Posts Tagged eggs

Scraping by With Some Unidentified Squash

squash

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m Brokey McBrokerson lately. And last night I wanted nothing more than something warm and comforting to eat. Plus, I had three unidentified squash from my final CSA share I needed to use before they went bad.

At first I thought I’d just roast the squash, so I cut it open, reserved the seeds for toasting (!), and proceeded to roast its meat with with olive oil and sea salt. But then I figured I could make that squash go a lot longer if I put it into a casserole. Not that I had too much to work with. Still, I decided I would attempt a version of a recipe that appeared in my cookbook “Casserole Crazy: Hot Stuff for Your Oven,” using only what I had on hand.

The original recipe was contributed by my friend and former roommate Maria. It was her grandmother’s, and one Maria swore by. Made with yellow squash, crumbled Ritz crackers and lots of butter, it was low-class comfort food at its best, and perfect for “Casserole Crazy” (it appears on page 47 in case you’d like to try it yourself) and exactly what I needed last night.

Given my affinity for onions, I’d added some to the recipe when it came time to write the book. And it called for butter. And milk. I had none of those things. It also called for a cup-and-a-half of cheddar cheese. I had about a half a cup.

But I did have three unidentified squash (which I identified as Delicata after the fact), olive oil and even some Ritz crackers (don’t ask… they were football shaped, too!). Oh, and eggs. It called for eggs.

Because I’m sort-of the MacGyver of the kitchen, and always use enough salt, the result was delicious, gooey and perfectly comforting.

The recipe is after the jump.

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It Was a Dark and Stormy Tortilla

tortilla española, sorta

tortilla española, sorta

It was a dark and stormy morning. September the dog’s eagerness to go outside subsided like a pot of boiling water into which a frozen chicken is dropped when she stuck her nose out the door into the nearly horizontal southbound rain. Even my Helly Hansen mommy-get-that-creepy-man-away-from-me full-body rubber raincoat was no match for the blast. Missy was down with a migraine. She lay in the bed, a pillow clutched tight over her head to muffle the truck noise from the street. I asked her what she needed. She delivered her one-word reply in a muffled whisper: “Eggs.” For a moment, I had the impression that a contest of will between pain and appetite raged in her temples. Appetite won: “Potatoes. Cheese.”

This is the record of what followed.

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Cari’s spending, Week six: Under budget, with meat and turnips

Behold, the noble turnip!

Behold, the noble turnip!

Billy and his friend Dave spent a good part of the 4th of July digging a tree stump out of our backyard. (Which means MORE GARDEN SPACE! Can you say Onion Bed? Oh yeah, baby. Onion bed. Of the overwintering persuasion, thanks.) Heavy lumberjack work on a 95° F day, when done by omnivores, deserves meat. Particularly when it’s the 4th of July and there’s a grill handy. Even I, the vegetarian, recognize this. The kid and I strollered on over to New Seasons and I bought them not one, but TWO kinds of fancy organic sausage. (Mostly because I didn’t know what to get. I haven’t eaten meat in 20 years. I really shouldn’t be the one sent to the store to buy sausage.) I figured the budget for the week would be shot right there, but getting the stump out of the garden was worth it.

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How Does Your Garden Grow?

vegetable_garden_tomato2We here at Eating Well on Fifty Bucks a Week like to think we’re giving you a little something while helping our own wallets, whether it be recipes, helpful links or somewhat humorous one liners about our various vices (peanut butter, alcohol, expensive coffee in my case). Now, readers, I turn to you for advice.

I have mentioned in pretty much every post that I belong to an amazing CSA that provides me with milk, cheese, meat, bread, eggs and vegetables every week for only $25. Not only am I supporting local farms and eating foods I might not otherwise buy, I’m saving a ton of money on groceries. What I failed to mention when bragging endlessly about this particular CSA is that it ends in September—at which point I worry I will be royally screwed. The silver lining is that I will be forced to do what I’ve been saying I was going to do since I moved to Kansas City in late December: grow my own vegetables.

The landlord of the building next door has generously allowed me to use a 6 x 2-ish plot of land in the back of his building for my garden, but I’ll admit: I have no clue what the hell to actually do with it. I have most certainly missed planting season, the soil probably sucks and I have very little experience growing anything that can’t survive on a fire escape (even then, there’s been trouble).

So, if you were me—but with advanced knowledge of what vegetables to plant in the summer that would survive in the Midwest in possibly-crappy soil—what would you plant? And how?

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Fear Factor, Breakfast Edition

Bluff Mountain, Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina

Bluff Mountain, Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina

For the weak of stomach, let me say that this isn’t a post about slugs, or Zombie Frogs.

Over Independence Day Weekend, I took a road trip down to Asheville, North Carolina, with Isabel and John. We were there to attend a mutual friend’s wedding. My initial resentment at having to travel on or about the 4th of July, a holiday reserved in my mind for hanging out in backyards, grilling burgers, watching fireworks, and under no circumstances venturing more than ten miles from home or site of extended vacation, was soon overcome by the joy of the drive. Bridges rose and fell beneath the fender, the city disappeared in the rearview mirror, and gave way to New Jersey highways, checked with Queen Anne’s Lace; long Pennsylvania farmland, tagged with homely place-names; Maryland’s mixed mouth of northern speed and southern splendor; West Virginia’s jutty hills, invitingly close to home; Virginia’s stately verdure and eternally clear-eyed skies; and finally, via a detour through trailer parks and used car lots, pulsing with an auctioneer’s patter, onto the Blue Ridge Parkway, past staggering cloud-smoked hills and bounding ruddy deer, into lovely, slow-spoken North Carolina itself. In the backseat, Isabel made us mozzarella and tomato sandwiches on good baguettes, layered with fresh basil and moistened with olive oil and vinegar, somehow without spilling a drop. Arriving late that night, John and I dropped Isabel at her downtown hotel, and proceeded to our rooms at the Motel 6, the choice of classy iconoclasts everywhere. Read the rest of this entry »

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Reimagining Breakfast for Summer

a summer breakfast: bread, cheese, eggs, fruit, coffee

a summer breakfast: bread, cheese, eggs, fruit, coffee

The older I get, the more important breakfast becomes. In my twenties, I’d have nothing but coffee in the morning — or, worse, coffee and a cigarette. Now, at thirty-six, if I don’t get a decent breakfast, I’m dizzy by ten, incoherent by ten-thirty, and drool-napping at my desk by eleven in the morning.

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Things I Will Pay More For: The Incredible, Edible, Free-Range Egg

eggI’ve been thinking and writing a lot about eggs this week. This is, in part, because since I’ve started eating “good eggs” I’ve come to discover that eggs are not as gross as I once thought they were. And it’s also due to the fact that I saw “Mad City Chickens,” a documentary that chronicles the resurgence of the backyard hen on Monday.

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Adam’s spending, Week 3: funning the numbers

It was a week of $2.49 for a bag of chipotles that I thought cost fifty cents less, $4.18 for a half pound each of ground beef and pork, and another $4.31 for a pound of sweet Italian sausage. It was a week of $3.49 for peanut butter I haven’t dipped into yet, $1.81 for adzuki beans I haven’t yet soaked, and $2.89 for pumpernickel bread that I tore to pieces. I dined out on kielbasa and potato salad at the Bohemian Beer Garden, overpriced at $8 and $4, respectively, and went in on some credible basic-model pizza from Fascati.

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Cari’s spending, Week 3: Yes, I’m sure I counted everything

Legumes are cheap and tasty but not as pretty as the Oregon coast.

Legumes are cheap and tasty but not as pretty as the Oregon coast.

$69.66. Not per person. Total. We spent $69.66 so far this week (including $13.00 for two lunches Billy had to buy at work because he forgot his lunch once and I forgot to pack one for him another day), and there’s now just the weekend to go* and plenty of food in the house. And no, we’re not hungry. Nor are we eating bark chips at the playground. (Okay, maybe a few, but only for the fiber.) How did we do it? Cooking ahead, and legumes. Go ahead, say it with me: Legumes.

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Easy as Custard

custard

I am incredibly adventurous when it comes to eating other people’s food. My own? Not so much. I buy the same thing at the grocery store almost every time I go and my daily menu is usually some variation on the following:

Breakfast:
Plain, fat-free yogurt with cinnamon and whole wheat

Snack:
Apple
Peanut Butter
Peanut Butter
More Peanut Butter

Lunch:
Tuna salad on whole wheat or peanut butter

Dinner:
Rice or whole wheat pasta with Cascadian Farm sweet peas or Roasted Brussels Sprouts washed down with lots of red wine or Jameson

Dessert:
Peanut Butter

Such a diet might make it easy to stick to a $50-a-week budget, but as I mentioned last week, I recently joined my local CSA. The $25-a-week share provides me with vegetables, bread and various staples that normal people might already have in their fridges including a half-gallon of milk and a dozen eggs. I have never been able down a glass of milk on its own—though I’ll buy it by the pint for my coffee—so a half-gallon is excessive as far as I’m concerned. And I rarely buy eggs unless I’m making something that requires them.

As I was standing in front of my fridge yesterday—already feeling guilty about draining all of that energy—I worried the eggs and milk might go to waste. Any time I buy more than a pint of milk it always sours before I can finish it, and to make matters worse, I’m leaving for Bonnaroo, a music festival in Tennessee, tomorrow.

I had plans to attend a roving vegetarian potluck last night and wondered what I could make; eggs and milk… eggs and milk… eggs and milk… custard! I was extremely proud of this idea because 1. I’d never made a custard before and 2. the weekly event often lacks dessert.

I looked online for the basics of making a custard and found that it is ridiculously easy. So easy, in fact, that I felt shame for all of the milk and eggs I’d let go to waste over the years. I decided to modify this recipe because, as anyone who’s read the intro to my book knows, I never follow a recipe from start to finish—even if I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. Luckily it worked.

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