The other day I had the day off of work. And amazingly enough I found myself with “nothing” to do. We have one car, and since David had taken it to work, I couldn’t go thrifting or garage sale-ing.

So with this newfound “boredom” I decided to make myself busy and finally start making a few things from scratch I have said I would.

So I decided to make homemade granola bars. We were getting ready to go on vacation and they’d come in handy for the long plane rides. I got the recipe from here because it didn’t require corn syrup or peanut butter. I did alter it a bit, so here’s what I came up with.

Homemade Granola Bars (taken from HappyFoody)

2 cups ground oats (blended quick oats in food processor)
1 cup quick oats
1/2 t sea salt
1/4 t cinnamon
1/4 cup pure maple syrup - didn’t have so I used extra honey
1/3 cup fruit sweetener or other thick honey alternative - didn’t have so I used raw honey
1/4 cup plain non-dairy milk (Almond Breeze)
2 T canola oil

Optional Extras (I also used whatever I had around to mix in)
1/3 cup of Dried Cranberries (put through processor first to chop up)
1/3 cup of chopped pecans (for the heck of it, had extras from baking)
3 T of milled Flax Seed (first time baking with it, adds nutritional value)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, combine all the dry ingredients. Add the wet ingredients into the dry mixtures, stirring until well combined. Transfer the mixture to a lightly oiled 8 x 8 or 8 x 12 baking dish and press down until it’s evenly distributed. Using a sharp knife, cut to mark out the bars before you bake them to make it easier to fully cut and remove the bars once baked. Bake for 19-21 minutes, then remove and let cool in pan. Once cool, use a sharp knife to fully cut the bars, then remove with spatula.

The Results
They turned out well. Probably a little dry - because I added so many “extras” I should’ve increased the honey. Next time I will look for agave nectar or some other fruit sweetener alternative to honey. I wrapped a few individually in plastic wrap, and the rest went in a Tupperware to take along on the plane.

See photos of the process here.

Originally posted on That’s Swell.

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.

Meal: Hamburgers and roasted potatoes
Cooking time: about 40 minutes for the potatoes, 20 for the burgers, not including thawing time; 20 minutes for the buns, plus rising time for the dough (1.5 hours with the bread machine, and half an hour for first rest and 20 minutes for the second)
Cost per serving (1 burger, 1 bun, with cheese): $1.20
Local ingredients: beef, cheese, potatoes
Organic ingredients: flour

Jeff makes, hands down, the best hamburgers I’ve ever had. I spent five years as a vegeterian in my late teens and early 20s, and even after I took up eating meat again, I wasn’t big on beef. A lot of beef is just bad - tough, badly cooked, and with a flavor that I didn’t much care for. But then we found Rocking F’s beef, and I was converted. Grass-fed hormone-free beef is so much better than anything you’re going to buy at a normal grocery, and we’re lucky to have a source for it so close to us.

So, Jeff’s hamburgers. We don’t measure anything when we make these; it’s all by eye. Take a pound of beef, and mix it with worcestershire sauce, garlic powder, onion powder, and black pepper to taste. Form four burgers. Cook them in a medium high skillet, five minutes to a side. Serve up with homemade hamburger buns and roasted potatoes (cube potatos, coat with olive oil, and top with garlic powder, onion powder, thyme, salt, pepper, or whatever else appeals; 30 to 40 minutes, until they’re as done as you would like, at 425 degrees).

A couple of notes: the hamburger bun recipe calls for milk powder, which we’re out of; I found that a tablespoon of skim milk worked fine. I used olive oil for the shortening.

How long did all this take? I had to start the buns pretty early in the afternoon, which was fine, because I was home studying. Otherwise, it would have been a fairly quick dinner, since the buns can go in at the end of the potatoes cooking (just turn down the oven) and the burgers can be cooked while the buns are cooking, but for one thing: I forgot to take the beef out to thaw early enough. It came out at 6. We finally ate around 9. We often eat fairly late, especially on weekends. We could of course be a bit smarter about it and move the frozen beef from the freezer to the fridge the night before so it could thaw. Our meal planning hasn’t quite gotten to that level of detail though. Just goes to show that there’s always room for mprovement.

tofu teriyaki

Meal: tofu teriyaki
Active preparation time: under 30 minutes
Approximate cost per serving (3 servings total): I’m not sure; the sauce ingredients were all purchased ages ago. The tofu was $1.59 for a pound of organic. The rice was a $1 a pound for organic brown rice, and we might have used a quarter of a pound. This was a pretty cheap meal.
Leftovers: 1 serving
Local ingredients: honey
Organic ingredients: tofu, rice, garlic

Last night was scheduled to be salad; however, we never got to the store this week to get greens (and other stuff too; I’m out of fruit, and this is no good), and we used the rest of the head of lettuce that we had with the side salads on Tuesday. So, I cast about in the kitchen to see what else we had. Fortunately, we had picked up an extra block of tofu on Sunday, and we had brown rice and the stuff for teriyaki sauce, so tofu teriyaki and brown rice it was.

Our teriyaki sauce recipe comes from here. I usually make one cup for one pound of protein. As long as your proportions are 1:1:1 for the honey, soy sauce, and rice wine, you’ll be fine. Add as much garlic and ginger as you can stand. If have the great fortune of living near an Asian grocery, go buy the ingredients there. You’ll get much better for much cheaper than you will at a normal grocery. Also, if you don’t normally cook this sort of thing, and thus, will only use the ingredients to make teriyaki sauce, the ingredients will last forever. I’m working off of a year old bottle of rice wine. So while it’s a slight initial investment, it’s worth it.

I mixed up the sauce (measuring a little oil, or something else slick, in your measuring cup first, will help the honey not stick) (also, heating the sauce briefly in the microwave - for a minute or so - will help the honey combine with everything else), sliced up the tofu, and set it to marinate about 3:00pm yesterday, but it would be even better if this was mixed up and set to marinate in the morning before one went to work. About 40 minutes before we were ready to eat, I put a cup of brown rice and three cups of water in the rice cooker. About 10 minutes before the rice was ready, I heated up the George Foreman, and cooked the tofu on it for about 7 minutes. (This would also work just fine with baking the tofu - I’d guess 10 to 15 minutes at 350, until it starts to brown, or in a skillet over medium heat until it starts to brown. However, the George Foreman made it dead easy.) While the tofu was cooking, I brought the remaining marinade to a boil in a saucepan. We served the tofu over rice with the remaining marinade as sauce. It was very, very good. :)

Apparently, I forgot
take a picture of
these done. Picture them
covered
in sauce and cheese.

Meal: beef and potato enchiladas
Active preparation time: 45 minutes
Approximate cost per serving: $1 (five servings total)
Leftovers: three servings
Local ingredients: beef, cheese, potatoes, milk
Organic ingredients: flour

Dinner Wednesday night was beef and potato enchiladas. The first step, of course, was to make tortillas. I deliberately made these a little thicker than our taco tortillas, because I was afraid the thinner ones would fall apart in the baking. I got nine 6 inch tortillas out of the batch, which was a half batch from what I made on taco night.

Meanwhile, I cooked about a half a pound of beef and microwaved a couple of medium potatoes (I didn’t feel like beef last night. Luckily, with just a little work, enchiladas are a very flexible meal.) Once the meat was cooked, I mixed it with a bit of a cheat - a little jarred enchilada sauce. I mashed the potatoes with a bit of garlic powder and a little milk. I also shredded 8 ounces of cheese. Once the tortillas were cooked, it was simply a matter of putting a little filling in the middle of each tortilla, rolling it up, and once each pan was done, dousing each pan with cheese and sauce and throwing the whole thing in the oven at 350 for about 15 minutes (until the cheese was melting and was starting to brown a bit.) I spent about 45 minutes in the kitchen, but that netted dinner for two, lunch for Jeff yesterday, and lunch for me yesterday and today, and I’d count that as 45 minutes well spent.

ravioli in progress

Meal: beef ravioli with tomato sauce
Active preparation time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Approximate cost per person: $2.50
Leftovers: one lunch serving
Local ingredients: beef, cheese, eggs
Organic ingredients: tomato puree, flour

Last night, I made homemade ravioli from scratch for the first time. It was very tasty, and rather time consuming. These ravioli weren’t pretty - they certainly didn’t look like the frozen ones you would get out of a bag. However, the effort was totally worth it, and they tasted much better than I would have gotten out of a bag. The next time I do this, I think I’m going to set aside an afternoon and make a ton to freeze. I’m having visions of having ziploc bags in the freezer marked “beef”, “spinach and cheese”, “pesto”, etc., ready to pull out for a fifteen minute dinner.

The pasta recipe I used was the same as the lasagne (only halved), and the ravioli I made last night were beef and cheese filled. I cooked about half a pound of ground beef in a skillet until it was brown, then drained off what little grease there was. I added half a cup of broth to the meat, and cooked it, covered, until the liquid had cooked off. I then let the meat cool, and mixed it with an egg, dried parsley, and garlic powder (in the future, I’d skip the egg, unless I were also mixing in bread crumbs.) I shredded about 6 ounces of cheese total, and mixed some of it in with the beef, and left some loose. Meanwhile, I also got the sauce going - about half of a 28 ounce can of tomato puree, with enough water to get it to our preferred sauce consistency, and spices to taste.

Then it was time to make the ravioli. :)

This took two cutting boards. I rolled out a sheet of pasta on one, then rolled out a sheet of pasta of approximately (very approximately) the same shape and size on the other. On sheet number one, I mounded a small amount (probably a tablespoon’s worth) of the beef and cheese mixture, then mounded a little more cheese on top. I then dipped my fingers into a small bowl of water (a brush would, of course, work better for this) and wet the pasta around and between the mounds. The second pasta sheet got placed gently on top of the mounds, then pushed down around and between them; the wet pasta sheet seals up with the dry pasta almost instantly, though make sure your edges are sealed well. Use a sharp knife to cut between the mounds, and hey! You’ve made homemade ravioli. (This felt like a bit of magic to me last night, making something I’d previously only eaten out of bags.) Transfer the ravioli to a plate or cookie sheet (and make sure that you flour the plate or cookie sheet, which is something I neglected to do last night, lest your ravioli stick to the plate. These are fragile creatures.) and do it again. Once they’re all ready, cook them in boiling water in small batches for one to two minutes (until they start to float, basically, just like the bagged kind.) Drain in a colander, top with tomato sauce and a little more cheese, and feast.

lasagne

Meal: lasagne
Active preparation time: 1 hour, 15 minutes
Cost per 8×8 pan: $7
Leftovers: one lunch serving from one pan, plus one full pan to go in the freezer
Local ingredients: Italian sausage, cheese, eggs
Organic ingredients: tomato puree, flour

“I think I’ll try making that myself” has become a familiar refrain around our house. Either we look at something and don’t like the ingredients (high fructose corn cyrup, hydrogenated oils) or food miles involved with it, or we don’t like the cost associated with it. On the list of things that most people purchase that we make at home are butter (though we sometimes purchase that, when we can get it local and unsalted), bread, pizza, hot dog and hamburger buns, torillas, and now, lasagne noodles. (Next up, I think I’ll tackle crackers.) When we were at Deep Roots the other day, our choices were mildy pricey rice noodles, or even more pricey organic noodles imported from Italy. We weren’t fond of either choice. I’ve tried making pasta before, but without much success; the efforts have always tasted good, but I’ve had problems getting the shape and texture right. However, I’ve been emboldened by my recent success with tortillas, and so I decided to tackle homemade lasagne noodles. I figured that since they’d be buried in a pan underneath cheese and sauce, making them a uniform thickness wouldn’t be such a concern (though they did turn out to be much better than previous efforts; maybe I’ll tackle linguine again next.) So, we left the rice noodles and the imported noodles on the shelf, and yesterday afternoon found me in our kitchen, making lasagne noodles.

Traditional Egg Pasta Dough (from How to Cook Everything)

2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more as needed for rolling
1 teaspoon salt
3 eggs (I ended up using 4 because our eggs were smallish this week, and the organic AP flour tends to run on the dry side)

Mound the flour on a board or in a bowl; make a well in the center and place the salt in it. Break one egg into the flour, beating with a fork and mixing it in with the flour. When the first egg is mixed in thoroughly, add another egg and mix it in. Repeat for the remaining eggs. Form the dough into a ball. HTCE also reports that you can process the dough in your food processor.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and kneed once or twice, until it is smooth. Add a little water or flour as necessary.

HTCE everything also advises dividing the dough into six pieces and wrapping five of those in plastic wrap while you work with the sixth; I imagine this is to keep the dough from becoming dry. However, I didn’t do this, and it turned out fine. Also, HTCE reports that you can freeze the dough; I had some left from yesterday’s efforts, and it’s bagged up and in the freezer; I’ll report on how the frozen dough turns out next week.

I pinched off a smallish piece of dough and shaped it into a rough square, then rolled it out as thin as I could with a rolling pin, trimming the edges where necessary to make the dough into a square (a pasta machine would be helpful, but I don’t think one is necessary for making lasagne noodles in this manner.) I was making up 8×8 pans of lasagne, so I was aiming for squares that were roughly 8×8. I was making two pans, each of which ended up taking 4 8×8 noodles. In the meantime, I had thawed a pound of Italian sausage and cooked it in a skillet, and grated up about 12 ounces of cheese. Once the Italian sausage was cooked it went into a pot with about 20 ounces of tomato puree, another 8 or so of water, and garlic powder, salt, pepper, and dried basil. That simmered while I worked on the noodles.

Once a square was rolled out, it went into boiling water for about 30 seconds. Fresh pasta barely needs to be cooked at all, and lasagne noodles especially should be a little underdone since they’re going to bake in the oven. Once they’re cooked, remove them to a colander to drain. Once I had enough noodles, I assembled two 8×8 pans of lasagne, layering cheese, noodles, and sauce. I ran out of sauce on the second one, so I had to puree some canned tomatoes (I threw in several cloves of garlic while I was at it), and it didn’t have as much cheese as I would have liked, either. However, that pan is going into the freezer for a no-work dinner at some point, so we can just add more cheese later if we want to.

Total work time was probably an hour and fifteen minutes. However, it was totally worth it to walk into the house after class, put the pan in the oven, and have lasagne 20 minutes later (I was using the Pyrex baking dishes, so I had Jeff pull the pan out of the fridge before he left to pick me up. Cold Pyrex + hot oven = potential cooking disaster.) And, as I said, I have another lasagne that will require no work at all in a couple of weeks.

Dinner was delicious. The noodles were lighter than storebought, and tastier. It makes me want to try all sorts of pasta-making variations.

This was to be a picture of the
meatballs, but the picture
just didn’t turn out very well.

Meal: Spaghetti with red sauce and meatballs, focaccia
Approximate per person cost: $1.97
Actual hands-on time: about 20 minutes
Leftovers: Half a loaf of focaccia, half a serving of pasta

Last night’s dinner was a bit of a cheat - we already had meatballs frozen from an attempt at meatball soup back in December, so even though spaghetti and (homemade) meatballs sounds complicated, it was pretty easy. This is the sort of “cheating” that you can use to your advantage, though; if you make something like meatballs that can be labor intensive (though homemade meatballs weren’t as hard as I thought they were going to be), freeze part of the batch for a later meal. It’s a little more work at the time, and a lot less work later on.

Preparation went as follows:

- About 2.5 hours before we wanted to eat (the 1.5 hours for the dough cycle, 20 minutes for the baking, and time to measure things out, get the oven preheated, the dough in the oven, etc): start the bread dough in the bread machine.
- About 1.5 hours before we wanted to eat: prepare the sauce and the meatballs.
- About half an hour before we wanted to eat: pull the dough out of the machine, shape it on the pan, preheat the oven, put the dough in the oven.
- After the dough had been in the oven for 10 minutes: cook the pasta (in this case, Vita-Spelt spelt spaghetti. It’s organic, and the grains are grown either in the U.S. or Canada, which is better food-miles-wise than most of the pasta on our grocery store shelves, most of which is imported from Italy.)
- When the pasta is ready: drain the pasta, pull the bread out of the oven, and feast.

The recipe for the focaccia came from here. Using the bread machine dough cycle to do most of the work, the bread was a quick piece of work with great results. I had to measure out the ingredients, shape the dough on the pan, and preheat the oven. 10 minutes worth of work, tops.

I made the spaghetti sauce in our slow cooker; I think it comes out tasting better, and it means that I don’t have to tend it at all. (I have a habit of turning up tomato sauce too high when it’s on the stove. It overheats and starts making a mess. However, if you’re not absent-minded like I am, a pot on the stove works just fine for the sauce.) Doing the sauce in the slow cooker also meant not having to thaw the meatballs. I just threw them into the slow cooker with the sauce, and they came out perfectly. The sauce itself was a 28 ounce can of tomato puree (we use Muir Glen Organics, because that’s what our co-op stocks), with water added until it was at a thickness that I liked, and garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, dried thyme, and dried basil to taste. I added the meatballs, gave it a stir to distribute them, and let it cook. The sauce and meatballs cooked on high for about an hour and a half, but they would have been ready at about an hour. We didn’t need that much sauce for spaghetti for the two of us; I knew that we had homemade pizza planned for tonight, so I went ahead and made extra sauce to make tonight easier. Also, we didn’t eat all the meatballs that I thought we would, so those can go on the pizza tonight as well.

Therein lies a tip: By planning out your meals for the week, you can purposely make too much of one thing, the sauce in this case, to use in a completely different meal a few days later. Making extra sauce took no more extra time, but it will save time tonight when we use the sauce for our homemade pizza. All we’ll do to the sauce tonight is add some extra oregano after we spread it on the pizza.

Now is perhaps a good time to talk about time; I’m a graduate student on semester break, which means that I’m home to do things like start bread a couple hours before dinner. Also, we tend to eat dinner later than many people do. This will continue to be the case when classes start again on Monday, as my schedule is pretty open and I’m lucky enough not to be doing the 8 to 5 thing, though you could occasionally catch me grading papers at midnight. However, cooking dinner at home (and not just opening bags of frozen food) can be done easily, even on a weeknight, and even if you work 8 to 5. If you want fresh bread for a meal, check to see if your bread machine has a delay cycle**, where you can measure out the ingredients before you go to work and the machine will fire itself up in the afternoon. Another option is to do prepatory cooking, like making meatballs, on the weekends, so that most of your work is already done for you. If you have older children who get home before you, they may be able to handle tasks like starting sauce in the crockpot or starting bread in a bread machine. If you’re making something like stir fry that requires a bit of labor but not an expanse of time, don’t be afraid to draft roommates, partners, or children into the kitchen; cooking together is a great way to wind down from your day and get in some quality time together. There are creative solutions to the problem of eating at home that don’t involve take-out or convenience foods. Also, we’ll be posting more quick meals starting next week, as I’ll be in class late two nights a week, and much as I love to cook, even I’m not going to be starting something complicated at 9:00 at night when I’ve just gotten in from class.

** Our friend Jill pointed out that the delay cycle should not be used if the bread recipe calls for eggs, milk, or anything else that requires refrigeration. She has a very good point. We wouldn’t want anyone to get sick this way.

Thanks, Jill!