Using up the leftovers

I hope everyone had a good Christmas. Mine was OK, could have been better for a number of reasons, but lots of good food, mine and some of the gifts my husband's family has sent.

Christmas Day, I cooked the turkey and a mincemeat pie (Don' favorite), but my sister-in-law provided all the side dishes as well as the house for our feast.I was a little bit surprised when I opened the bag of turkey I had arranged to take home, and found containers of sweet potatoes, cranberry slices and stuffing as well as the turkey.

Don and I have somewhat of a tradition that on the last day we spend in our house before traveling out of town to spend Christmas with family, we enjoy a pre-Christmas dinner. So, to all of the above, I also must add to my stash of leftovers a good chunk of ham. (We did eat all my side dishes that night.) In addition, I had some already grilled onions, and raw white potatoes, carrots and celery that really needed to be used SOON.

So, I have been trying to use up all these leftovers. Here's some things I came up with.

I jazzed up the boxed stuffing with the grilled onions, and served that alongside some of the turkey and the sweet potatoes.

I made potato pancakes with the potatoes. Potato pancakes are yummy on their own, but for extra flavor you can add ham or turkey. We had some with each. And the cranberry slices with a few of them. The recipe for potato pancakes is fairly simple. I have two different potato pancake recipes I'm working with, one with ham for two people and one with turkey for six people. Since I'm in a household of two, I present the recipe with either choice of meat in that quantity. Following my instructions makes one largish pancake, which you can cut into four pieces to serve. If you have more people, or want to eat more than one serving of these delicious pancakes, you can double or triple this recipe. Plan on making at least two or three pancakes if you do. While this recipe is just fine for smaller pancakes than the 7" diameter it will create, anything larger than that will be harder to flip and cook thoroughly.

POTATO PANCAKES

1 Tbsp flour
3 Tbsp milk
1 egg (or if you prefer, a single yolk or single white)
1 cup shredded potatoes
1/4 to 1/2 cup chopped meat, ham or turkey are both good

Oil or melted butter

Mix together flour, milk and eggs.Stir in the potatoes, then the meat. Fry in oil or butter, 10 minutes on each side for one large pancake, less for smaller pancakes. Pancakes are done if golden brown.

The rest of my turkey and vegetables I made soup from. I was trying to follow two, maybe three different recipes, and I've come to the conclusion that turkey soup will be good with just about anything. Besides turkey, my soup had lentils, carrots and celery and some very flavorful broth. I am sure onions, cabbage, tomatoes and/or potatoes would be good in the same soup. Another soup I had my eye on, but ran out of turkey before I could make, called for corn, chile peppers, tomatoes and chicken, and I'm sure turkey would be fine with that combination of vegetables as well. Broth, water mixed with bullion cubes, or wine all would be good choices for liquid.

The key is to make sure whatever liquid you add covers all the meat and vegetables - when you're done cooking it. With those lentils in there, my soup needed about an hour of cooking. Beans will take longer, and without legumes, you probably can say "soup's on in fifteen to 30 minutes. I added the rest of the vegetables 15 minutes before the end, but I think the carrots will taste better when I heat up the leftovers tomorrow, because they haven't yet absorbed the flavor of the soup. Tomatoes, cabbage and other softer vegetables like that, maybe only need about five minutes to cook.

Beyond tuna fish

I struggled about admitting to this. I know there are a good many people who this won't appeal to.

1. Anyone who doesn't like seafood like clams or anchovies. (If you don't like salmon or tuna too, you're sick!)

2. Anyone who won't eat ANYTHING that comes from a can.

3. People who can afford fresh seafood without blinking.

But that leaves some of us. I love seafood of any kind. However, my limited income does not. And that's why I will now admit, I eat seafood from cans. In fact, a few days ago, I enjoyed recipes I had created from three different kinds of canned seafood. I'm going to share two of those recipes here today. I am not going to share with you my recipe for Salmon a la King, because a la King is an acquired taste. If you like it, you already have a good recipe for at least Chicken a la King, and the difference is putting in canned (or fresh) salmon instead of chicken.

I will also say that if you are buying Tuna Helper or making a favorite tuna casserole with canned soup, Tuna ala King and Salmon ala King are better! I have titled this blog entry "Beyond Tuna Fish" because I want people to know that canned seafood can be used for so much more than the standard tuna sandwiches and casseroles.

Speaking of better, because I have an extreme preference for fresh vegetables, I will recommend that if your a la King recipe (or any other recipe for that matter) calls for pimento, put in fresh colored peppers instead! I don't even know where pimento is in my favorite grocery stores, and if I could find it I am sure it would come in a jar with way too much for the recipe, and costing far more than a single red pepper. Pimento is a sweet red pepper. Use that instead, or as I did, use a yellow one. Or even a green one if you really want to save some money.

The recipes I would like to share with you today are clam dip and a flavored mayonnaise. On my first food-related post, I shared with you I had bought clams for 99 cents at the 99 Cents Only store. Since then, I saw them at the March Air Force Base Commissary for the same price. I can't say for sure they would ever be that low at a normal grocery store, but keep your eyes out for a good price.

CLAM DIP (Courtesy of McCall's)

1 package (8 oz) whipped creamed cheese

1/3 cup sour cream

1 can minced clams

Seasonings to taste, i.e dried parsley, garlic salt, seasoning salt, fresh parsley, fresh or jarred garlic

Combine cream cheese and sour cream in bowl, mix in seasonings. If you wish to serve any of your guests a vegetarian version of this dip, spoon out some now. Add clams. Add additional sour cream to taste. Good with crackers, chips or on celery stalks.

ROSEMARY MAYONNAISE

3 anchovies from can of anchovies, dabbed with paper towel to absorb oil, then pureed

2 Tbsp. fresh rosemary (or 1 1/2 tsp. of dried)

1 cup mayonnaise

Mix first two ingredients into mayonnaise. Let sit at least 30 minutes. Serve with fish. Also a good dip for French fries, either made with sweet potatoes or regular potatoes.

Note: Do you really hate anchovies? OK. Leave them out. I love them, but I'm sure this mayonnaise would taste good flavored only with rosemary or another spice.

Updated Dec. 19: I just checked the email associated with this blog, and over the weekend, allrecipes.com sent me a recipe for chicken ala king! I'm going to share that link with you. Remember, canned tuna and canned salmon would work in this too!
Chicken ala king

Holiday Baking

Nestleusa.com's photo of its blondies with the Macadamia nuts

In December, if you cook at all, chances are you want to do some Holiday baking. As one who is always on the lookout for new recipes, I enjoy reading new holiday baking recipes on the Internet, and in my cookbooks. Sometimes they have some amazingly delicious ingredients. For instance, my Nestle cookbook has at least two recipes for cookies with white chocolate chips and macadamia nuts.

I noticed this because when we were traveling Thanksgiving week, my husband purchased some white chocolate chips. He likes putting chocolate in his signature dish, our Sunday waffles. Some time ago, I turned him onto white chocolate chips in waffles after I came across a recipe calling for this. So when he saw the white chocolate chips at Sierra Nut House, a coffee and gourmet goodies store in Fresno, he had to get them.

To me, white chocolate chips in December have to go into holiday baking. I have at least one party coming up this week where I'm supposed to bring something. So, even though everyone else may be doing the same thing, I'm bringing some cookies. With white chocolate chips.

But not with macadamia nuts. I went to a local grocery store and bought 8 oz. of walnuts for $3.79. (Not saying that's a good deal.) But the same grocery store had 4 oz. of macadamia nuts for $5.79. Now I love macadamia nuts, but I just can't justify spending $5.79 for a bag of macadamia nuts that will be going into cookies that will be served alongside maybe a few dozen other cookies that may look more festive. So despite Nestles' strong recommendation that white chocolate be paired with macadamias, mine are paired with walnuts. And they are delicious! They may not make it to the party, even though here at home they are competing for my taste buds' attention with some persimmon cookies a friend gave us last night.

My white chocolate creation is a simple recipe for blond brownies. The white chocolate chips, and another important ingredient I had on hand, coconut, are making them irresistible.

White Chocolate/Coconut Blondies

3/4 cup packed light brown sugar

1/3 cup butter or margarine

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 egg

1 cup plus 1 Tbsp all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup (6 oz.) white chocolate chips

1/2 cup coarsely chopped walnuts

1/2 cup shredded coconut

Preheat oven to 350. Grease 9" square baking pan. Cream together sugar, butter and vanilla. Add egg. Sift in dry ingredients. Mix thoroughly, stir in chips, walnuts and coconuts. Press batter into pan and bake for 25 to 30 minutes.

By the way, I'm bringing crackers and clam dip to my party this week too. Remember my post a few days ago about finding asparagus at the 99 cents store? They had canned clams too. I will be using a very simple recipe, adapted from a very old McCall's cookbook for this dip. Mix the clams with small containers of sour cream and soft cream cheese, and add some seasonings. I have all kinds of seasonings on hand. As for the rest of this stuff, I wonder if the 99-cent store has it too?

Just found a website I'd like to share

I am on Google + as well as Facebook. I just did some prowling around over there, and came across this website that my Google + friend Saida had shared. This website is all about what I'm trying to do here with food ideas, but it's all about frugal living. So I though I'd share it here. I want this blog to be as helpful as possible when it comes to frugal food, so why not?

http://www.pennilessparenting.com/

Tips for lower food costs

Today, I want to share with you some of my friends' tips for low-cost grocery shopping.

First of all, Jennifer is the couponing queen. She and her husband John even have their own couponing website, love2coupon.com. Some of her other favorites are moneysavingmom.com and hip2save.com. Add to this your grocery stores' websites, and your favorite manufacturers' websites, and you can find plenty of good coupons to use.

Jennifer enjoys going from store to store to find places where the merchandise is already on special, yet a coupon allows even more of a discount. She has received some amazing discounts by doing this. For instance, right after Thanksgiving, she went to Vons (double coupons) and saved 72 percent on some grocery items! She tells me she does even better with coupons for toiletry type things - toothpaste, room fresheners, diapers for her bambino that's coming next July, etc.

While Jennifer and John are so into websites that John makes them for a living and Jennifer gets almost all of her coupons from them, I myself and other friends still like the newspaper coupons best. About 10 years ago, before I met Jennifer, I had crowned my friend DeAnna the couponing champion. DeAnna used to take two copies of the Los Angeles Times every Sunday and spend time going through them. Two copies because she had four children at home back then. If you have a smaller family, one is probably sufficient. Sunday papers are smaller than they used to be, but still have lots of coupons.

Every Tuesday, DeAnna would take the grocery store sales papers and look for things that matched her coupons. So did a number of other women I knew. One of them, I recall, obtained a bottle of spray cleaner for 19 cents this way! It's still possible!

Not all my friends coupon that fanatically, but a few others have great tips. For instance, my friend Mindie and her husband carefully budget the money they make on Colin's income as a high school teacher and coach. And they stick to that budget. Way to go guys, how many of us have budgets but don't stick to them? Or don't even have budgets? I've found myself in both of those latter categories.

Because Mindie knows EXACTLY how much she can spend on food, she plans her menus out a month in advance, I'm pretty sure by taking the calculator to a grocery store to figure it out, even though she's going to have to go back to the grocery store for some of the items like milk and fresh produce later in the month. At the beginning of November, she knew what she was having on Nov. 29. Now, I am assuming if her family of two adults and one small child had leftovers or decided to join friends for dinner after she planned out the menu, the plan had that flexibility. But with that kind of organization, she certainly won't go over her grocery budget for the month!

My friend Sarah offered me the last tip I will share with you today. She loves to shop for food in ethnic grocery stores. Being Chinese-American, she can get a variety of grains, vegetables and seasonings for Chinese food like what she grew up with, things not found in a typical American grocery store. But, even what she can get in an American store, she often finds cheaper at the ethnic store! I haven't tried this one lately because ethnic stores are a bit of a drive out of the way for me. But Cardenas, a Latino-themed grocery store, is coming soon to a corner not too far from here. I will then!

So here it is! This is now a food blog!

I am very excited to report that as of today, my blog has a new name, Fresh, Good and Cheap and a new focus - good, cheap fresh food! Oh, we will also be looking at things for the pantry too, but since I am a farmer's daughter, when I think of food, my preference is for fresh.

What I would like to do with this blog is share my tips for getting good food less expensively. I think I might have a book along the same lines not too far into the distant future, but I have two blogs that aren't getting much use, so why not change this blog to a food blog. I certainly am cooking more than scrapbooking these days.

I am going to tell you about meal planning, couponing and where you might find some good deals with or with out coupons. I am also going to give you some of my favorite recipes that accomplish my goals, which are balanced healthy meals that taste great and don't cost a lot. Sometimes that means changing ingredients, somtimes it means just keeping your eyes open.

I also want to give you a little tip on where all my entries will be coming from. Menu planning. It's very important. Menu planning. I have several friends who do this, and they will agree, menu planning is the key to not spending too much money on food.

I have been menu planning for more than 15 years now, but with the financial problems my husband and I are having these days, I take it very seriously. So seriously that I keep track of it all on an Excel spread sheet. First column is what food I have. Next column, a list of dates. Third column, what's for dinner that night. I have a few other entries like the names of cookbooks i want to use, but it's that simple.

The rest of this blog post is my first example of what I want to share with you on how to cook good food without much money.

DO YOU LIKE ASPARAGUS?

So Does the 99 Cents Only Store!

One of the items in my pantry was an unopened bag of pasta elbows. Determined to use it, I came on a recipe for pasta with bow ties. Since I wanted to use elbows, I saw no reason why a simple change of shape would not work in this case. A purist might say that bow ties, with more flat surfaces on them, hold the sauce this pasta recipe called for better than elbows do. But, having elbows in the pantry and bow ties no closer than the nearest grocery store was a good enough reason for me to make the substitution.

The recipe also called for asparagus. When I saw this, I wondered "How will I buy fresh asparagus in December?!! Guess I'm going to have to leave it out. Even if I could find it, it would be a big expense for our tight budget. On the column in my menu planner that allows me to make notes, I wrote next to this recipe "omit asparagus."

But then we put up a Christmas tree. I have white bunting that I've used most years instead of a tree skirt, but my husband isn't quite as frugal as me. Since I wasn't sure which box of Christmas stuff I was storing the bunting in, he thought it was better for us to go to the local 99 Cents Only store and purchase a new tree skirt there instead of looking for the bunting at home. So, this year's tree is wrapped in lovely green felt instead of white bunting. The skirt is too small to tie around the tree stand. Not sure that was a good deal, and I am sure the $1 glass candle with the angel on it was entirely unneeded, but we definitely did find some good deals.

And one of them was asparagus! That's right, a standard-sized bunch of asparagus for 99 cents. In December. I am not sure if they still have asparagus since it was on Saturday we purchased this, but the lesson I have learned from this is to check the dollar stores! We also have Dollar Tree and an independent dollar store here in Jurupa Valley, the latter are both in the same shopping centers as Stater Brothers' grocery stores, so next time I go to either one of them, I'm making it a two-for-one stop.

Here's my take on the recipe. I'll call mine:

SICILIAN ELBOWS

Olive oil Olive is our favorite oil, for health reasons. You can buy all different kinds, but I only recommend two: Extra virgin and extra-light. Extra virgin has the most health benefits, but extra light really does taste better when you're baking. The original recipe called for a tablespoon, but I put in just enough to coat a 10" frying pan.

2 Tbsp of sun-dried tomatoes The recipe only called for 1, but I put in two for two reasons. One Tbsp just didn't seem like enough, and my sun-dried tomatoes are in a bottle of oil. They won't keep forever, so why not enjoy a few more while I can?

1/4 cup of white wine This recipe did not specify what kind of white wine. Some cookbooks will specify "cooking sherry" but that means buying a bottle of wine just to cook with. Why? Every standard sized bottle of wine has about four and one-third glasses of wine. What are you going to do with that one-third of a glass? Put some of it in the recipe!

1/4 cup of cooked asparagus I doubled this too. That left me half of the asparagus for another recipe that I'll share with you next.

2 cups cooked pasta I of course used elbows, instead of the bow ties called for in the original. I wouldn't recommend spaghetti or lasagna noodles for this but I think any type of small shaped pasta would work.

Salt and pepper, to taste

Parmesan cheese

Coat a frying pan with oil. Add sun-dried tomatoes and wine, simmer for one minute. Add the pasta, asparagus, salt and pepper, and toss like a salad. Top with Parmesan cheese.

With the other half of the 99-cent asparagus, I made this for lunch the next day:

GRILLED HAM AND CHEESE WITH ASPARAGUS

Six to eight thin asparagus spears

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

Bread My cookbook recommended either a purchased baguette or following another one of their recipes from scratch for homemade baguettes. I could have done the homemade recipe, as a box of roll mix has been sitting in the pantry awhile. But my husband and I really prefer the texture of whole wheat bread most the time. And we always have that on hand! I actually had to purchase a new loaf in this week's grocery shopping. I paid an OK price there, but not long after I saw that Wal-Green's has it on sale for 99 cents! I purchased another to freeze, since bread is one of those things we always need. I will save the roll mix for a heartier meal.

3 oz cheese, sliced thin My cookbook recommended Taleggio or another soft cheese like Brie. I couldn't even find Taleggio in the grocery store, so I opted for what's in my refrigerator - cheddar cheese. I think it was still good, but if you like gooey cheese on your grilled ham and cheese sandwiches, Brie would be better. I personally think cheese that stays in the sandwich is just fine.

4 oz ham My cookbook recommended proscuitto, and sine I was craving the spicier taste of this Italian ham I went for it. Good thing Fresh and Easy had that! If you want to spare the expense of proscuitto, or can't find it, any sliced deli ham will work. Including the kinds whose manufacturers often give out coupons.

Grill the asparagus 3- minutes. Put the proscuitto on one slice of bread, top that with cheese, top that with asparagus. Grill the sandwich about six minutes per side, longer if you like a good toast.

I was given a panini maker as a gift for Christmas one year, so that's what I use to grill my sandwiches. That means you grill both sides at once and one side gets cool panini marks. But otherwise a frying pan works just as well.

Major changes coming - stay tuned!

I have been struggling for a time to define the purposes of my two blogs. This blog, the older one, originally focused on my passion for scrapbooking and my hopes of turning that into a business. But with some major life changes taking place recently, my interest in scrapbooking is definitely not what it was two years ago. And so, I will be changing directions with this blog soon. It's late, but I wanted to let everyone know. John Jones, I think you are very much going to enjoy the change in direction this blog will be taking. As for my other four followers, thank you for your support. Visit the blogs I am following for even greater inspiration. (Well, except for Oh My, Mini, which is the story of the best grandchild I have ever known.)

I will post more tomorrow when my thoughts are more coherent.