red cabbage slaw

A lot of my recipe inspirations come from having lots of extra veggies in my fridge that I don't want to go to waste.  In this case, I had lots of red cabbage and radishes left over from pulled pork tacos.  I pulled out Betty Crocker's Cookbook and adapted her Sweet-and-Sour Coleslaw to my own ingredients.  You can adapt too, according to what you have in your fridge.  This salad would make a great side for a family barbecue or for a church potluck.  In fact, I think I had something similar at a church potluck once (and come to think of it, the lady who made it thought Betty Crocker's cookbook was the best on earth!).  Here's my creation:

For the slaw:
2 cups red cabbage, shredded
2 cups shredded carrots

6-10 radishes, sliced thin (or more, if you like it)
1/2-1 small onion, diced
1/2 cup cilantro, chopped

For the dressing:
1/2 cup sugar (I used Splenda)
1/2 cup white wine vinegar (or substitute a vinegar you have)
1/4 cup canola oil
1 TBS Dijon mustard
1/2 tsp celery seed (very important ingredient)
1/2 tsp salt

Toss the veggies together in a large bowl.  Wisk the dressing together in a small bowl and toss that in as well.

For a fun variation, you might want to add some dried fruit to the salad, like raisins, yellow raisins, dried cranberries, or dried cherries.  You could also top with toasted sliced almonds for a classy touch.

Enjoy!

how to avoid the 5 o'clock dinner panic

In talking to other moms lately, I've discovered that many of them suffer from the 5 o'clock dinner panic.  As in, "Yikes!  I've been busy all day and it's 5 o'clock and I have no idea what I'm making for dinner!"  I won't mislead you into thinking that I never suffer from this feeling (life happens, right?), but I've been able to limit it quite a bit by coming up with a system of meal-planning that works for me.  I'd like to share a few tips with you.  Without too much time and effort, you really can have a nice, healthy, affordable meal every night, instead just another plate of scrambled eggs.

Tips to help you avoid the 5 o'clock dinner panic:
1) Plan an entire week of meals in advance.  You can use the pad of paper method to do this, but ever since being inspired by The Mrs. over at her blog, I've found it more helpful to scratch out a rough draft on my note pad and then transfer the plan to my erasable board above the sink.  That way, rather than scrambling around the house to find the ever-elusive notepad, I can easily locate my list.  It is also helpful for Christopher.  With just a quick glance at the board, he can know what is for dinner (and theoretically, whether to rush home or make other plans!).

2) When planning your meals for the week, take into account which nights will be busier than others, which nights will involve eating somewhere else (such as church potlucks or dinners out), and so on.  Since my husband is a pastor, I try to touch base with him the day I'm working on the meal plan and find out if he has any evening meetings.  I often plan leftovers or simpler meals such as spaghetti for evenings he will be out, so that everything will be ready on time (I have a habit of taking far longer than expected to cook meat dishes so it's good to be able to control the time with simple meals).

3) It is very helpful to take a half hour or so and go through the grocery ads for your area for the week before making your meal plan.  Get to know what is a good price for each item and circle great sales in the ads.  Building your dinners around as many on sale or already stocked-up items will help tremendously in budget-consciousness.  Building dinners around what's on sale also helps give you variety to your meals, because obviously the same things will not be on sale every week. 

4) Stay stocked up on key grocery items that won't spoil and that you find yourself using in meal after meal.  We have a Costco membership and always stay stocked up items such as low sodium chicken broth, red and black beans, canned tomatoes, tomato sauce, pasta, pre-shredded Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and so on.  It becomes much easier to build your meal plan when you have less items to purchase, and your staples already sit on your shelves.

5) Regularly take time to peruse your favorite cookbooks or cooking magazines.  Take note of key ingredients and file interesting recipes away so that when those ingredients go on sale, you can pick out the appropriate recipe.  For example, I subscribe to Cooking Light Magazine and draw many of my recipes from there.  I pay attention to the seasonal nature of many of the recipes.  Often a produce item will go on sale when it is in season.  I also subscribe to favorite food blogs like the Pioneer Woman Cooks and I find that the more I peruse these along with my favorite cookbooks, the more I begin to understand how food works.  I find myself remembering interesting recipes when grocery items go on sale.  And I find myself able to cook up recipes of my own far more easily because I have seen similar recipes side by side and understand how ingredients work together.

6) Plan for leftover food nights.  I have found that when I don't plan to use my leftovers, all too often they go to waste.  So if I'm going to make a big meal with leftovers like chicken pot pie or pot roast, I try to plan it to be made near a day when we can eat the leftovers.  Leftovers aren't very good if they are more than a couple of days old, and they need to be used promptly.  So if I'm going to be away from home a couple of evenings in a row, then I won't make my big meal the day before I'm to be away.  I'll wait until I plan to be home for several days in a row.

7) Use your meals that require lots of fresh produce items first, if you can.  Fresh produce items tend to spoil quickly so if I'm cooking with zucchini or cilantro or fresh tomatoes, I try to plan meals involving these ingredients for earlier in the week.  Otherwise, I find that my produce may go to waste.

8) Read through the recipe for the evening ahead of time.  Sometimes it will happen that you didn't realize the meat would take 2 hours to cook or that there was an extra prep step that you didn't know about.  If you have a clear idea of how long dinner will take to cook, you will be able to start in time to get it on the table by 6 PM (or whenever dinner is in your house).

9) Once your meal-plan is sketched out for the week, put in on your erasable board, make your grocery list and stock your kitchen.  You'll be patting yourself on the back when you realize it's 5 o'clock and dinner is not only planned; it's in the oven!

Questions?  Shoot them my way and I'll see if I can tackle them for you.

Note added July 24: After writing this post, I found a fantastic website with some great ideas for how to go about meal planning.  Check it out here.

perfect for a hot summer day: shredded pork tacos

This meal will feed a crowd, so if you're having a neighborhood get-together, pull out the crock pot and this recipe and prepare to impress them with delicious tropical flavors.

I have made these shredded pork tacos several ways.  When I lived in North Dakota, I couldn't find the specialty ingredients that I needed, so I found a jarred chipotle simmering sauce to use instead and added extras like the honey, oregano and garlic to spice things up some more.  Here in Montana, I had trouble finding the ancho chiles, so I made the recipe without them once.  It was still really good.  The pasilla chiles and chipotle peppers in adobo sauce provide enough flavor even without the ancho chiles.  Later I found ancho chiles on the bulk spice rack at my local natural foods store, so I bought three, put them in the microwave with a little water at the bottom and cooked them till they were tender.  I was then able to open them up and remove the seeds.  They were delicious that way too.

The recipe on Food Network's website doesn't say what toppings to add to your tacos, but the original magazine that I found the recipe in did.  They suggest using: chunks of mango, chunks of avocado, lime wedges, cilantro, jicama, red cabbage, and queso fresco.  I suggest using the cheaper and still delicious feta cheese instead of queso fresco. 

Here's one more tip: Chipotles in adobo sauce come in a small can, but you'll have lots of leftovers since you only need a couple peppers for the recipe.  Try using sandwich bags to freeze the remaining peppers in small batches of two or three.  You'll save money next time you make the recipe and you can always throw them into other recipes too.  Less waste!

creative suppers on the cheap (I)

Since going down to one income, our family has had to do some budgetary adjustments.  We are much more conscious of what we are spending on groceries and much less willing to throw out leftovers or produce.  I won't say we perfectly use every last morsel, but we do try a lot harder to waste very little.  Whereas I used to plan my menus around what I wanted to eat, now I plan them around what is on sale.  However, I find that I can always find something delicious to make, even with more budgetary constraints.

Food is important to me.  While I never starved as a kid, there were years when food wasn't the most plentiful.  I tend to stock up enough food so that I never have to worry about being hungry.

But food doesn't just inspire sad memories in me.  Some of my happiest memories are about food too.  I just got a book from the library called What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets.  One essay in this book asks the question, "Why do we cook, when it's not necessary for life?"  The answer the authors come up with is that cooking is something that is simply very human.  It adds a powerful dimension of creature comfort to our lives.  It separates us from the animal kingdom.  I would add that it is a powerful burst of creativity.  It even brings some meaning to our lives.  My favorite quote from an interview during my freelance writing days was when a cook told me that she felt cooking was one of the most intimate things you could do for another human being because when you cook something, it becomes a part of them.  Cooking means sharing in community, sharing in creativity, bringing something of beauty to the lives of those around you.  It brings people together.  It brings joy into my heart.

All this to say, I don't know if I could live on a diet of rice and beans.  Cooking and food are too important to me.  If there is a way to seize up life and experience it with gusto for each person, cooking and eating are my way.  So, one of my biggest worries as our budget got tighter was that it would mean very, very boring eating. 

Boy, have I been shocked.  We eat good.  We eat so good. 

And like I said above, one of the biggest helps is wasting less.  This means not only eating leftovers, but also not always having to follow a recipe.  Which is new for me.  I have almost always been a recipe cook, afraid to venture outside the boundaries of the known, the defined.  But when we have a bunch of veggies about to go bad in your fridge, when you have a hankering for something wonderful to eat, you bring these two elements together and you make something that makes sense to you.  That's how I came up with my Roasted Vegetables with Maple-Balsamic Glaze (which I made for friends this Easter and they loved it).  I am finding that if I have a well-stocked refrigerator and pantry (thank you, Costco!), if I understand some basics about technique when I cook (the why, not just the what), I can put together some lovely food.  Of course, I have to be willing to fail a little bit.  Not everything I create or adapt will turn out perfectly.  Sometimes there will be a great big flop.  Am I willing to fail?

One recent meal which decidedly did not fail came about because we had been given some beautiful lake trout caught by a local fisherman.  It was from a smaller fish, so the meat was a gorgeous pink, almost the color of salmon.  I decided not to mess too much with what God had made so beautifully, so I simply salted and peppered the filets, coated them in Dijon mustard, caked them in panko breadcrumbs and fried them in extra virgin olive oil in a cast iron skillet.  They came out crunchy and browned and almost buttery, melting in my mouth.  It was easily some of the best fish I had ever had.  I paired it with an adaptation of a recipe I had found in Cooking Light magazine, Mediterranean Barley with chickpeas and arugula  (I adapted this to Mediterranean Bulgar with chickpeas and spinach; spinach always makes an excellent substitute for arugula and is often easier to get.) Altogether, it was truly a beautiful meal.

I am learning to take what I have been given and make something beautiful out of it.

Hm, maybe that's a lesson to learn from life in general...

turkey...and roasted vegetables with maple-balsamic glaze

When we moved to Montana, the lovely ladies of the church filled our cupboards, freezer and refrigerator with food so we would have something to eat right away.  Due to our personal insanity, we moved right before Christmas, so they included a turkey in our freezer.  I didn't have the energy to tackle a turkey AND a move over Christmas though, so it remained there for a few months.

But my mother-in-law and brother-in-law came to visit this weekend and since we were going to have more people around to eat said turkey and since I needed some space in my freezer (given the existence of Costco), I decided it was time to make the turkey.

I have never prepared a turkey entirely on my own until this weekend.  The intimidation factor was lowered quite a bit the year I prepared a turkey with Christopher's help, using the step-by-step photo-accompanied directions of Ree Drummond.  But to prepare it entirely alone, without the help of Williams Sonoma's turkey brine...ack!  Scary!

But this weekend, I did it!  I found another lovely recipe to use as a guide and I prepared my turkey much as I would a roast chicken.  I filled it with herbs, lemon, celery, garlic, and onion.  I sprinkled and rubbed in coarse salt and pepper.  I slathered it down with butter.  I was mightily nervous.  But I also felt pretty good about the job I had done.  I popped it in the oven and the photo above is the BEAUTY I ended up with!  I was so proud!

I had planned to serve it with mashed sweet potatoes, but the Mrs. has been inspiring me to use up more food that is in my fridge and stop wasting so much, so inspiration hit me and I came up with a new idea.  Roasted sweet potatoes, celery, onions and carrots with a maple-balsamic glaze.  It's amazing how well tired refrigerator vegetables will stand up to roasting.  And I had bought a GONZO bag of celery from Costco a couple weeks ago that was quickly losing its relevancy to the world.  I was very happy with the results of my roasted vegetables.  They were warm and inviting, savory and slightly sweet.  I got seconds.

ROASTED VEGETABLES WITH MAPLE-BALSAMIC GLAZE
3 large sweet potatoes, cubed
5-6 celery stalks, sliced
1 yellow onion, cut into chunks
1 cup of baby carrots

For the glaze
1 TBS balsamic vinegar
4 TBS olive oil
1/4 cup real maple syrup
1 tsp. of cumin
1/2 tsp. of ginger
Fresh-ground salt and pepper

Mix the glaze in a separate bowl.  Toss with the cut-up vegetables.  Cover with aluminum foil and roast in the oven at 400 degrees for about an hour or until vegetables are tender.  Enjoy!