Ratatouille sandwich

If you have squash, eggplants, bell peppers, onions and/or tomatoes there's an easy way to use them up. Make ratatouille. This dish, which is like a vegan stew, originated in southern France and has kept the French name everywhere it goes.

Traditionally, ratatouille requires all four of these vegetables and roasting some of them for an hour. Traditionally, it is served over rice or noodles.But who cares about tradition?

I did not when I found a recipe for a ratatouille sandwich in my Panini cookbook. I knew that even though the recipe called for bell peppers and zucchini, I only had crookneck squash (and pattypans, which will hopefully be added to another recipe another day) and jalapenos, along with one eggplant. This recipe called for a single small onion, but unless you want to count green onions, I didn't have these either.

I further reduced my need for tradition, or even following a recipe, when I looked in the fridge and found that we only had three small, sorry-looking tomatoes left. We got good use out of the rest. And since I now wasn't following the recipe with four of the five called-for vegetables. The tomatoes and onions were eliminated all together, the squash and peppers had alternate varieties.

Further research into my refrigerator's contents made for yet another change to the recipe. We are beyond what is traditional here, since you usually don't add ham, cheese and sandwich bread to your ratatouille. Because this is what was in my refrigerator, I only added one slice of ham to each sandwich and a little Mozarella cheese. Also, since I didn't have any French bread (just wheat) but did have some sandwich rolls in the freezer, I left the panini maker in the appliance cupboard and toasted the buns in the toaster oven instead.

My recipe described this creation as as a ham and cheese sandwich with ratatouille. My sandwiches were more ratatouille sandwiches with a little ham (one slice each) and a little cheese. I have enough ratatouille left over to do this again, but I'm going to need French bread for another recipe. I also may get more ham, and some Gruyere cheese, which is closer to the obscure type of cheese the recipe called for.

As usual, most of my vegetables were from Unity Farm. However, my crookneck squash is from somebody's back yard garden. I don't have much room on the patio of my condo to grow stuff, but if you have a real back yard, you could have at least a few vegetables without even going to "the farm." Tomatoes, squash and peppers are all good things to grow in a back yard garden, and you might try eggplant too.

Vegetables Italianish

Chicken with tomatoes and basil

If you like pasta, and I do,  you can use up your fresh vegetables quickly by mixing them with your favorite noodles or other shapes. Here's a recipe using tomatoes, basil and green onions (*these three vegetables are in last week's Unity Farm box if you bought one), regular onions and mushrooms. This recipe also has chicken. 

4 chicken breasts (or equivalent chicken tenders, 1 to 1.5 lbs.)

1 small onion, chopped

1/2 cup sliced mushrooms

Lemon pepper

2 cups chopped fresh tomatoes

3 green onions

Your favorite pasta

Brown the chicken breasts. Add onion, mushrooms and pepper and cook 2-3 minutes. Add tomatoes and green onions. Simmer 15 minutes. 

Meanwhile cook noodles. Add to chicken and vegetables and serve. Makes enough for 4-6.

Pasta Primavera

As I probably have mentioned before, I'm a cookbook collector. As I may not have mentioned before, these days one place I shop for food is on a real farm. It's called Unity Farm, and it is an organic farm right here in Jurupa Valley, on the grounds of the Rancho Jurupa Park on Crestmore Road/46th Street. For me, that's only a little farther than right around the corner (I literally could drive to it without even going up to Limonite, although it's slightly shorter if I do take Limonite). For anyone living in Jurupa Valley or Riverside, it's worth the drive.

So, since I have referred a number of Riverside friends to Unity Farm, it's now become apparent that I need to share my ideas for what to do with those yummy vegetables. So here's how I used some of the ones in my last box. That box contained, among other things, squash, carrots, peppers and tomatillos.

So, really simple idea, although it's based somewhat on a cookbook. My recipes are for two people, but you can adapt for more.

Pasta Primavera

Chop up one of your squash, two of your carrots, at least one of your peppers and about seven or eight of your tomatillos from Unity Farm. Add about half of an onion you bought at the grocery store, unless you still happen to have one from Unity Farm (I haven't had one from there the last few boxes.)

Stir fry these in a little bit of oil. Meanwhile, cook half a package of pasta to the dente you like. (You could substitute spaghetti squash or maybe brown rice if you have vegan or gluten issues) Add the pasta to the stir fried vegetables and mix well. 

My cookbook, which was published in 1989, suggested adding Parmesan cheese to this mix. We like Parmesan cheese so we sprinkled it generously over ours, and we are glad we did.

Unity Farms

This is the produce I received in one small Unity Farm box. This smallest box is now only $17.

If you are my follower in the Jurupa Valley or Riverside area, I want to tell you about a resource that's even better than a Farmer's Market. Jurupa Valley has it's own farm!

Unity Farms is on Crestmore Road, which means it's right across the river from the City of Riverside. With a great view of the south side of Mt. Rubidoux behind it, Unity Farms grows lettuce, herbs, peppers and other vegetables on a full-sized family farm.

You must give this farm a call at (951) 318-4261 first. Then give them two hours, and they will  have a box of produce ready for you. Depending on the needs of your family, you can choose a $17 box, a $25 box or a $35 box. These prices are for boxes of assorted vegetables they choose. If you would prefer, you can work out a price for the vegetables of your choice.

I have planned entire meals for several weeks around my box, but you also will want to think about adding salads or steamed vegetables to previously planned meals if you have a Unity Farms box in your refrigerator. This is the only way you will use up the entire box before the food starts to spoil. It is organic, so it is delicious when first picked, but starts losing flavor and crispness after, at most, a week. You may be able to live with that if you are cooking the vegetables, but some more than others, and no one after awhile.

If you think a medium or large size box every week would meet your needs, you will have another option soon, at least you will if you actually live in Jurupa Valley. In September 2014, Unity Farm is expected to bring into Jurupa Valley a monthly co-op with at least one other farm. This will offer a greater selection of vegetables, and also fruit. Co-op participants will have to commit to purchasing a $25 or $35 box every week, but will be able to choose which fruits and vegetables they want. The potential downside, especially if you live in Riverside and not Jurupa Valley, is participants will have to pick up their boxes at the Jurupa Unified School District office, which is quite a bit further from Riverside than the farm itself. (This isn't really a drawback if you're one of my San Bernardino County followers though, because you can simply take the 15 or the 215 to the 60, go from there into Jurupa Valley, and exit Pedley Road. School district is at Pedley and Jurupa in Jurupa Valley.

The co-op is a development in my young city, Jurupa Valley. A year ago the city formed Healthy Jurupa Valley, which strives to improve the lifestyles of our residents. One aspect of this is to improve their access to fresh fruits and vegetables. It has been promoting Unity Farm since nearly the beginning, since organic vegetables fits in perfectly with this mission.

As a farmer's daughter, it is shocking to me that many children in Jurupa Valley and Riverside grow up not knowing where food comes from. Riverside Unified School District is working with Unity Farm on an educational awareness program, in which speakers from the farm come to the schools, or the children make an actual field trip to Unity Farm. Healthy Jurupa Valley leaders are working with Jurupa Unified School District to help Unity Farm provide the most local children a similar opportunity.

Healthy Jurupa Valley also has planted a demonstration garden at Granite Hill Elementary School, so that students at that school will have first-hand knowledge of where food comes from, and the rest of the public can see examples of how to grow food in their own back yards.

As a wanna-be serious food blogger, I have been somewhat following Healthy Jurupa Valley's efforts to make sure people in my city have access to produce. It has an action team called "Farms and Gardens" which advises the city on this. I haven't been as involved with "Farms and Gardens" to a great extent, and when I was serving as the Jurupa Valley Chamber of Commerce marketing manager, I was too busy to deal with Healthy Jurupa Valley at all. However, in the last four months, I have been more involved, and have been following the activities of Farms and Gardens a little more closely. However, I cannot say for sure if I will become more involved in Farms and Gardens, because Healthy Jurupa Valley is kicking off another action team, Economic Prosperity, at its meeting this Tuesday. For many reasons, it is my intention to give far greater energy to this action team. But you can be on two action teams, so I will, at the very least, promote our city's farm.

If you're not from Jurupa Valley, please do what you can to make your own city (or unincorporated place) a healthier place by promoting healthier dining choices, such as Farmer's Markets, community (of for-profit) farms, and restaurants that give you better choices than burgers and fries. And also any food education programs your community offers.

How I will make $15 in groceries last more than a week

Swedish meatballs in macaroni, using supplies I had on hand, created three nights of meals for me.

I posted on Sunday, March 22 in Facebook that I had only spent  just over $15 on groceries for this week. I'm happy for the positive feedback, and the amazement some of you have expressed on how I am doing that. What's even more amazing, folks, is that although there are a two quick meals at Carls' Jr. and one at IHOP, and three Tuesday nights of skipped meals, I have now made this $15+ in groceries stretch into enough meals to last me for almost three weeks.

And that's led me to pop back onto this poorly neglected blog to share my grocery shopping strategy. It's key to how I've made my food good, and cheap. And some of that $15 in groceries was fresh too.

But I start with what I have. And that may not be fresh, It may instead be a pantry staple, something from the freezer or something sealed in a jar or other container.

I have many of these items listed on my computer. For instance, when I started menu planning the other day, I had brown sugar, ground turkey, kalmata olives and pepperoncinis on the list, among other things. Three items I did not have on the list, but had in the pantry anyhow, were pasta, rice and beans. I also have a whole spice rack full of spices.

So, I then looked through my extensive collection of cookbooks to come up with some recipes. You probably could do this even quicker with some menu planning websites where you type in one or more of these ingredients and it recommends a bunch of recipes using them. Or, if, like me, you pinned a bunch of recipes to Pinterest, you can find something fairly quick that uses your ingredients on hand, I would bet. But I invested in cookbooks, so cookbooks it is for me.

Here's what I came up with:

Two-pepper stew (My planned meal for Sunday)
Salmon burgers with kalamata olives (My planned meal for Monday)
Swedish meatballs (My planned meal for Wednesday)
Brown sugar beans (My planned meal for Thursday)

I don't plan meals on Tuesdays because they are just too busy with Don at school and me in Real Healing at Sandals Church, and I don't plan meals on Saturdays because we eat dinner at church. This did leave Friday to plan for though, and my cookbooks weren't inspiring things with the ingredients on hand. So I turned to my coupons, found one close to expiring for Asian noodles, and came up with a recipe called Far Eastern Ginger Noodles.

To make these recipes, I had to purchase the bell peppers, beef chuck and tomatoes the stew required, a can of salmon for the salmon burgers, and just about everything I'll need for the Far Eastern Ginger Noodles. I ended up not using the coupon, because the brands at the store where I shop weren't the same.

In addition, my grocery purchase included one of my staples, Diet Dr. Pepper. Staple or vice? Gotta have it though.

I put my "save money" radar out on one recipe. The recipe for the salmon burgers I'm following calls for fresh salmon and fresh dill. The thing is, it also calls for both of these ingredients to be put in the food processor and ground together along with the olives. I just can't see paying $9 or $10 for a filet of salmon vs. $2.25 for a can of ground salmon on this. I also don't know if my grocery store had fresh dill, but I don't have any idea why the dill in my spice rack wouldn't work for these burgers.

I discovered an interesting thing on this grocery store trip though. There are two kinds of canned salmon, red and pink. Red salmon is the Alaskan salmon, and it costs more than twice as much, about $6.50 a can. I REALLY don't know why you need to pay that much for a CAN of salmon, but if you are curious, give it a try. I'm sticking with pink.

That's why my whole bill was under $16.

I should also issue a disclaimer or two: The day before I bought these groceries, Don bought eggs, olive oil, peanut butter and bread, which would have added about $12 to my breakfast/lunch grocery bill otherwise. Also, we have a lot of cereal and juice on hand, so we saw no need to buy more the first week. Milk, more bread and more eggs did also have to get purchased for breakfast and lunch meals as time went on, but the total grocery bill for March was only $80.

The two-pepper stew lasted two nights. I served it on rice one night and pasta the other. The next night was Tuesday, so as planned, I had a fiber bar for dinner. Then after determining that Friday night, for a variety of reasons, had to be a night of dining out, I made the meatballs on Sunday instead, and they're lasting for three meals.

We had meatballs on Sunday, March 30 and Monday, March 31, and will now finish them up on Wednesday, since Tuesday is the night we skip dinner all together. We'll move onto the beans this coming Thursday, and I suspect they too will also produce at least one night of left overs. Which means I won't have to go grocery shopping again until next week! Technically, not until next Thursday, as the ginger noodles won't be needed until Monday, April 7, Tuesday, April 8 is a skip meal day, and Wednesday, April 9 is a Carls' Jr. day.

I don't know if I'll be able to pull off $16 for another three weeks of groceries then, but I am looking forward to telling you what's next.