Try saying that five times fast. Or even once. But while I'm still not able to pronounce it, I was definitely intrigued by the description and picture I saw in a cooking magazine. Thick mosaiced disks, served in the article with twice-smoked bacon and presented on an elegant plate, enshrouded in a cloth napkin, they definitely caught my eye. What, I thought, is this?

"This" is another one of those marvelous re-uses of bread which every culture except Americans have deeply entrenched in their cuisine. In this case, the Austrians. It relies on having a day-old baguette, and is sort of a bread pudding formed into a torchon with cheesecloth and poached. Very easy to make and extremely cheap. Baguette, eggs, milk, onion, flour, and whatever herbs and spices you want to throw in. After it's poached, let it drain on a rack, and then unwrap the roll from the cheesecloth. Voila! You have a big sausage of bread pudding that can be sliced and served (or sliced and put in a plastic container to schlep to work).

I ate mine at work with some leftover goat cheese (from a salad I made for a company potluck), salami, and leftover stuffing from the stuffed onions. I arranged the knödel around the edge of the plate and heaped the stuffing in the middle. I heated the plate up a little in the microwave, and then put a little blob of goat cheese on each disk and continued to heat up the whole ensemble until the goat cheese was warm. It's California; you have to include warm goat cheese. Once everything was heated up, I put single slices of salami between the knödel slices, making little U's between the disks.

Yeah, I'd make it again. But Melissa had a different arrangement which might win out in the future; I left her a second roll, and she had apples with hers. She tells me that the sweetness and crunch of the apple was a very nice counterpoint to the knödel, goat cheese, and salami. My stuffing was a little harsh with the rest of the dish.

Costs:
Baguette (since I didn't have a day-old baguette, I had to buy one): $1.50
Goat cheese in pantry, and while the salami isn't precisely a pantry ingredient, I didn't buy it just for this dish but to have around for easy snacking; you could totally get away with not buying it. Stuffing was leftover.
Eggs, milk, butter and onion: Probably $1.50 all together.
Total costs: $3
posted by Derrick at 9:38 PM

Back to making myself lunches, trying to recoup some of the money I've spent in the last few days. Today's lunch was stuffed onions, and I was, for once, pretty darn happy with the way the dish came out.

I had the idea from a cooking class we took a couple weeks back. We didn't make the dish in our class, but another class that met that day made it, and I did my best to reverse engineer it.

Not too tough, as it turns out. You cut an onion in half across the equator, and then slice a little off near the root end and stem end to make it steady. Brush with oil and roast in a 425° oven for roughly 40 minutes (maybe nearer to 45; I could have liked them a little softer). When they're done, let them cool a little, and scoop out some of the inner "bowls" (they should just slide out), leaving enough of a wall to support your stuffing. The stuffing should definitely involve the inner bowls (I minced mine), but can also include whatever else you want. I used some smoked sausage, which I cut into small dice, and some Swiss chard leaves which I removed from their tough stem and blanched before chiffonading. I saved the stems, though, since I might turn them into a relish.

Easy to make, came out great, and was pretty to boot. Even my co-workers who are used to my lunches came over to ogle the dish. But even two halves don't make a very filling lunch, so I might use them as an opener (or here's an interesting idea: do the same thing with cippolini and make an amuse-bouche. hmmm). I would also mix in a little cheese to give a creamy consistency to the filling. Perhaps some Fontina Val d'Aosta, one of the world's great melting cheeses. And perhaps topped with some bread crumbs.

And I might plate them differently. At work, I just put the two halves on a plate, since that's all I had to work with. I thought of serving them atop a risotto cake or something. And I had another thought. What if I fried the outer bowls? This would entail an extra step for cooking the inner bowls, but it's not like that's ever stopped me before.

If I could have served a wine, my first thought was a mellow Grüner Veltliner. The dish wasn't so intense that it needed a really robust one. For the red wine snobs, perhaps a Grenache.

Think I'm happy with the dish?

Costs:
Onion: $.79
Sausage: $2 (again from Taylor's)
Chard: $1.29
Total cost: $4.08
posted by Derrick at 9:25 PM

I have been remiss in my posts to this blog. This is sadly because I have not been eating very cheaply over the last few days, even if I have been eating well. In addition, when I get home at 8:30-9:00, even my cooking energy wanes. In addition, Melissa and I have been eagerly working our way through Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 3. Ahem.

Still, all is not lost in my war to eat cheaply. The other night we made that old standby, pasta. I had bought some smoked sausage, just to have around as a last-minute flavor enhancer, and I sliced up two links and reheated them in a warm skillet. I also made a bechamel sauce and added the last of the delicious Red Hawk I got for Christmas. Nothing adds flavor like a washed-rind cheese, let me tell you. Our downstairs neighbors could probably smell it. The dish was good if not exactly well-balanced.

Costs:
Sausage: $2 (from the fantastic Taylor's Sausages in Oakland)

posted by Derrick at 8:55 PM

Melissa showed me this article from the SF Chronicle about how to use up morsels of food that might otherwise get thrown out. Lots of neat ideas, some of which I knew, some of which I didn't.
posted by Derrick at 2:17 PM

"Several of the other crostini toppings and combinations...are proudly based on leftovers, or larder items"

This quote from Judy Rodgers's Zuni Café Cookbook was the inspiration for Friday's lunch. I had leftover port-fig stuffing from the turkey breast I made a couple days ago, and decided to top some baguette slices with that, as well as a relish of beet stems which I made just for this lunch (the beets I bought for a potluck at work tomorrow). So all I had to do was toast the baguette slices in the morning, and bring them into work (a toaster oven can only do four slices at a time, so I sacrificed the freshness of just-made toasts for convenience).

These both worked very nicely, though the beet stem relish was so loose that I ended up with a bunch of it on my plate rather than in my mouth. But the fig-port stuffing worked really nicely on its own, reheated and then spread on top of the toast.

Costs:
Baguette: $1.50
(Beet stem relish was only made because I had beet stems from beets I'm using for something else)
posted by Derrick at 2:13 PM