Cass Cooks, Too!

posted by Cass on Nov 19

You know, …….. just imagine me sitting here astounded, because I am. I’ve been watching the price of grocery store food go up a few pennies per item for several months now, and wondering and worrying about how I am going to stretch provisions to make sure we don’t have leftover month at the end of the food.

Do you know that there are people who live in gated communities in my area, who are relying on food from charity organizations to eat? This morning, my husband went to pick up commodity foods. The doors opened at 9, he was there at 9:30, and they had already run out of three of the 4 promised meat items. How can this be in the richest country on earth?

I’m listening to news about how Washington is bailing out banks, and getting ready to hand over money to car makers, and the banks are still foreclosing on homes, and the auto makers are still paying their CEOs annual fortunes, and I am beginning to get angry. No, that’s wrong, I am not beginning to get angry, I am angry. Who is going to bail out the American family? My husband and I are both looking for work, I’m scraping every cent I can together to try to get my phone turned back on, and yet……. the government is giving more money to the very people whose piss-poor decisions and greed got us into this fix in the first place. And I am wondering what I can possibly do about it. How can I help you, my reader, make your food dollar go a little further?

I’m left rembering what I said I was going to do a couple of weeks ago: focus on recipes that use items from Angel Food and now, commodity food. And whatever I can find cheap or on a real good sale.

Now, I am begging and borrowing internet right now, and don’t even have my computer. I’ve asked a friend to try to repair the display on it so I can use it away from home. But I am going to figure out a way to cook, take pictures and upload them so you can “see what I am talking about” when I post a recipe.

In the meantime, I am at the library and the machine here doesn’t take sd cards. In fact, it still takes the little floppies. I haven’t seen a floppy drive in a very long time. There isn’t even a usb port. Really. Which brings me to another question– can we get the government to supply updated computers to local libraries?

Ok, back to the food! Next time I post, I’ll tell you how to make something that involves turkey ham.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How to Cut Your Grocery Bill In Half
• Pinching pennies like your grandparents
• Sarah’s Social Action Snapshot: Feeding America

posted by Cass on Nov 10

You know, sometimes I wonder why I even make menus. It’s not like we use them, becasue, out of this list from last week:

Chicken pot pie
Weiner Schnitzel
Fried Chicken
Beans and Rice
Hamburger Helper (sue me)
Home-made Pizza

We actually made chicken pot pie and weiner schnitzel. I guess that I do it to assure myself that there is actual food here to eat, ROFL! And also, so that if no one has a specific request, i at least have a plan. I’m pretty lenient with the meals, I guess: if someone asks for something, and I have the ingredients on hand, I don’t mind having a substitution. Besides, this way I only have to come up with 2 or 3 new ideas when it’s time to make a menu again.

So, here we go for this week:
Hamburgers
Fried Chicken
Beans and Rice
Chicken Fajitas
Home-made Pizza
Breakfast Casserole and fruit

posted by Cass on Nov 7

#1. Name a food you like that uses a red sauce or anything red in it.
#2. Name a food you like with whipped cream in it or on it.
#3. Name a food you like with blueberry in it.
#4. Share a recipe for pasta or dessert or a beverage.

man, am I ever late again. Sorry. I don’t mean for it to be this way, but life keeps happening while I am busy making other plans.

1. Umm. Umm….Spaghetti. Strawberry jelly. BLT.
2. Oooh, coffee drinks. Love big tall sweet coffee drinks with whipped cream.
3. Pie. D’uh.
4. Let’s see……… hot chocolate?

3 cups powdered milk
1/2 cup cocoa
3/4 cups sugar
dash of salt

Mix together well, and use 4 tablespoons of the mix to 8 ounces of hot water. Top with mini marshmallows or whipped cream, LOL.

posted by Cass on Nov 6

Ok, maybe not that many, but a lot. Last week, in my cooking segment on my knitting blog, I asked for recipes for Weiner Schnitzel. If you remember, there were pork chops in the AngelFood boxes, and I wanted to try my hand at this wonderful German dish. Allena offered up a recipe and I read through it, said “hmmmm”, and took off running. I made it this afternoon (and tweeted while I was doing it) and it was so good!

You’ll need:
eggs or egg beaters
fine bread crumbs

2 onions
2 jars mushrooms

6 porkchops, beaten thin and cut into two pieces each. BTW, when you get ready to pound your chops, cover them with wax paper. This will prevent flying pig juice from …..ok, enough, you more than get the picture, right?

oil
flour
salt
pepper
water
egg noodles
Please forgive me for not having a picture of these lesser, boring, but oh so necessary ingredients.

After you have pounded the pork chops, dip them in egg and then in bread crumbs. Fry them in a little oil until browned. It may take a couple of panfuls. Start the water for your egg noodles now. Once it boils, add the noodles, turn off the burner, and let them sit for the time it says on the package.

Once they are browned, stack them up on a serving plate, and set them aside.

Throw the onions in that same pan, and brown them. Oh my, doesn’t that smell so good? I do love the smell of frying onions. Even if it does last forever. That and cabbage. Yumm.

After the onions are done to your satisfaction, sprinkle in some flour and stir it around to make roue. Use plenty of flour, so you don’t end up with greasy gravy. Scrape up those pan crispies, too! They have such wonderful flavor! Let it brown as much as you like, and then add the water to complete the gravy. (Does anybody need a gravy lesson? I could do that; it would be a great justification for that flip video I want.)

Add the mushrooms. I got these at a steal. 10 dry ounces for 88 cents. I am going back tomorrow to buy Wal-Mart out of them. I would have done it today, but they say “in brine” and I wanted to make sure they aren’t too salty. They aren’t, they are just right!

Stir them in.

Heat them through and serve: A goodish portion of noodles, a cutlet or two and plenty of sauce ladled over the top of it all.

Doesn’t that look like it would get your ledehosen in a wad?

posted by Cass on Nov 5

Today, let’s talk about milk and pancakes. Sounds yummy, right? Now, I quit buying milk a couple of years ago, when Drama developed a sudden and alarming allergy to it. If you’ve never had the privilege of watching your calm, placid 2 year old break out in hives and then start banging her head against the wall in agony, let me tell you, you haven’t missed anything desirable. It’s horrible. Anyway, back to the milk. DaBaby loves it and I bought it for her after she was weaned until she turned two and then switched to dried milk, and only for cooking.

Lately Drama has had a few incident free encounters with milk some without breaking out, but I still wasn’t buying whole liquid milk because of the cost. After all, it’s 4 bucks a gallon! That’s outrageous— Except that I allow a budget of $4 a pound for cheese and such. A pound of cheese is 16 servings, and that breaks down to a quarter per serving. There are also 16 servings in a gallon of milk, so the cost per serving would be exactly the same. And the kids like it! And as Ranee points out in her post on frugality, buying milk may help reduce my food budget in other areas. (By the way, spend a few minutes checking out Arabian Knits. Lots of tasty recipes, a bit of knitting and almost as many cute kids as I have.)

So that’s the milk. Let’s move on to the pancakes! Here’s the recipe:

1 1/2 c. milk
1 c. rolled oats (oatmeal)
1 tbsp. oil
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 c. flour
1 tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt

The original calls for brown sugar, but I like to use white, because I have a hard time gettiing the brown sugar to un-lump and mix in after it sits a bit. And sit it does. Here’s why: I make up several batches at once. My family eats a double recipe of this, so I put

1 cup flour
2 tbsp of sugar
2 tsp baking powder
and 1/2 tsp salt

in each of 3 or 4 containers. Then when we want pancakes, I soak the oats, then add the contents of the packet, the eggs and the oil. Mix, cook, enjoy with jelly or syrup or honey. You know, I bet these would be awesome with milk

posted by Cass on Nov 3

I guess I am one of the lone holdouts this week, actually posting my menu on Monday an all. What can I say, it was a jam packed weekend. This week, we are back to cheer practice and also, my husbad has started a job that has him working evenings, so we are back to the quick and easy, tempered by the fact that we will eat our main meal at lunch some days. Yeah, life is never boring here–we just don’t do the same thing long enough to create a rut, let alone get stuck in one. Anyway, on to the plans:

Chicken pot pie
Weiner Schnitzel
Fried Chicken
Beans and Rice
Hamburger Helper (sue me)
Home-made Pizza