Aug 16 2012

Tilapia Yakisoba

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I came home on Monday from 5 days out in the woods, living out of a cooler (though a very methodically-stocked gourmet cooler, if I do say so myself), and the only errand I could come up with that seemed appealing on my 89-degree day off was a trip to Fubonn.  Oh man, do I love Fubonn.

Even though at this point I like to think I have a handle on it — which items I’m looking for, their approximate location in the store, I prove myself wrong every time, and even if I think I’m just going to pick up a gigantic $3 bottle of sesame oil, I end up wandering the aisles in a daze for at least 2 hours, comparing brands of coconut milk ounce-for-ounce, wondering whether it’s worth it to get the bamboo shoots in the glass jar rather than the can, and marveling over how the Indian curry paste is clear across the warehouse-size store from the Thai curry paste!  And then, just when you think you’ve wrapped your head around it all…here comes a whole new aisle of soy sauce.  It looks just like the first aisle from 75 minutes ago, but here it is again!  Why?!

I always begin with a Vietnamese iced coffee from the deli counter-esque area right at the entrance which is served over the most finely crushed ice you can imagine, and with a vacuum-sealed plastic cover.  How do they do that?  I ponder this while I snake up and down the aisles with a gigantic shopping cart and just let it take me where it will.  This usually lands me in the checkout line with the most random assortment of foods you can imagine, and an absurdly low total bill.  I regret not having taken a picture of my loot, because truly, it carpeted the entire register area and somehow came to only $50-something.

And it is also how Tilapia Yakisoba became a thing.  I didn’t think I wanted to actually end up cooking anything Tuesday night, on what had been a swelteringly hot day.  But you never know…after the sun goes down in Portland, the temperature really plummets — enough where I was even able to go for an evening run, shower, change into pajamas and decide I was done sweating for the night.  And then cook a meal on the stovetop.

This was definitely a “get rid of all the veggies that are about to go bad” kind of meal, especially the ones we’d chopped up for the weekend and brought in the cooler but had never used in the chicken masala Sunday night.  And, I was curious what dirt-cheap tilapia from an undisclosed location tasted like.  It was already frozen, and not going to be the main star of the show, so I fried it up in the skillet, letting it defrost as it cooked.



These mushrooms and green onions had already been sliced and stored — ready to go, there was no clearer option than to toss them in with a little salt and chili flakes and let them sautee up with the fish.  I also sliced up a red bell pepper and added this into the mix.



Then, of course, my favorite green to throw in the mix when I don’t have anything fresh is some wakame seaweed, perfectly salty and chewy once it gets a little dose of whatever juices it’s cooking in.



Maybe this is a misnomer, because I didn’t actually use soba noodles for this, but rather those wonderfully light Asian noodles that come curled up in these little balls and loosen up into wavy kinks like ramen once you cook them for just a minute or two.



I didn’t even use a colander to strain these, since I wanted a little extra water to loosen it all up, so I just drained them using the lid and then added them to the skillet with everything else.


I already had some sauce on hand that I’d made a few nights ago when I had made a delicious garlicky Asian green bean salad, comprised of soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, ginger, honey, and garlic, which I added to this skillet-of-everything, and then augmented by adding a little more of the soy, vinegar, and oil.

By this point, the fish had broken up and distributed throughout the dish, so a few quick little stirs was all I needed to mix the sauce in, let it rest for five minutes, and then dish it up with a handful of bean sprouts on top to give it a refreshing crunch.  It was, after all, still 80 degrees outside by the time I took this out to my (new!) back porch to enjoy in my camping chair.  Someday soon I’ll have to get an actual table to eat at.



This Week’s Groceries

Grocery Outlet 8/4

  • Chopped walnuts: $3.99
  • Bagged cole slaw: $1.19
  • Tortillas: $2.09
  • Eggplant: $1.29
  • Bacos: $0.99
  • Ground turkey: $1.99
  • Almond milk: $1.49
  • Onion: $1.00
  • Tomatoes: $2.99

TOTAL: $17.02

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $110.44

 

Trader Joe’s 4/7

  • Fruit leather bits & pieces: $2.49
  • Bombay simmer curry sauce: $2.49
  • Turkey bacon: $2.99
  • Red pepper spread: $2.49 — my favorite condiment in the world!!
  • Cottage cheese: $1.99
  • Sliced black olives (x3): $3.57
  • Crumbled feta: $2.79
  • Orange peach mango juice: $2.99
  • Firm tofu (x2): $2.58
  • Tricolor radiatore pasta: $3.98
  • Salt & pepper potato chips: $2.99
  • Light champagne salad dressing: $1.99
  • Basil in a pot: $2.99 — I don’t live in a basement anymore so now I can plant this in my kitchen!!

TOTAL: $36.33 (split with Jesse, as these were ingredients to prep for camping, so really $18.17)

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $92.27

 

Fred Meyer 8/7

  • Red onion: $0.95
  • Green lettuce: $1.50
  • Cucumbers: $1.00
  • Crimini mushrooms: $4.19
  • Spinach: $0.99
  • Cheez-Its: $2.50
  • Garlic: $0.34
  • Collard greens: $1.39
  • Coffee beans: $6.63
  • Bell peppers: $4.18
  • Deli ham: $6.09
  • Deli turkey: $5.82
  • Deli salami: $2.75
  • Shredded cheese: $2.29
  • Pork sausage: $3.99
  • Limeade: $1.25
  • Grapefruit juice: $3.29
  • 1% milk: $2.99
  • Half & half: $2.49
  • Sliced provolone cheese: $3.00
  • Sliced gouda cheese: $3.00
  • Dozen eggs: $2.99

TOTAL: $63.57 (split with Jesse for camping supplies, so really $32.29)

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $59.98

 

Grocery Outlet 8/7

  • Spring greens mix: $4.99
  • Strawberries: $1.50
  • Eggplant: $1.29
  • Avocado: $0.99
  • Blue cheese crumbles: $2.49

TOTAL: $11.26

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $48.72

 

Fubonn 8/13 (detailed list coming soon)

TOTAL: $57.31

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: -$8.59 — Okay, a little bit over for this month, but just you wait.  I’m going to be making yakisoba till the end of time.

Aug 3 2012

The First Week

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Things are finally getting back on track here.  In one short week, my brand new kitchen has gone from this…

to this:

This is how we were doing Tuesday night, before about eight of my girlfriends came over for an impromptu ladies’ wine night while the boys played poker, doubling as a rough, rough draft of a housewarming party.  It was, however, the best way I could have ever hoped to ring in the first night in the house alone (after Jesse had, as promised, spent the full first week there together with me — immensely helpful and fun).

Oh yes, and I did in fact get the fridge of my dreams.


French door fridge access, bottom drawer freezer, automatic (crushed!) ice and water dispenser — stainless steel, and 78,000 cubic inches of pure refrigerated goodness.  Plus, I got it at a killer price, at the Standard TV and Appliance Outlet Store (who knew?!) for $1,000 less than its original list price!

Yup, I got me a fridge.  And a kitchen sink.

The first non-take-out meal in the new house??  Baked potatoes.  I’m not sure why I got an insane craving for baked potatoes earlier this week, when I probably haven’t eaten one in 4+ years, but I did, and then when I walked the FOUR BLOCKS around the corner to my newly-discovered Grocery Outlet (don’t worry, you’ll hear more about this.  It warrants an entirely separate blog post), I found they had 10-lb. bags of russets on sale, so that sealed the deal.

Plus, I’ve only found about 10% of my dishes and utensils so far, so a DIY potato bar seemed to be the way to go, adorned with some seitan that I scored for $0.99, and then fried up in the skillet with some jerk seasoning, and topped with various chopped veggies, shredded cheese, and the last little bowlful of Greek yogurt that actually did make the cut and came with me in the cooler from the old house.

With Portland’s version of a heat wave upon us, and a kitchen that’s finally not in a basement, I’m loving the easy-dinner lifestyle of making do with whatever’s in the fridge, and turning it into some sort of creative cold salad.  Last night, I swung by the GO on the way home and, though their produce section is not the most impressive part of the store, I did find a good looking eggplant and a bag of cole slaw for super cheap, and turned it into dinner.

First I roasted the eggplant in little spears, coated with olive oil, salt, pepper, and nutritional yeast.

I made a spicier version of my go-to pizza dough, adding some tandoori seasoning that gave it a nice saffron flavor.  But instead of baking it, I rolled it into a little patty disc and lightly fried it in the skillet, giving it a wonderful naan flatbread quality.

I found some leftover ranch dressing in the fridge that I used to dress the cole slaw, and layered this on the flatbread with the eggplant spears for an awesome main dish.  I had a handful of beets in my fridge that I had already roasted a few days earlier, when my friend Hollis (now a Portlander!!!) brought over a bunch from her garden to the Tuesday soiree.  I sliced these up and tossed them with some red onion, olive oil, balsamic, candied walnuts, and Bacos.  Fantastic.


All right.  I think I’m back on the wagon.

This Week’s Groceries

Fred Meyer 7/27

  • Cucumbers: $1.18
  • Green pepper: $0.59
  • Orange pepper: $1.50
  • Roma tomato: $0.64
  • Roasted chicken: $5.99

TOTAL: $9.90

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $146.75 (carried over $6.65 unused from last month)

 

Grocery Outlet 7/31

  • Cottage cheese: $2.39
  • Chocolate milk: $1.69
  • Pico de gallo: $2.99
  • Pepper jack cheese: $3.17
  • Cubed seitan: $0.99 
  • Green onion: $0.50
  • Red bell pepper: $0.59
  • Bag of russet potatoes: $2.99
  • Avocado: $0.99
  • Green grapes: $2.99

TOTAL: $19.29

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $127.46

 

Jul 25 2012

No Fridge? No Problem!

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This week has been an interesting life experience.  Between camping in the woods for 4 full days at a festival, and moving into my new house, I have been 100% without refrigeration for nearly a full week now.  Which means, I spent $0 on groceries this week.  And seriously, all things considered, not even that much on going out.

If you’ll recall, I had a pretty serious food agenda planned for this festival, and we managed to pull it off with flying colors.  Aside from a $6 boat of fresh pesto garlic fries on Sunday afternoon, we didn’t buy any food from vending and subsisted entirely on the food we had prepared, and that we were sharing with friends.

Monday morning, I got up and ate a hearty breakfast of eggs, cheese, and toast, left over from our weekend’s camping groceries — so satisfying that I didn’t eat again until later that night when I got to try out the new Bollywood Theater up on Alberta with two of my best friends from out of town (one of whom has now been officially promoted to in-town, as of last night) — a delicious and creative array of Indian food in a super cute atmosphere, for just under $20, including a Pimm’s Cup!

Tuesday morning I was cooked a generous breakfast of eggs, veggies, and avocado before these friends and I headed out for a full day of errands:

Fridge shopping for my new house!

Bike shopping for Hollis!

Aardvark shopping for Jamie, where I also scored 6 gigantic banana boxes to finish packing up my kitchen.

Secret Aardvark

Food total for the day?  $18.50, including an afternoon snack at A La Carts of a Vietnamese papaya salad with steak, iced coffee, and the Veggies Gone Wild bowl at Laughing Planet with a local IPA as a final meal together before Jamie headed back off to Brooklyn early this morning.

And today?  I’m hoping this is my final meal of non-cookery.  I stopped at the food carts again on the way to work this morning to purchase the largest breakfast burrito I’ve ever seen (for $5!).

breakfast burrito

And an iced coffee from Stumptown that was nearly the same price and offset my excitement.  Lame.  As soon as I close up shop today I’m heading straight to the Standard TV & Appliance Outlet to pull the trigger and buy a brand new fridge.  I cannot wait.  Do you know what it feels like to have a brand new kitchen and not be able to cook in it?!

This Week’s Groceries

TOTAL: $0!!

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $6.65

 

Jul 18 2012

It’s been a big week.

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Truth be told, this past week was not a big cooking week for me.  In the last seven days, I:

Closed on my house.

Was visited by one of my oldest friends.

Had a 24-hour debrief summit with my colleague from UCU to go over feedback and ideas from last weekend’s show.

Had the most ridiculously indulgent weekend of eating out that I could ever imagine.

Saturday night dinner at Screen Door, Sunday morning brunch at Arleta Library Cafe, Sunday dinner at Pok Pok, and Monday brunch at Tasty & Sons.  I wasn’t hungry again for almost 12 hours after that, when I ended up eating Jesse’s homemade Zuppa Toscana in bed while we watched Dexter.  I feel okay about this, because, a) now that UCU is over, I finally have some money again to spend on going out, and b) half of these meals were business expenses!

Oh, and now, I’m prepping the shop for our first summer vacation that we’ve ever had, and prepping four days’ worth of meals to bring with us this weekend to the String Cheese festival at Horning’s.

Overly ambitious?  Ask me again tomorrow when my phone is off and I am on vacation for the first time all summer, wearing my hippie skirts and sipping cocktails with friends in the woods while I listen to fantastic music, and knowing that all my delicious, healthy, hearty food for the weekend is totally pre-made and organized in our cooler, come what may.

This Week’s Groceries

Fred Meyer 7/17

  • ingredients for festival pre-cooking — sadly lost the detailed list but it’s pretty much everything shown on the list above.

TOTAL: $54.00 ($108 split with Jesse)

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $6.65 — this sounds drastic, but keep in mind that this is my last week with a fridge for a good long while.  I’m moving next Monday and probably won’t be for-reals cooking again until the end of the month.

Jul 12 2012

Poached Salmon with Ginger Honey Cinnamon Glaze, Coconut Collard Greens, and Red Rice

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I love when I can make a delicious dinner entirely out of what’s already in my kitchen, and all that is required is stopping on my bike ride home to pick up some fish and a head of collard greens.

I can’t even believe how busy this week is, and relish in the fact that with all that’s going on, I still take the time to cook myself a delicious meal on a Wednesday night.  Really, at a time like this, I should be eating take-out or leftover pizza from UCU last weekend.  I mean, seriously.  After driving back down to Portland on Sunday night, I spent all day Monday unpacking from the show and reorganizing the shop, prepping for the coming work week, especially because my wonderful employee is on vacation and I’m flying solo for the next 2 weeks.  Awesome timing.

Then on Tuesday morning, I signed about 1,000 pieces of paper, and agreed to a bill whose final payment is due in 2042.  Yep, I bought a house.  NBD.

Then, I’m working all week, getting the keys to the house, spending the evening with my best friend who just got back from 3 weeks in Hawaii, hosting old high school friends from out of town Saturday night, and then quickly washing the sheets so I can host my business partner for a 24 hour debrief of last weekend’s show.  And we’ll treat ourselves to a fancy dinner in there somewhere.

Oh, and then Monday I had to buy a fridge.  And a bed.

And then Tuesday I move.  Into my new house.

And then Wednesday I will go to work and spend the whole rest of the evening prepping 4 days worth of food to bring with us to String Cheese at Horning’s, the festival we’ll be at the whole following weekend.

And yet, last night I came home and still felt compelled to cook this.

As soon as I walked in the door and poured myself some iced tea, I got a pot of red and brown rice started on the stove.

A lot of times when I make a teriyaki-esque type of sauce, it involves stir frying veggies or noodles or meat first, then incorporating an Asian sauce concoction into it.  But for some reason this time, I just wanted a nice thick, bubbly sauce, so I started with that.  Pus, I have about 9 half-used bottles of red wine that I’d really love to not transport with me to my next residence, so this seemed like a good way to tap into that.

First, some minced ginger.

This went into the big skillet on medium-high heat with some honey, soy sauce, chopped garlic, and a hefty amount of red wine.  It smelled disgusting at first, but once the sauce bubbled together and reduced and the alcohol cooked off, it became deliciously sweet and dark and syrupy.

I put the salmon directly into the skillet, still frozen, and let it thaw and start to cook from the steam as the sauce continued to reduce and the water evaporated off the fish.

When it was about half cooked, I was able to remove the fish and peel off the skin with my fingers, removed the sauce from the heat and let it all sit there while I worked on the greens.

Have you ever had to deal with collard greens before?  There are few veggies out there that I won’t use in their entirety, but collard and chard stems are one of them.  I mean, if I’m making a soup the next day then sure, I’ll toss them in, but really other than that, I don’t force it.  I compost now so it’s all good.

What I like to do here is take each leaf, and quickly slice out the stem, making diagonal cuts right along each side of the rib and plucking the stem from the middle.

After doing this to each leaf, I stack them all on top of each other, roll them up like I’m chiffonading basil, make a slice lengthwise down the middle, and then again perpendicularly into strips — this makes perfect little rectangles for sauteeing.

Sliced up half an onion…


Then, in a separate pan, I heated up some coconut oil, and let the onion caramelize with some salt for a few minutes.

In went all the greens, and as they cooked down to the size of the pan, I added some jerk seasoning, a splash of cider vinegar, and some black pepper.

I wanted to add just a bit of chicken broth, but I’ll let you in on a secret.  You know those recipes that tell you to add like half a cup of chicken broth?  It’s like, who has that?  Any commercial liquid broth that’s open in the fridge will go back long before I get a chance to use half a cup of it, and any bullion requires a separate pot to make the broth in…for half a cup?  Here’s what I do: I make my own chicken stock each time I roast a chicken — about once a month — and keep the stock in serving-size containers in the freezer, usually cottage cheese-sized.

Then I use these the same way you’d use a stick of butter to grease a cooking pan: take out the fist-sized ice cube, and place it in the pan of whatever needs a little extra richness.

Not for too long — maybe 3 minutes, until just a few layers (or about half a cup!) melt off.  Then, put the broth cube back in the cottage cheese container and replace in the freezer.  No harm done, no broth wasted, no extra pot to clean.

Did I mention that I don’t have a sink in my kitchen?

Yep, 4 years and approximately 3,800 meals cooked…without a kitchen sink.  Just one of the many things I’m really, really excited about in my new house.

So anyway, I took the greens off the heat and let them absorb the rest of that broth while they cooled, and returned the salmon-and-sauce pan back to medium-high heat for another five minutes or so until the salmon had finished cooking and was wonderfully warm and caramelized.

OMG.

This Week’s Groceries

Trader Joe’s 7/9

  • Sockeye salmon fillets: $6.69
  • Cod fillets: $4.39
  • Roasted plantain chips: $1.69 — for the bike ride home.  
  • 2 cans tuna: $3.38

TOTAL: $16.15

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $72.70

 

QFC 7/11

  • Roma tomatoes: $1.00
  • Green pepper: $0.94
  • Half & half: $2.29
  • Cottage cheese: $2.99
  • Red onion: $0.55
  • Cucumber: $1.79

TOTAL: $9.56

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $63.14

 

New Seasons 7/11

  • Collard Greens: $2.49

TOTAL: $2.49

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $60.65

Jul 4 2012

Kenny & Zuke’s

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Like I said, this week’s a busy one.  Instead of cooking I’ve been busy packing up half my shop to bring to Seattle for my booth setup, organizing all the last-minute stuff that goes into putting on a gargantuan production like the Urban Craft Uprising, and packing my house to move.

It’s not quite time to pack the kitchen yet — that comes absolutely last — but needless to say, this has been a week of grilled chicken on green salad, leftover calzones, and having other people cook for me.

Like Kenny and Zuke!

Sunday night, Jesse and I hopped on our bikes and took a gorgeous summer evening bike ride downtown (a rarity for me, crossing the river) to have dinner at Kenny & Zuke’s, and then up the hill to take me on a tour of the incredible house of his favorite client, that he’s been working on all week.  It’s such an old house that it’s actually an official historical landmark, and one of the most awesome houses I’ve ever seen.

Fortunately, in addition to breathtakingly large smoked meat sandwiches, we had also shared a plate of pastrami cheese fries, which pretty much made our bike right straight up the northwest hills a wash.

I’m okay with that.

Come say hi if you’ll be at the Urban Craft Uprising this weekend!  I’ll be holding down the fort at the Yarnia booth.

This Week’s Groceries

Fred Meyer 7/2

  • Yogurt: $3.39
  • Cottage cheese: $2.49
  • Milk: $2.99
  • Coffee: $7.13
  • Orange juice: $3.00
  • Strawberries: $1.67
  • Roma tomatoes: $0.98
  • Bunch radishes: $0.50
  • Avocado: $0.88
  • Cucumber: $1.49

TOTAL: $24.52

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $88.85 — Back on track!

Jun 28 2012

Tex-Mex Calzones, and The Best Pizza Dough Ever

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Okay, so I didn’t exactly stick to my $5 grocery rule for this week.  This was due to an insane craving for some homemade calzones, fresh salad to offset a Hawaiian barbecue binge I had last Friday night with Jesse and Nate at Noho’s, and an impromptu decision to make some peanut ginger soba noodles with fried tofu, red bell peppers, and bok choy for dinner last night.  BUT, it’s all good, because next week/end is the Urban Craft Uprising summer show, and I guarantee you I will not be cooking next week.  It will instead be a week of calling in the saved-up Groupons, eating take-out, and most likely, the frozen-and-reheated remains of this here meal.  So basically what I’m saying is, by the time the UCU Summer Show is over, it will already be almost mid-July, I’ll have a freezer full of new leftover pizza and bagels from the staff room, and I’ll be back on track.

I haven’t been doing my weekly bread-baking thing lately.  In fact, ever since my cleanse this spring, I’ve been a little disenchanted with bread.  I definitely can’t say I’m “not doing gluten” or anything like that, but it’s been less of a major player in my life.  But, I do still crave foods that fill that bready role — something that I can use to wrap, support, or otherwise encase my food with.  Plus, sometimes I really just want pizza every day for a week, and this somehow feels like a healthier version of that.

And waaaaay easier.  I’ve never really been into homemade pizza — it seems like so much work for something that I ultimately consider to be a junk food that it always feels like a waste to me.  But calzones…calzones are as easy as–nay, easeir than–pie.

So, first let’s talk about the dough.  This meal was one of about six different things I had on my agenda for the evening, so I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of time making a labor-intensive dough.  I turned to my online cooking bible, and lo and behold, she’s got a fantastic recipe for the best pizza dough ever.

I doubled her recipe, and then made a few little tweaks so that I ended up with the following ingredients sharing a mixing bowl:

  • 3 cups flour
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 1.5 tsp yeast
  • 1 cup lukewarm water
  • 3 tsp sugar
  • 4 tbsp olive oil
(After forming the dough, I then rolled it around in a handful of cornmeal, and the last of the rosemary I had lying around)

My favorite thing about this recipe is that it uses exactly the right amount of everything.  It’s not one of those dough recipes where you have to keep adding flour to dough it up…and the more water because it’s too dry…and them more flour because it’s too wet.  Nope, these ingredients are in this magical proportions so that, seriously, you just mix them all together with a fork, and then your hands, and you end up with a perfectly clean bowl, perfectly clean hands, and a perfect little ball of delicious dough, that you can wrap pretty much anything in and be stoked about it.  In fact, keep this on the DL, but I already have fantasies of pre-assembling dozens of breakfast calzones for festivals this summer, with eggs and sausage and veggies and cheese, to heat up on Jesse’s camp stove and eat with Kate’s infamous bloody marys in the morning.

So to make the calzone, I ripped off a little chunk of dough after letting it rise for about an hour, and rolled it out into a nice little round.

So then…the filling.

My original plan was actually to just do something super simple — a basic store-bought tomato sauce, some sauteed mushrooms and zucchini, fresh spinach, and mozarella.  Which I totally did.

But then I came home from the grocery to realize that I had already set a pot of pinto beans out soaking earlier, thinking I’d make some bean salad for lunches this week.

Knowing these couldn’t go to waste, I thought, there’s got to be some way to turn this into another awesome filling.  Enter the Tex-Mex Calzone.  I went ahead and cooked those beans, and then sauteed them in a hefty amount of olive oil and fresh chopped garlic.


Added some green bell peppers and diced up the last of a jalapeno I had in the fridge…

Added some V8 juice and taco seasoning and let this all reduce…


Stirred in some raw red onion, and decide with satisfaction that I had just created this delicious pinto-bean-veggie-enchilada stew.  Which is exactly what I spooned onto my little round of dough after letting it rise for an hour, tearing off a little chunk, and rolling it out as thin as I could with a rolling pin.

Full disclosure: those are not my hands.

(I like to stretch my calzone dough super thin.  I hate those calzones you get at restaurants that have like an inch-wide layer of dough, totally upstaging whatever it’s been filled with.  This gives it more of a thin, flaky crust, which perhaps would technically throw these more in the realm of the empanada, but I’m not going to get too technical here.)

But that’s not all.  Who knows why or how this occurred to me, but I remembered that I had a bag of Trader Joe’s tater tots in the freezer, and threw a couple of those on there as well.

Some shredded pepper jack cheese on top…

and then pinched all the edges of the dough together, sealing this puppy up, and put it in the oven on a baking sheet for 20 minutes at 350 degrees.  Oh.  My.  God.


Lunch!

This Week’s Groceries

Fred Meyer 6/27

  • Crimini mushrooms: $3.32
  • Head of lettuce: $1.00
  • Bok choy: $0.94
  • Zucchini: $0.78
  • Brick of tofu: $2.19
  • Pepper jack cheese: $3.00
  • Half and half: $1.59
  • Mozzarella cheese: $2.48
  • Fresh spinach: $0.99
  • Radishes: $.50
  • Pasta sauce: $1.37
  • Green bell pepper: $0.69
  • Red bell pepper: $1.50
  • Walla Walla onion: $0.58
  • Red onion: $1.02
  • Cucumber: $0.59
  • Cilantro: $0.49
  • Ginger root: $0.84
  • Garlic: $0.60

TOTAL: $24.37

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: -$36.63 — to be remedied next month!!

Next week might be too crazy for cooking or blogging, so wish me luck at the show and I’ll see ya the following week!

Jun 21 2012

Pork Chops in Garlic Red Wine Reduction, Roasted Broccoli, and Tzatziki Potato Salad

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All right, back in the swing of things.  After a fantastically fun housewarming party on one of the first super hot, sunny days of the summer, and then a relaxing evening of Papa Murphy’s and Redbox movies on Jesse’s couch, I finally had an old school, productive Monday/Tuesday “weekend,” where I knocked out a slew of errands like getting my car cleaned, oil changed (and Jesse even changed my brake pads for me over the weekend!  Little Ford Focus is getting in shape!), taking my work computer up to Jantzen Beach to have the hard drive replaced, going to the gym, getting ahead on my transcription for the week, picking up my new car title from the post office, making a yarn deal out in Lake Oswego, and compiling a comprehensive list of everything in my house I need to pack — either now or later — before the big move.

And then I cooked all my food for the week!

I’ve started a Pinterest account — not because I actually like Pinterest as an addition to the social media landscape, but because my old method of cataloguing recipes I want to try with Delicious was just too dang obsolete.  I’m totally ambivalent about whether people follow me on here or not, because the sole utility it poses to me is that while I’m perusing my food blogs (this is what I do whenever I’m eating alone), when I see something I want to make, I just click a little widget to pin it, and then trust that it’s being saved somewhere.

Then, on an afternoon like Monday, when I want to cook something but don’t know what, I can visit my board and see what I’ve been hanging on to, make whatever I choose, and then delete it when I’m done.  It’s kind of like a big visual to-do list, divorced from my actual to-do list that makes my world go round.

This week, I knew I had a little extra money to spend on some good meat, so I decided to try out The Pioneer Woman’s pork chops.  I’ve never made pork chops before, so this felt sort of exotic.  I also knew that, despite living in a basement, it was summer outside, so I also took a stab at Smitten Kitchen’s Taztziki Potato Salad.  And then some roasted broccoli, because I needed something green in there.  And I love broccoli.

I took Deb’s warning and got the potatoes boiling first, so that they’d have time to cool before going in the salad.


This is about 3.5 pounds of baby reds.

A little proud of myself for having purchased my first ever pair of pork chops, I seared them in some butter and olive oil (after salting and peppering both sides), while those potatoes boiled and cooled.

I was only making two chops instead of Rhee’s recommended six, so after browning both sides and removing the meat from the pan, I threw in six whole peeled cloves of garlic, as well as half a yellow onion, slivered, which was my own personal touch.  Once these had cooked for a few minutes I added about a cup of red wine and a bay leaf, letting this mixture reduce down.  Then, I added a little spoonful of Better Than Bullion’s beef paste and some water to turn it into broth, and added the chops back in.

Meanwhile, I was throwing together a quick base for the potato salad.  It all revolves around this.

I love Smitten’s idea of using yogurt as the base rather than mayonnaise, because even though I can totally get behind mayo on a sandwich or even in an aioli, I still have a hard time using it as a legit ingredient in dressing.  But yogurt?  Yogurt continues to amaze.  Like eggs, yogurt seems to be able to impress in a myriad of forms, meals, and context.  Salty, sweet, savory…whatever you’ve got going on.

In this case, it forms the creamy foundation for this summery salad dressing, starting with 2 full cups of thick Greek yogurt.  I don’t usually buy Greek yogurt, which seems to be a new craze as of the last year or two, but I can see why it’s perfect for this recipe: even after adding 2 tablespoons of lemon juice and 1 tablespoon of cider vinegar, the dressing is still thick and rich, not runny.  After that, I stirred in half a bunch of chopped dill, 2 teaspoons kosher salt, the rest of my jar of capers, some garlic powder, and black pepper.

Then I took those potatoes from awhile back, cut them into nice little wedges, and let them cool some more while I tossed some big broccoli pieces in a bowl with olive oil, salt, pepper, and curry powder, and then spread them on a baking sheet and roasted them at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes.

Back to the pork chops.  Once they were fully cooked, I removed them from the pan and continued to reduce the sauce, adding 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar and my remaining little square of butter, until it was a thick, rich sauce to spoon over the top of everything.

First foray into pork chops?  Success!

This Week’s Groceries

New Seasons 6/18

  • Plain organic yogurt: $2.99
  • Greek yogurt: $3.99
  • Cottage cheese: $2.19
  • Corn tortillas: $1.49
  • Pico de gallo: $3.69 — this is how I solve the tomatoes-are-prohibitively-expensive conundrum.
  • Dozen eggs: $2.89
  • Red potatoes: $4.87
  • Collard greens: $2.49
  • Fresh dill: $2.99
  • Yellow onions: $1.28
  • Bananas: $1.30
  • Roma tomatoes: $1.05
  • Pork chops: $5.03
  • Chorizo sausage: $5.09

TOTAL: $41.34

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: -$12.26 — bummer 🙁  Went over for this month.  The good news is, I have tons of leftovers still in the fridge, so with another, say, $5 worth of veggies, I can definitely sustain for the rest of the month.

Jun 15 2012

Chicken Peanut Bok Choy Stir Fry

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Last night felt like a huge welcome home — the first meal I’ve cooked in ten days!  Yes, between impromptu backyard barbecues, Jesse treating us to gigantic calzones on a Friday night when I had to stay home and catch up on work for the third evening in a row, and then a quick emergency trip up to B.C. to wire myself the remainder of my Canadian money that I’ve been saving since college, so that all my accounts are consolidated for my upcoming down payment on a house(!), I haven’t actually bought vegetables and done a full load of dishes and cranked out a good solid meal in over a week.  Even with my crazy insane-o-pants schedule, that doesn’t happen too often.

Earlier this week Jesse and I had been musing about what appliances and accoutrements we each have in our respective kitchens, realizing with satisfaction that when our kitchens eventually merge, there will be little to no redundancy, and between the two of us, we will suddenly own every appliance created (including a crock pot, pressure cooker, AND deep fryer).  Well, except for a KitchenAid, but I still maintain that that one’s unnecessary.

Now, I just recently acquired a super awesome heavy duty cast iron skillet, which I’ve been using to cook pretty much everything I consume, but during the mental tour of my kitchen, when I got to my well-seasoned wok, which sits in one of my big underneath cupboards, I realized that I’ve perhaps never cooked Jesse a wok meal before, and it gave me a serious hankering to do just that.

This is pretty much a re-run of my go-to Pad Kee Mao routine, but this time with chicken and some toasted peanuts for some extra protein, and to bulk it up.  I wanted leftovers, and Jesse is a serious eater.

First, I got these rice noodles soaking in some hot water, while we discussed whether or not a home warranty is necessary (I’m thinking no, when your boyfriend is a super smart contractor, right?  I’m all about taking the money that could be going to an insurance company and putting it into my own “emergency/repairs” fund).

I sauteed those up in some garlic and dark soy and sugar, and set them aside, then in the empty wok, browned some chicken and raw peanuts, with salt and chili flakes.

I sliced up some carrots and celery (on the diagonal, of course.  That’s what differentiates an Asian stir fry from an American saute!), and got these cooking with half a sliced onion and some minced ginger.  Then I whisked up a simple sauce of soy sauce, rice vinegar, ginger powder, chili paste, fish sauce, and sesame oil, and added it to the veggies slowly, so that the liquid absorbed but didn’t overpower the stir fry.

Towards the end, I added a few handfuls of adorable little shitake mushrooms, and half a bunch of this awesome looking bok choy.

I spooned a little more sauce over the top, then added back in the chicken, peanuts and rice noodles, and mixed them all together until perfectly combined.

Served it up and garnished with fresh lime, sriracha, and extra sauce to taste.

And then, we drove up to Tonalli’s on Alberta and got ice cream cones.

This Week’s Groceries

New Seasons 6/14

  • Half gallon milk: $2.89
  • Shitake Mushrooms: $2.38 — would have been way more expensive but he charged me as a portobello.  Score!
  • Carrots: $1.06
  • Broccoli: $3.02
  • Bok choy: $1.76
  • Pascilla Peppers: $0.26
  • Garlic: $1.08

TOTAL: $12.40

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $29.08

Jun 8 2012

Easy Summertime Grillin’

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I’m happy to report that the only meal I had the opportunity to take pictures of this week was entirely grilled.  And that’s because I got to spend my “weekend” (Monday/Tuesday) staying at a souped-up cabin near Mt. Hood, taking an Internet-free vacation while Jesse worked on refinishing the basement of said cabin.  And well, when you’re staying at a cabin and buying meal-to-meal groceries, and have this at your disposal, it just sort of makes sense.

It’s a pretty sweet deal, if you ask me.  Jesse’s been up there for three weeks himself, working 10 to 16 hour days, but then getting to enjoy the fact that he’s temporarily living here, all the while.

But truly, it’s an even sweeter deal for me.  Because I just get to hop in my car, cruise an hour and a half along the Columbia River, and arrive at his doorstep to visit and keep him company, armed with tote bags full of books, knitting, lounging clothes, and a bottle of wine.

He spent most of his waking hours down here…

And I spent mine here.

Or at my makeshift office.

Or catching up on phone calls while knitting on the deck (that Jesse built last fall when I got to come visit and do the exact same thing!).

Or zipping on the zip line.  For real, there is a zip line.

The color of that shed is, incidentally, the same color (and future trim) as my new house!

Or enjoying the view from the end of the driveway.

And in the evenings, Jesse washes all the drywall out of his hair, and we make dinner together.

On my way out of town, I stopped by New Seasons and picked up some of their pre-marinated kebabs, a big handful of green beans, some sliced almonds, a red onion, a bag of fingerling potatoes, and some young garlic spears, which I was soooo stoked to see!

Jesse took care of the grillin’.

Meanwhile, I slathered the potatoes in some oil, salt, pepper, and spices, and roasted them at 400 for about 45 minutes.

And then during the final ten minutes of roasting, I quickly sauteed up the green beans in a big pad of butter, with some nutritional yeast, salt, and pepper, blackening the sides.  I could have waited a little longer to throw in these thinly sliced almonds, but just between you and me, I kind of love the taste of burnt.

Everything about this meal makes me excited for his eventual living under the same roof of this house that I am buying.

This Week’s Groceries

QFC 6/1

  • Half gallon milk: $1.99
  • Whole bean coffee: $7.73

TOTAL: $9.72

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $87.34

 

Fred Meyer 6/2

  • Frozen has browns: $1.99 — My DIY ethos usually forbids me from buying these, but as you’ll see below, I was making 2 gigantic breakfast casseroles for “the morning after” Kate’s cocktail party and this was a necessity
  • Mushrooms: $1.89
  • Potato bread: $2.00
  • Shredded cheese: $4.00
  • Bell peppers: $4.08
  • Limes: $1.00
  • Breakfast sausage: $2.89
  • Yellow onion: $0.55
  • Cucumber: $1.38

TOTAL: $19.73

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $67.61

 

New Seasons 6/4

  • Sliced almonds: $0.70
  • Young garlic spears: $2.50
  • Fingerling potatoes: $3.99
  • Roma tomatoes: $1.00
  • Green beans: $2.30
  • Red onion: $1.32
  • Rosemary garlic beef kabob: $4.50
  • Spicy Thai pork kabob: $2.87
  • Teriyaki beef kabob: $2.45
  • Olives: $4.50

TOTAL: $26.13

REMAINING FOR THE MONTH: $41.48