Surviving the polar vortex . . . and the flu

Well, that was a spate of cold weather, there.

And just before it hit, I came down with the flu, even though I got my shot before Thanksgiving.

On the one hand, I was going to have to cancel a slew of meetings earlier this week since I was on doctor's orders to stay at home in what I like to call my home-office work-cave. But on the other hand, most of my commitments canceled anyway due to the weather or facilities reasons. By Thursday, I was out of "quarantine" and could hobble my way to an event planning meeting. Then I took the bus to Penns Landing to take a gander at the ice-clogged Delaware River and had a healthy walk home.

I was happy, while I was sick, to have a good store of food and nibbles on hand. I'd fallen ill on a Thursday evening and was incapacitated, shuffling back and forth from sofa to kitchen, for about 36 hours. A friend came around on Friday evening with some comfort-food saltine crackers, but otherwise I had plenty on hand to keep myself going. We spent the weekend watching "Mystery Science Theater 3000," and my friend shopped for eggs and fresh fruit. Then on Monday I was on my own again, having arranged for my daughter to stay at her dad's an extra few days. Crockpot to the rescue! I now have a new, no-brainer recipe for sick days and other emergencies.

Ingredients:

One can spicy/chili/ranchero beans

One can creamed corn

1 - 2 cups cubed winter squash

Water to cover

Method:

Combine all ingredients in a small slow cooker and heat on LOW or HIGH until warmed through. Serve with bread or crackers. No, seriously, that's it. It's so simple, someone with an axillary temperature of 101 degrees F can do it!

Let's be clear. I'm not usually of the "open a bunch of cans and dump them in the slow cooker" school of cooking. I think you lose vitamins and can add a ton of sodium to the diet that way. Rather, I put this recipe together to get some nice, hot calories and fiber into myself while I was sick as a dog with flu and unable to do the dishes for a few days.

Cost: You can get cans of beans and corn for under $1.00 apiece. A small quantity of leftover winter quash, or white potatoes, or sweet potatoes, or cooked rice (watch the liquid content if you use rice) will add about $0.50 - $1.00. The total cost, including cooking electricity, should run $3.00 at the most, and provide 3 or 4 large portions.

Cheap eats: Croutons for salad or soup

As I've mentioned, when it looks as though I won't be able to finish a loaf of bread before it starts to go south, I'll slice up what's left into cubes, place it in some tupperware, and pop it into the freezer. Then I'll use the cubes as a topping for a casserole or gratin, or I'll toast them up and make salad croutons.

Ingredients:

2-3 tablespoons butter

2-4 cups bread cubes (1- or 2-inch dice)

salt and pepper to taste

oregano or marjoram and sage to taste

Method:

If the bread cubes are frozen, let them thaw at least partially before beginning. Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the bread cubes and toss. Stirring occasionally, allow the cubes to brown gently.

Note that these started as 2/3 whole-wheat bread.
Your croutons may not be this dark as they toast.

Season to taste. For salad croutons, add oregano. For soup croutons, add marjoram and sage.

Salad of CSA greens and croutons. In the background,
Rowhouse Livin' pantry vinaigrette.

Serve warm or cool, but let cool completely before storing. Store in an airtight container at room temperature and use within 2 days. Quality is best when these croutons are used immediately; but at $0.45 per batch, you may not mind tossing a few out after they've gone stale.

Cheap eats: Pantry vinaigrette

This isn't haute cuisine; it's merely cheap cuisine, nothing fancy, made with ordinary items you almost certainly have in your kitchen cabinets at all times.

The Rowhouse Livin' household finds that most bottled salad dressings are too sweet for our tastes, or they have hippie-scaring preservatives. When a bottle comes our way via a potluck or family get-together, it will often end up sitting in the fridge, unused, for literally a year. And who knows how old that dressing is? When were the ingredients produced, then packed, then sold at the grocery store, and then finally opened? Let's try something fresher -- especially considering that, at my count, we've had about ten heads of salad greens and two dozen radishes already this season with our CSA subscription.

This vinaigrette works with lettuce-based salads as well as pasta and cold potato salads. You can up the salt content if your greens are a little bitter. You can add dried onion flakes, dried marjoram, mustard seeds, or tarragon if you like. Paprika gives it a little kick. And it holds up well with crumbled bleu cheese over spinach.

Ingredients:

1 part white vinegar

salt and pepper to taste

1/4 teaspoon dried garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon dried oregano leaves

2 to 3 parts olive oil

Method:

Small portion (for one salad, serving 4): Pour 2 tablespoons vinegar into the salad bowl. Add flavorings and stir to moisten. Whisk in 4 to 6 tablespoons olive oil until emulsified. Let stand while salad is prepared, at least 5 minutes. Whisk a few strokes again, add salad ingredients, and toss until salad is coated and a little wilted.

Large portion (to keep in the fridge): Put 1/2 to 3/4 cup olive oil, 1/4 cup vinegar, and flavorings in a pint jar. (Increase quantity of flavorings to taste.) Close jar tightly and shake until emulsified. Let stand at least 5 minutes. Before using, shake again. Store unused portion in the fridge and use within a few weeks.

Fresh herbs option (to go with a large portion): This works best with a single herb at a time, not a combination, and is a lovely way to feature whatever bounty is overwhelming the garden or the CSA box that week. Select a cup or so of fresh herbs. Prep them as necessary and chop them coarsely or into chiffonade. Add to the pint jar with the oil, vinegar, and seasoning, and proceed as above.

Five-dollar rhubarb pie

I'm always excited when rhubarb starts showing up at the supermarket and farmers markets. I have a very fond memory of my grandma going out to her front stoop, hacking some leaves off a weedy-looking plant, going into the kitchen, and re-emerging a couple of hours later with a pie in her hands. I don't know where she got the recipe -- to tell the truth, she got most of her recipes out of the newspaper or Chatelaine -- but it's a highlight of my year to make a Mothers Day rhubarb pie for myself or to bring one to a Memorial Day picnic.

It's even better when I'm patient. When rhubarb first showed up at our farmers market this year, it was priced at an insulting $6.00/lb. Insulting because rhubarb, once established, grows like crazy, returns every year (and in fact prefers a good, hard freezing every winter), and doesn't require a terribly gentle hand to harvest and ship. Don't get me wrong: I want my farmer to get a fair price for what they take the trouble to bring me every weekend. But I'd also appreciate being charged a fair price for what I want to bring home. So I waited two weeks, and this time it was $4.50/lb. Still not ideal, but enough to make a pie for about $5.00.

Ingredients:

1 9-inch pie crust (a half recipe of Flaky Pastry Dough from the 1997 Joy of Cooking works well here)

1 1/2 cups white granulated sugar

3 tablespoons flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons butter

2 eggs, separated, yolks beaten and whites set aside

3 cups (about 1 pound) chopped rhubarb

Method:

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Fit the pie crust into a 9-inch pie tin or plate (not a deep-dish pie pan). Sift together the sugar, flour, and salt. Rub in the butter. Mix in the beaten egg yolks. Combine with the chopped rhubarb and fill the pie crust.

Bake 15 minutes, then reduce temperature to 375 degrees F. Bake 35-40 minutes. Prepare a French meringue with the egg whites and about 2 tablespoons sugar (omitting cream of tartar); top the pie and bake until meringue is browned, about 5 minutes.

Remove from oven and let cool before serving.

Coffeecake on the cheap

Brunch-time family visit over the weekend means I made a coffeecake. I don't know why I used to think coffeecakes are complicated. They're basically a butter cake -- the same as any ordinary sheet cake you'd make for a birthday -- but a little more forgiving, since you want it to be dense and homey, not bake-shop perfect. The batter can take a lot of abuse and inexpert preparation. I like to boost the nutrition and fiber a little by using some whole-wheat flour, but I wouldn't go so far as to skip all the white flour.

I find that they're an opportunity to use up some fruit I've stashed in the freezer. This time, I used blueberries (natch), pulling them out of the freezer a day ahead of time, letting them thaw in the fridge, and tossing with about a tablespoon of sugar before starting to prepare the batter. Rhubarb is an excellent choice as well.

I'm ballparking that the cake here cost about $2.50, including cooking gas. You can shave about 50 to 75 cents off that cost by using non-organic ingredients.

Here goes:

Ingredients:

1 cup white flour

1/2 cup whole-wheat flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 stick (1/4 pound) unsalted butter

1 cup sugar

1 egg

2/3 cup milk

1 cup chopped fruit

Sugar for the fruit (optional)

Method:

Pre-heat oven to 375 F, and grease a small cake pan. Sift together the flours, baking powder, and salt. In a large bowl, beat the butter until light. Gradually add the sugar and cream until light. Add the egg and milk and mix well. Add the flour mixture and stir until smooth.

Scrape the batter into the cake pan and smooth it out. Toss the chopped fruit with sugar, if desired, and spread onto the top of the batter. Bake about 25 minutes. Let rest at least 20 minutes before serving.

Bon apétit!

Potatoes are cheap

Every summer I quit baking potatoes because it's so hot and I don't want to heat up the house by using the oven. Then it's well into winter before I remember, hey, potatoes are cheap and the house is cold, so why don't I bake or roast potatoes for dinner tonight?

Cookbooks and the internet discuss the difference between waxy and starchy potatoes. I tend to get whichever variety is least expensive. This week it was ordinary russet potatoes. I coarsely chopped them into dice, tossed them with a little olive oil, salt, pepper, and oregano, and baked for about 45 minutes at something like 375 F.

Served with grated cheese, it makes a decent light dinner with fresh vegetables like sliced bell peppers.

Baking bread right afterward saves me a few pennies in cooking gas, too.

And of course we had leftovers. I did a sort of a gratin, spreading the potatoes in a Pyrex pie dish and dropping a few ounces of mozzarella cheese on them. I had an acorn squash already in the oven, baking away -- so when it was about 15 minutes from being done, I said "Move over, bacon" and slid the potatoes in until the cheese was melted and a little browned.

But zounds! Still more leftover potatoes! But just a little bit. I'll have 'em with eggs for breakfast.

Cheap eats: soup from the pantry

As promised, a cheap wintertime recipe.

The household's teenager is wrapped up in daily rehearsals for the school play, so we don't roll home until 6:00 p.m. or even later on weeknights. She usually has homework to finish, and I often have laundry to move or bread to bake. But we want to end our household activities early enough to start the whole routine over again the next morning. And like everyone else whose kids are busy with after-school activities, we want dinner on the table as soon as possible after we get home. It helps, too, if dinner is nutritious, cheap, and different from whatever it is we scrounged up the night before.

That said, I won't do take-out. Although we have a half-dozen options for food to go within just one block of the Rowhouse Livin' homestead, I avoid them. Why? Take-out is expensive, for one. I might spend $25.00 on a take-out dinner for two; and though it may give me leftovers for lunch the next day, $25.00 is several times the amount I may spend on a dinner (plus lunch leftovers) made from scratch. If I get take-out just once per week, that's $100.00 per month added to my grocery bill. Shudder!

For another, take-out meals aren't terribly healthy. They're very calorie-dense but nutrient-poor, even if you choose an option heavy on the vegetables. A veggie lover's pizza is still pizza. Asian-style tofu and broccoli is still stir-fried and high in sodium. A burger or steak sandwich with fries . . .  sounds really good right now, but I digress. The following recipe is scientifically proven to be healthier for everyone in the world than a take-out cheesesteak and fries:

Ingredients:

One quart jar of cubed winter squash, or 1 to 1 1/2 pounds pre-cooked winter squash

Broth, or water plus 1 bouillon cube or other soup concentrate to taste, to cover

1/2 cup to 1 cup (up to 1/4 pound) very small pasta (e.g., conchigliette, ditalini, orzo, elbow macaroni)

Method:

Empty the jar of squash into a medium saucepan. Add broth or fresh water plus bouillon to cover. Bring to a boil. Add pasta, reduce to simmer, and cook until pasta is done.

Cost And Time:

I don't remember exactly how much I spent on the winter squash that I canned, which I'd bought at the farmers market when it was in season. I think it was $2.50/pound, and I fit a little under 2 pounds in each jar; that makes for a total of $5.00, to include the costs related to home canning. The bouillon cubes I used cost about $0.50 apiece. And I added about $0.25 worth of pasta. Let's add another $0.10 for water and cooking gas. This batch of soup cost $5.85.

Not the end of the story, though! Winter squash is very filling, and adding starchy pasta also helped the soup stick to our ribs. We ate only half of the pot of soup one night; we finished it the next night. So really it was $2.93 per night, or just $1.46 per meal, per person. (We are a household of two.)

As for time, I had this soup on the table within 20 minutes of our walking in the front door. If we had brought home take-out food, we would have eaten right away, of course. But I'll argue that we ate faster by cooking: we did not have to wait at a restaurant while our food was prepared, or wait for delivery after phoning in an order.

And that's how I avoided getting take-out dinners for two weeknights this week. How about you?

Cheap eats: Greens without bacon

Look at these farmers market greens. I think it's Swiss chard. I'm not sure. One of my parents is from Italy, and I understand they eat a lot of greens there, but we never ate greens much when I was growing up, other than salad lettuces. And those of the pale-green variety. But these greens were $2.50 per bunch at the farmers market. I pulled the bunch apart, let the leaves soak in fresh water in the sink for a few minutes, and rinsed each leaf individually. Then I pulled the leaves away from the rib to about halfway up the leaf, and discarded the large ribs.

So close you can smell the magnesium

Rowhouse Livin' is a mostly vegetarian household, for health and budgetary reasons. So although studies show that it's a scientifically proven fact that greens are better cooked in bacon, salt pork, or some other kind of dripping, we're using butter today.

Two generous tablespoons of butter for one bunch of greens

The skillet is at medium-high heat. Before adding the greens, soften some sliced or diced onions, if you like. We didn't this time. Then put about a third of the greens in, and season with salt and pepper. Let the greens wilt, then put in another third, and then the last third. Stir the greens and turn them over. Cover loosely with the lid to a large stockpot if the pan gets dry. A little more salt helps draw out water and also eases the bitterness that some people find objectionable in dark, leafy greens.

One third left to go

Some people add nutmeg. We added curry powder. A half-tablespoon will do.

No, as a matter of fact, daughter didn't exactly care for it

Turn the leaves over to distribute the curry powder (or nutmeg). Turn the heat to low, cover with a lid, and stir occasionally. The greens should be softened and savory in under 20 minutes. Serve with rice or pasta. If brown rice, then start preparing the rice before the greens. If white rice or pasta, cook at the same time.

Cost: Greens, $2.50. Butter, $0.25. Salt, pepper, curry powder, $0.20. Rice, $0.50.

Total Rowhouse Livin' dinner cost: $3.45, or $1.73/plate.

Cheap eats: Rice and beans

Why doesn't anybody eat rice and beans any more? They are so filling. They are so nutritious, lacking really only Vitamin C (links: rice, beans). They have such an unobjectionable taste. They are so cheap.

I could wax poetic on rice and beans.

Say this with former N.J. governor Tom Kean's accent:
"Rice and beans. Perfect together."

You can get a 1-lb. bag of black beans for $1.39, often less. You can get a slow cooker to cook them in for under $25.00 (or used for even less). You can get a 5-lb. bag of brown rice for $6.59, often less.

When you are short on money, your food budget is one place where it's easy to economize. Stop eating out. Stop buying coffee from people who make it for you. Stop buying expensive food: out-of-season produce, prime cuts of meat, processed convenience foods, junk foods and sodas, and so on. Learn how to put up with a diet less varied than you would perhaps prefer. And embrace rice and beans, possibly starting with the recipe we use in the Rowhouse Livin' household:

Place 1 cup dried black beans into the slow cooker crock. To clean them, cover with water and agitate with fingers or a utensil; drain; repeat. Cover with water to a depth of 2 inches and let stand in the crock overnight. Drain, rinse, and return to the crock.

Cover with water to a depth of 1 inch and turn the slow cooker to HIGH. After 1 hour, turn to LOW. (Or: start cooking the beans on LOW in the morning and let sit all day while you are away at work.) After 5 hours (or: after you return home), add half a small onion, diced; one tomato, chopped; and salt and pepper to taste. Add any of the following to taste: cumin, chili powder, bay leaf, epazote, curry powder, garlic powder. Stir thoroughly. Turn the heat back to HIGH and cook for another hour.

While the beans are finishing, prepare 1 cup of rice per package instructions or another method. When the rice is done, turn off the slow cooker and serve. We like to grate hard Cheddar cheese on top, and I like to add hot sauce.

Note how this is a meal that we can have on the table within an hour of returning home from school and work. In that hour, my daughter can finish up some homework, and I can work on bread or move laundry along. And really importantly, it costs under $1.00 per plate, including water, electricity, and cooking gas. During the school year, the Rowhouse Livin' household sees rice and beans on the table almost weekly.

If you are concerned about indigestion due to the beans, you can try Beano. But rest assured that most people find that, the more they eat beans, the more they find them digestible. As for the brown rice, yes, it has a lot of fiber. If you are concerned about the laxative effect of eating so much brown rice, then you can start by using white rice, then trying a 50-50 mix, and then gradually transitioning to 100% brown rice. (Note that white rice takes less time to cook than brown rice.)

No-knead bread by Rowhouse Livin'

It's been almost six years since the NYT published Jim Lahey's no-knead bread recipe. It's been over three years since I started making it myself on a regular basis, and almost a full year since I last bought a loaf of sandwich bread from the grocery store.

We eat a lot of bread in our household. Nobody has a gluten intolerance or allergy, and we haven't seen a need to try a low-carbohydrate diet. Between toast with our breakfasts and sandwiches in our sack lunches, during the school year my daughter and I use about eight slices of bread per day. Being a hippie, I want to use whole-wheat bread while avoiding high-fructose corn syrup and scary-sounding chemicals. Being a penny-pincher, I want to maximize the hippie-ness of the bread I buy while minimizing its price. So what to do when the cheapest whole-wheat bread I can find still has HFCS and smells funny because of the dough conditioners and raising agents? Hint: it's cheap to make from scratch. Recipe and eight illustrative photos after the jump:

Blueberries III: the baking

Continuing with the 12 pounds of blueberries we acquired. What better to do during the height of summer than heat up the house with baking? (Spoiler: Do some canning. Tomorrow's post.)

And yet they're not the absolute gnarliest-looking muffins I've ever made.

One of the best recipes ever published was Amy Dacyczyn's "Universal Muffin Recipe" from The Tightwad Gazette. Any standard American cookbook will give you what you need for a particular type of muffin; Dacyczyn offered a formula for hacking 12 individual quickbreads from whatever flours and fruit you happen to have on hand. My love for The Tightwad Gazette is another post entirely, though. Today we are baking.

Pop quiz: Is this a cobbler or a pandowdy?

Pop quiz: Is this a cobbler or a pandowdy?

In the two-tone Pyrex dish is a blueberry cobbler. Cobbler is a deep-dish fruit stew, with no bottom crust, on top of which you drop sweet biscuit dough. In the Corelle dish is a blueberry pandowdy, like a deep-dish blueberry pie but again with no bottom crust. Strictly speaking, you push the pastry crust topping into the filling to make a glorious mess and let it soak up the oozing filling. I left my crust alone, so that the pandowdy was more like a deep-dish pie with no bottom crust, or a cobbler with a pastry top rather than a biscuit top.

American fruit dessert semantics.

I confess that I salvaged the crust on the pandowdy there from some scraps of pie dough that had been languishing in the freezer for a few months, to save a few pennies.

I would post recipes but they're easy enough to google or find in the Joy of Cooking that you should have on hand. In short: Toss a couple of cups of blueberries with flour; add sugar; top with biscuit or pastry dough; bake at 350 or 375 (depending on what type of vessel you're using, how deep it is, how cold the ingredients are, etc.) for 45 minutes or until done. Eat for dessert and breakfast.

Blueberries I

About a week and a half ago, we drove over to Jersey to get blueberries at a u-pick farm. Completely unable to control ourselves, we came home with 12 pounds of blueberries at $1.50/lb. At my neighborhood farmers market, at Headhouse (2nd and Lombard) on Sundays, blueberries have been going for about twice that -- $3.00 or even $5.00 per pint, and "a pint is a pound the world around" -- so even adding in gas and tolls we made out like bandits:

So close you can almost see the bugs

But what to do with the blueberries? I'll post what I did with them over the next few days. First and easiest, of course, is simply rinsing them off and eating them fresh:

Bowl is from Lyncharm Pottery, a now closed studio in Nova Scotia --
the best place in the world for wild blueberries

You can't go wrong, really.