planning leftovers may be a strategy to stick with - along with using the crock pot - for Monday night this semester.

Dinner Wednesday night was a total cheat. We were at Earthfare picking up a few necessities (and a few not-so-necessaries, for my birthday dinner tonight) when we noticed that they had organic blue corn taco shells (Garden of Eatin’ brand) that appeared to at least be made in the U.S. Dinner Wednesday night was supposed to be risotto and leftover turkey, but we still had a bunch of taco meat from a weekend lunch that needed to be eaten, and we both feeling too tired to fuss with a fiddly new meal. So the taco shells came home with us. The turkey went into the freezer, and the taco meat went into the microwave. Dinner was ready in five minutes, and was extremely tasty. Everyone cheats sometimes, right? :) Total cost was $6.85 for a total of 12 tacos, which made dinner for us both and lunch the next day for Jeff. Not bad. More expensive than what we make from scratch, but cheaper than falling prey to the fast food monster, and our periodic hard-shell taco craving was scratched, so I’m happy with that. The blue corn tortillas were very tasty, and they had no forbidden ingredients like hydrogenated oils.

Dinner last night was an easy meal, too. We did pan-fried potatoes (microwave potatoes until they’re cutable but not falling apart, fry with a little olive oil and spices to taste until they’re as brown as you would like, 20 to 30 minutes) and green salads with hard-boiled eggs, red pepper, cucumber, and baby carrots left over from our second Thanksgiving a couple weekends ago. We were originally going to have just salads, but Jeff was craving some potatoes. Total cooking time was about 30 minutes, and we hung out together in the kitchen doing dishes and putting the salads together. It made for a nice evening, and dinner was quick and cheap.

Dinner tonight, on the other hand, is scheduled to be a feast, since I turn 30 today. More about that tomorrow. :)

turkey noodle soup

Meal: turkey noodle soup
Cooking time: about 30 minutes, not including resting time for the noodle dough
Cost for the batch (2 suppers for 2, total): about $3.60
Local ingredients: eggs
Organic ingredients: turkey, flour

Noodle soup is one of our favorite things around here; it’s quick, it’s tasty, and it’s comforting. I talked about turkey noodle soup over here a little bit, and last night’s soup was much the same, except that I made fresh egg noodles. The big thing to note about the noodles is that when she says “Slowly add water a little bit at a time until a ball of dough is formed” she means it. I have a bad habit, when I’m making something like this, of getting impatient, adding too much water at once, and then ending up with a dough that’s a wet mess. Then you have to add more flour and mutter to yourself, and eventually it turns out all right, but not as nicely as it would have if you’d just been patient in the first place. So, please - be patient, add the water a little at a time, and your noodles will thank you for it.

It’s most convenient to make noodle soup if you already have meat cooked up and leftover from something else; failing that, boil chicken or turkey until it’s cooked, or pan fry it with a little oil, or put it on your George Foreman, if you have one - how you cook the meat for this doesn’t really matter. In a real pinch, canned turkey or chicken works. (We once made an unexpectedly amazing chicken soup using canned chicken, but that’s a story for another day.) This would be best with homemade stock, but I’ve been cheating and using powdered vegeterian “chicken” broth from our local co-op until I get around to turning the turkey and chicken bits in the freezer into stock. You can season your broth/stock anyway you want. We kept things simple with some salt, pepper, and onion powder.

So, make your noodles, roll them out, and cut them up - a pizza cutter works great for this. Let them dry for a few minutes. Meanwhile, get your stock or broth heating and add the cooked meat. Let it boil together for a couple minutes, then added your noodles, cooking them until they float to the top (you can always fish one out and taste it), which will take four or five minutes. We served this soup up with our leftover homemade hamburger buns from last night - they have a very firm crust, more of a roll than bun, and are perfect for tearing to pieces and dipping into broth, one of Jeff’s favorite food things.

breakfast casserole

Meal: Breakfast casserole
Prep time: under 30 minutes, including making the waffles
Cost for the batch: $3.51
Servings: 2 dinner and 3 snack
Local ingredients: milk, eggs, cheese, sausage
Organic ingredients: flour

The search for Spock foods that I can make in the afternoon and leave for Jeff to put in the oven when he gets home on my class nights, that we’re both going to like, continues. Thursday, it was breakfast casserole, also known in some quarters as breakfast strata. Most recipes I looked at for this kind of thing called for day-old bread. We didn’t have any on hand so I made waffles instead.

Breakfast Casserole

- 8 4×4 waffles. (If you’ve been making extras and freezing them, then this is easy. I needed to replenish our freezer stash anyway so I made a fresh batch.)
- 6 eggs
- 1/2 cup milk (we use skim)
- 1/2 cup cream
- Sausage (I used two patties from our local pig farmer, which comes in at a shade under 5 ounces. More would have been nice, but it was definitely sufficient.)
- Cheese (I used 4 ounces of a nice Colby marble, which shredded up to about a cup. Swiss would be tasty. I plan on experimenting with different cheeses from time to time.)

Cook your sausage and shred your cheese. If the waffles are frozen, toast them. Meanwhile, mix the eggs, milk, cream, cheese, and cooked sausage. Line an 8×8 baking dish with 4 of the waffles. Pour half of the egg mixture over them. Repeat. You can prep this ahead of time and leave it in the fridge until you’re ready to eat. Put the dish in the oven, put the oven on 350, and cook until browning and puffy (about half an hour.) Salt and pepper to taste. This reheats well, which would make for super easy breakfasts on weekday mornings.

salad and tofu

Meal: salad topped with tofu
Prep time: less than 30 minutes
Cost per person: Hard to estimate. The tofu was $2.19 for the block, and we used about half the block (the other half will made lunch for me today and tomorrow). The lettuce was $2.50 a head and we used a little over half. The green pepper was 50 cents. I think the cucumbers were 50 cents apiece, and we used about half of one. The big bag of carrots we bought ages ago, so I can’t remember how much they were, and other ingredients were party leftovers from the weekend. The marinade was purchased over a year ago.
Local ingredients: lettuce, green pepper, cucumber
Organic ingredients: carrots, tofu

The rule in our house is that we’re eating much less processed and prepackaged foods, but that anything that was purchased before we started eating this way is fair game - I’m not about to waste food. Which is how I found myself marinating a pound of tofu in Ken’s Steak House Herb and Garlic marinade last night. (The verdict? Tasted like bottle Italian dressing. It was all right, but I’ll be glad when the bottle is done.) It marinated for about an hour, and then went on the George Foreman for five minutes, and then on top of green salads. Quick, easy, tasty. This week’s tofu was “White Wave Extra Firm” which I like best of any we’ve tried so far; it really was firm, and had a good flavor and mouthfeel.