What's Cooking?

Artisan bread English Muffins

I really am on the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day kick right now.  I can't stress enough how easy the bread is to make, and how great it turns out! I typically use the Light Whole Wheat recipe from the book, and I cheat and bake it in a loaf pan (I don't have a pizza stone, which is the suggested thing to cook the bread on). It has turned out great, it's incredibly cheap to make, and I can make so many different things with the dough that is always ready and waiting in my fridge.

There is an english muffin recipe on the Artisan Bread site, but I wanted something easier, and I wanted to cook my english muffins on a griddle. The official website recipe calls for English muffin forms, and letting the dough rise, baking in the oven, and then the muffins turn out  rounded on one side. That actually *does* offend my sensibilities, so I did things a little differently.  

This is why I love this bread dough - I pulled my dough out of the fridge, freezing cold, and sort of patted it out/rolled it out on a counter sprinkled with cornmeal until it was about 1/4 inch thick (maybe slightly thicker). I made sure that both sides were well coated with cornmeal (yum! A favourite of mine), and with no rest, no rise, no warming up, I cut the muffins out with a clean empty tuna can. Then I put 7 of them on my electric griddle at medium heat. The time to do all this was at most 5 minutes, and it took about 10 minutes of unsupervised cooking to have the muffins finished.  Easy. Cheap. Did I mention easy, and cheap? The English muffins were fantastic to boot! The only thing I may do differently is to let the muffins rise slightly before cooking, more to allow the dough to warm up first - it was hard to get the muffins to cook through to the centre when the dough was so cold.

Baked Ham - photo

Here is my picture for Adrienne's Mulled Ham, which I made tonight for my kids and I.  It looks pretty good, doesn't it?

Now, if you've read Adrienne's recipe for the Mulled Ham, you might have noticed MY ham is missing a few things.  Like the pineapple.  And the poaching liquid. And the brown sugar.  There's a story behind that, of course.  I dropped the ham - not once, but twice. The first great drop landed on my fuzzy slipper (ew) and then bounced to the floor. The kids were on the Wii, so I quickly scooped it up, carefully set it back on the plate, picked it up - and dropped the whole thing again.  I didn't want to waste a good ham, so I cut off the outside, threw out the pineapple, ditched the poaching liquid, and put it back in a hot oven to fix it.  

So here is my version of the Mulled Ham - I call it 'Megan's Beat-up Ham'.  Enjoy!!  The link to the Mulled Ham recipe can be found here.

Mulled Ham, by guest author Adrienne Charlton

Hi everyone. This is a recipe for Mulled Ham (a ham baked in orange juice and mulling spices), by guest author Adrienne Charlton. No picture of it yet, but if I manage to bake a ham in the next couple of days, I will get a picture up!

From Adrienne (who is from Ottawa, Ontario originally, and is currently living in London, England):

Being in Britain, I am surrounded by remembrances of the wartime slogans like "make due and mend" and "keep clam and carry on;" so, when I was unable to find cloves for my Christmas ham I steeled myself and found a solution. The resulting flavour was so complex and seasonally appropriate that it definitely bears repeating. I hope you enjoy the recipe.

Easy Everyday Beef Stew

 

Tonight - it's peasant food again! This is my everyday go-to standard beef stew, that I throw in the pot and ignore for a while. It uses some ingredients that I call 'by-product' ingredients: bacon fat, ketchup swish (more on that later), and beef stock. Ok, beef stock may not be a by-product to everyone, but I found a great cookbook at a garage sale, called "Hazel Meyer's Freezer Cookbook". This is an excellent book for learning to extend the table, so to speak, or to cut back on grocery bills. Hazel says in her book that pretty much everything can be frozen; just fried hamburger in the pan? Well, add a cup or so of water to the 'empty' pan, give it a stir, and you've got stock! This works if you're browning or roasting anything - leftover gravy also makes an excellent base for stock. Put it in a container or freezer bag, and thaw it out next time you need a bit of stock. Ketchup swish is the same idea. It's about a 1/4 cup of water swished around in a nearly empty ketchup bottle. Perfect for this recipe, and lots of other things! We're all tight for money these days. Groceries are an easy way to help cut back on living expenses, and using ingredients you don't have to buy makes it even easier. Next year I think I'm going to start scavenging for food, although scavenging food for a beef stew could be a bit challenging. I'll keep you posted anyway :)

Apple Pie Muffins

 

It's been a while. Thanks to the power of Facebook and a little apple spice muffin bragging, here I am posting a new recipe. I was actually craving an apple pie, but that seemed like too much work, so I did a little hunting and came up with this recipe. It's an old recipe I had around, but hadn't made in a long time - I'll definitely have to keep it in the roster. There's a great topping on these, sorta like the top of a Dutch Apple Pie. Enjoy! These are really moist, yummy apple spice muffins. They taste good coming out of the oven, but they're even better the next day.

Oven Baked Salmon with Herbs

 

 

I found this Baked Salmon recipe on Recipezaar - my favourite recipe site on the web. Not surprisingly, I modified it from the original to make use of what I had on hand. This recipe says "Great for Beginners!" in the description, and that appealed to me. I also wanted a fish recipe that my kids would like, and thought this might work. Surprisingly enough, the picky-middle-child ate it up, the girl practically threw it at me, and the oldest boy took a few bits, said it was good, and went back to Guitar Hero. So I almost had two out of three, and two out of three ain't bad. A side of easy rice pilaf and some steamed broccoli made for a colourful and healthy supper.

Homemade Laundry Soap

 

Here we go - a non-food recipe, but it is a frugal one. I've been meaning to try homemade laundry detergent for quite a while, and when I ran out of the regular stuff the other day, I decided to make a batch (or two) of the homemade detergent. It's way easier than I thought it would be, and at tops took me 30 minutes to make 3.5 batches of laundry soap. I've included the cost breakdown as well just so you can compare the costs between store bought detergent and homemade detergent. The picture above is of the laundry bar I grated. I started out by grating the soap on the coarse side of a cheese grater, and then threw the soap and other ingredients into the food processor to finish it off.

String Beans - the U-pick variety

 

Here's the thing about living and eating frugal - you can save the environment at the same time. So how do I figure that? Well, the lightbulb went off while picking green and yellow (wax) beans the other day - it was a dim bulb, but it flashed nonetheless. My first priority for food right now is that it's healthy, second is that it's cheap. Luckily for me one of our local 'U-Pick' farms is happy to fill both of those requirements, with a little work from me. A half grocery bag of string beans (green and yellow or wax beans) cost me $2.20 and took a little less than 10 minutes to pick. The more I pick, the cheaper it gets - in fact, if I had picked a half bushel it would have cost roughly a dollar more. Lesson number two for the day - ask the prices before you pick. How does this save the environment? Eating locally grown produce is a fantastic way to reduce fuels used in trucking, commercial canning or freezing, and you support local farmers - all great ways to do a little part for our community.

An update soon

An update is coming soon - I promise. I don't know if it was foreshadowing or not, but I have been thrust into my own version of the $35 a week grocery challenge. Mr. Chef is a great guy - but his family is whacked out crazy, and the soap opera we call life has become very interesting. So - coming with the update will be more tips on living frugal and eating frugal. How to stretch $1290 per month into $1350 per month (I haven't worked that one out yet). An adventure to be sure. See you very soon! Megan

Steak Sandwiches - Cook and Eat Meat

Cook and Eat Meat, hosted by Arfi at HomemadeS caught my eye as an interesting event, but I have to admit I worried it might be a considered un-pc by our society standards. I see from Arfi's profile, though, that she is not in North America and is probably not worried about the political correctness of steak. Cook and Eat Meat is a reminder to those of us who DO eat meat, especially women, that eating 100grams of lean meat each day will help raise and stabilize our iron levels. We raise our own beef and pork here on the farm so for the most part we eat a lot of meat. The recipe I chose for Cook and Eat Meat is the Steak Sandwich. This is a really simple steak sandwich, that Mr.Chef and I discovered on route to this steak sandwich from Pioneer Woman Cooks (an offshoot of Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, a fantastic blog). At any rate, we were making the actual sandwich and decided that even stopping halfway through it was really good (we did make the whole, official recipe right through the first time around). The original steak sandwich recipe calls for a cube steak, but I used a round steak that I tenderized myself with a meat mallet. A great exercise for anyone frustrated with life. In fact, the first time around I pounded the steak so thin you could practically see through it -- inspired by hyperactive boy, video game addicted boy, and half-monkey - half-toddler girl. Store-pounded steak would probably work just fine should you lack inspiration. But if you need the workout just let me know - the kids are available most days and evenings, and are excellent for graying hair as well. I will say here, though - real butter really does make a difference in this recipe. And if you're looking for heart healthy steak recipes - check out my london broil instead. Your arteries may just clog looking at this one.