(Still here. Jeff’s mom is in town, and school has started. I might make with some new recipes next week, which will give me something to talk about.)

Everyone cheats occasionally with food shortcuts. We cheat a lot less than we used to, but when we’re in the mood to do so, pot roast is one of our favorite ways to do it.

1. Buy a nice chunk of roast. It can be a cheap cut - after eight hours in the crockpot, almost anything will be tender - or a more expensive one, or whatever. In our case, Rocking F had roast on sale for $3 a pound, and Marguerite recommended a sirloin tip roast. The night before you want the roast, pull it out of the freezer and into the fridge to thaw.
2. Put the roast into your crock pot eight hours before you want to eat. Pour into a couple of packs of onion soup mix, and make sure the meat is cooked. Add in a couple of cans of cream of [whatever your preference is, we used chicken.] Top with as many diced potatoes as your crockpot will hold (no matter how many you make, they will get eaten.)
3. Turn to low. Ignore for the rest of the day.

8 hours later, you will have a lovely, tender, falling apart roast, just the thing when you’ve had your first evening class of the semester and you’re danged hungry when you get home. As a bonus, since you’ve used the crockpot, your kitchen won’t be blazingly hot, so it won’t seem odd that you’re eating pot roast in the middle of a record heat wave.

Meal: taco soup
Cost for the batch of soup: $6.50, and we got over 5 servings out of it. 30 cents for the tortillas, and about 60 cents worth of cheese.
Time: 10 minutes for the soup, plus 5 hours in the crockpot; 20 minutes for the tortillas
Leftovers: a ton of soup. I had soup for lunch yesterday, Jeff had soup for a late afternoon snack, and there’s still some left.
Local ingredients: beef, cheese
Organic ingredients: tomato puree, flour, corn

Everyone has a version of this, don’t they? Ours this time around was a pound of beef, a can of corn (undrained), a cup of tomato puree, and 3 cups of vegetarian “chicken” broth, along with a bunch of garlic powder, salt, pepper, and chili powder, in the crockpot on high for 3 hours and on low for a couple more, served up with homemade tortillas and a bunch of cheddar cheese. This batch turned out on just this side of bland; I should have cooked up the beef with some taco spices before it went into the pot, but I was going for expediency this time. Other good additions to taco soup are green chilis, whole or chopped tomatoes, and beans. This works well with just about any protein source, including veggie crumbles or TVP. Serve up with a bag of tortilla chips if you don’t want to make tortillas. It freezes well, the leftovers are stellar, and it carries well in a thermos for lunch (I like taco soup, if you can’t tell. :) )

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…

Meal: Crockpot chili
Batch cost: about $9, which has so far resulted in 4 servings, with at least another 2 still in the crock
Prep time: 10 minutes
Local ingredients: beef
Organic ingredients: tomato puree

One of my favorite crockpot dinners is chili. Chili in our household is very, very basic, due to a lack of overlap in food tastes. For us, that means a package of stew beef and a can of tomato puree, in a little water. They go into the crock with some garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, and chili powder (unfortunately, I’ve never measured; I just guess) for 8 hours or more on low, or 5 to 6 on high, and dinner is ready when I get home from class.

If you have time or you’re craving some carbs, you can run up a batch of corn cakes. My version looks like this:

- 1/3 c all-purpose flour
- 1/3 c cornmeal
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/3 c cheese
- 2 tbs jarred enchilada sauce
- 1/4 c water

Mix ingredients together until they’ve just combined and you have a thick, play-dough like dough (he uses his hands; it worked fine for me with a fork.) Pat out into rounds, cook in a medium skillet 3 to 5 minutes on a side until brown. Eat. Enjoy. They’re thick and hearty and tasty, and would probably benefit from a strong cheese, like a pepper jack or something. You can have these in under 15 minutes from when you enter the kitchen. For us, the cheese and cornmeal are local, and the flour organic.

Using your crockpot is an excellent way to make leftovers with zero effort on your part. You can add just about anything you want - chili peppers, corn, beans, etc - for a minimal increase in cost. This chili freezes well, and also tastes even better the next day. It serves well over mashed potatoes.

ribs and brown rice

Meal: Slow-cooked Ribs, Brown Rice
Per person cost: about $2.25, for both dinner and lunch the next day put together
Leftovers: enough for both of us for lunch today
Local ingredients: beef ribs from Rocking F Farm
Organic ingredients: brown rice, sugar, and garlic, purchased at Deep Roots Market

I couldn’t tell you what Rocking F’s normal price on ribs is, because I only buy them on sale (either $1.75 or a $1.80 a pound). This isn’t because they aren’t delicious - they are - but because they go on sale often enough that I can get away with waiting. I grab a pack or two whenever they are on sale and chuck them in the freezer.

This sort of stockpiling came in handy last night; we had been going to have crock pot chilli last night, but Rocking F wasn’t out at the market last weekend, and we were out of stockpiled ground beef and stew beef. So, out came the ribs (a 1.5 pound package of them.) I have class from 6pm to 8:50pm on Monday nights from now until the beginning of May, so the crock pot is going to get pressed into service most Monday nights.

The recipe for these ribs is easy, and stolen from a friend: mix about 2 cups water, 1/3 a cup of soy sauce, a little over 1/4 a cup of sugar, ground ginger to taste, and as much garlic as you can stand (the garlic in this comes out almost roasted, so I put a lot in. Last night, I used half a head.) Taste the mixture. Too salty? Add a little more sugar. Not salty enough? Add a little more soy sauce. Once you’re happy with it, pour over the ribs in the crockpot, turn it on high, and walk away for five hours. I started the ribs on high about 3:30 (they had been in the fridge since 11:00, but no significant thawing had occured, merely enough so that I could break apart the ribs and make them fit into the crock pot) and they were tender and falling off the bone when I walked in at 9. Jeff had turned them down to low at 8:45 when he left to pick me up. I had made the rice before I left for class (1 cup brown rice, 3 cups water, 45 minutes in the rice cooker, which is the best appliance I would never have bought for myself, but it’s turned out to be very handy) and we reheated it in the microwave. It was delicious, and with almost no effort.