Cheap Eats

Well, too bad I decided to start doing the food blog soon before we went on a trip to Europe. We've been saving (and X-ing the calendar) for what seems like forever leading up to this, but we still planned to do a grocery spending freeze as part of the last month of savings plan.  We basically ate every food out of our freezer, refrigerator, and pantry. Even the chicken broth, all pasta, and frozen veggies that had been there for maybe years. I have to admit only half of the freezer bag was edible because of all of the excess freezer burn. Anyway, it's all worth it, and I'm hoping this down to the wire saving allows me to come back with some cool souvenirs. I specifically want to find some cool street vendor or market paintings/sketches that we could take home and frame later of beautiful scenes that my camera won't be able to do justice for.

Anyway, we'll be gone for 10 days, so no cooking for that whole time! I'll have to post pictures from our food over there....and yes, sadly that will be about half of my pictures. That IS a lot of the culture to me. I just like to dive in and eat/drink/do what they do over there. I'll try the weird stuff, but I'm thinking that I won't consider anything weird...just YUMMY!

So, here was one of our last "clean the pantry/freezer" meals before Europe and Matt made an ordeal of it. It was sweet because I had come home from a LOOOONNNNGG day at work. Not bad, just a late one, so I was starving and this concoction hit the spot! :)

Macaroni and Cheese takes over

      *****this picture is not of my from the box dinners, but I thought it was pretty:)
          
This week was a macaroni and cheese week. It was interesting. Sorta weird. I went to Kroger on Sunday after a baby shower I went to, and I was feeling nauseous for some reason, so NOTHING looked good. I got what Matt eats for lunches, but nothing looked good to me, so I couldn't bring myself to buying any of our normal foods. I ended up coming home with Matt's stuff, numerous boxes/assortments of macaroni and cheese, and hot and spicy pork rinds. Yes. Disgusting and strange, I know.

Seriously, I went down the mac and cheese area and bought no two like items. I got the off brand box kind, the velveeta 2% fat box kind, and then four different types of individual mac and cheese meals: white cheddar, triple cheese, original (all kraft), then 1 velveeta. Matt thought I'd totally lost it. I can't even try to explain. It was like I passed out and came home with a lifetime supply of the goodness.

So, we ate that all week.

Plus, Matt went to the grocery store (probably disgusted with my purchases), and bought a few things he could make. One thing that was good was freezer food egg rolls. They were good.

This week has been a go out for lunch week, too. When I wasn't eating mac and cheese for lunch, I had sushi with my group at work, then today we celebrated one of our old co-workers being home by going to her favorite Memphis spot, Huey's. She lives in Baltimore, now, so it was a treat!

Then, tonight Carrie had a CA-bi party, and I got to eat her good food for dinner. There was chicken salad, spinach/artichoke dip, chocolate covered strawberries, and a vegetable tray. I was all over the dip, and the chicken salad is so good. I need that recipe to share.

Anyway, that's it for now! It was a lazy 64 cent meal week (yes...one of the off brand boxes was 64 cents)

awesome.

Chicken Gumbo

On Sunday night we decided to fix a large pot of gumbo. It was a last minute decision, so I was afraid it wouldn't work out (i've heard gumbo takes a while to cook), but it turned out really well! Nothing like some authentic gumbo, but it was still good. We used the recipe out of this month's Southern Living called "Easy Chicken Gumbo" or something. It was funny because there was some type of okra that was supposed to be added...well it was actually referencing another recipe that called for okra, rice, and some other stuff. Needless to say, we messed that up. We just bought frozen okra, but it turned out really good still. The problem was we forgot rice, so we tried to make up for it with grits...well, the grits were years old and tasted like the box. So, we ate it as soup. The next night we tried again. I went to the grocery  and I picked up some rice...so I thought. It was actually Rice a Roni's Chicken Rice with vermicelli. Oops, again! So, that tasted like pasta, and didn't work either. So, that night we ate it as soup, again, and the rice/noodle stuff by itself.
By the third night I had grown tired of it  so Matt and Larry finished it off. Luckily, I had made spinach dip for a baby shower at work, so I ate the rest of that--like half the bowl; plus a mini grilled cheese. This was the night Matt worked until about 8pm, and I had this crazy amount of energy and cleaned the whole house---cleaned out closets, took the trash out, did dishes, clothes, the whole works, AND I had Matt's dinner hot and set out when he got home. His comment was, "is there something you need to tell me?" ha! I think he was dreading that dinner conversation, but really I just had all this energy. Work had been stressful, and I needed to get it all out, so I took it out on the house--in a good way, I guess! Okay, so back to the recipe:
The moral of the story is, buy some rice. Plain ole brown rice. If you don't, then it's really just as good as soup, but the rice would have made it a little more gumbo-ey.

Here's the recipe!
EASY CHICKEN GUMBO
1/2 c oil (we used vegetable)
1/2 c all purpose flour
1 chopped sweet onion
1 chopped green pepper (we didn't use this)
1 cup chopped celery (we didn't use this)
cajun seasoning, to taste
2 tsp minced garlic (never enough of this!)
3 (14oz)cans chicken broth
1/2 lb andouille sausage, sliced
Okra Pilau (oops, it was a recipe, a bag of okra worked fine for us)
4 cups chopped cooked chicken (we used can - shortcut, but better w/ the real deal)

1. Heat oil in a large Dutch oven (or big pot), then gradually add in four, whisking constantly until it is chocolate colored (about 5 minutes)
2. Reduce heat to medium, and stir in onion and next 4 ingredients, stirring constantly (about 3 more minutes). Gradually stir in chicken broth and sausage, bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low and simmer, stirring occasionally for about 20 minutes.
3. Meanwhile prepare okra pilau (since we didn't do this, we just cooked the okra). Stir chicken into gumbo and add cooked okra.

Very good! I will suggest, though, that you use real chicken, reduced sodium chicken broth, and get the rice! Very cajun-ey yumminess.

All three of us, patiently waiting on it to be ready.

Yuuummmmm...

Cleaned my bowl.

This was the next night. Eating the rice/pasta by itself. with chopsticks, of course (my favorite utensil).  I had been sick all day, and Matt thought this would be a nice photo op. awesome.

It was a leftovers and go out to eat week

We really haven't cooked much this week. Monday we had leftovers from Sunday (BBQ that my dad had fixed), then Tuesday we went to this Vietnamese restaurant called "Saigon Le"...it's soooo yum. You can get so much food for such a small price. We, like disgusting gluttons, had 2 beers a piece, an appetizer, soup, and an entree (but these entree's are pretty huge!). The appetizer was called 'crunchy shrimp on a skewer' or something, and it was crispy fried noodles wrapped around shrimp on a skewer, and you dipped it in this yummy sauce. They were so interesting and very good. I got hot and sour soup, too, which was very tasty. For Matt's entree it was a pretty traditional meat with sauce veggies and rice type dish.  It was huge, though...I think it was called Chicken Szechwan. I ordered this dish that came with rice paper, a bowl of water, lots of greens (lettuce, cilantro, and mint), cucumber, and 'meatballs' (which was really sliced pork). Anyway, you have to wet the rice paper to get it soft, then fill it with all of the good stuff, then wrap it up into what looks like a spring roll. It was awesome, and really fun to do.
Anyway, I'll try to find a picture of it on the internet.
Tonight I had my standby: pesto pasta. Matt had a rotisserie chicken...okay okay! I had some of the chicken, too....like almost half...and some hummus (gosh, maybe all of this food tracking will help me calm down on the intake!).
I totally ate more than Matt, but I blamed it on the fact that I didn't make his lunch today, so he went to McDonald's and had a Big Mac meal, while I had a turkey wrap. there!
:)

So, I couldn't find a picture of the food, but here's the restaurant. Doesn't look like much, but it's great! For anyone familiar with Memphis, this is on Cleveland, near the Methodist University (north of it).

Okay, I found this picture. It doesn't look exact, but you can see the rice paper in the bottom left being dipped in the water to get soft. Then, you stuff it with meat/veggies, and wrap it up, and it looks like the thing on the plate all lonely to the bottom right. Mine were much larger and looked different, but that's the general idea.

Pesto Pasta

Tonight, after the squash soup incident, I couldn't make myself eat the leftovers, so I decided to go with my ole standby: pasta.
I had all the ingredients I needed, so it seemed good. After a nasty day at work, I got home late, and requested that Matt get the pasta boiling (which he forgot, but upon me entering the house, he was sweet and remembered, so he got it out for me). Anyway, I went with angel hair pasta with pesto.

PESTO PASTA
About 1/4 of the angel hair pasta package
olive oil
pesto
garlic
salt and pepper
parmesan
 So I boiled the pasta, drained it, then put it back in the pot with some olive oil. Then I added about 2 big teaspoons of pesto, and 1 teaspoon of minced garlic. Then, I put salt, pepper, and parmesan cheese on it. It was YUMMY! I have to give my friend, Lyndsie, some credit because she made some awesome mac and cheese last night and said parmesan was her best ingredient in there. That lead me to remembering to add parmesan. I only had the sprinkle kind, so you can only imagine how some fresh parmesan would have made this EVEN better.
Anyway, it was perfect, and I loved it. Pasta is my fave (okay, and guacomole). Oh, and don't forget the chop sticks. I really believe they
make any pasta dish better. Makes me feel special. I even eat my
ramen noodles with them.

You can see Larry wanting the pasta, too...then, in the picture
below, we're having a stand off over the pasta.

You win some, you lose some (squash soup)

Last night, I tried "Creamy Butternut Squash Soup," and it was pretty bad. I don't think it's the recipe's fault, rather the cook's. I had been at my parents' house and was going through their "Best of the Best" cookbook, and jotted down a few recipes, and this was one of them. The problem is, I didn't do that great of a job of writing down the steps to cooking the recipe, just the ingredients. Herein lies the issue with the nasty squash soup. So, maybe I'm being overly critical..it was edible. I mean, you put chives and sour cream in anything, and it becomes edible....but I just knew it wasn't at its potential:)
Here goes----



CREAMY BUTTERNUT SQUASH SOUP
2 lbs. squash (peeled and cubed)

2 tbsp of butter
1 1/4 c sour cream
4 cups chicken broth
chives
cayenne pepper
salt and pepper
mushrooms, optional

Weellllll....so I did all of this...and put it all in the pot at the same time....and I think that was my mistake. I looked up recipes online and I think you're supposed to put the squash in first and get it soft, then remove and cream it..the add everything else, but the mushrooms, sour cream and chives. Then have it simmering while cooking the mushrooms in a skillet. Then, the sour cream and chives go on top. Well, I put the sour cream in to boil...ew..it separated. AND, I put the mushrooms in at the same time as the rest, so all of the mushroom and squash liquids made an awesome flavor (not really). Anyway, now that I've criticized it, it did have an okay flavor, and I did eat a whole bowl, but tonight I couldn't bring myself to leftovers.
Oh well!
Don't be discouraged from trying....just look up a better set of instructions on the internet. I'll include Paula Deen's...her's looked better, but a few more ingredients.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/creamy-squash-soup-recipe/index.html

Bruschetta (sorta)

Well, tonight I was in the mood for some sort of bruschetta something. Matt already had dinner (leftovers from a super bowl get together last night), so I went and bought some French bread, a tomato and onion, and mozzarella cheese (they didn't have fresh, just the block kind). We had to go to our local smaller grocery store because today was a snow day, and we really didn't want to drive more than we had to...so this is where the 'sorta' came in.
Here are the ingredients:
about 1/3 of the mozzarella block, sliced
slice about 1/2 inch thick French bread pieces (i did about 15)
1 tomato, diced
1 onion, thinly sliced and chopped
balsamic vinegar (small amount)
olive oil
Kosher salt
pepper
garlic powder
pepperocini (sliced)---optional

I mixed the onion, tomato, peppericini's, vinegar and olive oil in a bowl. I put my bread slices on a pan and brushed with olive oil. I put 1 slice of cheese on each bread, then covered them in the tomato mix. Then I sprinkled a little Kosher salt and pepper on top. From there I put them in the onion on the bottom rack (broil--high broiler), and let the onions start to crackle, then I turned the oven off, but moved them to the top rack to finish cooking through the tomatoes and cheese. It only took 5 minutes or so to cook.
If you want it crispier, leave the broiler on longer. Once they were out,


I put a small amount of garlic powder on them. I thought they were very good! Nothing like bruschetta with fresh mozzarella, but it filled the craving.