What's Cooking?

Healthy Eating on a Budget: Alternatives to Pizza

This is Part One of Healthy Eating on a Budget and is about healthy, inexpensive alternatives to ordering pizza.

I completely understand the allure of ordering pizza after working all day and getting home late to a hungry family.  For my gang of four it costs about $22 to order pizza and garlic bread. I'd like to think we could get away with no garlic bread but I'd just be lying to myself.  There are the cheap pizzas in the city - Hot and Ready for $8 (mediums, and they advertise $5 but I haven't encountered one of those yet) - and once in a while I get a couple of those as well.  Any way you look at it, it costs me about $20 to get pizza. 

The problem with pizza is that for what you are getting it costs a lot.  Start adding salads and anything remotely healthy and the price goes up.  There are healthier alternatives to ordering pizza, that are almost as quick and easy after working all day.

Samosas made from Egg roll wrappers

Okay, so these were not traditional samosas. There's a story here, as usual.  

I had to make supper for the kids, and I decided to make something from some leftovers in the fridge. I dug around for a while, and the leftovers I came up with were: some wonton (egg roll) wrappers, one barbeque chicken breast complete with sauce, some corn, a few peas, half an onion, a couple of sorta dried out carrot sticks, and one large-ish baked potato. Now, before you really start to worry, all of this stuff (with the exception of the carrot sticks) was cooked either yesterday or the day before. The carrot sticks -- well, I'm not sure about those, but they looked almost okay.

I put all this fridge 'stuff' together, added some curry powder and garam masala, and came up with samosas. These were really yummy but ended up a bit on the spicey side, which was fine with me but not so much for the kids. At any rate, I froze the leftovers, and hopefully they'll reheat well and I can eat them for a quick and cheap lunch. 

I've included a 'recipe' here, but this is pretty flexible. More potatoes would have been really good in this, and the meat could have been left out entirely. I tried both baked and deep fried versions, and honestly, reach for your deep fryer! They were way better than the baked version. And as far as shaping them, I'm really no help to you at all. If I can find a link on how to shape them I'll add it here. 

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.

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 :)

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.