Cooking entries
This entry started out as a comment to Kris’ potluck post on Get Rich Slowly, but it soon became too long for a mere comment, so I moved it over here.
In addition to being frugal-minded, I’m also an unabashed foodie. When I was lucky enough to have three friends nearby who also liked to cook, I enjoyed a sort of cross between a potluck and a dinner party that we called a ‘supper club.’ It involves a lot less ‘luck’ and allows for more coordinated and ambitious meals, but maintains a similar thriftiness and community spirit. Here’s how it worked:
The four of us agreed to meet on the same night each week for dinner. But unlike a dinner party, where the host does all the cooking solo and in advance, for the supper club everyone arrives prior to the start of preparation, and the cooking itself is a social event.
There are two rotating positions: ‘chef’ and ‘sous chef’. The chef hosts the dinner, plans the menu (often around a particular cuisine), and purchases all ingredients in advance. The sous chef is on call in the kitchen for whatever needs doing at the chef’s instruction — ‘chop these’ or ‘stir that’.
So two people chat over food prep in the kitchen, while the other two relax with a drink in the living room — or converse with the chef as a group if space and attention allows. (Some people can carry on unrelated conversations while cooking; others can’t. Me, it depends upon how many things I have going at once.) After dinner, the chef and sous chef relax and talk while the others clear up the dishes.
The supper club works best, I think, with four, five, or six people. More than six and it starts to get unwieldy; fewer than four and the ratio of exertion to relaxation climbs too high. One tip: if couples are involved, be sure to mix it up — don’t let your spouse sous-chef for you in your own kitchen.
And of course this is really an idea for the foodie set — if you’re wanting to include people who don’t know how to make toast, then a potluck provides more diverse options. But if you have a few friends who love to go out for expensive restaurant meals, this might be a great alternative: you can do ‘Thai night’ or ‘steak night’ or whatever, and have a restaurant-quality meal at home. You never have to cook alone — you have a guaranteed helper and as much conversation as you want. And someone else always cleans up!
Now that I’ve been reminded of this, I’m thinking about whether I know people now who would enjoy this. Because it was great, and I’d love to start one up again. Hmmm …
(Photo by Zeetz Jones.)
For the past few months, my newfound love for easy homemade bread got sidelined by my difficulties with excema. Even easy bread sort of requires being able to use both hands. So it was back to the Costco multigrain loaves for sandwiches and toast.
It’s always pained my frugal soul that a certain amount of every storebought loaf is wasted; the younger kidlet balks at crusts, and nobody likes the heels, me included. I tried saving them for breadcrumbs but … I just don’t usually cook things that require breadcrumbs.
Until I got the brilliant idea a couple months ago to try them in bread pudding. Now, I can’t be the first person to have thought of this, but it was quite a leap for me, as I only ate bread pudding for the first time a year or two ago, and had never tried cooking it. (For those of you who, like me, are new to the idea: it’s not actually pudding, but more of a custard. The bread gets very soaked and … un-breadlike in the process.)
I wanted to share my bread pudding technique. I can’t call it a recipe; I tend not to follow recipes unless I’m baking (and sometimes not even then), and I rely more on looks and taste than measurements. Bread pudding is perfect for this, as it’s one of the most forgiving dishes ever.
Bread pudding recipes call for white bread, preferably French, which we don’t eat. But whole wheat and multigrain crusts and heels work quite well. (Not rye though — flavor’s all wrong.) We go through bread quickly enough that I can usually keep the crusts in the fridge, but if you’re worried about mold just keep a container in the freezer and thaw when you’re ready to make the bread pudding.
Never one to pass up an opportunity to get extra vegetables into my family, I went for a pumpkin variation. (I always have canned pumpkin around — I pick up extra when it goes on sale around Thanksgiving and Christmas.)
Pumpkin Bread Pudding Ingredients:
- bread crusts and heels, torn into small-bite pieces
- dried cranberries or raisins (optional)
- butter
- canned pumpkin
- eggs
- cream, half-and-half, or milk
- sugar, brown sugar, or Splenda
- spices: any of vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and/or allspice
I’m not including quantities here because you’ve got a huge amount of leeway in the proportions. If you have fewer eggs, or less milk, or only a partial can of pumpkin, no worries! It’s almost impossible to mess this up.
This latest time I had about ten cups of bread crust bits, which completely filled a 9″x13″ baking dish, so all my listed amounts are relative to that. You could go with as few as four cups of bread or maybe even three, in a smaller dish.
With the ten cups of bread I used an entire 29-ounce can of pumpkin (more vitamin A!), but a 15-ounce can would have worked fine too, or anything in-between. I used four eggs, but you’re safe with anything from two to five. I used two cups of half-and-half, then (because I had so much pumpkin) thinned the mixture with a little extra skim milk. If you’re worried about fat content, use milk alone, or all cream if you want it really rich. Again, the actual amount is highly flexible — ultimately, all that matters is that you can pour the resulting mixture … more like a batter than a dough.
We try to keep a low-glycemic diet around here, so I used pourable Splenda. White or brown sugar also works, of course. One cup made for a lightly sweet pudding, but you can adjust to taste. I also prefer the slight tartness of cranberries over raisins. Generously add spice — whatever from the list above you have on hand, to taste. This last time I used some of everything except the allspice, including fresh minced ginger (because I had roots but no powder).
Preparation couldn’t be easier:
- Melt some butter in a shallow baking dish.
- Put the torn bread bits in, tossing them around a bit.
- If you’re adding dried fruit, sprinkle that on top of the bread.
- Mix everything else in a separate bowl and pour it evenly over the top.
- Bake at 350° until the custard is set — probably between 20 and 40 minutes.
I like it warm with just a touch of maple syrup drizzled over the top. I guarantee even the pickiest kidlet will eat their crusts when served like this!
(Photo by minjungkim.)
I love fresh homemade bread. Once, in my early twenties, I made a loaf by hand. I had picked up the classic Tassajara Bread Book from a remainder table, and one afternoon I went at it for several hours, kneading and punching away. It made a glorious loaf which we happily devoured straight out of the oven, but the effort-to-results ratio was just too high, and I couldn’t imagine going through that ever again.
Many years later, I bought a bread maker. Aside from an annoyingly difficult-to-clean paddle, the process was vastly simplified, and the results also quite good. That bread maker is still in a box in our garage, but our current kitchen (which we are likely to have for quite a few more years) is too small to make single-use appliances very practical — there’s no place to store something so large either on the counter or in the cabinets.
So I’d given up on homemade bread for the foreseeable future, until sometime last year when I started running across references online to ‘no-knead bread.’ I was skeptical, but positive reports abounded. Last weekend I finally decided to try this miracle for myself.
At his last annual checkup, Jak tripped the alarms for ‘pre-diabetic’ levels of blood sugar, and as a result I’ve made an extra effort to stick to whole grains and low-glycemic foods. Which is why I ignored the very attractive white-flour no-knead options and went straight for the whole wheat ‘bread brick’ introduced by New York Times food writer Mark Bittman.
It worked like a charm. It takes about six hours start to finish, but total active time is only about ten minutes. You need five items: one large mixing bowl, one non-stick loaf pan, a teaspoon, a measuring cup, and a brush for the oil. No expensive appliances, and cleanup is a breeze. It’s so easy that I’m going to use the next loaf to teach our ten-year-old how. (Edit: The kidlet did great; that’s the one she helped with in the photo above. Next time she’ll be ready to do it on her own.)
Here’s the recipe; the only adjustment I made was to use extra wheat flour in place of the rye I didn’t have. It’s arguably not the most beautiful loaf ever, but it sure is yummy.
I worked out the cost per loaf to be around 80¢ at regular price; by watching for sales on flour and yeast I can probably bring that down by a dime or two. The dense whole-grain bread I’ve been buying for Jak at Costco is something over $2 per loaf, though the loaves are slightly larger. Still, at a conservative estimate, switching to the homemade bread should save us $1.20 a week, or about $60 per year.
Frankly, though, homemade bread is so much better than anything storebought that I’d do it even if it didn’t save a penny!
