Bread for Dinner

I ate a half loaf of bread for dinner last night. It was an accident.  But it made for a cheap dinner.  42 cents to be precise.  The recipe came from the King Arthur Flour website. If  you don’t already know about them and you’re someone who likes to bake, please click here right now!  They have many, many great recipes that are well-tested and have consistent results.  The bread I made was a simple, whole grain number with really flexible rising times (2 hours to 2 days) so it’s easy to fit it into any schedule.  And yes, I ate 6 slices, which according to the King Arthur people turns out to be 7 cents each.  Go figure.

Other meals this week have included

Tonight’s dinner: steamed potatoes from the garden and leeks, apples and cabbage braised with cider vinegar, butter and sea salt. Yum.  Enough for four people cost about .50 for the apple and the olive oil. Everything else was garden gernerated. You can find the recipe here.

Todays’ lunch: pasta cooked in homemade broth with spinach wilted on top.  (about 15 cents a serving if you consider that the broth was made from scraps, the pasta was $1 a box, and the spinach came out of the garden.)

Thursday’s lunch: Rye crackers (2.79 for a big box) with cheddar (5.99 / pound) and macintosh apples (.75 / pound) and cider (3.00 / half gallon).  Must have been around 2.20 a person.

Thursday’s breakfast: left over soup.  Soup is one of my favorite breakfasts.  Especially soup with rice that has absorbed all the liquid…it’s similar to congee, a Chineese rice mush, and super easy on the digestive system.  A really great way to start the day with a hot meal and cheap one at that.

It’s been interesting to keep track of how much food costs.  We eat mostly at home, especially this time of year when I have more time to cook and the garden is still producing so much food.  When it is late winter, early spring and I am working long days in the greenhouse, we end up spending a lot more on food, and by then we are pretty sick of storage vegetables.  I don’t know if we could get by on $30 a week if we did not have a garden.  Well, it would still be possible, just not as abundant or as easy.

No Grocery Store Dinner

I hate to brag, but I try to make every meal as grocery-store-free as possible.  Like tonight’s dinner, for example, was an almost free feast which would have cost a bundle in a restaurant.  The garden is the answer.  Escarole….the chard froze last week…braised in homemade broth with garlic.  Carrots, steamed and topped with a parsley salad, and some grilled lamb (sorry vegetarian readers, but we eat meat occasionally if it is raised nicely by people we like).  The total cost of the meal, for 3, was $4 and that was for some incredible lamb chops.  Everything else was from the garden, even the makings of the broth for the braised escarole. I bought half a lamb for our freezer a few weeks ago and tonight was the first time we tried it.

The rest of the day’s meals were eggs (from a neighbor’s hens) and toast (homemade bread with local wheat flour) $1.20 for 3 people. Lunch was homemade chicken soup (thanks to Wells Family Farm) with sliced shitake (this week’s store splurge), carrots, scallions, and nappa cabbage.  I think a half gallon of soup cost about $5.00 if we factor in the fact that the chicken appeared in 3 different meals.

For those city dwellers without much room for a garden, you can still grow greens on your fire escape.  A milk crate, lined with burlap or window screening, and filled with potting soil makes a perfect mini-garden for salad greens or herbs.  If you have room for 3 milk crates, you can cut salad greens from one while the plants in the other 2 crates are growing back, and just keep rotating which you cut from.  They will continue to grow back and should last a quite a few weeks.  You can also do sprouts indoors and pea shoots and sunflower shoots.  Just line a tray or rimmed cookie sheet with a 1/2 inch of potting soil, sprinkle on some seeds, cover with a quarter inch of soil, water, and in a week or two, snip the greens into a salad, a bowl of soup, or into a sandwich. Be your own farmer!  Knowing where our food comes from and how it is grown is really a great way to create your own health insurance and keeps you out of the grocery store.

Guest Blogger Julie, Checking In for Duty.

Hello to all the fans and followers of 30 Bucks a Week. I am excited to be a part of this blog (thanks so much to P and T) and hope that I can, along with fellow guest blogger, Sasha, live up to the honor of guest blogging, an activity that is relatively new to me, but should not be a problem since I love to eat, cook, write and am proud of my frugal food ways. My main culinary interests are tied into growing my own food and encouraging others to do so. I own a greenhouse and nursery in Vermont, just outside of Burlington, called Red Wagon Plants. We grow really healthy organic seedlings for home gardeners which we sell at our retail greenhouse and wholesale to other nurseries all around the state. I am passionate about what I do and hope to humbly infuse others with the joys of growing your own food, and feeding our communities by feeding ourselves. Okay, enough diatribe.

Here are some things I will be writing about, and feel free to chime in and add your thoughts to steer this ship. Let’s show P and T that they are leaving behind some happy chatterers while they go off on their blissful trip. I won’t be doing much with receipts because I don’t get that much food, other than pantry staples, from stores. Most of our food comes from farms and our back yard.

• The well stocked pantry
• Edibles to grow in small places
• What my family eats and how to schedule food prep so it’s all very easy and cheap
• How to get to know your local farmers and the benefits of charm

Today’s menu, sort of:

Breakfast for me and L (my 12 yr old daughter): scrambled eggs (from a neighbor’s hens – FREE), toast, and tea. (50 cents?)

Lunch for L – Packed her some bread with peanut butter and honey (.50?) and an apple (.40) since she is away all day.

Lunch for U (girlfriend) and Me: sauteed onions, peppers, with guacamole, on tortillas, with cheddar cheese.

Dinner: don’t know yet.

I started out the week with buying just a few things: Bread (local, O’Bread), walnuts (haven’t used those yet), cheddar cheese (local), apples (Shelburne Orchards….they are amazing and make all kinds of very unique apple products like calvados, apple jack, and ginger cider). I think all of this came to approx. $25. I have not purchased anything else all week, but have tons of great things in our pantry, fridge and freezer. More on that later.

Bon Voyages to P and T and thanks for this experience!

Guest Bloggers Sasha and Spence, check check.

Hey everyone! Sasha and Spencer here. We’re roommates who just moved to Boerum Hill, Brooklyn from Los Angeles, California (Sasha’s actually been living in NY for about 5 years now and just moved from Flatbush) and we’re really excited to sub for Thirty a Week! We are also excited to collaborate with Julie, who will be providing a whole new perspective for this blog. It will be wonderful to learn how to bring a little bit of the Vermont garden lifestyle into our own daily living. In fact, we’ve already been inspired and invested in our own little herb garden to sit by our windowsill!

Since we just moved in (literally weeks ago) our kitchen isn’t exactly what you would call “stocked”. We’re missing quite a few basics, such as spices, flours, and the wealth of canned goods that usually accumulate over the years of living in an apartment. But we’re still psyched to explore all the possibilities of simple, delicious, (cheap!) and healthy cooking that doesn’t involve all of the flair that comes with spending tons of money on a lot of extraneous ingredients.

We wanted to start with a classic: something incredibly basic but phenomenally delicious. This recipe dates back two generations and has just three ingredients: canned, whole, peeled tomatoes (not crushed or pureed), yellow onions, and butter. That’s right, butter. One of the more expensive things we’ll be purchasing on this journey, but also the most necessary. We’ve never tried it with margarine or olive oil, but we can almost guarantee it won’t be the same. Sasha’s a bit of a health freak, but after tasting this she was convinced. And if the recipe doesn’t convince you, you can go read “In Defense of Food”, or see Julie and Julia – Michael Pollen and Julia Child will tell you what’s up.

Recipe: Jane McCaffrey’s Tomato Sauce

“Pour the can of tomatoes in a medium-sized sauce pan. Thinly slice onions, but don’t chop, and add to the pan. Bring the whole thing to a low boil. Stir onions well into the tomatoes and squish or use knife to open tomatoes to free up their juice. Turn heat down to simmer. Leave uncovered, stirring to keep from sticking, until the onions are translucent, about 20-30 minutes. You might need to do this in batches, but after it’s done add the sauce to a cuisinart or blender. Slowly add butter while you’re blending. Return to pot, add a little salt and pepper to taste if you want, or fresh basil if you have it.”

Since we started this endeavor on a Tuesday, we didn’t have time to do our weekly shopping. So our “thirty a week” probably won’t start until this Sunday. However, we’d like to mention that at our local grocery store, 28 oz. cans of Sclafani and Progresso tomatoes are on sale for just $0.89! So we stalked up a bit and bought a couple. The pro-rata price of the one onion we used was $0.60. We already had butter on hand, and a healthy helping of linguine fini ready to be drenched in our sauce. Pasta can be boring, but this is elegant. Spencer made a tossed arugula salad on the side. Yum!

As we said before, we’re really looking forward to this, especially Spencer, who is an aspiring food writer. If you have any ideas, questions, comments, etc., please let us know!

Escarole Feast Cheap and Shape Shifters

It’s Tuesday already, and yesterday was the start of my $30/week experiment.  Money spent on food so far: zero sort of.  My pantry is small, but pretty well stocked with staples and I bought some things at the farmers’ market on Saturday in Burlington — bread, feta, and chevre.  Those alone added up to $21.oo. It’s a splurge item for us a few times during the summer.  Plus, the producers, Kristin and George of Does’ Leap Farm make the best chevre I have ever had.

Dinner on Sunday (for 2 people)  had enough leftovers to turn into lunch and dinner for 2 on Monday and lunch for one for today.  I think part of being frugal is to not be afraid of leftovers.  So often, I will cook one large meal and then stretch it into many meals by morphing it into other things.  Shape shifting dinners.  Here’s what I made, and you can substitute any greens you want if you don’t like escarole.

Escarole and White Beans on Pasta ($2.99 for 8 individual meals)

1 TBS olive oil (10 cents?)

1 medium onion, chopped or 2 leeks (for a sweeter flavor), white parts only, washed and chopped (mine came from the garden)

1 jalapeno, chopped (use the seeds if you like it hot. Mine came from the garden, not to brag or anything)

3 cloves of garlic sliced, minced, or crushed (all three ways produce different results, figure out what you like. mine came from our garden, so it’s FREE)

1 large head escarole, washed, but not chopped.  (mine came from my garden…wish I had a photo, it was gorgeous) or any other green you like — chard, kale, mustard greens, arugula

1 can white beans (butter beans are my favorite – $1.89 for organic at our coop)

1 box pasta, whatever you like ($1 at our Shaw’s grocery store  when they do “10 for $10″– one of the few reasons I go there)

Optional garnishes — fresh squeezed lemon juice, capers, feta or parmesan, another drizzle of olive oil.  But it will all cost you! (.20 / serving?)

Salt and Pepper to taste

• Get your (salted) pasta water going in a large pot.
• While that is coming to a boil, heat the olive oil in a large skillet or dutch oven type of pot.
• Saute the onion or leeks, garlic, and jalapeno over medium high heat, stirring.
• After about 5 minutes, when everything is softening and realeasing its aroma, dump in all of the escarole (still wet from being washed so that it creates some steam).  Put a lid on the whole pan and ignore it for a few minutes.  Open the can of beans, rinse them if you need to, dump them on top of the escarole and put the lid back on for a few more minutes.
• By now, you should also be cooking your pasta to the toothsome al dente point – i.e. not mushy.
• Stir up all the escarole and beans so that they are evenly distributed, and season with the salt and pepper to taste.
• Drain the pasta, reserving a little of the cooking liquid if you want to stir it into the finished dish later if it seems dry.
• You can combine noodles with the vegetables in the big skillet or pot, or alternately, you can serve big shallow bowls of pasta with the veggies on top, passing the optional garnishes around at the table.

This is a great dish to serve reheated as is, or you can turn it into a stew by reheating it with some broth.  I also love it with an egg cracked on top, and steam poached: just put the lid on the pot you are using and make sure there is enough liquid or fat in the bottom of the pan so that nothing sticks.   Super simple, and super yummy.  The escarole becomes silky, with a little bit of pleasant bitternes and the garlic and jalapeno balance it all out.  Bon Ap!

Welcome Guest Bloggers!!

Hey folks!  Phil and I are getting hitched tomorrow and are pleased to announce our two helpers to take our place when we’re on our honeymoon.  Drumroll please…

Guest-blogger 1: Sasha lives in Brooklyn and works as a Legal Advocate.  She lives with two roommates, one of whom is just learning to cook while the other is an experienced cook and aspiring food writer.

Guest-blogger 2: Julie was born in France and now runs an organic nursery in Vermont, where she lives with her girlfriend and daughter.  You can check out her nursery website here.

We hope that Sasha and Julie will be posting enough content for you all to be entertained almost daily while we are away in Portugal and Spain (any tips, let us know, we’re leaving Monday!).

We received a LOT of amazing offers for helpers and we both want to say thank you all so much for being interested!  Who knows, when we come back, we might try to have a guest post from a reader every once in a while because some of the ideas we got were great.  In the meantime, we went over budget by $1.75 this week and we’re getting married in about 12 hours!  Wahoo!

Soup Made of Soup

One thing about soup is that when you have some left over, you can often include those leftovers in the next soup you make. I mean, it might be a little dangerous to throw yesterday’s gazpacho into tomorrow’s miso, but if you’re just making some autumn vegetable and legume soups you shouldn’t run into too much friction.

This is a lentil and vegetable soup I made the other night – about a third of the volume is made up of the leftover yellow pea soup from last week. The new soup materials included the lentils, some carrots, potatoes, and our homemade veggie stock. Probably a dash of olive oil too, and of course some salt and pepper.

I served it with some spicy roasted wax beans (the last vestige of that CSA haul – hard to believe they lasted this long). For those, I just put the trimmed beans in a roasting pan with olive oil, red pepper flakes, lemon juice, some slivered almonds, and S&P and cooked them on 425 for…oh…15, 20 minutes?

We do have a receipt from my shopping trip yesterday, which we will post tomorrow. Due to some confusion about whether we had remaining bonus funds from last week, we (I) went over budget by a buck and change. We’re slipping here – looks like it’s about time somebody else took over this place for a couple week.

On that note, we’ve gotten many terrific offers for guest bloggers, but we’re still waiting until tomorrow night to decide, so let us know if you have an idea.

Farro “Risotto” Sorta

We got a Cuisinart electric pressure cooker and while I think I’ve got beans and chili nailed down, I think my grains technique might take some time.  I decided to use the pressure cooker tonight to save some time since farro can take a while.  The pressure cooker did cook it quickly, but it was a bit watery at the end.  I decided to play that up and added some Parmesan cheese, lemon juice, freshly ground black pepper and a handful of crumbled basil leaves from the freezer.  Stirred it all up and let it simmer in the pressure cooker for a bit.  The result was some pretty delicious whole grains!  We had that with some tempeh that Phil marinated with olive oil, cider vinegar, lemon juice, Sriracha, salt & pepper that I sauteed and then some sauteed patty pan squash and caramelized onions.  I decided to cook everything separately and combine them at the end because squash tends to release a lot of water.  Behold!

Update on the receipt stuff tomorrow.  Phil went shopping today and got some exciting stuff!

Update on Spending

$18 bonus to start

$2.50 (cheese), $1 (2 apples), $1.50 (12 eggs), $4.99 (veggie bacon – BRUNCH INDULGENCE) =

$8.01 bonus left

Looking for a Helper

So, the Thirty a Week household will be undertaking a big change next week in that we are getting married. More or less directly after the wedding, we’re going to be heading out on our honeymoon (to Portugal and Spain) for a couple of weeks, during which we will neither be living particularly frugally, or posting anything on the internet. But, since we’ve been getting a pretty substantial amount of traffic around here these days, we thought it might be a good idea to try to keep 30/W trucking while we’re away. Along those lines:

Is anybody interested in taking over this site between 10/10 and, say, the end of October? You could alter the budget/project to make it make sense for you – just so long as it generally sticks to the idea of frugal cooking with good, wholesome food. You could be an expert cook or a novice looking to get more engaged in the kitchen. On vegetarianism, my own bias would be to keep this site meat-free, but theoretically I could be convinced otherwise.

In any case, the basic commitment would be posting once a day (more or less) while we’re gone.

If you’re interested, send us an e-mail (“thirtyaweek” at ye olde Gmail) telling us who you are, where you live, and what you have in mind to do with the site. We’ll probably pick somebody on Wednesday night, so get in touch before then if you’re interested.