Eating Well on $50 a Week

Three writers. Three cities. One culinary experiment.

Posts Tagged zucchini

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

Oct 30

Posted by cari in budget analysis, update

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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If I have to eat sauteed zucchini one more time…

Aug 13

Posted by cari in Uncategorized

zucchinote

Okay. That last post about the zucchini recipe? That was the very last shred of my zucchini denial. The truth is, I’m totally over it. Zucchinied out. We have eaten so much goddamn zucchini from the garden in the last few weeks that I want to hurl at the thought of it. But it’s there in the garden, and it’s free, and we’re on this budget, so…

And then Tuesday night we had a big rain storm, and in the morning we had sun. In the afternoon, I harvested those beasts you see in the photo. No, I hadn’t delayed the harvest too long because I couldn’t bear facing the zucchini plant. Those are not old, overgrown, leathery squash. Those were the size of my finger on Monday, I swear. So now I’ve got three ginormous zucchuni (plus one modest one) in the fridge, and about eight more coming in close on their heels on the plants. (Why do I have two zucchini plants this year? Because we love zucchini. Heh.)

I’m going to freeze a lot of it, for sure. I’ll be very glad to have zucchini from our garden come winter. But we still need to eat a good deal of it now, and for however many more weeks zucchini season drags on.

Which is to say: Recipes, please! For the love of squash, people. I need some new ideas! What the hell do YOU do with zucchini?

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Cari’s spending, Week 7: garden garden garden

Jul 17

Posted by cari in budget analysis

Squash blossoms and mixed baby greens from the garden

Squash blossoms and mixed baby greens from the garden

Have I mentioned how much I love my garden? Maybe once? Twice? Yeah. Love it. We spent $123.20 this week for the three of us. I was worried we’d go over budget because we ran out of a lot of staples at one time: dried beans (I went for pinto beans and black-eyed peas this time, a change from our usual black beans and adzukis), dried chickpeas, brown AND white rice, soba noodles, and tahini. What I got will carry us through a few weeks, so over the course of the month it will work out budgetwise, but I was sure I’d blown it for this week when the first shop came out to $55.40 and we were still going to need more fruit, yogurt, and peanut butter, etc as the week went on. Well, we cut it close, but we squeaked in underbudget. It wouldn’t have been possible without the garden.

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Gardening where you can

Jul 15

Posted by cari in update

Baby greens and baby zucchini from our garden. We like 'em young.

Baby greens and baby zucchini from our garden. We like 'em young.

I’m kind of obsessed with my vegetable garden. I walk through it every chance I get, peeking through the leaves to see how the zucchini are coming along, propping up the cucumber vines and cooing at the teeny little cucumbers now emerging, encouraging the okra to grow even though the odds are against them here in Oregon. I love knowing that with a little bit of effort I can feed my family fresh, organic vegetables straight from our garden. And the more the garden produces, the lower our food bill goes. We’re not fancy-cheese eaters. (In fact, we don’t eat much cheese at all. Plain yogurt, and milk for coffee and tea are pretty much the extent of our dairy consumption, unless there’s the occasional pizza involved.) The bulk of our grocery money goes for organic produce. A non-negotiable for us, particularly since we’re feeding a child. But with the garden there’s also the benefit of knowing EXACTLY where our food came from.

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Steak Salad on a Sticky Night

Jun 25

Posted by adam in recipe, update

hangar steak a-grilling

hangar steak a-grilling

Sometimes I need a little steak. I like the classic sides with it, too. But when it’s seventy degrees and sticky on a school night, I don’t think baked potatoes and broccoli, or anything else that involves turning on the oven. Instead, I think steak salad.

I’ve been making steak salads since I was seventeen, when I discovered that by bringing the yin of the meat line and the yang of the salad bar together, I could produce a plate wholly more appetizing than anything else to be found in the college dining hall (this, if my GPA is to be trusted, was my greatest academic achievement). Nowadays, steak salads are familiar fare at NYC’s Vietnamese, Thai, and pan-Asian eateries (pan-Asian means that the food is cooked in an Asian pan, or wok; the cook, like as not, is a Mexican dude). But I do not reject the steak salad, as I do this year’s celebutante sandwich, the Banh Mi. For where the Banh Mi’s joys have been sung, tarted up, botoxed with truffle oil, bejeweled with foie gras drippings, and sung again, the steak salad is long past celebrity status, if it ever had any.* No one sings it, no one sends it flowers, not even a lousy nasturtium. That makes it safe to eat.
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