New Domain!

With a super huge promise that I’d continue posting, Tracy has set me up with a domain. Head over to http://intothefridge.com for your reading pleasure!

Closing Up!

Despite having had some fun times, my absolute lack of updating and a million half-written posts has spelled doom for this poor little blog. However, I am moving on and up with my cheap-eating food blog idea, and would like to invite both of my readers to visit Wok of Ages, where I’ll be assuming the role of teacher and sharing recipes and ideas on how to eat well while broke.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

I fail so hard.

Due to frenetically working on an essay, I completely spaced on posting yesterday. Oh well, I’ll continue to try to keep up my regular posting schedule about food-related goodies.

Well, today I’m not cooking a thing because I’m stuck at school all day working on ANOTHER essay (which I should be tackling right now), and so instead I’m going to talk a little bit about buying food, and eating cheaply. It’s the direction I’m interested in taking this blog as my complete lack of financial management abilities ensure I live paycheque to paycheque. Also, I’m certainly not a high quality cook, I’m an alright one – my skills lie in eating well on practically nothing, not haute cuisine.

I can’t spend too long on the post, so I’ll state my first rule of eating cheaply, and subsequent posts are going to give you a few more rules.

STAY AWAY FROM PACKAGED FOOD.

If you have no money, don’t fucking buy kraft dinner. That’s the worst thing you can do. Even the cheap stuff isn’t -that- much food for money, and the pasta is going to be atrocious. No nutrition, and filling on pasta with pretty much no protein is never very satisfying. The same goes with frozen, premade dinners, sauces in packets, all that kind of stuff. The only exception I make is ramen noodles, which Tracy loves quite dearly, and I can do a few different things with, cooking wise. The basic rule is that if somebody has done any of the cooking for you when you buy something, you are wasting money.

Porkshire FAIL

(pictures have been taken, but not uploaded, you’ll see them tomorrow!)

Dragging out a chop from the freezer for today, which is always a guaranteed success. Tracy likes pork chops, and I think I’ve become pretty good at cooking them. The intent here it to do it up on a cast iron pan, and then use the drippings from the pan to make yorkshire pudding. Yummy! On the side, I’m doing a quick slaw of grated carrots with some red wine vinegar.

Here are the recipes I’m using:

Carrot Slaw:

– Some carrots
– Some red wine vinegar
– Dash of olive oil

As the concept of quick is vital here, I just ran the carrots through the grater on my food processor, threw in a couple of tablespoons of red wine vinegar and the last of my precious olive oil. Tossed with my fingers, and serve. This is a favorite of mine, it’s tasty, refreshing, and healthy.

Pork Chops:

– Pork chops (strangely enough)
– Couple teaspoons each of cumin, coriander, and black pepper

For the spice rub, I toasted the whole seeds in the pan for the chops, and then threw them in my coffee grinder. Once done, they got rubbed over the chop.

Now for the chop itself, I like thick pork chops, cooked to medium, and juicy as you can get. Just to restate myself – medium. Pork does NOT need to be cooked until well done. In the good old days, pigs ate a great deal of garbage, and from this they got a parasite, trichinosis which could survive until it was killed by heat and be transferred to a human. Not food poisoning. Modern farming conditions have effectively eliminated this parasite as a threat, and so pork can now be cooked to a mild pink, instead of white. This means the leaner meat we get nowadays can remain juicy and tender, instead of with the texture of shoe leather.

Anyways, my method of cooking chops is simple. Cast iron pan on maximum heat until it’s white-hot, and then sear the chops for two minutes on each side. Remove from heat, cover with foil, and leave for ten minutes. Dead simple, and you get incredibly juicy, easy pork chops this way. Also, some smoke in the kitchen.

Porkshire Pudding:

– 2 cups flour
– 2 cups milk
– 1/4 cup drippings
– 4 large eggs
– 1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Holy shit did THIS fail. Haha. Wow. So I figured out the basic idea being yorkshire puddings, and recently made dutch babies (a sweet variety without pan drippings) that turned out wonderfully. So I decided to give yorkshire pudding a shot. The idea here is you just blend the above ingredients, and then pour onto pan drippings (usually from a beef roast, I used my chop drippings) and then throw it in the oven at 400 for a half an hour.

Well, I think I screwed up this recipe. The recipe above was cut in half, and it ended up having too much flour. What I hoped for was this puffy spectacle of a yorkshire pudding, Instead, I got this:

Whatever. My porkshire flatbread was actually pretty tasty – not a complete loss, but certainly did not end up the way I expected it to.

The Verdict:

This is really “just another night with Dave and Tracy” food. It took very little time to whip up, the chops were delicious, the porkshire flatbread was filling if anything, and the carrot slaw vanished from my plate in seconds. It doesn’t seem to have been as popular with Tracy, but oh well, more for me!

National Blog Posting Month!

An offshoot from national novel writing month, national blog writing month is an informal competition to write a blog post every day of the month of November. As I never update this blog, I’ve decided to try this out. So every day this month, you’ll see a short post from me on whatever it is I’m cooking/eating.

Today:

Poverty Soup!

As we’re living paycheque to paycheque until employment stuff settles for the both of us (having been horribly sick doesn’t help things), we’re going on the last scraps in the kitchen until I get paid. Tracy, who’s still not well, requested some soup, so here we go!

Ingredients:

1 litre beef stock (this is just some oxo bullion and water, which I keep on hand in case I run out of decent stock)
1 really large carrot
1 onion
3 cloves garlic
1/2 cup alphabet pasta (fun!)
Two teaspoons rosemary
1 tablespoon something to fry the veggies in
1 bay leaf
Salt & pepper

This is about as basic as it gets, but I think my greatest skill as a cook is the ability to consistently make good food when there’s really nothing in the house. Procedure is simple – dice the onions and garlic, cube the carrots, fry them up in whatever I have left. As I’m even out of oil, I dipped into some baking lard.

Toss the lard into a pot and heat it on medium low heat. Once the lard has melted, toss in your onions, garlic, and carrots. Fry, stirring occasionally so that you don’t brown anything. Browning probably wouldn’t be bad, bit of caramel flavour, but that’s not the plan today. Once carrots are soft, pour in the beef stock (water/bouillion), add the bay leaf and the rosemary, and simmer for at least five minutes so the pasta softens. Season to taste. I left it for around twenty minutes so that the dried herbs properly flavoured the soup without turning the pasta

For those of you who don’t cook (I think only family really reads this and I know all of you cook, but bear with me), the basic idea here is that canned soup is unnecessary, and this is -cheap-. I doubt two dollars went into all the ingredients here, and five minutes of effort. Any number of flavours can be used here, Tracy is sick and so I decided not to get too adventurous. Everyone loves rosemary!

Pour in a bowl, and serve! A decent pot of soup to warm us up on a very chilly November day. No picture as our camera is dead, but you’ll see crap like this every day, so get used to it!

Take Two!

Not everything turns out perfectly, but we do try.

Dave does this thing with his hamburgers, where he heats the cast iron pan to near molten temperatures, puts the burger in, and flips it constantly. According to Heston Blumenthal of In Search of Perfection, this seals in the juices. Dave makes delicious burgers, but it does tend to smoke the place up a bit.

Keep On Gnocchi But You Can’t Come In!

Every time I mention to someone that cooking is a hobby of mine, I’m immediately asked what my ‘best’ recipe is. Most what I do involves just randomly grabbing recipes from the internet and trying them out; I don’t have many staples, and I have even less I’d say that I can really show off. There was the occasional dish I thought I could do really well. I think I know how to PROPERLY barbecue an excellent steak, my penne with veggies dish is a long term favorite of Tracy, and some trickier common recipes like lasagna go over well.

But since I started cooking, I’ve had an obsession with making a good ragu bolognese. Normally served over spaghetti (traditionally tagliatelle) it’s the Italian sauce that everybody knows and loves. I’ve never made pasta from scratch, though I intend to learn, but I have learned how to make the next best thing.

Gnocchi.

Restaurant Review: Cattlemen’s Club Restaurant at O’Keefe Ranch

As a note, I actually intend on submitting restaurant reviews to the local paper. This is my first attempt at such a review, obviously it needs proper editing and to have the length cut in half, but I’d appreciate comments from anybody who reads this as this is a first step towards an intended career path.

The O’Keefe ranch is a famous tourist destination in the north Okanagan, being a resident and not a vistor, I’d never checked out the place. Sort of like when our friend Tim forbid us from seeing the CN Tower whilst we lived in Toronto. Real locals never visit the tourist traps. However, the restaurant is apparently good, Tracy’s parents adore it, and we’re looking for a place to hold our wedding dinner.

I’m melting! I’m melting! Oh what a world…

I hate corn silk.

In the history of mankind, perhaps the universe, I don’t believe that there is any more substance that has evolved on our planet more irritating than corn silk. Don’t try to lead me astray with your lies, either. Removing it under running water, slicing around the bottom, just removing the stuff by hand, even using (gasp) a microwave. I’ve tried them all, and they are LIES. The stuff can never be completely removed.

With that out of the way, I present my triumphant return to food blogging! Both of my readers have missed my sporadic updates terribly, and I do enjoy writing about my attempts to cook. Today, I present a grilled chicken sandwich with aioli, along with a grilled corn salad!

Stew: More of a Thick Soup Than a Name, Really

I bought a roast on the weekend with the purpose of making beef stew. I was looking for an excuse to use the slow cooker. We found this one at Coopers for seven dollars. There are a couple of great butchers in the area, but with gas prices being in the $1.40 range, it’s hard to justify travelling all over the city. This, apparently, is a sirloin tip oven roast. A name like that screams “chop me up for stew!”