Eating Well Cheaply |
| "Eating" and "Cheaply" are not necessarily two words which people who know me would figure I could use in the same sentence. Not my friends, and not those who read
my other blog, An Obsession With Food.
However, the technology sector layoff axe has swung my way, and so I find myself trying to stretch my savings as far as possible. But I firmly believe that one can eat well
on a tight budget. After all, many so-called gourmet foods had their roots in peasants trying to make their money stretch as far as possible. Of course, something like
coq au vin is only peasant food when you're actually in Burgundy, and can more easily find cheap wine for the stew.
It just takes more time and planning. But time has become much more available. And even when I get hired again, I'll keep
cooking this way since my girlfriend Melissa and I are thinking about buying a house once we both have income again. Plus, then I'll have more money to spend on the
extravagant meals I occasionally describe on my other blog.
A note on costs: in general, I don't keep track of how much things like flour, sugar, salt, and so forth cost. When I list costs, it's usually just the items I had to buy specifically for that meal. Not always, though. If I buy a bunch of some type of fruit, and use a couple pieces here, a couple pieces there, I'll try and fill in the per-fruit cost or an estimate. Also, I usually just list costs for the first time I buy something. After that point, it counts as leftovers, since I've paid the price for it for some other dish, and the fact that I get to re-use it is a bonus. |
Portrait of Me as a Bachelor Saturday, December 21, 2002
My obsession with food is fairly recent. Say the last seven or eight years, but probably more like
the last six or seven. For much of that time, the last five years in fact, I've been dating Melissa.
She has seen me evolve from someone who didn't really drink, could follow recipes and made a good risotto to someone who makes
really good original, multi-course, multi-wine
dinners whenever possible.
But as she went out with a friend tonight, I got a picture of what my modern self would look like as a bachelor. It's not a pretty one: me making an individual portion of cheese fondue, standing at the stove to dip the bread because I'm too lazy to set myself a plate. And what did I think would go really well with it? Sausages. And a nice bottle of Roero Arneis from Piedmont. At least Melissa demands a regular supply of vegetables. Heaven only knows what we'd eat otherwise. In truth, the laziness about setting my plate is partly caused by a major ant invasion we've had (damn rain), which of course caused us to empty out the pantry. And what better place to put the entire contents of our larder than our dining room table? But the part about sausages and Roero Arneis is correct. But here are some observations: Fontina Val d'Aosta makes a damn fine fondue, though an expensive one. And if you don't feel like cracking a whole bottle of wine for your fondue and attendant drink, the Czech beer Pilsner Urquell (which is owned by a Polish company) works pretty nicely. I am not, as it happens, the first person to discover Fontina's charm in a fondue; the Piedmontese have a dish called fonduta which is kin to the traditional fondue produced just over their northern border. In it, Fontina is mixed with butter and eggs and white truffles (presumably one could do without this if you were on a budget). Rather than dipping bread into it, the fonduta is whipped and poured over veggies or grains. Of course this means you don't get all the cute little traditions about what happens when you drop your bread in, and you don't get the crusty bit of cheese at the bottom of the fondue pot. But it's definitely tempting.
Costs: Turkey 2
The other turkey dish I planned on making was a stuffed turkey breast. The heaving bosom of a
Broad Breasted White, I've since realized, could feed about forty people (well, okay, maybe 8). So I sliced
some pieces off the breast, going crosswise, and ended up with two decent-sized chunks of meat. These
I pounded out to be fairly flat, and laid prosciutto salami (from dinner last week) and Fontina d'Aosta
on top. Then I rolled up the turkey breast, and wrapped it in plastic overnight.
As Melissa and I realized that we'll be eating elsewhere for basically the next week, I think I'll be freezing the rest of the turkey breast. For the actual dinner, I made mashed potatoes, along with a wilted spinach/arugla concoction. The arugula came from Melissa's boss. Then I breaded the stuffed turkey breasts, sautéed them, and then baked them for a while. I also made a quick sauce with a dark roux and leftover giblet stock from Thanksgiving, which itself used chicken stock as its base. The nice thing about the "stuffed breast" concept is its presentation. You roll up the turkey (or chicken, or whatever), so all you have to do when you serve it is slice it across the rolls to get pretty little spiral medallions. So I put a pile of mashed potatoes in the center of the plate, covered that with the spinach/arugula, and then laid the medallions on top in a row of overlapping circles. Finally, I surrounded the potatoes with the sauce, making the whole assembly look like an island rising out of the sea. A polluted sea, I'll grant, since the sauce was brown. Yeah, yeah. Get a digital camera. It certainly looked pretty enough to photograph. For dessert, we tried a Derrick original. We had some leftover cranberry juice from when I made wassail for the Two Towers outing, so I made that into a syrup. I was going to do blood oranges (which I got at the farmer's market) with this cranberry syrup, but when I thought about what this was going to look like, a red syrup on red oranges, I decided to expand it a bit. So I bought regular oranges, and turned most of them into an orange syrup. The remaining oranges, and two blood oranges, I split into segments (without any of the membranes) and broiled for a couple of minutes. To plate them, I laid out regular orange segments at 12:00, 3, 6, and 9. For the other positions on the clock, I laid out blood orange segments. All pointing the same direction, of course. Then I used my fancy squeeze bottles to make a line of cranberry syrup going over the regular oranges, and a line of orange syrup going between the blood orange segments. It was a little cluttered on the plate, but other than that it looked nice. As for its taste, I was unhappy with my cranberry syrup. I think this was because it wasn't cranberry juice but "cranberry juice" as I realized later: artificial flavors and other fruit juices and the like. So when I reduced it so much, well, it lost a lot of its cranberriness. If I were to do this again, I'd probably make grenadine and use that for my red syrup. What was that about getting a camera? Finally, to go with dinner itself we broke into another Trader Joe's special, this the San Andrés Cabernet Sauvignon from the Lontué Valley in Chile (2002). $2.99. Melissa and I both noticed the obvious thing about it: its color. If you ever get the chance, look at the color of a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir. Tilt the glasses a bit against a white background to really compare the two. Assuming they're decent, the Cab should be noticeably darker than the Pinot Noir. Our Cab last night? It looked like a Pinot Noir, light and see-through. The label says it's meant to be drunk young. No kidding. It had virtually no tannins. You wouldn't even want this to breathe for more than the time it took to get the wine to your glass. I keep wondering if they mislabelled it. How do you get a Cabernet Sauvignon that's so light in tannins? Anyway, flavorwise it was completely uninteresting. Bland. Not even a lot of oak for flavor (which I normally don't like, but it would have been something). Chile can produce some very good Cabs, but this isn't one of them. Melissa proposes another idea for calculating costs, which are always hard to figure because how much do you count the excess turkey or whatever? Her idea is to do a weekly summary of what I've spent on meals, and average it out. Maybe I'll try that soon.
Costs (before wine): Turkey Cycle Friday, December 20, 2002
Once again, Fate has kept me out of the kitchen for a couple of days. Tuesday night, I was sitting
in line to see the 12:01 showing of The Two Towers. Did I eat cheaply? I guess, if you count buying
my Reeses Pieces at the local drugstore instead of the concession stand eating cheaply. Of course I also
bought a bag of Chessman cookies and a bottle of Mountain Dew to enjoy in line, so it's debatable.
Wednesday night, Kathy, Melissa's mom, had us over to celebrate Melissa's grandfather's birthday. The main course was a yummy soup, but there was cheese and bread and peach pie for dessert. So last night? Well, it was soup again. It's raining and cold here in the Bay Area, so it makes sense. I went to the store to get half a turkey breast. I figured half a breast would give us enough meat for soup last night, and dinner tonight. I was wrong. We'll be eating turkey for days at this rate. Which, given the $20 price tag on the turkey, is a good thing. I also had an abundance of cheese. I didn't feel like having The Pasta Shop cut me a slice of Fontina Val d'Aosta, so I bought one of their prewrapped slices for dinner tonight. $9.23! We'll be eating Fontina for a while, too. Anyway, back to the soup. I did a turkey soup, using some of the turkey stock I made after Thanksgiving, some celery Melissa had, some leftover carrots, and some shallots. I garnished the soup with toasted baguette slices (I actually bought the bread, because I thought I wasn't going to be home last night, either, so I didn't start it nineteen days ago or whatever), which I toasted with slices of Fontina, 'cause you know I've got so much. I also caramelized some leeks until they were very crisp and sprinkled them on top of the soup in its bowl. A pretty expensive dinner, overall, but lots of stuff to stretch as far as possible. As long-time readers may guess, the real goal here was not the turkey meat but its skin; I'm still collecting turkey fat to try turkey confit, so I wanted some skin to extract fat from.
Costs: Omelettes Tuesday, December 17, 2002
Whenever I say I'm making omelettes, someone inevitably makes a joke about my cat, Omelette. But she's
just not plump enough yet, so I had to resort to regular omelettes. I didn't feel much like cooking,
so omelettes are a safe default. We had some cheese and bacon in the fridge, so it was simply a matter
of making them. No cost, though I guess you could argue the eggs were $1.20. (I had 2 omelettes)
When making the smothered pork chops the other night, however, I was reminded of the very obvious technique
of rendering bacon fat and using that in your pan. Since I was putting bacon in my omelette, I rendered out the
fat first, and then used that instead of butter. Even more cost savings! Smothered Pork Chops and Cheap Wine Sunday, December 15, 2002
I had been intrigued by a recipe for Smothered Pork Chops in last November's Cook's Illustrated. So when
I thought about doing pork chops, and Melissa wanted onions involved, I thought about this recipe. Basically,
it's pork chops which are braised in a gravy and covered with onions in the process. The magazine's improvements
were fairly non-invasive: sear the pork chop first, make a dark roux for the gravy, and sauté the
onions for a while before doing the final braise. It's a good recipe, though next time I'd want more gravy
to really enshroud the chops; I thought the pork was a little tough.
And though their recipe calls for chicken broth, I opted to use the liquid I had left over from porcini mushrooms we rehydrated on Thanksgiving (I had frozen the leftover liquid). Talk about a flavorful sauce! It didn't use up all my porcini liquid, but I'm left with something like half a cup, so I don't know what I'll use the rest for. It's back in the freezer, though, waiting to add luscious porcini flavor to some future dish. To go with the chops, I made glazed parsnips. I had hoped to do another white wine vinegar glaze, which I did and liked a couple of weeks ago, but then I tasted our wine (see below) which was decidedly not acidic, and only put in a little bit of vinegar. I came up with a cute way to cut the parsnips, though: cut the parsnip in half, and then cut lengthwise into thirds along a diagonal, so you end up with three roughly equal roughly triangular slices. Shave off any curves that detract from the triangles, so that when you're done, you should have an extruded triangle. Cut this into wedges. (Those of you who have suggested I put in more pictures are probably thinking that this would be a good place for them; the digital camera will have to wait until I'm employed again, however.) But wait, there's more. Have you ever seen pains au chocolat? I decided to do a similar form, namely an envelope with three slashes, but using puff pastry for the shell and diced carrots and some honey as the filling. This worked fairly well based on what I had, but I was using leftover puff pastry, so didn't have a lot of it. If I were doing it again, I'd want to use bigger pieces. As it was, you barely registered that there were any carrots in the puff pastry envelope. Still the medium-diced carrots cooked very nicely, and it's hard to go wrong with something as laden with butter as puff pastry. Finally, the wine. Melissa wanted to check out some of the cheap wines which Trader Joe's carries, and she sprang for a few bottles (which totalled something like $21). The idea was to find something which is drinkable on a daily basis, without necessarily being really special. For this dinner, we tried the Black Mountain Vineyard 2001 Pinot Noir, Painted Ridges. It's $5.99 at Trader Joe's. It's not complex at all, has its alcohol a little out of balance, and isn't more than minimally acidic (but this is from someone who loves German, Austrian, and Loire wines which are notably acidic). I think the label is being a bit generous with its description of all the aspects of the wine ("strawberry, vanilla and cedar...finishes with gentle tannins and persistent flavors of plum, cranberry, and smoky oak"), though I'd agree it had gentle tannins; they were virtually nonexistent (which is fine with me). But for six bucks, it was perfectly drinkable and pretty decent. It went fine with dinner, though I was hoping for more of Pinot Noir's earthy, mushroomy character to complement the sauce.
Costs (minus wine): |
