| When I first started this blog, it was because I had just been laid off, and wanted my savings to last as long as possible. So I undertook this project, trying to stretch
leftovers in creative new ways. Just reheating was a cop-out. But now I'm re-employed, so it'll have to be a bit different. The cheap meals will more likely be lunches from now on, but
I still intend to keep up my old habits. More money for the expensive dinner parties we like to throw!
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.
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End of the Week
Sunday, February 16, 2003
Not much excitement on the eating cheaply front. Wednesday and Thursday I had tamales, great
tamales from the farmer's market that cost $2 each. It's hard to beat those prices, even when you
add in a semi-pricey Asian pear.
Valentine's Day was a nice meal, and only cost $15 for each of us before wine. Pan-fried striped bass,
with parsnips and green beans. I tried to tie the green beans with a little blanched chive, but I think
I over blanched them, because they weren't holding themselves together, let alone the green beans. But
I did manage to cut a long strip of lemon peel off a lemon and garnish the fish with that. I went
for a beurre blanc sauce, but it broke and I couldn't get it back together, so I turned it into
a beurre noisette. This works reasonably well, except next time I'll scoop the shallots out from
the beurre blanc before noisetting it; they became very caramelized, and not in a good way.
Saturday we used up the leftover wonton wrappers from our big dinner party last weekend, and made ravioli
with some leftover Teleme cheese Melissa bought for Valentine's Day. I've heard this technique described
before but never tried it. Basically, wonton wrappers can be used to make impromptu ravioli. Or so
goes the theory. I don't know that I would classify the ravioli as impromptu, since I had to cut them down
to size, but they did come out pretty well. We mixed in some boxed gemelli, since we didn't have
enough wrappers to produce a useful amount of ravioli, and added some leftover sausage to the sauce.
posted by Derrick at 10:51 PM
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