One Dinner, Two Success Stories

For dinner tonight, we made an African Pineapple Peanut Stew that Marianne posted about last month. We really followed her recipe word for word, so I’ll just direct you there to make it for yourself. In any case, it was really delicious – just the right combination of sweet and savory and the peanuts make it really rich. We served ours over couscous rather than rice.

The one thing that gave us pause as we were shopping for the ingredients today (receipt post coming soon) was whether we could afford to buy pineapple. Ideally, we wanted to get a fresh pineapple rather than canned so that we could avoid unnecessary packaging. The thing is, a whole pineapple costs $3.19 at the coop – a bigger part of our budget than we were willing to give up – and we couldn’t find any canned pineapple there, so we ended up going to our local supermarket where we got a 20oz. can for $1.59. Not really sure whether this was ultimately cost-effective, though I sort of doubt we would have gotten twice as much meat from the fresh pineapple.

Anyway, this recipe gave us a chance to use the beautiful marble mortar and pestle that our friend got us a couple years ago from the Cooper Hewitt shop.

Tina made a big (huge) batch of mung bean sprouts last week and we wanted to make sure we used them all up before they went bad, so in lieu of a traditional side salad, we just had the sprouts with a homemade paprika vinagrette (just olive oil, cider vinegar, paprika, salt and pepper). Also delicious!