deep fried dinner

I am quite happy to own a deep fryer.  Sometimes, when I don't feel like putting a lot of effort into dinner, I can just drop something in.  Well not literally, or I burn my fingers with the splash-back.  Now, while deep fry items are available at most grocery stores, I almost always buy mine from Best Buy Foods across from CCMH on Rte 6.  They sell Tyson all-white-meat, hormone-free chicken products, and even though they're more expensive than generic ones, I don't feel as bad about serving my kids meat and starch with little-to-no veggies. 

This bag of Tyson chicken tenders contained 32 fingers and cost $19.71.  I ate 3 fingers (they're big).  Basic math tells me that's $1.85 worth of meat.  The kids wanted nuggets so that's what they got.  The whole bag was 2 pounds worth for $5.99.  I counted 29 nuggets in the bag, which means the 11 nuggets I made for the kids (4 for each of the older kids, 3 for my littlest one) cost $2.27.  The fries were $4.50 for 5 pounds.  I cooked maybe a pound's worth, at 90 cents.  These are big fat fries, so I didn't need to cook as many to fill up my kids. 

Dessert was actually the drinks; since the kids had sparked this dinner by requesting McDonald's, and specifically milkshakes, so I made some with my blender.  I had some freezerburnt chocolate ice cream, so I just added some milk and puree'd it in my blender.  My daughter, however, wanted a smoothie, which I made with some ice cubes, a heaping spoon of yogurt, a splash of grape juice, a smaller splash of lemon juice, and heaping spoon of sugar.  I don't know if I did it "right" or not, but she liked it, and it was probably the healthiest thing any of us ate tonight. 

And I know that they don't teach the "food pyramid" anymore. (Seriously, they don't.) but when I was a kid we learned that starches, like potatoes and the breading on the chicken, were the biggest part of any meal.  All right, now I'm just rationalizing.

All kidding aside, dinner was $1.85 + $2.27 + $0.90 + dessert = $5.02 + dessert, which is FAR less than $10, and also far less than if I'd actually given in and bought 4 McDonalds meals.  Some nights when the kids do this I put the "meals" in brown paper bags and draw on them, or put old Dollar General toys inside, to add to the "Happy Meal" feeling.  Tonight I was lazy, I mean, justifyably tired, so we just went with something fast, cheap, and easy.  Veggies with dinner will resume Monday.

The Great Debate: Pre-made vs Home-made

I had a conversation the other day with a woman who said eating around here is expensive.  I was confused.  She had moved here from a city, but, in my experience, food costs more in big city grocery stores.  The reason her bills were so high, it turns out, is because she doesn't actually cook.  She tends to buy pre-made dinners and "cook" them.  It's more convenient, it doesn't require any planning ahead or defrosting, and she knows that she and her husband both like the taste.  But since "everything is freezerburnt" (her words, not mine) she and her husband have been eating out every meal. 

Now, just about anything you buy pre-made can be made at home, but I will admit that there are some advantages to pre-packaged food. 

Sometimes, it's cheaper.  Factory-made pizzas and pies are made in extremely large batches, literally hundreds a day, and the factories can get bulk flour and yeast a lot cheaper than you or I can.

Sometimes, it's tastier.  A lot of the folks in my generation grew up with fast food more often than once a month, and we enjoy the taste of Kraft Mac N Cheese more than a home-made version.

Often, it's faster.  Occasionally not, but Often enough to consider it "Always".  Yes, it is faster to open a can of soup than to make soup from scratch.

Sometimes, of course, you don't have the equipment to make it yourself.  Even though I really enjoy cooking, I still don't own a vegetable steamer or dehydrator.

So, food I buy, that I could make myself: loaves of bread, cans of soup, mac n cheese, and cake mixes are the big ones.  I make cookies and frosting from scratch.  I think I buy cake mixes because I despise washing all those measuring cups.

And sometimes, I do make home-made soup, and pizza, and steam vegetables in the microwave.  There's something to be said about doing things for yourself and your family, and knowing exactly what went into those cookies that are disappearing by the minute.  Ummm... gotta go.

steak and corn

Tonight I just wanted something fast and simple.  Last week, corn on the cob was on sale for 50 cents an ear, so I bought 4 ears, and I still had, in my freezer, that cheap, thin steak that was on sale for $3.29/lb. 

 This week, it was even cheaper, and a thicker, juicier cut, but I couldn't justify the purchase while I still had steak in my freezer waiting to be used.  Since it's only Monday, I may buy some of the juicier steak before the end of the week.

Since I was interested in speed more than anything else, I thawed the steak in my microwave, peeled 3 ears of corn (since I knew my boys would split an ear), chopped the steak into "serving-sized" chunks, and pan-fried it with some Italian dressing and water. 

The corn I boiled for 12 minutes and served with margarine and salt.  Like I said, I was after "simple".  Dessert was a bisquick coffee cake, recipe off the side of the box.  I would recommend making twice as much crumb topping.  This wasn't nearly sweet enough for my taste.

Bisquick coffee cake recipe:  Preheat oven to 375 degrees and grease a 9 inch pan.  In a small bowl, combine 1/3 cup bisquick, 1/3 cup packed brown sugar, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, and 2 Tbsp margarine to make crumb topping.  In larger bowl, mix 2 cups bisquick, 2/3 cup milk, 2 Tbsp sugar, and 1 egg.  Spread batter in pan and cover with crumb topping.  Cook 18-22 minutes until golden brown.

In the end, I only used about 2/3 of the steak.  The rest I diced into "stir fry" sized chunks and put in my freezer for future use.  As far as costs go, the steak was $6.76.  I used about 2/3 of it, so that was roughly $4.50 worth of steak.  The corn was 50 cents an ear.  I bought four but only cooked 3 tonight, so that's $1.50.  The bisquick cake is hard to calculate but a whole box of bisquick only costs $5.99 when not on sale, and the side of the box says it contains 9 cups of mix, so I used 2 and 1/3 cups, or roughly 26% of the box, or $1.56 worth.  Since I also used small amounts of milk, egg, etc, we're going to call this a $2 dessert.  Total spent tonight: $4.50 steak, $1.50 corn, and $2 dessert = $8.00

ham and potato casserole

This dinner is both crazy cheap AND crazy easy.  I made a box of scalloped potatoes according to the directions on the box.  I bought a pre-cooked pound of ham (turns out I only needed half, so I froze the rest in a zippered bag for next time) and added about 6 ounces of shredded cheddar cheese.  It was an 8-oz bag once upon a time, that I had used a little of before, then frozen the remainder.  I also added some diced onion, but that was it.  So, to the potato mix (before baking) I added the diced ham, cheese, and onion, then baked according to the box.

With this casserole I served broccholi, steamed in a glass bowl in my microwave.  I only added a little bit of garlic salt this time, and a bit of butter.  The broccholi complemented the casserole very well.

Dessert was ice cream cones.  Again.  But it's warmer now, the kids are wearing tee shirts, and they want to go swimming and eat ice cream and do all those summer-y things that kids do.

The entire dinner took less than half an hour from start to finish, even measuring out ingredients for the scalloped potatoes.  By the way, these were the Dollar General brand, clover valley, and absolutely delicious.  The vote of confidence from my six year old: "Mom, these are WAY better than the ones the school makes.  But you should put bacon in it."

So, calculating the cost of this meal, we have: Half a ham steak, $2.44, box of DG potatoes, $1, half-pound bag of cheddar cheese: $2.50, half frozen bag of broccholi: 90 cents, and 4 ice cream cones at 38 cents each: $1.52.  All of this gives us a grand total of: $8.36

A failed experiment

Not every cooking experience results in good food, or even edible food.  But every experience results in knowledge, and that means that no cooking experiment is ever a complete failure.  Even when you turn something semi-edible into something not at all edible, you haven't failed, as long as you learned what not to do in the future.

This last Monday was a day off of work for me.  I spent some of Sunday night looking for green peppers in my house, possible pre-diced and frozen and just waiting at the bottom of my freezer.  I did not find any peppers.  What I did find, however, was a box of Steak-Ums (pre-packaged cheese steak meat) which had been opened and dropped in there sometime in the last several years.  The meat itself did not look freezer burned, but I knew I hadn't bought any in years, and this box was open.  Rather than just toss it, I thought I would try to salvage it by turning it into jerky.

My dad had built a home dehydrator out of (I am not kidding) plywood, chicken wire, and lightbulbs, and made venison jerky with the first deer of the season every year.  He would portion it out into seven baggies: two for each of the 3 kids and one for him and my mom.  We'd get our first bag immediately and the second bag at Christmas.  And my dad's jerky recipe was delicious.  The meat always marinated overnight, so that's what I did with this. 

I took the pack of steak-ums, put them in a pyrex bowl, marinated them in what was left of a jar of Kraft Honey Barbeque sauce (good stuff, honestly, and I had a third of a jar in my fridge) overnight on Sunday. Then, on Monday, slow-cooked them on cookie cooling racks over top of baking sheets (so the BBQ wouldn't just drip into the oven.)  I had to do an internet search to find out how long and what temp, and all the websites suggested that I slice a roast "into 1/2 inch thick strips" or "into 1/4 inch thick strips".  Steak-ums are much thinner than that, and the idea with jerky is to slowly dry out the meat.  The websites I found suggested an oven temp of 200 degrees for anywhere from 4 to 8 hours.  I lowered the oven temp to 175 (as low as mine would go) and left the meat in for 3 hours before "peeking", flipped it (it should have dried evenly but I was just being cautious) and then, because it didn't seem "done" (it was still "floppy") upped the oven temp to 200 and gave it another 2 hours.

Well, it was absolutely horrible.  Literally.  Horrible.  I would not recommend this to anybody.  I am still not sure if it was because I was starting from years-old meat, if it's because the meat was too thin, if I had the oven temp too low for the first 3 hours, or what. But it was nas-tay.  As I said, an experiment is not a failure if I have learned something. And the only materials lost were a third-bottle of sauce and the meat (not even a whole pack) which I would have thrown out anyway. 

If I wanted to know what went wrong here scientifically, I would have to isolate each factor, and repeat this experiment several times.  But since I don't want to waste actually edible steak-ums that I would have to buy with real money just to satisfy my scientfic curiosity, I think I'm just going to go with: this was bad, and my dad's is good.  Therefore, IF I ever make homemade jerky again, I will start from an actual, proper cut of meat, and use my dad's marinade recipe. 

Minus ten points from Gryffendor

chili con carne and corn bread muffins

Last night, my daughter wanted soup for dinner.  Specifically, she wanted chili.  Her exact words: "We had chili at school once and it was delicious."  Now, chili recipies vary: some folks add corn or potatoes to give their chili a little starch.  Some folks (most that I know) add hamburger meat, which is technically, chili con carne (latin for "with meat") or chicken, or make a "white chili".  All chili recipes have two factors in common, though: Pepper and beans.  Note, I said, "pepper", not "peppers", although most contain actual pepper meats, some only contain pepper spice or dried pepper, or "chili seasonings" which is a generic-store concotion containing, among other things, pepper.  After a thorough search of my cupboards, refrigerator, and freezers, I found a lack of both.  I did have a bag of dried kidney beans, but they needed to soak for at least an hour and it was already 5 o'clock.  So last night, I made our actual dinner, a very quick one, then started the chili so I could serve it tonight.  It didn't hurt that today was a day off of work for me, which meant I'd be able to work on it all day.

As I said, I began by soaking the dehydrated beans, which I did by covering them in cold water, bringing them to a rolling boil, boiling for 2 minutes, then removing from heat and leaving, hot and covered, for an hour.  In short, I followed the directions on the bag.  I used a whole bag of dried beans that have been in my cupboard for years.  I know, because when I was nursing my now-four-year-old son, I received WIC checks that allowed for a jar of peanut butter or a bag of dried beans.  Just once I got the bag of beans, and it has sat in my cupboard for years.  Not that dried beans go bad, which is one of their virtues.  They're an apocolypse food.  Once the beans have soaked and re-hydrated, you rinse them and put them back in your giant chili kettle.  Or whatever you have for such things.  On top of the beans, I added 1 and a half large onions, diced. 
In a very large skillet, I cooked this entire family-sized pack of hamburger meat, which I bought ages ago for what I can only deduce was $5.57, due to my amazing, Sherlock-Holmes-ish deductive skills. 
         I cooked the meat with 4 spoonfuls of garlic-from-a-jar, stirring every few minutes with a spatula, then used the same spatula to lift the meat out of the grease pool (it was that crazy cheap "less than 78% fat" burger that's got the most fat and grease out of any burger you can buy) rather than get meat grease all over my strainer.

To this I added a family-sized (32-oz) can of diced tomatoes, and put the whole thing in the fridge (with a lid) for today.  As I said before, today, I had the day off, so I went to the store with the kids and got 3 bell peppers, one red, one green, one yellow, for $3.69.  They were packaged together for $4.59 but, with a little bit of math, I found I could save 90 cents by buying them separately.  If I bought Birds Eye frozen stir-fry mix, I could get the bag for $3.59, but (a) it would have onions in it and I already added onions, and (b) it would cost more per pound since the frozen bag was only about 60% of the weight of the fresh peppers and (c) I would still have to dice them since they were pepper and onion strips not diced chunks which is what you (or at least I) put in chili.  So I spent 20 minutes in the store with 3 kids on the peppers alone.  (grumble)  The only good thing is that after I diced all three peppers I only needed to use about half of them, so I was able to put the remaining diced pepper in a freezer bag for later use.

So, today, I added the fresh diced bell peppers and the seasonings, which for me included 7 beef bullion cubes, a little worchestire sauce, (I always have to spell-check that one) another spoonful of garlic, salt, pepper, paprika, chili seasoning, basil, and, because I decided it wasn't "tomato-y" enough, but putting in another jumbo can of tomatoes would be too much, I added a jar of my favorite spaghetti sauce.  This also added a bit of flavor that wouldn't have been there before, but she tasted, and she saw that it was good.  I brought it to a boil, then took it down to slightly more than "simmer" on my stove's dial (a "three", for those who care about such things).  I left it on "simmer" for over an hour.  (Oh, and added some water so it wouldn't dry up and stirred it every twenty minutes, so that the stuff on the bottom wouldn't burn permanantly to the kettle) 

When it was done (about 1 pm today) I removed it from the heat and let it cool to room temp, then put it in the fridge.  I didn't put it right in the fridge because I didn't want to over-work my fridge trying to cool down my milk and butter and fresh fruit AND a big kettle of something that was just boiling.  Anyway, at about 4 pm I took the now-cooled kettle out and ladeled it into plastic quart-sized "zippered freezer storage bags" which is a nice way of saying generic ziploc.  I did this, by the way, by putting a bag in a 32-ounce tumbler and ladeling into the cup.  This kept soup from getting all over the outside of the bag. 


This resulted in 4 bags of chili for another day (or another 4 days, as it were) and left me with enough chili in the bottom of the pot to serve with dinner tonight.

Our side dish tonight was cornbread muffins, which is kind of obvious, when you think about it, as THE thing to serve with chili, when the chili is your main course.  If your chili is not the main course, of course, then it should be served with something else which will be the main course.  Of course.

Sorry about that, I've been watching a lot of VLOGBROTHERS while I waited for my picture of a pepper to load, which it ended up not doing anyway.

So anyway, I made some muffins using a crazy cheap corn muffin mix, which just happened to be the last in my cupboard.  I think I bought it for 67 cents (3 for $2).  I'm gonna go with that.

And I made them using cupcake wrappers from the cupcake spree of two weeks ago for ease of removal.  When all was said and done, we had a satisfying, delicious dinner that only took parts of two days to prepare, and the kids were so filled that they didn't even want dessert, which was store-bought butterscotch pudding, but which they will happily eat, I am sure, very, very soon.

The cost of tonight's dinner must be calculated as a whole, then proportioned:  The beans were technically free for me, since they were a WIC product (given away by the PA government for nursing mothers and mothers of young children - I don't even know if they give away beans any more) but I'm going to assume that someone buying beans would have to pay $2.50 for them, since that's what I think I paid last time I bought a jumbo can of beans.  The meat was $5.57, the peppers $3.69, but I saved half in the freezer for later use, so I used $1.85 worth of peppers tonight, and the onions, sold in a 3 pound bag (about 5 medium-sized onions) for $1.99, of which I only used 1 and a half onions, came to 60 cents.  The can of tomatoes was $1.79, and the jar of sauce was $1.67.  The random spices and such probably totaled less than 50 cents.  Adding that all up, the entire pot of chili cost somewhere around $14.48.  Since I used 1/5 of that tonight (four freezer bags plus what I served with dinner) tonight's chili cost $2.90.  Now then, the cornbread mix cost 67 cents, and I used all of it, plus 1/3 cup of milk and 1 egg (honestly, practically nothing - if a dozen eggs is $1.79 each egg is 15 cents, and eggs at Costas were a dollar saver item this week, which meant they were less than that even), plus "fake butter" (spread, actually called "A change for the butter") that I mixed with honey in a re-used (as in reduce reuse recycle) yogurt cup to make a honey butter spread, so I'm gonna round that 67 cents up to $1.  The pudding that nobody ate was made from a SureFine pudding mix (mixed with whole milk and cooled in the fridge for 5 minutes according to the box, 20 minutes in real life) and cost 69 cents.  So the total of dinner plus dessert was $4.59.

There was even about 16 oz of soup left over tonight, and 2 cornbread muffins, which I offered to a neighbor.  So goodnight to all my Potter County neighbors, who need a little warmth on this "chili" spring evening.

 

"Chef Boyardee" (but not really)

Occasionally, you just want something fast and easy.  Earlier this week, I made pork steaks for my family, and had three 9-ounce steaks left.  Two of the steaks we ate heated up with some vegetables, which left me with one steak.  It was too little to make it the entree, and I had a few ideas but wasn't quite sure, so I just went with what sounded the tastiest. 

                                      When the kids were younger, and both my spouse and I were working, we would often eat food from a can, or a box, or delivery, or drive through.  As much as I enjoyed cooking, I think I only cooked for my family once a week.  Now that I'm divorced, and can't really afford that much drive-through, I cook most of our meals from scratch.  One of the kids' favorites from those days, though, was Chef Boyardee.  So, when I saw that Mama Rosie's (not to be confused with the actual brand name Mama Rosa) ravioli was on sale last week for $1.50 a bag, I bought some. 

First, I boiled the whole bag of ravioli (serves 3, supposedly) in my deep skillet.  While it was boiling, I finely diced the remaining pork chop.  It looked like a lot of meat when it was all chopped up.  My plan was to make a "meat sauce", and sneak the meat in.  There was so much here, though, that I put some of it in a salad.  Think, "grilled chicken salad".  Kinda like that. 

When the ravioli finished boiling, I strained them and put them back in the skillet with about 3/4 of the pork meat and a whole jar of Franceso Rinaldi spaghetti sauce.  This is my favorite brand, and comes closest to my mom's homemade sauce of childhood memory.  I always buy several jars when it's on sale, so I can't remember exactly how much it cost, but usually when it's on sale it's 3 jars for $5 or 3 jars for $4.  Only rarely can I get it for $1 a jar, and since I only had 2 jars in my cupboard, it was probably more expensive when I bought it.  I'm going to assume this was 3 jars for $5, or $1.67/jar. 

So anyway, I added the diced pork to the ravioli/sauce and also put some on the salad, which was just lettuce and pork until each member of the family added their "salad favorites": Green olives for one, banana peppers and olives for me, diced apple for another, and diced onion for the fourth.  Those who know us can guess who had what.

I had to make cupcakes last week for my daughter's class, then again this week for my oldest son's class, so the kids have been in a cupcake mood.  Since they're easy, we baked a batch from a box of "strawberry-flavored Sure Fine cake mix", topped with a homemade vanilla glaze (like donut glaze).  To make a glaze, mix about 1 Tbsp melted margarine with (again, I eyeball it, I don't measure unless I absolutely have to) roughly 1/4 cup of warm water, 1 tsp vanilla extract, and 1 cup of powdered sugar in a microwave-safe bowl.  It should be "goopy" but not "runny", similar to frosting/icing.  To get the right consistency without measuring, I put the warm water in a drinking glass, mix the vanilla, margarine, and sugar, then slowly add the water until it's right: an "icing" consistency.  Then, microwave it for just 20 seconds and stir vigorously.  Then, it should be as runny as a liquid.  Pour (or spoon) this liquid onto the cupcakes.  When it hardens, it's a glaze.  Extra frosting/glaze can be saved in the fridge in a sealed container for as much as a month.  It doesn't really go bad.  I never seem to have enough left to warrant saving; maybe a few spoonfuls of glaze left over at the end, so I usually just pitch it.  Or eat it.

I didn't start the cupcakes early this time, though,

so we didn't eat dessert until long after the table was cleared.

Total for tonight's fast and easy dinner was....$1.67 sauce, $1.50 ravioli, $1.18 for one pork steak, and $0.75 salad (since a whole head of lettuce this week was $1.39, and we used less than half, but I'm rounding up for the few olives, onion, and apple bits, and salad dressing).  Now we can't forget the $1.33 cake mix (these ones were 3 for $4) with probably $0.50 glaze, which made 24 cupcakes, making each cupcake 7.625 cents.  We ate six tonight, making tonight's dessert total 46 cents.  This brings our grand total to... $5.56.  To be perfectly honest, I was hoping this would be a "less than $5" night.  Our dinner total was probably a lot more expensive than if I had simply bought 2 or 3 cans of chef boyardee. But it was incredibly tasty, and very quick to make, and we had about 2 servings' worth of leftovers, which we can eat tomorrow.  Along with the other 18 cupcakes.