Gourmet Cooking on a Food Stamp Budget

Soy Milk Doesn't Do a Body Good

2012-07-29T12:00:00.000-07:00

    If you think that my rants on food are insane, I know how you feel. There are several types of food that people say are awful that I think they're crazy for thinking that (I'm going to talk about one next week, in fact). As I've mentioned in my previous two installments of "HOLY CRAP DON'T EAT THAT" is that the foods I'm talking about are not, in and of themselves bad. However, they've been embraced by the food industry as cheap, easy ways to either make the food taste better to the American palette or boost the nutritional content of a food and have, therefore, been put in everything. Corn syrup and salt have been added to make poor quality food taste better, and our health has suffered because of it. Soy has been added because it has protein in it. At some point, food manufacturers discovered that items that have added protein can have their prices increased, so here we are with tons of food with soy flour, soy lecithin, soybean oil, etc.
   Soy beans are the food equivalent of bamboo. They grow quickly, they're hardy, and they recover (grow back) quickly. They can also be used in a metric ton of stuff. Soy can be used to replace petroleum oil in everything from plastic to the rubber in tires. Seriously, except for gasoline (they're still working on it), if you can make it out of petroleum, you can make it out of soybean oil. This stuff is a freaking miracle. So why do I try to refuse to put it in my body?
     Here's the part where I sound crazy then I'll back up and explain myself. If you are female or have a female of any age in your house you should seriously consider burning everything with soy in it. BURN IT. I'm not kidding. If you are the miraculous single dad that has 3 boys, well, this isn't such a concern, but you might want to pay attention if you ever plan to have a woman eat at your house again.
     Before we started using soy in literally everything we put into our bodies, it had one major use - estrogen replacement. See, soy has what's called a phytoestrogen, or plant estrogen. For those of you who skipped biology class, estrogen is the group of primary sex hormones for females of all species. They create breasts, increase fat stores, stimulate uterine lining growth, reduce calcium absorption in bones, and stimulate ovulation among like 50 other things. In short, estrogen makes girls become women and women to become fertile. That seems great at the surface.
     In fact, there's evidence that small amounts of plant estrogen before and during puberty can reduce the chance of breast and prostate cancer when children reach adulthood. There's also evidence that once a woman has had breast cancer and gone into remission, taking small amounts of plant estrogen can increase a woman's chance of staying in remission. Again, great and wonderful concepts.
      So, why don't I eat soy and recommend that every woman burn all of the soy additives in her house? Because we, as Americans do not eat a small amount of soy. If you eat processed foods at all, you eat soy all the time every day. Most fast food burgers have soy in the bun, soy fillers in the burger, and soybean oil on the grill that it's cooked on. Then you have the french fries powdered with soy flour then deep fried in soybean oil. Even if you order the salad, your salad dressing's most likely made with soybean oil. In fact, the only thing I can think of that wouldn't have any soy in it at a fast food restaurant is the sodas. I'm not convinced it's not there somewhere, but it isn't in the ingredients.
      Remember all those things I mentioned that soy does for women? Imagine enhancing them every time you eat anything. Your breasts will get bigger (happy time for men, but sad time for your back). Your fat stores will increase (insert screams here). Your bones will absorb much less calcium (broken hips anyone?). Then we get to the really scary stuff: It thickens your uterine lining and stimulates ovulation. Want to know a way to instantly increase your menstrual cramps? Thicken your uterine lining! Yay! Want to know a way to create pain between menstrual cycles? Stimulate ovulation too much. Double yay!
      My family has a history of polycystic ovarian syndrome. That means we're prone to getting tons of cysts on our ovaries. These cysts hurt like words I've promised myself I won't say on this blog. Let's just say that I have never been stabbed in my sides, but I think I know how it'd feel. Guess what ovulation stimulation does? It creates more freaking cysts! Yeah, really, when I'm really, really careful about my soy intake, the knife-like pain in my lady parts decreases exponentially. I often wonder how many women are out there experiencing this pain and not knowing why.
     Okay, so we know what excess estrogen can do to a woman, but what's the problem, right? Our bodies are programmed to change the amount of estrogen in our bodies to be less or more depending on our environment, right? Right. Kinda.
     See, every woman's body comes equipped with a switch in her brain to stop producing estrogens when they get to a certain concentration. So, we shouldn't often have too much estrogen, right? Wrong.
     The problem is that in addition to giving us an estrogen boost, soy goes up and disables that switch. That means, when you have an excess of estrogen, your body can't stop producing it. It just keeps making more and more and more.
     So, now we have a situation where you're producing estrogen naturally, adding to your natural estrogen with a natural plant estrogen, and now a body that can't stop producing your natural estrogen. Oh, and did I mention that the fat that the estrogen creates stores estrogen in it which means you're now toxic with it? It does.
    Doesn't that seem like it's going to lead to a bad situation? It does. Excess soy leads to excess weight gain, increased menstrual pain, and even infertility. I've read journal articles about the dangers of soy, and I can't figure out why it's still on the market and in every freaking thing I can buy. My only answer is that it must be a capitalism thing where the food manufacturers have discovered how much money they can make off of it, and refuse to let it be taken off the market. After all, they all say those convenience foods shouldn't be eaten as much as they obviously are. Yeah, that's happening, guys.
     So, if you want the women in your life (including you, if you're female) to be healthy, I highly recommend eschewing soy. That means, to begin with, substituting canola oil for vegetable oil (that's actually soybean oil, kids) then start reading your freaking labels. Soy lecithin makes fats coagulate with your food easier. Gee that seems healthy. Give us more hormones that we can handle and blend fats into our food. Add in soy milk, soy flour, soy grits, soy meal, and soy sauce and you have a huge list of what you shouldn't be eating.
     If you want an easy way to know if you have soy in your food, skip right to the bottom where all food products are now required to put allergy information and see what's listed there. If soy's there, put it down. Then write a letter and scream at the company. The only way to stop manufacturers from using this as an additive is to stop giving them monetary benefits from doing so.

Your Weekly Frugal Recipe - Chicken Enchiladas

2012-07-28T12:00:00.001-07:00

Chicken Enchiladas

The Food Stamp Way

Skills

Prep

Cook

Blender/Food Processor

What do these meters mean?

This is another one of those recipes that you might need to plan to make ahead of time. It takes a little more time than a lot of people like, but it shouldn't take more than about 25-30 minutes of prep and 25 minutes of cooking time. I've made this ahead of time and stuck it in the fridge to bake later.
The main reason I love this recipe is I don't like to have to take the time to roll my ingredients into each tortilla separately, put them in a pan and then put sauce over them and bake. This is made in a casserole method, but when you cut it into pieces, most people don't know the difference between this and the individually rolled enchiladas.

Equipment you'll need
Skillet, blender or food processor, 11x7 baking dish, saucepan, whisk, knife, cutting board

Serves 10-12

Ingredient	Amount	Cost
Corn tortillas	12	$0.43*
Medium onion	1	$0.50
Canola oil	1 oz	$0.06*
Shredded Monterey Jack	1 lb	$4.23
Chicken	1 lb	$2.28
Butter	1/4 c.	$0.34*
Flour	1/4 c.	$0.03*
Chicken Broth	2 c.	$0.78
Sour cream	8 oz	$0.96
Poblano pepper	1	$0.50
Fresh cilantro	1/4 bunch	$0.14*
Total		$10.25
* Based on price per package divided by amount used.

Price per plate =$1.25 Notes about ingredients:

The poblano pepper has to be roasted. If you're not comfortable with this, you can pick up a 4 oz can of chopped chiles for roughly the same price.

You have to use fresh cilantro for this recipe - no substitutions.

Prep Instructions:

Chop the onion into medium-size pieces.

Cut the chicken into medium-sized pieces. Heat the vegetable oil over a medium flame and cook the chicken and onion in it. If you have it, sprinkle some cumin over the raw chicken.

Roast the poblano pepper under your broiler for about 5 minutes and skin it. Put the pepper, cilantro, and chicken broth into a blender or food processor and blend until smooth.

Instructions:

1.   Preheat your oven to 425º F
2.   Melt the butter in a saucepan and whisk the flour into it and allow it to cook until it starts to froth.
3.   Add the chicken broth mixture to the flour and butter and whisk together quickly. Allow to simmer.
4.   Add the sour cream to the sauce whisk everything together.
5.   Grease a pan with cooking spray or a little canola oil. Cover the bottom of the pan with a third of the sauce.
6. Top the sauce with 6 corn tortillas, allowing them to overlap to cover all the sauce completely.

7. Cover the tortillas with all of your chicken pieces.

8. Cover the chicken with about half of the cheese.

9. Cover the cheese with a third of the sauce.

10. Cover the sauce with another layer of tortillas.

11. Cover the tortillas with the last of the sauce.

12. Cover the pan with aluminum foil with the shiny side pointed toward the food.

13. Bake at 425º for 20 minutes.

14. Remove the aluminum foil and sprinkle the rest of the cheese over the top. Replace in the oven and bake for 5 minutes or until the cheese is completely melted.

What recipe would you like done the food stamp way? Comments? Questions? Tweet to @cookingcheap

Luxuries - Fresh herbs

2012-07-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

     I'm sure that after last week's post you were certain that I was finished with herbs. Sorry, but not quite. We're close to being done with them, though. I promise. The only reason I'm writing a separate entry about fresh herbs is because I can't count how many recipes I've seen that say "fresh thyme" or the like, and for a long time, I didn't know when it was okay to substitute dry spices or, for that matter, how you did it.
     The issue with the dried herbs that are far preferred by most people because of their longevity is that, once you remove all the water out of an herb, it's flavor becomes incredibly enhanced. I don't really know why that is, but it's true. If you ever get a chance to chew on a single leaf of fresh rosemary then on a single leaf of dried rosemary, you'll see that the flavor is much more intense in the dried version. For that reason, you can't substitute 1 tsp of dried thyme for 1 tsp of fresh thyme or you'll have a dish that people say, "Wow, that's a lot of thyme!" about. By the way, if you have people in your house that can identify thyme, I'm really impressed.
     There are also situations that you just can't substitute the dried version for the fresh version. For example, bruschetta, a tomato-basil topping to bread, would taste awful if you sprinkled dried basil over it. That's because you'd just get hard flakes in parts and it would be too strong.
   That being said, if you're lucky enough to have an herb garden, or at least a couple of herbs growing fresh, you can always substitute fresh for dried. Always. Even though they're less intense, there's no reason to not use them because your recipe asks for dried oregano.
     Here are the four rules of dried-fresh substitution:

When to leave it fresh
   Like I just mentioned, there are dishes you can't substitute dried for fresh. These are dishes that the herbs will not be cooked and softened in the process. With the exception of powdered sage and/or garlic, uncooked dishes require fresh herbs. They lend a light crispness to the dish that, for some reason, tastes like summer. That's why we serve fresh vegetables in the summer, because they're so refreshing. For raw salads, toppings, and decoration, fresh herbs are the only way to go.

When to substitute
   When you're making pretty much any cooked dish, you can straight up substitute dried herbs for fresh herbs. That's because, in a cooked dish, any herb, dried or fresh, is going to have its flavor leeched out and spread through the whole dish. When you have a recipe calling for fresh herbs and you only have dried, use half of the amount that the recipe calls for. For example, if your recipe says "1 tsp fresh thyme" put in 1/2 tsp dried thyme. This rule goes in reverse for people who have fresh herbs on hand. Double the amount in the recipe, if it's asking for dried. So your 1 tsp of dried oregano becomes 2 tsp of fresh oregano. If your recipe doesn't specify fresh or dried, I always assume dried. It's worked so far.

When to rehydrate
   This is the in between stage of substitution and leaving the herbs fresh. In the rare case that you have a dish that you know you need a softer herb, but it isn't necessarily fresh, you can rehydrate the herbs. Like I said before, use half the amount in the recipe and put your herbs in water or oil for at least 30 minutes before you use them. Whether you use water or oil is dependent on the recipe.
     For example, I make an herbed pasta that requires me to cook herbs in oil then toss pasta in it. I know that the pasta tastes tons better with fresh herbs, but I just can't go buy 6 types of fresh herbs every time I make it. That's because I always waste a lot, and I haven't been able to grow herbs successfully in the dry heat of Arizona. So, before I make it, I put all my herbs in the olive oil in which I will cook them and leave them for an hour. The oil softens the herbs and absorbs some of their flavor before I throw everything in the pan. I wouldn't use water for this because water and oil don't get along well.
     Another great example would be making a dip. If you wanted to make a dill dip, you might soak your dill in some water to soften up the herb before adding it to the sour cream. In this case, you would want to pour your water and dill through a fine mesh sieve to get rid of the water before adding it to the sour cream.

When to make tea
   I realize that seems like a weird option here, but it's not really. See, there are a few times that I want the herb, but I don't want to see the leaves in what I'm making because they'd just create a patch that was really strong, and I want my dishes to have a even flavor throughout. In these cases, I use a liquid ingredient in the recipe, heat it up, and put my herbs, fresh or dried, into it. Then I leave it for 30 to 45 minutes.
     While it sits, the herb does the same thing a tea bag does, releases its flavor into the liquid. Then I put a sieve over my dish and pour my liquid directly into the dish while removing the leaves. The result is a beautifully soft, even flavor that resonates with the dish.
     The most common place I do this is in rosemary mashed potatoes. No one likes lumps in their potatoes, and they like leaves of rosemary even less, especially when one goes down the wrong way. However, almost everyone loves rosemary mashed potatoes. When I'm getting ready to mash my potatoes, I heat the cream I'm going to use and put a couple of pinches of rosemary into it. Then I leave it while I get the potatoes mashed up. Once it's sat there for a while, I pour the cream, now infused with the rosemary flavor, into the potatoes. This makes the whole dish resonate with rosemary and makes it scrumptious.
      You can do this with fudge to infuse a flavor into the dish or with water to put into a soup. It's also worth mentioning that this is the only way to get flavor out of saffron.

Techniques - Peeling

2012-07-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

     I really thought about dedicating an equipment section just to what kind of peeler you should get, but I realized that we have five different peelers and they all work equally well. Really, you can buy a peeler from the dollar store and it'll work just as well as the one you get for $20 from Willams Sonoma. Yeah, you might have to replace it after a few years (like 5), but you can buy an other $1 peeler and move on. It's not going to make a huge difference.
     Peeling is one of those things that is only rarely necessary and most people consider it messy because, if you do it wrong, it is. I could make a crack about how I'm well associated with potato peeling because I was in the Army, but truth be told, they didn't do that by the time I got there. I have, however, peeled all kinds of different things both with peelers and paring knives. I highly recommend peelers, if given a choice.
     That being said, peeling is only really necessary about 10% of the time. Items we used to peel (potatoes, carrots, apples, etc) have been found to store a large amount of their nutrients in their peels. It's worth mentioning that every single adult in my life told me that before there was scientific evidence to prove it. Therefore, we really don't need to peel that much. I peel sweet potatoes, if I'm making a sweet potato casserole, but not much more. For that reason, the video at the end of this is of me peeling sweet potatoes.
     Peeling is fast and easy, and there's probably a lot of people who are skipping this entry because they rolled their eyes and thought it was dumb. There's only one little trick I'm going to share with you before I let you go: plastic wrap.
     Plastic wrap is what's going to keep you from making a horrible mess of your kitchen. I remember when I started peeling, I was pretty young and almost the whole counter got covered with peels in the process. Yes, this is one of those techniques you get to teach your kids to do while you're cutting up vegetables (my daughter cuts up vegetables too, but she's been working in the kitchen with me for 2 years). It's the simplest thing in the world, really.
     So, here's how to peel something without it getting everywhere.
1. Cover your work area with saran wrap, completely.

2. Press firmly on your vegetable with your peeler. You shouldn't need to worry about smashing the vegetable because you only do this with hard veggies like potatoes and zucchini.

3. Slowly, with long strokes, push the peeler down the length of the vegetable, rotating the vegetable as you need to reach more peel. Do this slowly so you keep your peels on the saran wrap.

4. Peel all the vegetables you need, keeping the peelings on the saran wrap. If you miss, just pick the pieces up and put them back on the wrap.

5. Pick up the four corners of your saran wrap and roll it into a ball with the peels inside.

6. Throw the saran-wrapped peels away. You now have a clean counter and don't have to bring the trash can over to get a thousand pieces of peel off of it!

Did this save you time and mess? What do you want to learn to do? Tweet to @cookingcheap

Equipment - Knife Sharpeners

2012-07-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

     Knife sharpeners may seem like a frivolous expense to most people, and I completely understand that. Sharpeners are something that most people don't know how to use, don't know what to get, and/or seem expensive. However, I say that a knife sharpener is one of the very basic things you need in your kitchen. Right after you've bought a decent knife and a cutting board, you absolutely need a knife sharpener to keep your knife useable. See, your knife starts going dull as soon as you start using it. First you won't be able to cut tomatoes, then fruits, then vegetables, and the next thing you know, you've cut your thumb while trying to muscle your way through a chicken breast.
     Remember when I said a dull knife is the most dangerous knife? It's absolutely true, and the lesser the quality of your knife, the more it will go dull. The question is, is it worth it to cut your hand open often to avoid buying a sharpener? I guarantee buying a sharpener is cheaper than a hospital visit to stitch up your hand. I also guarantee that it's cheaper than buying a new knife every time yours gets dull.
     There are three types of sharpeners I want to discuss: Crock sticks, stones, and electric, but before that, I want to tell you about an experience I had last week. See, we have at least 3 different sharpeners in our kitchen, but I had seen these commercials for a $15 sharpener on television and I was curious if they worked. I figured that, if one of those would work for you, then you wouldn't have to be as concerned about price. Everyone can put away $7 a month for 2 months to prevent a hospital trip, in my opinion. So, I went to Wal-Mart in their "As Seen on TV" section and bought this:
   I have a lot of experience with different kinds of sharpeners, so I took it home and my dad and I gave it a try. We found the dullest knife in our kitchen - the one that wouldn't cut a tomato (you need a razor's edge on a knife to cut a tomato without squishing it) and ran it through this "miracle product" several times. The blade would not cut the tomato. So, next, we found a blade that would cut the tomato and ran it through the Samurai Pro. The knife would no longer cut the tomato.
   In my opinion, that pretty much sums up my opinion about the $15 knife sharpener that you can get on the "As Seen on TV" section of different mega stores. I think that if you buy this, you not only won't get sharp knives, you'll probably end up dulling the ones you have, rendering them more dangerous.
Anyway, on to sharpeners I believe work. As I said before, there are three types of sharpeners I'm going to talk about and at the end I'm going to throw in a paragraph or two about steels as well as a paragraph about using what you have in your kitchen to do the same thing (but it's a little advanced).
    Let's start with the basics - why does your knife get dull? Well, it has to do with a lot of different things. First, the amount you use your knife, will, of course, get more dull the more you use it. This is because it wears down as you use it, just like the tires on your car and the soles on your shoes. Logic dictates that, the more you cook, the more you'll use your knife and the more it'll go dull. Second, the type of cutting board, or lack thereof, can have an impact on your knife's sharpness. According to wood cutting board lovers, the blade of your knife can slide through wood grain at a molecular level which prevents dulling while plastic cutting boards press on the edge and dull it. However, my opinion is that you can take that money you saved by buying a plastic board instead of a wood board and use it to buy one of these sharpeners. Finally, sometimes, your knife isn't always dull. Sometimes, it just needs to be honed. The difference is that, when you sharpen a knife, you actually take a little bit of metal off the knife. If you sharpen too much, at a coarse grit, you'll wear away at the knife. Alternatively, honing a knife re-aligns the metal molecules and makes your knife sharper by comparison. There are two options on this list that both sharpen and hone your knife to reduce wear and tear on your knives.

Crock Sticks $10 - $55
Crock sticks are ceramic rods that are (usually) positioned at a 45º angle to one another while secured to a wooden or metal base. The ceramic has a grit that can either sharpen or hone your knife. A basic setup for one of these is about $20 to $25 and it comes with either medium or fine grit sticks. A medium grit stick will actually sharpen your knife while a fine grit will hone your knife.
     The nice thing about these is that you can buy sticks with different grits for about $5. That means that if you buy a set that has one grit, you can get another grit for relatively cheap. Sets that come with three different types of sticks go for about $55 and you can buy the sticks on their own for $10.
     The only problem with crock sticks is that finding them is often difficult. You won't find them in a cooking store, nor will you find them in the cooking tools area of your local store. In fact, I can only find them in sporting goods stores. That's because most stores assume that the only time you'd choose to use this method of sharpening is when you're cooking. However, my dad uses it at least once a week. Here's how to use a set of crock sticks like the ones above.

Stones $10 - $75
Sharpening stones come in two types: wet and oil. They also come in multiple grits, coarse, medium and fine. If you're going to get a stone, buy at least a medium and a fine. The fine is for your regular honing while the coarse and medium are actually for sharpening. The only difference between the two types is what they need to be whetted with. If you can't figure that out, oil stones are whetted with mineral oil and wet stones with water. The very basic stones are $10 for each stone while a tri-stone with 3 sides and grits goes for between $50 and $75, depending on where you find it.

The trick to sharpening stones is that you absolutely have to figure out at what angle you'll be sharpening your knife. That means, you have to figure out what the angle between the knife and the sharpening stone will be. This sounds really easy until you realize that that angle must remain the same every time you sharpen your knife. My teaching chefs recommended between 10º and 20º to get the best edge on your blade. That takes a lot of concentration at first, but once you're used to it, it's easy as pie.
One important thing to remember if you do use an oil stone is to get some mineral oil from the pharmacy to use as the oil. Food-based oils go rancid and make your stone stink.
Here's how you use a sharpening stone:

Electric sharpeners $20 - $400
      There are two distinct positive sides to electric knife sharpeners: First, you can find an electric knife sharpener any-freaking-where. I mean, they're in the cooking aisle in every major "super" store. Second, they are seriously the easiest thing on this list to use. You put the blade in the sharpener's slit and pull it toward you and voila you have a sharp blade! There's no learning curve; there are no angles to remember; and there's no repetition.
      Now that you've read that, you may wonder why I don't have an electric knife sharpener. The fact is, that though they have the largest range of prices on this range, they also have the largest range of reliability. See, electric knife sharpeners are kind of like the diet programs of the cooking market. There are some that work just fine, and they cost a lot. There are also very many that either don't work or work very poorly and don't cost nearly as much. Both of them have a cost that could be prevented with hard work, or practice in sharpeners' case.
     The major problem I have with even the best electric sharpeners is that they only sharpen your blade. There's no honing with an electric sharpener which means that every time you use one, it's taking a little bit of metal off your blade. That means that, eventually, you're going to wear through the blade of the knife and have to replace it. If you press down on the blade while you're using one of these sharpeners, you can cause the blade to wear out too quickly as well.
     If you decide to buy an electric sharpener, do yourself a favor and do your homework. Go to the stores you frequent and write down the brands and types of sharpeners they have (I always have a notebook with me) then go home and search for reviews for those sharpeners on the internet. I have good luck entering something like "Presto 08800 knife sharpener reviews" and I'll get a few different sites. Read the good and the bad on several websites and draw an opinion from those reviews.

Steels $15 - $180
   Steels are one of those things that come with knife kit that many people don't really understand. They're dedicated to honing your knife, not sharpening it. The thing with a sharpening steel is that it aligns the edge of your knife so that it seems sharper. Most chefs use a steel once a day, at the beginning of cooking. When you're only doing major prep work once a day, you can probably get away with doing it once or twice a week.
      When I was in school, I was told that steels work by being magnetized and pulling the metal to one side or the other. My father's steel isn't magnetized in any way, shape or form. I can't find anything on the internet that says which way is correct, so just use your best judgement. The most important thing to remember when you're buying a steel is that its full length is smooth or has grooves that run the length of it. A bumpy steel will not make your knife sharper.
   Here's how to use a steel:

     Now, there's one exception to the steel being solely for honing and not for sharpening. They're called diamond steels and they have diamond dust along the length. They're also magnetic, so they both sharpen and hone your knife at the same time. I should also mention that they're on the higher end of the price range for these.

Coffee Mugs $1 - $10
     Okay, so we've gone over sharpeners and you might be considering buying one, but you might also be thinking that you can't afford one for a couple of months. That's fine, no one's expecting you to run out immediately anyway. You might want to look on craigslist and in garage sales while you're saving up to see if you can find one cheaper.
     In the meantime, you might have a knife go dull because they do that. Here's a quick fix that takes more work than crock sticks and electric sharpeners, but will get the job done. Turn a coffee mug over and feel the bottom edge. Feel how it's rough? It's made of the same stuff that a crock stick is, just less refined. You can use the bottom edge of the coffee mug as a sharpening stone until you save up the money to buy one.
     As with the sharpening stones mentioned before, position your blade at 10º to 20º to the edge of the mug and draw the blade across several times then turn it over and repeat that. Here's how it'll look.

I think that a knife sharpener is one of the best things you can get for your kitchen. It'll keep your knives sharp and safe and make your cooking so much easier in the process. If you're having a hard time saving up for one, remember one when someone asks you what you want for your birthday or Christmas, and keep your eye out for helpful garage sales. When buying a non-electric sharpener used, there's literally only one thing to remember - make sure it's not broken. Broken crock sticks or sharpening stones will not sharpen anything.
Remember that the non-electric sharpeners will take practice. As I tell my daughter, "Nothing worth doing is ever easy or comes without practice."

What kind of knife sharpener do you have? What do you like about it? What's hard? Questions? Comments? Tweet to @cookingcheap

Planning - Frozen vs. Fresh vs. Canned part 1

2012-07-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

     Possibly one of the greatest misconceptions about cooking great food is that you must use things that are in the produce or butcher section of your grocery store. In short, it's believed that you can't use anything canned or frozen to make a good meal. I beg to differ. In many cases, frozen and canned foods are not only as good as fresh food, but are able to be kept indefinitely in your cabinet or freezer (choose wisely, haha).     Now, I won't argue that fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats are the best, but I'm not sure where this belief that things can't be frozen and remain good. For goodness sake, I freeze the meat I buy to make it last longer, why can't manufacturers do the same? It's also worth mentioning that even some of the fresh foods you find in the grocery store might be of worse quality than what you find in the freezer section, so here I'm going to go over fresh, canned, and frozen fruits, vegetables, and meats so that you can determine what's best for your situation.

     I was going to try to write this all in one week, but after I got started, it was so long, I just couldn't bear to subject you to the whole thing (you're welcome). So, this week, I'm doing fresh food. Next week, I'll either do canned or both canned and frozen.

Fresh:
   The big issue with a lot of fresh foods is that they must be bought in season in order to keep them to our budget. That means you can only have certain items at a certain time of year before they start having to be shipped from Chile to get them. Nothing against Chile, but strawberries that are shipped from there are going to cost more than the ones that came from the farm up the road. I experienced my first organic food market when I lived in California, and it only sold fruits, vegetables, and meat from farms within 100 miles. For the longest time, I didn't understand what people were talking about when they said organic food cost more because those prices were the lowest in the town. You know why? because they didn't have to pay nearly as much in gas and transportation costs as did the grocery stores that were getting off season items from Mexico. If off-season items are on sale, the chance is pretty high that they're selling unripe food and expecting you to ripen it on your own.
     The other problem with buying fresh produce and meat is that you can't store it like you can frozen and canned food. Like most of the things on this blog, fresh produce has no preservatives and will go bad within a week or less, depending on its ripeness. Now, with the meats, as I've already lined out, you can buy in bulk and freeze, but it's very rare that you can do the same with anything that didn't come out of the butcher's section. Trust me here, you can try to freeze your own fruits and vegetables, but it won't go well. That being said, if you want to write an article on home canning, email me and we'll talk.
Meat & Poultry:
   Meat is one of those things that doesn't ever seem to go out of season. With the amount of meat storage that many manufacturers have now, we have access to all types of meat throughout the year. That being said, beef, pork, and chicken are pretty much immune to season prices. That means that the beef, pork, and chicken industries have good enough storage and high enough production rate that they never have to worry that they're going to run out.
     When you're shopping for red meat, it may surprise you that it doesn't actually need to be red to be good. Most producers of meat use sodium nitrate to "fix" the color in the meat. That means that it actually dyes the meat red. The brighter the red on your meat, the more preservatives are in it. I like to try to find brown or pink meat because I don't like the idea of artificial colors. However, that's not usually fiscally responsible.
     The basic rule of meat and poultry is that, if it's not green, it's fine to buy. My favorite section of the meat department is the "day old" section where they put the meat that's going to expire within the next two days. That stuff is about half the price of everything else, and as long as you either use it immediately or freeze it, it's fine for consumption.
Fish & Seafood:
   Conversely, meat that comes out of the water has definite seasons. There are times you just can't find certain fishes and seafood in the fresh section of your grocery store, and even more times you can find it for an incredibly high price. It doesn't matter if its fresh or saltwater fish, there are certainly times that they're less expensive than the others. Most people don't spend the money on fish, but as I'm going to line out someday in Luxuries, they're really essential to your kids' brain development.
   Some of the fish and seafood you'll see will say that it's never been frozen - not that important to me - but the thing I rely on most is the smell. You know that old saying "it smells fishy"? Well, fish should never "smell fishy" because that fishy smell is the release of ammonia from the dying carcass of the fish. Seriously, if your grocer's fish counter ever smells like that, walk away, quickly.
     As far as shellfish goes, here's a quick and easy calendar you can click on and print to know when different seafoods are in season here in the U.S. and Canada. If you live in the UK, you can go to this site to make your own. All other countries, tweet me and tell me what your websites are and I'll add them too.

No, I'm not expecting you to go buy lobster, like ever, but it was included in the different types of seafood.
Vegetables:

Vegetables are tricky. There are some that never seem to go out of season and there are others that you can never find on sale. Some of them will never be in your grocer's frozen or canned sections (lettuce), some of them, you can't find anywhere else (palm hearts). Vegetables are far more hardy than fruits, so they'll stay good longer. When you're looking at vegetables that are on sale, ask the store's produce guy how to tell if an item is ripe or not before you buy it. Well, you can do that or use a smart phone to search the internet. The produce guys in my grocery stores always know, and sometimes the store puts a guide to buying ripe vegetables on the signs.

Now, that's not anywhere near all the vegetables that you could possibly find. If you want a full, comprehensive list for the US, look here.

Fruits:

Fruits are delicate, to say the least. When you buy a ripe peach, you're lucky to get through 2 whole days before it starts to rot. If you buy an unripe fruit and ripen it yourself, you won't get the same taste as a tree or vine ripened of the same variety. Further, some vegetables will never taste right, if your store or you don't treat them right. A perfect example of that is the tomato. Did you know refrigeration stops the ripening process of tomatoes? That means that, if your grocery store transports its fruits and vegetables in a refrigerated truck, you will never get a ripe tomato from the produce section. Depending on where you live, those types of fruits might be best bought canned or frozen.

I don't know how your brain works, whether you prefer to have these in categories, or all at once, but while I made the lists, I kept a comprehensive list going in alphabetical order. You can just print this one:

All of that information was obtained through this site, but I thought it'd be easier for you to see it put together like that. You can always visit here to see what's in season this week.

If you'd like to get some inexpensive vegetables that are in season where you are, you should check out sites like bountifulbaskets.org that provide low-cost fresh vegetables from local farmers. We've done that a few times and have always had a great time trying to figure out what dishes we were going to make from 2 heads of cauliflower and an eggplant.

A War on Convenience Food - Snacks part 1

2012-07-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

     Before you get frightened that I'm going to have an unbroken string of snacks, I'm not. I just thought that the majority of the money that we spend on pre-made stuff is the stuff we keep in our cupboards and give our kids when they need a snack. You know what I'm talking about: cereal bars, crackers, cookies, etc. I'm going to do several parts on snacks that we buy, but I'm not going to do them all at once. Instead, I'm going to split them up and do one every few weeks with other convenience foods mixed in.

     When my daughter comes home from school or gymnastics and says to me, "Mommy, they're allowing us to have snacks now, but only healthy ones," I want to punch a wall. Though I totally agree that schools should allow kids a snack when they're hungry, the first question that always jumps to my mind is, "What's healthy?"
     It's a valid question. There are "health foods" on our shelves with corn syrup, chocolate, and salt packed into them as well as people who will assume that anything that looks like health food is healthy. Do I go buy one of those cereal bars that are packed with marshmallow creme? Do I send her with trail mix that most likely has M&Ms in it and risk some kid with nut allergies getting ahold of it? Is this one of those people that considers popcorn healthy? (Note: The last school teacher was) Apple slices go brown and soggy unless you put lemon juice on them, then they taste like lemons. Whole fruit takes too long to eat and makes a lot of noise and/or mess. Worst of all, if I make a bag of carrots and my daughter forgets about them, I find a baggie of brown goo at the bottom of her backpack a month later. Gross.
     I like the idea of energy bars, but I have a difficult time finding any of them that my daughter will eat that aren't packed with chocolate and corn syrup and soy (I'm really going to talk about that soon) as well as about four other kinds of syrups I've never heard about. Heck, Fiber One bars have both Corn Syrup and High Maltose Corn Syrup listed in their ingredients, and they're haled as incredibly healthy. (Maltose is a more complex sugar than fructose, but it's still not great.) They're also covered in chocolate 90% of the time. Add the fact that they're store-bought, non-fresh food to the mix, and you have a combination of things I think I can do better.
     So, I went down to my local grocery store and stood in the "convenience breakfast" aisle with my magic notebook of prices and wrote down the price of every different brand of energy bars that are made without fruit in the middle or marshmallow creme. In other words, I looked at the "healthy" bars. They ranged in price from $2.50 for 8 bars (31¢ each) to $3.99 for 5 bars (80¢ each). I also should mention that the low end bar had three different types of corn syrup (corn syrup, low fructose corn syrup, and high fructose corn syrup). Admittedly, the more expensive the bars, the better the ingredients, but I still don't know what they all are.
     So, I did some research and I made my daughter her own energy bars that are endlessly customizable for your family. In the notes about ingredients section, I'll tell you some substitutions that you can use to make these work for you. I'm putting those in because there's no telling if you have family members allergic to peanuts or tree nuts or if you're vegan. I have some options for those.

Equipment you'll need
Saucepan, cookie sheet, 13"x9" pan, mixing bowl, rubber spatula

Makes 10 bars

Ingredient	Amount	Cost
Peanut butter	1/2 c.	$0.43*
Honey	1/2 c.	$1.39*
Oatmeal	1 c.	$0.18*
Puffed Rice Cereal	1 c.	$0.66*
Slivered Almonds	1/2 c.	$1.60*
Raisins	1/3 c.	$0.72*
Total		$4.98
* Based on price per package divided by amount used.

Price per plate =$0.50 Notes about ingredients:

If you're allergic to peanuts, you can substitute almond butter. If you're allergic to both peanuts and tree nuts the internet promises me that you can use sunflower seed spread

As many health benefits as raw, local honey may have, buy the cheap stuff for this recipe. You're going to cook it anyway

Vegans can use agave nectar instead of honey.

If you've got tree nut allergies in your family, use 2/3 c. of chunky peanut butter to give it that crunch. If you've got tree and peanut allergies, get some hulled sunflower seeds to add.

You can substitute the 1/3 c. of raisins for literally anything - miniature dark chocolate chips, dried cranberries, chopped dried apricots, etc.

Prep Instructions:

Spread the oats and almonds (or sunflower seeds) out on a cookie sheet and put them under your oven's broiler for 5 minutes or until slightly browned and toasted.

Instructions:

1. Put the peanut butter and honey into a small saucepan and allow them to melt together over low heat. When they're melted, they'll stir together smoothly as a liquid.
2.   Pour the peanut butter mixture into a bowl with the oats, almonds, raisins, and rice cereal.
3.   Mix all ingredients together until they're all the same color.
4.   Oil your pan with some canola oil and press the mixture into the pan. Press as hard as you possibly can so that the mixture will stick together.

5. Put the mixture in the fridge for about an hour then cut into separate bars.

6. Wrap each bar in wax paper to have at a later time.

My experience with this recipe is that they taste amazing. However, they're very gooey. I'm having to keep the wrapped bars in the fridge to keep them solid.

Corn Syrup isn't Sugar

2012-07-22T12:00:00.000-07:00

I would like to introduce you to my least favorite commercial on television. Oddly enough, the company that makes it doesn't actually have it up anywhere on the internet, so you're getting an awfully filmed version from YouTube. I'll talk about why it makes me mad after it's over.

     Once again, I'm going to remind you that these are just my personal views, and you are, in no way, required to believe what I believe. I should also mention that the First Amendment protects my right to say what I want to say.
   C.Y.A. statements aside, I believe that corn syrup is the cornerstone upon which American obesity is built. I'll also mention that a lack of activity and crappy eating habits make up the foundation, but today, I'm going to tackle corn syrup. In 2010, the Corn Refiner's Association petitioned to have "high fructose corn syrup" renamed to "corn sugar." On May 30, 2012, the FDA rejected the petition on the grounds that sugar is defined as a solid, dry, crystallized food.
   Regardless of the FDA's decision, it appears that the Corn Refiner's Association is attempting to get the American public to rename it themselves. I personally agree fully with the FDA because I feel like corn syrup provides a disservice to the American people.
    I want to make it clear that I have nothing against corn or actually corn syrup in general. In fact, my daughter suffered from severe constipation when she was an infant, and her pediatrician recommended adding a teaspoon of Karo syrup to one of her bottles a day (before someone says something about nursing, I feel like I should say that I breastfed as long as I could). The reason it works is because corn syrup has a sugar alcohol called sorbitol that makes your intestines relax.
    I also want to say that I have nothing against sweet things. I have issues with my weight because there's sugar in the world. However, I think that sugar from sugar cane is where most of our sweet stuff should come from and I have several reasons why.
     Let's talk about pure numbers first. 1 teaspoon of high fructose corn syrup has 53 calories and 14 grams of carbohydrates. 1 teaspoon of granulated sugar has 16 calories and 4 grams of carbohydrates. That means that, even if you took in the 3.3 teaspoons of sugar you'd need to have the same amount of calories, you'd still have taken in almost 40 carbohydrates less than corn syrup. Since you need to take in about 750 g of carbohydrates per day, 1 teaspoon of high fructose corn syrup is 7% of your daily intake. That's pretty big, compared to 0.5% you'd get from your teaspoon of granulated sugar. It's worth mentioning that high fructose corn syrup is 6 times sweeter than sugar.
     Okay, so let's move on to the difference between sucrose and fructose. Science time! (Sorry.)
Meet sucrose, it comes from the sugar cane plant. It's a hydrocarbon with two six-sided rings connected by what we call an ether (the oxygen in the middle). Despite what many people think, sucrose is considered a complex carbohydrate. Complex carbohydrates are more difficult for your body to break down and store as fat.

     This is fructose. It's the sugar that's released from fruits and vegetables (that's why the "fru" part). It's a very simple sugar that your body can process and store as fat really really quickly.
   So, that's the basic difference. For the record, all fructose does not come from corn. Any time you have a fruit or vegetable that's even a little sweet, it has fructose in it. However, you don't see concentrated apple juice being used in every little thing to sweeten it (it is a fantastic sweetener, but the point is still there). Your body can and does tell the difference between sucrose and fructose, and I'm about to tell you how.
     I'm a favor of empirical research which means I like research that can be replicated and tells us things about ourselves. I have two very important studies that have to do with fructose vs sucrose in which you might be interested.
     Researchers at Princeton University gave a large number of rats diets exclusively of sucrose and fructose measured to give the rats the same amount of calories. Now, no one's saying that you should eat a diet of exclusively sugar. This was a test to see what the difference of the two types of sugar would be. In the study, the rats who ate the fructose gained more weight, especially in the abdominal area, kept the weight on longer after returned to normal food, and had raised triglyceride levels which are unhealthy fats in the blood.
    This is just the latest in the Princeton line of corn syrup studies. The link up there will take you to an article that lines them out, but they all come down to this: When you eat corn syrup, you gain more weight. If you don't know that being overweight is bad for your body, you should pay attention.
     The second study comes from UCLA where they fed rats a high fructose diet once again. In this study, the rats' brains showed delayed responses after 6 weeks of a high fructose diet. That means, the more fructose you take in, the slower your brain works. If your kids' cereal has corn syrup in it, you might want to think about that before you send her off to school with that in her belly.

     So, there's my rant on why you should be controlling your family's high fructose corn syrup intake. Really think about it the next time you're thinking of buying something with HFCS in it.

Your Weekly Frugal Recipe - Meatloaf

2012-07-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

Meatloaf

The Food Stamp Way

Skills

Prep

Cook

Casserole dish

What do these meters mean?

Raise your hand if the last thing you think of when it comes to gourmet cooking is meatloaf. Now put your hand down, no one can see you. The thing with meatloaf is that it's a basic staple that can be changed into several different things. In fact my next few beef recipes (there is a pattern to these recipes) will be based off the meatloaf recipe that will be here and we'll transform it into meatballs, stuffed peppers and more!

Equipment you'll need
knife, cutting board, mixing bowl, casserole dish, cooling rack (optional)

Serves 8

Ingredient	Amount	Cost
Ground beef	2 lb	$2.99
Pork sausage	1 lb	$3.48
Eggs	2	$0.15*
Bread crumbs	1/2 c	$0.13*
Onion	1/2	$0.25*
Green onions	3	$0.31*
Garlic	1 clove	$0.07*
Crushed tomatoes	1, sm can	$0.66
Total		$7.79
* Based on price per package divided by amount used.

Price per plate =$0.97 Notes about ingredients:

If you don't eat pork, use 3 pounds of ground beef or find some chicken sausage.

1/2 tsp of minced garlic in oil is the same as 1 clove. 1/8 tsp of garlic power is also the same as a clove.

If you don't have a can of crushed tomatoes you can also cut up 1 or 2 fresh tomatoes to use what's in your kitchen.

Prep Instructions:

Mince your garlic if it isn't already or powder.

Chop your onion. It should be about 1/2 c.

Slice the green onions thinly.

Instructions:

1. Preheat your oven to 350º F
2. Mix all ingredients thoroughly.

(The movie's sped up. The whole process takes about a minute)
3. Form into a loaf.

4. Place in a casserole pan on top of a cooling rack, if you have one.

5. Bake for an hour to an hour and a half or until done in the middle. That means there's no pink left or a meat thermometer reads 155º F.

6. Remove the loaf from the grease in the pan, if you baked in a casserole, and slice to serve.

What recipe would you like done the food stamp way? Comments? Questions? Tweet to @cookingcheap

Luxuries - Spices 3

2012-07-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

This is the entry I've been looking forward to since I started the spice articles. It may seem strange to you, but this one entry has all my favorite herbs in it. See, when I was a kid and just starting to experiment with the flavor of herbs in cooking, I thought the song Scarborough Faire by Simon & Garfunkel was cooking advice. At the age of 9 or 10 that makes total sense. For that reason, for about 3 years, whenever I made anything from macaroni and cheese to grilled cheese to well, really anything that's acceptable for a child to make, I would add copious amounts of parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.
Since then, I've stopped adding parsley for reasons I'll mention in a minute, but I still add sage, rosemary, and thyme to anything in the Italian genre regardless of what the recipe says. I've also started adding oregano and basil. In fact, when I started my kitchen in my first apartment, those five are the first herbs I bought to make my kitchen run.
So, now you know my five favorite spices. They pretty much explain why I adore cooking Italian food. I'm sure you have your own or will find your own, and I can't wait to hear about them! Without any further ado, I give you the final installment of spices.

Oregano is the leaf of a flowering plant in the mint family that’s native to the Mediterranean region and the Middle East. It has a strong taste that’s less sweet than basil and is very pungent. It’s a central herb in pizza sauce and many beef dishes.
Paprika is a mixture of ground, dried peppers. There are several varieties of paprika, and depending on the country from which yours comes, they vary from mild to spicy. Interestingly enough, this is one of the few words that are remarkably similar across languages. In most stores, you’ll find either Spanish paprika or Hungarian paprika. Spanish paprika comes in three varieties – mild (dulce), moderate (agridulce), and spicy (picante). Hungarian paprika is usually very mild and pungent. That’s the kind you’ll usually find simply labeled “paprika” on your grocer’s shelves.
Parsley is a leafy plant that’s related to cilantro. By itself, a sprig of parsley is actually a great breath freshener, but when added to a dish, I haven’t found that it adds anything. That’s why I stopped cooking with it, and stopped buying it dry altogether. When I want to use some parsley, I buy a bunch at the store for under 50¢ and chop it myself.
Peppercorn also known as pepper is the dried fruit of a flowering plant native Southeast Asia and china. It comes in several different color varieties dependent on how the fruit is treated before you get it. You can get black pepper, white pepper, green pepper, and pink pepper (not actually pepper) in whole peppercorn varieties. You can also get ground black and white pepper. You’ll use more black pepper than any other kind, and someday, I’m going to write a full article just on pepper to explain all the ins and outs of it. Buy ground black pepper to refill your pepper shaker and we’ll discuss everything else later.
Rosemary is hands down my favorite herb of all time. I love, love, love, love, love rosemary. If I could figure out how to put it in every single dish I cook, I would. Rosemary is the leaf of an evergreen bush. In fact, you can probably find it in the hedges outside businesses everywhere. Heck, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve pulled leaves off of them to chew on while walking around. Rosemary has a resonant flavor and aroma that is very similar to pine.
Saffron is an herb you’ll probably never use. Not only is it usually used in either Spanish or Middle Eastern dishes, it’s freaking expensive. Seriously, this is the most expensive thing by weight in my kitchen, and I buy it cheap. At Trader Joes, I can buy 0.035 ounces of this stuff for $5. That’s $142 an ounce. Most saffron is $25 for a smaller amount. It averages about $500 per ounce which, at the time I wrote this was a third the price of an ounce of gold. Why is it so expensive? Because saffron is the stigma of the Spanish crocus and can only be harvested by hand. It takes over 8,000 flowers to make 3.5 ounces. Lots of work. Why do I have it? Because it has an amazing metallic/sweet taste that you just can’t get anywhere else. The next time Buddhist monks walk by in their yellow robes, the smell that follows them is saffron. That’s right, saffron is also a yellow dye for clothing. Guess what color it turns food!
Sage is a flowering plant that literally grows everywhere. Garden sage is native to Europe and Asia minor. Mountain sage grows in the mountains in the U.S. It has a woody flavor and goes great on poultry and pork.
Savory is related to both rosemary and thyme. It has a slightly salty, spicy flavor that is used as a salt substitute sometimes. It’s common in bean dishes as well as Italian dishes that need a little zest.
Star Anise is an eight-pointed spice that has the seeds of the Chinese anise plant which is a type of evergreen. Interestingly enough, though they taste similar, star anise and anise are not related at all. They were named as such because they both have the same licorice taste, though star anise is far less pronounced. It’s used in some very culturally sound Chinese dishes. It’s also really pretty to look at.
Tarragon is a leafy plant common to Europe. Who knew there were so many different herbs and spices that all taste like licorice? This one does too! Add that to the list.
Thyme has teeny tiny leaves on a wooden stem. It’s used extensively in Italian dishes as well as herbal oils and soaps. It has a slight lemony, peppery flavor. It goes great on chicken.
Vanilla is the fruit of the vanilla orchid. If you don’t know what vanilla smells like, go smell the bath aisle in your local store. Next to saffron, it’s probably the most expensive herb you’ll find. Instead of buying whole vanilla beans, which have a limited use, buy real vanilla extract. Though it’s slightly more expensive than artificial vanilla extract, there’s an amazing difference. Never taste raw vanilla extract, it’s awful.

Ok, I admit that I haven't covered every single herb and spice out there, but there are some that have such limited uses that, if I ever give you a recipe using them, I'll explain them there. I'm sure I've missed something you really love, and if I have, please let me know. I'll write a special entry just for you! Tweet to @cookingcheap

Techniques - Cutting Onions

2012-07-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

     Onions are one of those ingredients in recipes that make people cower in fear. First of all, they're a perfect sphere which makes a lot of people worried about the onion rocking in mid-cut and the knife slipping. Second, onion juice has sulfur in it, which when it evaporates irritates your eyes and causes them to water. That's why onions make you cry. The trick to onions is to cut them right, cut them fast, and cut them clean.
     First, I'm going to skip all the techniques out there for avoiding the tears when you cut onions. The truth of it is, those tears are your body's way of cleaning itself. If you didn't have those tears, your eyes couldn't clean themselves. You can try all of them and tell everyone what works for you in the comments section, but I've never found a great way that works for everyone. Besides, the technique where you cut onions underwater just seems unsafe!
     There are a few things I can tell you that will lessen your discomfort. First, if you chop onions with a non-serrated blade, it will lessen the amount of juices released which will also decrease the amount of sulfur gasses reaching your eyes. Make sure your knife is sharp. A dull blade will crush the onion and make more juice spray out. More juice = more gas = more tears. Finally, and this is very, very important, don't touch your face or eyes!!! If you put the juice on your face, the sulfur gas will reach your tear ducts much faster and make more tears. If you touch your eyes, you're going to tear up so badly you won't be able to cut safely.
     You'll notice that, the more you cut onions, the less you'll cry. That's because you'll learn to work with the onion much faster than you've been. The faster you work, the less time you spend with the sulfur gasses coming up to your tear ducts. It's just a benefit of practice. However, ever so often, you'll get an onion that's so strong that you'll have tears running down your face no matter what.
     So, let's get to peeling and cutting onions. This is one of those things I learned from a professional chef, came home and told my dad, and he said, "I've been telling you that for years." Oops. Well, I'm going to pass on the wisdom from my dad and a professional chef to cut your onions fast and easy.
   First, you're going to take the loose skin off your onion and throw it away. Then you're going to cut your onion in half.

Either way, it doesn't matter.

Then you're going to lay half of the onion, flat side down, on your cutting board and cut it into quarters. If you were making onion rings, these steps would be completely different, but since we're talking basic techniques, let's just talk about slicing and dicing this week. When you cut your quarters, there should be some of the root or tip on each piece, but only on one side.

Next, you're going to cut off the root or tip from one of these pieces.

Once the root or tip is removed, you'll be able to easily remove the paper-thin skin from the onion.

Now, here your method changes depending on what you're doing with the onion. If you're slicing the onion, simply set your knife and make cuts along the widest part of the onion.


Picture, courtesy of gracefulcuisine.com

However, I like dicing my onions because they cook faster. No one ever seems to notice if they're sliced or diced unless you're making fajitas. Dicing's a little more involved, but once you practice at it, it's simple.

First you're going to make cuts along the lines of your onion, don't cut all the way to the back. Leave a little bit of room so the onion stays together. Once you're used to it, you'll cut all the way through. If you want, leave the root end on for this part so you have a stop point.

Here's where I differ from every other chef in the world. I don't think there's any need to make a cut that's parallel to the cutting board. Literally every chef I've ever seen teach how to dice onions makes a cut that looks like this:

When they're dicing. I don't understand it - at all. For one, if you slip while you're making that cut, you are going to cut yourself horribly. For another, as I have experimented greatly with this, There is absolutely no difference in the final size of the cubes that you produce. Really, I've tried it so many times that I feel like I can say confidently that making a cut parallel to the cutting board will not produce a smaller dice.

Instead, you're going to turn your onion 90º and repeat the slicing motion you just performed until the whole thing is in cubes. Some stick together, but you can break them up really easily.

Telling it to you in words and pictures is really difficult, so I took the time, while I was making Ratatouille, to take some video of me cutting an onion. Hopefully, watching it will help you understand what's going on. It's 2 minutes long, but it includes the whole onion, so you can stop anytime you like.

Equipment - Cutting Boards

2012-07-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

     Right after you get yourself a good knife, you need to worry about maintaining it. The problem with knives, regardless of their quality, is that a knife will begin to go dull as soon as you start using it. The lower the quality, the faster it will go dull. There's an old saying that the most dangerous knife is a dull one, and it's true. A dull knife requires more pressure to go through the food and that excess pressure eventually leads to you slipping with the knife and cutting yourself.
     So, the next two weeks in equipment are dedicated to making sure that you have the proper tools to keep your knives sharp and safe. The first of these tools is a good cutting board. Cutting boards protect that razor-thin line of steel that makes your knife sharp from the hard surface that most likely makes up your cabinet tops. That said, I have cut on a cabinet before, but I also had access to an amazing sharpening tool.
     Cutting boards are made of a couple types of materials, all of which are softer than stone and metal. This is so your knife can press into the material instead of the material pressing into it. The less give a cutting board has, the more damage it does to your knife's edge. That being said, you don't want something so soft that your knife goes right through it. I've never seen a cutting board that did that, but I'm sure someone, somewhere has a horror story about it.
     Your two main materials for cutting boards are going to be wood and plastic. I've seen glass plates shaped like cutting boards, but I'm almost certain they're supposed to be decorative. When glass is pressed to hard it breaks. When it's pressed just hard enough to mar its surface, it creates glass dust which is kind of like sand. That sand will wear your blade down really fast.
Wood:
      Wood cutting boards are the proverbial favorites of chefs everywhere. They're beautiful, they're natural, they're long lasting, and they're way better for knives. However, they're also porous, hard to clean, and expensive. The website where I found that picture to the left right there sells that board for over $60. I'll admit that wood cutting boards can stay in the family for generations. In fact, I'd put money that there's a family somewhere using the same cutting board their Great Great Great Great Grandma used to cut vegetables in the covered wagon. If taken care of properly, a wood cutting board can last forever.
   Proper care is the key, though, because if improperly cared for, your board doesn't just become useless, it becomes dangerous. I'm seriously in amazement that my image searches for poorly taken care of cutting boards doesn't come up with anything like I've seen, but trust me, wood cutting boards can be scary. When wood gets really wet and is allowed to dry naturally, it cracks. When wood cracks, it opens up hollows in the wood and releases splinters that can get in your food. Hollows in the wood of a cutting board mean that you might not get all the raw chicken out of the board the next time you clean it. Honestly, I've studied microbiology long enough that the thought of the pores in wood absorbing salmonella today and depositing it on lettuce tomorrow is enough to scare me away from wood boards.
     However, if you're willing to spend the money on it and aren't nearly as educated about microbes as I (really, don't try, it's horrible), a wood board will meet your needs, if you take care of it. When you buy a new board, don't assume its already been seasoned or oiled. I typically don't assume that anyone's done anything to make my life easier, and I'm safer because of it. Go down to the drug store and buy some mineral oil. DO NOT USE VEGETABLE, OLIVE, OR ANY OTHER FOOD OIL. We use mineral oil because it has no proteins which can sour, or go rancid. Oiling a board with an oil that will later go rancid is as good as throwing it away
     Warm your oil slightly in the microwave for 10 to 15 second and then, with a soft rag or towel rub the oil into the wood slowly and with the grain of the wood.

The grain goes this way

Wait for the oil to soak in and repeat four or five times. This will fill in the pores of the wood and make it more bacterial resistant.
Once that's done, maintaining your wood cutting board isn't as hard as you think. Two main things to remember: never submerge it in water and never ever put it in the dishwasher. When you need to wash your cutting board, scrub it gently with soap and water, rinse it, and pat it dry. That will prevent cracking. If you've cut something like chicken or raw meat (most people suggest you just don't do that), wipe it down with some white vinegar to kill excess bacteria. Some people recommend using bleach on your wood board, but I don't. See, just like bacteria, bleach can soak into the pores of a board and possibly contaminate something later. I just like to prevent poison in my kitchen. Vinegar will also remove bad smells that might have stayed on your cutting board.
As often as once a week and as rarely as every six months, you'll have to reseason your cutting board as mentioned above. This keeps the bad stuff out of the pores and lessens your family's chance of getting sick. If your board ever cracks, there are dozens of resources on the internet about how to reseal it.
As with all your other items, this can be purchased used, but you want to be very, very, very careful when buying a wooden cutting board. As I said, you can keep these things forever, if they're properly maintained, but if they aren't you could end up getting sick or hurt. Check a cutting board for deep cracks that go all the way through it. Even though I mentioned resealing resources a second ago, you don't know how long that crack's been in that board or how much the family has worked to keep it clean. There's a chance that you're buying a board with a crack that's been building up bacteria for 5 years. Ask the seller when the last time it was seasoned then do it again when you get home.

Plastic:

Plastic cutting boards are my favorite thing in the world, for many reasons. First off, though they may not be as pretty as a wooden cutting board, they're inexpensive. That ad up there (click it, just for fun!) has plastic cutting boards for $16 a piece. That might seem like a lot, but it's at Sur La Table, a really expensive store, and they do that folding thing. Just think, for the price you paid for the wooden board I put up there, you could buy 3 of these with the tax. On the other hand, you could go to Wal-Mart and buy a 3-pack of different sized cutting boards for $13. They don't fold or anything like that, but they work.

Here are the pros of plastic boards: they're non-porous, they clean easily, they're cheap as heck, and I have yet to have to throw one away. There are even really thin cutting mats that look like cheap place mats that we have in our cabinets 4 years later. It's really hard to destroy these things.

The other thing I like about plastic cutting boards is that you can get them in more than one color. You may wonder why that's important, but it really is when you have more than one. See, when I make food, I'm often cutting meat and vegetables at the same time instead of cutting one, washing the cutting board, then cutting the other. The other day, I had my daughter tenderizing chicken while I cut vegetables. When you have those kinds of things going on in the same kitchen (I always recommend training your kids to help), you absolutely need more than one cutting board. When you have more than one cutting board, it's easier to keep track of them if you have more than one color.

See, you probably realize that you can't cut your salad vegetables on the same cutting board that you cut your chicken before you cooked it without washing them in between. What you may not realize is that the grooves that the knife leaves in your cutting board may not have been cleaned out by that quick scrub with soap and water that you gave the board between prep. To eliminate this problem, we have multiple cutting boards. I found this set of colored cutting boards at Ross for $20. It has 3 colored cutting boards, red, blue, and green, and a holder for them. This thing retails at $65. I call it a win.

When I cut my vegetables, I know that I used the red one (I'm supposed to use green, but that's the one I picked), so I know I can't cut my chicken on the red one, I have to use the green or blue. In OSHA approved kitchen, there's actually a full color-coded method to this, but my rule is to just not use the same color for two different types of food. You can pick up colored cutting boards just about anywhere nowadays.

The best thing about plastic is its ability to be washed. When I'm done with my cutting for dinner, I stick them in the dishwasher. The high temperatures of the dishwasher make it so no bacteria can survive. If you don't have a dishwasher, you can always put hot water in your sink and add a tiny bit of bleach to it for your cutting boards to soak in. Always make sure to rinse them off afterward.

No matter what cutting board you choose, you have to be comfortable with it. Make sure, if you find a cutting board at an estate sale that's got 1" long legs, that you'll be comfortable cutting on top of it. Heaven forbid you spend money on something you'll hate.

Planning - Sale Shopping

2012-07-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

     Every week, on Tuesday, my mailbox is filled with something that looks like this:
That would be the full ton of ads that appear at our house on a weekly basis. In there are ads for pool supply companies, furniture stores, and other stores in the area. If you dig through them and know what the names of your grocery stores, you can find the weekly specials on food in your area. The problem with sale shopping is that we usually end up spending more than we would have without the sales. That's what this post is dedicated to - making sure you actually save money when you shop using the ads.
     The problem I usually run into is that the ads always make me say, "Hey! We haven't had that in a while!" and I go get it. Though this seems innocent on the surface, the issue is that, if we haven't had it in a while (like six months), the reason was probably because we didn't need it. Why do I want to go out and buy something that we don't need just because it's on sale?
     Unfortunately, that's what the grocery stores are hoping to get you to do. They want you to go buy things you don't need or won't use because they were on sale. I will say that sales provide you a great opportunity to try new things, but only if they fit in your budget. They also provide you the ability to stock up on things you will use when they're on sale. The problem is finding the balance. So, this week, when you get the grocery ads, look through them and ask yourself these questions when you see something that draws your eye:

Do I need that?
Do I have it?
How much will I save?
How much will I spend to get it?

See, we tend to buy things we already have or that we don't need. For example, just because fruit roll-ups are on sale doesn't mean I need them. On the other hand, if I have 5 cans of carrots and the ad says they're 50¢ each if I buy 10, do I need that many? How much will I really save if I go get that $5 of canned foods? How far do I have to travel?
Let's look at each item in your grocery ads and figure it out. Some of my grocery ads say what the price usually is, but most of them say things like the circled part:

On the surface, that looks like a great deal. You could save up to $2! But wait, you have to buy 10 avocados to save that $2 which means you only save 20¢ on each one. I'm not saying it's not a good price on avocados, I'm saying you probably won't save what you think you will. Were you planning on making guacamole this week? Do you think you'd use more than 2 avocados for it? I know my family wouldn't, even if we were making it for the extended family. At the most we'd use 3 which is still a savings of 60¢, but it isn't the $2 the ad promises. The fact of it is, that you're usually not going to buy the quantities that the grocery ads advertise. I can't remember the last time I needed 10 boxes or cans of anything.
     The nice thing is, a lot of grocery stores have started getting away from you actually having to buy the ten items to get the sale price. The stores I shop at usually allow you to get a 10 for $10 item for $1 a piece instead of requiring you to buy 10 of them. This is really beneficial. However, you should know your local grocery stores, so you don't end up with 7 rotting avocados because they don't separate the price.
     There is one exception to this rule. One of my grocery stores has a special they run about once every 2 months that states "Save $5 when you buy 10!" The idea is that you buy 10 of the items they specify and you save 50¢ on each item. When they run these ads, they often have over 30 items to choose from. The problem is that I often need two or three of those 30 and I have to decide if I want to buy 5 of each to save my 50¢.
     Sale shopping is tricky that way. The money you spend this month is probably money you don't have to spend next month. For example, if your local store has a buy one get one free sale on ketchup and you're not out of ketchup yet, do you buy it so you don't have to get it in a month when you are out? Each sale is different, so you have to evaluate everything in your ads and decide if you're going to use it.
     Step 1 is to decide if you need what's on sale. If you're me, you're going to automatically decide you don't need anything that's premade or premixed. With few exceptions, eliminate your convenience foods and junk foods. Also eliminate anything you don't normally use or fresh foods you won't use this week. For example, if fresh broccoli is on sale and you're not planning on using it within the week, it's a waste of money to buy it. Frozen broccoli isn't so much.
     Step 2 is to see if you have what's on sale. Like my example with ketchup a moment ago, you have to go look and see if you have what you're looking at before you put it on your list. If your ketchup bottle is 3/4 full, don't go get two more unless you use a full bottle in a month. If, however, it's sitting upside down with 1/2 an inch of ketchup in it, go ahead and get your two bottles for the price of one and you won't have to worry about it for a while. The most common exception to this rule for me is canned food. If I have less than 10 cans of a vegetable, I'll probably replenish my stock when they go on sale, even if I only buy two cans each.
     Step 3 is to see how much you're going to save. After you do this for a while, you'll know what a good price is for an item you buy often. If I say to my dad, "What's a good price on chicken breasts?" He'll automatically respond with "$1.39 or less." If you're just starting out, look at the original price in the ad or how much it says you're saving.
     Step 4 is probably the one no one thinks about when they're making their list. How much are you going to spend to get the sale price? If every ad you have in your mailbox comes from a grocery store that's within 5 miles of you, you really don't have to worry about this. However, I have grocery ads from stores that are in excess of 10 miles away from me. I have to decide if the sale prices in those are worth the gas I'm going to spend to get there. The answer is usually no, but I hate to pay full price if I know it's on sale elsewhere.
     I've found a solution to this problem, at least where I live. See, I have a grocery store that most towns have that promises to match the prices from local grocery stores. I'll put money that you've got one of these stores nearby. I'll give you a hint, their stores are usually painted blue and grey and start with the letter W.
     The beauty of price matching stores is that I don't have to drive all over town to get the lowest prices. The problem is you have to know exactly what you're getting and for what price. You should probably also go on a day and time that isn't so busy because there's nothing worse standing behind someone who's saying "Those bananas are 88¢ a dozen at Safeway" for ever item in their cart. So, here's how to plan your shopping list, whether you're price matching or not:

Not price matching:
     Take your ads one at a time and pour over them like I've mentioned above and have a piece of paper nearby to write them down. Write the store's name at the top and then make your sale list under it. Organize your stores from farthest to nearest and go to them one at a time to get your sale items. Any items that aren't on sale should be purchased at the last store you go to so that perishables aren't sitting in your car. For that matter, this method is especially dangerous if you're buying perishables in multiple stores. I'll admit to taking vegetables and meat into a store that I need to get other items in. Make sure to take your receipt and keep your groceries in their original bags to prevent the greeter from questioning your honesty.

Price matching:
     This is the best thing to do if you have perishable goods on sale at 4 different stores. Really. You avoid having to go to the stores and take your food into each one or go home between each one. To do this, go through your ads like I mentioned before, but this time, write down the price of each item next to it and the store at which it's on sale. When you do this, you have to write down any brand names that might pertain to the item. For example, if Farmer John sausage links are on sale, you need to note the brand. If there's a specific size that's on sale, write that down too. This might seem like a lot of work, but it will save you a lot of time in the long run.
     When you go shopping, make sure you get what's on sale in the ads. If the sale item is the store brand for that store (Kroger, Fresh Select, etc.) the stores that match prices will usually substitute their store brand for those. The first time you do this, take your ads with you. That way, if your checker asks for proof of the sale price, you can show him or her. Put your items on the belt with your non-price match items first. That way, you're don't have to stop unloading your shopping basket to tell your checker what price is what. Have them written down clearly so you can say each item and its sale price. Make sure you can break down the price for the checker if you have to. For example if your Farmer John sausage is on sale 4 for $5 at Fry's, be sure you can tell the checker that the price per unit is $1.25. Sometimes, they need that help.
     When you do this the first time, be prepared to show the ads if you're asked. In fact, be prepared to do the same for the first few times. Eventually, you'll know whether the checkers at your price matching store are going to ask. I've never been asked once for the ad.

A War Against Convenience Food - Bread Part 2

2012-07-16T03:55:00.000-07:00

Last week, I sang the praises of homemade bread. I have since discovered there's a small pitfall to making my first loaves of bread in I don't remember how long. The loaves disappear like crazy! This is due to the fact that homemade bread simply tastes better than the store-bought kind. People who haven't thought about bread in years rave about the fresh bread in our house right now. The fact is that the loaves you'll make will be smaller yet still more dense and filling than what you're eating right now.
So, today, we'll go your method since we already talked about the ingredients last night. I'll mention that this recipe can be used for whole wheat bread if you substitute half of the all-purpose flour for whole wheat flour. It's also able to be used with bread flour in the same proportions. Like I said, when you get used to making bread, you'll probably want to learn to make others, but let's get used to it first.

Ingredient	Amount	Cost
Yeast	2 pkgs	$0.63*
Warm water	1 c.
Warm Milk	1 c.	$0.10*
Sugar	1/2 c.	$0.14*
Melted butter	1/2 c.	$0.22*
Eggs	2	$0.15*
All-purpose flour	6 - 7 c.	$0.64*
Total		$1.88
* Based on price per package divided by amount used.

This makes about 3 pounds of bread, which we made into 3 - 1 pound loaves. I'll mention that, because our loaf pans are smaller, that was equal to about one and a half store-bought loaves of bread. However, it's worth mentioning that a store-bought loaf weighs 14 ounces to be twice the length of my loaf pans. If I were to make a loaf the size of the ones on my grocer's shelves, it'd weigh 2 pounds. That should tell you how much more dense these loaves will be.
We made 5 pounds of flour worth of bread and came up with 9 loaves of bread, all in different shapes:

That ends up being about 62¢ a half loaf or $1.24 for the size you buy in the grocery store. Is that cheaper than the cheapest loaf you'll see? No. However, they're way cheaper than the average in my grocery stores. They're also a lot healthier. So, let's get down to how to make your bread.

1. Fill a mixing bowl with water that's approximately 115º F. Pour your yeast into the water, stir with a fork until it dissolves, and let it stand until it starts to bubble.

2. While your yeast sets, blend the warm milk, sugar, salt, butter, and eggs in a large mixing bowl. Mix these ingredients until the sugar and salt are completely dissolved.
3. Pour the yeast mixture into the mixing bowl.
4. Beat in 3 cups of flour until the mixture is fairly smooth.
5. Gradually stir in enough more flour to make a soft dough that pulls away from the bowl.

6. Knead the dough until it's smooth and satiny - about 8 to 10 minutes.

7. Place the dough into a greased bowl, cover it with a towel and set it in a warm spot until it doubles in bulk - about 45 minutes.

Our warm place is on top of our refrigerator. It's probably the best place to let your bread rise. Remember that heat rises, so the higher you can get your dough, the better it'll do.
8. Punch down and knead lightly 2 to 3 minutes on a floured cutting board or cabinet.

9. Allow the dough to rest for 10 to 15 minutes then form it into loaves.

Now, you'll notice that you don't necessarily need a loaf pan to to make bread. If you make your loaves properly, you come up with some beautiful round loaves. We also had a french loaf pan sitting around that we finally got to use.

10. Cover your pans and/or loaves with a towel and allow them to rise in the pan or on the board for another 30 minutes.

11. Bake in a 350ºF oven for 20 minutes or until the crusts are golden brown. When you knock on a loaf, it should sound hollow.

Let your bread cool and try it. Send me pictures of your attempts!

How did it go? What does it taste like? What other types of bread do you want to try? Tweet to @cookingcheap

Let's Talk About Salt

2012-07-15T12:00:00.000-07:00

The music embedded above is just a silly thing because that's what I hear in my head when I say "Let's talk about salt." That topic might have been great for Salt 'n' Pepa to sing about.

     Over the next three weeks, I'm going to talk about three items that are in every, single item you buy pre-made at the grocery store: salt, soy, and corn syrup. All three won't appear in every, single item, but at least one of those three will be in your convenience food that you've picked up, unless you've found a magical store that sells pre-made food without them. If you have, please share it with the class. The thing about these elements is that they aren't necessarily bad in small amounts, but in the amount we get, they're awful.
     Quick statement to cover my butt. Everything I say about this is my own opinion, even if I support it by scientific fact. You are not required, in any way, to agree with what I'm saying or to change what you're doing. I am simply going to pass on information as I understand it and you can make your own decisions about that information.
     First thing you should know - Salt is a vital mineral that your body requires to function properly. Sodium ions both monitor and control the absorption of water into your body's cells as well as making sure that the neurons in your muscles can send signals to one another. That means that, even if you could, you shouldn't eliminate salt from your diet completely.
     Unfortunately, the companies that make our food have made that decision for us. If you ever look at a nutrition label and this section:

has more than 0 mg in it, your food probably has added salt. Double check the ingredients to make sure. The FDA recommends about 6 g per day for a person's intake, but some doctors are now saying you can get by on 50 to 100 mg of salt per day. That's not a while lot. To put it in perspective, 1 teaspoon of salt weighs over 5500 mg. That means, you probably need less than 1/8 tsp of salt in your daily diet and not more than 1 tsp. That's not very much! Most people think they need a lot more.
     So, what's so bad about salt? Nothing, until you take in too much. When you take in too much salt, you run the risk of developing a case of hypernatremia which translates into "too much salt in your blood." In this situation, your kidneys can no longer cope because you now have more salt than water in their blood. This is the result of dehydration.
    In the long term, hypernatremia causes high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke and osteoporosis. This is because, when your sodium levels are too high, they get too good at transferring water out of your cells If your cells can't absorb liquid, they can't take in calcium for your bones, and if they don't have enough water, it becomes difficult to push your blood through your body.

My boyfriend would have me say that that means that you shouldn't put any salt in your food, but I disagree. I think it means you just need to know what you're doing. We have salt in our kitchen. It looks like this:

If you're not sure, that's a earthenware crock filled with kosher salt. It holds about a pound of salt. We use kosher salt because its coarse grind dissolves so much easier than typical salt. Why do we keep it loose instead of in shakers? Because we know exactly how much we are using. When you grab a pinch of salt, you know how much you've grabbed. If you use a salt shaker, you can't always see it coming out, and you might end up using more than you intended. In that case, sprinkle the salt over your hand then put it in the food from your hand.
     My biggest way to reduce the salt in your diet is to stop buying processed foods. You probably don't even realize what's in them when you buy. I also don't particularly like putting a salt shaker on the table, but I usually get outvoted by others who live in the house. Someday, I'll get to make that call and we won't have one. Don't let your kids add salt. They're usually doing it because they see you or your spouse doing the same, not because they actually need it. Do them a favor and let them learn how food tastes, and maybe they won't need to add salt later in life.
    When you're preparing food, make sure you know what ingredients have salt in them and adjust your added salt appropriately. For example, butter comes in salted and unsalted. If you're using salted butter, don't add salt to your recipe. The same goes for pretty much every kind of cheese as you need salt to get it to turn from milk to cheese.
    The point of this post is to make you aware of what you need and what you're eating. There's a good chance that you're taking in more salt than you need to, and if you are, your kids are. Consider what that means for everyone's health and change your cooking appropriately.

Your weekly frugal recipe - Ratatouille

2012-07-14T13:03:00.000-07:00

Ratatouille

The Food Stamp Way

Skills	Prep	Cook

What do these meters mean?

This recipe suggestion comes from someone I have literally known all my life. Seriously, we met in kindergarten! When she started reading my blog, this was what she suggested as one of her favorite recipes. As luck would have it, our local organic food store, Sprouts, put every fresh ingredient on sale the next week. I served this over whole wheat pasta to make it stretch more. By stretch, I mean that we could have served 12 easily once everything was done. That reminds me, we're having leftovers tonight...

Equipment you'll need
Skillet, knife, cutting board, baking pan

Serves 10

Ingredient	Amount	Cost
Olive oil	2 Tbsp	$0.42*
Garlic cloves, minced	3	$0.05*
Parsley, minced	1/4 c.	$0.11*
Eggplant	1	$1.98
Parmesan, grated	1 c.	$1.91*
Zucchini	2	$0.67
Mushrooms	2 c.	$1.68
Bell pepper	1	$0.50
Tomatoes	2	$1.98
Jar of pasta sauce	1	$1.00
Total		$10.80
* Based on price per package divided by amount used.

Price per plate =$1.08 Notes about ingredients:

Really, use olive oil for this. It'll make everything better

I buy garlic pre-minced in oil and keep in the fridge (to prevent botulism). Then I just take a spoonful out with which to cook.

If your store has small eggplants, buy 2.

I found one huge tomato and only bought it instead of 2

If parmesan's too expensive, try mozzarella

Prep Instructions:

Square off your eggplant and cut it into slices

Place the slices into a pan in a single layer and sprinkle them with salt (preferably kosher, but any will work). Allow it to sit while you finish the rest of the prep.

Slice your zucchini and mushrooms.

Cut the bell pepper in half, remove the seeds and slice it.

Dice your tomato(es) and onion.

Once you've completed your prep (it'll take about 30 minutes), your eggplant will have sweated out all its bitter juices. Rinse each slice or wipe it down with a paper towel to remove the juice and salt.


The juice left in the pan

Cut the slices into cubes.

Instructions:

1. Preheat your oven to 350º F
2. Heat the olive oil in a skillet. Sauté the garlic until it's very slightly brown then add the eggplant cubes and parsley. Sauté until the eggplant is soft, about 10 minutes.
3. Coat the bottom of your baking dish with pasta sauce.

4. Cover the sauce with your sautéd eggplant and sprinkle cheese over it

5. Cover the eggplant with zucchini slices and sprinkle cheese over them.

6. Cover the zucchini with mushrooms and onions and sprinkle cheese over them.

7. Cover the onions with tomatoes and sprinkle cheese over them.

8. Top the tomatoes with bell pepper slices.

9. Bake for 45 minutes in the 350º oven. Spoon the hot dish over pasta and serve.

We're philistines here, and nothing survives on our table without some meat in it, so we cut up some chicken sausage and put it on top.

What recipe would you like done the food stamp way? Comments? Questions? Tweet to @cookingcheap

Luxuries Part 4 - Spices 2

2012-07-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

It's spice time again! After looking over all the herbs and spices that are possible to put in your cabinets, I decided to break them into three smaller posts so you wouldn't have to read them all at once. Besides, there are plenty in each post that you can think about. If you break your spice buying into several weeks, it'll go more smoothly. I've found that there are some grocery stores that sell some of their spices for $1. If you read a spice here that you think would work with your cooking style and you see a bottle for a dollar, you should probably pick it up. You won't need to worry about having back ups until you know what you tend to run out of quickly, and even then, you don't generally run out in the middle of a recipe. There are a couple of herbs and spices of which I've gotten the larger bottles so I can refill when I need them, but you probably won't need that for a while.

Cumin is the ground seed of a flowering plant in the parsley family native to the Mediterranean region. It dates back to at least the second century B.C. and is even mentioned twice in the Bible (Isaiah 28:27 and Matthew 23:23). It has a flavor and taste that is impossible to describe. Though it’s used in almost every culture’s foods, it’s very common in Hispanic and Middle Eastern foods. I’d get a tiny bit and try it for yourself, but I adore the flavor of cumin.
Curry isn’t a spice. It’s more of a group of Indian dishes that involve a very specific mix of spices in very delicate ratios. However, I can’t take the time to make my own curry mixes, so I cheat and use commercially available curry powder. Curry powder is usually yellow because there’s a large amount of tumeric in them. They provide a very authentic Indian taste while not being spicy (usually) or requiring you to mix your own spices.
Dill Weed is a flowering plant in the Mediterranean and Russian areas. It gives your dill pickles their flavor. Dill doesn’t have that many culinary applications. In fact, most people only ever use it to mix into sour cream and make dip. I can’t think of a reason you’d need it otherwise.
Fennel is the bulb end of a flowering plant in the Mediterranean region. It has a strong licorice taste and is sold in bulb, leaf, and seeds varieties. I don’t like fennel because I don’t like licorice. If you like licorice, you’ll like it.
Fenugreek is a plant that comes from the Middle East and Asia. Fenugreek seeds are used in the preparation of pickles while the dried leaves are used widely in Indian and Ethiopian cuisine. I’ve racked my brain and can’t remember that I’ve ever used this one.
Garlic is the best thing to ever make the spice trade. Native to Europe, it’s a member of the onion family with a deeper flavor. You can buy it in whole cloves, pre-minced in oil, and dried in flakes, powder, salt, pepper, etc. I personally prefer to buy pre-minced in oil and keep it in my fridge. That stuff stays good forever, as long as it’s refrigerated. However, garlic powder doesn’t take up that much room in your cabinet either. Your preference – your choice.
Ginger is the root of a plan native to South Asia but it also grows in the Caribbean. It’s sold fresh, powdered, candied, and pickled. Eating straight ginger will appear spicy, but it’s also a great stomach calmer. Ginger is used, almost exclusively in Asian dishes, but if you ever make real gingerbread, you’ll need it.
Lemongrass is a general name for about 55 different types of grasses. As you might have guessed, they have a lemony flavor to them. It’s generally used in south Asian dishes.
Mace is not an incredibly spicy herb, regardless of the pepper spray by that name. In reality, mace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed. As such, it has a very, very strong version of the nutmeg taste and costs about twice as much. I have successfully substituted twice as much nutmeg for mace in the past.
Mint is probably the most versatile of any of the herbs listed here. There are peppermint, spearmint, winterfresh mint, and others who all lend their name to different types of gum. Mint tastes just like its name and is excellent in some teas as well as a rub for fishes and a dip for lamb. I like fresh mint, but it is available dried.
Mustard is the yellow spice that both flavors and gives color to the condiment. You can buy the seeds ground or whole. The whole seeds are those neat round pebbles in bread and butter pickles. I have a cool recipe that uses ground mustard as part of a rub. It gives a unique taste to the meat you use it on. However, most people don’t need this to start out with.
Nutmeg is the nut of a tree that grows in Indonesia. As such, if people in your family have tree nut allergies – do not use nutmeg!!! I’m serious; I accidentally served a nutmeg dish to a friend who had to use his EpiPen because of it. It made me feel awful and I’ve never made the same mistake again. Nutmeg has long been considered good luck and has a flavor that’s great in cookies and tarts. In fact, there was a time that you could buy an entire American plantation for three or four whole nutmeg nuts. If you don’t use nutmeg a lot, buy a whole nutmeg and grate it when you need it. It’ll hold its flavor much better. If you’ve watched Good Eats with Alton Brown, you’ve probably seen him do that.

Techniques - Slicing and Mincing

2012-07-12T12:00:00.000-07:00

You won't slice and mince things as often as you'll dice them, but these cuts are common enough to warrant a mention. Both of them are pretty easy. In fact, mincing is so easy that I taught my daughter how to do it. Granted, when she minces parsley, she gets a little over zealous and ends up with parsley powder on the cutting board. We'll start with slicing because you've already done that motion.
Remember that video I posted with me dicing the carrots? Slicing isn't really that much different. You use the same motion I used to change the sticks into cubes, but you don't cut the section into sticks first, nor do you have to square it off, if you don't mind the peel. In this video, the gentleman picks up his knife after every single cut, but he still does a great job of what we call "slicing on the bias."

Slicing on the bias is when you cut the vegetable or bread at an angle before you start slicing. Then you continue to cut at the same angle all the way down. When you start slicing, your slices will be fairly thick. As you get used to it, you'll make thinner slices. Don't feel like you need to cut on the bias at the beginning, just get used to making even cuts down the length of your vegetable. Then you can try the tricky cuts.

Mincing is one of those things that professional chefs argue about how to do properly. I've seen chefs who mince by picking their knife up off the cutting board between every single strike. It makes a lot of noise and a lot of mess but is really flashy, but in my experience, it also dulls your knifes really quickly. The method I use lets you keep your mess contained while being quiet and not providing you opportunity to accidentally cut off your fingers. First, you'll want to cut your vegetables, fruits, or herbs into smaller pieces. Then using the flat of your knife sweep them into a pile (using the blade dulls your knife). Then, hold the tip of your knife and rock the blade over your pile. When you've gone over the pile, sweep it up and do it again in a different direction. Do this three or four times until you have a fine pile of what you started with. Here's me doing it. You don't have to watch the entire 2 minutes; I think you'll get it pretty quickly:

Equipment - Knives 2

2012-07-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

So, we talked about the different parts of knives last week and what you need to look for in a good knife. This week, I'm going to talk about the different types of knives that are out there and which ones you really need. Please note that the pictures I'm going to post are going to be mostly non-serrated blades because that's what I prefer. However, the rules still apply if you want a serrated set, and I'll think no less of you for having them. The truth of the matter is that you really don't need a whole bunch of different knives to cook well. I have a really nice set because I got several when I went to culinary school, and my dad has his collection from a whole life's work. We've never broken a knife and we've never gotten rid of one.

Chef's knives are also called French knives or kitchen knives. It kind of depends to whom you're talking. No matter what the name, it's the same knife. Most chef knives are either 6 or 8 inches from the tip of the blade to the end of the handle, but they can be as long as 12 inches. Chef knives are the one knife you absolutely, positively need. If you can't get any other knife, go get one of these. You'll use them to chop vegetables, mince herbs, and slice meat. They can also be used for virtually any other purpose, even if I mention it as a specialty knife later. Above this entry are three different types of chef knives. The top one has a typical blade which is either French or German depending on where the chef that names it is from. The others have Asian blades. Specifically, the bottom is a Santoku blade, which I already mentioned. I recommend a French or German-shaped blade. They allow the blade to rock while you cut. Remember when I mentioned that you should leave the tip of your knife on the cutting board when you cut? That shape of knife will make it easier.

Boning knives are, surprise surprise, for taking the bones out of meat. They've got longer, flexible blades that curve nicely at the tip. These blades allow you to get right up to the bone and cut right along it, pulling the meat off neatly. However, because it's used less, mine stays sharper longer, so I also use it for the slicing tasks that require an ultra sharp blade, such as slicing tomatoes. These aren't really that necessary, if you're not going to be deboning many different things. You can do that with a chef knife too, but it won't be as clean. Similar to this, but slightly different is the filet knife which is specifically for fish. I have less use for a filet knife than a boning knife; you probably will too.

Paring knives are small versions of chef knives even though their blades aren't bigger than the handle. Paring knives are really just tiny versions. In fact they're 3 to 5 inches long. They're great for peeling fruit and cutting small items like strawberries. If you're really good, you can carve roses out of tomatoes and neat things from watermelons and pumpkins. However, if you have a peeler, you don't need this - and you really just should get a peeler. They're way easier to use.

Welcome to the serrated knife in my kitchen. Bread knives are always serrated because they need their teeth to break through the crust of bread. There is no substitute for a good bread knife, because your chef knife will just crush your bread. However, if you're not baking bread (shame on you!), you really don't need one of these until you are.

The best thing about these types of knives is that, many times you can find them all in a good knife set. However, good knife sets are hard to come by, and even harder to buy on a budget. The ones that come with a knife block are the best because you don't have to worry about where you're going to store them all. On the other side, I see chefs knives by themselves in almost every grocery store I visit. Heck, I saw one for $25 in a restaurant supply store today. Make sure the knife is comfortable in your hand and isn't so light it'll fly around the kitchen if you let it go by accident.

Planning - Protein

2012-07-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

     There's no denying that the most expensive part of your food budget will be your proteins. It doesn't matter if your family is vegetarian, white meat only, kosher, halal, or has no dietary restrictions, protein is freakin expensive. The problem is that none of us can survive without protein. You have to have some form of it to make sure your muscles function properly and can heal from injuries.
   The issue with protein is that small amounts aren't usually on sale. In fact, the larger the amount, the less it tends to be per pound. You'll notice, if you look, that a pound of 80/20 hamburger might be $3.83 a pound, but 5 lbs might be $15 even and 10 lbs are $25. That's a good amount of savings, but then you wonder if you'll use all of it because it might go bad. The more you buy, the more you save, but the more you buy, the more potential you have for waste.
      So, how do we meet our budget and get all the protein we'll need at the same time? The same way we get anything else within our budget. We plan exactly what we want and need. I've heard of some techniques that will help you in this endeavor. I hope they help:
1. Buy by the week
      If you have a very small freezer, you're going to have to shop week-to-week. That means, when you make your shopping list, you'll figure out exactly how much meat you'll need for the week's food and buy as close to that amount as possible. There are exceptions to this rule like when your local store has a sale on chicken breasts for 97¢ a pound, but you have to really consider the amount of room you have to freeze them. I suggest buying week-to-week for most people who are just starting out in the cooking realm as well as those with small freezer. If you keep pork chops in your fridge for more than a week at a time, they'll start to go green, and that's gross.
2. Buy for the month
     The typical fridge/freezer combo that comes in most low-income rentals is a top-freezer like this:

     Once you get all the hot pockets and TV dinners out of that freezer, it's got more than enough room to hold a month's worth of meat in it, easily. Heck, you can probably hold two months of meat, if you don't have bags of beef broth stuffed in there. But we all have neat things packed into our freezer because they were on sale. Ergo, you can buy several pounds of every type of protein you use and freeze it. When I buy chicken for the month, I consider that we eat about a pound a meal at least twice a week. That's 8 to 10 pounds. The same goes for our beef and pork purchases. However, you have to decide what you're going to feed your family. If you don't eat certain types of protein, you have to choose enough to feed your family for the month. The thing about this method is that you can use sales to your advantage to get the most for your money. If you can get 10 lbs of chicken for $10 it's better than 5 lbs for $15, so get it. When you get home, you'll need to freeze them, but if you wait until after method 3, I'm going to go over how to do that.
3. Buy in bulk
     I really don't suggest this unless you have an excess of money for some reason. For example, you got a back payment on your benefits or you put some of your tax refund to do this three or four times during the year. Even if you have that situation, don't buy in bulk unless you have a great deal going. I'm going to go over sale shopping next week, so just be patient on that one.
     Buying in bulk is kind of the advanced meal planner's game. The one you play after you've gotten really good at knowing how much your family eats each week, what you need, and what it costs you on average. Seriously, you'll probably need to consistently plan your meals for at least six months before you get the hang of this. Then you can start sale shopping for the best deals you can find and buying three or four months of what's on sale at a time. I can't tell you what a good deal is for your area, but I'm sure, after looking around for a while, you'll be able to tell.
     Bulk buying will only work for you if you have a freezer solely for keeping your stock of meat in it. Whether that's an upright freezer or a deep freeze, you have to have a dedicated freezer. The top-freezer won't work, the french door freezer is closer, but it still won't work. Find a freezer on Craigslist before you consider bulk buying.

     Okay, so at this point, you're probably ready to buy for a month or more at a time, but the question might be "how do I store it?" If you've ever taken the Styrofoam packaging from the meat section of your grocery store and tossed it in your freezer, you've probably dealt with the result that requires a hammer, a chainsaw, and tears. Don't freeze things in the container they came in. You always end up trying to cook the spongy thing that's meant to soak up the blood of the meat or the Styrofoam itself. If you've never done this, I'll ruin surprise - that stuff does not taste good.
     There are two options that are dependent on how much you bought and how much your family uses at a time. Note: These are only good if you bought them fresh rather than frozen. If you bought frozen, just toss them in the freezer the way you bought them. There's nothing wrong with pre-frozen, but I'm going to talk about that later.
     The first option you have is to freeze it all at once. To do this, you need a lot of space to start out with. Let's use chicken breasts as an example because it's rare that someone who eats meat doesn't eat chicken. If you just bought 20 pounds of chicken breasts, take them home and open up the packaging in which they came. Take them, one at a time, and put them in a gallon, zippered storage bag that says "freezer" on the label. Put them in individually so that you're sure you have one layer and one layer only. Lay your gallon bag on a cookie sheet (that's important) and put your chicken breasts down at the bottom. Spread them out so that they're touching, but not smooshed (that's a technical term) together. Once your bag has a full level, press all the air out of the bag and zip it closed. Put your cookie sheet in the freezer, making sure to keep it level. If you have more meat to freeze, repeat the process and put the second cookie sheet on top of the first bag to freeze. Leave it there until you can knock on the chicken and they're hard. Then, you take them off their cookie sheet and put them in the freezer without it. If you've done it correctly, they'll have formed their own solid base that will allow them to rest evenly and levelly in your freezer. This is the exact same process you should use for pork chops and beef cutlets. However, if you are freezing ground beef or any other kind of ground meat, divide it into 1 lb portions to freeze in blocks that are, again barely touching in the bag.
     If you're freezing all your protein at once, you make sure they're barely touching so that you can break out portions a little at a time. That's why you separate your ground meats into one pound blocks. That way, you can pull one or two pounds out to make dinner and leave the rest in the bag.
     Your second option, of course, is to freeze your meat in single portion sizes. This is especially useful if you know your family and what you usually use. For example, a family of four usually uses 2 chicken breasts per meal. If you want to freeze in single portions, you'll need to choose how to do so. I'm a fan of quart-sized, zippered freezer bags. That's because, if I ever really need to, I can always wash a zippered bag and put something else in it. However, you can also use plastic wrap, if you wrap it really, really tightly. I will say that if you aren't very good with plastic wrap, use the zipper bags. They're easy to get your food in without extra air that will cause freezer burn. So, freezing single portions isn't that much different from freezing full amounts, with one exception - you're making smaller bag. So, again with the chicken breasts, take two chicken breasts and push them into your zipper bag. The fit will be tight, but as long as you get it closed, it won't matter. Put each of the bags on the cookie sheet and slide it in the freezer once it's full. Again, if you have more than a cookie sheet's worth, put the second sheet on top of the first and let them all freeze at once.
     The benefit of this method is that, once you know what you're making for dinner (yay for that meal planning!), you can take your portion out of the freezer before you leave for work in the morning. Put it in your refrigerator and walk out the door. You then have defrosted meat when you get home, and you can get right to it.
   The internet informs me that you can freeze tofu. I don't eat soy products, so I wouldn't know the first thing about it. If you're interested in writing an article about how to properly freeze tofu, please email it to fairefaerie.gourmet@blogger.com If it's good, I will totally post it and give you credit!

     Now for a little bit of quality control. Before you put any of your protein into freezer bags, label them with a permanent marker as to what type of meat, what type of cut, and on what date you're freezing them. Do this because, after 2 months, frozen chicken and frozen pork start to look a lot a like. Besides, if you don't label them, you might not be able to know the difference between chicken breasts and chicken thighs that you have sitting next to each other. You put the date on it so that, when the same meat goes on sale in two months, you know to use the stuff you froze in July before the stuff from September. You do that so that you don't run into the dreaded freezer burn that comes from having too much air in contact with your food for too long. That's why we press all the air out before we freeze it!

What do you freeze the most of? Questions? Comments? Tweet to @cookingcheap

A War Against Convenience Foods - Bread

2012-07-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

     I started this post assuming that you couldn't make a loaf of bread for less than you can buy it in your grocery store. After doing the math for a batch of bread (recipe follows, of course), I realized that, unless you're looking at the generic brand in the dollar store, you can make a loaf of bread for the same price as the least expensive brand on your grocery store's shelf. However, it'll be about 3/4 of the length. But there's a good reason that you can't. Have you ever heard that you can take a loaf of Wonder Bread and smash it down to the size of your fist? Surprisingly, I can't find a single clip of someone doing it on YouTube (if you can, please comment with a link).
     The interesting thing, is that it isn't Wonder Bread specifically, it's just what the legend grew up around. You say that about a name brand and people pay attention, but if you say it's possible with almost any loaf of bread and it's no longer impressive. The fact is, that you can smash almost any loaf of bread that comes off of your grocery store shelves down to almost nothing. I wouldn't suggest doing it unless you can get a loaf of bread for 100% free, but if you've ever dropped your mayonnaise on the bread, you know what I'm talking about.
     Why can you do that? Because sliced bread is pumped full of air to make it lighter and fluffier and cheaper for the manufacturer. The benefit of light, fluffy bread is that kids love the stuff. Unfortunately, it's also packed with things we don't really want in our kids' bodies, much less our own. A brief search of the internet returns these as the ingredients in Wonder Bread, but you should know they're pretty similar to almost anything you're going to find on the shelves at your local grocery store:

Wonder Bread
Whole wheat flour, water, wheat gluten, high fructose corn syrup, contains 2% of less of: soybean oil, salt, molasses, yeast, mono and diglycerides, exthoxylated mono and diglycerides, dough conditioners (sodium stearoyl lactylate, calcium iodate, calcium dioxide), datem, calcium sulfate, vinegar, yeast nutrient (ammonium sulfate), extracts of malted barley and corn, dicalcium phosphate, diammonium phosphate, calcium propionate (to retain freshness).

     My basic bread recipe has flour, sugar (small amounts), butter, yeast, salt, and eggs. In short, I'm skipping the high fructose corn syrup, soybean oil, and all those chemically sounding ingredients that most of us don't know what they are. Besides that, I get the amazing smell of fresh cooked bread filling the house. There are very few things that smell that good.
      Ok, I'll admit that bread takes a long time. From start to finish our recipe took about 3 hours to make 10 loaves of bread. However, if you're not used to making bread, don't make more than 2 or 3 at a time. The recipe next week makes just that many.
   If you're working long hours or holding multiple jobs, you might feel like you never have time, but everyone gets a day off now and again. If you go out and buy a 5 lb bags of flour, you can make 10 loaves in a little more time than it takes to make the three in the recipe. Then you take your finished loaves, wrap all but one in aluminum foil and saran wrap and stick them in the freezer. When the loaf you're using is almost gone, pop one out of the freezer and let it defrost while you're at work.
     Homemade bread is different than what you're used to. It feels different in your mouth and it tastes very different than the stuff you pulled off your grocer's shelves. It's thicker; it's denser, and it'll fill you up a lot quicker than the stuff that's full of air. That means, if you're sending your son to school with a tuna fish sandwich, the one on homemade bread will keep him full longer than the one on supermarket brand bread. The same goes for that lunch you're making for yourself. No longer do you have to worry about being hungry an hour after lunch.
     So, I went down to my grocery store and priced out a typical loaf of white or wheat bread. I'm not pricing in the sourdough, rye, or seven-grain you find at the market because we're not making that kind. You'll notice that those types of bread weigh a lot more than your loaf of white bread. I think you'll find that the loaves we make are going to be closer to the "special" breads than the regular.
     My store has a generic brand that costs as little as $0.98 and the most expensive brand of typical bread cost $4.49 for a loaf. If I average out all the different brands, I get $2.68 as the average price of bread here in Arizona. Now let's talk about making our own bread and price it out.
     My dad and I prefer to make bread with our hands. There are a couple reasons for this, but the most important is that you get to feel the bread. As my pastry chef once said, "God gave us the best whisks at the ends of our arms." He could literally whip a meringue with his bare hands too, but we're talking about bread. Raw bread dough feels so wonderful under my hands that I can't imagine making small batches in a mixer.
     However, you can put it in a mixer and let it mix if you don't want to get your hands messy. Just make sure your mixer has a dough hook attachment. In older machines, those look like corkscrews and in new ones, they look like, well, hooks.

The reason you need a dough hook is because the usual beaters for your mixer will get stuck in the thick dough that bread requires. Seriously, if you don't have a dough hook for your mixer, mix it by hand because you'll burn out the mixer motor if you use beaters or a paddle.
Before you start, there are several parts of bread to consider, so instead of having a "Notes about ingredients" section, I'm going to discuss each ingredient that you might have questions about before we get to the recipe and method section next week.

Warm water might not seem like something you have to worry about, but surprisingly, you have to have the proper temperature of water to activate your yeast. On the back of my yeast packet, it lined out the temperatures you need to know:

105º-115º yeast directly into the liquid
120º-130º mix liquid into dry ingredients then add yeast

Now, you might not know how hot your water is because you might not have a thermometer in your kitchen. Here's a hint at a future equipment entry: Go get one! I mean, I'm assuming you haven't gone and gotten all your bread ingredients yet, so just grab one in the cookware aisle when you do. If you can, get a digital one. It will make your life better in the long run.

The thing about yeast is that it's a living organism. To be technical, it's eukaryote, or a cellular organism with a nucleus which is similar to fungi (I'm still a Science major at heart). When you add it to warm water, it wakes up, but if you add it to water that's too hot, it dies and does nothing. For the 1/2 c. of water in this recipe, heat it in your microwave for about 10 to 15 seconds. If it's over 115, let it cool for a while until it is.

Yeast makes your bread rise. After you activate it, you add it to sugar. When yeast eats sugar, it releases CO₂ bubbles. Those bubbles are what make your bread puff up. When you go to buy your ingredients you'll probably see at least two different brands. The most common are Fleischmann and Red Star, and they come in either jars or packets. Some people swear by one or another, but honestly, I go by price. When you're buying ingredients for your first recipe of bread, I highly recommend buying the packets. That's because yeast does go bad after a while, and the jars are more expensive for a single recipe. If you find yourself making bread over and over again, buy the jar and keep it in your fridge.

Flour is probably the most difficult choice you'll have to make in the process of bread making. There are so many questions you might ask yourself when you're in the baking aisle looking at five or six different brands of flours and the four or five types of flour they each have. Depending on your store there's whole wheat flour, naturally white flour, all purpose flour, rye flour, bread flour, not to mention the cake and pastry flour that you're going to ignore for bread making. Simple choice, for your first few attempts at homemade bread, use all purpose flour. All purpose flour is, just that, for all purposes. That means that you can use it for literally everything. It's also a lot less expensive than all the other kinds and it comes in generic brands. When you get the bread making down, you can start experimenting with other kinds of flour, but you're probably always going to want all purpose around when you're baking.

Butter is one of those things you keep hoping you can substitute. You can make your bread with canola oil, but it will taste much better with butter. Not margarine - butter. Use unsalted butter because you're already adding salt to this recipe, and you don't want to have too much salt in anything, especially bread.

Pans are probably right after flour in the high stress area when people start thinking about making bread. Here's a spoiler for you - you don't actually need a pan to bake bread. In fact, when you see the pictures we'll post next week, you'll see a full range of shaped loaves and loaves that were put in pans. If you don't have a loaf pan, you can just shape the loaf and put it on a cookie sheet, or heck, the oven rack. Just make sure you put some non-stick cooking spray on whatever you bake your bread on.

I was going to do this all in one week, but the process of making bread is long and has a ton of pictures included. Ergo, I'll post the recipe and method next week so that you can see each part of it. Goodness my house smells good right now.

What's your favorite bread? How did making it go? Questions? Comments?

Tweet to @cookingcheap

Sneaking Nutrition

2012-07-08T11:40:00.000-07:00

     I am blessed. My daughter is not a picky eater. I'm really not sure if that's because of how I raised her or because I'm just lucky like that. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that picky eaters are a mix of nature and nurture - not one or the other. There are some kids that I've met whose parents don't give in to their demands and are still little hellions when it comes to eating dinner. I've also met the parents that just give them whatever they like, whenever they like and then complain that their kids are picky eaters.
     So, let's assume that picky eating can be due to nature or to giving in to kids' demands. If your kids are picky, I'm sure it's because of their nature. Regardless, you still need them to eat healthfully, so you'll need to adjust your parenting style a little too. Like I said, two weeks ago, your kids will eat when they're hungry. If they're willful, they might need to be a little hungrier than if they weren't, but they will eventually eat. Before Child Protective Services comes knocking on my door (which would indicate that this blog's gotten a lot more attention than I thought), I want to be clear that I'm not advocating starving your children. However, I am saying that you can't let their food preferences hold you hostage.
     I've heard people who are closed-minded about food tell me time and time again, "If my parents had had the same attitude as yours, I would have starved." I tell them the same thing I'll tell you. No. They wouldn't. Deep down, we are all anthropologically programmed to survive. Never is that animalistic instinct more intact than during childhood. Sure, they don't have any logic circuits yet which makes them take weird risks. However, they still have an instinct to survive. Regardless of your views of how humans got to the top of the food chain and got to wear the clothes, we certainly didn't do it by refusing to eat something because it was different.
     Here's help from the Science point of view. It takes at least 3 weeks of no nutritional value for someone to starve to death. That's a long time! That also means that if your child refuses to eat your tuna casserole tonight, she's gonna be ok. She'll be ok because the next morning, you'll give her breakfast just like any other morning and life will continue as normal.
     So, what do we do with picky kids to get them to eat the things they need? I have a few tips I've compiled from the internet and people who have dealt with picky kids, but I'd be glad to do a supplement with your tips and tricks later. Let's start with what you need to know and expect from your child:

Be realistic. Your four-year-old is not going to be able to eat the same amount of food as you. Their tummies are tiny; therefore, their portions should be too. When you're measuring out food for your kids keep this in mind: A piece of protein should be the size of their palm; carbohydrates should be about the size of their closed fist, and they can eat as many vegetables as they want (but only give them a quarter of what you gave yourself).
Don't bribe them. I would hazard a guess that every overweight person in this country has a bad relationship with food for one reason or another. Break that cycle right now and don't give your kids rewards or punishments for eating or not eating their food. For example, cleaning their plate should no longer result in dessert or Xbox time or a movie next weekend. Food should be eaten because it's nutritious. If they don't eat it, they go hungry, but they don't have to watch their siblings eat dessert while they do it.
Cut out snacks. It's fine to have a half peanut butter sandwich ready when your son comes home from school, but it's not fine to have the half peanut butter sandwich as well as an open bag of chips, fruit roll ups, and Coke sitting around waiting for him to eat whatever, whenever. Leaving easy, unhealthy snacks lying around makes it so he doesn't have to eat dinner. He can just fill up on junk then claim he's not hungry. My daughter is a huge snacker/food stealer. We've had to put anything she might try to sneak up in the cabinets where she can't reach it as well as putting the step stool where she has to move things to get at it. The second we did that, though, she started eating better at dinner.
Remove dessert for a while. I just heard children cry out in pain as I typed that. I really don't think dessert has to be a part of your everyday routine, and if it is now, it's probably a leverage factor for your kids. If you're not serving dessert, you don't have some kids getting dessert and some not because of a refusal to eat. Regardless of political views, I have to say Michelle Obama's method of restricting dessert is perfect. They only have dessert on weekends. That's 2 days out of the week that the kids have sweet stuff available to them. Make sure to serve a meal everyone likes on those days.
Don't make them sit at the table alone. As I mentioned before, if my daughter refuses to eat, she has to sit with us until the adults are done. At that point, she can do whatever she wants for the rest of the evening. However, on the few nights she has refused to eat, we're very adamant that she gets up when we get up. There's none of the "Sit there until your plate's empty" mentality in our family. There are nights that she eats very, very, very slowly, but that's a different story. Even then, at least one person will either stay at the table with her or at a table nearby so she's not alone.
Don't serve it to them cold or for breakfast. Here's how every parent's story that I've heard goes about letting their kids go hungry once or twice. The kid thinks he's gotten off scott free for about an hour. Then they're hungry. At that point, about half of the time, they come back to the parents wanting to eat. If this happens, give them food. Don't act like they're out of luck. Feed them! They have given you the control. Heat their plate up (which you've very intelligently wrapped in saran wrap and put in the fridge for just this occasion) and set it in front of them. Don't make them eat it cold. That's just going to reinforce the "this is nasty" response. Show them that you're proud of them for respecting your authority. Sit at the table and talk or read a book while they eat. However, if this doesn't happen, don't be mean and serve it for breakfast. You want your child going to school with a good breakfast, and shoving his or her willfulness in his or her face is just going to bring up tension. You can always serve it on leftover night.
Serve something she'll like. If you have a night that your child chooses to go hungry, serve something that everyone will enjoy the next night. If that means making a pizza from scratch (we'll go over that some day), that's fine. Make sure she knows that every night won't be filled with weird things she's never seen, and you still know how to make her favorite meal. If you pair it with the game I'm going to describe next, you'll get your way without her knowing.

     So, there's a list of things to do to not screw up your child's mentality about food forever. The second question is, if they really won't eat their carrots (or whatever vegetable it is), how do I make them? There are tricks to this, but you need to make sure that this battle really needs to be fought. Sure, spinach is an amazing source of Vitamins A, C, E, K, and B6 along with iron, calcium, potassium and a ton of other good stuff, but does your child really need to eat steamed spinach? Quick answer: No. Raw spinach is as good if not better than cooked spinach, and it's rare that a person won't eat a spinach salad, if you don't tell them what it is. So, go get some mixed greens from your grocery store and make a salad.
     But what if you get to that impasse where you know your child needs the Beta Carotene in carrots and you've literally tried everything (glazed carrot recipe coming soon) and they won't eat it? Then you get to play a little game I like to call "Being a Parent" where you give them what's good for them, even if they think they hate it. This game does not require you to pin your child down and hold his mouth closed over carrots until he eats them. That will land you in jail. Instead it requires 3 pieces of equipment: A food processor, something to cook the veggies in, and secrecy. Rules to the game: Don't get caught, don't get caught, and don't get caught.
     Step 1 is to cook your vegetable. You'll need some time where you can do this in private. If you're doing worst-case scenario carrots, you'll need at least half an hour. I prefer a to steam my vegetables in a rice cooker, but you can use a steam inset or just boil them in water for a while. Each of those methods has a different cooking time for each vegetable, so run a Google search on it first. Cook the vegetable thoroughly, or until a fork will easily pierce and be removed from it.
     Step 2 is to puree it. I'm sure you can use a potato masher if you have to, but try to find a cheap food processor and just let it run until you have nothing but mush. If there are chunks, let it run a little longer. At this point, you can hide your little secret in baggies where only you know where to find them or use them immediately. Most moms have a different veggie for each kid, and you can use them in tandem.
     Step 3 is to hide the vegetables in your child's favorite food. Does your kid like spaghetti? Perfect! Mix some pureed goodness into the sauce. Chances are, she'll never see it. The same goes for meatloaf, the ricotta cheese for stuffed shells, and mashed potatoes (add cheese to mask the colors). The best thing about this method is that you don't even need to hide the veggies in main dishes. I have a friend whose mom hides broccoli in her brownies and sends her son to school with one every single day. It's a great method. Heck, you could hide six servings of vegetables in your child's next birthday cake!

How do you sneak nutrition into your food? What's worked and what hasn't? Tweet to @cookingcheap

Your Weekly Frugal Recipe - Lasagna

2012-07-07T11:49:00.000-07:00

Lasagna

The Food Stamp Way

Skills

Prep

Cook

Crock pot

What do these meters mean?

    Before you start planning to have this for tonight's dinner, you should know that this is a crock pot recipe. If you don't have a crock pot, don't make this recipe unless you know someone who will let you borrow theirs.
     I have a confession to make; I can't make lasagna in the oven. Every time I try, the noodles end up dried up and crunchy. In short, it's a bust - every time. There are two ways that I can make one: buy it from a store or use the crock pot. We're trying to do the "not from the freezer section" thing, so let's make it in the crock pot instead!
   The problem with crock pot recipes, for most people, is that they perceive them as taking too long. This particular recipe takes about 30 minutes of prep work and 4 hours to cook. If you don't want to get up and do it before work some morning. Take some time the night before you want to serve it and do all the prep work. Then put the removable part of your crock pot in the fridge over night. The next morning, when you're getting ready for work, put the removable part of the crock part into the heating part, put the cover on, and turn it on low. Then walk out the door ready to come home to lasagna that night!

Equipment you'll need
Crock pot, skillet, knife, cutting board, mixing bowl

Serves 8

Ingredient	Amount	Cost
Italian Sausage	1 lb	$3.00
Medium onion	1	$0.50
24 oz cans pasta sauce	2	$2.00
Shredded mozzarella	2 c.	$2.29
Ricotta	15 oz	$2.15
Grated parmesan	1 c.	$2.66*
Uncooked lasagna noodles	16 oz	$1.77
Total		$14.37
* Based on price per package divided by amount used.

Price per plate =$1.80 Notes about ingredients:

8 ounces of brick cheese makes 1 cup of shredded cheese.

Depending on where you buy it, ricotta cheese can be the same price as cottage cheese or as much as three times the price. Decide appropriately, and substitute cottage cheese if it's less expensive.

Italian Sausage was on sale this week which made it literally 3¢ more expensive than ground beef. If it's not on sale where you are, or if your family doesn't eat pork, substitute ground beef and sprinkle some Italian seasonings over it while it cooks.

Prep Instructions:

Chop the onion into medium-size pieces.

Brown the meat and onion together in a skillet. Drain the grease off and mix the pasta sauce with the meat.

Mix 1 cup of mozzarella with the Parmesan and ricotta together in a bowl. Reserve the rest of the mozzarella in the fridge for later.

Instructions:

1. Cover the bottom of the crock with about a quarter of your meat-sauce mixture.
2. Cover the sauce mixture with lasagna noodles. Break them to cover it as completely as possible.
3. Cover the noodles with about one-third of the cheese mixture. Use a spoon to spread it around, if you need.
4. Cover the cheese with a quarter of your sauce mixture. I use my spoon to squish them together a bit to make it cover more area, but that's up to you.
5. Cover the sauce mixture with lasagna noodles again.
6. Repeat steps 3 through 5 once more.

7. Cover the top layer of noodles with the last of your meat sauce.

8. Place in the cooking element of your crock pot on low for at least 4 hours.

9. About 20 minutes before you're ready to eat, sprinkle the rest of the mozzarella cheese over the top of the sauce and replace the cover.

10. When the cheese is all melted, dish it out and eat.

What recipe would you like done the food stamp way? Comments? Questions? Tweet to @cookingcheap

Luxuries Part 3 - Herbs and Spices Part 1

2012-07-06T01:54:00.000-07:00

     Dry herbs and spices are probably the most valuable thing that you can have in your kitchen. You can cook food without herbs and spices, but it just won't taste the same. Ideally, herbs and spices are to be used to accent the natural flavors of food, not to mask them. The problem is a small bottle of spice usually costs $3 or $4 depending on what you're getting and what brand you're buying. For that reason, I'm classifying them as luxuries. WE don't always have room in our budget for them, and we don't always know what we need. There are also literally hundreds of herbs and spices, so for the next couple of weeks, we'll go over them, in alphabetical order, to discuss their flavors, their uses, and their importance.
     First things first. Herbs and spices are drastically different. Herbs are the leaves and stems of plants while spices are the seeds. Despite their name, spices are not inherently spicy. They are, however, far more pungent than herbs, so they can be used more sparingly.
     There are definitely herbs and spices that are a must for kitchens, but what do you do if you have a recipe for something that you don't have? You don't want to buy a whole bottle of something you've never used before and might never use again. In these cases, go down your local natural foods store and see if they sell spices in bulk. My local Whole Foods store has a section of jars full of herbs and spices. I can go and buy a tablespoon of Star Anise, if I need it instead of getting a bottle. That tablespoon costs 20¢ - 30¢. Way cheaper than a bottle!
   However, if you buy a bottle of a dried herb or spice, you can feel pretty good about it because they stay good what seems like forever. They do lose their flavor over a very long time, but you'll probably need to replace them before you notice the absence of flavor.

Allspice is the dried berry of what’s called an evergreen pimento tree. It’s incredibly important in Caribbean dishes as well as some British cuisine. It has the taste of a mixture of cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. I rarely use it, but I have a tiny jar of it, just in case. You can substitute a 50/50 mix of cinnamon and ground cloves or an equal mixture of cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg for allspice.
Anise is the ground leaves of a flowering plant native to the Mediterranean. Though it has uses in dishes across several cultures, I have never personally used it. It has a licorice flavor.
Basil is the leaves of a plant that originally came from India. Sweet basil (usually printed without the sweet) is very common in Italian dishes as opposed to Thai basil, lemon basil, and holy basil which are used in Asian dishes. I always, always, always have a bottle of dried basil in my stores.
Bay Leaves are the leaves of the bay laurel tree. These are rarely if ever left in a food when served. Instead one or two bay leaves can flavor an entire soup or stock and are removed before serving. If you don’t use these often, you can see if you can buy them one or 2 at a time to save some money.
Caraway is the leaves of a plant native to Asia, Europe, and North Africa. It has a licorice flavor, but is often used in breads like rye. I’ve never personally used it, but if you feel like making some rye bread, finding some is going to be important.
Cardamom is a spice native to the Middle East and Africa and, as such, is used in those dishes. You can buy it in the pod, out of the pod, and ground. Though ground cardamom has a lot less flavor than the stuff you’ll find in the pod, you may prefer that to grinding it. However, this is a rare ingredient, to say the least.
Cassia is the aromatic bark of an evergreen tree native to China. This is also called Chinese cinnamon because of its similar taste to the cinnamon tree. If you look on your bottle of cinnamon the next time you shop, it may list cassia as its main ingredient. That’s because cassia is much less expensive than true cinnamon. Cassia is supposed to have a much stronger, spicier taste than true cinnamon, but chances are you won’t notice it. I have cinnamon of one kind or another in my cabinets all the time.
Cayenne pepper is a spicy red powder made from chilies from French Guiana. In fact, it’s one of the major reasons Europe liked this continent. Because of its spiciness, it’s used in all kinds of dishes from all over the world. If your family doesn’t do spicy, don’t buy this.
Celery seed has an intense form of the flavor you know from celery. It’s used in very few things, though our family uses it in tuna salad. You probably don’t need it.
Chives are those little green things you find on your baked potato at Wendy’s. They’re sold dry, but I hate them. If you like them, more power to you, but I’d rather mince my own chives when I need them.
Cilantro is also known as Mexican parsley, though it’s native to Eastern Europe. It seems that many people have a volatile relationship with cilantro as one of the first websites that pops up on Google is dedicated to banning the herb. However, I personally like it. Fresh cilantro is really important in Hispanic sauces while the dried herb is used in dishes from around the world. The issue is that it’s a very strong herb, so use care with it.
Cinnamon is the name of the tree that gave us the spice that we associate so strongly with Christmas. As I mentioned before, cinnamon in a bottle is either cassia or true cinnamon. True cinnamon is supposed to be mild and softer on the tongue. It’s also usually more expensive.
Cloves are the dried flower buds of a plant indigenous to Indonesia. They have a deep pungent taste – so much so that you rarely need more than 2 to 3 cloves to spice an entire pot of apple cider. In my mind, they are the spice equivalent of bay leaves. You don’t need many and you take them out before you serve. You can buy ground cloves, but they’ll hold their flavor much better if you buy them whole. Also, if you have a toothache, you can put a clove near the gum where it hurts as they work as a local anaesthetic.
Coriander is another word for cilantro, though it’s usually used to talk about the seeds of the plant. There are plenty of uses for coriander seeds, but don’t buy them, if you don’t need them.

Next week we'll cover cumin through nutmeg. Did I miss something? What's your favorite herb/spice? Questions? Comments? Tweet to @cookingcheap

Techniques - Knife Skills 1

2012-07-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

     It slices! It dices! It julienne fries! If you've not heard that, you haven't listened to a joke about "As Seen on TV" kitchen gadgets. The thing about these gadgets that everyone finds so tempting is they make knife skills unnecessary. However, we're trying to make a kitchen on a budget, and since we're talking about knives for the next two weeks, we might as well talk about how to use them.
     Knife skills are some of the most important techniques in the kitchen even though, on the surface they seem trivial. In their basic form, good knife skills are supposed to make it so each piece of food is the same size and shape. Why is that important? Well, according to the laws of physics, items that are the same size cook at the same rate. That means, if you have some small pieces and some large pieces, the small pieces may get burnt while the large pieces cook or the large pieces stay raw. Unfortunately, knife skills aren't something that come immediately. You'll need to practice them for a while before you get it right every time. When I was learning my knife skills, I made a lot of soup and stock where it really wasn't that important. Or you could make mashed potatoes after you're done practicing. Really, just practice any time you get a chance.
   There is one thing you must do to safely and correctly cut food with a knife. You must hold the food correctly. A proper food hold prevents you from cutting the tips of your fingers off. No one wants your fingers in their food. Zest of mom (or dad) is in bad taste (sorry for that pun) when you serve dinner. Here's a picture I'm borrowing from Danilo Alfaro's guide to using a chef's knife.

What you should notice about that picture is that his fingers are bent backward away from the knife. Your knuckles then provide a surface for the flat of the blade to rest upon as you cut. That means, if you slip, the most it'll do is skin you up a little bit. That's still way better than cutting off your fingertip. If you're already in the habit of cutting with your fingers flattened out, this is going to take a lot of practice. Just keep reminding yourself to bend your fingers as you cut. Add an extra 15 to 20 minutes to your prep time until you get used to it. Before you know it, you'll be doing it out of habit.

So, let's get down to some actual knife skills. While I talk about knives in the equipment section, I'll be going over different knife skills so that you know how to use what you got. This week I'll talk about julienning and dicing because they kind of flow into one another. Once you learn how to make one, you can make the other. The thing about both of these is that they come in different sizes. I'll talk about how to make them and then I'll tell you the technical terms at the end. The basic truth about knife cuts is that when you get the larger versions down, the small versions will come easier. For a while, work on your large dice and then work it down from there.

While I'm using pictures and video of me cutting, I'm going to use the pictures from Danilo Alfaro's gallery on about.com for the completed knife cuts. That's because he has an excellent gallery of very well-done cuts that are on a good contrast background.

First, you're going to want to cut your food into uniform sections so that you can use those sections to make your pieces. I recommend doing this with either a potato or a carrot first as they're hard vegetables and won't squish if you grip them too hard. Take a carrot or potato and cut it into 2 to 3 inch sections. If you want to make really sure that the pieces are the same, cut one section then line the rest of the vegetable up next to it and use it to measure the next section.

Then, you're going to want to square off the edges of your sections. Take one, put it cut end down on the board and slice off the round part of one of the sides. Then lay the section down on the cut side and cut off the two rounded sides you see when you look down on it. Turn it on one of those and cut off the fourth side.

When you make your cuts, you'll want to keep the tip of the knife on the cutting board. This provides you leverage and helps prevent knife slippage which usually ends in bleeding on your vegetables. Tip: you can't cook a vegetarian meal if it has your blood in it.
Now, you're going to want to make sticks out of your vegetable. For the purpose of this, we'll work on a medium dice, so you're going to want to cut sticks from your sections that are about 1/2-inch square. The 3 things that are important to remember here are that the sticks are all one length, they're all the same size across, and they're all square. These sticks are called batonnets, if you care. It's okay if you don't.

Now line or stack these up on one another. A tip I've seen a lot of chefs use is to push the sticks up against the blade of the knife to even them up. I do it between each cut, just to make sure everything stays even. Put the sticks perpendicular (I know, big math word) to your knife and cut them to make them 1/2-inch long. This makes them the cubes that we call "medium dice."

Here's the whole thing in a video so you can see it, beginning to end.

Welcome to the very basic cuts of the culinary arts. Really, almost anything you make can be done with a medium dice or the batonnet cut. Most people call the batonnet cut julienne, but they are different. We'll get to that in just a second. The beauty of this is, unless you need something sliced or minced (that's next week), you can pretty much use a medium dice for anything. If you want to learn the smaller versions or larger version, that's up to you, but it's really your decision. The other knife cuts, in order of size, are as follows:


Large Dice: A 3/4-inch cube


Allumette: 2-3 inch sticks with 1/4-inch sides


Small dice: 1/4-inch cubes

Julienne: 2-3 inch sticks with 1/8-inch sides

Brunoise: 1/8-inch cubes

I have literally used a brunoise cut twice in my life. I know how to do it, but I haven't found a use for it in my every day life. There are also fine julienne and brunoise cuts that are half the size. If you get down that small, except for very specific instances, you'll probably want to just mince your food.