A Very Scrappy Dinner

So, I thought I would post a picture of what I (and the roommate -- yes I feed her. It helps her tolerate my late nights) had for dinner last night. No recipes, just a picture and a list of ingredients. Why? Because I feel like people overthink food. Dinner doesn't have to be this big "thing." Of course I believe that we should take note of how blessed we are to have the opportunity to eat well every time we sit down to a lovely meal. That's not what I mean.

I think that many of us have this rigid idea of what a meal should entail -- that certain vegetables perform certain tasks, that there should be exactly this much protein to this much starch, that sort of thing. For example, too many people think of vegetables as a side player to a protein, or they think that beans go with rice and tortillas.

The best meals come, at least for me, when I "Iron Chef" it. That's how I refer to the act of cooking with whatever the heck I already have. Since I started getting the CSA boxes from Green Hill Urban Farm (http://greenhillurbanfarm.com/), I've been doing that more often. It's an awful lot of fun to spread a rainbow of seasonal produce across the counter, stare at it for a few minutes, and come up with something fun to make with it.

It doesn't take much to be creative with food, just a fairly well-stocked pantry. A few whole spices and a mortar and pestle, a couple types of oils and vinegars, and a good selection of dried beans and grains should supplement any assortment of veggies to make a fine Iron Chef-style meal. Oh, as always, I highly recommend making and freezing your own chicken stock -- such a great thing to have on hand: http://thescrappygourmet.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-juice-chicken.html.

Thinking creatively about food helps to avoid waste, too. Instead of rushing out to buy a bunch of stuff you don't need to make dinner tonight, look in your fridge and see what needs to be cooked. Do you have scraps of 6 different vegetables sitting in your fridge about to turn into compost if you don't do something with them? Well, sounds like soup waiting to happen! Or, perhaps a really eclectic vegetable "ragout" over quinoa, like in that picture up there.

The ragout came about after I surveyed my very modest pea harvest from this spring. Not enough to be a major feature in a dish (man, I've been dreaming about spring pea risotto. Oh well). So, I chopped up some baby chiogga beets, purple broccoli, fennel and chard from Green Hill, some baby golden beets, oregano, snow peas, English peas and pea shoots from mine. I sauteed some red onion and garlic, threw in the veggies, then added chopped tomato, chicken stock, white beans, a touch of rice vinegar and some extra Theros olive oil. Covered it, steamed it all for a bit, then served it over quinoa. Probably would have been pretty awesome with some Moroccan spice added to the mix, but salt and pepper was just fine as well.

So basically, this post is meant to encourage several things:

1. Try not to waste food. Visit this link for some interesting stats on poverty and food waste in America: http://www.soundvision.com/Info/poor/statistics.asp

an excerpt:

Almost 100 billion pounds of food is wasted in America each year. 700 million
hungry human beings in different parts of the world would have gladly accepted
this food.

2. Be creative! There are no real rules beyond keeping your food safe for people to eat.

3. Consider planting a garden. It's amazing how far you can stretch your food dollar when you can supplement your meals with things growing right in your yard. Saves on fuel if you only have to travel 20 feet, too.

4. Keep your pantry stocked with spices, dried grains and beans, and other non-perishables. They make your life so easy.

5. Consider supporting your local farming community by joining a CSA .

How to juice a chicken...

Mmmm. Chicken juice. Alright, all kidding aside, see all this?



That's almost a gallon of chicken stock. It's pretty concentrated, as you can tell by the color. Do you have any idea how much a gallon of organic chicken stock costs in the store? An absolutely ridiculous amount, considering that it's essentially made from scraps. Make no mistake, though, this is liquid gold to a serious home cook. It livens up pasta sauce, rice and tons of other grains. Risotto cannot exist without chicken stock -- and risotto is astoundingly cheap to make if you know make your own stock. Risotto, trust me, is on my agenda to show you.

Ready to make chicken stock?
Here's what you need:

A deep stock pot
your leftover chicken frame (picked over bones), cleaned of all stuffing
2 onions
3 small carrots
3 celery stalks
2 bay leaves
water
I also like to throw in thyme as it is crawling all over my yard, but this is non-essential.

Instructions: Throw everything in the pot (removing peel from onions to keep the bitter away), cover with cold water (a gallon and a half, approx.), bring to a boil, turn down heat, simmer for several hours or until you have to leave the house or go to sleep or something. That's it. Really. You don't even have to chop anything up small. I cut the onion into 1/8's and break the carrots and celery up with my hands. And you thought this would be hard.

Set a colander over a deep container and pour the stock through the colander. Toss out your solids. You are done with them. Do not, as I did groggily one morning, pour half of your stock down the sink reserving the solids before you realize what you are doing. Oh, you think, who would be stupid enough to do that? Just you wait.

Cool stock down as quickly as possible by setting it in a sink full of ice (this keeps it from staying at a dangerous temperature for too long and breeding harmful bacteria). After cooling, put into containers and freeze what you won't use right away -- don't forget to label with the name and date!

So, to be clear, this is essentially what got me started on the roasting whole chickens thing in the first place. It is so nice to have cheap food for a week and, as an extra bonus, have nearly free chicken stock on hand all of the time. Plus, I promise that you will feel like a bit of a culinary bad ass once you start making and storing all of your own stocks -- and that is worth plenty in its own right.

Lazy girl's supper...

Most evenings, you likely stumble home tired and the last thing on your mind is cooking, especially when it's hot. Say, for example, you also have a half picked-over chicken lurking in your refrigerator because some writer convinced you that you would get a million uses out of it. What's for dinner? This:

A nice bed of lettuce, some chopped tomato and some chopped avocado make a great summertime meal -- especially for a girl like me who tends to eat more than three meals a day. Add some dressing, serve with good bread and you're done. You could add some cheese if you wanted to. I like my salads kind of spartan, however. If anything, though, I'm trying to teach you to be loose and use whatever's available, so just go for it.

I'm going to throw out a few more ideas for the roasted chicken, tell you how to make a stock and then leave the yard bird alone for a little while. I think that you get the picture. HOWEVER, should you have any requests for recipes or need to find yet another use for chicken, please do not hesitate to ask. I will indeed take requests, especially if you bribe me.

Chicken ideas:

Chicken tacos with rice and salsa

Chicken pasta with pesto and tomatoes

Chicken salad sandwiches

Chicken Caesar salad

There, so I've given you at least five different ways to use up your bird. Be creative -- it's how you learn. Plus, if you learn to stretch your food with cheap ingredients, it can go far. Think, for example, about adding plenty of celery, grapes and onions to your chicken salad. After about a week, pull the rest of your chicken if you haven't used it off of the bones, pack it into a Ziploc, label it with a sharpie (include the date) and stick it in the freezer. Now you have chicken for future chicken salad. This may seem obvious, but most people that I know do not use their freezers enough. Learning how to not throw away food is a big step toward saving money and -- get this -- freezers are more efficient when full.

By the way -- the bones are not trash! Next I'll tell you how to make stock.

No one ever said the NYT wasn't elitist at times...

I love the New York Times. I really do. I especially like Frank Bruni, the food writer for the NYT. However, this article kind of made my blood, well, not boil...but definitely heat up a bit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/dining/25frank.html?scp=6&sq=dining%20challenge&st=cse

The premise: cook a meal for six for -- wait for it -- $50! I get that the chefs were trying to make some higher-end dishes and multiple courses which is in and of itself a challenge anyway. Come on, though, really? In today's economy the whole concept comes off sounding a bit ridiculous and short-sighted. Here's a quote from Bruni:

Less than $8.50 a person for a full dinner? I didn't see how this budget allowed for much strutting, not even from home cooks as gifted and resourceful as these two kitchen goddesses.

Sadie at http://www.jezebel.com/ had this to say about it:

Not only is $50 for six no challenge to a cook on a normal budget (see: any issue of Taste of Home), not only is such a "competition" an insult to those of us who adhere to such constraints, not only is the raillery of the contest precious and irritating, but, the menus are too intricate for the average working person to tackle. Not the point? Maybe not - but it's a further bit of alienation for those of us who cook as a daily
necessity.

Word. No, really, it's exactly this mentality that makes people nervous about getting in the kitchen. If it's so tough to feed a group of six for under $50 a meal -- and make it good -- why bother? For that matter, how do you think large families do it? Some of them are likely eating crap food (well, a lot, if the Duggars are a fair model), but many are subsisting on good food for much less. I know that the New York Times' target audience might not be the food stamp crowd, exactly, but how about a little awareness of the economic difficulties that a large group of people are staring down on a day-to-day basis? No matter what your target demographic, journalists should maybe start edging toward more responsible reporting to stay relevant in today's economic climate, no?

With that, check what I bought at the store for just a little bit over the budget of the chefs in the article. It's all organic, too. I'm gonna show you what to make with all of it, eventually:


All of this will make much more than a few meals. You'll notice a whole chicken back there, a New York strip and a pound of bacon from the meat case. Tons of veggies, fruits, a loaf of bread, a pound each of split peas, arborio rice and Great Northern beans. Yum. You know why the money went so far? The entire haul consists of whole foods. Whole foods are cheaper because with processed foods you're paying for the labor and processing, and with whole foods, the processing falls on you (I know, I said this wasn't rocket science). Time really is money.