Sunburst Carrots & Garam Masala Spiced Tofu
Posted: November 30, 2008 Filed under: Photos, Recipe, Tina Wrote It 1 CommentWe got back to our apartment yesterday and have no more access to the bountiful leftovers at my parents’ place. There wasn’t much in the fridge, but I think this was one of the prettiest meals we’ve made in a while. With three carrots left in the crisper, a block of tofu, half a bunch of slightly sad parsley, and a bag of string beans donated by my mom, we made this masterpiece:
The Sunburst Carrots are from 101 Cookbooks. I made a bunch of changes since we didn’t have many of the ingredients Heidi calls for, but I recommend following her recipe verbatim sometime because it’s really tasty. Basically, I swapped in parsley for the cilantro, pickled jalapenos for the Serrano chiles and didn’t add the pumpkin seeds or lemon zest (just bottle lemon juice, I know, not ideal). As for the tofu, follow the steps below closely to get it crispy on the outside, moist on the inside.
Garam Masala Spiced Tofu
Ingredients:
1 block of tofu
2 tablespoons garam masala
2 teaspoons garlic powder
generous pinch of crushed red pepper
splash of oil
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup vinegar
1/4 cup juice (orange would be excellent, but I used some hibiscus tea because it was in the fridge)
1/4 cup strained or Greek yogurt
lots of fresh pepperTo Do:
- Wrap tofu up in a clean dishtowel or paper towels. Put on a plate, put another plate on top of the tofu and then put something heavy on that plate. The goal is to squeeze a lot of the moisture out of the tofu so that it will marinate better. Ideally, the tofu would be pressed for about an hour, but do it as long as you can.
- Whisk all of the ingredients together. Cut the tofu into thin slabs and place in a shallow dish. Pour the marinade over the tofu (make sure it’s all covered) and let it rest for at least an hour and up to overnight. The longer it sits, the tastier it will be.
- Get out a pan that can be used on the stove top and in the broiler. I use a cast iron grill pan. Place pan over a burner on medium-high heat and add a bit of olive oil. When hot, place tofu slabs in the pan and lower the heat to medium. Start heating up your broiler while one side of the tofu cooks. When the top looks a bit dry, pour some leftover marinade over the top and put the whole pan under the broiler. Let it sit for about 5 minutes or until the whole mess looks crispy. This recipe would also work well on the grill, but it’s late November in Brooklyn so…
Happy Leftovers Day
Posted: November 29, 2008 Filed under: Food for Thought, Phil Wrote It, Recipe Leave a comment30/Week would like to give a sensiblilty shout-out to the day after Thanksgiving as the celebration of our nation’s most famous leftovers. Forgetting momentarily that the famously frugal cuisine must share the day with an annual bacchanal of vicious, orgiastic consumerism (or indeed the holiday’s own problematic origins), let’s take a moment to recognize that more than any other day, the day after Thanksgiving is when America is happy to get the most out of yesterday’s feast.
You only have to google “thanksgiving leftovers” to get a whole list of recipes – many, though not all of them turkey-based. If you have any favorites, share them in the comments section. For me though, nothing but nothing beats the Thanksgiving sandwich. Behold:
That’s Tofurkey (yeah, the pre-packaged stuff), stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and vegetarian gravy, all on a couple slices of fresh rustic round bread. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find another sandwich that could measure up in promise or delivery. You’ve had a night off after eating too much, and now you get to enjoy it all again in a new, convenient, hand-held format.
Anyway, here’s a bonus recipe that’s become a Thanksgiving tradition for us, but is good for the rest of the year as well: nut-based vegetarian gravy as featured on The Veggie Table. It’s thick, it’s rich, it’s a little sweet a little more savory. Delicious.
Vegetarian Gravy
2 T butter or oil
3 T flour (white or whole wheat)
2 c milk or vegetable stock
1 c ground toasted nuts (whatever kind you like – I prefer cashews)
Salt and pepper1. Heat the butter or oil in the saucepan, until melted/hot. Whisk in flour and stir continuously for one minute.
2. Remove from heat for 2-3 minutes.
3. Return saucepan to stove and whisk in the milk and nuts. Simmer, stirring constantly, until thickened, 3-5 minutes.
4. Season with salt and pepper and serve.
Budget Kitchen Fundamentals: Grow Your Own
Posted: November 25, 2008 Filed under: Fundamentals, Phil Wrote It 4 CommentsAlong with our grocery budget, we’ve been trying over the past year to make our diet more sustainable and economical by growing some of our own food. If you’re an urbanite looking for tips on how to start a garden despite your lack of arable land, I suggest The Urban Homestead, written by the folks who run the Homegrown Evolution blog (actually, they were kind enough to link to our site recently, motivating me to finally finish up this post).
Last spring we laid out some cash for soil, pots, and seedlings from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden in hopes of reaping a harvest of tomatos, squash, strawberries, snap peas, and herbs; all from the five by five foot balcony off the back of our apartment. Ultimately, we managed to collect one tomato and one very small strawberry. The rest was devoured, or just wantonly torn apart, by packs of vicious, sadistic, nihilist squirrels (Sciuridae horribilis). I can’t understand how they didn’t get an explicit mention in the ten plagues of Egypt.
From the wreckage, however, we were able to salvage our herb plants, which we have since transplanted into smaller pots and brought inside. And here we get to the point: an indoor herb garden is attractive, fairly easy to maintain, and will save you a load of money when compared to buying fresh herbs from the store every time you need them.
First, a couple household articles of faith concerning herbs:
1. Dried herbs in plastic canisters, while they will do in a pinch, can never stand up to flavorful fresh herbs. Yes, there are tips and tricks you can use to get the most flavor out of your dried herbs (e.g. don’t store them above your stove), but all in all it’s a losing battle.
2. Packs of herbs that you buy at the store are expensive, and almost always give you more than you need for a given recipe (unless you’re buying basil to make pesto, for instance), leaving you with the choice of either finding a bunch of recipes to use the rest up before they go bad or maybe drying them yourself for later use. For the latter, refer to article 1.
With a relatively small cash outlay, an indoor herb garden can provide you with a perpetual supply of your favorite herbs and you don’t have to worry about using them up before they spoil. Aside from watering and occassional pinching, you don’t have to put much work in.
At the moment, our garden provides us with basil, rosemary, sage, thyme, mint, marjoram, and lemon verbena. We use one or the other of them several times a week, often to delicious result. And in case you’re having trouble thinking of something other than tomato sauce that benefits from the application of fresh herbs, here are a couple great ways to showcase your herb garden:
Sage-Scented Shortbread
Omlette Aux Fines Herbs
Mint Julep (out of season, perhaps, but oh so delicious)
Things to Be Thankful For – 3 Recipes for T-Day
Posted: November 25, 2008 Filed under: Recipe, Tina Wrote It 3 CommentsWe’re heading to both sets of parents for Thanksgiving and I am very excited about eating some delicious food that is not on a budget! I mean, we eat well for our $30/week, but I’m looking forward to being fed. It will also be nice to get out of the city for a while and spend time with the family. There will be some cooking for us though. Our three Thanksgiving recipes will be: our Autumn Millet Bake, Chewy Ginger Cookies and Mary’s Spiced Nuts for nibbling on with cocktails before the main meal. These nuts are addictive, tasty, easy to make and perfect to make in advance or to give out as a gift in a pretty jar. Good mixed nuts can be expensive, but if you’re thinking of making something savory to give out during the holiday season, the cost is worth it. My friend Mary used to only give this recipe out to people who beat her in arm wrestling. Consider yourself lucky you can just get it off this website. Thanks Mary!
Mary’s Spiced Nuts
Ingredients:
4 c. raw, unsalted, un-roasted nuts (cashews and pecans work best, but a mixed bunch are good too)
2 TBS unsalted butter
2 TBS honey or maple syrup
1/2 – 1 tsp. hot pepper sauce (Mary uses Tabasco)
2-3 tsp. yellow curry powder (more or less depending on its strength and your taste)
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. salt
extra salt and raw sugar for sprinklingTo Do:
Heat oven to 250. Line a large baking sheet with tinfoil. Make sure the tinfoil covers the edges, because otherwise you will have to scrape caramelized curry goo off the corners of your baking sheet.
Put your raw nuts in a big bowl.Combine butter, honey, and hot pepper sauce in a small saucepan. Heat just until it melts together. Stir together.
Remove from heat and stir in salt and spices. Pour the honey mixture over the nuts in the bowl and toss well, until the nuts are nicely coated. Taste one and adjust seasoning/sweetness/saltiness until you like it.
Spread the nuts on the prepared sheet and bake until they are dry and toasty, about 40 minutes. Stir them a few times so they don’t burn, and remember, they’ll crisp up a little as they cool.
Use your hands to separate any clumps. If you like (and I do like), sprinkle them with some raw sugar when they’re still slightly warm, for an extra-crunchy coating. You can add a little extra salt then too.
When the nuts are completely cool store them in heavy-duty airtight plastic bags. They keep for a week, allegedly, but I’ve never had any go uneaten that long.
Receipt Update & Soup When It’s Cold
Posted: November 20, 2008 Filed under: $ Left, Recipe, Tina Wrote It 2 CommentsThis week’s receipt came out to $30.15 (we had $14.79 last week, but I spent another $8 on soy milk, tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese last Saturday, so we still had a surplus of $6.69 when I went food shopping on Tuesday). Now we actually have $6.54 LEFT for the week! Pretty exciting. I’ll post the receipt later, but we got a lot of good stuff this week!
The weather suddenly got much colder over the past few days. Combine that with feeling under the weather and you get soup for dinner. This split pea soup is inspired by 101 Cookbooks, but I added some extra bits to make it more smokey tasting.
Smokey Split Pea Soup (variation from 101 Cookbooks)
Ingredients:
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 onions, finely chopped
2 carrots, finely chopped
2 cups dried split green peas, picked over and rinsed
5 cups water
1 cube vegetarian bouillon
2 tablespoons bacon bits (they’re vegan!)
1 strip of vegetarian beef jerky (not necessary, but wow)
salt and pepper to tasteTo Do:
Heat olive oil in a big pot and add the onions and carrots. Sautee for a few minutes until the vegetables get soft. Add the split peas, water, bouillon and bacon bits. Bring to a boil and let simmer for about a half hour, or until the peas are soft. Add jerky (if using) and cook for another 5 minutes or so. Puree everything with a hand blender, blender or food processor. Use salt and pepper to taste and serve with some crusty bread (The Kitchn’s No Time bread was made to eat with this soup).
Transformative Leftovers Award: Hash Brown Rice
Posted: November 16, 2008 Filed under: Brunch, Leftovers, Phil Wrote It, Recipe Leave a commentThough we still had a good bit of food in the house (and, more surprisingly, over $10 left in our weekly budget), we ended up having Chinese take-out with a friend last night. The thing about Chinese take-out is that one is always left over with a bunch of leftover cooked rice that quickly turns into an weapons-grade starch brick if left in the cardboard foldy-box. You can always re-cook it with a little bit of water and get edible rice out of it again, but a big helping of leftover rice is often not the most appetizing dinner option, especially the night after gorging on sesame tofu and eggplant in garlic sauce.
In the past, I’ve tried to re-cook the rice in soy milk with cinnamon, cardamom and some kind of sweetener to make an impromptu Indian-style rice pudding. This works okay for a frugal dessert, especially if you’ve had some drinks with dinner, but I probably wouldn’t serve it to guests.
A much better option, as Tina discovered this morning, is Gourmet magazine’s recipe for Hash Brown Rice as a breakfast/brunch potato replacement. Our recipe is somewhat different, since Gourmet expects that you will be cooking fresh rice for this recipe, and also based on the ingredients we had in the house at the time – an onion is usually key for hash browns, but we were out.
Hash Brown Rice (from leftover Chinese)
1 large takeout box of cooked brown rice.
3 large cloves of garlic, chopped fine
1 Tbsp fresh rosemary (chopped)
2 Tbsp olive oil
crushed red pepper
salt and pepperTo Do:
1. Heat the oil in a cast iron skillet. Saute the rosemary, red pepper, and garlic over medium-high heat.
2. Add rice and leave to cook for a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, turn on broiler.
3. Stir the rice thoroughly, flatten out on top, and stick in under the broiler until top is browned.
Polenta with Three Root Ragu
Posted: November 11, 2008 Filed under: Phil Wrote It, Photos, Recipe, Veggies 4 Comments
Perhaps not the best food portrait ever…but it tasted delicious.
A co-worker heading out of town was cleaning out her refrigerator and we ended up with four organic sweet potatoes and a good idea for a future frugal fundamentals column: sharing with your friends and neighbors is a good way to avoid both waste and having to eat the same leftovers over and over. Anyway, I decided to try an autumn vegetable variation on the traditional meat-based ragu. In fact there’s very little traditional about this dish, but it turned out delicious nonetheless.
Three Root Ragu
2 medium turnips
1 large potato
1 medium sweet potato
1 cup red wine
1/2 cup milk
3 or 4 scallions
3 Tbsp fresh diced sage*
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 Tbsp butter
crushed red pepper
salt and pepper1. Chop all the root veggies into 1/2″ pieces. Cut the scallions into small slices, including some of the greens.
2. Put the olive oil and butter in a medium saucepan and sautee the veggies and the sage until the roots begin to soften.
3. Turn the heat down, add the wine, milk, red pepper, and S&P to taste. Simmer for about 45 minutes, stirring occasionally until the vegetables become very soft. It’s ready to serve!
I served the ragu on top of some polenta with slices of soft boiled egg for protein and chiffonaded basil for garnish.
*Ours came from our indoor herb garden – the subject of another frugal fundamentals post coming in the near future.
This Week’s Receipt and Last Week’s Recap
Posted: November 11, 2008 Filed under: $ Left, Food Lists, Tina Wrote It, Weekly Rundown 1 CommentSo, below is this week’s receipt (so far). Last week we had a surplus of almost $4, but used it over the weekend to buy some bread, 2 tangerines and some coffee (Cafe Bustelo, $2.39, to be exact). Things are going pretty well! I am getting nervous as my stock of frozen butter is low, which means no impromptu cookie making. AHHH! We still have quite a few grains, chickpeas, tofu, flour, two turnips and a lone carrot in the crisper.
Budget Kitchen Fundamentals: Buy it in Bulk
Posted: November 7, 2008 Filed under: Food for Thought, Fundamentals, Phil Wrote It 5 CommentsAs promised, here is the first installment of our series of basic tips on how to make your meals cheaper without sacrificing the quality of food you’re eating. Like many of the skills (well, maybe more like practices – not too much real skill involved here) we employ, this post focuses on spending your time instead of your money to put together good, healthy meals. The idea here is to share ideas, and not just our ideas, so if anybody out there has some input or a response to these suggestions, let fly.
The idea, as you can glean from the title, is buying foods in bulk whenever possible. I’m not talking about a five gallon bucket of mayo from Sam’s Club…though I guess that’s a pretty economical purchace if your household has substantial mayonaisse “needs”. Anyway, what I’m talking about is buying unpackaged staples, such as salt, sugar, grains, tea, honey, nuts, beans, etc. by weight.
Why is this cheaper? Without doing any substantial research on the question, my sense is that buying in bulk means that you are paying only for the food itself and some markup for transport, etc., but probably not for packaging, advertising, or branding. For example, at our coop you can get a pound of rolled oats for $1.09. At Walgreens (online at least) an 18-ounce canistar goes for $2.50, which comes to about $2.22/lb.
If you’re a tea drinker, the savings can be even more dramatic. We got a bag of spearamint leaves (which is all you need for mint herbal tea) for $.28. The bag is .03 pounds, which is about the size of half a baseball – easily enough to make at least 20 cups of tea. I looked online at prices for Celestial Seasonings Magic Mint Tea and found prices of $1.50 to $3.49 for boxes of 20 teabags. So, that’s 7 to 17 cents a cup, as opposed to 1.4 cents a cup for the bulk. Taking into account an initial investment of two bucks for a cheap-o tea strainer, you’ll saving money in no time.
Aside from the economic benefits of shopping in bulk for staples, there is also the environmental impact inherrent in buying unpackaged food. All you have to do is take some reuseable bags to the store* and you do away with all the cardboard/paper/plasic trash that comes with needlessly packaged food.
The biggest challenge for buying bulk is probably trying to find a place that sells bulk food. Bulk sales are more and more common in your more helth-food-type grocery stores. Maybe they even sell bulk in Whole Foods, but since stores like that aren’t the most economic places to shop, your savings might not be all that substantial (of course, if you’re shopping at Whole Foods all the time anyway, buying bulk there is probably a good alternative). If you simply can’t find a store that sells bulk, you could probably implement a Bulk Food Lite ™ regimen – buy large sizes of basic dry goods like rice, dried beans, flour, and so on. You’ll probably pay less by weight and have less packaging. This will be a small step toward frugality and sustainability, but it’s really not as good as real bulk groceries.
*For the most part, I have no desire to endorse particular brands or products on this site, and I have an inherrent distrust for anything with an “As Seen on TV!” label. However. I have to say that Debbie Meyer’s Green Bags are a truly worthwhile investment. They’re totally reusable and I swear they do keep produce fresh longer. When you’re on a budget, losing three bucks in spoiled broccoli can be a real bummer. Needless to say they’re good for bulk dry goods too.
Cheap Livin’ in the City
Posted: November 7, 2008 Filed under: Tina Wrote It | Tags: NYC, what we had for dinner 1 CommentPerfect for those living in NYC and its environs, NY Magazine presents it’s “Cheap Living Guide“. A lot of the ideas are good for any big city and it’s dive bar feature on the Nancy Whiskey Pub holds a dear place in my heart. Some bits are food related, but I’m all up for anything inexpensive – especially in these economic troubling times.
Phil and I are going to try and put up a little guide to making something frugally, whether is using dried beans or making your own seitan, etc., this weekend. We’ll also be making a bunch of gifts (starting now) for the holiday season, which probably won’t be limited to $30/week rules, but we’ll get back to you on that.
Last night’s dinner was some delicious oven-baked “fries”, faux-curry chicken salad sandwiches on pilfered bagels from volunteer session and oven roasted brussel sprouts. For lunch, I whipped up some pumpkin soup in the crockpot last night and ladled it out this morning. A full report on how it tastes and recipe later.
30 Bucks a Week 
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