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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.

Budget cooking 1

No picture yet, but I might take a picture of the salad tomorrow when the lighting is better. I thought I'd post what we (the kids and I) had for supper tonight, with a cost break down included. It's become a cliche, but times really are getting tough, and food is an easy way to cut back on expenses. It can't be said enough, but shop local if you can, buy from local producers where possible, and think about the cost of driving a distance to get a bargain. I'm all for shopping loss leader sales - that's usually the stuff listed on the front and/or back page of the flyer - but sometimes it doesn't all add up to a great deal. It IS possible to eat frugal, cheap even, and not give up on quality or resort to Mr. Noodles and Spaghetti O's (I don't think we can get those in Canada, but I know what they are).

We had lasagna for supper tonight, with a salad and garlic toast on the side. The noodles were purchased at the local grocery store. The beef, though, came from a local beef farm, and the flour for the cheese sauce and the bread came from the Arva Flour Mill, a mill within 60km of my house which mills locally grown grains. The lettuce came from the grocery store - that's something to work on, I guess!  I made the bread for the garlic toast, using the Light Whole Wheat recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. It's incredibly easy, and it really does only take five minutes per day. 

The cost breakdown is on the next page ....

Meat Pie

This recipe started out as the best of intentions to make a tourtiere for the site. However, after I started cooking the meat and onions I realized I didn't have any of the spices needed to make a tourtiere. So this is simple a meat pie, or meat tart, really, since I cheated and used some frozen pre-made tarts I found while digging in my freezer.  The meat pies turned out really well - a total winner with the kids!  They all loved them, so these are definite keepers. There are some ... well, herbs and herb blends that I couldn't identify and that I used on the meat, so it's not a cut and dried recipe, but a bit of a creative instruction.  This meat pie or meat tart also fits in with the $35 per week challenge, which is always on my mind if not on my blog.

A special note about the tortiere this was supposed to be: my mom's original recipe does not use beef. She would be appalled to see I used it at all, but I have 100 pounds of ground beef in my freezer, so I'm going to use it any chance I get!! And the spices I've used have nothing at all to do with a real tourtiere, so don't let them be any sort of guide at all.

Hawaiin Ham, the redux

It occurred to me tonight, as I made Hawaiin Ham, that this is nothing like the Hawaiin Ham my mom made when I was a kid!  So I thought I should take a picture of my variation.  I have posted this recipe before - you can find it here - but I'll post it again with all the additives and changes I've made since the last time I posted it!

My  mom's version of this recipe is completely different than mine.  I actually had to dig up a recipe book she gave me as a bridal shower gift many, many years ago, just to see the actual differences.  I'll post both recipes so you can do your own comparison, but in my own defense, I think I added all the extra veggies both to stretch the dinner, and to make it a little more 'healthy'.  I'm air-quoting that just in case she ever logs in here and reads this.  The veggies make sense though: carrots and pineapple are a great combination, green beans and pineapple AND green beans and pork are great together, ham and pineapple are complementary, and, well, the green peppers were called for in the original, so I had to keep them in.  Take a look, see what you think!

Emergency pasta sauce

Tonight was one of those "oh my god I have no sauce and the pasta is in the pot already" nights.  

I like to have a bag or five of frozen ravioli and tortellini on hand in my freezer, for nights like tonight.  I had school last night until 9:30, a great visit with a friend, then worked all day today, then home at 6:00pm to cook supper for three incredibly  hungry kids.  It's a long couple of days, that's for sure!  And the thought of cooking at the end of them is just not my favourite thing to think about.  It's even worse when I've realized I've dropped the pasta in the boiling water, and there is no sauce to be found!

This is a recipe for a very simple tomato sauce that I made in a hurry for tonight's ravioli. Simple, natural foods are my favourite thing, and I may have just converted my kids from quickie canned sauce to this simple marinara type sauce.  Now, I do have a great meaty spaghetti sauce that I'll never share the recipe for (see mom, I told you I wouldn't), but for a quick weeknight meal, I've always just opened a jar of whatever-was-on-sale pasta sauce.  This sauce tonight was so easy and tasted so good though, that I may just use this from now on!  This is probably a half recipe of it, so just double it if you're feeding more than one adult and three children.

Whole Wheat Carrot Pineapple Muffins

Whole Wheat Carrot Pineapple Muffins are sort of a 'creation from leftovers' special.  New Year's Eve here at my house was a family friendly affair, and we made eight different kinds of homemade pizza for all the kids and adults.  One of the pizzas we made was a Hawaiin pizza (we'll talk about the steak dinner pizza later!), and I ended up having a half can of pineapple tidbits leftover.  From the veggie tray, I managed to salvage a few carrot sticks - and the inspiration for Carrot Pineapple Muffins was born.  I added in some whole wheat flour, mainly because I have some lingering around, and I thought it would add some flavour and 'healthy' to a nice treat.  The amount of whole wheat flour can be adjusted up, if you'd like more whole wheat in your muffins, but in my experience, a little white flour is needed to lighten them up. If you do try all whole wheat and they turn out great, then let me know, I'd love to hear about it. To get the crushed pineapple called for in the recipe, I whizzed the leftover pineapple tidbits in my food processor until I had something probably more correctly called pureed or pulverized pineapple, but it worked.

For the New Year's Eve party, we had a Nintendo Wii competition for the kids, and a Playstation2 Sing Star competition for the adults!  I highly recommend Sing Star - what a hoot!  I'm pretty confident saying we all had a great time, and I can't wait for the next party.  

Brunswick Stew - Pork Hocks and Chicken

 

Brunswick Stew was inspired by a discussion with my friend on the problem with pork hocks. More precisely, what to do with a freezer full of them (also a freezer full of blueberries, but I was no help there). Since I also seem to have more pork hocks than any one hog should have - I have eight in my freezer, and I'm sure there are only two hind legs - I decided to look for a recipe that would use them up. The pork hocks that I used in this recipe were smoked, but if yours are not, it's not a problem. You can add a teaspoon or so of liquid smoke and get the same effect, or leave it plain and it will be just as good. The meat of the pork hocks is almost sweet, and that adds a great flavour to the stew whether there is smoke in there or not. Traditional Brunswick Stew is a Southern Dish, served with cornbread. My version is a little modified for what I had on hand, but it still turned out good. I may change my mind if I get the chance to eat real Brunswick Stew. The original recipe calls for a 28oz can of diced tomatoes, but kids voted no on that, so I used the tomato paste instead.

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.

Bagels in New York City

 

So, after a long hiatus, some really inedible suppers, and lots of grocery store chicken, I am going to try to get back at my blog. And the first post for the new year isn't even a recipe of my own, it's a review of a bagel. I've included a recipe for Herb and Garlic cream cheese at the end of the review, just to keep on topic. My first trip ever to New York City was fantastic, and since I travel for food, I absolutely had to try a New York style bagel. That quest led me to Absolute Bagel on Broadway St. It's a little tiny shop on the edge of Harlem, and it served up some excellent bagels.

Crispy sticky mashed potatoes

I'm not usually a fan of mashed potatoes, but when you fry them in a very hot oven in butter and oil then I start to like them. This is based on a Nigella Lawson recipe that she calls Sticky Garlic Potatoes. I really didn't change too much - just slightly reduced the garlic and used regular potatoes. Oh, and added some butter so I could live up to my 'ChefMoreButter' nickname. I served these with a roasted chicken and I used the garlic 'scented' potato water to make the gravy. It was delicious! Something to think about if you decide to make these potatoes. They're a little time consuming but well worth the effort. Besides - what else do we housewives/single parents have to do? (yes, I'm joking)