Fall is upon us and the end-of-summer bounty must be used! Now!!! Continue reading ‘End-of-Season Cream of Summer Soup’
Monthly Archive for September, 2009
Creme fraiche and queso fresco are two ingredients you might encounter in your recipe travels that, while great additions to your cooking, can be pricy and/or just plain hard to find, depending on where you live. Fortunately, there are easy and thrifty ways to make each of these at home!
Continue reading ‘Fab Frugal Friday: Queso Fresco & Creme Fraiche’
This is a choose-your-own-adventure recipe, price-wise. I may do this from time to time if you like the idea: take a base recipe (i.e. the curry) and offer different levels of frugality, shall we say; typically reflected in the protein choice. Continue reading ‘Coconut Curry: 3 Price Ranges’
Will your kids guess the secret (and healthy!) ingredient? You may even be surprised yourself: Tofu! Continue reading ‘Back-to-School-Special: Healthy Lunchbox Mac 'n' Cheese’
I love to buy those jars of sun-dried tomatoes in oil – they are so incredibly handy to have in the pantry. But they are spendy.
Thanks to the fact that my garden is exploding right now with huge delicious tomatoes, I decided to see if I could make my own version of sun-dried tomatoes by slow roasting them in a warm oven.
I cut them in half, sprayed them with a little oil and put them in the oven. I set my oven on Convection Bake at 225 degrees. I checked them every hour or so, and turned them over once. Now I’m going to throw them in a zip lock bag, and in February when it’s icy outside, open them up, soften them in some olive oil and let my taste buds remember the summer bounty!!!
– posted by Donna
(Anyone else remember that SNL skit?)
Anyway, I have a new obsession: roasting broccoli. I’ve pretty much always liked broccoli in general, and it’s among the healthiest things to eat on this green earth – but I’ve never had broccoli like this before. Seriously, if I lived alone, I would be eating this every day. Continue reading ‘Roastin' broccoleh, I'm roastin' broccoleh-eh . . .’
If you need one last way to use up that zucchini that has been making you feel guilty, here it is! I’ve tried planks, slices, breaded, deep fried – I just love crispy zucchini any which way!
Most of the food blogs that have written about crispy zucchini as an appetizer have cut the zucchini into planks. I like thin slices because then the whole thing is crispy, not just the outside. The trick to making these crispy is to slice them on the diagonal so that you increase the surface area and the water can bake out. These are easy and fast and can be used as a side dish or an appetizer. You can use the frugal cheese in the green can for this – it is so finely ground that it adds the right texture. Be sure to spray the wire baking rack with oil, because the slices will stick if you don’t. Bake them in a screaming hot oven to add extra crunchiness to the crust. Yum!
Continue reading ‘Oven-Fried Zucchini Crisps’
Fab Frugal Food Sassy Smoky Salsa featured on Grow Your Own, www.andreasrecipes.com
I recently discovered Andrea’s Recipes, a great blog that promotes growing your own fruits and veggies. It also promotes bartering, foraging, gleaning and all things frugal when it comes to gathering produce.
Andrea’s blog features great tips and recipes for making use of yours (or your neighbor’s!) home grown produce. If you take just a few minutes and check out her most recent recipe roundup post, she has recipes from food bloggers all over the world. The recipes look amazing, and I am thankful I discovered this blog just in the days that my garden is overflowing! Here are some of the latest from her recipe roundup: Vegetable Tian, Sassy Smoky Salsa (our very own fab frugal food recipe!), Garden Spaghetti, Pear Custard Pie, Tomato Basil Bread and Lemon Verbena Madelines. Wow!
My hat’s off to you, Andrea, and may you blog forever!
– posted by Donna
This is a guest post from a Fab Frugal Friend, Kimberly, which I think befits the female friendship symbolism of the fried green tomato – well, ever since the movie at least. (If you haven’t seen it, go rent this classic ASAP!) Continue reading ‘Fried Green Tomatoes – Gluten-free!’
It’s strange. I don’t like peanut butter, but a good spicy Thai peanut sauce is one of my favorite things. I love it drizzled on just about everything. I had trouble making good peanut sauce until it finally dawned on me: to have really good Thai peanut sauce, you must start with really good peanut butter. It was one of those “Duh” moments for me! So, forget the popular brands and go for the good stuff for this recipe. It is a little more expensive, but you only use a little and it is well worth it. I like the all-natural kind that says “dark roasted” on the label, and only has two ingredients: salt and peanuts. I made this recipe with the idea of serving it cold on salads, so it is more like a vinaigrette than a sauce you would serve warm with chicken.
With a garden full our second crop of of spinach and Swiss chard, I have plenty of dark greens to spare, and they are a perfect match with peanuts, it turns out! I very lightly and briefly sauteed some rough chopped spinach for less than a minute until it just barely started to wilt. You could also blanch it quickly in boiling water. I then drained it and drizzled it with my Thai peanut sauce recipe, and sprinkled with some diced roasted peanuts. Wow! Such an explosion of flavors!
This peanut sauce is so delicious I just want to sit and eat it with a spoon!
Continue reading ‘My Salad Days: Spicy Thai Peanut Drizzled Wilted Spinach’
