Updatia Type Stuff

[ellyssian]

The posts today will be Legion.

I thought about writing them all out and spreading them across a few or a dozen days, but hey, maybe I'll just flood the market.

Food will, of course, take up most of them. Some measure of all, really. Even the two posts on architecture and home design (from the How to Tell if ... are from Another Planet series... see the other episodes here and here) will be related to food preparation. There will also be six recipes: three main dishes, one sauce, one component, and one overall Plan for the entire meal.

I've mentioned before that I get into things in waves. I can be really intensely focused for a while, and then I'll move on to other things. Obviously, the food wave is cresting now. Thursday had the recipe for sweet lemon cod and winey 'zo 'n 'zo. Saturday had the Valentine's Feast that will generate all the food posts mentioned above, and was previewed here and had results depicted here. Yesterday, there were egg rolls which also works fairly well as a stir fry recipe ~ thought I had posted a stir fry one before, but if I did, I failed to tag it with either food or recipes.

There's likely to be more food recipes ahead in the near future. Maybe. I have some hamburger, and I'm likely to try something different for making burgers, so maybe something on that at the end of the week. Everything else for the next week or so will involve less of the recipe and more of the open-package-and-heat variety, unfortunately. Although I've seen some newspaper articles claim that healthy, fresh foods are cheaper than the pre-processed crap out there, Deb goes into conniptions when I get into a cooking phase because I like to work with ingredients instead of heat-n-serve stuff, and, apparently, her issue with this doesn't involve taste or health, rather money, of which we have, well, none.

In other news, aequitaslevitas drove to college today. All by his own self. Next step will be him getting a job ~ beyond the part time work with me* ~ so he can pay for gas.

~ ~ ~

* He's very restricted on what times he can work; even if he doesn't have high school classes or college classes, his working permit is based on the school district we live in, not that he attends... so no work while they are in school, even if he is not. Which pretty much limits any landscaping help to the summer vacation ~ can't exactly do that sort of thing in the night time, or, even, schedule it to start late enough in the day to take him along. I suppose now that he's driving, he'll be able to come out in the afternoon for a few hours a day... hadn't thought of that until typing it... but that may work, although it means two vehicles going to the site... =)

Comments

[cissa.livejournal.com]

Ingredients ARE cheaper for cooking than processed stuff... but probably only over time, since stuff like 5 pounds of onions is spread over a lot of meals, as is 15 pounds of potatoes. Etc.

I used to cook using more procesed, and now seldom use that, and it IS cheaper- even with CSA meats and CSA veg during half the year.But that's happened over time.

[ellyssian.livejournal.com]

I wish I could convince her of that, but every time I mention it, she tells me I lie.

I'm working on it, though. =)

[cissa.livejournal.com]

Dunno that you can be convincing over the short term. I think the tactic to use is insisting on cooking from scratch oneself, and over time comparing the per-serving cost.

I really think that whoever cooks has the right to choose what they cook WITH; this is why- when K and J started whingeing about what I made, I made a rule that no one who waws not cooking 1 meal a week for everyone had the right to complain. It worked pretty well. :)

And it really doesn't work except o0ver time. Like, a box of Kraft M&C is pretty cheap. 12 oz. of mac, plus a can of evap milk, plus 2 eggs, plus 12 oz cheddar (or velveeta etc, but I go for the cheddar albeit on sale) is also pretty cheap- and makes probably 3-4 times as much food. But the batch does probably cost double the prefab, so the savings happen on a cost-per-serving basis.

Now. When K was a kid, and very hard to deal with- I used a LOT of prefab stuff. I just didn't have the energy for scratch cooking. This is where the cooking-once-a-week-minimum thing comes in; when K and J were each cooking one meal a week, I was more able to cook from scratch myself.

Good cookbooks/recipes also help a lot.

And one more thing: prefab cooking tends to be a lot higher in protein and meat than scratch cooking needs to be; this can be a substantial source of savings. Personally, I tended to find the prefab stuff too heavy on the meat and too light on the rice or whatever; it was a real motivation to cook from scratch myself, and tweak the proportions more to our tastes.

[ellyssian.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's why I'm trying to cook more. I fell out of the habit for a while, being busy and all. I've been less busy for too long, and I should have been back to it sooner, though.

To be fair, although we do get some Hot Pockets type crap once in a while (although less than before) the pre-fab bits she uses are often things like breaded chicken, frozen meatballs, and that sort. A lot of the side dishes are Near East boxes and that sort of thing. And her M&C does start with Kraft (actually, haven't seen her make it, so it might be more winging it from scratch now...) and adds to it from there, with cheeses and toppings, and so forth.

[cissa.livejournal.com]

I've only relatively recently moved away from the Near East stuff, etc.- mostly because I can make a HUGE pot of, say Mexican rice for ony a bit more than the prefab mixes cost, assuming I buy everything on sale. Plus- the mixes have gotten way too salty for us anymore; I don't tend to use much salt when cooking (J has recently been told he may have a blood pressure issue, but I've known for ages that his mom does), so prefab and restaurant stuff tends to be too fatty and too salty for anything but a special one-off for us. Even though I do sometimes salt my food before eating. :P

Also- the more from-scratch I cook, the more chemical the prefab stuff tastes.

Now: I still do like it sometimes. Sometimes what I WANT is a frozen pizza, or buffalo wings, etc... but any more they're not as good as they ought to be, so I'm looking for homemade versions. I'm still on the fence with the pizza: the prefab isn't as good as I want, by my own stuff doesn't hit the right buttons, for some reason. Dumb! I do like frozen hot wings upon occasion, though... and these are not, on sale, really more pricey than buying the damn overpriced raw wings myself, which is stupid. But that's another issue.

In general- the more I cook, the better I like my own cooking and the less enticing other cooking is.

If you're looking for a good set of tasty and non-pre-fab recipes, I like Cook's Country magazine- they have mostly easy stuff, NO cream of whatever soup, and pretty fast, easy and REALLY good. I do tend to cut the fat appreciably, by the way. And the salt.

[ellyssian.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on salt. I have a limiter built-in, there's been times I just couldn't finish something because whoever made it (chef, assembly line machine, or a fast food kid) put way too much salt in it.

When I made this feast, that's the first time I've added salt in my cooking in maybe, I don't know... 15? 20? years? I used the sea salt, and went very light with it.

I'll try and get Deb's pizza recipe for you, but the biggest key to that is the pan. The iron pans are the best ~ we've got two that Deb was given as a gift when she stopped making them for a living. They were used, broken in by years of making pizzas, and they work beautifully. Of course, now we have to make 5 pizzas, so three are in other pans, and she's almost never happy with the crusts on those others.