Posts Tagged fried green tomatoes

Cari’s spending: Getting close to admitting we need to up the budget (and a bonus garden post/grumble)

My first attempt at fried green tomatoes. We ate them with plum chutney. So good!

My first attempt at fried green tomatoes. We ate them with plum chutney. So good!

We’re either on budget or over this week, depending on whether or not I decide to finally go ahead and tack on that Fetal Food Allowance that so many of you have generously insisted we qualify for. It does make sense: I’m eating more and craving/needing more expensive foods (obscene quantities of fruit, more moderate amounts of orange juice, and the more-than-occasional bar of dark chocolate with blueberries) because I’m pregnant. And that certainly won’t let up once the baby arrives. As I recall it from Kiddo #1’s babyhood, during those first six months of exclusive breastfeeding I was even hungrier than during his pregnancy. I ate more in those early nursing months than during the pregnancy (and lost all the baby weight while eating that much. Exclusive breastfeeding, mamas. It’s good on about 50 different levels).

But I’m stubborn, and highly competitive, and I’m still hoping to find a way to stick to the original $125 a week budget now that our family is growing. It’s possible. I know it is. If there hadn’t been a pumpkin-milkshake-and-harvest-burger Burgerville incident over the weekend, we would have come very close to the budget this week. That means it’s totally possible. I’ve only been baking about half the bread we eat in the past few weeks, so if I can get back to baking all our bread, and ration the chocolate bars to one every week and a half…

Yeah. Maybe.

So…the numbers:

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Rib-Sticking Resumed

rice and beans, fried green tomato

rice and beans, fried green tomato

Am I glad it’s autumn. I love summer’s salads and cookouts, but, after a while, it’s like going around in a bathing suit all the time. I want jeans and a sweater. I want food that sticks to my ribs. I want to use the oven for more than a second. I want food that cooks for a good long while.

Work being — thankfully — what it is, I don’t always get to cook as much or as long as I’d like, but I am more than glad to fall back into cool-weather comfort food. The rice and beans you see before you are an example of that. They also started as something else.

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It’s surplus week on $50 a Week

Emily’s got a freezer full of pig parts. Me? Fall garden cleanup this weekend resulted in this:

The big'uns

The big'uns

The little'uns

The little'uns

I haven’t weighed them yet, but hefting the bags I’m estimating we’re looking at about twenty pounds of green tomatoes. Pickle them? Fry them? Sort small batches into paper bags and hope they ripen? What the hell to do with this many green tomatoes?

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